The Real News Network has an interview with Lawrence Wilkerson: Senate Pushes Obama Towards War and Susan Rice a Bad Choice.

When the discussion of Susan Rice starts, the video cuts to a 2008 interview of Rice by Paul Jay.

JAY: You talk to anyone who knows the situation, they know more troops in Afghanistan is—unless there’s hundreds of thousands of troops in Afghanistan for years to come, it’s not going to significantly change the situation without dealing with warlords and dealing with reconstruction.

SUSAN RICE, SENIOR FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER TO SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Not by itself. I mean, I mentioned very—I said, coupled with the economic and political steps.

JAY: So what would be concrete steps?

RICE: Well, we have underinvested in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but particularly Afghanistan, with respect to the counterterrorism effort. We haven’t done the socio and economic investments in infrastructure and education in alternatives to poppy.

Later in the interview with Wilkerson, he refers back to the snippet of the Rice interview that he had just chosen to show us and remarks:

JAY: When I interviewed her in New Hampshire, I was primarily focused on candidate Obama’s position on the Afghan War, essentially to expand it, and I asked her, well, doesn’t there—if you’re going to expand, don’t you really have to expand solving problems facing the Afghan people in a serious way? A lot of rhetoric’s been thrown around about doing something to win the hearts and minds of Afghanistan, the Afghans, but very little in terms of real money and real on-the-ground action. She kind of said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and kind of dismissed it. Her main argument was about increasing troop levels.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t hear Rice say what Paul Jay says that she said. If he wanted to make this point, couldn’t he have chosen a better snippet from the interview? I presume that since he did the choosing of the snippet, that a better snippet to make his point could not be found.

I have a perverse conspiracy theory for you. The Republicans actually want Susann Rice as Secretary of State. They are making the silly charges about her remarks on Libya so as to back Obama into a corner where he has to stick by Rice in order to not look like a weakling. If they really didn’t want Rice, they would focus on the issues raised by Jay and Wilkerson in this interview.

The other side of this odd conspiracy may be that the Obama side has realized that they cannot get Rice approved for Secretary of State and therefore feel the need to save face by pointing out her flaws as justification for dumping her.

This political business can get so convoluted it makes you dizzy.

The Nation of Change has published the Pepe Escobar article Mr. President, Tear Down This Wall.

Let’s start with the obvious but important: on entering the Oval Office in January 2009, President Obama inherited a seemingly impregnable three-decade-long “Wall of Mistrust” in Iran-U.S. relations. To his credit, that March he directly addressed all Iranians in a message for Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, calling for an “engagement that is honed and grounded in mutual respect.” He even quoted the thirteenth century Persian poet Sa’adi: “The children of Adam are limbs of one body, which God created from one essence.”

And yet, from the start he was crippled by a set of Washington misconceptions as old as that wall, and by a bipartisan consensus for an aggressive strategy toward Iran that emerged in the George W. Bush years when Congress ponied up $400 million for a set of “covert operations” meant to destabilize that country, including cross-border operations by special forces teams. All of this was already based on the dangers of “the Iranian bomb.”

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With an Obama 2.0 administration soon to be in place, the time to solve the immensely complex Iranian nuclear drama is now. But as Columbia University’s Gary Sick, a key White House adviser on Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, has suggested, nothing will be accomplished if Washington does not start thinking beyond its ever-toughening sanctions program, now practically set in stone as “politically untouchable.”

Reading this full article might get you thinking outside the box in which the administration seems to be locked.

Many of you will probably react with anger over the mild suggestions in this article, possibly due to the propaganda you have been fed by our own mefdia and politicians.

I am not naive enough to think that Pepe Escobar may not have his own agenda. Yet, long before I read this article, I have been thinking that the U.S. position on Iran has been unnecessarily and unproductively  bellicose. This article just explains the reasons why I have felt the way that I have.

I do not want you to think I am hiding anything here, so I will feed you some information that may reinforce your biases.  But remember that what is being reinforced for you may be a bias.

According to TomDispatch.com, where I think this article may have first been published:

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, an analyst for al-Jazeera and the Russian network RT, and a TomDispatch regular. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

The Nation of Change has the Joe Conason article Arithmetic For Republicans: Why Boehner’s ‘Offer’ Just Doesn’t Add Up.

Summing it all up, Conason ends with the following:

Unless and until the Republicans start talking about real numbers that can actually add up, there is nothing to be gained from pretending to negotiate. Nor should the president start negotiating with himself, as he has sometimes done in the past. Instead, he ought to make sure that the opposition understands what will happen when they fail to act responsibly. After Jan. 1, he will bring them an offer they cannot refuse to restore cuts for the 98 percent — and they will be held accountable for any consequences caused in the meantime by their stalling.

The preceding points in the article give some details of the failure of Republican arithmetic.  The Republican proposals actually hide more than they reveal about what they really want to do to us.

The Nation Of Change has published Robert Reich’s article – Cliff Notes on the Three Real Perils Ahead.  The executive summary is:

Yes, America does face a cliff — not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices we’ll tumble over because the GOP’s obsession over government’s size and spending has obscured them.

The three cliffs are:

The child poverty cliff.

The baby-boomer healthcare cliff.

Healthcare costs are already 18% of GDP. Between now and 2030, when 76 million boomers join the ranks of the elderly,those costs will soar. This is the principal reason why the federal budget deficit is projected to grow.

The Affordable Care Act offers a start but it isn’t nearly adequate to limit these rising costs. The President and the Democrats have to lead the way in using Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over providers to get lower costs and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system of healthcare.

But we can’t avoid the fact we have the most expensive and least effective system of health care in the world that’s spending 30 percent more on paperwork and administration than on keeping people healthy. The real healthcare cliff can only be avoided if we adopt a single-payer healthcare system.

The environmental cliff.

For people obsessed with the deficit, read the section on The baby-boomer healthcare cliff. It is a good explanation of what the real problem is, what Obama has tried to do to solve it, and what more needs to be done. All the rest of the malarkey coming from the Republicans is just noise.

PBS has an interview Paul Krugman: Hasty Fiscal Fix to the Deficit Would Cause ‘Austerity Bomb’.

Well, what’s happening is that we are scheduled, unless something is done, basically to do to ourselves gratuitously what has been happening to some of the European economies.

We’re going to have substantial spending cuts, substantial tax increases at a time when the economy is still very weak. And, of course, that’s a recipe for sliding back into recession.

So, we set ourselves up with the land mine in the road in front of our economy, which is not based on anything real. It’s just based on our political mess.

I find the following exchange typical of many interviews you hear from the so called news media.

GWEN IFILL: Among the critics of his plan are those who say that it doesn’t do anything or speak at all to the question of entitlement reform or at least cutting the costs of entitlement.

PAUL KRUGMAN: That’s a very weird thing. It does, in fact. It actually cut a substantial amount from Medicare spending.

It actually — of course, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, does a lot to curb the long-run growth of Medicare costs.

So, there’s actually a lot in there. He’s actually done more to bring down the cost curve for Medicare than anyone has ever done before.

But in Washington, that is considered not serious because he’s not actually taking benefits away from people who need them. So, it’s a really weird thing. It’s only considered serious if you inflict pain on vulnerable people.

Obama is actually very serious in the real sense. It’s just the notion he hasn’t done anything on entitlement reform is totally unfair. He’s done more than anyone has ever done before.

GWEN IFILL: Well, talk about one part of the Republican, if you want to put air quotes around it, plan, as you replied, and that’s the idea of raising the eligibility age for Medicare. Why isn’t that something that might actually be a big first step?

Gwen Ifill’s follow-up question seems to indicate that she didn’t pay attention to a thing that Paul Krugman said in his previous answer. Krugman just got through telling Ifill about the first big steps to rein in Medicare costs that is in Obamacare. Then Ifill asks why a minor step of raising the eligibility age for Medicare might not be a big first step. What part of “He’s done more than anyone has ever done before” did Ifill not understand?

Bloomberg News has the story Elizabeth Warren Said to Head to Senate Banking Committee.

U.S. Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard University law professor and critic of Wall Street, is poised to join the Senate Banking Committee after she’s sworn into office in January.

Two Democratic aides briefed on the matter said Senate leaders intend to assign Warren to the Banking Committee, although a final decision on committee assignments won’t be made until the new session of Congress convenes.

Let’s hope that this really comes to pass.  According to the article:

“We certainly plan to reach out to Senator-Elect Warren,” said James Ballentine, executive vice president of congressional relations and political affairs at the American Bankers Association.

If the American Bankers Association is taking this report seriously, maybe they have given up trying to block this assignment.  I hope you weren’t drinking anything when you read that last sentence.  If you were, you might want to wipe your computer screen.

I just received an email that says 238,000 have signed the petition at ReformTheFilibuster.com.

This is one of the first issues that Elizabeth Warren will be working on as our new Senator.

Reform the Filibuster

Far too often, we’ve seen good ideas stall in the Senate because a single Senator can stop everything without a single word uttered on the Senate floor.

In a few short weeks, we can reform the filibuster. But it won’t be easy. And it’s going to require that the American people speak with one, clear, loud voice.

Take action now: Tell the Senate to fix the filibuster.

If you want Washington to respond to your needs, you have to make your voice heard more often than just at election time.  Use the link above to sign the petition.

The New York Times has the article Lines Blur as Texas Gives Industries a Bonanza.

Mr. Ryan’s specialty is helping clients like ExxonMobil and Neiman Marcus secure state and local tax breaks and other business incentives. It is a good line of work in Texas.

Under Mr. Perry, Texas gives out more of the incentives than any other state, around $19 billion a year, an examination by The New York Times has found. Texas justifies its largess by pointing out that it is home to half of all the private sector jobs created over the last decade nationwide. As the invitation to the fund-raiser boasted: “Texas leads the nation in job creation.”

The rest of the article talks about the pros and cons of these tax breaks. I don’t doubt that each reader of the article will see the moral of the story to be whatever fits best with their political outlook.

It is kind of ironic to pit the facts presented here with the Republican mantra that the government should not pick business winners and losers. I suppose the answer is that the Texas government does not care if the companies they pick are winners or losers as long as they provide the promised jobs. You’ll have to read the whole article to decide for yourself what you think about the situation.

From personal experience of having lived in Texas for 4½ years, I have my own opinion of low wages and high living standards for engineers.  My wages were enough to have a decent living standard in Texas, but they were falling behind national wage levels.  I felt that if I stayed in Texas much longer, I would be financially trapped by my inability to afford to live anyplace else.  Sharon and I are both glad we got out when we could.

I actually faced a similar situation in Oregon, also a low cost-of-living, low-wage state.  Had it not been for the real-estate boom in Oregon which doubled the value of our house while we were there, we might have been trapped in Oregon after retirement.  Unlike Texas, Oregon is actually a very nice place to live, but it was not near family, so it is not where we wanted to retire.

The bursting of the real-estate bubble before we moved back to Massachusetts is what made it possible to return to the high-cost of living state even in retirement where my income is not affected by where I live.

NBC has the article Facing the fiscal cliff: American taxpayers have had it easy for decades.

Still, with the deadline for a deal to head off the so-called “fiscal cliff” now less than a month away, the debate has shifted from whether taxes should go up to just who should pay more. Both sides seem to acknowledge what some economists have been saying for some time.

The problem with the budget is that Americans don’t pay enough taxes.

The case isn’t hard to make. The U.S. federal tax burden, relative to gross domestic product, is lower than it’s been in half a century. Americans pay lower taxes in relation to the size of their economy than all but a handful of developed countries, including Chile and Mexico.

The relatively low tax burden on Americans is, in part, an illusion that results from heavy reliance on hundreds of billions of dollars of so-called “tax expenditures.” To make government spending appear lower than it really is, the U.S. tax code is larded with givebacks, deductions and exemptions.

I particularly like this article because it provides so much food for thought.  As a well balanced article, it was hard to find a concentrated excerpt that also showed its balance.  As I looked for as good an excerpt as I could find, I chose the above.  At first, I was going to leave out the last excerpted paragraph above, but as I stepped away from the posting the article to go have breakfast, the ability to digest some of that food for thought led me to see the importance of the paragraph.

There is a tradeoff between tax expenditures and collecting the taxes and then spending the money on targeted programs to accomplish some specific purpose.  The tax expenditures may be meant to encourage some social good, but they tend to be less focused and targeted on the specific social good they are trying to promote.  For instance, lowering the tax on capital gains may encourage investing more in businesses, but not all businesses are the types in which  we want to encourage investment.

On the other hand, we could stop favoring capital gains in the tax code, but use the extra money collected to spend on particular industries or particular business practices that we want to encourage.  That would focus the tax money where it might do the most good, but such a plan would require more bureaucracy to manage it.  The burden of bureaucracy would fall on both the government to administer such a program and the beneficiaries who might have to apply for the benefit.

Like any good idea for change, it needs to be applied judiciously.  There are some aspects of the old way that are worth preserving.  One management course that I took as a Digital Equipment Company employee argued for a certain methodology when contemplating making changes.  Write down what it is about the current system that you want to change and also write down those parts you want to preserve.  Neither the old system nor the new system is likely to be all good or all bad.

McClatchy  has the article Al Qaida-linked group Syria rebels once denied now key to anti-Assad victories.

Nearly a year later, however, Jabhat al Nusra, which U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaida, has become essential to the frontline operations of the rebels fighting to topple Assad.

I have no idea about the truth of or falsity of anything in the article.  The only conclusion I can feel certain of is that dealing with the Syria problem is complicated.

In the comments on the article are links to two other articles, America’s New Proxy, The Syrian National Coalition: The Many Faces of its Leader, Sheikh Ahmad Moaz Al-Khatib and
Al-Qaeda affiliate playing larger role in Syria rebellion.  I have no more ability to vouch for these two articles than I have for the McClatchy article.  However, taken all together they just reinforce how fraught with danger it is to meddle (or decide not to meddle) in the internal affairs of other countries.

I guess the only lesson to take away from this is to avoid getting too wedded to one side of the argument or the other and keep your mind open to new information.