Word: obamas
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...Beltway consensus can change. A few months ago, health care reform was dead. Then it got undead. Financial regulatory reform was supposedly dead too, but now that Republicans have supposedly learned that pure obstructionism is a losing play, it's being treated as a done deal. Democrats like Obama's economic adviser Larry Summers and Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd are saying it's going to pass, perhaps as early as next month. So are key Republicans like Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who recently put the odds of passage...
...version passed last year with zero Republican votes; even though Dodd's version passed through committee last month with, yes, zero Republican votes; even though Big Finance is blasting boatloads of money around Washington to block reform. It's at least plausible, as I've written, that if President Obama succeeds at framing reform as a stark banks-vs.-people choice, and enough Republicans get nervous about the political price they might pay for siding with Wall Street, a deal could be cut to get the issue out of the news before November. And the most recent behavior of Republicans...
...valleys, recognizing the fact that power changes hands in Afghanistan when those warlords switch their allegiances. Karzai probably considers the U.S. political leadership naive for believing that a pro-Western government there can survive without paying off a lot of unsavory characters. (See a story about President Obama's surprise visit to Afghanistan in March...
...President Hamid Karzai has a death wish. The Afghan leader has lately begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies - the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996. Having infuriated the Obama Administration by continuing to drag his feet on corruption - and then cozying up to Iran and China when Washington turned up the heat - Karzai ratcheted up the rhetoric last week. He accused the U.S. of trying to dominate his country, blamed the West for last year's electoral fraud (which his campaign...
Like Pakistan over the past eight years, Karzai has been biding his time, positioning himself for the battles and power shifts that will come when the Americans leave, his goal - like Islamabad's - being to protect his power. And the arrival in Washington of the Obama Administration signaled the onset of the endgame. Driven by a desire to conclude America's fiscally burdensome wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and alarmed by the downward security spiral in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration put Karzai on notice that failure to tackle the corruption that was deemed to be fueling the insurgency would jeopardize...