This is a guest note by Kevin Nealer. Nealer has been a Fulbright professor of trade law & policy in China and is Guest Lecturer at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
What follows below is an interesting article that I am going to post in full as it does not at this point appear to be available on the internet anywhere.
After a long, messy battle between Senator Jim DeMint and the Obama administration, Senator DeMint removed his holds on two key administration appointees whose nominations have been languishing pending the outcome over a battle involving the Honduras ouster of President Manuel Zelaya.
My liberal friends who watch Latin America often cringe when I say this, but I really don’t like Hugo Chavez. I recognize that he was democratically elected — but I think he’s a reckless leader in Latin America who has too much of a frequency to animate trouble beyond his borders.
Kind of sad when you see a Freshman US Senator get appointed and immediately hijacked by lobbying groups who have deeply parochial interests that run against the nation’s and even Senator George LeMieux‘s own state of Florida.
Each month when I get the official unemployment figures from the US government, I quickly search in my inbox for a note from former cable network CEO and senior economic adviser in the John Edwards and Barack Obama campaigns Leo Hindery who sends me the “effective unemployment” figures that many economic commentators from Joseph Stiglitz…
This is a guest note by former Senator Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings (D-SC) who served for 39 years in the United States Senate. He is the author of Making Government Work, which Steve Clemons recommends for anyone wanting to understand more about legislative structure and process.
Today, the government announced a surge in the national unemployment figure of 10.2% — which seriously underestimates the ‘effective unemployment’ rate of those who have stopped looking for work or who are undermployed. Leo Hindery issues these numbers regularly, and I will post them when I receive them.
For some time, I have been writing that the US has lost sight of its al Qaeda-rationalized strategic objectives in Afghanistan and stumbled into a civil war.
Jon Weinberg is a research intern at the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force. Last week, Zalmay Khalilzad, former US Ambassador to the UN, and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) spoke at RAND’s “Afghanistan: Basic Questions–Strategy Choices” conference. Both emphasized that key strategic choices must be considered before a decision on troops is made.
