Thanksgiving Week

What a week. TSA feeling up 5 year olds at the airport, while very important congress-critters and their posse slip in the side gate. A shopkeeper in Afghanistan managed to run off with a chunk of American taxpayer's money. With his proven ability to extract profitability, I'll bet that Wall Street head-hunters are looking for his number. April is when the debt ceiling has to be raised or maintained. Some of our new critters have announced an eminent Government shutdown. I feel very safe in predicting that neither their paycheck nor the IRS will be effected. First things first, after all. President Obama took a trip to Asia and the G-20 meeting. One country went so far as to suggest that they would put the needs of their own people before America's Strategic Interests. Great googly moogly!! A world where people tended to their own business - unacceptable. We might be forced to grow our own food and sew our own clothes or make something for trade. (beside debt tranches) I seem to remember something the Greeks were muttering about hubris, or was it Gods, punishment and TV, or maybe cynicism being way too easy. The dumping of links begins.

• Musharraf attempts a comeback: There are certainly countries that promote men like Musharraf, and it's possible he could mount a political comeback - but so few are able to apply authoritarianism correctly, if there is such a thing. If Musharraf has no plans to push back against these internal forces, his usefulness to America seems minor at best.
• Congress Erodes National Security: Congress has also experienced a declining pool of expertise in important foreign policy areas such as arms control, and it remains ill-equipped to prepare the country for coping with the many overlapping foreign policy challenges wrought by globalization, King says. She urges leaders of the new Congress to return to rules of order and emulate some of the ways the executive branch is taking on the cross-jurisdictional challenges, especially the State Department and Defense Department.
• Rising East, Setting West: Add to this the peculiar obsessions of the Washington power elite, with regard to Iran for instance, and you have an unpalatable mix. These all-American fixations are viewed as an inconvenience or worse in Asia, where powerful regional hegemons are increasingly determined to chart their own courses, even if in public they continue to humor a somewhat addled and infirm Uncle Sam.
• Congress Should Defend My Junk: If, on the other hand, Issa were to launch an investigation of TSA, he'd instantly win the media stardom he longs for and would probably win over a good many independents and Democrats (and Atlantic staffers). Think about it: he could call as witnesses some poor 5-year-old kid who got felt up and the kid's furious mom.

The next three are about reducing the Pentagon budget. I'm not sure why I include them, no-one has any real intention of actually doing it. We can't be soft on **place current boogie here**.

• Defense on a Diet: Such agreement is easy enough to find among think-tank academics, especially those employed by institutions that specifically advocate limited government or scrutinize the military-industrial complex. But there’s far less appetite for it on Capitol Hill, especially among the Republican congressmen currently beating their chests about excessive government spending—though Democrats are seldom much better.
• Defending Europe: Europe is not under threat from any nation state that its own armed forces could not dispatch. What's more, it's not clear why Brzezinski is so dismissive about the costs of these garrisons. The U.S. Army was already in the process of consolidating its European bases and drawing down brigades - a process that the Obama administration has halted, at a cost of billions of dollars to the taxpayer.
• Defense Cuts: The idea that we need a defense budget almost 60 percent larger as a share of GDP than a decade ago is ludicrous. While it is true that the wars initiated by George W. Bush and a Republican Congress will impose a financial burden on American taxpayers for many years to come, that isn’t enough to justify spending more than half of the world’s military expenditures. Almost all our NATO allies get by spending well less than half what we spend as a share of GDP.

The last three are a bit of history. The Glen Beck one isn't so much about the gloryhound himself, that's low hanging cherries, but more about how simple sending up a smokescreen to go with those gilt mirrors really is.

• Glen Beck's Myths: Certainly there are features of Progressivism that anyone concerned about centralized power has every right to criticize. But there are problems with how Beck frames his critique. There were different types of Progressives who stressed diverse themes, not all of which can be subsumed under the rubric of “big government.” The connection between Progressivism and modern liberalism is weak.
• Eurasian Time: His current work broadens the canvas by looking at broad temporal patterns of consolidation and turmoil across the full expanse of Eurasia, including Russia, France, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia.
• Ghandi's Invisible Hands: Ever since reading Unto This Last, John Ruskin’s 1877 paean to the dignity of manual labor, in South Africa, Gandhi had had a credo to match his Victorian attitude of industriousness. Accordingly, he transformed his ashram into a workshop where each member engaged in substantial amounts of communal service, from working in the community’s kitchen to teaching in the ashram school to cleaning the shared latrines.