Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

This looks really interesting. I’m glad Ed Norton took time away from Hollywood to do it; a historic election like Obama’s should be documented in real-time.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Ahmed Wali Kharzai, brother of Afghan president Hamid Kharzai (currently arranging the theft of a runoff election) is on the CIA payroll and waist-deep in the opium trade.

American strategy for the last eight years has been dominated by used-carpet salesmen pretending to serve our, and their own nation’s, interests while actually serving their own.

The same day brought news from the AP that coalition troops already outnumber Taliban 12-1 in Afghanistan. That might seem like a winning ratio until you realize most of the troops are actually poorly-trained Afghans. Both the NYT and the AP are reporting the new plan will focus on population centers, while troop-surge advocates focus on lines of communication:

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

But military planners are also pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy — tasks that would require significantly more reinforcements beyond the 21,000 deployed by Mr. Obama this year.

In other words, owning the cities is not a workable strategy without owning the roads between them and the food-growing part of the country. You can’t operate without roads, and a series of helicopter crashes has reinforced the shortage of helicopters in-country.

So what’s an armchair-general to do? It’s easy to say the United States should just up and remove itself, but that won’t work. The entire operation exists under the auspices of the United Nations (PDF) and NATO — which makes this week’s attack on a UN guesthouse all the more understandable.

My guess: Obama will secure the main population centers, patrol the highways by air, try some civil society and development initiatives, and continue a quiet effort to engage the Taliban and separate them from al-Qaeda. The real question is whether he can engage new partners outside of Kabul and stop relying on just two unruly personalities.

Morning tab dump: Obama has ended the grant program for abstinence-only education, restored powers to the independent Intelligence Oversight Board, announced $3.4 billion in stimulus grants for smart grid technology, helped make electric cars a reality, and cut several unnecessary Pentagon programs. Oh yeah, and he signed the Matthew Shepard Act.

Health care reform legislation — with a public option — is likely to pass through Congress. Work is underway on climate change and financial reform.

“Just like Bush” my ass. The same with complaints about his style. Progressives need to wake up: this president is making Congress work again after eight years of laziness, and he aims to get what he wants — even if you can’t see what he’s doing.

Here’s one thing Bush never did that Obama has done:

This fascinating exercise in wingnutery comes via the Brad Blog. Presenting an alternate reality where the tea parties were NOT created by FreedomWorks, a self-appointed documentarian focuses on the one black man in the crowd and covers the nonsense with dramatic music and an over-the-top voiceover.

Insisting that teabaggers were both ignored and mocked (both things cannot be true at the same time), the promotional website for this Morning Awful belongs to one Al Smith, owner of a small business making $73,000 a year. Which means he not only got a tax cut from Obama, but will likely qualify to save at least 30% on his health insurance premiums under a public option plan.

Keep it up, wingnuts! You’re doing great!

There is fail, there is epic fail, and there is a rarefied realm of sublimely perfect fiasco. Glenn Beck has that essential problem of topping himself all the time; after a boiled plastic frog, what’s next? Thus the perfect ingredients for fiasco are ever-present with Beck.

Beck told his audience to record the show yesterday because a new board would be unveiled. So…Media Matters recorded. What they caught was Beck cheating against himself at Connect Four:

Did you see that? He declared red the winner even though yellow had already won.. If I’m not mistaken, there were four red pieces in a row on his right-hand side, too.

Beck’s subject du jour was the Yosi Sergant nontroversy. Beck says he doesn’t want his mind changed by art, and asks whether the audience wants

someone who’s getting real political discussion every day, or someone making their choice on health care from a painting or a Broadway show?

I would love a “real political discussion” to happen on Faux Noise. If it did, I would have to stop calling it Faux Noise. The reason I keep calling it Faux Noise is that what takes place on Faux Noise is anything but a “real political discussion.”

Somehow, Beck gets away with making statements like that even though he admits he is not a journalist; the Faux Noise Channel gets away with acting as a right-wing opposition propaganda organization; but when the White House asks arts organizations to consider maybe, possibly thinking up ways to promote clean energy, public health, and American renewal, that’s a danger to freedom.

See how that works?

Last time you went shopping, how many jobs did you create? You have no way of knowing how your dollar turned up, or with whom, or what they did with it. But as Obama’s stimulus jobs report comes out today, Republicans are counting on widespread ignorance about basic economics to dominate the discussion. Of course, the media is channeling the ignorance. Here’s CBS last night:

My favorite inanity: a driving school in Georgia bought trucks. The “jobs created” were listed as students, which means there weren’t any “real” jobs created. This is only correct if you discount the facts that trucks don’t spring into existence on their own, but have to be manufactured and sold to driving schools.

The whole point of stimulus is to create economic activity. Economic activity creates jobs. That, too, is basic economics.

But wait! The Republicans cry. We’re already in the hole! Why spend on stimulus? I could go into great detail about how “deficit” is a scary word for something people don’t understand, but it happens that Bruce Bartlett at Capital Gains and Games has demolished this canard:

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s January 2009 estimate for fiscal year 2009, outlays were projected to be $3,543 billion and revenues were projected to be $2,357 billion, leaving a deficit of $1,186 billion. Keep in mind that these estimates were made before Obama took office, based on existing law and policy, and did not take into account any actions that Obama might implement.

Therefore, unless one thinks that McCain would have somehow or other raised taxes and cut spending (with a Democratic Congress), rather than enacting a stimulus of his own, then a deficit of $1.2 trillion was baked in the cake the day Obama took office. Any suggestion that McCain would have brought in a lower deficit is simply fanciful.

Now let’s fast forward to the end of fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30. According to CBO, it ended with spending at $3,515 billion and revenues of $2,106 billion for a deficit of $1,409 billion.

To recap, the deficit came in $223 billion higher than projected, but spending was $28 billion and revenues were $251 billion less than expected. Thus we can conclude that more than 100 percent of the increase in the deficit since January is accounted for by lower revenues. Not one penny is due to higher spending.

But it doesn’t work! Republicans cry. Except that it does. The largest stimulus program in world history was America’s “war effort” against fascism. When World War II ended, America’s chief economic challenge was a devastated global economy; the Marshall Plan was the second-biggest stimulus program in history, and worked just fine. Given that GDP grew 3.5 percent last quarter, it’s clearly working now.

In fact, CBS spent another segment straining to discount the effect of stimulus on the economy. Methinks they do protest too much:

Of course, there are caveats. For instance, stimulus in good economic times has less effect, and even in bad economic times government spending makes up a small portion of GDP. Nevertheless, stimulus has a place in recession economics because it can make things less awful and spur investment spending; that reality is lost on the Village. The GOP has nothing left except Teh Stupid™, and Teh Librul Media™ media is playing parrot.