A bunch of lefties talking sports? How cool is that! Check out Dirty Hippie Sports Talk.
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Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Maddow via OpenLeft: McChrystal comments bigger than McChrystal
We need more people to make this point: The war in Afghanistan is a failure, can be nothing more than a failure and we need to pull the plug.
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Cutting off our noses….
The shift toward deficit reduction is a dangerous one, given the unsettled foundation on which this less-than-modest recovery is built. We need more stimulus to pump more cash into the economy and create jobs, not cuts that will lead to a reduction in government payrolls and an end to programs designed to help the folks hit hard by the downturn.
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Out of work? Out of luck
We are facing the worst employment crisis in memory, but Senate Republicans insist on playing political games with jobless benefits, forcing the Democrats into a counterproductive slashing of the bill and then still voting as a block against it. I’m waiting to hear a coherent argument for why they pushed for this thing to play out as it did.
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- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
New face, same failed war (cont.)
Anyone who seriously thought President Barack Obama might use the McChrystal affair to alter the course in Afghanistan needs to understand that the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal will do nothing to change direction.
On the contrary, his firing and replacement with his boss, Gen. David Petraeus, shows that the president is committed to the current course and has no intention to change directions:
In the short term, choosing Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal avoids many of the problems associated with removing the commander of a war effort involving 120,000 U.S. and NATO troops, billions of dollars in reconstruction projects and sensitive diplomatic negotiations.
As the head of the U.S. Central Command, Petraeus is more steeped in the Afghan war than any other four-star general in the military. He has played an active role in shaping the overall strategy as well as McChrystal’s tactical plans, and he knows Afghan President Hamid Karzai and many other senior Afghan government officials. During a recent trip, he met with the Afghan leader’s half brother, the chief power broker in the violence-plagued province of Kandahar.
“The decision to name Petraeus is the least disruptive way of removing McChrystal,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the leader of an Afghanistan-strategy review team for Obama in early 2009. “Petraeus knows the strategy inside and out, he knows the plans — he is as much of an architect of this as General McChrystal.”
The Petraeus appointment, therefore, stands as a recommitment to the failed policy, one that compounds mistakes made first by President George W. Bush and exacerbated when President Obama approved his surge.
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- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
