Afghan President's Brother Assassinated by Bodyguard

Afghanistan

Published July 12, 2011

| Associated Press

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AP

Oct. 9, 2010: Afghan President Hamid Karzai, second from right, is met by his half brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, left, in Argandab district of Kandahar province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan –  President Hamid Karzai's half brother, the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan and a lightning rod for criticism of corruption in the government, was assassinated Tuesday by a close associate. His death leaves a dangerous power vacuum in the south just as the government has begun peace talks with insurgents ahead of a U.S. withdrawal.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Kandahar provincial council, was shot to death while receiving guests at his home in Kandahar, the capital of the province that was the birthplace of the Taliban movement and was the site of a recent U.S.-led offensive.

Tooryalai Wesa, the provincial governor of Kandahar, identified the assassin as Sardar Mohammad and said he was a close, "trustworthy" person who had gone to Wali Karzai's house to get him to sign some papers.

As Wali Karzai was signing the papers, the assassin "took out a pistol and shot him with two bullets -- one in the forehead and one in the chest," Wesa said. "Another patriot to the Afghan nation was martyred by the enemies of Afghanistan."The killing coincided with a visit to the capital, Kabul, by French President Nicolas Sarzoky.

"This morning my younger brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was murdered in his home," the Afghan president said during a joint news conference with Sarkozy. "Such is the life of Afghanistan's people. In the houses of the people of Afghanistan, each of us is suffering and our hope is, God willing, to remove this suffering from the people of Afghanistan and implement peace and stability."

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assassination at the heavily guarded house, hidden behind 8-foot blast walls. The Interior Ministry said an investigation was under way.

Wali Karzai, who was in his 50s and had survived several previous assassination attempts, was seen by many as a political liability for the Karzai government after a series of allegations, including that he was on the CIA payroll and involved in drug trafficking. He denied the charges.

The president repeatedly challenged his accusers to show him evidence of his sibling's wrongdoing, but said nobody ever could.

Wali Karzai remained a key power broker in the south, helping shore up his family's interests in the Taliban's southern heartland, which has been the site of numerous offensives by U.S., coalition and Afghan troops to root out insurgents. Militants have retaliated by intimidating and killing local government officials or others against the Taliban.

The United Nations said in a quarterly report issued June 23 that more than half of all assassinations across Afghanistan since March had been in Kandahar. In April, the Kandahar police chief Khan Mohammad Mujahid was killed by a suicide bomber wearing a police uniform who blew himself up beside the official's car.

According to a government official with knowledge of the investigation, Wali Karzai was holding a meeting in his home with five provincial council members and a number of local village elders, including the assassin. The official said Mohammad was a close friend and had represented Wali Karzai many times in their shared home village of Karz, the president's hometown. Mohammad was the village elder of Karz and was his emissary and travel companion throughout Kandahar, the official said.

At about 11:30 a.m. Mohammad asked Wali Karzai to speak with him privately and to sign some papers in an adjoining room, the official said. Three shots rang out, according to the official. Wali Karzai's bodyguards ran into the room and found him on the floor with bullet wounds to his head, hand and leg. The bodyguards shot and killed the assassin.

The government official said that it remains unclear whether the killing was the result of an internal feud or a Taliban plot.

Although tribal rivalries are common in Kandahar, bloodletting within tribes is fairly uncommon, he said.

Agha Lalai, deputy of the provincial council, said he was one of the first to respond to the sounds of shots.

Lalai said that he and several other men picked up Wali Karzai and attempted to carry him out of the house, but he died before they left the grounds.

In Kabul, the political elite reacted to the killing with shock and concern about the future of the country's southern region and beyond. Though Wali Karzai held an elected office in the provincial council, people who knew him said he seemed to float above the various political and tribal spheres dominating the south. Throngs of people came to Karzai's house on a daily basis seeking remedies for everything from family disputes, to tribal battles, to political intrigues.

Members of the international community had urged the president to remove his brother from his powerful provincial position, saying that it was essential if he was to prove to the Afghan people that he was committed to good governance. But despite his alleged forays into narco-trafficking, smuggling, and land theft, many Western officials also relied on him because of his unparalleled reach and understanding of the various players in the area.

Noorolhaq Olomi, a former parliament member from Kandahar, said Wali Karzai was the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan -- "more of a governor than the governor" and "everybody's leader in the south, not just Kandahar."

"I cannot say whether this was political or personal or some other matter," Olomi said. "But whoever did it, it shows the weakness of this government. The president needs to change things. He needs to change himself and build a government that is real. Right now, there is no government. It's all a fraud."

Condolences flooded into the president palace throughout the day.

Gen. David Petraeus, the outgoing commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, condemned the murder and said the coalition would support efforts to prosecute anyone who played a role in the killing. "President Karzai is working to create a stronger, more secure Afghanistan, and for such a tragic event to happen to someone within his own family is unfathomable," Petraeus said in a statement.

Both Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani called the president to express their sadness at his brother's death.

Abdullah Abdullah, the top opposition leader in Afghanistan who ran against Karzai in the latest presidential election, called it "an act against national personality and the ones who are at the service of the Afghan people."

Mohammad Yusuf Pashtun, a senior adviser to the president for construction, water, energy and mines, said the death will have a big impact on security in southern Afghanistan.

"My first impression is that in spite of all the negative propaganda against him he managed to be a source of stability in that area," he said. "When it comes to bringing people together in the south, this creates a vacuum. I don't know what will happen now, but something must be done by the local leadership."

Rangina Hamidi, a resident of Kandahar and daughter of the city's mayor, said Wali Karzai is survived by five children -- two sons and three daughters. She says his youngest son was born about a month ago.

Wali Karzai has been the reported target of multiple assassination attempts.

In May 2009, a bodyguard was killed when his motorcade was ambushed by insurgents but Wali Karzai was not harmed.

That attack came less than two months after four Taliban suicide bombers stormed Kandahar's provincial council office, killing 13 people in an assault that Wali Karzai said was aimed at him, although he had left the building a few minutes beforehand.

Wali Karzai also survived a November 2008 suicide attack on the provincial council offices that killed six other people.

Revenue Increases that Republicans will Support

Uploaded by senatormikelee on Jul 8, 2011

Ron Paul won't seek congressional term in 2012

Posted: Tuesday, July 12, 2011 10:38 am | Updated: 10:50 am, Tue Jul 12, 2011.

By John Tompkins | 

LAKE JACKSON — After serving almost 24 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Ron Paul told The Facts this morning he will not be seeking another term for the District 14 seat.

Paul, 75, will instead focus on his quest for the presidency in 2012.

“I felt it was better that I concentrate on one election,” Paul said. “It’s about that time when I should change tactics.”

His announcement will give enough time for anyone with aspirations for his seat to think about running, he said. Paul didn’t want to wait for filing in the 2012 primary to let people know he wasn’t seeking reelection.

“I didn’t want to hold off until in December,” he said. “I thought it shouldn’t be any later than now.”

Paul has served 12 terms in Congress. District 14 encompasses a 10-county area along the Gulf Coast.

“The people in the area have supported me for many years,” he said.

Before turning to politics, Paul was an obstetrician based in Lake Jackson. The Pennsylvania native served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force before moving to the area to start his practice.

Paul first was elected to the U.S. House in 1976 and served four terms before stepping down in 1984. After Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Paul said he felt inspired to run again and sought the District 14 seat in 1996. He beat incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Greg Laughlin in the 1996 primary and won the general election against Democrat Charles “Lefty” Morris.

Paul has held the seat since 1996 and has fended off challengers both from his party and from Democrats. In the last election in 2010, Paul easily beat three Republican challengers in the primary and then won reelection against Democrat Robert Pruett in the general election.

Brazoria County Republican Chair Yvonne Dewey said she was not expecting Paul’s announcement, made exclusively to The Facts early Tuesday.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “He has won very handily in the last few elections. He’s hung in there all these years.”

While he has faced many opponents in his own party in recent years, no one has formally announced running for his nomination in the March 2012 primary, Dewey said.

“I think it will be treated as a wide-open seat,” she said. “You will have a lot of candidates on both sides.”

He unsuccessfully ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate in 1988, and in 2008 unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the White House.

Paul said while he is vacating the District 14 seat, he feels his chances for the 2012 Republican nomination are much better than in 2008, when he set fundraising records driven by the Internet.

“We have a lot more support right now,” he said. “Things are doing well for us.”

Paul is traveling the country in his bid for the White House and said he has spent twice the amount of time in New Hampshire and Iowa this year than he did in 2008. Throughout his time in politics, Paul has had a stance of limited government, reduced federal spending, individual liberties and a non-interventionist foreign policy.

“I have been talking about this for years,” he said Tuesday. “I will always be doing that. But not in the U.S. Congress.”

Breakdown of Obama's strategy

By The Last Word Staff

  -  

Mon Jul 11, 2011 10:23 PM EDT

Step-by-step, Lawrence explains President Obama's approach to the debt negotiations and why he's masterfully winning the fight.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

GOP: Debt vote is 'shared sacrifice'

Obama is growing frustrated with Cantor's (left) and Boehner's bargaining stance. | AP Photos By: David Rogers July 11, 2011 07:49 PM EDT

Republicans dug in deeper against adding tax revenues to any deficit reduction package Monday, suggesting that just voting for a debt ceiling increase qualifies as “shared sacrifice” and even taunting President Barack Obama by saying that if he feels compelled to pay more taxes, “he can write a check anytime he wants.” That last remark came from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who has pushed past Speaker John Boehner as the public spokesman for the House GOP in recent days while also reasserting himself in negotiating sessions on the debt issue at the White House. Cantor said it was “laughable” to suggest that Republicans aren’t prepared to deal with the nation’s deficit and insisted the real distinction is: “We don’t want to go and raise taxes on people in a tough economy. That is what it comes down to right now. The president and his party do.” The tone was more polite at an afternoon White House negotiating session, where Cantor used color-coded charts to present his vision of how to get almost all the way to $2.4 trillion in 10-year savings without added taxes. But that’s still far less than what Obama is seeking, and Cantor didn’t hide the fact — yellow marked caution — that he was pushing the envelope beyond what spending cuts had been agreed to in prior talks with Democrats and Vice President Joe Biden. Talks are to resume Tuesday, and Obama said he will keep calling congressional leaders back each day until an answer is found. But the president’s frustration was apparent: “I do not see a path to a deal if they don’t budge, period,” Obama said at a morning press conference. And he risks seeing the whole process unravel as allies like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid show increasing impatience with the GOP’s stand. At a White House meeting Sunday night, Reid exploded at one point, angrily swearing that Republicans were now rejecting any peace dividend from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but had counted more than $1 trillion for this purpose in their own budget. And when Cantor spelled out his list of savings Monday, Reid bluntly predicted that the package would never have the support needed to pass the Senate. Obama himself walked Cantor back to about $1.7 trillion — the number used by the White House to better estimate what had been agreed to in the Biden talks. And Reid has argued that before further savings are agreed to at the expense of Medicare or Medicaid, the GOP must add revenues to the mix to get to the $2.4 trillion target. Among the listed savings which appear to be new on the Cantor sheets are up to $53 billion from proposed reforms in supplemental Medigap insurance policies, which are often criticized for encouraging an overuse of Medicare at the expense of taxpayers. And in the case of Pell Grants for low-income college students, Cantor’s estimate shows a huge range of savings from $10 billion to $56 billion — a fivefold increase. In a moment of humor, the president suggested Cantor’s detailed presentation had a page missing—on revenues. In fact, the Biden group had also discussed potential tax loophole closings with Cantor, who has said he might go along if the tax savings were used to finance other tax breaks. Biden jumped into the back-and-forth at this juncture, and it appeared to some that the president was reminding Cantor of these past revenue talks—perhaps to tweak the majority leader in front of the speaker.  The $2.4 trillion target represents the dollar-for-dollar equivalent of the estimated $2.4 trillion debt ceiling increase needed next month to guarantee the Treasury has sufficient borrowing authority to manage past the 2012 elections. Obama again Monday rejected the notion of a short-term fix, and until this past weekend he had hoped Boehner would join him behind a much larger $4 trillion deficit reduction package that would include substantial savings — but also new tax revenues. “It’s not going to get easier,” the president said. “It’s going to get harder. So we might as well do it now — pull off the Band-Aid. Eat our peas. Now is the time to do it. If not now, when?”  “I’m prepared to do it. I’m prepared to take on significant heat from my party to get something done, and I expect the other side should be willing to do the same thing if they mean what they say, that this is important.” Boehner himself has the air of a man beaten down, after giving up on the larger $4 trillion deal. But unlike Cantor, the speaker avoided taking any personal shot at Obama and still spoke favorably of the need for tax reform, a key element in that proposal. “There was a big conversation under way about revenues,” Boehner told reporters. “Revenues in the context of tax reform, lowering rates, broadening the base, which would encourage more economic activity and real growth in our economy that would result in additional revenues to the federal government.”  “There is, in fact, a way to do this.”  Indeed, coupling tax reform with a package of savings may yet be one path to restore momentum behind the negotiations.  Economist Mark Zandi told POLITICO that tax reform is “the most logical approach to bridge the gap between the two, and it would be a significant plus for the economy.” And Cantor himself has signaled that he would be more accepting of a reform deal — if the new revenues assumed for deficit reduction came solely from this resulting economic growth.  Nothing on the scale of the $4 trillion package seems possible, and Boehner will be shy of jumping back in. But Obama was clearly prepared to make significant spending concessions as part of his talks with the speaker.  Democrats confirmed that even options like slowly raising the eligibility age for Medicare were on the table — something that would have been taboo before enactment of health care reform last year. And the president saved part of Monday’s press conference to talk to progressives in his party who have been critical of his willingness to make concessions on core Democratic priorities.  “If you look at the numbers, then Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up,” Obama said. “I mean, it’s not an option for us to just sit by and do nothing. And if you’re a progressive who cares about the integrity of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and believes that it is part of what makes our country great, … then we have an obligation to make sure that we make those changes that are required to make it sustainable over the long term.”  “So, yeah, we’re going to have a sales job; this is not pleasant. It is hard to persuade people to do hard stuff that entails trimming benefits and increasing revenues. But the reason we’ve got a problem right now is people keep on avoiding hard things, and I think now is the time for us to go ahead and take it on.”

Deficit Predators: Everything You Need to Know About the Twisted, Dangerous Debt Ceiling Fight

By James K. Galbraith, New Deal 2.0 Posted on July 11, 2011, Printed on July 12, 2011 News reports hold that President Obama scored a political victory by agreeing to put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block to achieve a “go-big” $4 trillion deficit reduction. Speaker Boehner had to concede that Republicans won’t vote for any package that includes tax increases – and the deal died. So the gambit worked and the President emerged with a solid image as the alpha deficit hawk. To which one can only say: how nice for him. We’re in a summer that only Salvador Dali could paint, a reality so twisted that one almost yearns for the simple verities of the War on Terror or even the invasion of Iraq. Then as now, to be serious one must be a “hawk.” (The dove is a weakling, a loser, and the owl for practical purposes does not exist.) So let’s review some of the strange and mysterious faces of this ugly, vicious bird. The debt ceiling was first enacted in 1917. Why? The date tells all: we were about to enter the Great War. To fund that effort, the Wilson government needed to issue Liberty Bonds. This was controversial, and the debt ceiling was cover, passed to reassure the rubes that Congress would be “responsible” even while the country went to war. It was, from the beginning, an exercise in bad faith and has remained so every single second to the present day. Today this bad-faith law is pressed to its absurd extreme, to force massive cuts in public programs as the price of not-reneging on the public debts of the United States. Never mind that to force default on the public obligations of the United States is plainly unconstitutional. Section 4 of the 14th amendment says in simple language that public debts, once duly authorized by law and including pensions, by the way, “shall not be questioned.” The purpose of this language was to foreclose, to put beyond politics, any possibility that the Union would renege on debts and pensions and bounties incurred to win the Civil War. But the application is very general and the courts have ruled that the principle extends to the present day. What is going on in Congress at this moment already violates that mandate. It is an effort to subvert the authority of the government to meet and therefore to incur obligations of every possible stripe. It is an attack on the concept of government itself – as the “Tea Party” by its very name would no doubt agree. It therefore paints those deficit hawks who are using the debt ceiling to take budget hostages as enemies of the United States Constitution. The President, though supposedly a constitutional expert and though sworn to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, will not say this. Instead he appears to treat the Constitution as an optional matter, to which he will not resort, in the hope that by negotiating with the hostage- takers he can reach some reasonable outcome that will preserve everyone’s good name. (The great Harvard legal scholar Laurence Tribe recently argued that the President cannot defy the debt ceiling on his own.That’s a debatable point.) It is as though Lincoln in 1861 faced with the siege of Sumter had sat down with Confederate commissioners to see what could be worked out. In Washington it appears that this assault on government has a large measure of elite and media support, if not on the crass details or vulgar personalities but because it could conceivably force the parties to do “what they should do anyway” – namely come to a long-term deficit and debt agreement. Such an agreement would cut spending, raise some taxes, put the projected debt-to-GDP ratio on a declining track, and solve the “government’s fiscal crisis.” What fiscal crisis? The great unasked question in this summer of sound-and-fury is “why?” The United States has many problems at the moment: a high-and-stubborn unemployment rate, a foreclosure catastrophe, a slowing economy that has not recovered and will not recover from the Great Crisis, and the ongoing challenges of infrastructure, energy and climate change. Fiscal crisis? The entire thing is a figment, made up of wise-men’s warnings repeated endlessly and linked to the projections of technicians at the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere. The projections, as I’ve written here, are made up of two economically impossible arguments. One is that there will be a big economic rebound, restoring near-full employment by 2013 or so. We’re already off that track, as some of us warned from the beginning. Of course, a recovery would reduce the deficit even if nothing were done. But CBO then recreates the exploding debt by assumptions, which include steady growth and low inflation, but sharply higher health-care costs and much higher short-term interest rates. These lead the projected debt to compound skyward, soon surpassing all previous records in relation to GDP. Is this possible? No it is not. The Federal Reserve would never raise the short-term interest rate as CBO projects, without a prior increase of inflation, which CBO assumes will not occur. If they did, the economy would collapse! And if they don’t, the debt does not compound out of control. I have presented these simple numbers here. For what it’s worth, if you believe the capital markets signal anything, they signal their disbelief in doomsday forecasts, in the long-term interest rate on US government bonds, every single day. Is it possible that cutting government is, by some other path, the way to economic recovery? There are many people who believe fervently in the resilience of the private sector and for whom government is just a burden. Some of those people are pure predators: resource magnates, media magnates, banking magnates. Others have blinded themselves to the role government actually plays in sustaining the advanced networks, human protections and social systems that make up our lives, and imagine that one can go back to the world of subsistence farming, church charity and credit from the corner store. But there were many fewer people in that world, they didn’t do what we do, and they didn’t live nearly so long. In broad terms, today’s government does four major things: – it provides for the national defense. – it purchases goods and services from the private economy for a wide range of public purposes, most of them individually quite small-scale in relation to GDP. – it regulates a wide range of private-sector activity, for safety, health, environmental and other purposes, including financial stability – or so one should hope. – it administers Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as other pension and health benefit programs. On what grounds are any of these functions too large? As an economist concerned with peace and security issues, I do believe we would be better off ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly, that we could dispense with the real resource costs of many foreign bases, aircraft carrier groups, fighter aircraft and submarines and nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War. But these are security judgments, not broad economic ones. In other words, I would not cut a single dime of Pentagon spending that was actually necessary to defend the United States, in order supposedly to lower the interest rate on federal debt. By the same reasoning, why should we cut transportation, or public health, or environmental protection, or scientific research, or bank inspectors or funds that support the public schools? One can argue these matters program by program - and one should. (I would happily cut ethanol subsidies and oil company tax breaks, for starters.) But there is no economic case for placing an overall limit, and it is obvious that the 500,000 public sector workers – including many teachers, police, fire and park rangers and librarians – who have lost their jobs since 2009 were doing good and useful things that are now missed. If sacking them had been good for the economy, we would be having a stronger recovery than we are. Finally there are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Unlike the military or the transportation program, Social Security is not a government purchasing program. It therefore takes nothing directly from the private sector. What it does, is provide insurance: it protects workers from poverty in old age, whether or not their families would otherwise be willing and able to support them. And it taxes all workers, whether or not they would otherwise be burdened with elderly parents, or survivors, or the disabled, to support. Along with Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security is a powerful protector of the entire working population – young and old. It redistributes purchasing power, in loose relation to past earnings, in a way that meets the basic needs of a large number of Americans who would otherwise, in many millions of cases, be destitute or medically bankrupt. What economic purpose would cutting such programs serve? To do so would again redistribute incomes. Many of the future elderly would be much worse off, and of course many would die younger than they otherwise would. Survivors and the disabled would suffer as well. In return, what would the federal government and the country gain? A release of real resources to the private sector? Social Security does not take real resources from the private sector! Lower interest rates? The idea is absurd, and not just because interest rates are low today. The notion that cutting Social Security would help keep interest rates down is absurd because interest rates are set in a way that has no relationship at all to the scale of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.* This argument has nothing to do with the trope, oft-repeated and perfectly true, that the Social Security system does not contribute to the deficit. It would not matter if it did. The important question is: are benefits too high? Obviously not. How about payroll taxes - are they too low? There is no case for that either. One of the very few bright spots in recent policy was the decision to reduce payroll taxes on employees, temporarily, while leaving Social Security benefits alone. If you wanted to build on that, the right steps would be to lower – not raise – the Social Security early retirement age, permitting for a few years older workers to exit the labor force permanently on better terms than are available to them today. This together with a lower age of access to Medicare would work quickly to rebalance the labor force, reducing unemployment and futile job search among older workers while increasing job openings for the young. It is the application of plain common sense. And unlike all the pressures to enact long-term cuts in these programs, it would help solve one of today’s important problems right away. Instead of this, what do we have, from a President who claims to be a member of the Democratic Party? First, there is the claim that we face a fiscal crisis, which is a big untruth. Second, a concession in principle that we should deal with that crisis by enacting massive cuts in public services on one hand and in vital social insurance programs on the other. This is an arbitrary cruelty. Third, a refusal to stand on the strong ground of the Constitution, against those whose open and declared purpose is tear that document and the public credit to shreds. In the Daily Beast on Sunday, Howard Kurtz wrote in optimistic terms of the prospects for a deficit bargain: “But away from the cameras, even sharp-tongued politicians recognize the imperative of avoiding the fate of Greece. It is a sign of the times that the Kabuki players of Washington may take a bow simply for averting catastrophe.” Kurtz did not say that the big Kabuki here was his own notion that somehow the United States might face the fate of Greece – a small and overmatched member of a currency zone it cannot control. He did not say that the catastrophe he fears – a default on US government obligations – was entirely the product of treacherous politics, abetted by an irresolute President who seems not to grasp the danger of allowing the Constitution to fail. And he did not say, that the deal he would applaud, with cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all the legitimate and necessary functions of government — would be for millions of Americans the catastrophe itself. * Short-term rates are whatever the Federal Open Market Committee dictates they should be. And if the Treasury wants to pay low interest rates on the debt, it can always issue short-term debt only — or it can issue long bonds and the Federal Reserve can buy them back, maintaining the structure of interest rates it prefers. There is no market default risk, no threat to “solvency” from a “loss of confidence” – nothing the private sector can do to make the US government pay more than it wants do – a point that should be obvious from the fact that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions are never overruled by the market. The only way the United States government can default is if it makes a political decision to do so – which is what the debt-ceiling hostage-takers threaten and what the Constitution forbids.

Matthews: We need to concentrate on jobs

By Chris Matthews

  -  

Mon Jul 11, 2011 8:00 PM EDT

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Let me finish with a powerful word: jobs!

I spent a good deal of my life working in the U.S. Senate, then in the White House, then for a legendary Speaker of the House. One thing we concentrated on was jobs!

One of my first jobs was working for a Senator in Utah. I was counting up the public works and economic development projects that were shovel-ready if the government would approve them. Jobs that put people to work doing things that needed doing - not leaf-raking - but getting roads fixed and bridges up to code - getting sewer and water systems in place.

When I worked for Tip O'Neill, the Republican leader complained that a jobs bill the Democrats were pushing was make-work. I called up the chief engineer in his district and got the names and addresses of the bridges below code. The Speaker read that list aloud on the floor of Congress. It upset the Republican leader but it made a point: there's good work out there that needs to be done and this is a good time to get going on it.

"If not now, when?" The president asked that today about the debt ceiling. "If not now, when?" 

We could demand the same of our politicians about jobs. That "stimulus" bill they passed two years ago ain't very stimulating, not because it was too big, but because it was a pipsqueak. After you've taken out the tax cuts in it, the amount that actually goes to job creation - real public investment spending - comes to about one percent of the economy. One percent. No wonder the stimulus ran out of juice.  It never had much to begin with.

I read Paul Krugman's column in The New York Times today. He makes a great point: the government has fewer people working for it than it did when President Obama came into office. So we've got no real money going into public works, no money going into public service jobs, and you've got your explanation of why we've got a 9.2 percent unemployment rate.

I like the fact that the president is trying to compromise with the Republicans who control the House. But one of the big delusions is always that the truth - the smart policy - is somewhere in the middle between the two sides being argued.  

Maybe we have to go back to old-style partisan politics on this. You know, like getting the list together of all the bridges below code in John Boehner's district - or Eric Cantor's - or Kevin McCarthy's. Maybe the smart policy is the smart politics - put a little heat under their butts.

Mila Kunis Accepts Marine Ball Invite

Uploaded by TheYoungTurks on Jul 11, 2011

Misty Kingma and Richard Eskow discuss Mila Kunis accepting an invitation to the Marine Corp Ball by a Marine serving in Afghanistan. Did Justin Timberlake pressure her into going on the date?

Don't Cut Care, Mr. President (Pt.1)

Keith Olbermann

July 11, 2011 at 6:34 pm

Keith's Special Comment (Part 1 of 2): Despite extreme pressure to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, President Obama must firmly fulfill his obligation to take care of the least of our fellow Americans.

Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz Responds to GOP Leader’s Statement on Potential U.S. Default

Posted by DNC Press on Monday, July 11, 2011 at 4:09 PM

In response to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, the head of the national Republican Party, saying on ABC’s Topline today that the August 2nd debt limit deadline is “not the end of the world,” DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz released the following statement:

Chairman Priebus is not the first Republican to suggest that it would be fine for the U.S. to default on its obligations and fail to raise the debt limit, but as the head of the Republican Party his comment that doing so is ‘not the end of the world’ is among the most irresponsible. Never before has the United States defaulted on our obligations and economists agree that going into default would have catastrophic consequences for our economic recovery and repercussions in financial markets across the globe. If we were to default on our obligations our economy could crater and significant pain and hardship would fall on our nation’s most vulnerable citizens including seniors, the poor, the middle class and young people.

This sort of reckless rhetoric is detrimental to the efforts of President Obama and Congressional leaders to find a responsible solution to getting our fiscal house in order in a balanced way and meeting our nation’s obligation to pay its bills. Instead of playing politics and risking default to appeal to the most extreme elements of their base, Republicans should use this opportunity to reach a meaningful compromise to put our country on firmer financial footing.