Deep rifts at the heart of Western policy on Afghanistan were laid bare yesterday when President Obama’s top military adviser challenged him to authorise a troop surge that his most senior congressional allies have said they will oppose.

Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more US troops as well as a rapid increase in the size and capability of the Afghan army were needed to carry out the President’s own strategy for prevailing in Afghanistan as the eighth anniversary of a debilitating war approaches.

His remarks to a Senate hearing came as Bob Ainsworth, the British Defence Secretary, said that the Taleban had proven a resilient enemy. “We’re far from succeeding against them yet but I reject that we’re not making progress,” he said at King’s College London.

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Former Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page said he doesn’t expect much to result from the work of advisers to the White House’s office dealing with faith-based and community groups.

“I believe that the policy recommendations that will come forth will be relatively innocuous, good, helpful,” said Page, a member of the panel, on Thursday (Sept. 10) at the annual meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association. He expects results to be not much more than “low-hanging fruit.”

“There will be good things, but nothing of great substance.”

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The president’s contention was questionable.

But Rep. Wilson’s rash rudeness was a disgrace for him, an embarrassment for South Carolina and a particularly appalling breach of protocol by a native of Charleston, a bastion of gentility. Fellow federal lawmakers swiftly responded with bipartisan condemnation….

And we express sincere disappointment at seeing Joe Wilson descending to such deplorably bitter depths in a sorry spectacle that’s a sign of our increasingly acrimonious times.

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“God of grace and God of glory,” prayed the Rev. Cynthia Hale during a national conference call Aug. 19 on health care reform, “É We believe that it is your will that every man, woman, boy and girl receive quality health care in America.”

On that point, no religious leader would contest Hale, pastor at Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga., who offered the prayer at the kickoff of an effort by the faith community to mobilize religious support for the ideals of health care reform favored by President Obama.

From the pulpits and through public statements, religious leaders have been weighing in on various elements of what they say is a crucial moral issue. Catholic bishops in New Jersey, in letters to the state’s members of Congress, have lobbied against possible inclusion of abortion coverage in any federal health care plan, a possibility Obama dismissed in his prime-time speech Wednesday. The Episcopal Church USA passed a resolution favoring a single-payer system, while some Catholic bishops in the Midwest have publicly opposed any massive government effort.

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Some 150 years ago, a congressman from South Carolina, angered by a speech on slavery, entered the Senate chamber and beat a senator from Massachusetts into unconsciousness with a metal-topped wooden cane.

Years earlier on the House floor, a representative from Vermont attacked a colleague from Connecticut — also with a cane — only to be attacked himself with a pair of fireplace tongs.

And then there was the 1838 pistol duel in which William Graves of Kentucky shot and killed fellow Congressman Jonathan Cilley of Maine over words spoken on the House floor. (Graves wasn’t even expelled.)

Given those breaches of congressional protocol, it would seem that a mere shout of “You lie!” from a 21st-century South Carolina congressman would be small potatoes. Especially when compared with a global tradition of brawls, scuffles, hurled insults (sometimes fruit too) and other mayhem in legislatures around the world.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

But he chose again to duck the biggest dispute of all: whether the new insurance exchange must contain a government-run “public option.” Mr. Obama once again outlined the arguments for a public plan and once again said it was not essential. Perhaps the president’s advisers made the right political calculation in determining that Wednesday night was not the time to embrace a particular alternative, such as nonprofit cooperatives or a trigger under which a plan would be created only if private insurers do not reduce premium costs to a certain level. But this laissez-faire strategy guarantees that the rather peripheral debate over the public option will continue to dominate the health-care discussion.

Mr. Obama sketched out a measure that would cost $900 billion over the next decade — about three-fourths the size that the administration initially envisioned but still containing the basic elements of universal coverage. The money would come from an amalgam of savings in federal health spending programs and a new tax on insurance companies that offer plans costing more than a set amount. This is an ungainly and inefficient, but politically safe, way to approach the goal of limiting the amount of health benefits that can be offered tax-free.

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President Barack Obama’s address to Congress on healthcare reform was short on specifics and long on ideas he and his advisers had already floated this year.

The historic speech left some liberals wanting more details and conservatives emboldened to torpedo the president’s top domestic priority.

The big question of the night was how Obama was going to address the public health insurance option, but he largely repeated what he has said for weeks: He supports it, but will sign a bill that does not have it.

Read it all, and, yes, Joe Wilson should apologize–that was uncalled for.

While some were moved to tears by the president’s soaring rhetoric, others were moved not at all. Where some saw a new clarity, others saw more vagueness. And while some praised him for reaching out to Republicans, there were those who felt he was overreaching in some ways and not reaching far enough in others.

Americans listened intently to President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech on health care reform Wednesday night, and not surprisingly, their reviews varied. Few said they had changed their minds.

Matt Petrovick set his treadmill at a leisurely 2.8 mph pace so he could pay full attention to the television on the wall in front of him. He’s not sure the president’s words boosted his heart rate, but the speech certainly got him going.

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President Obama’s spirited defense Wednesday night of his broad healthcare goals avoided making concrete commitments on some of the most contentious issues, reflecting a guiding principle of his legislative strategy: to put off the most controversial decisions until the very last moment.

It is a strategy born of political reality. At this stage of the process, when neither the House nor the Senate has even begun a floor debate, lining up firmly on one side or the other of the hot-button issues invites gridlock or even defeat.

And so, though some liberal Democrats have threatened to revolt if Obama does not insist on a new government insurance option — the so-called public plan — the president told the joint session of Congress that he would consider other approaches to making coverage affordable for the uninsured.

“The public plan is only a means to that end,” he said, “and we should be open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.”

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I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last. It has now been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health care reform. And ever since, nearly every President and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way. A bill for comprehensive health reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Sixty-five years later, his son continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session.

Our collective failure to meet this challenge ”“ year after year, decade after decade ”“ has led us to a breaking point. Everyone understands the extraordinary hardships that are placed on the uninsured, who live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare. These are middle-class Americans. Some can’t get insurance on the job. Others are self-employed, and can’t afford it, since buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer. Many other Americans who are willing and able to pay are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.

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After a nearly 40-day recess that was anything but restful, House Democrats are returning to work Tuesday still unsettled over pending health-care legislation and sure only that the people have had their say.

They are in almost the exact position they were in when they left the Capitol in late July. Conservatives are still leery of supporting a government-funded, or public, insurance option. Freshman lawmakers from suburban districts remain fearful of increasing taxes for their wealthy constituents to pay for the new measure and await alternatives from moderate Senate Democrats. And progressives, who are demanding the most far-reaching reform since the Great Depression, are still threatening to bring down the legislation if it does not contain a robust version of the public option.

In the lead-up to President Obama’s critical Wednesday night address to a joint session of Congress, interviews with a cross section of about 15 House Democrats and half a dozen aides show that there is still overwhelming support for some overhaul of the health-care system. But the caucus remains deeply divided over the details of the more than 1,000-page measure and now faces a public that is more skeptical than when House committees began drafting the plan two months ago.

“We knew a lot of work still needed to be done, so no, not a lot has changed,” said Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.), a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of 52 Democrats from moderate-to-conservative districts.

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Barack Obama is committing the same mistakes made by policymakers during the Great Depression, according to a new study endorsed by Nobel laureate James Buchanan.

His policies even have the potential to consign the US to a similar fate as Argentina, which suffered a painful and humiliating slide from first to Third World status last century, the paper says.

There are “troubling similarities” between the US President’s actions since taking office and those which in the 1930s sent the US and much of the world spiralling into the worst economic collapse in recorded history, says the new pamphlet, published by the Institute of Economic Affairs.

In particular, the authors, economists Charles Rowley of George Mason University and Nathanael Smith of the Locke Institute, claim that the White House’s plans to pour hundreds of billions of dollars of cash into the economy will undermine it in the long run. They say that by employing deficit spending and increased state intervention President Obama will ultimately hamper the long-term growth potential of the US economy and may risk delaying full economic recovery by several years.

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Amid political battles over the role of government in health care and other functions, White House officials Sunday offered carefully drawn statements describing how far the president would go in pushing for a so-called “public option’ alternative to private insurance in his health care overhaul initiative.

The president “believes the public option is a good tool,” said David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” But Axelrod added: “It shouldn’t define the whole health care debate, however.”

The president addresses a joint session of Congress Wednesday in the hope of reigniting interest in retooling the nation’s health insurance system. In advance of the nationally televised speech, he has been buffeted by pressure from the left and the right over the public option, a government-backed policy that that would be offered alongside private plans to promote competition and assure coverage for the uninsured.

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President Obama plans to address a joint session of Congress next week in an effort to rally support for health care legislation as White House officials look for ways to simplify and scale back the major Democratic bills, lower the cost and drop contentious but nonessential elements.

Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.

But the officials said Mr. Obama was unlikely to unveil a detailed legislative plan of his own. And they insisted that Mr. Obama had not given up on the provision that has attracted the most fire from the right, a proposal for a government-run competitor to private insurers, although many Democrats say the proposal may eventually be jettisoned.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said Mr. Obama would be “more prescriptive than he has been to date.” And he added, “We have a tremendous amount of consensus in Congress to build off of.”

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Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

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The editorial [in the Tablet] has value for several reasons. First, it proves once again that people don’t need to actually live in the United States to have unhelpful and badly informed opinions about our domestic issues. Second, some of the same pious voices that once criticized U.S. Catholics for supporting a previous president now sound very much like acolytes of a new president. Third, abortion is not, and has never been, a “specifically Catholic issue,” and the editors know it. And fourth, the growing misuse of Catholic “common ground” and “common good” language in the current health-care debate can only stem from one of two sources: ignorance or cynicism.

No system that allows or helps fund””no matter how subtly or indirectly””the killing of unborn children, or discrimination against the elderly and persons with special needs, can bill itself as “common ground.” Doing so is a lie.

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Tuesday’s sharply upgraded forecasts for growth in US national debt over the ext decade could hardly have come at a worse time for Barack Obama. Shortly after he was elected last November, the president let it be known he preferred the “big bang” approach to domestic reforms.

As Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff put it, you should “never allow a crisis to go to waste”. In other words, the financial meltdown was seen as an opportunity for Mr Obama to enact as many of his key reforms, including healthcare, within the first year of taking office.

But fears of the Great Depression have receded only to be replaced by mounting concern over the country’s long-term creditworthiness. Rather than shoring up the appetite for domestic reform, the rising tide of fiscal panic could threaten large chunks of Mr Obama’s agenda.

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The reason why Obama is finding health reform such a struggle ”“ even though it was central to his election platform ”“ is not because an extreme wing of the Republican Party, mobilised by media shock-jocks, is foaming at the mouth, or because Republicans have more money than Democrats to buy lobbying and advertising power. Nor is it only because so many influential groups, from insurance companies through doctors, have lucrative interests to defend ”“ although this is a big part of it.

It is because very many Americans simply do not agree that it is a good idea. And they include not only mainstream Republicans, but Democrats, too. Indeed, Obama’s chief problem in seeking to extend health cover to most Americans is not Republican opposition: he thrashed John McCain to win his presidential mandate; he has majorities in both Houses of Congress. If Democrats were solidly behind reform, victory would already be his.

The unpalatable fact for Europeans who incline to think that Americans are just like us is that Democrats are not solidly behind Obama on this issue. Even many in the party’s mainstream must be wooed, cajoled and even ”“ yes ”“ frightened, if they are ever going to agree to change the status quo. Universal healthcare is an article of faith in the US only at what mainstream America would regard as the bleeding- heart liberal end of the spectrum.

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The Obama administration, citing an economic downturn that has been deeper than it had first thought, raised its estimate on Tuesday of the government’s deficit over the next decade to $9 trillion from $7.1 trillion.

The Office of Management and Budget also said that it expected the economy to contract 2.8 percent this year, substantially more than previously estimated, and that employment would peak at around 10 percent.

Despite the budget shortfall, White House officials said they saw no reason to back away from President Obama’s ambitious and costly goal of overhauling the health care system. The new amount includes the cost of the health care overhaul as well as about $600 billion in additional revenue that the administration hopes to raise, two initiatives Congress has yet to approve.

“I know there are going to be some who say that this report proves that we can’t afford health reform,” said Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. But he said the opposite was true: the only way to control spiraling Medicare costs, he said, was to get control of overall health care costs by overhauling the system.

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President Obama will reappoint Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, administration officials said Monday night, electing to maintain continuity in the nation’s most powerful economic policymaking job in a time of crisis.

The decision, expected to be announced Tuesday morning, ends speculation about the fate of the nation’s top banker. Bernanke won praise for the unprecedented actions taken to contain the recession, but came under withering criticism from lawmakers for not preventing the financial meltdown that dragged the country and the rest of the world into a deep downturn.

If the Senate confirms him, Bernanke would serve a second four-year term when his current one ends on Jan. 31. He would, in his second term, begin the difficult task of unwinding the Fed’s extensive interventions in the economy.

A senior White House official said Obama has been impressed by Bernanke’s handling of the economic crisis over the past year and wants to maintain a steady hand in place as the economy begins to recover.

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The West is spending a fortune in aid to Afghanistan. As the new head of Britain’s army recently pointed out, it is likely to have to go on supporting the country for decades. Yet the roads that are foreign development’s proudest boasts also serve to meet the insurgents’ and drug-dealers’ logistical needs.

That is inevitable: infrastructure serves the wicked as well as the righteous. But the West has not spent its money as well as it could have. By giving too many contracts to foreigners, it has created grudges instead of buying goodwill. To most Afghan eyes, watching heavily guarded foreign aid-workers glide by in their Landcruisers, it is obvious that much of the money is going straight back out of the country. To a degree, this is forgivable: in such a poor country it is difficult to build the capacity to manage huge volumes of aid, and channelling more of the cash through the government may mean that more of it gets stolen. But that is a risk that needs to be taken to build support for the West and the government.

Taking even the rosiest view, the war in Afghanistan is likely to get more expensive, and worse, before it gets better. The mini-surge this year to enable the election to take place in most of the country will probably be followed by another to try to contain the growing insurgency. For the moment, Mr Obama is better off than George Bush was when Iraq went bad, because he enjoys broad political and popular support for this commitment. But as casualties mount, political pressure in America to announce a timetable for military withdrawal will intensify. To resist it, Mr Obama will need more men, a better strategy and a great deal of luck.

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White House officials and Democrats in Congress say the fears of older Americans about possible rationing of health care are based on myths and falsehoods. But Medicare beneficiaries and insurance counselors say the concerns are not entirely irrational.

Bills now in Congress would squeeze savings out of Medicare, a lifeline for the elderly, on the assumption that doctors and hospitals can be more efficient.

President Obama has sold health care legislation to Congress and the country as a way to slow the growth of federal health spending, no less than as a way to regulate the insurance market and cover the uninsured.

Mr. Obama has also said Medicare and private insurers could improve care and save money by following advice from a new federal panel of medical experts on “what treatments work best.”

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The United States economy is now out of the emergency room and appears to be on a slow path to recovery. But enormous dosages of monetary medicine continue to be administered and, before long, we will need to deal with their side effects. For now, most of those effects are invisible and could indeed remain latent for a long time. Still, their threat may be as ominous as that posed by the financial crisis itself.

To understand this threat, we need to look at where we stand historically. If we leave aside the war-impacted years of 1942 to 1946, the largest annual deficit the United States has incurred since 1920 was 6 percent of gross domestic product. This fiscal year, though, the deficit will rise to about 13 percent of G.D.P., more than twice the non-wartime record. In dollars, that equates to a staggering $1.8 trillion. Fiscally, we are in uncharted territory.

Because of this gigantic deficit, our country’s “net debt” (that is, the amount held publicly) is mushrooming. During this fiscal year, it will increase more than one percentage point per month, climbing to about 56 percent of G.D.P. from 41 percent. Admittedly, other countries, like Japan and Italy, have far higher ratios and no one can know the precise level of net debt to G.D.P. at which the United States will lose its reputation for financial integrity. But a few more years like this one and we will find out.

An increase in federal debt can be financed in three ways: borrowing from foreigners, borrowing from our own citizens or, through a roundabout process, printing money….

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With so much evidence of wasteful and even harmful treatment, shouldn’t we instantly cut some of the money spent on exorbitant intensive-care medicine for dying, elderly people and redirect it to pediatricians and obstetricians offering preventive care for children and mothers? Sadly, we are very far from this goal. A cynic would argue that this can’t happen because children can’t vote (even if their parents can), whereas members of AARP and the American Medical Association not only vote but can also hire lobbyists to keep the money flowing.

One thing’s for sure: Our health care system has failed. Generational spending wars loom on the horizon. Rationing of health care is imminent. But given the political inertia, we could soon find ourselves in a triage situation in which there is no time or money to create medical-review boards to ponder cost-containment issues or rationing schemes. We’ll be forced to implement quick-and-dirty rules based on something simple, sensible and easily verifiable. Like age. As in: No federal funds to be spent on intensive-care medicine for anyone over 85.

I am not, of course, talking about euthanasia. I’m just wondering why the nation continues incurring enormous debt to pay for bypass surgery and titanium-knee replacements for octogenarians and nonagenarians, when for just a small fraction of those costs we could provide children with preventive health care and nutrition. Eight million children have no health insurance, but their parents pay 3 percent of their salaries to Medicare to make sure that seniors get the very best money can buy in prescription drugs for everything from restless leg syndrome to erectile dysfunction, scooters and end-of-life intensive care.

Read it all from yesterday’s New York Times.

Six months after President Obama launched a $787 billion plan to right the nation’s economy, a majority of Americans think the avalanche of new federal aid has cost too much and done too little to end the recession.

A USA TODAY/Gallup Poll found 57% of adults say the stimulus package is having no impact on the economy or making it worse. Even more ””60% ”” doubt that the stimulus plan will help the economy in the years ahead, and only 18% say it has done anything to help improve their personal situation.

That skepticism underscores the challenge Obama faces in trying to convince the public that the stimulus has helped turn the economy around. It also could complicate the administration’s plans to overhaul the nation’s health care system.

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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said providing citizens with the option of government-run insurance isn’t essential to the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of U.S. health care.

“What’s important is choice and competition,” Sebelius said today on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The public option itself “is not the essential element.”

Asked if a cooperative plan is a possible replacement, Sebelius said she didn’t know what alternatives Congress would settle on among competing versions of the health legislation now under consideration. The Senate Finance Committee is discussing cooperatives, or networks of health-insurance plans owned by their customers, that would get started with government funds.

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What is lamentable is the lack of politeness that has invaded some of these town hall meetings. The problem, apart from the threat of violence inherent in the intensity of expression and the fact that some people have come to meeting places armed, is the fact that loud, boorish speech is an enemy of the civil discourse that a serious subject like health care deserves.

Some of what is being said is a reflection of the public’s general discontent in a range of painful areas, most of which is fully understandable. There is unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, credit-card default and bankers enriched by bailouts. People are concerned about the cost of the proposed health-care programs, fearing they could increase the ballooning national debt, to be paid by higher taxes or increased debt passed along to descendants. They don’t like the Iraq war dragging on or the rising cost in lives and money of the Afghanistan war. They also do not like the fact that the cost of health care continues to rise.

Congress is a target of people’s wrath in part because of its own misdeeds….

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Looking back, a key domestic moment in this presidency occurred only eight days after his inauguration, when Mr. Obama won House passage of his stimulus bill. It was a bad bill””off point, porky and philosophically incoherent. He won 244-188, a rousing victory for a new president. But he won without a single Republican vote. That was the moment the new division took hold. The Democrats of the House pushed it through, and not one Republican, even those from swing districts, even those eager to work with the administration, could support it.

This, of course, was politics as usual. But in 2008 people voted against politics as usual.

It was a real lost opportunity. It marked the moment congressional Republicans felt free to be in full opposition. It gave congressional Democrats the impression that they were in full control, that no one could stop their train. And it was the moment the president, looking at the lay of the land, seemed to reveal he would not govern in a vaguely center-left way, as a unifying figure even if a beset one being beaten ’round the head by the left, but in a left way, without the modifying “center.” Or at least as one who happily cedes to the left in Congress each day.

Things got all too vividly divided. It was a harbinger of the health-care debate.

I always now think of a good president as sitting at the big desk and reaching out with his long arms and holding on to the left, and holding on to the right, and trying mightily to hold it together, letting neither spin out of control, holding on for dear life. I wish we were seeing that. I don’t think we are.

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Does it matter that the Obama administration is now involved in “overseas contingency operations” rather than “fighting terror”? Is it important that our Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, refers to man-caused disasters rather than terrorism? And how about the news made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was asked about the elimination of the phrase war on terror: “The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself,” Clinton said. “It was controversial here [in Europe].”

The New York Times often used quotation marks around the war on terror during the Bush administration. National Public Radio commentators sometimes referred to “the so-called war on terror.”

The rhetorical struggle isn’t just about the war on terror, of course. It’s about the very notion of terrorism. To modify Burleigh Taylor Wilkins’ excellent definition, terrorism is violence against the property or lives of noncombatant civilians, whose purpose is to promote the terrorist’s cause by preventing moderate solutions or provoking extreme countermeasures. But when someone commits such an act, he usually graduates to militant status within a couple of days, if not immediately. Several months ago Judea Pearl, the father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, asked the question this way: “When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?”

It appears that those luminaries have won the war on the war on terror. Scores of innocents will continue to be killed by terrorists but their lives will no longer be part of a narrative that we understand as the fight against terrorism.

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