A week or so ago, we were hearing a lot about how decisive the current surge over Marja in Afghanistan would be. Of course, we were hearing all sorts of things – including a lot of happy talk about how well things were going. This week we learn that the fight is not so easy with US forces still facing “strong resistance” even though the US/NATO/Afghan force is 15,000+ while the reported “taliban” presence before the attack was estimated at 400. US officers are now saying that the military component of the campaign will take at least a month. They have also told the Guardian that Marja is just a “confidence building” action leading to the new “decisive” battle which they are beginning to plan for Kandahar.

There is still enough energy left in the wounded serpent that is the Southern Strategy to lash out in a furious flowering of poison to corrode our moral fiber. The question is whether the corporate interests that back this strategy in order to keep their taxes low (or non-existent) will finally forsake the oncological, selfish model of capitalism for the more civic-minded one that prevails in Europe and elsewhere.

Jon Landay has a very good piece about Gen. McChrystal overruling his officers’ judgment in eastern Afghanistan about closing two remote military outposts that “were worthless and too costly to defend.” An official investigation into a deadly insurgent attack on one of them last fall ignored McChrystal’s role in the decision and appears to hang out to dry the colonel and the lieutenant colonel who wanted the bases shuttered. That’s wrong and can’t be allowed to happen. But McChrystal’s judgment in this case appears to be on the continuum between defensible and solid.

In the wake of the decision by the Justice Department to find the OLC lawyers who wrote the torture memo guilty only of “poor judgment” not professional misconduct, we need to take a closer look at the extreme views of one of the men exonerated and what this exoneration says about us as a nation and a people.

In Baker’s retelling, the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department, specifically Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson (featured on the cover as the “false profits” of the title), allowed the housing bubble to grow unchecked, ignored and even encouraged the reckless mortgages that intensified risk, and were caught completely off-guard by the eventual meltdown. Stripped of their home equity wealth, consumers could not ring up the purchases that fed the national economy. Foreclosures and a glut of vacant housing on the market devastated the construction industry. The write-offs and toxic securities at the banks brought them to their knees. Baker says this was completely predictable:

Every trend line says America’s private insurance system is imploding, leaving tens of millions at risk and killing/bankrupting thousands. But the willfully misinform[ing] George Will say we’re all happy, not to worry, because, you know, he’s well off and can afford his insurance.

For the first time in the health care debate in a couple months, the major players seem to be reading from the same script. The President made his pitch for health care reform before the big summit this week. Democrats, including members of the leadership, continue to sign on to using reconciliation to finish off the bill. And Harry Reid provided a timeline.

Two very revealing snapshots from CPAC yesterday.

The basis for US capitalism is a group of myths. Our current social arrangements allow vast disparities in the share of the wealth produced by the labor of all of us. What is the justification for these arrangements?

Conservative leaders’ pompous and self-congratulatory “Mount Vernon Statement” twice refers to the line “self-evident truths” from the Declaration of Independence. Conspicuously absent, however, are two of those self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with unalienable rights.