The Grinding Wheel

Withdrawn
As President Obama considers how quickly to withdraw the remaining 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan and turn over the war to Afghan security forces, a bleak new Pentagon report has found that only one of the Afghan National Army’s 23 brigades is able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners. (NYT, 12/10/2012)

It is worth another reminder here that Afghanistan is demonstrably Obama's war. As an Ann Coulter column some time back reminded us, Bush had largely turned away from Afghanistan (and toward Iraq) after the initial rout of the Taliban and some additional clean-up. We doubt that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld held any illusions that Afghanistan would never be a problem again. Rather it is likely that they recognized that given its history, it was unconquerable and ungovernable and that from time-to-time the U.S. would have to return to kill the cockroaches which had returned. Time to move on.

Obama, by contrast, promoted Afghanistan as the "war of necessity" probably to show his strong-on-national security bona fides. He owns it and he owns the following:

More than 2,000 American service members have died in the war, which has cost the United States more than $500 billion since 2001. More than 1,200 American service members have died in Afghanistan from the beginning of 2010 to the present, which is roughly the period of the surge. (NYT, 12/10/2012)


Conditional
Republicans said they intended to cast final votes as early as Tuesday on legislation abruptly announced last week that would bar workers from being required to pay union fees as a condition of employment, even as thousands of union members planned to protest at the state Capitol and as President Obama, visiting a truck factory outside Detroit, denounced the notion. (NYT, 12/10/2012)

Are unions being outlawed? No. Is collective bargaining being outlawed? No. Are unions being forced to give back wages or benefits? No. So what is all the fuss in Michigan about? 

Workers cannot be forced to pay union dues. That's it. That's all. 

Obviously unions view this as an existential threat, knowing as they do that when right-to-work has been passed in other states, lots of workers don't pay. 

So in a free society, a segment of the population does not believe that they are getting value for their purchase and does not want to be forced to pay. Isn't this the way things are supposed to work?

...the best case for right to work is moral: the right of an individual to choose. Union chiefs want to coerce workers to join and pay dues that they then funnel to politicians who protect union power. Right to work breaks this cycle of government-aided monopoly union power for the larger economic good. (WSJ, 12/10/2012)


Might
President Obama says the middle class benefits mightily from the Bush tax cuts and cannot afford to see them expire. Which provokes a question: Where has our press corps been these past 10 years?  For most of that time, Democrats have been hollering that the only people to benefit from the Bush tax cuts were Bill Gates, Wall Street bankers, and the guy with the top hat and monocle who appears on our Monopoly sets. Now the same press that accepted, approved and amplified the "Bush tax cuts for the wealthy" trope leaves unchallenged a president who today tells us, oh, by the way, those Bush tax cuts are vital for America's middle class—and claims that the opposition to middle-class tax cuts proposed and put into law mainly by Republicans comes from . . . Republicans. (William McGurn, WSJ, 12/10/2012)

McGurn knows the answer to his rhetorical question. Journalism is dead.