Our soldiers and marines fought and died for this? The story is here.

Memo to the President: Why don’t you just announce we are taking our stuff and that our people are coming home? This war was, is and always will be none of our business.

In this article, the U.S. now must face the prospect of propping up an Afghan Administration that many Afghanis consider to be illegitimate. Here is a quote:

 "WASHINGTON — With the White House’s reluctant embrace on Sunday of Hamid Karzai as the winner of Afghanistan’s suddenly moot presidential runoff, President Obama now faces a new complication: enabling a badly tarnished partner to regain enough legitimacy to help the United States find the way out of an eight-year-old war.

It will not be easy. As the evidence mounted in late summer that Mr. Karzai’s forces had sought to win re-election through widespread fraud to defeat his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, administration officials made no secret of their disgust. How do you consider sending tens of thousands of additional American troops, they asked in meetings in the White House, to prop up an Afghan government regarded as illegitimate by many of its own people?

The answer was supposed to be a runoff election. Now, administration officials argue that Mr. Karzai will have to regain that legitimacy by changing the way he governs, at a moment when he is politically weaker than at any time since 2001. "

The full article is here.

In this article we learn that Europeans like Obama personally but fear that he is not breaking far enough away from Bush Administration policies for them to be comfortable with his world leadership. They do not see enough movement on Obama’s part to repudiate what they see as the nightmare of the Bush years. That story is here.

In this article we learn that partisan media coverage like Fox News is actually growing, not dying. The American media is quickly splintering into groups that write from a point of view that is strongly on one side or the other of the political divide in our country. The middle ground of traditional American journalism is swiftly eroding. The story is here.

Paul Krugman has written an Op Ed piece lamenting that Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is too little of a good thing and that it will not substantially improve American employment. That story is here.

In the Washington Post today we have equally insightful stories. First up is this article on the House Ethics Committee’s investigations concerning congressmen and women presently holding office. Here is an excerpt from the article that will get your attention:

"But the document also brings potential political peril for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose party claimed the majority in November 2006 after she promised to "drain the swamp" of corruption on Capitol Hill. Two and a half years into Pelosi’s reign, more than 25 Democrats have been targeted for ethics reviews by the two ethics bodies, while just seven Republicans appeared to be under scrutiny, according to the document." 

Wow! Who would have thought? National Democrats can be just as sleezy as Republicans.  The full story is here. 

In an Op Ed piece by Robert Samuelson entitled "Could America Go Broke?" there is the disconcerting realization here that we actually could put ourselves in a position where we could not pay our creditors. Nations like Russia and Argentina are already there. If it happens to us or Britain or Japan, the entire world economy as we know it is cooked. Wow! The story is here.

In this story, the North Korean government is asking the U.S. to resume direct talks on nuclear disarmament. It seems that they are desperate for trade, aid and financial assistance of all kinds. That story is here.