Question: You've selected a number of high-profile people for your National Security team. How can you ensure that the staff that you are assembling is going to be a smoothly functioning team of rivals and not a clash of rivals?

Answer: I think you hear Joe mention the fact that many of the people standing here beside me are people who have worked together before, who have the utmost respect for each other. These are outstanding public servants and outstanding in their various fields of endeavor. They would not have agreed to join my administration and I would not have asked them to be part of this administration unless we shared a core vision of what's needed to keep the American people safe and to assure prosperity here at home and peace abroad. I think all of us here share the belief that we have to maintain the strongest military on the planet, that we have to support our troops, make sure that they are properly trained, properly equipped, that they are provided with a mission that allows them to succeed. All of us here also agree that the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of our diplomacy and that we are going to be committed to building and strengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security. And so in discussions with this entire team, what I am excited about is a consensus not only among those of us standing here today but across a broad section of the American people that now is the time for us to regain American leadershp in all its dimensions and I am very confident that each of these individuals would not be leaving the outstanding work that they're currently doing if they weren't convinced that they can work as an effective team. One last point I will make. I assembled this team because I'm a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions. I think that's how that's how the best decisions are made. One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion, there are no dissenting views. So I'm going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House but understand, I will be setting policy as President. I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out and I expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made. So as Harry Truman said, the buck will stop with me. And nobody who's standing here would have agreed to join this administration unless they had confidence that, in fact, that vision was one that would help secure the American people and our interests.

Seriously, anybody who presumes to hold an opinion on America's defense needs, defense spending, and long term military strategy really has to read "America's Defense Meltdown," available in free 2MB pdf download here.

This is a guide on how to think about, pay for, reconfigure, equip, deploy, withdraw, modernize, simplify, support, strengthen, lead, motivate, inspire, and in all other ways improve America's military establishment. [...]

What is most remarkable about the book is the array of authors who have joined to produce this anthologized volume. If I started listing a few, I would have to name them all (PDF of full list here.) They include the closest colleagues and collaborators of the late Air Force colonel John Boyd plus leading defense analysts and practitioners of the next generation. They have amply earned the right to be listened to. What I said in a blurb on the book's jacket* is, if anything, not enthusiastic enough:

The talent, judgment, and insight collected in this book are phenomenal. Over the last generation, the authors have been more right, more often, about more issues of crucial importance to American security than any other group I can think of. It is a tremendous benefit to have their views collected in one place and concentrated on the next big choices facing a new Administration.  This really is a book that every serious-minded citizen should read.

• America's defense budget is now larger in inflation adjusted dollars than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period, our Navy has fewer combat ships and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on average than at any point since 1946; in some cases they are at all-time historical highs in average age.
• The effectiveness of America's "high-tech" weapons does not compensate for these reduced numbers. The Air Force's newest fighter, the F-35, can be regarded as only a technical failure. The Navy's newest destroyer cannot protect itself effectively against aircraft and missiles, and the Army's newest armored vehicle cannot stand up against a simple anti-armor rocket that was first designed in the 1940s.
• Despite decades of acquisition reform from Washington's best minds in Congress, the Pentagon and the think tanks, cost overruns in weapon systems are higher today, in inflation adjusted dollars, than any time ever before. Not a single major weapon system has been delivered on time, on cost and as promised for performance. The Pentagon refuses to tell Congress and the public exactly how it spends the hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated to it each year. The reason for this is simple; it doesn't know how the money is spent. Technically, it doesn't even know if the money is spent. Even President George W. Bush's own Office of Management and Budget has labeled the Pentagon as one of the worst managed agencies of the entire federal government.

This board is modeled on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board created by President Eisenhower to provide rigorous analysis and vigorous oversight to our intelligence community by individuals outside of government -- individuals who would be candid and unsparing in their assessment. This new board will perform a similar function for my administration as we formulate our economic policy.

This isn't about big government or small government. It's about building a smarter government that focuses on what works. And that's why I will ask my team to think anew and act anew to meet our new challenges.

I suspect that you would be troubled and the American people would be troubled if I selected a Treasury secretary or a chairman of the National Economic Council at one of the most critical economic times in our history who had no experience in government whatsoever.

What we are going to do is combine experience with fresh thinking. But understand where the -- the vision for change comes from first and foremost. It comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing it.

Given the extraordinary circumstances that we find ourselves in, however, I think it is very important for the American people to understand that we are putting together a first-class team and for them to have clarity that we don't intend to stumble into the next administration. We are going to hit the ground running. We're going to have clear plans of action. We intend to have the kind of economic recovery plan that is going to put 2.5 million people into jobs. We are going to make sure that we start focusing on energy, on health care, on revamping our education system so that it's competitive in the 21st century, and as I'm talking about today, that we are not going to back to business as usual when it comes to our budget.

When the presidential flight touched down at Nagoya airport in Japan on Tuesday, Yudhoyono made a statement to reporters over the airplane's intercom.

"He addressed me with, 'Apa Kabar Bapak President?' (How are you Mr. President?), with his fluent Indonesian language," Yudhoyono said. Obama was missing several local delicacies such as nasi goreng (fried rice), rambutan and bakso (meatball soup), he added. Yudhoyono had congratulated Obama's election as U.S. president and suggested he visit Indonesia after attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Singapore next year.

President-elect Barack Obama will appoint former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker on Wednesday to be the chairman of a new White House advisory board tasked with helping to lift the nation from recession and stabilize financial markets, Democratic officials say. [...]

The board's mission won't be to supplant the policy-making role of the Treasury Department and other agencies, but to give Mr. Obama an official forum for getting expert advice outside the normal bureaucratic channels. It will give briefings to the president. The panel, called the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, is modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board established by then-President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, when officials worried that that the existing bureaucratic structure was inadequate to help the U.S. keep pace with the Soviet threat. The financial crisis has drawn similar worries that the government isn't properly organized to monitor and respond to modern financial markets. [...] The board's tasks will be broad: to help design and implement short-term programs to jump-start the economy, raise wages and living standards and confront the housing crisis. It will also address the delicate task of bolstering Washington's oversight of the financial markets in the wake of a Wall Street collapse that has taken down many of its most venerable institutions.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let's give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history. Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures - combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

Cheney's papers are the Amazon rain forest of Bush administration records: they are of immense importance to the big picture, and there is a real risk that they will be lost before we know exactly what's in there.

Scott Horton, New York attorney specializing in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, and regular contributor to Harper's; Suzanne Spaulding, lawyer specializing in national security issues, including homeland security, intelligence, and terrorism; Daniel Larison, Ph.D student at the University of Chicago and host of the blog, Eunomia; Mickey Edwards, former congressman (R-OK), lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school, and Vice President of the Aspen Institute; Anne Weismann, Chief Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; and finally, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

The video message from Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in which he called Barack Obama a "house Negro," demonstrates, if anything, that the terrorists are always damn good in PR. You feel disgusted? Horrified? That's exactly their aim. In this regard, Zawahiri's diabolical comparison of Obama and Malcolm X ("an honorable American who converted to Islam," as Zawahiri put it) is an even bolder move: not only do they insult the American president-elect, but they rub it into one of America's deepest wounds--the racial divisions and the profound antagonisms generated by Malcolm X's radical claims. In terms of "hatred arts," this is just brilliant. Those who are shocked by Zawahiri's words have merely to remember: spreading hate is the terrorists' job. Hating you is not enough; they also need you to hate them, so the struggle goes on unchallenged.

Al Qaeda and all its followers badly need to perpetuate Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" paradigm. The West and Islam are deadly enemies, in the radicals' view. The more irreconcilable the former, the happier the latter. In this regard, the agenda of Bush and the neocons was a true blessing for the terrorists.

Al Qaeda's true problem with Obama has indeed nothing to do with the color of his skin. By proposing to meet Iran's Ahmadinejad without preconditions instead of just bombing him out, the American president-elect thinks outside of the confrontation box. The radicals just hate that. And above all, they hate the idea of the United States resuming the chase of Al Qaeda operatives in the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borders. He's coming to them, how could they not react fiercely?

There is something else, which I witness everyday in the streets of Casablanca, where I live: Muslims tend to claim Obama as their own--because he's black, because he comes from an oppressed minority, because his middle name is Hussein. ... Not that they think Obama is a Muslim himself--he made clear that he was not. Yet he could have been. His father was. Anyway, this man looks like a "brother" to many Muslims, which is indeed a good thing for the prospect of global peace.

Not surprisingly, Zawahiri's video message targeted this specific point: "Obama is not a Muslim, he's a renegade who abandoned his ancestor's religion to embrace the 'crusaders faith' and the 'Zionists' ideology'," Zawahiri suggests. The genuine message being: please don't like him! Well, too bad for them: we do. We will like him more, of course, if he keeps his promise of backing out of Iraq within 16 months and putting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track. Meanwhile, let's all of us, Muslims and Westerners, take advantage of the honeymoon period. And let's enjoy the terrorists' embarrassment: it's a rare occasion.

"In our view, ...derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.

Obama does not believe in interfandom fighting. Kirk versus Picard? Joel versus Mike (or the modern version, Cinematic Titanic versus Rifftrax)? He is above that. He wants to bring fandoms together, not tear them apart with fearmongering and wank.

Obama knows more Star Trek trivia than you ever will. He just doesn't see the need to talk about it and scare off the women. Obama would spend his time with Michelle and the girls whenever he came home from the campaign. And then would stay up all night watching MST3K episodes when they went to sleep. Obama does not buy into all this sparkly vampire bullshit. He does love Growing Up Cullen, though.

It's also amazing how "ending the partisanship" is always code for "I am right" when Lieberman is speaking, like crossing party-lines is somehow, in and of itself, valuable. Lieberman is an opportunist of the highest order.  I understand why they didn't take him down yesterday--it really isn't Obama's way. My man is focused on getting shit done--I really believe that--not meting out justice. But there is a time and place for meting out justice. 2012. Connecticut.

But a broadcast I just heard was not only a reminder that she is, in fact, truly a great interviewer but also a demonstration of what that means in practice. [...]

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview, is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads ("Now, that's an intriguing idea, tell us more about..."), to look for interesting tensions ("You used to say X, but now it sounds like..."), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said ("It sounds as if you're suggesting..."). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult. If you have this standard in mind -- is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? -- you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.

Outsiders who follow Chinese events have known for years about Roland Soong's EastSouthWestNorth site*, which draws from Chinese-language and English-language sources for reports and analysis.

I've just seen this post, from a few days ago, which strikes me as something that people who don't normally follow Chinese events should know about. It's the text of a speech Soong prepared for last weekend's annual Chinese Bloggers conference (but did not deliver, for family-emergency reasons). In it, he discusses the differences the Internet has, and has not, made in the Chinese government's ability to control information and maintain power within China.

I was covering and writing about deregulation and financial derivatives back when one of the very few Congressmen to oppose the deregulation of the savings and loans, Texas Democrat Henry Gonzales was chairman of the House Banking Committee (read Molly Ivins' November 2000 obituary of Gonzalez here) and Richard Breeden was chairman of the SEC. Many of you probably know the general outline of the history of these issues the past 30 years. But in the late 80s to mid-90s, I was in some of the hearings where these ideas were debated in the Congress, in the SEC and CFTC and in some of the think tanks back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I saw how Wall Street got its way over and over and over again.

For me, opposing Wall Street came down to one central idea - it's the real economy that's important, and the banking and financial system should always be kept in a position of subservience to it. It's the real economy that produces and distributes the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the cars and buses and trains and planes we ride in. The real economy provides what people need to survive; by contrast, you can't eat a debenture or a bond. And in the 1980s, the real economy, as I saw it, was being sacrificed to and looted by the banking and financial system.

Does anyone remember "It doesn't matter whether we produce potato chips or computer chips" ? I was among the Cassandras that were shouted down when we tried to warn such foolishness would bankrupt our country. Yeah, too damn bad we had to wait twenty years to show you the proof.

The financial catastrophe that has occurred under George W. Bush is only the logical result of the "post industrial" policy trends of the past three decades, but some people still don't get it. I find it hard to believe there are people, so called "progessives," here - here of all places! - that are in favor of allowing the auto industry and at least one million working class jobs to disappear.

No one I have seen yet has challenged the estimates that a million jobs would be lost to begin with. Some estimates go as high as three million jobs lost. It will take years, and millions of lives lost to despair, hopelessness, misery, and the amplified affects of deteriorating mental and physical health, before we would climb out of this disaster.

Yet, many people appear anxious to pay this extravagant price. To punish auto's management for making bad decisions. To punish industrial workers for abandoning the Democrats and supporting Reagan and both Bushes. To punish organized labor for making more money than they do.

To punish mankind for having the arrogance to tame and harness nature so that ninety percent of kids no longer die before they're five years old.

What stupidity. What short-sighted, unthinking, vengeful moronbasity.

Well, people who have had their heads up their ass for the past twenty years, are about to have their asses handed to them. Too bad the innocent are going to get the same treatment.

I left my journalistic position in 1996, feeling very tired, belittled, jaded, cynical, and completely marginalized.  Meanwhile Wall Street led the country on a tear of false prosperity that my fellow Americans can now see was nothing but debt, debt, debt, piled on more debt. This is my "I told you so," moment, but what effing good does it do?

What I can do that might do some good is to tell you what I think is coming next.  

The Obama administration will spend around 12 to 24 months try to find a solution to the new world depression within the confines of neo-liberal economic thought.

Meanwhile the suffering and misery is going to get worse, and worse, and worse. The Rethugs will be grinning from ear to ear.

I'm hoping the street organizer in Obama will come to the fore at that point, and we can begin to crack down on the financial markets and their addiction to hot money. In other words, saving the real economy is going to require destroying all the offshore tax havens and imposing a tax on financial transactions that chases out short-term speculation.

Basically, we are either going to force the financial system to eat the losses of its deflated bubbles, or the financial system is going to force us to cut wages, pensions, Social Security, national healthcare and the standard of living.

Most people, including Obama I fear, don't understand this yet. We are going to waste a year or two floundering about trying to avoid both massive economic pain and panicking the markets, before we finally figure out it is impossible to do both.

Geithner is one of the most able technocrats to have risen through Treasury's ranks, which makes him the perfect pick to run its sprawling bureaucracy; Summers is one of the top two or three economic minds of his generation, which makes him a guy you want in the room with the president.

But, beyond the pairing of person and job, it's the way these guys complement one another that's really key here. Geithner is the rare bureaucrat with the smarts and the self-confidence to effectively challenge Summers when he's off base. [...] The two men also developed an incredibly effective good cop/bad cop routine, which I'm guessing they might reprise:

Summers was the bad cop--the outspoken sheriff with strong views about how to structure the international financial system. Geithner was his antidote--a master of process and protocol and Treasury's ambassador to global forums like the G-7.

Human rights groups have put Kazakhstan in the spot light for its treatment of religious minority groups.

A long running dispute between the authorities and Hare Krishna followers could end with the destruction of the country's only Hindu temple. Robin Forestier Walker reports from Kazakhstan.

Voters in Indian-administered Kashmir started heading for the polls on Monday, November 17, amid tight security. Voting for the 87 assembly seats comprising the state government is being held in seven stages until December 24, 2008.

So far, around 55 per cent of Indian-controlled Kashmir's 6.4 million strong electorate have turned out to vote, including many Muslims, who separatists and rebels are urging to boycott the elections to protest against New Delhi's hold over the Himalayan region. Indian-administered Kashmir was put under direct federal rule in July, after the state government collapsed following its controversial decision to donate land in to a Hindu pilgrim trust. About 70 per cent of the region's population is Muslim. This year has seen some of the biggest anti-India protests in the Kashmir Valley since an insurgency began in 1989.