Today’s now-postponed Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan was overshadowed by Gen. David Petraeus’s brief but frightening loss of consciousness. But before Petraeus momentarily took ill about 45 minutes into the hearing, he and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, made a vigorous case that training More…
I wasn’t able to make the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing this morning on Afghanistan owing to another commitment, so I had to catch the webcast. And a few minutes ago, right after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the panel, called witness Gen. David Petraeus one of More…
That’s going to be the focus of this morning’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing this morning with Gen. David Petraeus and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, and tomorrow’s complementary hearings in the House. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have big stories on congressional More…
Gen. Stanley McChrystal is citing these figures in the expansion of the Afghan security forces as an accomplishment of his first year in command of the Afghanistan war:
“A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces,” he said. “Today, there are 230,000. That’s a significant
It has been a quiet week on the financial regulatory reform front, but that does not mean the deal-making has stopped. With the House and Senate out of session this week, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has been pushing his provision to reform the credit ratings agencies, and Sens. Jeff Merkley More…
In the culmination of today’s big push from activists to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the White House budget director, Peter Orszag, has written a (rather reluctant) letter to Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Penn.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) to say that the Obama administration “supports [their] proposed amendment” to More…
There’s a ton of last-minute changes currently happening to Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill. Below are my updates on the most important ones.
First: No cloture vote at 2 p.m. The Senate will vote on amendments instead, and the bill will still be up for debate. Notably, More…
The Huffington Post’s Shahien Nasiripour, a great financial reporter, has a good piece on a top executive at J.P. Morgan Chase trashing Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and the Hill in general. James Glassman, a Morgan senior economist, writes a note to his clients bashing the financial regulatory reform process More…
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), in an interview with The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, says that the government should ban synthetic financial products — which allow investors to make a bet on an underlying asset or bond without actually investing in it. (For instance, see this description of synthetic More…
Today is a busy day for economic wonks and other economist-types in Washington. Below is a brief guide to all the action:
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