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Can we get another stimulus package and ignore the Republicans and their tax cuts this time please? From This Week, Paul Krugman agrees with his fellow Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz that there is a good chance that the economy is going to contract in the second half of 2010.

TAPPER: OK, we are getting close to short on time but I do want to ask you a question about the economy for 2010. Your fellow laureate, Joseph Stiglitz has said there's a significant chance the U.S. economy will contract in the second half of 2010. He's calling on the government to prepare a second stimulus. Do you think that's possible?

KRUGMAN: Yes, it's a reasonably high chance. I don't think it's more -- it's less than 50/50 odds, but you know, what we've got right now is a recovery that first of all is not showing up very much in jobs yet. It's being driven by fiscal stimulus which is going to fade out in the second half of next year and by inventory bounce. You know, production was low because companies were running on their inventories. They're stopping doing that so now you've got a bounce in the economy.

But that's also going to run out. So the things we know about are all going to be negative in the second half of next year. Now the financial markets, the last month, the financial markets have gotten really optimistic. You look at things like the term spread on bond rates. They suggest that the financial markets really think there is going to be a much more vigorous recovery. I don't see where it's supposed to come from, so the range is huge here. I would basically go with Joe Stiglitz. I'm really worried about the second half.

From Digby:

Boy I hope he's wrong about this.

[...]

Atrios agrees.

Tim Geithner, on the other hand, is confident that everything's coming up roses. Take your pick.

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Conservative columnist David Brooks expressed support for a system of health care that is most often demonized by the right wing. "I wouldn't mind a single-payer. I prefer it to what we have now," Brooks told ABC's Jake Tapper Sunday.

Brooks support for single-payer comes late in the health care reform debate. Both houses of Congress have passed reform bills which Brooks says he can't support. "I oppose it. It's a close call for me," said Brooks. "My preferred option is to give consumers choice."

In July, Brooks deflected a question about implementing a single-payer system. "There is no way something that big and complex and dynamic can be run out of Washington," he said.

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Paul Krugman points out the obvious with the attempted airline bomber slipping through the cracks... too much information for anyone to sort through. That's the problem with this data mining they think is such a woderful idea. Sweep everyone in, open possibilities for abuse if the information gets into the wrong hands, and miss the stuff you ought to actually be worried about.

KRUGMAN: I think we do want -- I mean, someone's head ought to roll over this. Something needs to be looked at. But if you read your military history, every major military surprise that ever happened, there were ample warnings. You go back to the record; you find out there was information.

The trouble is, there is so much information. You know, there's 500,000 people on this list we're talking about. Stuff is going to fall through the cracks. Ultimately, you do what you can, but someone who is prepared to die while killing a bunch of civilians, that's going to happen now and then. In fact, we're quite lucky it didn't happen now.

But, you know, I think -- I think we are using a lot of 20/20 hindsight. What was the kind of thing that always happens whenever anything goes wrong.

(CROSSTALK)

DOWD: Well, to me, OK, so the situation now is, what do we do in the aftermath of this?

So what it looks like we usually do is we profile an article of clothing, not the person.

(LAUGHTER)

And so we're reluctant, because of politically correctness, to profile a person, but the shoe bomber happens and now we all have to put our shoes on the conveyer belt for it to go through, and we're not going to profile a person.

This guy's underwear is on fire...

(LAUGHTER)

I'm afraid what we next have to profile...

(CROSSTALK)

(UNKNOWN): Everyone's going to have to wear their underwear on the outside.

(LAUGHTER)

Sadly they may not be that far off the mark with how much worse airline security is going to get now.

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From Greg Sargent at The Plum Line--McConnell Won’t Say Whether GOPers Will Call For Full Repeal Of Reform:

As this blog first reported the other day, the Dem game plan in 2010 will be to try to put Republicans on the spot by insisting they say whether they support a full repeal of the health care reform bill, presuming it becomes law.

This morning on ABC News, Senator Mitch McConnell repeatedly refused to say whether Republicans would call for such a repeal.

Asked by Jake Tapper whether Republicans would do that, McConnell didn’t answer directly, instead excoriating the bill and predicting that it would spell political disaster for Dems.

Continue reading...

I agree with Greg's assertion that they want to use it as a campaign issue without putting themselves in a box.

TAPPER: Do you think that Republicans running for Senate in 2010 should run on a platform of vowing to repeal the health care reform bill, should it become law? And will that be one of your first items should you regain control of the Senate, repealing what you guys call Obama-care?

MCCONNELL: Well, certainly, politically, it's a big problem for them. They all kind of joined hands and went off the cliff together. Every single Democrat provided the vote that passed it in the Senate. You have seen what's happened already with Congressman Parker Griffith in Alabama switching parties. There are rumors there may be others. There is great unrest in the Democratic Party. And the reason for that is, the surveys indicate the American people are overwhelmingly opposed to this effort to have the government take over all of their health care. It will be a huge political issue next year, and that's why you hear the Democrats saying, let's don't tackle any more big issues. I mean, I was reading an article this morning indicating they don't want to do cap-and-trade anymore, they're nervous about financial reregulation. What they understand is the new administration and the new Congress has squandered its goodwill with the American people, leading to what could be a big setback for them a year from now.

TAPPER: Respectfully, sir, you didn't answer my question, which is should Republicans campaign on a platform of repealing the health care reform measure? And will that be one of the first items on your agenda should you become the new Senate majority leader after the 2010 elections?

MCCONNELL: Well, I'm sorry, I thought I did answer your question. There's no question that this bill, if it were to become law, and frankly even if it doesn't become law, will be a big, if not central issue not only in the 2010 election, but in the 2012 election.

TAPPER: All right, I'll take that as a yes, that they should campaign on repealing Obama care.

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George Will quotes free-trader Milton Friedman to trash the idea of "shovel-ready" projects while continuing his defense of George Bush's economic policies. I'm guessing that George Will has refused to go within fifty feet of Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine since he holds Friedman in such high regard.

And Ed Gillespie, when even Murdoch's Wall Street Journal disagrees with your assertions, you're in trouble. From Jan. 2009--Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record.

PODESTA: I want to come back to Eric Cantor, which is no cost, no jobs, no ideas. I mean, it seems to me that the Republican Party on the Hill has become the party of no.

Maybe I'd say that it looks, a little bit from his defense of no regulation that it's become the party of Bush, that we've seen how that movie played out. It ended in the in financial meltdown and the great recession. It seems that...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is Ed Gillespie right that it's no risk?

WILL: What?

STEPHANOPOULOS: This strategy?

WILL: I think there is no risk at this point because I think the American people understand that the greatest job creation machine in the history of the world is a reasonably lightly taxed and lightly regulated economy. But one idea, John, that, happily, we're not hearing. When we began this year with...

PODESTA: George Bush had the lowest job creation since World War II, lightly taxed, lightly regulated...

GILLESPIE: Fifty-two months of uninterrupted job creation, the longest in the history of the United States of America.

PODESTA: ... major recession.

STEPHANOPOULOS: What's the one idea?

WILL: The one idea that we seem to have dropped, happily so -- remember the phrase was "shovel-ready"? We were going to create government jobs.

It put me in mind of a great story Milton Friedman used to tell. He went to Asia in the 1960s and was proudly taken by the government to see a public works project. They were building a canal. He was struck everyone was digging the canal with shovels. Friedman says, why no heavy earth-moving equipment?

They said, oh, this is a jobs program. So Friedman says, why don't you give them spoons instead of shovels? I think we understand, now, the sterility of government trying to create jobs.

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Katrina Vanden Heuvel, the lone liberal voice during the panel discussion on This Week pointed out the obvious about our war on terror and what we're doing in Afghanistan.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... let me put the counter… and let me put it, the question, to you this way. If they see us leave Afghanistan, wouldn't the Pakistanis say, "We're next. They're going to abandon us again"?

VANDEN HEUVEL: No, I think it's much more complicated, and our occupation of Afghanistan is going to deepen divisions in Pakistan and destabilize an already fragile civilian government.

I mean, we are already engaged in a secret war in Pakistan. The Nation's cover story this week, based on multiple sources, shows that Blackwater is working with the Joint Special Operations Command, planning targeting assassinations and drone campaigns. This is fundamentally destabilizing. We need another policy.

The larger overlay of all of this, in my view, is our overreaction to the terrible, horrible tragedy of 9/11 has led us to wage war against terrorism. You cannot wage a conventional war, which we are doing in Afghanistan, against an odious, horrifying set of ideas or tactics. And until we end that, we are, as an American people, going to have a de facto policy of permanent warfare. Do we want that in our country?

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Russ Feingold reiterated what he’s been saying all week, that our troop escalation in Afghanistan doesn’t make any sense and will only increase instability in the region and Pakistan. When asked if there was anything that could be done to stop this now Feingold said this:

FEINGOLD: Well, that's difficult. And what's going to happen here is that it's probably going to be difficult to stop it now. We'll do whatever we can. We're already working with members of both parties in both houses to question whether this funding should be approved. We're going to fight any attempts to use sort of accounting gimmicks to allow it to be funded. If there's an attempt to have an emergency supplemental, I think that's something we're going to oppose, not only on the grounds of it being an unwise policy, but also being fiscally irresponsible.

Full transcript via ABC News.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You heard Secretary Gates there. Even though you've called the president's decision an expensive gamble, he says the United States must escalate because this is the epicenter of extremist jihad, and that's why our vital national security interests are at stake.

FEINGOLD: Well, Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter, although Al Qaeda is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province. That's not next door to Waziristan. So I'm wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn't make any sense to me.

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Looks like George Will is at it again. This time carrying some water for James Inhofe on the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia. Paul Krugman reminds Will that there was no "smoking gun" in those emails and also asks Will why he hates the free market so much with his opposition to cap and trade.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, he is also going to be dealing with health care, right now on the floor of the Senate. He announced this week to Copenhagen to deal with climate change. And it comes at a time when the politics seem to be changing a little bit in this.

Let me show our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll. It shows whether people believe global warming is occurring. That number is going down. July 2008, 80 percent of the public; down to 72 percent now. And there's been a sort of a real partisanship. Look at Republicans, 74 percent believed global warming was occurring back in 2008. Now, a 20-point drop to 54 percent.

George, there has been a partinizing of this issue, and let me turn to one more complication we've had over the last week. This Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University, someone hacked into their e-mail account and showed a bunch of emails between scientists, which opponents of climate change legislation said proves that they are rigging the science and trying to hide information that runs counter to their theories.

WILL: It raises the question of -- we're being asked to wage trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven. And the consensus far from being as solid as they say it is, and the debate as over as they say it is. The e-mails indicate people are very nervous about suppressing criticism, gaming the peer review process for scholarly works and all the rest. One of the e-mails said it is a travesty, his word, it is a travesty that we cannot explain the fact that global warming has stopped. Well, they shouldn't be embarrassed about that. It's a complicated business, and that's why we shouldn't be (inaudible).

KRUGMAN: All those e-mails -- people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There's not a single smoking gun in there. There's nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn't actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that's loose wording. Right? Everything is about -- we're really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there's no trend here. And that's what -- the travesty is how hard it has been to explain...

WILL: One of the emails, Paul, said he wished he could delete, get rid of the medieval warming period. That lasted 600 years...

KRUGMAN: It's not -- read -- this has all been explained. What he meant is they want to put a start on it. We have an end to it, we don't have a start on it. There's a lot of loose use of language when you're just talking among each other. And what the deleting really meant, the deleting would be meant that, you know, we don't know when this thing started, because we don't have very good data back then. There weren't any weather stations. And that's what the context was.

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From This Week with George Stephanopoulos Nov. 29, 2009, Sen. Lindsey Graham let's us know where his spending priorities are. Forget health care or stimulus spending, we need more money for Afghanistan. Sen. Bernie Sanders reminds us all what is so terribly wrong with that line of thinking.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, how about this question of cost, as Senator Sanders raised? It looks like the cost is going to be about $1 million per year for each additional service member, and a lot of Democrats, like the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey, talked to our Jon Karl this week, said we ought to pay for it. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBEY: If we have to pay for the health care bill, we should pay for the war as well.

JON KARL, ABC NEWS: How?

OBEY: By having a new war surtax. The problem in this country with this issue is that the only people who have been asked to sacrifice are military families.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Does he have a point there, Senator Graham? If we're going to fight a war, shouldn't the American people pay for it?

GRAHAM: Well, I'd like to see an endeavor to see if we can cut current spending and find some dollars that we're spending today to pay for the war, and prioritize American spending. Where does our national security rate in terms of spending? Are there things that we can do in the stimulus package? Can we trim up the health care bill and other big-ticket items to pay for a war that we can't afford to lose?

So I welcome a debate about how to control government spending and pay for the war. I do want to let Bernie and anyone else listening know that from my point of view, the president is correct in assessing that Afghanistan is a war that must be won because the national security implications of what happens in Afghanistan will follow this country for decades, so I intend to support the president.

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Boy, this is some hard-hitting journalism by George Stephanopoulos here isn't it? Anyone think Tom Coburn would have gotten this type of softball from Rachel Maddow?

Shorter George Stephanopoulos:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So Senator, is there anything else we should know about you arranging a bribe for your C-Street buddy that you can tell us in ten seconds or less?

COBURN: Nope.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Okay, nothing to see here. Move along. Thanks for coming in everybody.

Let's hope his network's interview with Doug Hampton yields just a tad more information than Georgie-boy decided to try to elicit from Coburn on This Week. Really pathetic George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I'm going to have to -- I'm going to have to stop this right now. And, Senator, before you go -- and I know this is your least favorite subject -- but Doug Hampton, Senator Ensign's chief of staff, has given an interview to "Nightline" which is going to air tomorrow night, where he says that you were an intermediary between him and Senator Ensign, and I want to show that for a second.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HAMPTON: Tom Coburn said, "What I would do, Doug, if I was you is I would have them buy your home, give you $1 million bucks so you could get started over, and that's what I'm willing to help you negotiate."

(UNKNOWN): And what happened?

HAMPTON: John said, "No can do. Not going to happen."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is he telling the truth?

COBURN: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Flat no?

COBURN: No.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You did not serve as an intermediary?

COBURN: Oh, I did. No, there's no question. Look, my whole goal in this thing was to bring two families to a closure of a very painful episode. And there's no question that Doug called me and said, "Will you talk to John about solving a problem?" And so I called John Ensign and said, "Do you want me to talk to him?" He said, "Yes."

But, you know, the -- the question that's worrisome is, what is the motivation now for -- for this? Doug obviously asked to have some remuneration for the injury that he had. And on private sector, that happens all the time. But there -- there was no negotiation. There was, "I'll pass it along," or, "Yes, I won't."

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, thanks very much.

Thank you all very much.

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George Stephanopoulos just had to give Liz Cheney some more air time on his bobblehead show in another of his "fair and balanced" panels. Sorry Liz but what's "inexcusable" is your daddy helping to get us into this quagmire in the first place. I still want to know when she's signing up for the military if she wants to keep beating those war drums.

WILL: The danger is that the president is going to be seen as escalating this war. He’ll do it half-heartedly with his heart not in it, he will lose his party, and he’ll be supported by Republicans of the stripe of Liz Cheney, and that’s not a sustainable path.

CHENEY: Well, let me just say that what I will support is the strategy that actually will win in Afghanistan, a strategy that’s the one that was laid out by General McChrystal, and I think it’s just completely inexcusable that we’ve now had month after month after month of photo-op out of the White House and no decision.

The president is very fond of saying, “Before I commit troops, I’m going to think very carefully about it.” Somebody in the White House needs to remind him: He’s already committed troops. We’ve got American men and women in Afghanistan today, because we’ve got to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a safe haven for Al Qaida. The cost of walking away, the cost of defeat, the cost of retreat is huge. They’re fighting there today, and they’re fighting without the kind of resources and reinforcements that he needs -- that they need.

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Columnist David Brooks is a conservative that isn't blindly devoted to former Gov. Sarah Palin. "She's a joke. I can't take her seriously," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday. "The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are not going to elect a talk show host," said Brooks.

But the other conservative on the panel with Brooks wasn't buying into the Palin frenzy either. George Will thinks Republicans can do better. "Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings Bryan. Now, Why would they want someone who lost the presidency three times?" asked Will.

John Amato: David Brooks has never been much of a fan of Palin. This is from a piece in Oct, 2008:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.
--
But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

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I'd like to know why the producers of This Week thought it was necessary to bring Laura Ingraham on the show to defend Fox News? She had about as much to add to the conversation as Michelle Malkin did not long ago. The rest of the Villagers did a pretty good job of circling the wagons around Fox whether the likes of Ingraham was there or not. Ingraham's hackery became even too much for the rest of them to take when she started comparing the White House's view of Fox to that of "Islamic Jihadists".

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now the president did cancel the subscription, George, but then he kind of blew it off. Is it time now as President Obama faces down FOX News down for a JFK moment?

WILL: I think so. Look, no president in the history of this republic has less reason to complain about his treatment in the press than President Obama. Liberals have academic, they have a mainstream media, they have Hollywood. They’re all for diversity and everything but thought. And out here is this one channel, FOX, and they’re all up in arms because in the words of Ms. Dunn of the White House, it is opinion journalism masquerading as news, which some of us would say describes the “New York Times” and certainly MSNBC.

PODESTA: Well, we have partners in journalism in America for a couple hundred years. But I think FOX takes it a little bit to a different level. I think Bill Shein, the vice president for news at FOX came out and said, “We are the opposition.” You know, that I think, can you imagine David Westin going out and saying something like that? Anybody, really in the mainstream news organization, they’re organizing. And I think it seems to me they were overcome with that feeling of joy you get from telling the truth once in a while. And probably they may actually even regret going as far as they have.

INGRAHAM: Well as the FOX representative on this show, by the way, you’re all going to be banned from any future White House events from having me at this table.

Bill Shein said that and I know him well. He said that, because he believes that of all the networks, FOX was going to hold the administration the most accountable. Last time I checked, I thought that was the role of the press. I think and again, I might not be invited back George, but when Charlie Gibson didn’t know what the ACORN story was all about, that was a collective gasp you heard across the United States. Charlie Gibson is an esteemed journalist, how do you not know a story about a group where President Obama cut his political teeth that had been exposed to the extent that Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill were ready to pull the rug out from under them in their funding? That’s the kind of the story that the White House doesn’t want to have reported and repeated on other networks. That’s why they don’t like FOX News.

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George Will is either lying, or he doesn't have any idea how to use the Internet. During the panel discussion on This Week, Will says this about the Baucus bill that came out of the Senate Finance Committee.

Stephanopoulos: And if he does is that the last hurdle? Or are we in for more twists here before the end?

Will: I think there could be more twists and there are going to be a lot of amendments put on the floor. And they're going to have to decide whether or not they're going to allow amendments and to what extent they're going to allow extensive debate.

Stephanopoulos: Nancy Pelosi suggested this week that there might not be any amendments on the House floor.

Will: Of course not for the same reason--although they could put this on the internet in 10 minutes, they haven’t put it on the internet, this 1502 pages, because people might discover what’s in there.

As our reader and tipster Stephen noted today, the bill has been on line since Oct. 19th. Anyone can go read all 1504 pages here and here. I guess it's asking too much of George Stephanopoulos to have pointed that out to George Will.

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Well, I guess when Dick Cheney referred to Obama "dithering", he actually meant spending any time thinking about the situation at all, given how little time they spent preparing a report for the incoming administration. CAP's John Podesta points out the problem on This Week:

(Former Bush officials and Republicans) have been citing an Afghanistan strategy report they handed off to the Obama administration that clearly laid out recommendations for moving forward (to criticize Obama's decision process). From Cheney’s recent remarks to the Center for Security Policy:

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.

Today on ABC’s This Week, Center for American Progress President and CEO John Podesta revealed that the Bush administration spent just one hour on that report:

PODESTA: [T]hey did present him with a report at the very end of the Bush administration, but I have it from reliable sources that the principals in the Bush administration spent one hour on that report before they handed it off to Obama.

Oh...I see...we're operating on the "shoot first, ask questions later" methodology of foreign policy. Yeah, that's worked so well for us so far.

Recently, Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) — a former top aide to Biden and co-chair of the Vice President’s transition team — said that the Bush administration basically just “threw” the report “to the transition team as they were going out the door”:

KAUFMAN: So for him [Cheney] to come in at the end and say, “Well, we did it wrong for eight years. But then, in the end, we gave them a plan which really is what they should have used.” Let me tell you something: This administration came in. Rahm Emanuel was there. I was on the transition team on this. They started from scratch on Afghanistan. They took a blank piece of paper out and said, “What are we going to do to get this thing done?” … It was absolutely the perfect time to take a hard look at what we’re doing.

If nothing else demonstrates why the world community was happy enough with the new direction in foreign policy brought by the Obama administration that they would award him the Nobel Peace Prize, this certainly does. Imagine--taking a measured, educated and thoughtful approach as to how to deal with the mess that is Afghanistan. What a radical notion after the last eight years.

Steve Hynd at Newshoggers has a piece up on Afghanistan that focuses on why the Bush's gut reaction, no brains technique in Afghanistan has made it impossible to ever "win":

Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg talks to Real News Network about Afghanistan. He says that he wrote McChrystal's assessment thirty years ago, only with the names changed; that counter-insurgency cannot succeed for a foreign occupier and that there can be no success that will survive after U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.

Ellsberg should be followed by reading Paul McGeogh's blistering critique of McChrystal and Obama's Afghan plan, which I noted yesterday and Andrew Sullivan picked up on today.