President Obama is announcing on Thursday that he will convene a jobs summit in early December, at a time when the unemployment rate has surpassed 10 percent.
The Times’s Jeff Zeleny noted that the president is detailing his efforts to turn around the economy before he departs for a weeklong trip to Asia.
The unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since 1983, and last week’s job loss report for October showed larger numbers of workers who were unemployed for more than six months. In a compelling piece, The Times’s Michael Luo reveals the ways in which hardships of unemployed parents affect children in the family.
The Asia Tour: It’s likely that the awkward and increasingly tense relationship between the United States and Japan’s new government may be one of the least pressing foreign policy concerns weighing on the administration.
After an intense review of America’s war in Afghanistan including eight Situation Room meetings in the last two months, Mr. Obama is expected to solidify a strategy in the region during this trip with an announcement now expected by early December.
The long debate has played out in an unusually public forum with major players in the administration and the military voicing conflicting recommendations. The most recent episode played out Wednesday in news that Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, has strong reservations about sending more troops to the country.
Mr. Eikenberry, who once served as the top American military commander there, sent a written warning to Mr. Obama last week, putting him in stark opposition to the current American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who has asked for 40,000 more troops.
In the past, Mr. Eikenberry has expressed strong concerns in the past about President Hamid Karzai’s reliability as a partner. The Times’s Helene Cooper examines the difficulties in getting Mr. Karzai to crack down on his government’s corruption and the drug trade when possibly the most effective leverage — withdrawing American forces — is all but off limits.
Short of pulling out of the country, one lever the White House could use, the officials said, would be to shift money from Mr. Karzai’s central government in Kabul to provincial leaders who perform better than their national government counterparts. And while complete withdrawal of American troops is not considered an option right now, Mr. Obama might do a partial withdrawal that drops back to the kind of more limited counter-insurgency strategy initially advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden.
Politicizing Afghanistan: Congress is out of session for the remainder of the week in honor of Veterans Day, but as the administration closes in on a decision, lawmakers and candidates are already looking forward to a vote on the matter. In Massachusetts, where the two Democratic candidates for the Senate seat vacated by the late Ted Kennedy are gearing up for the Democratic primary on Dec. 8, Mike Capuano is running this ad that says he won’t vote to send more troops without the “right answers” to questions about the administration’s mission, definition of success and exit strategy.
Oil Politics Peter W. Galbraith has long been associated with the interests of the Kurds, but it now appears that his affiliations with an oil company and Kurdish interests could reap him hundreds of millions of dollars. The Times’s James Glanz and Walter Gibbs examine the relationship’s apparent benefits.
Travel Day: En route to his first stop in Japan, Mr. Obama will speak to military personnel at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. He arrives in Tokyo Friday afternoon and meets Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.
Bushes are Back: Former President George W. Bush will hold his tongue no more. Today he will announce the new George W. Bush Institute as a forum to promote some of his domestic and international priorities in education, global health, human freedom and economic growth. The institute will be housed along with his presidential library as Southern Methodist University in Texas.
Meanwhile, TalkingPointsMemo reports that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley are preparing to establish a “strategic consulting” venture called the RiceHadley Group LLC in California.
Supreme Speech: Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. will speak to the conservative legal organization, the Federalist Society, at the Mayflower in Washington at 7 p.m.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Barney Frank, an openly gay Massachusetts Democrat, said that repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy will likely be included as part of next year’s Department of Defense authorization bill in both chambers of Congress.
Fatal Accident: A Secret Service vehicle struck and killed a man early Wednesday morning in Prince George’s County, Maryland just outside Washington, The Hill reports.
Palin Power: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin certainly has her detractors, but her official stamp of approval is coveted by at least one Republican gubernatorial candidate with his eyes on the 2010 elections. Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive and the Republican frontrunner for governor in 2010, managed to snag a clandestine meeting Wednesday with Mrs. Palin, who’s mostly avoided political meetings as she prepares for her book tour that starts next week
Speaking of that book, here’s a glimpse of what’s in and what’s not. As for who makes these much anticipated pages: There’s no index, so her party’s “Washington establishment” will have to read the testimonial cover to cover to find out if they escaped unscathed, reports The Page’s Mark Halperin.
Eye on 2012: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will “unofficially begin” his 2012 presidential campaign next month when he speaks at a Republican political action committee fund-raiser in Concord, New Hampshire. (Perhaps he already had done so in Iowa last weekend.) The Washington Post’s Dan Balz mines recent actions by Mr. Pawlenty, including his criticisms of Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican, and posits whether the fledgling national candidate should take a few cue cards from Mitt Romney’s tablet of lessons learned. Only 1,087 days until the 2012 election.
source
* just five chapters—but they are very, very long.
* just five chapters—but they are very, very long.
