Former general and outgoing US Ambassador to Kabul with some real talk for Hamid Karzai:

“When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost — in terms of life and treasure — hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people,” the ambassador said, “they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.”

See Spencer Ackerman for some larger context on Eikenberry.

In policy terms, though, this kind of self-righteous outburst only serves to underscore how dysfunctional the relationship between the US government and the Afghan government is. They don’t like us and we don’t like them. At this point, who’s right and who’s wrong is pretty irrelevant. It’s just time for a divorce.

Historical analogies are a dangerous tool, but reading about the founding era while watching the European sovereign debt situation unfold it’s hard to avoid being struck by parallels. The Articles of Confederation were, like the European Union, a form of supranational entity that was more than a treaty by less than a state. The Confederation Congress lacked taxing power, and had a cumbersome decision-making structure. And under the Articles, the United States was troubled by a variety of sovereign debt problems that were eventually resolved by the adoption of the US Constitution and the enactment of Alexander Hamilton’s debt assumption plan. And while a Hamiltonian solution to Europe’s current woes is extremely unlikely, I think it would work economically.

What would that look like?

It would start with the recognition that Greece is insolvent. It can’t pay the money it owes. One or two or maybe three other countries also may be insolvent. And the existence of solvency problems in some states is creating liquidity problems for other larger states. So there’s some insolvency, and even though the insolvency is concentrated in a relatively small number of small states it’s a problem for a much broader set of European people. At the same time, if you look at the total amount of sovereign debt in Europe and compare it to the Eurozone’s total fiscal capacity, the debt is very manageable. The Eurozone as a whole is a very solvent, creditworthy entity. So in principle you could consolidate all that outstanding European debt into a single Eurozone-wide debt financed by a modest European Solidarity VAT Surcharge. Then you’d have to severely curtail (if not eliminate) the EU member states’ ability to engage in deficit spending, limiting them to some kind of authority to borrow from a central European entity. The EU itself would become a debt-issuing, taxing entity like a real country.

This would be hugely beneficial as an economic matter, taking a problem that’s currently totally intractable and resolving it at extremely modest cost to taxpayers. What’s more, the thinking of the Founding Fathers of the Eurozone appears to have been that the monetary union would be but one step on a path of “ever-closer union.” But obviously to enact my scheme, Nicholas Sarkozy would have to be willing to sign his name to the end of France as an independent nation state. And lather, rinse, repeat for Portugal, Spain, Italy, Finland, Ireland, etc. And as you can imagine, this isn’t going to happen, so….

Something I should say is that this whole “floors not ceilings” thing with regard to campaign finance reform shouldn’t be taken as just something to say in response to calls for contribution limits. Even relatively modest public financing would, if applied systematically, really transform the American political system. Consider, for example, this story about how only fifteen percent of Virginia House of Delegates seats are being contested.

People often discuss uncompetitive seats primarily through a gerrymandering lens, but I think the money is a much more important factor and one that there’s a better solution available for. If any major party nominee was guaranteed a decent amount of money, then almost every seat would be meaningfully contestes. Incumbents might still be regularly re-elected (and why shouldn’t they be if they’re ideologically well-fitted to their districts) but they’d still need to hustle and try and worry that they’ll be exposed to scrutiny. The way our system works now, the quantity of meaningful elections is very driven by the imperative to raise funds and then try to allocate them “efficiently” to winnable seats. It leaves us with a needlessly impoverished political debate.

After hearing a lot of anti-Obama sentiment from speakers at Netroots Nation I was planning to do a post noting how unrepresentative the NN crowd—mostly male, overwhelmingly white—is from the actual base of the Democratic Party which continues to like Barack Obama a lot:

But according to Christina Bellantoni, the best survey we have actually shows that the Netroots Nation attendees mirror this generous assessment of the president:

A straw poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research showed that 80 percent either approve or strongly approve of the president more than a year before voters head to the polls to decide whether he deserves a second term. The results broke down to 27 percent strongly approving of Obama and 53 percent approving “somewhat.” Thirteen percent said they “somewhat disapprove,” and 7 percent strongly disapprove of the president.

Nothing earth-shattering. But a reminder that the proximate problem faced by would-be left-wing critics of President Obama is that they generally have much less credibility with the progressive constituency than the president does himself.