More troops, lots more troops, or everyone they can get their hands on

I am so reassured the One is for moderation. But somehow it think they're not going to be happy until they exercise the third option listed above:

... The options include Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Officials hope to present the options to Mr. Obama this week before he leaves on a trip to Asia.

While some civilian and military officials believe Mr. Obama is seeking a middle ground in the debate over Afghanistan, aides denied he has made any decision or is leaning toward any of the options. Still, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appears to be supportive of the middle option, some officials said, and his view is thought to be pivotal because of Mr. Obama’s respect for him and his status as a holdover from a Republican administration.

The three options define the contours of a debate that has played out in public for more than two months. General McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, and his advocates argue the war cannot be won without a major infusion of forces to protect the population and ultimately turn it against the Taliban. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others oppose a buildup in a war they believe cannot be won through conventional means and that diverts attention from Pakistan, where Al Qaeda is primarily located. There are currently 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

The range of alternatives under discussion suggests that the president has rejected the extremes on either end. He appears inclined to send more troops — with the only question being how many — and seems not to be seriously considering General McChrystal’s highest proposal of 80,000 more troops...

So good of the Centurions to be willing to slide down their estimate from 80,000 to 40,000. So reasonable of the Moderate One to only be thinking of 30,000. So much moderate and reasonable and middle of the road carnage and mayhem in a land ruled by vicious drug cartels and religious fanatics, many of our own making, who'll we'll be fighting too.

Such a reasonable solution to the real economic problem we face.

...Unemployment surged from 9.8 percent in September to 10.2 percent last month, its highest level since 1983. At the same time, the economy lost 190,000 more jobs. That means employers have eliminated 7.3 million positions since the recession began in December 2007.

As dreadful as they are, the headline numbers understate the severity of the problem. They also obscure an even grimmer fact: Unless there is more government support, it will take several years of robust economic growth — by no means a sure thing — to recoup the jobs that have been lost.

The unemployment rate includes only jobless people who have looked for work in the past four weeks. The underemployment rate — which also includes jobless workers who have not recently looked for work and part-timers who need full-time work — reached 17.5 percent in October. And the long-term unemployment rate — the share of the unemployed population out of work for more than six months — also continues to set records. It is now 35.6 percent.

The official job-loss data also fail to take note of 2.8 million additional jobs needed to absorb new workers who have joined the labor force during the recession. When those missing jobs are added to the official total, the economy comes up short by 10.1 million jobs...

The natives are getting decidedly restless. The Village by and large somehow equates the outrage on the Right with the outrage on the Left and pretends that fake dichotomy is what fuels every issue. When the outrage is simply the outrage of a people realizing they are being scammed and enslaved:

...The Obama administration does not seem to understand that this rage, left unaddressed, could consume it. It has pushed aside the entreaties of many — including Paul Volcker, the chairman of the White House’s own Economic Recovery Advisory Board — to break up too-big-to-fail banks. Those behemoths, cushioned by the government’s bailouts, low-interest loans and guarantees, are back making bets that put the entire system at risk. Yet last Sunday, we once again heard the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on “Meet the Press” dodging questions about the banks in general and Goldman in particular with unpersuasive bromides. “We’re not going to let the system go back to the way it was,” he said.

Surely he jests. On Monday morning, a business-savvy Democratic senator, Maria Cantwell of Washington, publicly questioned Geithner’s fitness for his job, given his support of loopholes in proposed regulations of the derivatives that enabled last year’s collapse. On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats, with the White House’s consent, voted to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the post Enron-WorldCom law passed in 2002 to prevent corporate accounting tricks and fraud. Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, told me on Friday it was “surreal” that Democrats were now achieving the long-held Republican goal of smashing “the golden chalice” of reform. If investors cannot have transparency, Levitt said, “the whole system is worthless.”

The system is going back to the way it was with a vengeance, against a backdrop of despair. As the unemployment rate crossed the 10 percent threshold at week’s end, we learned that bankers were helping themselves not just to bonuses as large as those at the bubble’s peak but to early allotments of H1N1 vaccine. No wonder 62 percent of those polled by Hart Associates in late September felt that “large banks” had been helped “a lot” or “a fair amount” by “government economic policies,” but only 13 percent felt the “average working person” had been. Unemployment ranked ahead of the deficit and health care as the No. 1 pocketbook issue in the survey, with 81 percent saying the Obama administration must take more action...

Yes, you read that right. Wall Street no longer has to even pretend it's telling its shareholders the truth. Perhaps more the fitting in an economy where the banks are increasingly the only ones who own anything. The fact is that they couldn't believe each other any more in the first place is what precipitated this crisis under Bu$hCo, but now that Anyone Who Matters has a guaranteed bailout, one supposes it doesn't really matter.

All that remains is for the One to cross his own private Rubicon and ordain a service solution to all these unproductive drains on the banks... meaning the unemployed.

One supposes he figures by the time he does the people will be so strung out and wrung out they'll simply don the uniforms and march off to fight Terra like good little citizens of the empire state.