Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw "Radek" Sikorski, husband of Washington Post editorial writer (and Polish cuisine expert) Anne Applebaum, is a compelling, brilliant, eclectic political intellectual who I admire a great deal. In part, I admire Sikorski because while tenacious and committed to his own analysis and views, he maintains an open mind; he listens; and while tenacious, he debates his intellectual opponents without going into the gutter. And he is occasionally unpredictable in all the right ways...

This piece also appears in The Washington Note

This was not a good week for the Obama administration's Middle East peace efforts. Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem last Saturday, Secretary Clinton seemed to be praising the distinctively partial limitations that Israel was willing to implement on settlement non-expansion. During the following days in Morocco and Cairo, she walked those remarks back, but the damage had been done...

A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities outlines new gaps in states' 2010 budgets, estimates the size of the shortfall in 2011, and considers the potential effects of additional federal assistance and continued stagnation in the nation's labor markets.

Heading into fiscal year 2010, which began on July 1, 2009, 48 states faced budget shortfalls that had to be addressed through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases (Montana and North Dakota are the exceptions; Vermont is the only state in the Union that does not have a balanced budget requirement). Now, about five months into FY2010, new gaps have opened up in 26 states, totalling $15.8 billion or 4.0% of those states' aggregate budgets. Leading the way is New York, with a brand-new $3.0 billion shortfall (5.4% of the state's total budget), while Arizona's $1.5 billion gap represents a whopping 15.4% of its total budget...

It's time to table fancy counterinsurgency doctrines about "connecting the Afghan people to the government" -- Afghans have never had, and don't expect much, in the way of services from their government, and it's time now to focus on something much more basic: security. The last government to provide Afghans with real security was... the Taliban. When they ruled the country before 9/11, security came at a tremendous price: a brutal, theocratic regime that bankrupted the country and was a pariah on the world stage.

But in the context of Afghan history, the Taliban bringing security was decisively important, since what had immediately preceded their iron rule was a nightmarish civil war during which you could be robbed or killed at will by gangs of roving ethnic and tribal militias...

Richard Wolffe wrote in his Obama campaign memoir that the President sees most of his challenges in basketball metaphors and that he's turned on by nail-biting contests when he, Barack Obama, can switch things up in the contest and come in to make the key decisions and plays that achieve a win.

But lately, it seems to be Joe Biden who has to be given the MVP award on the Obama team this week.

Today Iraq's government passed a politically controversial new election law allowing parliamentary elections to take place in January and also keeping a drawdown of US combat forces on schedule...

What follows below is an interesting article that I am going to post in full as it does not at this point appear to be available on the internet anywhere. Out of respect for Nahum Barnea and Yedioth Ahronoth, I will clip the piece and provide a link to Ynet News when this article appears on the web.

But in my estimation, this is an extremely informed analysis of the dynamics between Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama and simply must be read and considered before Netanyahu lands in Washington. My guess is that the author has spoken directly to many of the very top tier Israeli principals. -- Steve Clemons

On November 5th, the U.S. Department of Labor released an update on U.S. labor productivity that may be good news for the U.S. economy, but might not be for the American worker: in the third quarter of 2009, U.S. labor productivity increased by 9.5 percent annually, the highest increase in productivity since 2003.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours of all persons, including employees, proprietors, and unpaid family workers." Productivity is output divided by input (hours worked), and can thus be increased in two ways: increasing the output, or decreasing the input...

Each month when I get the official unemployment figures from the US government, I quickly search in my inbox for a note from former cable network CEO and senior economic adviser in the John Edwards and Barack Obama campaigns Leo Hindery who sends me the "effective unemployment" figures that many economic commentators from Joseph Stiglitz to Mort Zuckerman to Bob Herbert are begninning to use...

For some time, I have been writing that the US has lost site of its al Qaeda-rationalized strategic objectives in Afghanistan and stumbled into a civil war. Recently resigned US official Matthew Hoh also frames the challenge in Afghanistan as that of a 35 year old civil war in which the forces are far bigger than anything the US can influence...

Now, that was what I was talking about.

Dick Lugar, one of the old bulls of the Senate, has introduced a bill, S.2727, to extend, on a reciprocal basis, the inspections under START for another six months. (More precisely, it extends the necessary privileges and immunities to Russian arms inspection teams.)...