Noah Shachtman
11/17/2010

Shachtman considers whether the TSA’s tech-centric approach to security makes any sense at all. The TSA is asking for public cooperation in unduly intrusive and revelatory x-ray images in exchange for incremental, uncertain security improvements against particular kinds of concealed weapons. Now pilots and travelers are rebelling against scanners that douse them with radiation and reveal their private parts. TSA has long hewed to an unthinking, unbending approach to security that prompts Shachtman to cast doubt on both the efficacy of the new measures and the agency.

Shachtman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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Warren E. Buffett
11/17/2010

Buffett writes an open letter to the American government to thank it for working so hard and efficiently to save the economy from meltdown in 2008. He gives a nod to Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair, who worked courageously, as well as President George W. Bush, who led through the crisis before the election of President Obama. Buffett notes that the crisis followed a bubble and now there is a fog of panic. People are second-guessing the government’s actions, yet the government was remarkably effective in that dark time.

Buffett is the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified holding company.

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Joseph Lieberman
11/16/2010

The greatest opportunities for bipartisan cooperation between President Obama and resurgent Republicans in Congress lie in the realm of foreign policy and national security. Success in Afghanistan requires the president and the new leadership in Congress to stand together against antiwar Democrats and isolationist Republicans. Lieberman suggests it may prove easier to do so in foreign policy than domestic policy. The president and congressional Republicans have a historic opportunity to build a new consensus that brings Democrats and Republicans together on some of the most important foreign policy challenges facing America and thereby make our country both safer and more prosperous.

Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.

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Bruce Ackerman
11/12/2010

A lame-duck session of Congress is not necessary during times of ordinary legislation. In 1932, the 20th Amendment to the Constitution limited the time for a lame-duck Congress to 7 weeks, during which time it was understood that lawmakers were not to convene except in extraordinary cases, such as war. Since the 1990s, however, lame-duck congressional sessions have become the norm, and often big legislative decisions are made during these sessions. Besides the “utterly undemocratic” fact that defeated politicians are acting as representatives of the American people during a lame-duck session, Ackerman warns that this encourages politicians to escape voter scrutiny by putting put off major legislation until a lame-duck session. Congress should enact legislation prohibiting lame-duck sessions of Congress except in emergencies.

Ackerman is a professor of law at Yale and the author most recently of “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.”

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Paul Krugman
11/12/2010

Krugman says he didn’t have much hope when President Obama created a bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but when it released an outline of its proposal it was worse than he and cynics expected. The co-chairmen are proposing a mixture of tax cuts for the wealthy and tax increases for the middle class, resulting in a transfer of wealth upward without any effect on deficit reduction. It also proposes raising retirement age for Social Security as life expectancy increases, but Krugman says that is impractical for laborers, whose life expectancy is not increasing at the same rate as knowledge workers. It seems the commission has been hijacked by a Republican ideological agenda. He doubts anything can be salvaged from the proposal.

Krugman is a New York Times columnist.

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Emil W. Henry, Jr.
11/11/2010

Although Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played a central role in causing the recent economic crisis, they are absent from the reform plans of Congress and the Obama administration. So these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) remain mired in conservatorship, as extensions of the federal government. Eliminating the GSEs and moving their activities to the private sector should be fairly easy: the Treasury Department can stop rubber-stamping their debt issuance at any time. Secretary Geithner can immediately reshape the mortgage markets by withholding his approval of new debt issuances by the GSEs. That’s the best way to begin curtailing the GSEs, and it can be done unilaterally.

Henry, the CEO of Henry, Tiger, LLC, was an assistant secretary of the Treasury from 2005 to 2007.

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George F. Will
11/11/2010

President Obama’s presidency has indeed been “transformative” in the sense that it ushered in conservatism’s best year since Ronald Reagan’s election. Two major regulatory attempts by the federal government failed: campaign speech and cap and trade. This was followed by Americans awakening in 2010 to an extremely unstable financial future and realizing that local governments had been “looted” by the collaborative efforts between federal workers’ unions and elected officials. Hence the deadening of “card check” legislation, the darling of unionized public workers. And yet another boost for conservatism was NPR’s “self-immolation,” begging the question of just how important government funding for “public” broadcasting is and supplying conservatives with a starting point for cutting government.

Will is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing about foreign and domestic politics and policy.

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Gail Collins
11/11/2010

After the midterm elections it is easy to draw parallels between many things in pop culture and politics. She likens the movie “127 Hours” about a real-life hiker who was forced to amputate his arm after being stuck in the desert to American politics; the cruise ship that is adrift to America itself. David Kennedy of Stanford University likened America today to the Gilded Age, and Collins says this fits, as the media was fragmented then and it produced some of the most sensationalist headlines. She says she is waiting for the next Teddy Roosevelt to ride to our rescue.

Collins is a New York Times columnist.

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Zoltan Hajnal
11/10/2010

Lost in the GOP’s euphoria over its midterm victory is the fact that it has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run, writes Hajnal. Republicans can’t win in the future without more nonwhite votes. If minorities didn’t give up on the Democratic Party last week, they are unlikely to do so without dramatic changes in the platforms of the two parties. A growing and resolutely Democratic nonwhite population is a serious threat to the Republican electoral calculus. Over the long term–as white voters become an ever-smaller fraction of the electorate and Latinos and other racial and ethnic minorities become a larger share–any campaign that appeals primarily to whites will be doomed.

Hajnal, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego, is author of “America’s Uneven Democracy” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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