Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar (R-IN) and House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) have jointly written a compelling case to end the travel ban for all Americans desiring to go to Cuba....

I just published an article at The Daily Beast on White House Counsel Gregory Craig's resignation.

For the record, I am an admirer of Greg Craig's. I think that Craig is one of the few people on the progressive side of things who has a deep grasp of the complexities of America's GITMO problems hatched by the last administration. In my view, he is the White House lawyer tasked with closing GITMO, not the PR machine and political operator who was supposed to seduce Congress in permitting detainees to be moved into the justice and prison system of the United States. The President and White House Chief of Staff were AWOL when it came to laying the political groundwork for what Craig was tasked with doing...

On Friday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a report estimating the effects of the House health care reform bill. Looking only at the spending side of the ledger, they estimate both greater costs and greater savings than does CBO -- netting to roughly $60 billion less overall. We have compiled the differences here, but it is important to note that CBO and CMS work off of different Medicare baselines, meaning that greater savings need not mean lower overall federal spending...

Last week, I found myself at yet another think tank-type meeting about Afghan policy choices. Toward the end, one of the participants, who had long experience in government, asked a deceptively simple question: What would happen if we failed?...

Even if President Obama weren't getting to China just now, it would be worth checking out the illustrated feature "Nine Nations of China," by Patrick Chovanec, which has just gone up on our site. Given the visit, it's all the more timely...

Nearly thirty years after he left office, the most important achievement of Jimmy Carter's time as president was his cementing the relationship with China that had begun under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (Second-most important: Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt. Third: showing that it was possible, at least for a while, to increase the energy efficiency of cars, buildings, power generation, and industry within the US.)...

UPDATE: Stan Collender thinks we might be making ice mountains out of snow hills.

According to a number of news reports, President Obama has begun asking agencies to plan for a discretionary spending freeze next year -- or perhaps a 5 percent cut. The President may propose such as initiative as part of a deficit-cutting themed State of the Union address in January...

In his current Asian trip, President Obama visits Japan, then addresses a forum of leaders in Singapore, and eventually ends up in Seoul to discuss nukes and North Korea. But make no mistake, the axis of this week is the time Obama will spend in China, which has catapulted to the forefront of international affairs and is on its way to joining the United States as the alpha and omega of the global economic system...

This morning, a Wall Street Journal article reported that the White House intends to use some of the remaining TARP cash for deficit reduction, while also keeping some funds available for emergencies.

The article reported that the Administration is also expected to lower the ten-year cost of the program from $341 billion, as reported in OMB’s Mid-Session Review, to $200 billion. This reduction is a result of two factors: lower expected spending and more optimistic assumptions regarding payback rates...

Antonio Giustozzi, a fellow at the London School of Economics, is the editor of a new volume of research essays about the Taliban entitled “Decoding the New Taliban,” which is being published here by Columbia University Press. It is an outstanding and important collection—just the sort of locally specific, openly debatable, scholarly analysis about the diverse structures and leaders of the Taliban that will be required more and more if the international community is ever to understand the insurgents and divine how to prevent a second Taliban revolution...