Resignations in Germany
Franz Josef Jung, Defense Minister of Germany at the time of the Kunduz airstrikes gone bad, got demoted to the Labor Ministry in the post-election cabinet reshuffle and will now be resigning from the cabinet altogether. General Wolfgang Schneiderhan and State Secretary Peter Wichert have already resigned over this matter. In light of the fact that all this is happening in part because of an increased American emphasis on the need to reduce civilian casualties, it does strike me as worth wondering whether you can imagine anything comparable happening in the United States? In any bureaucrat

Urban Institute Skeptical of Watered-Down Public Option
One issue that probably hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves is the growing evidence that the watered-down (i.e., “level-playing field”) version of the public option currently under consideration is so watered-down that it doesn’t really accomplish anything. A new report from the Urban Institute appears to make precisely that argument

In Praise of the Financial Times
John Judis has done a couple of posts recently noting how much better the Financial Times does of covering events outside the borders of the United States than do American newspapers. I agree and was tweeting the other day about how much more impressive the FT is than American papers. In their defense, American papers do tend to be as-good or somewhat-better at covering U.S. domestic political intrigue (what did Mitch McConnell say yesterday?) but there are lots and lots of good new media and/or specialty news outlets doing that kind of thing.

Dubai World and “Negotiating” the AIG Payouts
Dubai World, which is a state-owned company out of (you guessed it) Dubai, has announced the need to restructure its debt payments creating a lot of uncertainty in markets as to whether this amounts to a sovereign default that should lead people to panic. Willem Buiter says there’s no need to freak out, that this is basically just a real estate company having problems, and Paul Krugman

The China Turnaround
James Fallows rounds up the headlines and finds sudden progress being made on just about every issue on which Obama’s trip to China was deemed a “failure” by the media consensus. To reiterate what I said before, I do think it’s fair to observe that it seems slightly strange to have gone ahead with the trip in the absence of a clear signal that there were important bilateral deals ready to be signed. But it looks like Fallows’ earlier argument that this l