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Army Says Morale Has Fallen Among Troops In Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence, the Army said Friday. It was the first time since 2004 that soldier suicides in Iraq did not increase. Self-inflicted deaths in Afghanistan were on track to go up this year. Though findings of two new battlefield surveys are similar in several ways to the last ones taken in 2007, they come at a time of intense scrutiny on Afghanistan as President Barack Obama struggles to craft a new ...

Joseph Cao: Voting For Health Reform Was “A Decision Of Conscience”

The one House Republican to support health care reform said on Sunday that his decision to back the bill was driven by his conscience and the needs of his district and not back-room dealing with the White House or Democrats. Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La), appearing on CNN, said that he cast his vote in favor of reform only after an amendment greatly restricting the coverage of abortions was allowed to come to a vote. Once that hurdle was clear, Cao said, "I called the White House and said I could possibly support the bill." The subject of a fierce, late-in-the-game, lobbying effort ...

‘We got walloped’

Two big questions loom in the wake of the 2009 elections. The first is whether Barack Obama learned anything new about American voters. The second is whether American voters will soon learn something new about Obama. For a president who likes always to convey confidence and cool, the returns will test his willingness and capacity for self-critique and self-correction. So far, Obama’s White House has responded to the results — flaming defeats for Democratic gubernatorial nominees in Virginia and New Jersey, along with better news in the N.Y. 23 special congressional election — exclusively with self-justification. Obama himself did not mention the elephant ...

Student Loan Crisis

Is Wall Street really so sorry?

Wall Street keeps saying it’s sorry. It’s sorry for those bad bets on subprime mortgages. Sorry about the stock market crash. Sorry for needing those bailouts. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has admitted his industry “made its share of mistakes.” But nobody in Washington is buying its contrition. “The industry, I think, has a long way to go to demonstrate that they get it in terms of the harm they caused not just to world financial markets but individual families,” Sen. Bob Casey D-Pa. told POLITICO. “It would be really helpful if they showed it by their actions,” said Sen. Jon Tester D-Mont..The ...