PrairiePundit

The call came just after dinner: a pickup truck carrying Afghan national police officers had hit a buried bomb, and all five officers inside were dead.

When First Lt. James Brown and his team of bomb investigators arrived at the shredded remains of the truck, the grim significance of the attack became clear. One of the dead was a hard-charging commander who, more than any officer in this restive district of Logar Province, had helped fight a shadowy network of local bomb makers.
“If he wasn’t trying so hard, if he was taking bribes, taking naps, he’d be alive right now,” Lieutenant Brown said of the commander, Gul Alam.
This is the war in Afghanistan today, where death is measured less by the accuracy of bullets than by the cleverness of bombs. And though the Afghan insurgency’s improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, are less powerful or complex than those used in Iraq, they are becoming more common and sophisticated with each week, American military officers say.
This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.’s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war.
I.E.D.’s have been even more deadly for Afghan police officers and soldiers. At the current rate, I.E.D. attacks on Afghan forces could reach 6,000 this year, up from 81 in 2003, a American military official said. In early July alone, nine Afghan police officers were killed in two bomb attacks in Logar Province, south of Kabul.
With few paved roads, Afghanistan is even more fertile territory for I.E.D.’s. than Iraq, where hard pavement often forced insurgents to leave bombs in the open. Not so in Afghanistan, where it is relatively easy to bury a device in a dirt road and cover the tracks.
Even when I.E.D.’s do not wound or kill troops, the threat restricts and complicates the movements of coalition forces.
American convoys often must wait for bomb-detection teams that move at three miles per hour. Helicopters are limited, and most troops travel in mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs which are lumbering and hard to maneuver. Though heavily armored MRAPs are effective in shielding soldiers from explosions, two turret gunners died recently when one flipped over after hitting I.E.D.’s.

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There is more.

The story does not indicate if the US is mapping the placement of IEDs. Doing so in Iraq made it easier to develop patters and find the networks responsible. It also allowed the routing of UAVs to discover the bombers planting IEDs and taking them out on the spot. To defeat this kind of attack your need the kind of force to space ratio that can force the bombers through check points where they can be discovered.

About those green jobs ... UK edition

Times:

One of Britain’s biggest employers in the green energy industry is to cease production within hours of a government announcement today pledging as many as 400,000 green jobs by 2015.

Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will claim that Britain will become a world leader in low-carbon technology and manufacturing. He will argue that raising household energy bills to pay for investment in wind, solar and tidal power is justified not only by the dangers of global warming but also the opportunity to build a new “green economy”.

However, tomorrow morning the Vestas factory in Newport, Isle of Wight, Britain’s only significant manufacturer of wind turbines, will produce its last batch of seven-tonne blades. More than 600 people employed at the plant, and a related facility in Southampton, will be made redundant at the end of the month. All 7,000 turbines that the Government will commit today to installing over the next decade will be manufactured overseas, mainly in Germany, Denmark and China.

Vestas managers and union leaders held meetings with Mr Miliband and officials to discuss the possibility of converting the factory — which supplies the US market — to produce a different type of blade suitable for British wind farms. The Government did not, however, offer any financial aid and was unable to give any assurances that it would break the planning logjam that has paralysed the British market for wind turbines.
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The economics of "green" energy appear not to be working despite all the assistance and subsidies governments have showered on them. The fact is that without the government funding they never would have been viable and now with them they are still not viable.

Christopher Booker is merciless in his attack on the wind energy business in the UK.

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So far we have spent billions of pounds on building just over 2,000 wind turbines - and yet they contribute barely one per cent of all the electricity that we need.
The combined output of all those 2,000 turbines put together, averaging 700 megawatts, is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.
What's more, far from being 'free', this pitiful dribble of electricity is twice as expensive as the power we get from the nuclear, gas or coal-fired power stations which currently supply well over 90 per cent of our needs - and we all pay the difference, without knowing it, through our electricity bills.
But despite its best efforts to conceal the fact that wind turbines expensively and unreliably generate only a derisory amount of electricity, the Government keeps on telling us of its megalomaniac plans to build thousands more of them - at a cost of up to £100billion.
The prime reason for this is that we are legally obliged by the European Union to generate 32 per cent of our electricity from 'renewable' sources by 2020.
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Gordon Brown talks airily of building 4,000 offshore turbines by our target date - plus another 3,000 onshore. But this would mean sticking two of these 2,000-ton monsters, each the height of Blackpool Tower, into the seabed every day for the next 11 years.
Nowhere in the world has it proved possible to install more than one of them a week. The infrastructure simply isn't there to build more than a fraction of that figure.
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Even if they erected the number targeted it would be unlikely that they could get the energy predicted and teh cost in the US is running about three times that of conventional energy. Another cost not mentioned is that of running the transmission lines the cost of which is substantial.

Iranians boycot firms collaborating with regime

Guardian:

The mobile phone company Nokia is being hit by a growing economic boycott in Iran as consumers sympathetic to the post-election protest movement begin targeting a string of companies deemed to be collaborating with the regime.
Wholesale vendors in the capital report that demand for Nokia handsets has fallen by as much as half in the wake of calls to boycott Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for selling communications monitoring systems to Iran.
There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran's state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.
Nokia is the most prominent western company to suffer from its dealings with the Iranian authorities. Its NSN joint venture with Siemens provided Iran with a monitoring system as it expanded a mobile network last year. NSN says the technology is standard issue to dozens of countries, but protesters believe the company could have provided the network without the monitoring function.
Siemens is also accused of providing Iran with an internet filtering system called Webwasher.
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One Iranian journalist who has just been released from detention said: "I always had this impression that monitoring calls is just a rumour for threatening us from continuing our job properly, but the nightmare became real when they had my phone calls – conversations in my case.
"And the most unbelievable thing for me is that Nokia sold this system to our government. It would be a reasonable excuse for Nokia if they had sold the monitoring technology to a democratic country for controlling child abuse or other uses, but selling it to the Iranian government with a very clear background of human rights violence and suppression of dissent, it's just inexcusable for me. I'd like to tell Nokia that I'm tortured because they had sold this damn technology to our government."
NSN spokesman Ben Roome said: "As in every other country, telecoms networks in Iran require the capability to lawfully intercept voice calls. In the last two years, the number of mobile subscribers in Iran has grown from 12 million to over 53 million, so to expand the network in the second half of 2008 we were required to provide the facility to intercept voice calls on this network."
In other sectors, state-run TV has also been targeted by protesters who have listed products advertised on its channels and urged supporters to join a boycott. Companies are running scared, and viewers have noticed the number of commercials plummet.
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The economic boycott may have some impact on the regime. It will definitely have an impact on the economy and the taxes that results from the commerce. It will be interesting to see if the products boycott spreads to other countries.

Al Qaeda threatens Chinese working abroad

Telegraph:

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) said it would target the 50,000 Chinese workers in Algeria and elsewhere in Northern Africa.

Two extremist web sites affiliated with al-Qaeda also made threats against the large numbers of Chinese people working in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.
"Chop off their heads at their workplaces or in their homes to tell them that the time of enslaving Muslims has gone," read one posting.

It is the first time that any al-Qaeda group has threatened China or its interests and illustrates the high price that Beijing may pay for the riots in Urumqi, in which at least 136 Han Chinese and 46 Uighurs died last week.

Beijing's nervousness over its vast interests in Africa and the Middle East was underlined by the Foreign ministry, which rushed to reassure Muslims that China was not oppressing the Uighurs in the desert province of Xinjiang.

"We hope that our Muslim brothers can realise the truth of the July 5 incident in Urumqi. Once they know the truth, they would support our ethnic and religious policies and the measures the Chinese government has taken to deal with the incident," said a spokesman.

The Foreign ministry was also quick to deny a charge of genocide against the Uighurs that has been levelled by Turkey, which, together with Iran, has emerged as one of Beijing's sternest critics over the events of the past week.

"In which country could this be called genocide?" said a spokesman. "In 1949, the population of Uighurs in Xinjiang was 3.29 million, at present the Uighur population there is nearly 10 million, or three times more than 60 years ago. What kind of ethnic genocide is this?" he said.
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China has been repressing the Uighurs separatist movement, but there is no evidence that any genocide has taken place. Many Muslims have made the term meaningless by suggesting that a half dozen deaths in Gaza are genocide.

Al Qaeda has a knack for making enemies and it is making a serious mistake if it makes one of China. The political consequences will be as dire as those that came from the 9-11 attack.

The nunchuck case

The irony of a law that excludes this particular marshal arts weapon is that they were invented to get around the Japanese restriction on who could own a Samaria sword.

Human rights wackos and the Mexican army

LA Times:

Citing alleged rights abuses by Mexican soldiers assigned to the drug war, Human Rights Watch urged the Obama administration Monday to not release tens of millions of dollars in withheld security aid unless Mexico allows such abuse cases to be tried in civilian courts.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the U.S.-based group said Mexico's military courts had failed to bring to justice troops whom Human Rights Watch holds responsible for a "rapidly growing number of serious abuses."

Under the $1.4-billion multiyear aid package known as the Merida Initiative, the U.S. government is to withhold a 15% portion until the secretary of State reports that Mexico is meeting certain human rights conditions. One condition is that civilian authorities are investigating and prosecuting alleged abuses by troops and federal police "in accordance with Mexican and international law." Withheld funds so far amount to more than $100 million.

The conduct of Mexico's soldiers has attracted growing scrutiny since President Felipe Calderon launched a military-led crackdown on drug traffickers 2 1/2 years ago. He has dispatched 45,000 troops to the country's most violent trafficking zones. In places such as Ciudad Juarez, they carry out basic police duties.

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This is exactly the wrong response to the reports of abuses. What the Mexican army needs is intensive training in counterinsurgency warfare. They are suffering the frustration of dealing with insurgents who camouflage themselves as civilians while they engage in mass murder of competitors and civilians who get in the way.

The army needs to get better at protecting the civilians so they can get the intelligence they need to find and destroy the criminal insurgents. What these Human Rights wackos are suggesting would lead to less protection for the people and would destroy the army's ability to function.

Punishing soldiers who need better training is counterproductive in the extreme.

A 'miracle' saved Guadalcanal hero?

Richard Fernandez:

One of the actual models for the Hasboro action figure GI Joe was Marine Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Paige. Paige who passed away in 2003, held a hilltop on Guadalcanal against more than a company of Imperial Japanese soldiers by manning each of the four machine gun positions in turn after everyone else had been killed. Paige tells the story of that frenzied Medal of Honor night, as each position was overrun and he finally held the ring alone here. What is particularly interesting is that he held back part of the story as he remembered it for years, fearing that he would not be believed. Several Japanese were headed for one of the unattended machine guns as he raced for it. In the next few moments he would live and they would die. Yet he believes it was not totally due to his skill and bravery that he survived. The part of the story he held back was that something unseen on that hill helped him.

Galvanized by the threat, I ran for the gun. From the gully area, several Japanese guns spotted me and swiveled to rake me with enfilading fire. The snipers in the trees also tried to bring me down with grenades, and mortars burst all around me as I ran to that gun. One of the crawling enemy soldiers saw me coming and he jumped up to race me to the prize. I got there first and jumped into a hole behind the gun. The enemy soldier, less than 25 yards away, dropped to the ground and started to open up on me. I turned the gun on the enemy and immediately realized it was not loaded. I quickly scooped up a partially loaded belt lying on the ground and with fumbling fingers, started to load it. Suddenly a very strange feeling came over me. I tried desperately to reach forward to pull the bolt handle back to load the gun, but I felt as though I was in a vise. Even so, I was completely relaxed and felt as though I was sitting peacefully in a park. I could feel a warm sensation between my chin and my Adam’s apple. Then all of a sudden I fell forward over the gun, loaded the gun, and swung it at the enemy gunner, the precise moment he had fired his full thirty-round magazine at me and stopped firing. For days later I thought about the mystery and somehow I knew that the ‘Man Above’ also knew what had happened. I never wanted to relate this experience to anyone, as I did not want to ever have anyone question it.
Just this year Penguin Canada published a book by John Geiger called the Third Man Factor. Geiger, a Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Chairman of the Society’s Expeditions Committee was fascinated by references in survival literature to the sensation among men in extreme danger of an unseen presence, and decided to write a book about it....

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Some people who have achieved heroic status are able to show the grace under pressure that Hemingway defines as courage. Many of these heroes do not survive their moment of courage so we do not hear about their "third man" encounters. We can still appreciate their efforts in the fight for our survival. Mitchell Page was a Marine at the battle that became the turning point in the war in the Pacific. Guadalcanal was the first place their offensive failed, and because of Mitchell's success it lead to many more victories for the US.

Marines buying killer machinegun scopes

Strategy Page:

The U.S. Marine Corps is spending $33 million to equip many of its M240B 7.62mm machine-gun with an optical scope from Trijicon. This firm supplies a wide range of rifle and machine-gun scopes for police and military customers. Trijicon has an 8x48 machine-gun scope that weighs less than half a pound and retails for $2,500. This scope has a red chevron aiming point, bullet drop compensator and two-eyes-open aiming capability. The sight does not need a battery and is waterproof. The marines will get 25 of these scopes within a year, and the rest within the next four years.

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I think the method with the old M60 was to watch the tracer rounds. The theory behind the new scope is that it puts rounds on the enemy with the first shots and does not give them time to dive for cover.

Who is driving the engine of debt?

The Tea Party movement thinks Obama is driving too fast. How about you?

California running out of other people's money

Larry Kelly:

While Karl Marx believed that socialism—and ultimately communism—would replace capitalism as the morally superior societal system, it was Margaret Thatcher who observed, “The trouble with socialism is that it always runs out of other people’s money.” Now, after 50 years of steady indoctrination by California’s media and education establishments, acquiescence to the soft tyranny of socialism dominates the culture, business climate and legislature. A byproduct of this is California’s massive government spending machine, where wealth redistribution is the organizing principle. Despite being home to the eighth-largest economy in the world, California is also teetering on insolvency.

Consider California’s perfect fiscal storm. Although Arnold Schwarzenegger came to the governorship in 2003 as a populist reformer, California’s cost of government has risen 40 percent since his election. California’s current budget includes $103 billion in spending. And due to the contracting economy, its shortfall over the next 18 months is projected to be a staggering $41 billion. This shortfall, if financed, would represent $1,108 of new indebtedness for every one of its 37 million citizens. Yet California is already the most indebted state in the union with a half-trillion dollars in outstanding debt obligations.

Milton Friedman observed that one can’t have an open-border policy and a welfare state—the incentives are all wrong. Despite the 1996 federal Welfare Reform Act, California is one of the few states that still provides lifetime welfare benefits. In the mid-1990s, the National Academy of Sciences found that each native-born household paid $1,100 in additional taxes to accommodate new immigrants and illegal aliens. That study is more than 10 years old. Now, if President Barack Obama and the Democrat-led U. S. Congress do grant amnesty to the millions of illegals throughout the country, through chain migration, millions of new welfare recipients will pour into California.

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There is much more, but this article was worth reading for the Thatcher quote alone.

One of the lessons of California is for Republicans who think that making deals with Democrats on spending can solve a crisis or make "government work." That is how Gov. Schwarzenegger reacted to the rejection of some of his better plans by voters. The compromises he made resulted in an ever worsening situation for California and a cascading downward spiral of the state's economy.

The phony scandal to cover Pelosi

Andrew McCarthy:

With Speaker Pelosi caught in the web of her own deceit over what the CIA told her about “torture,” and the Obama administration in the middle of its latest 180-degree reversal over CIA interrogators (Attorney General Holder is now considering prosecutions despite Obama’s promise of no prosecutions), Democrats have trumped up a charge that the CIA, on the orders of Vice President Dick Cheney, failed to notify Congress that it was contemplating — not implementing, but essentially brainstorming about — plans to kill or capture top al-Qaeda figures.

This is their most ludicrous gambit in a long time — and that’s saying something. Given their eight years of complaints about President Bush’s failure to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, and given President Clinton’s indignant insistence (against the weight of the evidence) that he absolutely wanted the CIA to kill bin Laden, one is moved to ask: What did Democrats think the CIA was doing for the last eight years?

And if Democrats did not believe the CIA was considering plans to kill or capture bin Laden, why weren’t they screaming from the rafters about such a lapse?

Of course the CIA has been trying to figure out how to take out top al-Qaeda leaders. One assumes — one hopes — they are also brainstorming about wiping out the Taliban, overthrowing the Iranian regime, undermining Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program, disrupting Syrian support of Hezbollah, and tackling all manner of threats to the United States. But there is no law that requires, or could practically require, the CIA to brief Congress every time some agency component considers the feasibility of some security initiative.

Gen. George Washington himself observed that “upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises . . . and for want of it, they are generally defeated.” Washington thought it obvious that secrecy was the heart of good intelligence. That is a big part of why intelligence activities are executive in nature, a core part of what the Supreme Court long ago recognized as the “delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” Secrecy cannot be preserved in a system of national security by political committee, much less a system in which a sprawling, 17-agency intelligence community is forced to share all of its secrets, in real time, with 535 members of Congress.

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When everyone is being an adult and acting in good faith, this doesn’t present a problem. No one expects the CIA to alert congressional leadership every time some agent conjures up a potential operation or to waste Congress’s time with briefings to explain the agency’s current thinking on matters (like how to neutralize al-Qaeda) that everyone knows the agency is working on. After all, if Congress wants to inquire about such things, it can ask. At the same time, if the CIA is about to embark on an effort that could have significant policy or security consequences, it is in the interest of the president and the country that bipartisan congressional leadership be given a heads-up.

Problems arise, though, if congressional leadership goes juvenile, as has happened in recent times. Sen. Patrick Leahy, for example, had to be removed from the Senate Intelligence Committee several years ago for leaking classified information. And when Democrats decided to politicize our national security through demagoguery about “torture” and “domestic spying,” their leaders took to misrepresenting the fact that they were informed about — and were supportive of — these policies from the beginning. Such shenanigans make the notification process not only pointless but counterproductive.

That is the setting of the latest controversy. Needing some back-up for Pelosi’s smear that the CIA regularly lies to Congress, Democrats came up with a vaguely worded whopper about how the agency withheld from Congress that it was developing a “secret plan” to conduct “intelligence activities.” Now, as the “I” in CIA stands for “Intelligence,” and as most of the agency’s activities are secret, one might not think there was anything very startling about all this — especially given that the “secret plan” to conduct “intelligence activities” was never “implemented.” But Democrats reached into their bag of tricks for that favorite of all talismans — the name “Cheney” — and their pied-piper media played right along. It was somehow a story because, whatever the “secret plan” may have been, it was Darth Vader who’d hidden it from Congress.

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This scandal appears to have exploded in the Democrats face. They have gone strangely silent now that it has emerged that the "secret plan" was to kill the enemy. Do Democrats really have a problem with that?

Do they realize how ridiculous they look?

Small business reeling, so Democrats decides to raise their taxes

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

Using only strips of canvas and a little rope, Scott Peterson walked up a 50-foot flagpole here to remove a star-spangled banner with reds faded pink. His ancestors used the same method: the family business, originally Harold A. Peterson Steeplejack, opened in 1926.

And it will probably close in 2009. The Great Recession, especially its stranglehold on credit and new construction, appears to have mortally wounded what the Depression could not kill.
“It’s not ‘Oh, I don’t have a job, I have to go find a new one,’ ” Mr. Peterson said. “We’re losing a corporation that is 83 years old. We’re losing our house. We’re losing our credit. We’re losing, other than our own physical bodies, everything.”
Recessions, like bullies, always pick on the weak, but few victims feel more beaten down these days than the millions of Americans with family businesses. Most run small operations with just a few employees, and failure often means closing an office with a parent’s name attached and deciding which relatives to fire.
They have been hit hard since the labor market began to weaken. Businesses with one to 19 employees, nearly all of them family run, lost 757,000 jobs from the second quarter of 2007 through the third quarter of 2008, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, broken down by company size. That amounts to 53 percent of all private-sector losses for a group of companies with about 20 percent of all employees.
Recent surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business also show that small-business owners are reporting lower profits and fewer plans to add inventory or spend capital than at any time since the group began asking such questions in 1973.
Bill Dunkelberg, the federation’s chief economist, says the market is being “cleansed” of unneeded goods and services, but other researchers emphasize that this ignores the broader civic and social role that companies like H.A. Peterson and Sons have played since Paul Revere took over his father’s silversmith business in 1754.
“Outside looking in, people don’t understand that business has often been an organizing point for the family,” said Blaine McCormick, a professor at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University, who worked in his family’s oil business growing up. “Everyone works in it; it’s our livelihood and it’s a meeting place where we form our identities and the stories that carry us through life.”

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But this is the group that House Democrats are targeting to pay for their health care plan. While they claim to be taxing the wealthy, the biggest impact will be on small businesses who are struggling just to stay alive. Raising taxes on them at this point will mean further unemployment and less job creations. It is another reason why Democrats are losing ground in the polls and issue after issue.

See more on the small business surtax here.

Death sentence for some al Qaeda in Yemen

CNN:

A judge in Yemen sentenced six al Qaeda terrorists to death and sent 10 others to prison for up to 15 years, the state-run Saba news agency reported.

The ring, known as the Tarim cell, belonged to the Yemen wing of the al Qaeda terrorist organization, the agency said.
The group, which included four Syrians and a Saudi, had been convicted of bombing oil and military facilities and foreign diplomatic missions, including the U.S. and Italian embassies, Saba reported.
The Tarim cell also killed tourists in 2007 and 2008 and attacked a residential area where Westerners live.
Ring members were arrested in 2008.
The convicted men shouted at the judge when he passed down the sentences Monday, with one man threatening that al Qaeda wings in Yemen would kill the magistrate, Saba said.
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Their shouts point out the wisdom of the judges sentences. The death penalty has been shown to be 100 percent effective at stopping recidivism among those executed. The likelihood that these guys would change their opinion after being jailed is remote.

It is interesting to see that Yemen is taking the threat these people pose seriously for a change. Yemen has become one of the places to go for terrorist who are leaving Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The government needs to create a hostile environment for al Qaeda's religious bigots.

Obama, Democrats tanking in polls

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Obama's approval, in the Rasmussen Poll, has now dipped to 51 percent, one point less than his 2008 vote share of 52 percent. In past polls, most voters registering disapproval for the president had voted for Sen. John McCain. Now, Obama's starting to lose people who backed him last November.

But the true predictive measurement is a chief executive's and his party's ratings on specific issues. As these shift, so usually do his job-approval numbers and eventually his popularity. And current trends suggest that Obama is in for rough sledding -- his job-approval ratings likely will quickly fall into negative territory and then drop further.

Rasmussen asked voters to compare which party was best on 10 issues. While Obama's ratings are likely better than his party's, the Republicans can take heart in trumping their opposition in eight of the 10 categories.

The most significant topic was, of course, the economy. For the second straight month, Rasmussen shows a GOP lead over the Democrats, this time by 46 percent to 41 percent, indicating that the incessant bad news and the collapse of the false hopes the stock market entertained this spring have taken their toll.

And only 39 percent of voters say that Obama is doing an excellent or good job on the economy, 11 points lower than his overall job approval. Forty-three percent say he's doing fair or poor.

As unemployment continues to rise and even Obama predicts that times will get worse, this gap on economic issues will likely rise.

On their competing health-care reform plans, Rasmussen finds Obama and the Republicans drawing equal support. On health care generally, Democrats find their margin down to 4 points from 18 two months ago.

Obama is rapidly losing support on health reform, his key issue. And if he stays behind on health care and the economy for long, nothing much will hold him and his party aloft.

Rasmussen also found a Republican edge on many other issues. Democrats led Republicans 41 percent to 38 percent on education -- but the GOP led 49-40 percent on national security, 40-34 on immigration, 46-39 on abortion, 34-33 on ethics and corruption and -- get this -- 42-37 on Social Security.

When Republicans are winning on Social Security, it's bad news for the Democrats.
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The Social Security numbers probably reflect the Democrats' standing with older people more than the issue itself, but they are the voters who are most likely to show up at the polls so it is an important indicator.

I think what we are seeing a rejection of the liberalism that the Democrats thought they had a mandate for. It is also a reaction to the failure of their big spending approach to government.

More on the bad poll numbers here. This is a poll that oversamples Democrats which suggest that things are probably worse for Obama.

Massacre mongering

NY Times Editorial:

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President Obama has told aides to study the matter, and the administration is pressing Mr. Karzai not to return General Dostum to power. Mr. Obama needs to order a full investigation into the massacre. The site must be guarded and witnesses protected.
Some current American officials say there are no grounds for the United States to investigate because only foreigners were involved and the alleged events occurred in another country. But human rights activists say the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions provide ample basis. They say American forces accepted the surrender of prisoners jointly with General Dostum. A NATO base was near the grave site.
There is more at stake than just the history books. Out of desperation or fear, many Afghans have again thrown their lot in with the Taliban. There is no chance of getting them to switch sides if they fear being massacred. If there is any hope of salvaging the war, American forces must persuade all Afghans that they and the Afghan government are truly committed to justice.

There are things the Times Editorial Board should look at before they jump into this fray. This so called massacre occurred after a large group of Taliban had feigned a surrender and then started a massacre of their own at Qala-i-Janghi where they murdered among others Mike Spann the first American to die in the war. It took days to get back control of the fortress and many of Dostum's troops were killed in the process. This bad faith surrender was enough to make any commander wary of taking future surrenders by the Taliban. I am sure that is one reason why those captured the next time were put into the shipping containers.

The suggestion that US forces accepted the surrender of the Taliban does not even pass the giggle test. The only US forces in Afghanistan at the time were special forces troops who had been used to call in the air support for campaign against the Taliban. Some of their commanders had come into the country around the time of the surrender, but to suggest that they in anyway were responsible for accepting the surrender of the Taliban is laughable. At best they were in the background. Most of them were still trying to deal with the results of the first fake surrender where they were trying to help the NA put down the ambush at Qala-i-Janghi.

I again recommend Doug Stanton's Horse Soldiers and specifically his chapter entitled "Ambush." It gives more perspective on these events even if it does not describe what happened with the final capture of the Taliban at Konduz. One reason it does not cover that episode is that the US forces were not involved in any meaningful way.

Cap and tax in Obama's America

Sarah Palin:

There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America's unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won't bring jobs. Our nation's debt is unsustainable, and the federal government's reach into the private sector is unprecedented.

Unfortunately, many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges. So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be:

I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy. It would undermine our recovery over the short term and would inflict permanent damage.

American prosperity has always been driven by the steady supply of abundant, affordable energy. Particularly in Alaska, we understand the inherent link between energy and prosperity, energy and opportunity, and energy and security. Consequently, many of us in this huge, energy-rich state recognize that the president's cap-and-trade energy tax would adversely affect every aspect of the U.S. economy.

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn't lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America's economy.
Job losses are so certain under this new cap-and-tax plan that it includes a provision accommodating newly unemployed workers from the resulting dried-up energy sector, to the tune of $4.2 billion over eight years. So much for creating jobs.

In addition to immediately increasing unemployment in the energy sector, even more American jobs will be threatened by the rising cost of doing business under the cap-and-tax plan. For example, the cost of farming will certainly increase, driving down farm incomes while driving up grocery prices. The costs of manufacturing, warehousing and transportation will also increase.

The ironic beauty in this plan? Soon, even the most ardent liberal will understand supply-side economics.

The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will "necessarily skyrocket." So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

Even Warren Buffett, an ardent Obama supporter, admitted that under the cap-and-tax scheme, "poor people are going to pay a lot more for electricity."
...

There is more.

This is probably one of the reasons liberals hate Sarah Palin. She exposes the evils of liberalism in a way that everyone can understand. They will not be calling this a rambling incoherent screed. It is too blunt and too hard to ignore the internal logic of her arguments against Obama's anti energy plan.

BTW, if Palin is politically dead you can't tell it by the Memorandum roundup of comments on her piece which does not even include this one:

The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End — There is no shortage of threats to our economy. America's unemployment rate recently hit its highest mark in more than 25 years and is expected to continue climbing. Worries are widespread that even when the economy finally rebounds, the recovery won't bring jobs.

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Obama's first deal with Iran?

Washington Times Editorial:

We hope President Obama hasn't agreed to a quid pro quo to secure the release of hostages in Iran, but the evidence doesn't look good.
On July 9, the United States released five members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps captured in Irbil, Iraq, in January 2007. The five were suspected of coordinating Iranian financial and materiel support for insurgents in Iraq, part of the ongoing shadow war being prosecuted against the United States by Tehran that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans.
The State Department maintains that the Iranians were released at the request of the Iraqi government, but some reports suggest the move was part of a quid pro quo deal for U.S. journalist Roxana Saberi, who was arrested in Tehran in February and released on May 11.
We had feared such a deal was in the works. On April 22, we noted in these pages that "the Iranian government is maneuvering to trade Ms. Saberi's freedom for that of five Revolutionary Guards captured by U.S. forces while training insurgents in Iraq."
The same day that Iran's chief judge, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, ordered a "quick and fair" appeal for Ms. Saberi, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met with Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz and called for the immediate release of the "Irbil Five." This was a clear diplomatic signal of a potential deal.
There is a whiff of "arms for hostages" in the air. It would be a mistake to reprise that failed attempt by the Reagan administration to curry favor with Iran in the mid-1980s by sending weapons in hopes Tehran would release U.S. hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon.
The opening did not improve U.S.-Iranian relations, and President Reagan later admitted it was a mistake. In 1987, E.J. Dionne, writing in the New York Times, quoted then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. as saying that Mr. Reagan had been "blinded by the illusion" that there was "an easy solution" to the hostage crisis and had been misled "by people who had no competence in the area of foreign policy." Ironically, Iran expert Michael Ledeen reports that the deal for the release of the Irbil Five was coordinated through Vice President Biden's office.
...

The Iraqis and the Obama administration also released some of those responsible for the murder of US troops who were taken captive in Iraq. So as we see this administration release those who capture and kill Americans the same administration suggest we need to prosecute Americans who tried to get information out of the enemy. It makes you wonder how they can be so naive about warfare and lawfare.

Obama's inner Bush

Ralph Peters:

WHICH president spoke the following words?

"Where you have na tions that are oppressing their people, isn't there an international responsibility to intervene? I think the need for intervention becomes a moral imperative. . .

"There are going to be objections to just about any decision, because there are some in the international community who believe that state sovereignty is sacrosanct. . .

"But we also say we're not going to just wait indefinitely and allow for the development of a nuclear weapon, the breach of international treaties, and wake up one day and find ourselves in a much worse position and unable to act."

No, that wasn't George W. Bush justifying regime-change in Iraq. It was Barack Obama, speaking at a press conference in Italy last Friday. But his language and logic sounded as if he were channeling Bush.

Our president cited the British prime minister's anecdote about a boy who dreamed of becoming a doctor, only to be massacred. The tale was set in Rwanda. But it could have been the story of a Kurdish child gassed by Saddam Hussein.

It would have shown a flash of integrity had the media noted Obama's sudden adherence to the Bush Doctrine. But this isn't just about Gotcha! Two big things appear to be in play.

First, Obama's been getting a taste of strategic reality served up by just about every thug on the planet. (And the prez can't have been happy with the lecture he got last week from Russian strongman Vladimir Putin -- the O-Man prefers to do the lecturing himself.)

The second thing is that political hypocrisy governs our domestic criticism of war. Had Bill Clinton deposed Saddam Hussein -- who Clinton believed held weapons of mass destruction -- our left would have celebrated him as the greatest liberator since Lincoln.

The problem was never what we did in Iraq, but who did it. The crocodile tears for our troops were all about tearing down Bush.
...
He spoke, eloquently, of the need for Africans to take responsibility for their own future and to fight corruption, arguing that Africa needs strong institutions, not strongmen. He even had the audacity to insist that, while colonialism did its damage, it can't be blamed for the disaster in Zimbabwe and other self-wrought failures.

It was a great speech (he should give a variant of it to several of our own domestic constituencies). I could not have been prouder of our president.

But Obama was channeling Bush in Africa, too.

W never got remotely as much credit as he deserves for taking Africa seriously, for pushing through effective development programs that helped AIDS sufferers, small entrepreneurs and democracy advocates.
...

While Obama is right about the cultural affliction of Africans, he will not offer the same support to Iranians who are being murdered in the street by their government. It is a selective conscience he exposes. He is also exposing his own hypocrisy about Iraq where he said that we should retreat even if it resulted in genocide. Obama is a leftist ideologue. He will try to rationalize the positions of the left and find some genocides more acceptable than others.

The two Sotomayors

Byron York:

Sonia Sotomayor's opening statement at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing was, to many ears, brief and boilerplate. But to Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans listening intently just a few feet away, Sotomayor drew a map for the questioning they hope will expose the fundamental flaws in her judicial views.

The theme Republicans will stress is this: Which is the real Sonia Sotomayor? The one testifying before the committee or the one who's been giving speeches and writing legal opinions for nearly two decades?

"If you look at her opening statement, there are places where she is attempting, on the eve of her confirmation, to do a 180 on things she has said over the years," says one senior Republican aide. "Should we believe what she's said repeatedly in the past -- long before she was nominated to the court -- or should we believe what she said on the opening day of her confirmation hearing?"

For example, Sotomayor told the committee that, "My personal and professional experiences help me listen and understand, with the law always commanding the result in every case."

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, GOP aides were checking back to a speech Sotomayor made at Seton Hall School of Law in October 2003. "My experiences will affect the facts I choose to see as a judge," Sotomayor said back then. "Our experiences as woman and people of color will in some way affect our decisions." That's a far different Sotomayor from the nominee who appeared on Monday.

Sotomayor also told the committee that her judicial philosophy is simple: "fidelity to the law." "The task of a judge is not to make the law," she said, "it is to apply the law."

As she spoke, Republicans re-read her speech at Duke University Law School in 2005 when she said the federal courts of appeals are "where policy is made." Acknowledging that she was speaking more candidly than judges usually do, she added, "I know this is on tape. And I should never say that because we don't make law, I know." Her words drew laughter, because everyone knew she was plainly saying that she does, in fact, make law. Again, the Sotomayor at Duke was quite different from the Sotomayor who appeared on Monday.
...

The wise Latina speaks with forked tongue. When you see a video of her statement to the committee followed by her statements to the contrary the difference is pretty striking. Fox News has shown them, but I suspect it did not make it into the news cast of other organizations where the staff was back into full leg tingle mode.

Exxon looks at pond scum for fuel

The oil giant Exxon Mobil, whose chief executive once mocked alternative energy by referring to ethanol as “moonshine,” is about to venture into biofuels.

On Tuesday, Exxon plans to announce an investment of $600 million in producing liquid transportation fuels from algae — organisms in water that range from pond scum to seaweed. The biofuel effort involves a partnership with Synthetic Genomics, a biotechnology company founded by the genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter.
The agreement could plug a major gap in the strategy of Exxon, the world’s largest and richest publicly traded oil company, which has been criticized by environmental groups for dismissing concerns about global warming in the past and its reluctance to develop renewable fuels.
Despite the widely publicized “moonshine” remark a few years ago by Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the company has spent several years exploring various fuel alternatives, according to one of its top research officials.
“We literally looked at every option we could think of, with several key parameters in mind,” said Emil Jacobs, vice president for research and development at Exxon’s research and engineering unit. “Scale was the first. For transportation fuels, if you can’t see whether you can scale a technology up, then you have to question whether you need to be involved at all.”
He added, “I am not going to sugarcoat this — this is not going to be easy.” Any large-scale commercial plants to produce algae-based fuels are at least 5 to 10 years away, Dr. Jacobs said.
Exxon’s sincerity and commitment will almost certainly be questioned by its most galvanized environmentalist critics, especially when compared with the company’s extraordinary profits from petroleum in recent years.

...

Dealing with the bad faith arguments of the anti energy lobby is something that companies like Exxon will continue to have to deal with regardless of how much pond scum they are able to suck up. The anti energy left has always had unrealistic objectives and reacts to oil companies the way "truthers" have 9-11 and Obama's birth certificate.

The good news is that growing pond scum is pretty easy. Growing enough of it for commercial production is probably the real challenge. I suspect the environmentalist wackos will find some objection to using large areas for growing it because of wildlife considerations. Just like solar and wind the anti energy left will always find a reason to oppose any energy project.

Hutchison raises big bucks first half of year

Houston Chronicle:

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison had publicly vanished from the governor's race during the past several months, but burst back on the scene Monday with an announcement that she has $12.5 million for a campaign to knock Gov. Rick Perry out of office.
Hutchison said she will formally announce as a candidate next month. She described the $6.7 million she raised during the first half of this year as a record for a Texas politician.
“This is a huge victory,” Hutchison said.
Perry has announced that he raised $4.2 million in the final nine days of June and had $9.3 million in the bank.
...
In a Dallas news conference, Hutchison outlined the core of her campaign in next year's Republican primary; fighting property taxes that are too high — as well as insurance and utility rates — and pushing for better access to health care for Texas children She also described Perry's Texas Department of Transportation as “arrogant.”
...

This is the first I have seen of what her issues will be in the coming primary campaign. I am sure that these issues poll well. The taxing authorities on the local level have been ingenious at raising property taxes no matter what the state has tried to do to lower them, so it will be a challenge to construct a bill that will thwart their efforts. I don't know what she means about the DOT being arrogant. Perhaps that is a Dallas based issue.

She will have to contend with aspects of Perry's record that are really good. Texas has led the country in creating jobs, including half of all jobs created over the last two years. It is the leading exporting state.

Monday, July 13, 2009

2 indicted in Minnesota on Somali terror charges

Reuters:

A federal grand jury in Minneapolis indicted two men on Monday on charges of conspiracy and aiding terrorism overseas, according to court papers.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune said on Monday that one of the men, Salah Osman Ahmed, 26, is of Somali descent and lived in a Minneapolis suburb.

According to the indictment, Ahmed and Abdifatah Yusuf Isse were charged with two counts of providing material support to terrorists "and resources, namely personnel including themselves," and conspiring "to kill, kidnap, and maim and injure persons outside of the United States" between September 2007 and December 2008.

Ahmed was also charged with two counts of making false statements about a flight he took from Minneapolis to Amsterdam on December 6, 2007, and bound for Somalia.

Ahmed "stated that he did not know anyone on his flight to Somalia in December 2007 when, in fact, he traveled to Somalia together with an individual he knew so that they could fight jihad in Somalia," the indictment said.
...
Omar Jamal, executive director of a local group, the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, told reporters outside the court that he thought the two men indicted were "foot soldiers."

Jamal has said U.S. probes into Somali immigrants in the U.S. aiding the conflict in Somalia has hurt U.S. disaster relief to the African nation.
...

There is little effective disaster relief because teh terrorist in Somalia do not want the relief agencies to interfere with their famine strategy. They intend to starve their opponents and attack relief supplies to prevent their distribution. That was really what the Blackhawk down event was all about.

Stopping the return of these guys to Somalia is for their own good anyway. It is pretty passing strange that they would want to go back there anyway. I suspect that 95 percent of the non combatants in Somalia would give anything to be in the US.

The oath of the 'Wise Latina'

The view of a Wise Latino cartoonist Michael Ramirez.

Reporter discussed 'secret' program in 2006 book

...

In his 2006 book “State of War,” James Risen wrote that the C.I.A. set up paramilitary teams shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks to hunt down top Qaeda operatives. Mr. Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote that the operation was soon disbanded before the C.I.A. carried out any operations. But the spy agency continued to develop plans to target Qaeda operatives, and top C.I.A. officials were briefed periodically about the progress of these efforts, the officials familiar with the program said.
In the spring of 2008, C.I.A director Michael V. Hayden and top aides were told about one aspect of these plans that involved gathering sensitive information in a foreign country, according to a former senior intelligence official.
Mr. Hayden ordered that the operation be scaled back and that Congress be notified if the plans became more fully developed, the official said.

...

I guess Risen was beyond the reach of Cheney's "assassins." The more we learn about this program the sillier the Democrats look. I think most Americans support killing the enemy where ever he is found. There may be some human rights wackos and a few liberal Democrats who put terrorist rights ahead of stopping terrorist attacks, but most voters want to see the government do everything it can to protect us from our enemies and one of the best ways to do that is to destroy them when we can find them.

The way the so called intelligence committee Democrats tried to play this information is shameful and shows how they are trying to politicize the war and the CIAs part in the war. The suggestion that VP Cheney had somehow kept them out of the loop when the program never rose to the level that would require notification is ridiculous. I suggest they all buy Risen's book and take a deep breath.

Indian army procurement problems

Times:

At first sight the deal looked honourable: Indian army chiefs claimed they had spent 10 million rupees (£127,000) on silent reconnaissance vehicles for missions beyond enemy lines.

This week, however, it was revealed that they had bought 22 golf buggies, several of which were deployed to patrol the army’s Shivalik Golf Course in Chandigarh.

The scandal emerged in a scathing audit of the military’s recent spending by India’s civil servants after army chiefs were given powers over their expanding budgets to combat terrorism.

The report details how the army bought Dhruv helicopters that can fly to a height of only 5,000 metres (16,400ft) — well short of the 6,500 metres required to patrol the Himalayan battlefields. Thousands of Russian-made heavy artillery shells that do not fire were bought and the Northern Command, which oversees Kashmir, bought stretchers that were unsuitable for evacuating combat casualties.
...
The allegations come at a sensitive time for India’s security services. The terror attack in Mumbai in November led to criticism after frontline forces were left to tackle militant gunmen with ageing rifles and faulty armour.
...

It sounds like there are several officers in need of retirement. India needs modern arms to face regional enemies and the terrorist who are attacking its noncombatants. But if there is a sneak attack on the golf course they may be ready for it.

Why are Democrats going nuts over a CIA 'program'?

The secret CIA program revealed to members of Congress late last month involved a series of planned attempts to assassinate top al-Qaeda leaders -- efforts that never progressed to an operational stage, according to current and former intelligence officials.

The CIA has long possessed the authorization, granted by President George W. Bush in a secret 2001 directive, to use lethal force against a small group of top al-Qaeda leaders whenever they were located. Although the agency's attacks on terrorist camps using pilotless aircraft is well documented, the CIA's program involved operatives "striking at two feet instead of 10,000 feet," a current intelligence official said.

Neither the officials nor the CIA would elaborate on the program or explain how it differed from other, well-understood attempts to destroy the group's senior leadership. But one current U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the program was small, intermittent and "exactly the kind of work people would expect the agency to be doing."

Both officials said the program never progressed to the point where congressional notification was required.

"It didn't go anywhere," the current intelligence official said.

The program touched off a political firestorm last week when several Democrat lawmakers complained that the CIA had misled Congress by failing to disclose its existence to the proper oversight committees.
...

Just exactly what kind of "oversight" did this "program" need?

This seems to be another example of how unsuited Democrats are to have any control of national security. They should be ashamed of making a big deal out of nothing. It is really too bad the "program" did not reach fruition, because I would like to see more al Qaeda leaders destroyed. Apparently the Democrats on the intelligence committee have other ideas of how to make war against people trying to commit mass murder against our citizens.

The Democrats should be embarrassed to even bring this issue up. If they want to make a political event out of this case, they are going to be very disappointed.

Saudis plan indefinte detention for hardcore terrorist

Arab News:

Forty-two of the most “hard core” of the 330 Al-Qaeda militants will not be released even after they serve out their time.
“The authorities will not release many of the hard-core militants because of their complicity in acts of terrorism, which were proved by the courts,” said Justice Ministry spokesman Abdullah Al-Sadhan at a news conference in Riyadh. He was accompanied by Ministry of Information spokesman Abdulrahman Al-Hazza.
Al-Sadhan said all of the convicts “can appeal against the verdict of the special Saudi courts.” The officials were addressing concerns expressed by some human rights advocates that these men have not received adequate legal counsel.
...

I think the Saudis recognize that these terrorist will remain at war with us after they finish any sentence they have been given and there for they should be held until the war is over with. That makes immanent sense to anyone who is not a terrorist rights wacko. It is the ways wars or fought and it avoids the confusion with lawfare that has enveloped much of the left around the world.

Will Ahmadinejad be his defense counsel

From CNN:

Alleged Nazi guard charged in 27,900 murders

Iran's president seems to think the charges are just made up. For others it is an opportunity for justice.

States that accepted abstinence only funds substantiall reduced abortions compared to those who rejected funding

104 Babcock has the statistics and the charts. You are not likely to see this info in other outlets.

It is worth comparing to a British study that showed teen pregnancy doubling under a sex education condom giveaway scheme.

Missing perspective on call for Afghan investigation

CNN:

President Obama has ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001.

"The indications that this had not been properly investigated just recently was brought to my attention," Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an exclusive interview during the president's visit to Ghana. The full interview will air 10 p.m. Monday.
"So what I've asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known, and we'll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all of the facts gathered up," Obama said.
The inquiry stems from the deaths of at least 1,000 Taliban prisoners who had surrendered to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in late 2001.
The fighters were in the custody of troops led by Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a prominent Afghan warlord who has served as chief of staff of the country's post-Taliban army.
Dostum, a former communist union boss and militia leader who fought against the U.S.-backed mujahedeen in the 1980s, is known for switching sides as Afghanistan's political conflict has evolved. When the United States invaded Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Dostum sided with the Americans and received military and CIA support to battle the Taliban.
...

Remember Mike Spann? He was the CIA officer who was one of several casualties when the Taliban faked a surrender and attacked Northern Alliance forces in a fortress where they were held by Gen. Dotsum. I am sure this bad faith surrender had an impact on the subsequent treatment of Taliban prisoners and the low tolerance for any resistance. What is surprising is the short memory of the media and the Obama administration.

They can read about the Taliban bad faith and the terrific fight against them in Doug Stanton's Horse Soldier. I think that battle says a lot about the subsequent treatment of Taliban prisoners. The defeat of the Taliban was keyed by their loss to Dotsum's forces in Northern Iraq. There is little wonder that we were not eager to stab him in the back.

Finally, an explanation of liberal bloggers

Live Science:

That muttered curse word that reflexively comes out when you stub your toe could actually make it easier to bear the throbbing pain, a new study suggests.

Swearing is a common response to pain, but no previous research has connected the uttering of an expletive to the actual physical experience of pain.

"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," said Richard Stephens of Keele University in England and one of the authors of the new study. "It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain."
...

The poor bloggers are in pain when they don't get their way. I think the explanation makes them look even more juvenile in their reaction to disappointments.

Democrats upset by program to kill the enemy

Marc Thiessen:

Democrats on Capitol Hill have been indignant over the fact that the details of a top-secret CIA program apparently was not fully briefed to Congress. Within weeks of that program being brought to Congress’s attention, key details have now leaked to the news media — thus validating the original decision not to share the details with Congress in the first place.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the program which Democrats were so angry about turns out to be an effort “to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.” Excuse me, but this is the Democrats’ idea of a scandal? Most Americans would not only expect, but demand, that the CIA do everything in its power to kill al-Qaeda operatives before they strike our country. Indeed, the Obama administration itself has reportedly escalated targeted killings of al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan using Predator and Reaper drones. These targeted killings are not assassinations — they are legitimate strikes against an enemy that has declared war on us and attacked us where we live.

That Congressional Democrats are outraged by this program speaks volumes about the state of their party on national security. The fact that the CIA was trying to kill al-Qaeda operatives should not be a point of outrage — it should be a point of pride.

With this latest leak, Congress has shown once again that it cannot be trusted with highly classified information, and that efforts by House Democrats to require the administration to brief top-secret programs beyond the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees are dangerous and misguided....

...

I think this program was implicitly authorized in the use of force authorization that Congress approved after 9-11. This raises further questions about whom the Democrats think is the enemy in this war. Their focus appears to be on the Bush administration rather than al Qaeda.

See also Jules Crittenden and Ed Morrisey's take on this "scandal." It makes you wonder if the Democrats are as smart as they think they are.

Democrats war against black teenage employment

Opinion Journal:

Here's some economic logic to ponder. The unemployment rate in June for American teenagers was 24%, for black teens it was 38%, and even White House economists are predicting more job losses. So how about raising the cost of that teenage labor?

Sorry to say, but that's precisely what will happen on July 24, when the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour from $6.55. The national wage floor will have increased 41% since the three-step hike was approved by the Democratic Congress in May 2007. Then the economy was humming, with an overall jobless rate of 4.5% and many entry-level jobs paying more than the minimum. That's a hard case to make now, with a 9.5% national jobless rate and thousands of employers facing razor-thin profit margins.
...

Democrats continue to push policies that have a negative effect on blacks and they continue to support them. There is something wrong with this picture.

Behind Zelaya's exile

Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

...

If there is anything debatable about the crisis it is the question of whether the government can defend the expulsion of the president. In fact it had good reasons for that move and they are worth Mrs. Clinton's attention if she is interested in defending democracy.

Besides eagerly trampling the constitution, Mr. Zelaya had demonstrated that he was ready to employ the violent tactics of chavismo to hang onto power. The decision to pack him off immediately was taken in the interest of protecting both constitutional order and human life.
Two incidents earlier this year make the case. The first occurred in January when the country was preparing to name a new 15-seat Supreme Court, as it does every seven years. An independent board made up of members of civil society had nominated 45 candidates. From that list, Congress was to choose the new judges.

Mr. Zelaya had his own nominees in mind, including the wife of a minister, and their names were not on the list. So he set about to pressure the legislature. On the day of the vote he militarized the area around the Congress and press reports say a group of the president's men, including the minister of defense, went to the Congress uninvited to turn up the heat. The head of the legislature had to call security to have the defense minister removed.

In the end Congress held its ground and Mr. Zelaya retreated. But the message had been sent: The president was willing to use force against other institutions.

In May there was an equally scary threat to peace issued by the Zelaya camp as the president illegally pushed for a plebiscite on rewriting the constitution. Since the executive branch is not permitted to call for such a vote, the attorney general had announced that he intended to enforce the law against Mr. Zelaya.
A week later some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general's office. "We have come to defend this country's second founding," the group's leader reportedly said. "If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection."

These experiences frightened Hondurans because they strongly suggested that Mr. Zelaya, who had already aligned himself with Mr. Chávez, was now emulating the Venezuelan's power-grab. Other Chávez protégés -- in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua -- have done the same, refusing to accept checks on their power, making use of mobs and seeking to undermine institutions.
...

These incidents make the Obama administration reaction to his removal even more inexplicable. Jennifer Rubin says Obama was "Wrong on the law. Wrong on the politics. Wrong on the foreign policy." She has plenty of evidence to back up her charges.

When Obama claims he is backing the rule of law, he gives no explanation for condoning Zelaya's violations of it. He gives him a pass for blatant violations of the Honduran constitution. I thought "constitutional" scholars were supposed to support constitutions.

Don't know much about history--Obama Cold War edition

Liz Cheney:

There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week.

Speaking to a group of students, our president explained it this way: "The American and Soviet armies were still massed in Europe, trained and ready to fight. The ideological trenches of the last century were roughly in place. Competition in everything from astrophysics to athletics was treated as a zero-sum game. If one person won, then the other person had to lose. And then within a few short years, the world as it was ceased to be. Make no mistake: This change did not come from any one nation. The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful."

The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind. The basis of the Cold War was not "competition in astrophysics and athletics." It was a global battle between tyranny and freedom. The Soviet "sphere of influence" was delineated by walls and barbed wire and tanks and secret police to prevent people from escaping. America was an unmatched force for good in the world during the Cold War. The Soviets were not. The Cold War ended not because the Soviets decided it should but because they were no match for the forces of freedom and the commitment of free nations to defend liberty and defeat Communism.

It is irresponsible for an American president to go to Moscow and tell a room full of young Russians less than the truth about how the Cold War ended. One wonders whether this was just an attempt to push "reset" -- or maybe to curry favor. Perhaps, most concerning of all, Mr. Obama believes what he said.

Mr. Obama's method for pushing reset around the world is becoming clearer with each foreign trip. He proclaims moral equivalence between the U.S. and our adversaries, he readily accepts a false historical narrative, and he refuses to stand up against anti-American lies.
...
Mr. Obama has become fond of saying, as he did in Russia again last week, that American nuclear disarmament will encourage the North Koreans and the Iranians to give up their nuclear ambitions. Does he really believe that the North Koreans and the Iranians are simply waiting for America to cut funds for missile defense and reduce our strategic nuclear stockpile before they halt their weapons programs?
...

I really like Liz Cheney. She is too smart for the liberals and they have a tough time demonizing her the way the do her father or Sarah Palin. I think she has a real future as a leader of conservative Republicans. The Washington Times reports she is open to a run for office.

She is also spot on in looking at the Obama foreign policy, but I think the more serious problem is that Obama really believes the false narrative he is pushing about the Cold War and the War with the Islamic religious bigots. This alternate universe in which Obama resides is a liberal fantasy land, but in the real world there are real enemies and they want to destroy us regardless of whether we disarm.

Business down sharply at Pakistan smugglers market

Not that they really have the right to complain, but these are also dire economic times for smugglers and gun runners.

...

"Business is zero these days," he said, sipping green tea out of a porcelain dish. Earlier in the war, he could make more than $1,200 a day. Now he is happy with $60. "It's now much more difficult to bring something in the old illegal ways."

The vendors at Sitara Market do not like to spell out in detail their illegal ways, or explain how they acquire their loot. Some goods, they say, trickle over the border from what Taliban fighters scavenge off the battlefield, or from theft along the military supply route through the Khyber Pass. There are black-market deals in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and donations flipped for profit.
...
Business has fallen off for many reasons, the vendors say, from the devaluation of the rupee to stricter border security making shipment more difficult. Bombs frequently explode along their routes. Rising violence in Peshawar and other parts of northwestern Pakistan have frightened away customers.
...
"It was very good business five or six years back, but now with the situation inside Pakistan, with the terror attacks, that has made the business really suffer," he said. "People don't want to come here."
...

Perhaps there are a shrinking number of buyers because the Taliban are getting their but kicked. Whatever the cause this seems like good news to me.

Intensive focus on health care rationing

In political combat, there are few more potent weapons than a single word or a catchy phrase that can be used to target a proposal and drive it into the ground.
For Republicans, "rationing" could be that poison-tipped arrow for the Democratic-led health care bill, much as "amnesty" was the club with which conservatives beat President Bush's attempt at immigration reform into a bloody pulp in 2007.
"Governments ration care to control costs, and we've got stories from other countries where disabled children wait up to two years for wheelchairs. We've got a story that we found: a 76-year-old retiree pulled out their own teeth," said Rep. Dave Camp, Michigan Republican and the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee.
"Government rationing is a scary proposition," he said.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, echoed this point during a conference call Wednesday, warning that the government could get into the business of rationing health care, deciding how much Americans can get or can spend on it and denying people health care that exceeds some rationed amount.
"The rationing problem is very real in all this and I think that as the American people learn more and more about the proposals as we are now being allowed more time for them to engage on this issue, they are very, very much concerned," he said.
But Democrats say the insurance companies are already rationing care and that the reforms they want would cover all those who are being denied coverage under the current system, as well as keep down costs through an intensive focus on which medical procedures and products deliver care most effectively.
...

When HMO's did that the Democrats objected. And when they see the public reaction to the rationing that will occur they will back off and there will be no savings and skyrocketing costs of providing additional health care to millions. The fact is that what the Democrats are proposing will not cover everyone, but will drive up the cost for the rest of the country that already has coverage. They can't just send the bill to the "rich."

Crics complain that ICE is finding too many illegals in jail

Houston Chronicle:

A little after 3 a.m. Dec. 12, Carlos Garcia-Hernandez was booked into Harris County Jail on an aggravated assault charge, accused of slicing a man's nose down to the bone after a disagreement at a birthday party.
At the jail, the first in the country with full access to a Department of Homeland Security database that contains millions of immigration records, a Harris County detention officer ran Garcia-Hernandez's fingerprints.
Within minutes the system found a hit. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had deported Garcia-Hernandez in November 2007 after a string of convictions including marijuana possession and escaping from law enforcement custody, the system showed.
The DHS system also showed Garcia-Hernandez had two outstanding murder warrants in Mexico. “A year ago, we wouldn't have gotten that,” said Lt. M. Lindsay, the point man for the Harris County Sheriff's Office's efforts to identify suspected illegal immigrants in the jails.

The database is part of an ICE program dubbed “Secure Communities,” which aims to identify and deport the most dangerous illegal immigrants in U.S. jails and prisons. Since Harris County started using the database in October, participation in the program has grown to 70 sites in the U.S., including 39 in Texas.
In the program's first six months, more than 266,000 fingerprint submissions were run through the system nationally, generating more than 32,000 “matches” for suspects with both an immigration history and record of a prior conviction or charge. That includes 5,369 matches in Harris County.

But critics see a troubling trend in the data.

Nationally, only 15 percent of the 6,130 suspects that authorities filed paperwork to detain after finding a match in the system were classified as “aggravated felons” — the agency's primary target group. The percentage was even lower in Harris County, with fewer that one in 10 suspects falling into that category, according to ICE statistics from late October to the end of April, the most recent available.
Supporters of the program point to cases like Garcia-Hernandez's as a sign that the system is working. But critics say ICE's data indicates that, so far, the agency is casting a broad net for suspected illegal immigrants in the jails, and is sweeping up some offenders who do not pose a danger to the public along with more hardened criminals.
Many of the Harris County offenders eventually end up in an immigration detention center in Polk County, where they wear uniforms color-coded to show the level of crime they were convicted of committing.
On a Thursday in June, a handful of the offenders in the detention center courtroom were dressed in red jumpsuits, denoting a higher risk level. But most wore uniforms for low-risk detainees,including a few identified through the immigration database in Harris County Jail after being stopped for traffic violations.
...

It appears to me that the critics are the people who are not serious about enforcing immigration laws. As a law enforcement tool the program seems excellent. It is telling those who are here illegally that they better not commit any crime whatsoever. What is wrong with that?

What the critics appear to be asking is that we take the chance of not getting the really bad guys by limiting the data base used to look for them. The families of their victims would have a different point of view. That is certainly also the case for Houston police officers who have seen two of their own killed by these criminal immigrants.

I see this as another tool to discourage illegal immigration. I am not anti immigrant. I welcome all legal immigrants and we should encourage people to follow the immigration laws. Allowing them to ignore the law only encourages more illegal conduct.

The phony civilian casualty argument against UAV attacks

Opinion Journal:

Several Taliban training camps in the Pakistan hinterland were hit last week by missiles fired from American unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), or drones, reportedly killing some 20 terrorists. Remarkably, some people think these strikes are a bad idea.

To get a sense of what U.S. drone strikes have accomplished in the past two years, recall the political furor that followed a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that al Qaeda had "protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland [i.e., U.S.] attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership. . . . As a result, we judge that the United States currently is in a heightened threat environment." The media declared we were losing the war.

Less than a year later, then-CIA director Michael Hayden offered a far more upbeat assessment to the Washington Post.
What changed? At least part of the answer is that the U.S. went from carrying out only a handful of drone attacks in 2007 to more than 30 in 2008. According to U.S. intelligence, among the "high-value targets" killed in these new strikes were al Qaeda spokesman Abu Layth al-Libi, weapons expert Abu Sulayman al Jazairi, chemical and biological expert Abu Khabab al-Masri, commander and logistician Abu Wafa al-Saudi, al Qaeda "Emir" Abu al-Hasan al Rimi, and, in November, Rashid Rauf. Rauf, who had escaped from a Pakistan jail the previous year, was a coordinator of the summer 2007 plot to blow up passenger planes over the Atlantic.

Is the world better off with these people dead? We think so. Then again, Lord Bingham, until recently Britain's senior law lord, has recently said UAV strikes may be "beyond the pale" and potentially on a par with cluster bombs and landmines. Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says "the Predator [drone] strikes have an entirely negative effect on Pakistani stability." He adds, "We should be cutting strikes back pretty substantially."

In both cases, the argument against drones rests on the belief that the attacks cause wide-scale casualties among noncombatants, thereby embittering local populations and losing hearts and minds. If you glean your information from wire reports -- which depend on stringers who are rarely eyewitnesses -- the argument seems almost plausible.

Yet anyone familiar with Predator technology knows how misleading those reports can be. Unlike fighter jets or cruise missiles, Predators can loiter over their targets for more than 20 hours, take photos in which men, women and children can be clearly distinguished (burqas can be visible from 20,000 feet) and deliver laser-guided munitions with low explosive yields. This minimizes the risks of the "collateral damage" that often comes from 500-pound bombs. Far from being "beyond the pale," drones have made war-fighting more humane.

A U.S. intelligence summary we've seen corrects the record of various media reports claiming high casualties from the Predator strikes. For example, on April 1 the BBC reported that "a missile fired by a suspected U.S. drone has killed at least 10 people in Pakistan." But the intelligence report says that half that number were killed, among them Abdullah Hamas al-Filistini, a top al Qaeda trainer, and that no women and children were present.
In each of the strikes in 2009 that are described by the intelligence summary, the report says no women or children were killed....

...

One of the ways you can determine the lack of civilian casualties is the lack of effect following the attacks. If there were high civilian casualties you would see demonstrations and tantrums in the effected area. Instead you see the Taliban cordon off the area and work quickly to bury their dead.

You can also see it in the way the Taliban react to the strikes. Many of them are honest enough to admit that their forces are the targets and it has hurt their ability to operate.

The Taliban do have a history of creating civilian casualties to push a victim offensive against the US use of air power, but they have only been able to do that when their forces are in contact with our forces and they use human shields to effect their get away. On this type of targeted strike, they are caught by surprise and are not able to gather their human shields.

Iran's 'investment' in Nicaragua

For months, the reports percolated in Washington and other capitals. Iran was constructing a major beachhead in Nicaragua as part of a diplomatic push into Latin America, featuring huge investment deals, new embassies and even TV programming from the Islamic republic.
"The Iranians are building a huge embassy in Managua," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned in May. "And you can only imagine what that's for."

But here in Nicaragua, no one can find any super-embassy.

Nicaraguan reporters scoured the sprawling tropical city in search of the embassy construction site. Nothing. Nicaraguan Chamber of Commerce chief Ernesto Porta laughed and said: "It doesn't exist." Government officials say the U.S. Embassy complex is the only "mega-embassy" in Managua. A U.S. diplomat in Managua conceded: "There is no huge Iranian Embassy being built as far as we can tell."

The mysterious, unseen giant embassy underscores how Iran's expansion into Latin America may be less substantive than some in Washington fear.

Iran's proposed investments in Nicaragua -- for a deep-water port, hydroelectric plants and a tractor factory -- have also failed to materialize, Nicaraguan officials say. At a time when Iran's oil revenue is falling, the same is true of many projects planned for Latin America, according to analysts.

U.S. officials emphasized that there is plenty of reason to be concerned about Iran, which they consider a state sponsor of terrorism. But the Iranian activity has revived Cold War-style rhetoric in Washington that at times doesn't match what is evident in places such as Managua.
...

I think what we are seeing is a difference between Iran's ambitions and it capacity to achieve them. The fall in the price of oil probably has a lot to do with its failures to date, but we should not discount the ambitions. The religious bigots of Iran are still in charge and they have not changed anything but their time frame.

Democrats' attempt to criminalize political differences

Several Republicans on Sunday condemned a potential Justice Department criminal investigation stemming from George W. Bush administration interrogation policies, warning that such a move could be threat to national security and one advocating a "scorched-earth policy" against the Obama administration in retaliation.
"The question is: Do we want America's image harmed more by dragging this out further and further?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"We don't want to give the terrorists and the radical Islamic extremists more tools and bullets to shoot against us and help their recruiting in this ongoing struggle we're in," said Mr. McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War and has consistently criticized U.S. abuse of detainees in the war on terrorism.
Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called for his party to pursue a "scorched-earth policy" of refusing to cooperate with the administration if it pursues such an investigation, which he called an effort to appease Europeans and U.S. intellectuals.
"It's a wrong and shameful criminalizing political differences," Mr. King said during an interview with The Washington Times. "I would find it very hard to work with the administration on bipartisan issues if the attorney general and the administration start going after patriotic Americans who have dedicated their lives to protecting us."
A Justice Department official Sunday told The Times that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is considering opening a criminal investigation into Bush administration officials involved in the aggressive tactics that critics consider torture.
...

The bad faith exhibited by the Democrats is palpable. They would have done the same thing in similar circumstances and they are lying to themselves if they argue differently. In most of the cases they were aware of what they are now condemning and agreed with the policy.

What they are really doing is trying to cover for Pelosi who was one of the Democrats who was aware of the policies and went along with them. They are also trying to change the subject from the failure of Democrat economic policies as demonstrated by the stimulus bill that is not working.

While it is hard to lower my respect for the Democrat party, this group is plumbing new depths.

Change that keeps on changing?

From Gateway Pundit:

Obama July 2: Recovery Will Take Months...
Obama July 12: Recovery Will Take Years

OK, that is change we can all beleive in.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Pancreatic cancer for Nork leader?

The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who suffered a stroke last August, was also found to have “life-threatening” pancreatic cancer at about the same time, a South Korean cable television network reported on Monday.

The network, YTN, a cable news channel, quoted unidentified Chinese and South Korean intelligence sources for the report, which was made by YTN’s Beijing-based correspondent.
YTN did not explain how the sources obtained such medical information about Mr. Kim from North Korea, an isolated nuclear-armed state that historically has kept details of Mr. Kim’s health a closely guarded secret.
But if the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is true, he may not have much longer to live. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to detect early, it spreads rapidly and the fatality rate is high. The World Health Organization says fewer than 5 percent of patients with pancreatic cancer live longer than five years.
Although Mr. Kim began making occasional public appearances a few months after he mysteriously disappeared last August, photographs of him and television images recently carried by the North Korean media showed him limping and frail.
Mr. Kim’s loss of weight, in particular, has elevated speculation about the severity and nature of what is wrong with him.

...

His death would likely not effect the regime in the short run. It would only change if his son and heir tried to exert himself. The chances of that are unknown because he is mostly unknown too. What usualy happens in totalitarian societies is those at the top try to pick a ruler that will continue policies that benefit them.

It does look like government health care was not up to the task of treating him and they had to bring in an outside expert. I note that Castro did the same thing. It is not very communist of them.

The gear disparity between US and UK units

Times:

For a few months at least, American forces in Helmand are looking with envy on their British comrades-in-arms. Camp Leatherneck, the colossus of a US base that is emerging from the Helmand desert, is still a dusty building site of toiling earthmovers, fly-blown tents and mobile toilets. In the British Camp Bastion, built three years ago, there are gleaming food halls, gravel roads, drainage systems and rows of air-conditioned sleeping quarters.

But on the battlefield the envy is often the other way round. The 4,000 US Marines involved in Operation Khanjar in the southern districts of Helmand have arrived in theatre, as is their modus operandi, with their own air support of between 50 and 100 aircraft. The figure cannot be given more accurately for security reasons, but it is at least as big as the entire air force of many small countries.

It includes US Marine Sea Stallion and Sea Knight transport helicopters — both variants on the Chinook that is the workhorse of British units — as well as Cobra and Apache attack helicopters and Harrier jump jets for close air support, and Hercules air-to-air refuelling aircraft.

The start of Operation Khanjar saw two entire Marine battalions airlifted deep into Taleban-controlled territory. The Marine aircraft are prioritised for use by their US parent unit, but will fly in support of British and other forces when they have “excess missions” that their own troops do not need. “We have lifted British troops, though not regularly,” one US Marine officer told The Times.
By comparison, the 8,000 British troops on the ground have been given the support of about 20 Chinook and other transport helicopters, including several Lynx helicopters that have difficulty flying in the summer heat.

However, a significant part of the US “surge” in Afghanistan is the arrival of Combat Aviation Brigade, a force of about 100 aircraft — both transport and attack — deployed in Regional Command South, the area that includes Helmand province.

This is a doubling of the number of US air support brigades in the country and these aircraft are available to all Nato forces on the ground. This does not mean that Britain’s helicopter needs will instantly be met. The air assets are allocated according to need on a bidding basis — meaning that Dutch, Canadian and Danish troops in the southern provinces, who have almost nothing, can all lay a claim, not to mention the 4,000 extra American troops sent to Kandahar province this year.
...

This is what happens when a government's priority is rationed health care and not national security. The UK has been shrinking its defense budget for years and it is exposing its troops to more risks.

An army let down by its ministers

Max Hastings:

The steep rise in casualties in Afghanistan is being matched by increasingly bitter recriminations between the Government and the British Army.
Soldiers accuse ministers of failing to give the troops on the ground the support they need. Ministers charge the Army with dangerously politicising its role.
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, has especially angered Labour by complaining privately to a group of Tory MPs about under-resourcing of the campaign.
Senior officers are impenitent about speaking out, because they regard the stakes as so high - the lives of their men. One told me yesterday: 'I regard the losses of the past fortnight as a wake-up call to the Government.
'If we are going to fight this war as it needs to be fought, we need a properly-resourced army.
'We also need the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to explain to the British people, as they have never convincingly tried to do, why we are in Afghanistan and what we are trying to do there.'
General Dannatt, who left London yesterday to visit the army in Helmand, retires next month. He feels acutely his responsibility to speak out for the interests of his men who are doing the fighting.
He knows that, with only weeks left in his post, there is little the Government can do to punish him. To force his resignation at this stage would merely make him a martyr - with most of the country firmly on his side.
I have been writing about defence and Whitehall spending wrangles for 40 years, but I have never known such bitterness as exists today.
The Army's view is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown committed our troops to fight wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, yet have always refused them the means they need to do the job.
The Chief of Defence Staff, airman Sir Jock Stirrup, is thought to be more committed to keeping ministers happy and protecting the interests of the RAF than backing the soldiers in their struggle.
Army strength has been cut since 1997, though most defence experts think 98,000 men is not enough to defend Britain's interests.
Today, there is a new threat to reduce infantry numbers, to help bridge the Treasury's huge spending hole. The Army has repeatedly urged the need for more battlefield helicopters, but these requests have been rejected.
The RAF puts its commitment to maintaining its fast jet strength well ahead of its role providing
helicopter support for the Army, unless ministers force the airmen to do otherwise.
Commanders in Helmand province recognise that their key battle today is against the Taliban's roadside bombs - so-called IEDs, improvised explosive devices. 'We must win the IED campaign,' one of them told me. 'To do that we need better intelligence, more drone surveillance of the battlefield, more heavy armoured vehicles.
'These are all things which cost money that the Government has persistently refused to let us have.'

...

The US has already had this debate and Secretary Gates won the battle for more drones and IED resistant vehicles. In the UK it appears that the expenditures on social programs and rationed health care still trump spending on the troops. They are now paying a price for thsoe "savings."

Getting naked is good for you?

From the Telegraph:

Nudity does us all good

It certainly helps at bath time.

Laying off the robots

They may be the most efficient workers in the world. But in the global downturn, they are having a tough time finding jobs.

Japan’s legions of robots, the world’s largest fleet of mechanized workers, are being idled as the country suffers its deepest recession in more than a generation as consumers worldwide cut spending on cars and gadgets.
At a large Yaskawa Electric factory on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where robots once churned out more robots, a lone robotic worker with steely arms twisted and turned, testing its motors for the day new orders return. Its immobile co-workers stood silent in rows, many with arms frozen in midair.
They could be out of work for a long time. Japanese industrial production has plummeted almost 40 percent and with it, the demand for robots.
At the same time, the future is looking less bright. Tighter finances are injecting a dose of reality into some of Japan’s more fantastic projects — like pet robots and cyborg receptionists — that could cramp innovation long after the economy recovers.
“We’ve taken a huge hammering,” said Koji Toshima, president of Yaskawa, Japan’s largest maker of industrial robots.
Profit at the company plunged by two-thirds, to 6.9 billion yen, about $72 million, in the year ended March 20, and it predicts a loss this year.
Across the industry, shipments of industrial robots fell 33 percent in the last quarter of 2008, and 59 percent in the first quarter of 2009, according to the Japan Robot Association.

...

The good news is they have no union and they do not need to be paid unemployment checks. But it is a little surprising to see them get laid off before the humans. Perhaps the above sentence explains it.

It is a 'right' not a privelege?

From the Telegraph:

NHS tells school children of their 'right' to 'an orgasm a day'

I guess that is one thing that the UK's national health care is not rationing, yet.

Houston has billboard competition between Israel and Palestinians

Haaretz:

Texans have had occasion this week to witness the eruption of a billboard war waged between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel grassroots organizations vying to tell Houston commuters their side of the story.

On Monday, two pro-Israel groups put up two giant roadside billboards bearing the message: "Save Gaza from Hamas. Teach peace, not hate."

The signs - featuring a picture of two boys, an Arab and an Israeli, sitting arm-in-arm and smiling - was put up in response to an earlier roadside campaign by a pro-Palestinian group under the banner "Pray for Gaza," featuring crying Arab children.

The 10 pro-Palestinian signs were put up throughout the city after January's Operation Cast Lead by an organization called the "Houston Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine."

The billboards pointed onlookers to a Web site (www.pray4gaza.org) praising the intifada and quoting critics of Israel, such as Jimmy Carter and Richard Falk. According to the site's "Facts" section, in carrying out Operation Cast Lead - launched in response to Palestinian rocket fire - Israel "broke first" the cease-fire it had with Hamas.

The site's "History" section says Zionists began as "an extremist minority" of Jews, and accuses them of "sabotaging efforts to place Jewish refugees in Western countries" during the Holocaust.

"Many Houstonians were upset by the 'Pray for Gaza' propaganda campaign," observed Ira Bleiweiss, founder of Bridge Houston, a local pro-Israel group. "But they didn't know what to do," Bleiweiss told the local Jewish Herald Voice.

Talking to Haaretz, Bleiweiss said that "people are delighted that someone finally took a stand in public," made possible by a joint low-key fundraising campaign Bridge Houston launched together with the international Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs.

...

The Hamas death cult is getting a little more sophisticated in its communication strategy, but I doubt it will change many minds in Houston or Texas. They are doing their typical victim strategy while ignoring their own continuous attacks on Israeli noncombatants that provoked the Gaza operation.

I like the response ad. It puts the hate campaign of Hamas on the defensive.

Bin Laden comes out against satan

NY Daily News:

Osama Bin Laden told Pakistanis their leaders are "allies of Satan" in a newly released tape, urging them to fight the offensive in tribal areas where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are entrenched.
Bin Laden zeroed in on the Swat Valley and the Pashtun tribal belt on the Afghan border for his 32nd taped rant since the 9/11 attacks.
The Pakistani army has fought extremists in Swat who are imposing a brutal version of shariah, or Islamic law. The army has also moved against Waziristan - home turf of Taliban, Al Qaeda leaders and friendly warlords.
"Are you for the establishment of the shariah or are you for those who wage war against it, from America, [Pakistani President] Zardari and his aides?" Bin Laden said, according to a transcript of the tape provided to the Daily News.
"Zardari and his army are the allies of Satan."
...

One of the ways you can tell a person is a religious bigot is the way they try to characterize their enemies as Satan or in league with him.

What the message let's us know is that bin Laden is deeply troubled by the offensive against the Taliban. He ignores the miscalculations of the Taliban that caused the Pakistan response, but that is just the kind of guy he is. Hopefully his discomfort is caused by the fact that we and the Pakistan army are closing in on him.

Few takers for Austin's green energy program

Austin American-Statesman:

For the past decade, Austin's ambition to become the world's clean-energy capital has been best exemplified by one effort: GreenChoice, a program that sells electricity generated entirely from renewable sources such as wind.

Now the nationally renowned program is struggling to find buyers — the latest allotment is 99 percent unsold after seven months on the market — and Austin Energy is looking for ways to bring down the rising costs.

But those are short-term talks.

Austin Energy officials say that times have changed and that the nation's most successful (by volume of sales) green-energy program, which offers the renewable energy only to those who select it, might no longer be the best way to carry out the city's goals. It now costs almost three times more than the standard electricity rate.
...
Duncan said part of the solution might just be adding new wind, solar and other renewable-energy projects into the bills of all Austin Energy customers, which could increase rates for everyone. He said there are also numerous other policies being considered but declined to discuss them, saying only that they will be proposed publicly in the near future.
...

Who knew that most people were not willing to pay three times as much for "green energy?" Certainly not the Obama administration or Democrats in Congress. If you can't sell this nonsense to liberals in Austin, you are unlikely to sell it to the rest of the country.

The economics of green energy just do not work without significant market manipulation. The Democrats think they are up to that task, but voters will probably have a negative response.

Drug cartel's African connections plots coups against Guinea

BBC:

The military government of Guinea says it has put the army on high alert at all border posts after uncovering plans for an attack on the country.
The West African state said armed men were gathering on the borders with Guinea-Bissau and Senegal to the north and Liberia to the south.
An announcement on state-run national radio said drugs cartels were believed to be behind the plans.
Guinea is a key transit point for drugs en route from the Americas to Europe.
When the junta led by Captain Moussa Camara seized power some seven months ago, it made the fight against drugs one of its key priorities.
Several leading suspects have been arrested and are awaiting trial, but the regime must have made powerful enemies in the process, correspondents say.
...
"The ministry of defence was informed by the security services and other credible sources of the preparation of an armed attack on Guinea from its borders with Guinea-Bissau and the region of Casamance [in Senegal]," it said.
"These sources have also indicated that there are armed men regrouping on the border with Guinea Bissau to the north and the town of Foya to the south on the border with Liberia."
...

The country is one of the transit points the cartel uses to get its dope from South America to Europe. Guinea Bissau on the coast has also been active in the transit and its government has been destabilized to the point of being a failed state.

If the leaders of Guinea are thwarting the drug transit, they deserve credit and assistance in that endeavor.

Taliban retreat from their cash crop

Strategy Page:

No Taliban Summer offensive this year. Instead, it's the government forces who are attacking, with the targets being Taliban resources (drug operations) and supplies (access to Pakistan for reinforcements and weapons). The main target is Helmand province, where most of the world's heroin is produced. This is where the Taliban make the money that fuels their terror campaign. The Taliban control the local population largely through terror. Unable to handle the foreign troops in battle, the Taliban flee them. The only way the Taliban can inflict acceptable (not losing too many of their own) casualties on foreign troops is with roadside and suicide bombs. But if the Taliban lose Helmand, they lose the cash they need to pay most of their gunmen (and the families of the thousands of these fighters who die each year). While the core Taliban membership (a few thousand men) would keep on fighting for nothing, most of these guys have families, who have to eat, so the money is essential for even the hardcore. In order to be more than a local nuisance, the Taliban require large quantities of cash, which only the drug business can provide. Meanwhile, the Taliban base areas in Pakistan are being occupied by the Pakistan army. The Taliban, as they are wont to do, went too far in Pakistan, and the population finally turned against them. So the Taliban are being squeezed on both sides of the border.

The Taliban publically say that they will fight the 4,000 (assisted by 600 Afghan troops) U.S. Marines in southern Helmand. So far, this has largely been just talk. There are already 9,000 British troops operating in northern Helmand. The American marines wanted an equal number of Afghan troops, but the Afghan army didn't that many available. The marines intend to leave small garrisons all over southern Helmand, and wait for the Taliban to try and reclaim their little heroin producing cash machine.
...

With all the daily stories about the fighting in Helmand, it is easy to lose track of the strategic problem these attacks create for the Taliban and their ability to sustain operations. They have already found that they take unsustainable losses when they engage in combat with US forces. Now they are left with losing their sources of funds for what remaining combat they can do.

UK arrests woman for noisy sex

BBC:

A woman has been remanded in custody accused of breaching an Asbo banning her from being noisy during sex.
Neighbours complained of hearing Caroline Cartwright, 48, groaning and her bed banging against the wall at her home in Washington, Wearside.

Earlier this month she was given a four-year Asbo banning her from making excessive noise anywhere in England.

But she appeared in court on Monday, charged with three breaches of her Asbo in just 10 days.

She was remanded in custody until 5 May.

Cartwright was convicted of five breaches of a noise abatement notice on 17 April and fined £515.

But Houghton le Spring Magistrates' Court heard police arrested her on 18 April, on 22 April and again on 26 April, after reports from neighbours she was flouting the ban with her husband Steve.
...

It is surprising that Steve escaped arrest. Surely there is a more humane way to gag this woman than putting her in jail. I bet the UK has shops that sell such devices.

Palin's politicial genius

Willie Brown:

The pundits are wrong. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Sarah Palin's decision to step down as Alaska governor was a brilliant move.

Palin has some of the best political instincts I have ever seen. She became a pop-culture superstar overnight when John McCain made her his veep pick, and she's still second only to President Obama among politicians the public is interested in. Even in liberal San Francisco, she'd be front-page news if she ever came to town.

But that kind of celebrity comes at a high price. What a lot of people don't know is that Palin entered Alaska politics as a reformer attacking the corruption of the state's Republican establishment. As such, she was the darling of the Democrats - until she hooked up with McCain.

After the election, with Palin back home but positioning herself for a 2012 presidential run, it was clear she would catch nothing but ridicule from Alaska's Democrats. It was not going to be pretty.

If Palin wants to play on the national field, she has to be free to move around. She has to be able to drop into Indiana, Ohio or Tennessee and help Republican candidates raise money. She has to be available for radio and TV.
...
The pundits call her a quitter, but let's be honest - the pundits never liked her to begin with. Better to take one hit for stepping down and move on than to stay in Alaska and die a death by a thousand cuts.

Governor or not, Palin is still the biggest star in the Republican galaxy. After all, who else have they got?
...

I suspect there are other candidates who can rise to the top, but right now none of them can get the kind of attention that Sarah Palin can for good or ill. This is high praise from a liberal Democrat who has demonstrated political skills. Her enemies thought they had her boxed in in Alaska. She has broken free and that is what has made many of them angry.

Mexico criminal insurgents lash out after leader's arrest

CNN:

Coordinated attacks in at least eight Mexican cities killed three federal police officers and two soldiers Saturday in what officials are calling an unprecedented onslaught by drug gangs.

Another 18 federal officers were wounded, the state-run Notimex news agency reported, citing federal police official Rodolfo Cruz Lopez.
The attacks were in retribution for the capture early Saturday of Arnoldo Rueda Medina, a high-ranking member of the drug cartel known as La Familia Michoacana (The Michoacan Family), Notimex reported.
Rueda is considered second in command to the group's two top leaders, Nazario "El Chayo" Moreno González and José " El Chango" de Jesús Méndez Vargas, acting as a "right arm" to Moreno, the secretary of public security said Saturday in a statement.
Among other allegations, he was arrested for his role in designing the hierarchy of the organization, the production of synthetic drugs and movement of marijuana and cocaine to the United States, said Mexico's secretary of public security. Rueda was arrested along with a 17-year-old male who worked for him.
Following his arrest Saturday morning in Morelia, Michoacan, men armed with high-powered rifles and grenades attacked the police station where he was being held, the Secretary of Public Security said.
After failing to win his freedom, members of the group launched attacks in the cities of Morelia, Zitacuaro, Zamora, Lazaro Cardenas, Apatzingan, La Piedad and Huetamo in Michoacan state, Notimex news said, citing federal police.
...
Saturday's attacks came just days after a drug gang in Tijuana declared they were at war with police, threatening to kill five officers every week until Police Chief Julian Leyzaola resigns.
The threat was made in a note found on the windshield of a slain officer's car, news reports said.
At least three Tijuana officers have been killed since Monday, reports said. Leyzaola, a former army colonel, replaced a police chief removed from office in December after receiving numerous threats.
"Leyzaola has become the poster boy for honest police work, which has put the drug gangs on notice," Vicente Calderon, a reporter for the Tijuana Press news agency, told CNN affiliate KUSI.
"They believe he is serious, that he means business and is trying to re-establish the rule of law that has been affecting the city and whole state for many years since organized crime established themselves in Baja [California]."
...

The rule of law is the enemy of the criminal insurgents and they have demonstrated they have few inhibitions when it comes to fighting law enforcement. What what have they accomplished when they lash out and their guy is still in custody? While the deaths are personal tragedies for the families of the victims, their deaths do not put the insurgents closer to achiving their objectives.

The Tijuana situation provides some opportunities for law enforcement and the Mexican army to stalk the insurgent stalkers. With their stated targets the government can control where any attacks may take place and be there to capture or kill the shooters.

The dazzling hubris of President Obama

Rex Murphy:

...

We've seen him in action for a bit more than six months. What we can say with confidence, now that we have the evidence of his actions, is that had he run on (a) transforming the U.S. economy by massive federal government intervention, (b) taking an owner's stake in the automobile industry, (c) transforming the rules of America's energy economy, (d) instituting a national health-care system - all of these simultaneously and in the centre of a financial meltdown - Barack Obama wouldn't merely have lost the election, he wouldn't have got as many votes as gnarly old Ross Perot did in an election long past. He wouldn't, in other words, have beaten a bad-tempered, egotistical spoiler.

We have also seen enough to make some observations on the observations of his once and now-no-more mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. You will remember when the ravings of Mr. Wright finally got too much for the candidate, when the more pacific words of the “great speech” on race that he could “no more disown him than I can my white grandmother” were rendered inoperative by Mr. Wright's persistently obnoxious presence. Mr. Obama pushed him aside.

The pastor had one last shot of his own about his onetime “son.” That was the line, “He's a politician; I'm a pastor. He's got to do what politicians do.” We know what he meant by “politician”: one who is “forced” to say one thing to get elected, and do another; a person who conceals an agenda under cloudy rhetoric, a person whose calling – politics – is implicitly, essentially, deceptive.
...

I call it the politics of fraud. Murphy attributes it to all politicians, but one of the things that good Bush in trouble was his refusal to play that game on most occasions. To be sure his critics charged him with it especially on Iraq, but they were the ones who were rewriting history to meet their agenda.

Iraqis have not asked for US combat help since withdrawal

Reuters:

Iraqi forces have not called for U.S. help in urban combat since June 30, when U.S. combat troops withdrew from city and town centers under a bilateral security agreement, a senior U.S. official said. "Here's what has not happened: there have been no requests for combat forces to return back into the city, any city," said Lieutenant-General Charles Jacoby Jr, who took over in April as head of day to day operations in Iraq.
"There are established protocols for how (Iraqi forces) might ask for that, but we have not been asked for combat forces," Jacoby told a small group of reporters at the weekend.

Iraqi troops have asked, however, for assistance in pre- and post-combat operations, such as intelligence assistance from U.S. forces with much more sophisticated technology, a vast fleet of planes and helicopters, and logistics resources.
...
Jacoby acknowledged there had been an increase in violence in the last few days, but said it was one that was expected from an insurgency that is holding on in ethnically, religiously mixed areas like Nineveh, Kirkuk and Diyala provinces.
...
"The (insurgent) networks were waiting for this time period and I think they're going to punch themselves out," Jacoby said. He said Iraqi forces were adjusting to the new environment.

In the post-June 30 environment, Jacoby said U.S. forces are seeking to strangle insurgencies in places like Mosul by ringing the city and trying to stem the flow of weapons or fighters.

So far, the insurgents have not had any strategic punch. In fact their attacks have had little strategic effect and Jacoby is probably right that they will punch themselves out. The enemy has a limited capacity to surge with violence before it has to regroup. It has been regrouping in ever smaller cells.

Hopefully, the Iraqis will continue to show sustained resistance to the attacks. The government could help by being smarter politically in dealing with the Sunnis and the Kurds.

If there continues to be no need for the US forces in Iraq, we may see an earlier transfer of some of those troops to Afghanistan.

Source of cyber attacks still matter of dispute

AFP:

Seoul's spy agency has yet to be sure that North Koreans were behind recent cyber attacks on South Korea and the United States but it still sees Pyongyang as a prime suspect, officials said on Sunday.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement it was still looking into "various pieces of evidence" indicating that North Koreans might have orchestrated the attacks against South Korean and US government and private websites.
"The NIS... has yet to reach a final conclusion that the acts have been committed by North Korea," the statement said.
It denied a report by Chosun Ilbo newspaper on Saturday that the NIS had found an Internet protocol (IP) address used by a North Korean hacker surnamed Yun, who could be behind the cyber attacks.
It said the Chosun Ilbo report went "too far" and urged local media outlets to be prudent in reporting on the case.
...
The attacks that had crippled some South Korean government websites have now come under control after virus-infected "botnet" hosting servers were isolated and "vaccine" programmes were widely distributed to PC users.
...

The AP is still reporting that there is evidence of North Korean involvement. There is certainly reason to be suspicious of the Norks. Some question whether they have the means to mount such an attack, but it does not take that much if you have the intent and the malware.

Palin's plans for the future

Brushing aside the criticisms of pundits and politicos, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said she plans to jump immediately back into the national political fray — stumping for conservative issues and even Democrats — after she prematurely vacates her elected post at month's end.
The former Republican vice-presidential nominee and heroine to much of the GOP's base said in an interview she views the electorate as embattled and fatigued by nonstop partisanship, and she is eager to campaign for Republicans, independents and even Democrats who share her values on limited government, strong defense and "energy independence."
"I will go around the country on behalf of candidates who believe in the right things, regardless of their party label or affiliation," she said over lunch in her downtown office, 40 miles from her now-famous hometown of Wasilla — population 7,000 — where she began her political career.
"People are so tired of the partisan stuff — even my own son is not a Republican," said Mrs. Palin, who stunned the political world earlier this month with her decision to step down as governor July 26 with 18 months left in her term.
Both her son, Track, 20, an enlisted soldier serving in Iraq, and her husband, Todd, are registered as "nonpartisan" in Alaska.
Mrs. Palin, who vaulted to national prominence when Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, chose her as his running mate last August, left the door open for a future presidential bid.
But she shot down speculation among Republicans that she might challenge incumbent Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski for the party's nomination to the Senate next year, and she blamed her resignation as governor on the nasty, hardball tactics that last year's presidential campaign brought to her state.
"I'm not ruling out anything - it is the way I have lived my life from the youngest age," she said. "Let me peek out there and see if there's an open door somewhere. And if there's even a little crack of light, I'll hope to plow through it."
...
The governor, 45, said she shared former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's view that Republicans, now trailing Democrats and independents in registration in many states, should back moderate to conservative Democrats in congressional districts and states where Republicans stand almost no chance of winning.
The object would be to build a majority coalition that reflects what polls suggest is the center-right tilt of the U.S. electorate as a whole.
...

There is not that much new in this story but many of her critics could not comprehend the facts when she gave them the first time. She is going to do pretty much what I have suggested all along. She is going to help people she agrees with and make a decision later on whether a run for the presidency is in her future. If it is, it will be interesting to see the people she gathers around her to assist in that effort. There are some from the McCain campaign who will definitely not be included.

The Islamic Saudi Acadamy alumni

David Stokes:

Last month, a Saudi Arabian man named Raed Abdul-Rahman Al-Saif, placed three bags on the Tampa, Florida airport security conveyor belt as he made his way toward his gate to board US Airways flight 1077 to Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon. He never made it to the gate.
A Transportation Security Administration representative saw something on his screen that made him curious. Upon further investigation, TSA officers found a knife “artfully concealed between the outside fabric and the expandable pull handles of the bag.” This bag, by the way, would have been easily accessed by Al-Saif had he made it on his flight.
It was a butcher knife.
It turns out that he has been living in the U.S. illegally for a while and had been previously arrested on drug-related charges and for driving without a license. He had been a student at the University of Tampa, but was dismissed this past May due to poor academic performance. Word is, though, that he was a much better student back in high school. In fairness, that likely had to do with where he went to school and what he was learning.
Raed Al-Saif is a 2003 graduate of the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), the same institution that gave us the likes of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was the school’s valedictorian in 1999. If that name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the guy who was convicted in 2005 on charges that included “providing material resources to Al-Qaeda” and “conspiracy to assassinate President George W. Bush.”
Then there were Mohammed Osam Idris and Mohammed el Yacoubi, both former ISA students, who were denied entrance to Israel in 2001. It turns out that they had written farewell letters before the trip for some kind of “suicide mission in the name of jihad.” And, let’s not forget Mr. Abdall I Al-Shabran, the ISA director who was arrested last year for failing to report child abuse.
Islamic Saudi Academy operates under the direct authority of the Saudi embassy, one of 20 or so such institutions around the world. It is also funded by the Saudi government and uses Saudi government “curriculum, syllabus and materials.”
It is also virtually in my backyard – at least part of it. And they want to grow, that is, if the Fairfax County Government Planning Commission continues down its current path of blind accommodation and politically correct assuagement.
...

I don't think any graduate of San Benito High School, where I graduated, has ever done what these guys are charged with. I don't think it would ever cross their mind to do such a thing.

Stokes is trying to make the case against expanding the Saudi school. He probably has an uphill battle regardless of the facts. It would be different if the school was teaching tolerance instead of Islamic supremacy. It is the latter that has caused most of the problems with Islam in recent years. It is the bigotry that has become the driving force behind our enemies attacks.

The economic stimulus cocktail and hangover

George Will:

Economic policy, which became startling when Washington began buying automobile companies, has become surreal now that disappointment with the results of the second stimulus is stirring talk about the need for a ... second stimulus. Elsewhere, it requires centuries to bleach mankind's memory; in Washington, 17 months suffice: In February 2008, President George W. Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who normally were at daggers drawn, agreed that a $168 billion stimulus -- this was Stimulus I -- would be the "booster shot" the economy needed. Unemployment then was 4.8 percent.
In January, the administration, shiny as a new dime and bursting with brains, said that unless another stimulus -- Stimulus II wound up involving $787 billion -- was passed (BEG ITAL)immediately(END ITAL), unemployment, which then was 7.6 percent, would reach 9 percent by 2010. But halfway through 2009, the rate is 9.5. For the first time since the now 16-nation Eurozone was established in 1999, the unemployment rate in America is as high as it is in that region, which Americans once considered a cautionary lesson in the wages of sin, understood as excessive taxation and regulation.
"Everyone guessed wrong" about the economy's weakness, says the vice president, explaining why Stimulus II has not yielded anticipated benefits. Joe Biden is beguiling when unfiltered by calculation, as he often is and as he was when he spoke about guessing ("Meet the Press," June 14) and how everyone "misread" the economy ("This Week," July 5). To be fair, economics is a science of single instances, which means it is hardly a science. And it is least like one when we most crave certainty from it -- when there is a huge and unprecedented event and educated guessing is the best anyone can do.

But before embarking on Stimulus III, note that only about 10 percent of Stimulus II has yet been injected into the economy in 2009. This is not the administration's fault, the administration's defenders say, because government is cumbersome, sluggish and inefficient. But this sunburst of insight comes as the administration toils to enlarge governmental control of health care, energy, finance, education, etc. The administration guesses that these government projects will do better than the Postal Service (its second-quarter loss, $1.9 billion, was 68 percent of its losses for all of 2008) and the government's railroad (Amtrak has had 38 money-losing years and this year's losses are on pace to set a record).

Let's guess: Will a person or institution looking for a place to invest $1 billion seek opportunities in the United States, where policy decisions are deliberately increasing taxes, debt, regulations and the cost of energy, and soon will increase the cost of borrowing and hiring? Or will the investor look at, say, India. It is the least urbanized major country -- 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas, 50 percent on farms -- so the modernizing and productivity-enhancing movement from the countryside to the city is in its infancy. This nation of 1.2 billion people has a savings rate of 25 percent to 30 percent, and fewer than 20 million credit cards. Which nation, India or the United States, is apt to have the higher economic growth over the next decade?
...

It would help to look at Britain in the last half of the 19th century when capital flight took wings for the US because of the high taxation and the inordinate costs of unions made the return on investment to precarious. The US of that time was a place where opportunities were not so constrained.

What we know is that liberalism does not work and makes us all poorer. If the same amount of money had been invested in tax cuts as in the "stimulus" plan this year, we would be on our way to renewed prosperity.

Sunstein's anti sunshine policies

Kyle Smith:

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a "chilling effect" on speech that might hurt someone's feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

Advance copies of Sunstein's new book, "On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done," have gone out to reviewers ahead of its September publication date, but considering the prominence with which Sunstein is about to be endowed, his worrying views are fair game now. Sunstein is President Obama's choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It's the bland titles that should scare you the most.

"Although obscure," reported the Wall Street Journal, "the post wields outsize power. It oversees regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Obama aides have said the job will be crucial as the new administration overhauls financial-services regulations, attempts to pass universal health care and tries to forge a new approach to controlling emissions of greenhouse gases."

Sunstein was appointed, no doubt, off the success of "Nudge," his previous book, which suggests that government ought to gently force people to be better human beings.

Czar is too mild a world for what Sunstein is about to become. How about "regulator in chief"? How about "lawgiver"? He is Obama's Obama.

In "On Rumors," Sunstein reviews how views get cemented in one camp even when people are presented with persuasive evidence to the contrary. He worries that we are headed for a future in which "people's beliefs are a product of social networks working as echo chambers in which false rumors spread like wildfire." That future, though, is already here, according to Sunstein. "We hardly need to imagine a world, however, in which people and institutions are being harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet," he writes. "We live in that world. What might be done to reduce the harm?"
...
Sunstein calls for a "notice and take down" law that would require bloggers and service providers to "take down falsehoods upon notice," even those made by commenters - but without apparent penalty.

Consider how well this nudge would work. You blog about Obama-Ayers. You get a letter claiming that your facts are wrong so you should remove your post. You refuse. If, after a court proceeding proves simply that you are wrong (but not that you committed libel, which when a public figure is the target is almost impossible), you lose, the penalty is . . . you must take down your post.

How long would it take for a court to sort out the truth? Sasha and Malia will be running for president by then. Nobody will care anymore. But it will give politicians the ability to tie up their online critics in court.
...

There are better ways to get to the truth. The remedy for false speech is more speech not less. The sunstein "remedy" would lead to groups on both sides organizing "take down" efforts to attack the other side whenever there is speech with which they disagree. You would then have a tussle over whether the take down demand was true or itself should be taken down.

The face of counterinsurgency in Nawa

Most of the mud-brick stalls that line the street in this sweltering town on the Helmand River closed down a year ago when Taliban fighters began swaggering through the bazaar, levying taxes on merchants and seeding the roads with homemade bombs. Shopkeepers placed their wares behind padlocked tin doors, teachers shuttered the school, the doctor abandoned the health clinic and residents with means fled to other parts of southern Afghanistan.

This town does not merit a dot on most maps of Afghanistan. But U.S. civilian and military officials believe what happens to the chockablock market here will be a key indicator of whether President Obama can salvage a war the United States has been losing.

About 4,000 troops -- most of them U.S. Marines -- descended upon Nawa and other towns along the lower Helmand River valley 10 days ago in a massive operation to root out the Taliban. Their aim is to combat the insurgency in a new way: Instead of targeting extremist strongholds, they will aim to protect communities from the Taliban.

In Nawa, that means getting life back to normal. If that occurs, military commanders reason, it will be much more difficult for the insurgents to hold sway here.

"We'll be successful when we can walk up and down that street and most shops will be open, there will be a flow of commerce, there will be a recognizable and functioning government, there will be kids in school and doctors in the clinic," said Capt. Frank "Gus" Biggio, a Marine reservist who is on leave from the Washington law firm Patton Boggs to lead a civil-affairs unit in Nawa.

But employing U.S. forces to restore a sense of normalcy in a country ravaged by 30 years of war involves a series of assumptions and a set of challenges that are already proving more complicated than mounting hunt-and-kill missions against the Taliban. Will residents want the Marines to stick around? Will those who do be convinced that the Americans will stay until security improves? Will residents trust the local leaders -- including the police chief, whom one Marine officer calls "the Tony Soprano of Nawa" -- to run the town better than the Taliban?

An affirmative answer to those questions is not at all certain, and it will not just require the Marines to wage a different sort of war. The United States will have to spend billions more dollars to expand training for Afghanistan's army and police forces. Ineffective development programs will have to be overhauled. State Department diplomats and Agriculture Department specialists will need to deploy in larger numbers. And if the approach being employed in the Helmand River valley is extended to other areas under Taliban control, it could well result in the need for thousands more U.S. troops.

Marines have been heartened by the initial indications in Nawa. A dozen stalls have reopened in the market. People have approached patrols to express support for the troop presence. And perhaps most significantly, the Taliban appears to have retreated -- for now.

"Thirty days from now, the people will say: 'Okay. Great. You've cleared the Taliban out. Now what's in it for me?' " said Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the comman der of Marine forces in southern Afghanistan. "We have a very narrow window to bring about change."
...
Nicholson had wanted his troops to conduct every patrol and man every checkpoint with members of the Afghan National Army, largely because people here take less umbrage at being searched by fellow Afghans, and Afghan soldiers have a keener sense of who ought to be searched. But plans to partner with the Afghan army have been scaled back because the Marines have been allotted only about 400 Afghan soldiers instead of the several thousand Nicholson had sought.

He has been promised more troops, but they will not start rolling in until next year. In the interim, he has asked his superiors for permission to arm young men and train them to serve as a local protection force. It is similar to the Sons of Iraq initiative the Marines created in Anbar that resulted in locals turning against foreign fighters in the group al-Qaeda in Iraq.

But senior commanders have shown no sign of approving the request. They feel Helmand has too many overlapping tribal rivalries. Arming groups of young men could exacerbate tensions and lead some factions to turn to the Taliban for protection.
...
As a Marine patrol walked through the bazaar on a recent morning, its presence prompted a group of men sipping tea in front of a motorcycle repair shop to voice concern -- not that the Americans had arrived but that they might depart before the Taliban had been vanquished.

"If you leave, everything will be the same," a middle-aged man who called himself Sayed Gul told McCollough. "If you guys stay for a long time, everything will be fine."

This is from a very long story, but the writer saved the best for last. It says something that the locals have more confidence in the Marines than they do in their own public officials. It also suggest that the Marines concerns about the lack of Afghan troops may be overblown. I susupect that the corruption of police and Afghan army figures has caused the locals to have no confidence in those groups.

The retreat of the Taliban also says something about the confidence of that group in dealing with US forces. The Marines have again shown that they are the strongest tribe in the area.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Brit Sergeant overcomes equipment problems to fight Taliban

Sunday Times:

An army sergeant freewheeled his Land Rover down a hill into a Taliban firefight in order to protect an ambushed supply convoy after his vehicle broke down.

Sergeant Andrew “Mac” McNulty was towed to the top of the ridge in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, and rolled down the other side to take on the enemy.

However, when the heavily armed Land Rover came to rest it was facing the wrong way to fire its machinegun, forcing McNulty and two of his colleagues to get out and shove the vehicle into position with their bare hands while coming under fire.

The soldiers were guarding a 100-vehicle supply column on its way from Sangin to Camp Bastion, the British Army base, when the ambush took place.
Their Land Rover, fitted with a mounted machinegun and an automatic grenade-firing weapon, was struggling up a sandy desert slope when it broke down.

“The gearbox actually conked out on us so we had no way of getting the vehicle into gear,” said McNulty. “It was pretty knackered.”
...
With the supply vehicles relying on McNulty’s firepower for protection, he knew he had to act fast.

“Luckily, at that time the platoon commander was coming up the hill so I shouted across to him and he pulled me up to the top,” said the sergeant. “I thought I’d be able to see the enemy from there.”

McNulty, however, was to discover that his view of the battlefield was blocked by a ridge line, preventing him from engaging the Taliban.

“I spoke to the other lads in the wagon and I just said, ‘Right, just push it down the hill with the handbrake off. Using momentum, we should be able to get down there’.”
As the Land Rover plunged half a mile down the hillside, gathering speed, McNulty could see the enemy off to the right, attacking the convoy.

Yet when the vehicle finally came to a halt, McNulty realised he was badly positioned to fight back.

“You can’t fire the machinegun across the right-hand side because there’s a rollbar in the way,” he said. “We’d actually come into the contact the wrong way round.”

All three men had to jump out of the Land Rover and turn it around under sustained Taliban fire.
They managed to provide enough cover to allow the entire two-mile supply column through the ambush, but then had no way of getting themselves out of the line of fire.

“I had not really concerned myself with how we would get the vehicle out of the contact area,” said McNulty. “My colleagues were already there and we needed to support them.

“Once we managed to get the whole convoy through I had to get the platoon commander to come back and drag my wagon out.”
...

The story speaks better for the troops then the equipment they have been provided. That is becoming a political issue in the UK with the recent surge in deaths of their troops. There is more about the heroics of Sgt. McNulty who saved the lives of three troops whose vehicle was underwater.

The Pakistan Baluchistan insurgency

Three local political leaders were seized from a small legal office here in April, handcuffed, blindfolded and hustled into a waiting pickup truck in front of their lawyer and neighboring shopkeepers. Their bodies, riddled with bullets and badly decomposed in the scorching heat, were found in a date palm grove five days later.

Local residents are convinced that the killings were the work of the Pakistani intelligence agencies, and the deaths have provided a new spark for revolt across Baluchistan, a vast and restless province in Pakistan’s southwest where the government faces yet another insurgency.
Although not on the same scale as the Taliban insurgency in the northwest, the conflict in Baluchistan is steadily gaining ground. Politicians and analysts warn that it presents a distracting second front for the authorities, drawing off resources, like helicopters, that the United States provided Pakistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Baluch nationalists and some Pakistani politicians say the Baluch conflict holds the potential to break the country apart — Baluchistan makes up a third of Pakistan’s territory — unless the government urgently deals with years of pent up grievances and stays the hand of the military and security services.

...

You can see my earlier posts on this conflict here.

What this story suggest is that Pakistan is losing its internal coherence. It has already seen Bangladesh break away while it has wasted lives and treasure fighting for a bigger piece of Kashmir and supporting the Taliban religious bigots along the border with Afghanistan. While it is finally confronting the Taliban along the border it is not surprising that their allies in Baluchistan would foment troubles to distract that effort.

The 'arguments' for Obamacare

Stephanie Gutman:

Try this thought experiment. You are the editors and publishers of the New York Times. You believe you have a sacred trust. It’s not to tell your readers what’s going on in the world. Any moron can do that. No, as the “newspaper of record” your mandate is far loftier: you are here to make your readers better people.

Every day in every way, you are here to persuade them to ride their bicycles to work and to air dry their smalls. They need to open their pocketbooks on cue for programmes like HeadStart; they need to stop grumbling about affirmative action. Mostly, they need to trust in the sometimes mysterious ways of Chairman Obama.

Things had been going pretty well. The Chairman’s approval ratings had been high, but just recently things have gotten a bit rocky. Suddenly ObamaCare - the term pundits have coined for President Obama’s plan for a total overhaul of the US health care system in which everyone gets whatever they want whenever they want without any new costs to anyone (expect those distant baddies known as “the wealthiest Americans”) - is not moving smoothly toward passage by Congress.

It seems - who would have thought! - that there is no easy way to bring comprehensive affordable health care to every single American (and many non-Americans like illegal immigrants) without new taxes or cuts to government-funded programmes like Medicaid (which serves the elderly) or Medicaid (for the poor).

Sensing weakness, the baddies over at Right-wing talk radio and the Wall Street Journal have begun to spread ugly rumours of the coming “European-style” rationing. They’re painting vivid pictures of waiting lists, of committees, of standing-in-line-to turn in an application to petition authorities to be alloted a mammogram. (Which is actually something that happened to a relative of mine who lives in London.)

Americans do not like this sort of thing at all.

Last week the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page let slip its most vicious dog of war so far. Its editorial “Of NICE and Men” introduced Americans to the inner workings of the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) which basically figures out who deserves treatment and who doesn’t by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year”.

So what is that and how is it computed? Here is what Doctors Prieto and Sacristan, who studied it, wrote: “The basic idea underlying the QALY is simple: it assumes that a year of life lived in perfect health is worth 1 QALY (1 Year of Life × 1 Utility = 1 QALY) and that a year of life lived in a state of less than this perfect health is worth less than 1.”

Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on. But who’s to say that one wheelchair-bound person’s quality of life is necessarily so much worse than the life of someone who isn’t in a wheelchair? By this formula Stephen Hawking would have been euthanised years ago.

Nearly every expert agrees that ObamaCare will have to involve rationing - genteelly masked in pseudo-scientific trappings like the Quality of Life Year algorithm. The problem is getting spoiled, willful Americans to accept the idea of self-sacrifice for the collective good - of passing on that hip replacement, for instance, so that the young mother in the inner city can have better pre-natal care.
...
So stop sniffling, Americans. If you must die earlier under ObamaCare, the Times will be on hand to write a glowing profile.

There is much more between the ...s.

All of this sacrifice for the uninsured comes a cropper when you get past the empathy brigades and focus on the demographic. As many as a third to a half of the uninsured are in the country illegally. Back when the Times and others were pushing for "comprehensive" immigration reform, they were using 20 million as the number of people in the country illegally. Most are believed to have no health care coverage.

That is about half of the 40 million who are said to have no health care. If the Democrats were to confess these numbers they would probably lose the battle on health care and immigration reform. Most Americans would ask why they should make that kind of sacrifice for so many who came here illegally.

But even if the illegals were excluded the sacrifices that are being asked are far different from what Obama has been saying about being able to continue with your current health care. BTW, don't empathy out on the illegals, they are getting their health care at the emergency room. I really don't have a problem with treating someone with an emergency, but I think they should also be turned over to ICE after they get treatment.

And now for the really bad news

From Bloomberg:

Obama Says Economic Stimulus Plan Worked as Intended

Oh, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Letters from the Afghan front

Language advisory in in effect. The letters are from UK soldiers and were printed in the Observer/Guardian.

...

I am moving again, mate ... to take more ground off the Taliban, but the way the head shed [headquarters] are mate it's a fucking joke, we nod [see] 4 x Taliban 150m away in a compound the other day and we were denied to go in there and kill them. The OC [officer commanding] said it wasn't worth the risk and here was me thinking the infantry's mission was to close with and kill the enemy.

...

Well we are definitely not fucking winning anything and are just going out getting shot at, shooting back, waiting for some cunt in the ops room to make decision whether we can have fire support or not because we might set fire to a field of wheat and upset the locals (fucking criminal). Well, mate, I have been blown up again, but was in one of the new Mastiff vehicles and they can take a fair old fucking wallop. I am a bit deaf but none the worse for wear. We don't get to know much in the fobs [forward operating base] about what's going on around Afghanistan.

...

There is more colorful descriptions of warfare British style. Some of these guys sound like they don't get a lot of support.

Why you need to carry a baby picture in your wallet

Sunday Telegraph:

Researchers left 240 wallets on the streets of Edinburgh last year to see how many were returned to their owners. Some of the wallets contained one of four photographs – the baby, a cute puppy, a family and a portrait of an elderly couple.

Other wallets contained a card suggesting the owner had recently made a charity donation, while a control batch contained no additional items.
Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist who supervised the experiment, said 42 per cent of the wallets were posted back in total.

Those containing the picture of the infant were most likely to trigger an honest reaction from the finder, with 88 per cent being returned, followed by those containing pictures of the puppy at 53 per cent.

Of those featuring the family snapshot, 48 per cent were sent to the return address and only 28 per cent of those with the picture of the elderly couple.

Wallets containing the charity cards and the control sample were least likely to be returned, with rates of 20 and 15 per cent respectively.
...

I think the logic is that people who can afford charity, don't need the wallet back and those with a baby need all they can get. So save the charitable donation slip in your income tax files and find a baby picture. I wonder how they would react to an ultrasound photo?

UK to send more troops, equipment or maybe not

According to the Observer/Guardian the UK is going to send 2,ooo additional troops to Afghanistan.

Thousands more troops could be sent to Afghanistan within months, under an emergency review of the UK mission being carried out by the Ministry of Defence.
The news of a possible troop surge comes after eight British soldiers were killed within 24 hours, leading to fresh calls from senior military and political figures for urgent reinforcements - and an end to Treasury constraints on spending on the Afghan war. Fifteen British soldiers have died during the first 11 days of July, with the total of 184 deaths surpassing the 179 who were killed in Iraq. A soldier who died in an explosion on Thursday has been named as Daniel Hume, 22, from 4th Bn, The Rifles.
...

But hold on. The Independent on Sunday says the government is planning on withdrawing 1,500 troops.

Ministers are secretly planning to cut the number of British troops in Afghanistan, at a time when defence chiefs are appealing for thousands more reinforcements to meet the deadly threat from the resurgent Taliban.

Hours after the death toll of UK forces in Afghanistan rose above the number killed in Iraq, The Independent on Sunday established that Gordon Brown wants to bring up to 1,500 service personnel home from the war-torn country after its elections next month, seemingly on grounds of cost.
...

The Scotsman on Sunday says the opposition Tories believe the lack of helicopters and equipment were behind the spike in deaths last week in Afghanistan.

Curiously there is some truth in all the reports. The labor party would like to pull some of the troops out and they have been squeezing them with equipment shortages, while the military believes it needs at least another 2,000 troops. Apparently the cost of socialism is too high to fight a small war right now.

Congress was told about secret program

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

...

Someone tells the times that Cheney was behind the secret program, but was the information really withheld from Congress? Former CIA Director Michael Hayden says no.

I see a pattern developing here. Democrats cry wolf and the people in the know say the Democrats are wrong. When it comes to national security it would not surprise me that Democrats were turning a deaf ear to what the intelligence agencies were reporting. Hayden says he personally briefed Congressional leaders and they supported the program. That to me seems a bigger story than the suggestion from some anonymous source that Cheney said not to tell Congress. I suspect that someone is pulling a political spoof on the Times to cover for Pelosi.

Israeli skunk bomb clears demonstrators

Jerusalem Post:

The IDF stepped up efforts to quell violent anti-security fence demonstrations in the West Bank over the weekend using, for the first time in six months, the "skunk bomb."

The "skunk bomb" is a foul-smelling liquid which is sprayed on the protesters. "The smell is so strong that people flee immediately," explained an IDF source, noting that the demonstration on Friday was dispersed within minutes of firing the bomb into the crowd.
On Friday, IDF and Border Police forces used the spray against close to 100 Palestinian, Israeli and foreign demonstrators near the West Bank village of Bil'in. The demonstrators were protesting against the construction of the security barrier nearby. The "skunk bomb" was last used in January.
...
"We do not have a problem with them demonstrating peacefully against the fence but we will not allow the demonstrators to damage or vandalize it," the officer said, adding that the decision to use the skunk bomb was made as part of a new effort by the IDF to minimize friction between the security forces and the demonstrators to as low a level as possible.
...
IDF sources said that most of the demonstrators were surprisingly foreigners and Israelis, not Palestinians. In April a Bil'in protester, Bassem Abu Rahmeh, was killed after he was hit in the chest by a gas canister.

It appears the useful idiots of the Palestinian "resistance" have learned the smell of failure. I bet the Iranians wish they had thought of the skunk bomb.

Liberals have more attacks for Sotmayor firefighters

McClatchy:

Supporters of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor are quietly targeting the Connecticut firefighter who's at the center of Sotomayor's most controversial ruling.
On the eve of Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearing, her advocates have been urging journalists to scrutinize what one called the "troubled and litigious work history" of firefighter Frank Ricci.
This is opposition research: a constant shadow on Capitol Hill.

"The whole business of getting Supreme Court nominees through the process has become bloodsport," said Gary Rose, a government and politics professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.
On Friday, citing in an e-mail "Frank Ricci's troubled and litigious work history," the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way drew reporters' attention to Ricci's past. Other advocates for Sotomayor have discreetly urged journalists to pursue similar story lines.
...
"To go after so sympathetic a plaintiff as Frank Ricci . . . is a new low in the politics of personal destruction," said Roger Pilon, the director of the libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies. "If they were smart, they'd keep a low profile."
...

Liberals have a way of personalizing every dispute. Rather than discusses the merits of Ricci's claim they fall back on demonizing him. It is pretty disgusting but it is the way of "People for the American Way."

The liberal's sinking feelings

Bill Kristol:

The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying--okay, maybe not praying--for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history.

With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.

But did it? Maybe we're now experiencing a liberal interlude, not a liberal inflection point. After all, only six months into the new administration, even a talented hot air blower like President Obama, assisted by friendly gusts of wind from the media, is having trouble keeping the liberal blimp afloat.

The stimulus hasn't worked. Cap-and-trade and health care reform are in trouble. The can't-we-all-get-along foreign policy isn't leading to a more peaceful world. And the administration seems to have no idea what to do about Guantánamo.

Congressional Democrats are nervous. Even Obama's media base is concerned. At the end of last week, three leading Obamaphiles offered their lamentations. "The fact is, Obama may be blowing a major opportunity for reform," worried Joe Klein. "There's now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap," warned Paul Krugman. "Failure. Overwhelming, amazing failure," was David Brooks's take on the administration's effort to deal with health care inflation--something the president is (according to Brooks) "fervently committed to reducing."
Why such long faces? Because they realize that, despite the financial meltdown on the Bush administration's watch and the errors of omission and commission by the GOP over the last decade, the American public hasn't fundamentally rethought their turn in 1980 away from big government liberalism.

Gallup reports, "Thus far in 2009, 40 percent of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35 percent as moderate, and 21 percent as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004." This despite two decisive Democratic election victories in the intervening years. Gallup also reported that 39 percent of Americans say their political views have become more conservative in recent years. Only 18 percent say they've grown more liberal.

Similarly, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll had Americans favoring smaller government with fewer services to a larger government with more services by 54 to 41 percent--a slightly more conservative result than in 2004. As Michael Barone summarizes the situation, "Americans seem to be recoiling against big government when it threatens to become a reality rather than a campaign promise."
Tactical errors by the Democrats and breakdowns in message discipline on the part of the administration are helping the recoil....

...

Sarah Palin is not the only one asking how the Democrats are going to pay for all their spending. Their higher taxes will ultimately lead to lower revenues as people change their conduct to avoid the taxes and as the economy is depressed by their greater regulation and taxes. The fact is that liberalism does not work and it does not reward work.

Iran fantasy and the 10 week deadline to more meaningless talks

NY Times Editorial:

The world’s wealthy nations have given Iran until late September to agree to restraints on its nuclear program. If there is no progress, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France declared at this week’s Group of 8 summit, “we will have to take decisions” on imposing tougher sanctions.

We hope Mr. Sarkozy and the other G-8 leaders mean it. For seven years, the world powers have pursued a feckless strategy that failed to halt Iran’s efforts to master nuclear fuel production, the hardest part of building a weapon. More deadlines, without any real follow-through, will send a dangerous message to nuclear wannabes who already see Iran and North Korea defying repeated demands from the United Nations Security Council to cease and desist.
We don’t know if there is any mix of incentives or sanctions that would work. Certainly President George W. Bush, for all his tough talk and bullying ways, never tried to find it.
We also know that if any strategy has a serious chance of success, it must be fully embraced not only by the Europeans but also by Russia and China. So it was disheartening to hear Russian officials boasting in Italy about watering down the G-8 statement on Iran.
Dealing with Tehran is even harder after last month’s bogus presidential election sparked weeks of protest and repression. President Obama and the other G-8 leaders were right to deplore the violence. But Mr. Obama is also right to stay open to engagement, even if it’s a long shot.
Iran’s political tug of war is far from over. There are signs that Mr. Obama’s offer of direct talks may have helped deepen fissures inside the political establishment. The bad news is that American hard-liners — outside the administration — are still encouraging Israeli hard-liners to fantasize about a military strike.

...

The Europeans engaged in serious talks with Iran for much of the Bush administration's and the the only result was Iran ran the clock and never agreed to anything of substance. Adding the US or the UN to mix is not going to change that. There were serious offers made to provide Iran with nuclear fuel and help them build their facilities that were all rejected because Iran really wants to build a bomb. John Hannah exposes the liberal myths about Bush and Iran.

The Israels, correctly see that as an existential threat, that has been confirmed by the rhetoric of Iran's leaders. They do not need any encouragement from those in the US to want to do something about this threat. They are also not going to give anyone in the US a veto over their actions.

I have my own misgivings over an Israeli attack. They do not have the capacity for the kind of sustained attack needed to wipe out the threat as well as the inevitable Iranian reaction. That reaction is very likely to lead to Iranian attacks on US forces.

I don't think the Obama administration is prepared to put the US assets in the area needed to respond to the Iranian reaction to an Israeli attack. We would need more carriers in the area as well as air superiority planes like the F-22. It would also require the firing of Tomahawk cruise missiles for ships and subs.

US ships would need to also deal with swarm attacks from small Iranian boats. A coordinated attack could be used to wipe out most of these Iranian assets before they could strike, but it is highly unlikely that Israel would notify us of its attack for enough in advance to deal with this threat.

The best that we can hope for out of the September talks is the the Europeans will finally get serious about sanctions and stop their trade with Iran. The Russians and the Chinese will not go along with UN sanctions, but with our European partners we could impose limits on Iran's ability to use the international banking system that might cause the regime some financial pain. That is unlikely to change their objectives, but it could make it harder for Iran to achieve them.

Health care--The next Democrat jobs killer

John Kline:

...

Next up is health care, which is in dire need of attention. But – perhaps unsurprisingly – the projected effects of Democratic proposals on business and jobs are dismal.
Take small business, for example. It’s often called the engine of the U.S. economy because it employs approximately one out of six Americans and provides $1.7 trillion in annual wages.
If we leave it to the Democrats, that engine will break down. A national mandate on small business to provide health care would eliminate 1.6 million jobs over a five-year period according to a study by the National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation. Two out of three of those 1.6 million jobs lost in five years would be shed from small businesses.
Other studies have painted an even more troubling picture of the Democrats’ planned government takeover of our health care system. Based on a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer, it is estimated that some 4.7 million jobs could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage.
Make no mistake: The Democrats’ proposal is a government-run health program and something that absorbs tax revenue rather than creates it, which will contribute to a prolonged recession.
The plan also will take away the health care plans millions of Americans already have. A June study by the independent Lewin Group found that 114 million Americans would be forced out of their current private health coverage under the House Democratic plan. So much for the President’s assurance that “if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period.”
Sponsors of the Democrat plan seem all too willing to ignore the fact that we can’t pay for the government-funded health care programs we already have. Consider Medicare: Its trustees recently reported that the Great Society program’s funds will be depleted by 2017. That’s two years earlier than the date they projected last year – largely because of the recession that Democrats seem to keep fueling.
Add to that dire prediction the new spending of their government-run health care plan – not to mention the equally troubled Medicaid and Social Security systems. You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in economics to see that our children and grandchildren will be paying for these programs for the rest of their lives.

...

He goes on to give some of the GOP alternatives.

The Democrats now say they are going to finance this plan, as usual, with a tax on the rich, which really means mostly small business owners. It would be a surtax on those making over $280,000 a year. Even if it raised the money projected it would only pay half the cost of their program which will not even cover half of the uninsured. I can't imagine why voters would support such an expensive failure even if they can make the "rich" pay for it.

I have to admit, that I have never had a problem with my health care plans through the years so it is hard for me to see the need for a new program. My children are all grown and none of them seem to have any problems with health care coverage. Even people I know who don't have employer paid coverage or no coverage at all find a way to get their health care needs met.

When you also consider that a substantial portion of the uninsured are illegal aliens it strikes me that even the non rich would not support subsidizing their illegal status with health care programs that will only encourage further illegal immigration. I am surprised the GOP has not made an issue of this aspect of the program.

Green jobs not blowing in the wind

The Obama administration has made offshore wind energy a priority and an important part of its plans to create jobs and combat climate change, but even such favorable political breezes have not been strong enough to propel the nation's first projects.

The economy has intervened, and an unfamiliar federal approval process could hold up leading projects.

Just last month, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar distributed leases to explore five possible wind farm sites off Delaware and New Jersey on the outer continental shelf. The leases were the first ever, and Salazar proclaimed "a new day for energy production in the United States."

But that day may be years in the dawning.

Developer Bluewater Wind won two of the leases for sites 14 miles off Delaware and 15 to 18 miles off New Jersey. The company seemed to be barreling toward being first in the emerging industry, with plans to plant a wind farm into the seabed at Rehoboth Beach, Del. A year ago, it had even struck an agreement to sell power from the giant windmills to Delmarva Power.

But now, its parent company, Australian investment firm Babcock & Brown, has buckled under the weight of the global economic downturn and is selling off its assets to reduce debt. Bluewater is looking for investors to keep its projects moving.

"They're just reapproaching all of the other players out there, hat in hand," said Brian Yerger, chief executive of Aerca Advisors, a consulting company focusing on renewable energy. "There are a lot of balls in the air."
Hundreds of large and small wind farms have been built on U.S. land, but that sector also is feeling financing frustrations. This week, oilman T. Boone Pickens backed off of his plans to build the world's largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, citing tight credit markets and lower natural gas prices.

Pickens could not find financing to pay for the transmission lines that would hook up his wind farm to the Texas grid. Offshore developers face a similar problem. They need to find customers to buy their power and must do so before they can get financing to build. They must also navigate an untested federal permit process that was scheduled to take effect late last month, putting projects many years away from completion. Construction on even the most promising projects in Rhode Island, along with those in Delaware and New Jersey, won't begin for at least four years.

"I guess I would say there's a lot of uncertainty out there in the industry," said Matthew Kaplan, a senior wind analyst at Emerging Energy Research.

Ed Feo, a partner specializing in renewable energy projects at law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McLoy, said the fact that offshore developers are entering uncharted waters inevitably increases the level of uncertainty.
...

The story acknowledges that the Cape Wind project has left a bad taste in the mouth of investors because of the opposition of Ted Kennedy among others. It is an example of the hypocrasy of on the left when it comes to any form of energy. They hate them all and will find reason to oppose any project. If Boone Pickens can't get financing for his wind projects, that tells you something about the viability of the wind business--he needs high natural gas prices to make the loans viable in the minds of the lenders. The costs of tying into the electric grid has also become a deal killer in all areas of the country.

The offshore projects have their own drawbacks that make them difficult even in places where regulators are welcoming. A project approved by the State of Texas off the coast near Corpus Christi never made it off the drawing boards.

Friday, July 10, 2009

The warlord and the Taliban POWs

After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.
“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”
It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum’s reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.
The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant war crime in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.
“If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government,” Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, “There is always a time and place for justice.”
While President Obama has deepened the United States’ commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.
A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, have told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstalling General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.”

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum’s forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general’s forces near the town of Shibarghan.
Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that, over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Laili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

...

The story omits facts that led up to the capture of the Taliban at Konduz.

After Dostum and Atta captured Mazir-Sharif from the Taliban, Dostum met with Taliban commander Mullah Faisal to discuss the terms of surrender of about 10,00 of his troops. Dostum was trying to avoid a bloody street fight in Konduz and Faisal was requesting that he and his men be allowed passage to Herat as well as keeping their weapons. Some money was also paid to Dostum and a deal was agreed to.

In Dostum's view this moved these forces from the enemy camp to his. Some of them wound up as POW in a fortress control by Dostum with the help of some CIA offices one of which was Mike Spann. Spann was later killed in a prisoner revolt which almost succeeded in taking over the compound. I suspect that experienced weighed on Dostums treatment of future prisoners. Many of the worst of the Taliban had fled to Konduz, and the Northern Alliance did not have a facility for holding them which probably led to the use of the shipping containers.

Doug Stanton's Horse Soldiers gives the details of the fight that led up to the capture and Dostum's troops as well as the American special forces who fought with them endured some pretty horrific conditions on the way to opening up the north and making the defeat of the Taliban possible. The human rights wackos would probably have found their conditions appalling too.

I think this is probably be brought up as a way to pressure Dostum out of the government. He was an interesting character and he helped to make the defeat of the Taliban possible. That is probably another reason why there was reluctance to stab him in the back with a war crimes trial.

Taliban resistance disjointed in Brit offensive in Helmand

Telegraph:

Despite the growing list of British fatalities, troops are continuing to push the enemy back on operation Panthers Claw that is seen a "crucial" operation for the security of Helmand.
The fighting had been "exceptionally arduous" with the threat from the Taliban roadside bombs "enormous", Lt Col Simon Banton told The Daily Telegraph.
"But I think that the tipping point is about now where the enemy resistance is more disjointed," the officer said, adding that scores of the Taliban had been killed in the battle that has lasted three weeks.
The force of 700 British soldiers, accompanied by Afghan and Danish troops, is fighting in extremely difficult conditions with mines and booby-traps a constant threat. In countryside criss-crossed by irrigation ditches, thick compound walls and dense vegetation British troops struggle with 110lbs of kit in temperatures of 46oC.
"It is physically draining but now there is a much more prevalent IED (improvised explosive device) threat said the commanding officer of the 2nd Bn The Mercian Regiment, which has suffered more than a dozen wounded in addition to the death of 18-year-old Pte Robert Laws this week.
...
"This one has seen hard combat every single day," said Lt Col Banton. "The guys pick themselves up at 4am from whatever dusty floor they have slept on and carry on but psychologically they know that the enemy are suffering casualties at a far higher rate than us."
The densely farmed district where the operation is happening has a population of 65,000 people in a key area between the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah and the market hub of Goreshk.
...
"Britain has been holding the line and there only so much can do with troops available but the Americans will double our combat power and this will make a significant change to security in Helmand."

Increasing the force to space ratio makes it more difficult for the enemy to avoid detection and contact. The increased pressure from the combined offensive can cause the enemy to make mistakes. The Taliban do appear to be focusing on fighting the British troops while avoiding the Marines where possible.

Brit troop casuaties increase in Afghanistan

Guardian:

Ministers were bracing themselves for an increasingly bloody conflict in Afghanistan as it became clear that a further eight British soldiers have been killed in 24 hours, the worst combat death toll since the war began.
Five troops were killed in a single incident after they were caught in a bomb blast while on foot patrol. Officials confirmed that 15 troops have been killed in the last 10 days. With the government's handling of the conflict under increasing scrutiny, Gordon Brown was forced to defend the Afghan mission as he left the G8 summit in Italy. Before heading directly to a private briefing at the military's operational headquarters at Northwood, Middlesex, he warned of a "very hard summer … It's not over".
...
He (Prime Minister Brown) said: "There is a chain of terror that runs from the mountains and towns of Afghanistan to the streets of Britain. Our resolution to complete the work we have started is undiminished.
...

When five guys on a foot patrol are killed by one bomb it is likely that they did not have enough separation between them or had been lured into close proximity to the bomb. Troops are taught early during their training not to bunch up were one grenade could kill an entire squad.

It does appear that the Taliban are focusing on the Brits. Perhaps they perceive that the political support for the operation is weaker in the UK and they will be more influenced by casualties.

The Stasi who continue to work for German state

Independent:

Berliners and the citizens of eastern Germany are struggling to digest the news that thousands of former members of the dreaded Stasi secret police were working as their local civil servants, police officers and teachers, almost 20 years after the Iron Curtain collapsed.

More than 17,000 staff currently employed by Berlin and eastern Germany's five federal states were estimated to have worked for the all-pervasive communist police organisation, according to evidence compiled by historians at Berlin's Free University.

Shocking cases came to light after the fall of the Berlin Wall, including a husband who spied on his dissident wife for years and a mother who informed the Stasi about her son after he reached puberty because she considered him a threat to the state.
...
The Stasi was one of the biggest employers in the former East Germany. It had some 200,000 people working for the organisation full- and part-time and it is estimated that one in every 50 East Germans had Stasi connections. About half of the Stasi's employees were civilians who worked as informants. But the information they gleaned from spying on neighbours, friends and colleagues was used to imprison people, strip them of privileges and ruin careers.
...

The Stasi were essential to the odious apparatus of communist rule in East Germany. The government obviously thought the people would rise up against them if they were not controlled through this kind of operation. It tells you something about communism, that an organization like the Stasi was needed for communism to survive.

Afghan army may grow even larger

Reuters:

The United States and NATO may need to increase their goal for expanding Afghan forces significantly to better support President Obama's strategy for stabilizing the country, officials said on Friday.
The current goal is to boost the Afghan army to 134,000 soldiers and police to 86,000 by 2010 to ensure the U.S. and NATO security mission has what officials have described as "an Afghan face."

But officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said top defense and military officers have discussed plans to double the goal for Afghan soldiers to nearly 270,000 to better combat insurgents and avert the possibility that Western forces might come to be viewed by Afghans as foreign occupiers.

"All of that has been discussed," said one official.

Obama administration officials have examined the possibility of increasing the Afghan army and police to 400,000 personnel. But no decisions have been made.
...

They certainly need to grow it, but the reason they were not expanded initially was the belief that Afghanistan could not support a military of that size after the NATO forces left. But that was also before there was a real commitment to counter insurgency operations which need to have Afghan forces to hold the area after it has been clear and also work with the locals to get better intelligence on enemy movements. The Marine General in charge of the Helmand operation has complained about the lack of Afghan troops to participate.

The Washington Post has more on Gen. McChrystal's plan for more Afghan troops.

An insult to Johnnie Walker?

Scotsman:

PLANS that could see the Johnnie Walker plant in Kilmarnock turned into a tourist attraction have been branded an "insult" by political leaders.

The drinks giant's senior managers have said they want to leave a "legacy" in the Ayrshire town once they shut the plant, which currently employs 900 staff.

They believe a tourist attraction – possibly a whisky museum or heritage centre – could be erected on the site to capitalise on the 150-year-old link between the Johnnie Walker brand and the town.

...

However, Diageo directors insist that the closure of the Kilmarnock plant is the only option on the table. While they say they are open to any new ideas from ministers or enterprise chiefs, they insist the closure is necessary to guarantee the long-term future of their business.

...

I am admittedly not and expert on the whiskey business, but I had always heard that it was counter cyclical. Aren't there numerous stories about people drowning their sorrows in whiskey? Perhaps they are switching to cheaper scotch.

From concerned to seriously concerned about Iran

Steve Chapman:

The G-8 nations are turning up the heat on Iran. While two weeks ago the Group of 8 industrial nations said they were "concerned" about Tehran's nuclear program, they declared Wednesday at their summit in Italy that now they are "seriously concerned" about Iran's atomic weapon ambitions.

Not "seriously concerned" enough to lay down tough sanctions. But "seriously concerned" enough to agree "to take stock of the situation" in Iran at a United Nations meeting in September.

OK, I'm too sarcastic. Diplomacy by its nature moves slowly and cautiously. No doubt the G-8 leaders want to halt Iran's weapons drive. That program, say several sources, now alarms even Russia, but, by all accounts, Moscow remains cool to tough measures against Tehran.

However sarcastic I may sound, think how the G-8 pronouncement plays in Tehran. It can only encourage the theocratic and military bosses to think they can string out any negotiations long enough to acquire a nuclear warhead for the increasingly longer range missiles they're testing.
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I think the UN conference is D-Day for Iran, but the regime is probably to full of itself to comprehend that they are making a career decisions at the September meeting. Ahmadinejad looks at the meeting as a stage for him to hawk his demagoguery and hopefully robe Obama onto the stage to act as a foil.

It really sounds like the administration and its allies are going to make the September meeting the one where Iran walks a way from a deal and into an attack by Israel that will not be stopped by anyone. Iran should be seriously concerned.

US targets Taliban communications in South Waziristan

Bill Roggio:

The US military conducted yet another Predator airstrike against Baitullah Mehsud's forces in Pakistan's Taliban controlled tribal agency in South Waziristan.

The latest strike targeted a Taliban communications center in the town of Painda Khel, according to the Associated Press. A US intelligence official contacted by The Long War Journal confirmed the strike.

Three Taliban fighters were reported killed in the Painda Khel airstrike. No senior Taliban or al Qaeda fighters were reported killed at this time.

Today's airstrike is the fourth this week. All of the attacks took place in Baitullah Mehsud's tribal areas. The US launched a pair of strikes on a Taliban convoy and a training camp in South Waziristan two days ago. More than 50 Taliban fighters and several al Qaeda operatives were reported killed in the pair of attacks.

The day prior, a strike on a training camp killed 12 Taliban fighters and four al Qaeda operatives. Kifayatullah Anikhel, a close relative of Baitullah Mehsud and a senior Taliban commander, was reported killed in the attack.

South Waziristan is a major focus of the US air campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Of the 30 US strikes carried out in Pakistan this year, 22 of them took place in South Waziristan.
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Hitting the communication center is a way to effect Mehsud's command and control and send him back to more primitive methods. The downside is that we are giving up the opportunity to intercept his communications.

I suspect that the more primitive methods may also expose Mehsud's whereabouts. If he is having to use messengers to carry his communications with subordinates it may be possible to follow the messengers with UAVs that will reveal the commanders location.

Some in media admit they were unfair to Palin

Tim Graham looks at the confessions of White House reporter Carl Cannon. It is an admission that is worth reading in full. While Cannon discusses the obvious double standard in the media treatment of Palin and Biden, he really does not explain the reasons for the double standard.

I think one of the reasons was that Palin was seen as effective in attacking Obama and they need to discredit her in order to discredit the attacks. They used a similar approach in 2004 in attacking the Swift vets. It is much easier to counterattack the source of attacks than reply to the substance of the attacks. The pattern is to try to find some fact to challenge and then do a collective "ah, ha" and dismiss the whole thing.

What Cannon points out is the whoppers they also let Biden get away with. I think one reason Biden got away with them is he sounded like the voice of authority when making the claim. A lot of con men get away with their scams the same way.

The 'Rogue' Palin attacks

Marc Ambinder:

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Whose idea was it for Gov. Sarah Palin to attack Barack Obama as a guy who "pals around with terrorists?" Palin's camp has always insisted that the McCain high command endorsed the stratagem, while folks close to McCain have accused Palin of going "rogue" and pointed to the "pals around" attack as an example of how Palin simply could not be controlled. The idea that Palin was hard to manage as a candidate and ignored the advice and wishes of McCain's senior advisers is explicated in some detail by Todd Purdum.

But on the subject of linking Obama to ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers, it turns out that Palin hadn't gone rogue. Balz and Johnson answer this question pretty definitively. They've obtained an e-mail from campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace sent to Palin on the morning of October 4rd, with an attached New York Times article about Obama's relationship with Ayers.

Turns out that the McCain campaign was a week away from running an ad linking Obama to Ayers. The e-mail from Wallace, according to Balz and Johnson, reads as follows: "Governor and Team: rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this."

McCain HQ had suggested the following line: "This is not a man who sees American as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

At the event, Palin said this:

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."
Schmidt has never denied ordering this attack, although others in the campaign told me at the time that Palin had instigated it....

I don't think it was that bad of a line regardless of who instigated it. I don't think it hurt the campaign either. If it was really that bad why did the Obama campaign keeps Ayers mute until after the election?

It does appear to be an example of how some in the McCain campaign used Palin as a scape goat for their problems. The fact is that McCain lost because he lost control of the economic issues and looked impetuous in trying to deal with them.

Taliban Swat chief near death

BBC:

The leader of Taliban militants in Pakistan's Swat district has been critically wounded and is close to death, the BBC has learned.
The information about Maulana Fazlullah confirms statements from senior government and security officials.
A former village cleric, he founded the branch of the Taliban movement which eventually took over the Swat valley.
...
"Maulana Fazlullah was actually hit in two air strikes, and is critically wounded," Mingora resident Wasif Ali - who did not disclose his real name for personal security reasons - told the BBC on Wednesday during a trip to Swat.
"He is now stranded in Imam Dehri without any access to medical assistance and is close to death."
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He confirmed that another senior Taliban leader, Shah Duran, was also killed in an air strike as earlier stated by the army.
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The story has some details on the previous fighting in Swat.

One of the keys to destroying the Taliban is the destruction of its leadership. In that regard this is good news for Pakistan and those who are fighting the Taliban.

ISI offers to broker talks with Taliban

CNN:

Pakistan's military has declared that not only is it in contact with Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar but that it can bring him and other commanders to the negotiating table with the United States.

The acknowledgment of on-going communication with Taliban forces using sanctuary in Pakistan to launch military strikes against U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan is part of a new diplomatic overture to help the Obama administration find an end to the long-running conflict.
In a CNN exclusive interview, Pakistan military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said in return for any role as a broker between the United States and the Taliban, Pakistan wants concessions from Washington over Islamabad's concerns with longtime rival India.
And senior U.S. officials have told CNN the Obama Administration is willing both to talk to top Taliban leaders and to raise some of Pakistan's concerns with India.
With NATO's Afghan force commanders conceding the military fight against the Taliban in key areas of Afghanistan is at a "stalemate" and that a recent influx of American combat troops is hoped to break the deadlock, the consensus among military and diplomatic figures in the region is that the United States cannot win the war in Afghanistan militarily.
Most believe a resolution to the conflict will ultimately be a political, and economic, one rather than a military victory that will necessitate negotiations with the Taliban. Such a resolution will have to be struck with the involvement of Pakistan, India, Iran and possibly Saudi Arabia, as well as NATO and the United States.
And with the Pakistan military, with its intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), now going public with its offer to act as broker to help initiate talks, this could be the first opportunity for a breakthrough in ending the Afghan war that began with the U.S. invasion in 2001.
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I think little of value could come from such talks and much mischief could result. To start with, it is hard to credit the ISI as an honest broker in such talks since they have been duplicitous throughout the current conflict. Then there is the fact that Pakistan's own negotiations with the Taliban have led to disastrous agreements that the Taliban have not honored. Attempts at having a political solution with people of bad faith help only those of bad faith. There only value is a barely face saving way of retreat. There is no example of the Taliban acting in good faith with any of these agreements.

To enter such negotiations now when we are implementing a strategy that is kicking the Taliban butt out of Helmand makes little sense.

The old canard about getting a political solution to the dispute has been proven wrong in Iraq and will be proven wrong in Afghanistan. Political solutions in Afghanistan can only be achieved after the destruction of the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The non coup in Honduras

Miguel Estrada:

Honduras, the tiny Central American nation, had a change of leaders on June 28. The country's military arrested President Manuel Zelaya -- in his pajamas, he says -- and put him on a plane bound for Costa Rica. A new president, Roberto Micheletti, was appointed. Led by Cuba and Venezuela (Sudan and North Korea were not immediately available), the international community swiftly condemned this "coup."

Something clearly has gone awry with the rule of law in Honduras -- but it is not necessarily what you think. Begin with Zelaya's arrest. The Supreme Court of Honduras, as it turns out, had ordered the military to arrest Zelaya two days earlier. A second order (issued on the same day) authorized the military to enter Zelaya's home to execute the arrest. These orders were issued at the urgent request of the country's attorney general. All the relevant legal documents can be accessed (in Spanish) on the Supreme Court's website. They make for interesting reading.

What you'll learn is that the Honduran Constitution may be amended in any way except three. No amendment can ever change (1) the country's borders, (2) the rules that limit a president to a single four-year term and (3) the requirement that presidential administrations must "succeed one another" in a "republican form of government."

In addition, Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession. Not unlike what Zelaya's close ally, Hugo Chavez, had done in Venezuela.

It is also worth noting that only referendums approved by a two-thirds vote of the Honduran Congress may be put to the voters. Far from approving Zelaya's proposal, Congress voted that it was illegal.

The attorney general filed suit and secured a court order halting the referendum. Zelaya then announced that the voting would go forward just the same, but it would be called an "opinion survey." The courts again ruled this illegal. Undeterred, Zelaya directed the head of the armed forces, Gen. Romeo Vasquez, to proceed with the "survey" -- and "fired" him when he declined. The Supreme Court ruled the firing illegal and ordered Vasquez reinstated.

Zelaya had the ballots printed in Venezuela, but these were impounded by customs when they were brought back to Honduras. On June 25 -- three days before he was ousted -- Zelaya personally gathered a group of "supporters" and led it to seize the ballots, restating his intent to conduct the "survey" on June 28. That was the breaking point for the attorney general, who immediately sought a warrant from the Supreme Court for Zelaya's arrest on charges of treason, abuse of authority and other crimes. In response, the court ordered Zelaya's arrest by the country's army, which under Article 272 must enforce compliance with the Constitution, particularly with respect to presidential succession. The military executed the court's order on the morning of the proposed survey.

It would seem from this that Zelaya's arrest by the military was legal, and rather well justified to boot. But, unfortunately, the tale did not end there. Rather than taking Zelaya to jail and then to court to face charges, the military shipped him off to Costa Rica. No one has yet explained persuasively why summarily sending Zelaya into exile in this manner was legal, and it most likely wasn't.

This illegality may entitle Zelaya to return to Honduras. But does it require that he be returned to power?

No. As noted, Article 239 states clearly that one who behaves as Zelaya did in attempting to change presidential succession ceases immediately to be president. If there were any doubt on that score, the Congress removed it by convening immediately after Zelaya's arrest, condemning his illegal conduct and overwhelmingly voting (122 to 6) to remove him from office....

...

It appears the only violation of Honduran law in the removal of Zelaya was an act of mercy in exiling him rather than in sending him to prison. The Obama administration and much of the media have ignored the law that allowed Zelaya's removal. I have yet to see a persuasive case for doing so.

This Reuters story says there has been little progress in mediating the dispute. It is one of the few stories that gives the legal case for Zelaya's removal. I view that as some progress.

The CIA secret program that never launched

Opinion Journal:

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Mr. Panetta must feel burned. After the Pelosi blow-up, he has tried to repair relations with his own party's Congressional leaders, and last month he reached out to the Intelligence Committee. On June 24, in a classified hearing, Mr. Panetta produced so-called new information about CIA counterterrorism efforts in the months after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. We're told that he informed the Members that the agency had considered, then abandoned, a major covert antiterror program. (Our sources wouldn't say what it was.) Bush-era CIA officials didn't tell Congress because it never got off the ground. But this is the "at least one case" Mr. Reyes claims his committee was "lied to" about in the Bush years.

There's apparently no limit to how far Speaker Pelosi's friends on the Hill are willing to go to salvage her reputation. The intentions are transparent enough. The Reyes letter was addressed to Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on Intelligence. Mr. Hoekstra yesterday said the media received the missive before he did. And two days after the Panetta testimony last month, six Democratic Members of the committee called on the CIA Director to "correct" his statement in May that the CIA doesn't lie to Congress. He didn't. The six are allies of Speaker Pelosi. Her public standing -- and poll numbers -- have been battered since her run-in with Mr. Panetta and the facts this spring.
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This is looking more like the politics of fraud. The attempt to cover Pelosi's allegations made to cover her knowledge of harsh interrogation methods is plumbing new depths of deceit, not by the CIA but by Democrats on the intelligence committee. There attempt to cover up for Pelosi with leftist Democrats is a cynical ploy that compromises the integrity of the Democrats on the committee who have gone along with the ruse.

Obama's rosy apocalypse

Rich Lowry:

Barack Obama spent all of 2008 running against the sputtering economy and warned earlier this year of a crisis "we may not be able to reverse." Yet, as the unemployment rate climbs beyond the administration's projections, Vice President Joe Biden informs us that the administration "misread how bad the economy was."

Apparently we were going to experience a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis comparable to the Great Depression without a particularly high unemployment rate. This was the promise of the Obama administration, which indulged in hair-raisingly alarmist economic rhetoric while pumping out unduly hopeful economic projections. If the Reagan administration gave us the rosy scenario, the Obama administration has given us the rosy apocalypse.
The rosy apocalypse is an artifact of both ideological naïveté and knowing cynicism. The administration genuinely believed, against all historical experience, that government spending would boost us out of the recession. And it knew it had to assume an unrealistically rapid, robust economic recovery, because otherwise the already-horrid deficit projections would look worse. So Obama talked up the crisis to get the stimulus passed, and after that . . . happy days again!
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And this stimulus was touted as timely and targeted? Confronted by the inadequacies of the current program, its advocates have a predictable solution - a new one. Since the worthiest projects were presumably already covered in the first stimulus, a second stimulus would have to fund even more marginal priorities, and it would get into the economy even later. In other words, it would replicate rather than rectify the failures of the first stimulus.

Obama is resisting a second stimulus so far, but was foolish ever to go down this route. Now he's stuck hoping for the advent of his rosy apocalypse - as soon as possible.

If Biden and Obama were being honest, (Don't fall out of your chair laughing.) they would say their miscalculation was not the depths of the economic problem, but their belief in the efficacy of their remedy. But having committed to spending three quarters of a trillion dollars, they are not likely to admit they made that big a mistake. But it does make there attempt to sell another stimulus much more difficult. Spending money on Democrat constituencies are sink hole investments that do not have the economic effect of allowing people to keep more of their money and make their own investment decisions.

The left's view of McNamara

Adam Brodsky:

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McNamara was an "icy-veined, cold-visaged . . . point man for a war that sent thousands upon thousands of people (most of them young) to their utterly pointless deaths," one left-wing critic wrote in The New York Times this week.

Such imagery has carried over to the Iraq war -- and even to a possible engagement with Iran over its quest for nukes.

There are surely legitimate views on both sides when conflict must be contemplated. Doves may see smaller risks from a given threat than hawks, a more bearable downside, greater costs of confrontation. They may assign lower odds of success, or claim to have more promising or less costly ways to address the threat. Oftentimes, who knows who's right?

But the left's loaded, ridiculously simplistic rhetoric unfairly discounts the legitimate views of those who opt to face threats squarely. And in focusing on the price of engagement, the anti-war crowd also obscures the conceivably higher cost of not acting.

Vietnam was a hot battle in the Cold War. It grew from America's legitimate fears of a dangerous, illegitimate movement: communism -- which was spread by force and illicit co-option and which put liberties, and lives, at stake. Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, and China, had already killed tens of millions -- and subjugated hundreds of millions.

And the threat was rising: Khrushchev had placed nukes 90 miles from Florida (though he later stood down).

The Cold War, that is, involved a fight against an ideology every bit as pernicious as Nazism. Or Islamism. As for Vietnam, even if you suppose the critics right -- that it was unwinnable (it wasn't) -- challenging the creep of this enemy was nonetheless worth something.

As even the Times wrote in a 1965 editorial, the US "went into Vietnam to contain the advance of Communism . . . The motives are exemplary and every American can be proud of them."

Similar logic applies to Iraq. After America was attacked on 9/11, it was important for us to demonstrate our willingness to combat threats -- and Saddam Hussein was viewed as such, whatever his true intentions or capabilities.
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The decision to fight in Vietnam was not the problem. It was the way we fought that was the problem. From the early days when a naval confrontation was used as a casus belli, instead of a clear breach of the Geneva Accords by the communist using the Ho Chi Minh Trail was the more obvious cause. If we had used that breach then the logical consequences would have called for us to send troops into Laos to block the trail which would have ended the war rather quickly.

But McNamara and others feared that would lead to Chinese intervention so they chose to ignore the obvious and fight around the edges. This lead to a longer more costly war. McNamara and others in the Democrat administration also tried to modulate the tempo of the war with restrictions on bombing targets which led to more planes being shot down.

After the war was over the communist admitted that blocking the trial would have defeated them and the Chinese never had any intentions of coming to the North Vietnamese aid with troops. That was a significant miscalculation.

F-22 a maintenance pig?

The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show.

The aircraft's radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings -- such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion -- challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer.

While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged this week. The F-22 has never been flown over Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sensitive information about troubles with the nation's foremost air-defense fighter is emerging in the midst of a fight between the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress over whether the program should be halted next year at 187 planes, far short of what the Air Force and the F-22's contractors around the country had anticipated.

"It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure" that jeopardizes success of the aircraft's mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record. Other skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats.

But other defense officials -- reflecting sharp divisions inside the Pentagon about the wisdom of ending one of the largest arms programs in U.S. history -- emphasize the plane's unsurpassed flying abilities, express renewed optimism that the troubles will abate and say the plane is worth the unexpected costs.
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David G. Ahern, a senior Pentagon procurement official who helps oversee the F-22 program, said in an interview that "I think we've executed very well," and attributed its troubles mostly to the challenge of meeting ambitious goals with unstable funding.

A spokeswoman for Lockheed added that the F-22 has "unmatched capabilities, sustainability and affordability" and that any problems are being resolved in close coordination with the Air Force.
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Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states, and Sprey -- now a prominent critic of the plane -- said that by the time skeptics "could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors' " revenues.
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Skin problems -- often requiring re-gluing small surfaces that can take more than a day to dry -- helped force more frequent and time-consuming repairs, according to the confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon's independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.
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The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22's predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.
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There is much more. Opponents of continued funding for new planes are obviously making their case.

As expensive as the maintenance is in terms of dollars, I am also concerned about the turn around time. I high intensity combat a pilot can't afford to take a couple of days off for skin repair for every hour of dog fight. What is likely to happen is that the planes will be rushed back into combat and become less stealthy as the fight goes on. This will in turn put a real premium on wiping out the enemy craft on day one.

Doing that with fewer planes will make the task even more difficult.

The down time is the most critical factor. You can usually find more money to accomplish a war objective, but you can't replace the lost time in the fight.

Iran has until September to show nuke good faith

President Obama said Friday that Iran faces a September deadline to show good-faith efforts to halt its nuclear weapons program, and said the statement issued by the world's leading industrial nations meeting here this week means the international community is ready to act.
The president also said the current system of international organizations is a relic of the 20th century and needs to be updated, but also said the United Nations needs to step up and fulfill its role. He spoke at a press conference wrapping up three days of meetings here with the Group of Eight top economies -- exactly the sort of international institution that's come under fire for excluding major countries.
On Iran, Mr. Obama raised expectations for a September international summit in Pittsburgh, saying the invited nations will take stock of whether Iran has complied with international demands over its nuclear programs. He also denied reports that Washington tried but failed to achieve agreement on new sanctions here, saying the statement was what he wanted.
"It provides a timeframe," Mr. Obama said. "If Iran chooses not to walk through that door, then you have on record the G-8 to begin with, but I think potentially a lot of other countries, that are going to say we need to take further steps."
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This is actually a shorter time frame than he mentioned earlier of by year's end. I suspect it comes from a realization that Iran is not going to demonstrate any good faith anyway so cutting them off sooner rather than later gives the world leaders a few months to do something before a potential Israeli attack by the end of the year.

It also seems to make clear that the administration's willingness to have unconditional talks is not open ended. This may be too subtle for the current Iranian leadership. They are likely to see it as a mixed message. With the election still in dispute by many Iranians, I suspect Ahmadinejad is not positioned to make any concessions at this time. In fact, he seems more hostile than ever to dealing in good faith with the West.

He has recently suggested that he would like to debate Obama at the UN, but this is probably just an attempt to grab a role on the world stage where he can showcase his demagoguery.

Kurds moving toward separation from Iraq

With little notice and almost no public debate, Iraq’s Kurdish leaders are pushing ahead with a new constitution for their semiautonomous region, a step that has alarmed Iraqi and American officials who fear that the move poses a new threat to the country’s unity.

The new constitution, approved by Kurdistan’s parliament two weeks ago and scheduled for a referendum this year, underscores the level of mistrust and bad faith between the region and the central government in Baghdad. And it raises the question of whether a peaceful resolution of disputes between the two is possible, despite intensive cajoling by the United States.
The proposed constitution enshrines Kurdish claims to territories and the oil and gas beneath them. But these claims are disputed by both the federal government in Baghdad and ethnic groups on the ground, and were supposed to be resolved in talks begun quietly last month between the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, sponsored by the United Nations and backed by the United States. Instead, the Kurdish parliament pushed ahead and passed the constitution, partly as a message that it would resist pressure from the American and Iraqi governments to make concessions.
The disputed areas, in northern Iraq, are already volatile: There have been several tense confrontations between Kurdish and federal security forces, as well as frequent attacks aimed at inflaming sectarian and ethnic passions there.
The Obama administration, which is gradually withdrawing American troops from Iraq, was surprised and troubled by the Kurdish move. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sent to Iraq on July 2 for three days, criticized it in diplomatic and indirect, though unmistakably strong, language as “not helpful” to the administration’s goal of reconciling Iraq’s Arabs and Kurds, in an interview with ABC News.

Mr. Biden said he wanted to discuss the proposed constitution with the Kurdish leadership in person but could not fly to Kurdistan because of sandstorms. Instead he spoke to Kurdish leaders by telephone on Tuesday, and Christopher R. Hill, the new ambassador in Baghdad, met with them in Kurdistan on Wednesday.

...

Biden seems like a poor choice for this task given his earlier position of seeking to break Iraq into three parts one of which would be the Kurdish region. Then there is Hill who demonstrated he could be rolled by the North Koreans because he was willing to overlook the law to get any kind of deal. The administration is setting itself up to take the blame if the Kurds do break away.

Maliki who has been poor at communicating with the Sunnis appears equally uncommunicative with the Kurds, according to the article which said he was not on speaking terms with the Kurdish region’s president, Massoud Barzani. The article has more details on the recent history of thedispute. I am not optimistic that the Obama administration is up to the task of dealing with it.

Obama has been so intent on getting out of Iraq as soon as possible that he is quickly losing any leverage he might have in dealing with both sides.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

The secret program Dems are using to cover Pelosi's CIA blunder