The Increasingly Loathsome Wesley Clark

Wesley Clark, The hero of Waco, is taking shots at McCain's military service, questioning his leadership capacity in comparison to whom? Barack Obama?

Clark has best been described as a vain, pompous, brown-noser.

He answers his own argument in that he is an opportunistic example of why one who once wore a uniform is not necessarily qualified for anything.

Take a look back at the perfumed prince:


DEFENDING AMERICA
David H. Hackworth
April 20, 1999

CLARK AND VIETNAM.

NATO's Wesley Clark is not the Iron Duke, nor is he Stormin' Norman. Unlike Wellington and Schwarzkopf, Clark's not a muddy boots soldier. He's a military politician, without the right stuff to produce victory over Serbia.

Known by those who've served with him as the "Ultimate Perfumed Prince," he's far more comfortable in a drawing room discussing political theories than hunkering down in the trenches where bullets fly and soldiers die. An intellectual in warrior's gear. A saying attributed to General George Patton was that it took 10 years with troops alone before an officer knew how to empty a bucket of spit As a serving soldier with 33 years of active duty under his pistol belt, Clark's commanded combat units -- rifle platoon to tank division - for only seven years. The rest of his career's been spent as an aide, an executive, a student and teacher and a staff weenie.

Very much like generals Maxwell Taylor and William Westmoreland, the architect and carpenter of the Vietnam disaster, Clark was earmarked and then groomed early in his career for big things. At West Point he graduated No. 1 in his class, and even though the Vietnam War was raging and chewing up lieutenants faster than a machine gun can spit death, he was seconded to Oxford for two years of contemplating instead of to the trenches to lead a platoon.

A year after graduating Oxford, he was sent to Vietnam, where, as a combat leader for several months, he was bloodied and muddied. Unlike most of his classmates, who did multiple combat tours in the killing fields of Southeast Asia, he spent the rest of the war sheltered in the ivy towers of West Point or learning power games first hand as a White House fellow.

The war with Serbia has been going full tilt for almost a month and Clark's NATO is like a giant standing on a concrete pad wielding a sledgehammer crushing Serbian ants. Yet, with all its awesome might, NATO hasn't won a round. Instead, Milosovic is still calling all the shots from his Belgrade bunker, and all that's left for Clark is to react. Milosevic plays the fiddle and Clark dances the jig. 'Stormin' Norman or any good infantry sergeant major would have told Clark that conventional air power alone could never win a war -- it must be accompanied by boots on the ground.

German air power didn't beat Britain. Allied air power didn't beat Germany. More air power than was used against the Japanese and Germans combined didn't win in Vietnam. Forty three days of pummeling in the open desert where there was no place to hide didn't KO Saddam. That fight ended only when Schwarzkopf unleashed the steel ground fist he'd carefully positioned before the first bomb fell.

Doing military things exactly backwards, the scholar general is now, according to a high ranking Pentagon source, in "total panic mode" as he tries to mass the air and ground forces he finally figured out he needs to win the initiative. Mass is a principle of war. Clark has violated this rule along with the other eight vital principles. Any mud soldier will tell you if you don't follow the principles of war you lose.

One of the salient reasons Wellington whipped Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo is that the Corsican piecemealed his forces. Clark's done the same thing with his air power. He started with leisurely pinpricks and now is attempting to increase the pain against an opponent with an almost unlimited threshold. Similar gradualism was one of the reasons for defeat in Vietnam.

Another mistake Clark's made is not knowing his enemy. Taylor and Westmoreland made this same error in Vietnam. Like the Vietnamese, the Serbs are fanatic warriors who know better than to fight conventionally in open formations. They'll use the rugged terrain and bomber bad weather to conduct the guerrilla operations they've been preparing for over 50 years.

And they're damn good at partisan warfare. Just ask any German 70 years or older if a fight in Serbia will be another Desert Storm. It's the smart general who knows when to retreat. If Clark lets pride stand in the way of military judgment, expect a long and bloody war.

CBS Calls This a School Prank Gone Wrong.

Uniondale High School Classroom Profile

• Students Per Teacher 11.8
• Enrollment 1,839
• Economically Disadvantaged 23.1%

Breakdown by Ethnicity

1. White 1.4%
2. Black 68.8%
3. Hispanic 28.8%
4. Asian/Pacific Islander 0.6%
5. American Indian/Alaska Native 0.4%

New York City Schools

NEW YORK (CBS) ― A school prank gone wrong on Long Island is caught on tape.

Police said a group of students, dismissed early from Uniondale High School during the June 10th heat wave vandalized a 7-11 store.

They're seen grabbing items off shelves and throwing items on the floor. According to police, they also stole candy and beverages from the store.

Three teenagers are charged with riot and petty larceny.

Can the Dollar be Saved?

Why is Bernanke only using words to help stabilize the dollar? Because he does not have the currency to do it. The Treasury has somehwere around $75 billion in foreign currency reserves with which it could intervene. Turkey, Poland and Libya each have more. China, alone added $75 billion in May.

Look at these headlines:

China's foreign reserves at $1.8 Trillion

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

China's foreign reserves, already the world's largest, rose to US$1.8 trillion at the end of May but growth slowed, a government newspaper reported Friday.

The reserves grew by US$40.3 billion in May, well below the April increase of US$75 billion, the China Securities Journal said, citing data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

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(Brazil) CENTRAL BANK: Foreign reserves exceed US$200bn for 1st time

SÃO PAULO, 6/27/08 - Brazil's foreign reserves have exceeded US$200 billion for the first time and reached US$200.231 billion.

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Nigeria: Foreign Reserves Rise to $60.84bn

Posted to the web 23 June 2008
Aminu Imam
Abuja

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Thursday said that Nigeria's foreign currency reserve rose to $60.84 billion in mid June from $59.16 billion it recorded at the end of May.

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Mumbai,India, June 28: The country’s forex reserves jumped $1.79 billion to $312.48 billion for the week ended June 20 from $310.68 billion in the previous week. Foreign currency assets rose to $302.74 billion, up $1.78 billion, from $300.95 billion a week back. Gold reserves and special drawing rights during the week were static at $9.20 billion and $11 million, respectively. The country’s reserve position in the international monetary fund rose $5 billion to $524 million during the week.

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Russia piling up gold and currency reserves

RBC, 26.06.2008, Moscow

Russia's gold and currency reserves stood at $558.7bn as of June 20, up $7.2bn, or 1.3 percent, from the previous showing. Combined with a $70.5bn rise over the previous 18 weeks, reserves have climbed a total of $77.7bn, or 16 percent, in 95 working days. The rapid increase in reserves can be attributed to the euro's significant advance against the dollar on international exchanges, as well as a stepping-up in the Central Bank's purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market. As a result, Russia has somewhat narrowed the gap separating it from China and Japan, the global leaders in terms of reserves, which exceed $1.75 trillion in China and amount to roughly $1.015 trillion in Japan.

Supermodel, Ruslana Korshunova, Death Ruled a Suicide

A permanent solution to a temporary problem. How bad could it have been? I posted a video of her taping a perfume commercial. Look at the irony at 1:20 as she gets frightened while being up on a ladder.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Today) 6/29/08 – The life of successful fashion model Ruslana Korshunova was cut short Saturday afternoon after the young Kazakhstani fell from the balcony of her apartment in Lower Manhattan to the pavement below. According to an anonymous police source cited by local newspaper Newsday, Korshunova’s death, which occurred just four days before her 21st birthday, was being treated as a suicide.

It isn’t always psychologically easy for models who are suddenly flush with money and attention at a very young age. Drugs and a decadent lifestyle are always a temptation. Yet there was construction underway on the balcony which could mean it was accidental. And a cut in the temporary netting could indicate something more nefarious.

Korshunova dropped from the ninth floor of the Water Street building, which was under construction, at approximately 2:30 p.m. According to the New York Post, there was a gap (apparently cut) in the construction netting covering the balcony. Additionally, both publications reported that police found no obvious signs of struggle inside the model’s home.

Korshunova, who was represented in New York by IMG Models, had previously appeared on the covers of major magazines, including international versions of Elle and Vogue, and had done extensive work for a variety of major designers, including Vera Wang and Libertine.

More on Obama' Birth Certificate

June 27, 2008
Obama birth certificate mystery still unsolved
Clarice Feldman American Thinker

Controversy swirls among conservative bloggers over questions that have been raised over the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate posted at the Daily Kos and (a different one) posted at his campaign's "Fight the Smears" website. Yesterday Jim Geraghty of NRO dismissed the claim that they were fake:

I spoke to Ms. Okubo[ Director of Communications of the State of Hawaii Department of Health]late Wednesday afternoon, and she said she had seen the version of Obama's certificate of live birth posted on the sites. While her office cannot verify the information on a form without the permission of the certificate holder (Obama), she said "the form is exactly the same" and it has "all the components of a birth certificate" record issued by the state. In other words, she sees no reason to think the version posted on Obama's web site and Daily Kos is not genuine.

The "embossed seal" in question is, she said, probably on the back of the document provided to Daily Kos, but not visible (as in another certificate posted on Israel Insider for contrast). She thinks the difference in visibility can be attributed to the pressure used when applying the seal.

(jmh), a commenter at Just One Minute, who does know what she's talking about, says, not so fast, Jim:

Contra [Geraghty's] admonition, the birth certification question may, in fact, be a related issue [to Obama's missing legislative records]. On the technical side, I suspect that Ms. Okubo is not very familiar with what a scanner picks up at a 300ppi resolution (as in the image Kos posted). Embossing works by actually deforming the paper itself, so no matter how light the impression might be, if it were even barely discernable on one side of a page, it would necessarily distort the pattern (and show up in the pixels) on the reverse. Indeed, high resolution scanning often picks up more than is immediately visible to the naked eye, not less! When a simple ink stamped date does show through on the reverse, Ms. Okubo's hypothetical makes almost no sense. I was suspicious of the Obama certification, but when I saw the comparison document that Isreal Insider posted, it certainly removed any doubt in my own mind.

I have no idea why the Obama campaign would take such a risk. I've even wondered if perhaps his mother didn't list a father at all, but who knows? For some reason, however, I keep thinking back to that early campaign story about an attempt to gain access Obama's passport records. It turned out to have been made by Obama's own staffers, not someone else's oppo research team, which seemed peculiar at the time, and which was never explained, IIRC. Why were they trying to see - or feel the need to check -- what the passport office had on file? [emphasis added]

I admit to the uncomfortable feeling that I'm verging on truther territory here, but considering how clean the Obama slate seems to have been wiped, and how few of his past associations -- which keep turning up by ones and twos in a blog here, or a report there -- actually show up on his c.v., my antennae just keep buzzing away. It may be exceedingly difficult to put the puzzle together because the pieces are currently so dispersed, but there's a story here.

Obama on Taxes

The chart tells the tale. The Republicans have not stopped spending and in fact have increased non-discretionary spending by increasing present and future obligations. Where do you go from here?

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What Obama means by tax the wealthy
Here's a closer look at how the Democratic candidate defines well-off for different households, and what his proposals will mean for them.

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN
Last Updated: June 28, 2008: 9:52 AM EDT

Special Report

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Most voters are aware that Barack Obama wants to raise taxes on high-income taxpayers if he's elected president in November.

But what does the Democratic candidate mean by high-income? Who'd be affected and how? While the Obama campaign must still settle on more details about their plans, outlines are starting to emerge.

To start, Obama frequently cites $250,000 as the line between those who would be subject to higher taxes and those who wouldn't.

Indeed, under Obama's tax plan, married couples with at least $250,000 in gross income are likely to see their taxes go up if Obama is elected president.

But what about single filers? The line for them would likely be about $200,000, according to an Obama adviser.

Those groups could end up paying anywhere from several thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars more to Uncle Sam than they do now, according to estimates from the Tax Policy Center.

From income to Social Security to estates, we take a look at four areas where the high-income set and the very well off may be subject to a bigger tax bill in an Obama administration.

Income taxes

Obama would restore the top two income tax rates to their pre-2001 levels of 36% and 39.6%. Currently they're 33% and 35%.

Obama's proposal would also reinstate some limitations on how much of a given deduction or personal exemption high-income taxpayers may take.

However, not everyone in the top two brackets would necessarily be affected by the rate increase. Much depends on whether they've been subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) in the past.

You're supposed to calculate your tax liability under both the regular income tax code and the AMT. If your bill under the AMT is bigger, you must pay that.

The Obama rate increase would certainly narrow the spread between the two - since the amount owed under the regular code would go up. The question is would the amount you owe because of the increase exceed your AMT bill.

"Until the regular tax starts exceeding the [AMT bill], you won't have an increase," said John Battaglia, a director in the private client advisors practice of Deloitte. "But if people are deep into AMT, it wouldn't matter."

For example, if the rate increase would mean you owe $2,500 more under the regular code, but your AMT bill is normally $5,000 more than your regular bill, you would still pay the AMT.

Payroll taxes

In addition to wages up to $102,000 - the current cap on salary subject to the payroll tax, which funds Social Security - Obama would also tax amounts over $250,000.

In other words, income between $102,000 and $250,000 would be protected.

Obama's stated goals are to better fund the Social Security program - which faces a long-term shortfall - and to make the system more progressive. Currently, the vast majority of Americans pay the Social Security tax on 100% of their income because they don't make more than the $102,000 wage cap. By contrast, very highly paid taxpayers only pay Social Security tax on a portion of their income. People who make $204,000, for example, only pay the tax on 50% of their income.

The rate at which salary is taxed for Social Security is 12.4% (half of which is normally paid by employees and half by their employers).

Obama hasn't said whether the money from wages and salaries over $250,000 would be taxed at the same rate. If it were, the person making $300,000 in gross income - $50,000 above the $250,000 watermark - would pay an additional $3,100 into the system annually (6.2% x $50,000).

We also don't know whether the benefits promised to the highest income workers would go up as a result of their paying more into the system.

"Those are details that Senator Obama would want to work out on a bipartisan basis with Congress," an Obama adviser said.

That lack of specificity concerns some tax experts. "If Obama is hinting that those making more than $250,000 would pay a higher payroll tax rate ... it would fundamentally change the way Social Security operates and run the risk of making the program look less like social insurance and more like welfare," Tax Vox blog editor Howard Gleickman wrote for the Tax Policy Center.

Investment income taxes

Long-term capital gains used to be taxed differently than dividends, which were subject to one's top income tax rate. Under the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, gains and dividends are treated equally. Currently the most one would pay is 15%.

Both rates are scheduled to rise by 2011 - long-term gains to 20% and dividends would once again be taxed a taxpayer's top income tax rate for dividends.

Obama would continue to treat gains and dividends equally and would keep the current rate in place for everyone except high-income households.

He hasn't specified how high he'd like to make the rate, but observers expect and Obama himself has virtually said that the new rate likely would fall between 20% and 25%.

Estate tax

Finally, Obama's proposals to tax wealth are not only defined by income levels.

When it comes to family wealth, for instance, Obama favors maintaining the estate tax, which is scheduled to be repealed in 2010 for one year. But he would limit its reach.

Obama would freeze the estate tax exemption amount at $3.5 million - up from its current $2 million level and the $1 million level it's set to revert to in 2011. He would also keep the current top rate of 45%, which is below the 55% it is set to revert to in 2011.

A Sensible Natural Gas Alternative to Imported Petroleum

A full tank of gas supplies the GX with a driving range of approximately 220–250 miles.

No pie in the sky here. Honda makes the car and so can all the rest. Most existing cars can be modified. Use a little imagination and set up the distribution.

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Gazprom Pushing Natural Gas for Cars in Europe



Russian energy giant Gazprom wants to set up a network of service stations across Europe for cars fuelled by natural gas. Gazprom controls a quarter of the world's gas reserves.

Gazprom plans to increase its presence in Europe's gas retail business, the company's chief executive announced on Friday, June 27. Currently, few cars in Europe run on natural gas, in part because there are few places to tank up.

"We are proposing to our European partners the creation of a network of natural gas stations in Europe with the participation of Gazprom," Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller told a shareholders' meeting in Moscow on Friday, June 27.

Natural gas is seen as cheaper and more environmentally friendly than regular fuel. While the idea has yet to catch on in Europe, natural gas is widely used in cars in Argentina, Brazil, India, Iran and Pakistan.

For the moment, Miller said he doesn't see any "realistic alternatives" to hydrocarbons. He also panned biofuel, which he blamed for leading to a global food crisis.

Gazprom eyes liquid gas

Gazprom supplies a quarter of Europe's gas. It is also aggressively moving into the liquid natural gas (LNG) market. Gazprom wants to control 20 or 25 percent of the LNG market in the upcoming years, Valery Golubev, Gazprom's deputy chief executive said on Friday.

Russia's first LNG project on the far eastern island of Sakhalin is due to start production later this year. Gazprom's large Shtokman field in northern Russia is due to come online in 2014, executives said.

Banking on government support

Miller sees a rosy future for Gazprom. Its strong ties to the government give it a huge growth potential and it aims to become the world's energy leader, the CEO said Friday.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who took office last month, previously served as chairman of the state-controlled gas giant. Gazprom announced Friday that Medvedev's replacement as chairman will be former prime minister Viktor Zubkov.


DW staff (th)

Obama, Born Again with a New Birth Certificate? (hat tip: Charles)

Link Here for an analysis of this certificate.

BARACK OBAMA
Forget the Birth Certificate. There Are More Relevant Records.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Jim Gerraghty, National Review

More than a few readers have asked me what I think of this article from a publication called the Israel Insider, particularly a section which suggests a Hawaiian state official has doubts about the birth certificate posted on Daily Kos and Obama’s StopTheSmears site:

Janice Okubo, Director of Communications of the State of Hawaii Department of Health, told Israel Insider: "At this time there are no circumstances in which the State of Hawaii Department of Health would issue a birth certification or certification of live birth only electronically." And, she added, "In the State of Hawaii all certified copies of certificates of live birth have the embossed seal and registrar signature on the back of the document."

I spoke to Ms. Okubo late Wednesday afternoon, and she said she had seen the version of Obama’s certificate of live birth posted on the sites. While her office cannot verify the information on a form without the permission of the certificate holder (Obama), she said "the form is exactly the same" and it has "all the components of a birth certificate" record issued by the state. In other words, she sees no reason to think the version posted on Obama's web site and Daily Kos is not genuine.

The “embossed seal” in question is, she said, probably on the back of the document provided to Daily Kos, but not visible (as in another certificate posted on Israel Insider for contrast). She thinks the difference in visibility can be attributed to the pressure used when applying the seal.

I know I was one of the guys who wondered if there was something there when Obama initially refused to provide his birth certificate to PolitiFact. It seems many people continue to think that they will uncover something that will prove Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible for office of the presidency. As I wrote in the initial post, this scenario is “rather unlikely, as it would require everyone in his family to lie about this in every interview and discussion with those outside the family since young Obama appeared on the scene.” I would add this would require Obama to lie about his birthplace in every interview going back to Harvard Law.

There are, however, other documents in the past of the Democratic nominee that would be worth a close examination. For example, they may not even exist anymore – a convenient destruction – but Obama’s office records from his service in the state legislature, particularly the correspondence, would be an interesting resource in learning more about his efforts in state government.

The Illinois State Archives told Judicial Watch that they never received any request from Senator Obama to archive any records in his possession. Similarly, in 2007, Obama said to Tim Russert that his records were “not kept.”

MR. RUSSERT: You talked about Senator Clinton having records released from the Clinton Library regarding her experience as first lady, and yet when you were asked about, “What about eight years in the state senate of Illinois,” you said, “I don’t know.” Where, where are the—where are your records?

SEN. OBAMA: Tim, we did not keep those records. I...

MR. RUSSERT: Are they gone?

SEN. OBAMA: Well, let’s be clear. In the state senate, every single piece of information, every document related to state government was kept by the state of Illinois and has been disclosed and is available and has been gone through with a fine-toothed comb by news outlets in Illinois.* The, the stuff that I did not keep has to do with, for example, my schedule. I didn’t have a schedule. I was a state senator. I wasn’t intending to have the Barack Obama State Senate Library. I didn’t have 50 or 500 people to, to help me archive these issues. So...

MR. RUSSERT: But your meetings with lobbyists and so forth, there’s no record of that?

SEN. OBAMA: I did not have a scheduler, but, as I said, every document related to my interactions with government is available right now. And, as I said, news outlets have already looked at them.

MR. RUSSERT: Is your schedule available anywhere? Are—the records exist?

SEN. OBAMA: I—Tim, I kept my own schedule. I didn’t have a scheduler.

I have no idea how Obama's statement that "every document related to state government was kept by the state of Illinois and has been disclosed and available" can be in line with the statement from the Illinois State Archives. Is there some separate archive for state legislators?

The Hare and the Tortoise (or is Obama trying to Give McCain a Heart Attack?)

Obama plans to run McCain ragged across the US
3 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democrat Barack Obama is broadening the playing field against his Republican White House rival John McCain with a nationwide trawl for votes that could, if successful, produce a landslide.

Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe on Wednesday outlined the 50-state strategy the Illinois senator is pursuing for November's election, designed to stretch the poorer McCain campaign's resources to the limit.

"We're simply not going to wake up on November 4 worried about one state," Plouffe told a press briefing at Democratic Party headquarters, adamant that this election would be unlike the knife-edge contests of 2000 and 2004.

"We have a lot of different ways to get to 270," he said, referring to the magic number of electoral votes needed for victory in the election.

In 2000, Florida was the unforgettable battleground that handed victory to George W. Bush after much legal wrangling. In 2004, Bush won re-election when Ohio, by a wafer-thin margin, went against Democrat John Kerry.

Plouffe said Obama's "first strategic goal" was to retain Kerry's states. Of those, McCain scents opportunity among the white working-class voters of Michigan and Pennsylvania, and in independent-minded New Hampshire.

But in turn, Obama is intent on flipping Republican red states that have not voted for a Democrat in years, including Virginia, Colorado, Missouri and Iowa.

Two polls in recent days have given Obama a double-digit margin over McCain among registered voters nationwide, although these are still early days in the general election campaign.

A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey Tuesday said that in a head-to-head contest, Obama had 49 percent support against 37 percent for McCain. Newsweek last Friday had Obama ahead of McCain by 51 percent to 36.

But as Plouffe noted, the general election will be fought state by state and not on an imaginary national battlefield -- just like Obama's primary campaign that saw off the dogged challenge of Hillary Clinton.

Much of Obama's yawning lead comes on the back of Clinton supporters rallying behind the Democrats' new champion after the bruising nominating epic.

What interests the campaign brains such as Plouffe and Obama strategist David Axelrod are surveys in key states, levels of enthusiasm for the election contenders, and the extent of their grassroots organizations.

On those metrics, McCain trails Obama, who has become the first candidate since the Watergate scandal to reject public financing for his campaign, so reversing his vow to work with the Republican to preserve the system.

With a three-to-one fundraising advantage over McCain, Obama will be free to pile up advertising and get-out-the-vote operations in far more states than Kerry could ever compete in.

The Democrat is now airing his first general election ad, a patriotic ode called "Country I Love," in 18 states including Republican bastions such as Alaska, Montana and North Dakota that Plouffe says will be in play in November.

But beyond costly advertising, the Obama campaign is also taking a leaf from Bush's book to mobilize local supporters -- a "persuasion army," in Plouffe's words -- who can knock on doors and spread the word among friends and family.

That is where levels of motivation become crucial. The LA Times poll found that among voters who plan to vote for McCain, more than half were "not enthusiastic" about the Republican.

"McCain is not capturing the full extent of the conservative base the way President Bush did in 2000 and 2004," said Susan Pinkus, director of the LA Times poll.

"Meanwhile, Obama is doing well among a broad range of voters. He's running ahead among women, black voters and other minorities. He's running roughly even among white voters and independents."

The recent polls have given Bush record-low approval ratings, and found far more voters identifying themselves as Democratic instead of Republican, which could portend the Democrats tightening their grip on Congress in November.

But historically, voters have liked one party in the White House and another in charge of Congress. Therein lies hope for McCain and his promise of assured leadership in troubled times.

Air Force Nuclear Security Lacking

US says its nuclear arsenal in Europe is poorly guarded

• Air force finds inadequate security at most bases
• Leaked report suggests withdrawing some bombs
  

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian, Thursday June 26, 2008

The leaked Nuke document here

Most American bases in Europe where nuclear weapons are stored have inadequate security, a secret internal US air force review has found.

The report, which was ordered after the US air force lost track of six nuclear cruise missiles last August, found that "support buildings, fencing, lighting and security systems" were in need of repair.

In some cases, it was found that conscripts with less than nine-months experience were being used to guard the nuclear weapons. Elsewhere private security guards were used to protect the bombs.

The report recommends that the US nuclear arsenal in Europe be consolidated to "reduce vulnerabilities at overseas locations". That would involve the withdrawal of significant numbers of US nuclear weapons from Europe.

The US air force does not publicise details of its nuclear arsenal, but it is believed that it has up to 350 bombs in seven bases, including up to 110 B61 bombs at Lakenheath in Suffolk.

It is not clear whether Lakenheath is one of the bases that fall short of Pentagon security standards, but the report states that "most sites require significant additional resources to meet [US department of defence] requirements."

The current stockpile in Europe is only a fraction of its cold war size. Analysts say the residual arsenal, consisting of free-fall bombs rather than missiles, is of little military significance in the 21st century.

"They fulfil no military function. They are a political symbol for Nato," said Paul Ingram, of the British American Security Information Council. "Withdrawing them from Europe would be the logical next step in nuclear disarmament."

The classified US report, entitled Air Force Blue Ribbon Review of Nuclear Weapons Policies and Procedures, was circulated internally in February. But the Federation of American Scientists, an independent watchdog group, obtained a leaked copy this month and has published it on its website (fas.org).

Hans Kristensen, an FAS nuclear specialist, wrote: "The main implication of the ... report is that the nuclear weapons deployment in Europe is, and has been for the past decade, a security risk ... This contradicts Nato's frequent public assurances about the safe conditions of the widespread deployment in Europe."

The leaked review has triggered a political storm in Germany, where the Social Democrats, a partner in the governing coalition, this week called for the removal of all nuclear weapons from the country as a result of the findings. But the Christian Democratic Union, of Chancellor Angela Merkel, has argued against making any quick decisions, saying that the weapons remain a factor in Germany's defence.

The air force review was triggered by an incident in August last year when six cruise missiles with nuclear warheads were flown across the US, from North Dakota to Louisiana, by mistake. The B-52 bomber that took them was supposed to have taken unarmed cruise missiles. The warheads sat unguarded for 30 hours before their absence was noticed.

As a result of the inquiry, the US air force chief of staff and the air force secretary resigned earlier this month.

As well as unearthing shortcomings in security in Europe, the review found the equipment used to transport nuclear weapons was aging, there were "potential vulnerabilities" in the convoys used to move them, and "stubby pencil" note-keeping was used to keep track of them.

Step 1 Talk about raising Interest Rates

Fed talking tough on the threat of inflation
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
1 HOUR AGO

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are updating Teddy Roosevelt's admonition to speak softly and carry a big stick. The Fed policymakers are starting to raise their voices while brandishing the stick even though they don't appear ready to use it.

When the Fed concludes a two-day meeting on Wednesday, it is widely expected that the central bank will express more concerns about inflation and in that way signal that rate increases could be on the way.

However, at the same time, private economists are widely in agreement that the Fed will not actually start raising interest rates, given how weak the economy is at the moment.

"The Fed is caught between a rock and a hard place," said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University. "The economy seems to be slipping into a recession at the same time that inflation is getting worse."

I made my prediction here.

"You're gonna miss me when I'm gone."

Musharraf tried to tell us, "You're gonna miss me when I'm gone."

The New York Times
June 24, 2008
Leadership Void Seen in Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is in a leaderless drift four months after elections, according to Western diplomats and military officials, Pakistani politicians and Afghan officials who are increasingly worried that no one is really in charge.

The sense of drift is the subject of almost every columnist in the English-language press in Pakistan, and anxiety over the lack of leadership and the weakness of the civilian government now infuses conversations with analysts, diplomats and Pakistani government officials.

The problem is most acute, they say, when it comes to dealing with militants in the tribal areas that have become home to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Although the political parties and the military all seek a breather from the suicide bombings and nascent insurgency that have roiled Pakistan in recent years, there are fundamental disagreements over the problem of militancy that they have not begun to address, Pakistani politicians and Western diplomats say.

The confusion is allowing the militants to consolidate their sanctuaries while spreading their tentacles all along the border area, military officials and diplomats warn. It has also complicated policy for the Bush administration, which leaned heavily on one man, President Pervez Musharraf, to streamline its antiterrorism efforts in Pakistan.

If anyone is in charge of security policy in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, Pakistani politicians and Western diplomats say, that remains the military and the country’s premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, which operate with little real oversight.

While the newly elected civilian government has been criticized for dealing with the militants, it is the military that is brokering cease-fires and prisoner exchanges with minimum consultation with the government, politicians from the government coalition, diplomats and analysts said.

Politicians in both the provincial and central governments complain they are excluded from the negotiations and did not even know of a secret deal struck in February, before the elections.

“You see a lack of a coordinated strategy between the federal level and provincial level, and that includes the ISI and the military, who are clear players,” said one Western diplomat with knowledge of the tribal regions, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. “You see it even on principles of negotiation and combined strategy.”

One newspaper, the weekly Friday Times, satirized the situation with a front-page cartoon showing the country’s main political players riding in a plane, all issuing different instructions.

Since coming to power in February, the fragile coalition government, run by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, has been engrossed in internal wrangling over removing President Musharraf.

The coalition is barely functioning after half its ministers left the cabinet in May in a dispute over whether to reinstate 60 high court judges dismissed by Mr. Musharraf last year.

For now it is just accepting the military’s decisions regarding the militants, said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general who is now a political analyst. He characterized the country as suffering from “institutional paralysis and a dysfunctional government, signs of which are showing already.”

The American commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, also described the government as “dysfunctional” just before leaving his post earlier this month.

“I have a feeling that no one is in charge and that is why the militants are taking advantage,” Mr. Masood said. “It is a very dangerous situation because what is happening is the Afghan government is getting desperate.”

The frustration is such that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan threatened this month to send troops into Pakistan to pursue Pakistani militant leaders.

That Pakistan’s government appears broken is not surprising, analysts say. Pakistan’s civilian institutions were atrophied by eight years of military rule, and the country’s major political parties were left rudderless by the absence of their leaders, who lived in exile much of that time. The assassination of Ms. Bhutto in December left her party in even deeper disarray.

The military remains the country’s strongest institution, having ruled Pakistan for about half of the country’s 61 years of independence. But it is proving to be an increasingly fickle and prickly partner for Washington. United States and NATO officials are still struggling to decipher the intentions of the army’s new chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Last fall, at the time of his appointment, American officials spoke approvingly of General Kayani, who seemed well aware of the threat the militants posed to Pakistan, and of the dangers of peace deals that have allowed the militants to tighten their grip in the tribal areas.

But despite at least $12 billion in aid to Pakistan from Washington for the fight against the militants since 2001, General Kayani has recently shown a reluctance to use the military for counterinsurgency operations, suggesting that the task be left to the much weaker tribal force, the Frontier Corps. He has encouraged the civilian government to take the lead.

Part of the confusion stems from the shift in power from military rule, after President Musharraf stepped down as head of the army in December, to the new civilian government, one Western military official said. “Kayani is being careful not to get too far out in front and is trying to determine who is in charge,” he said. “We all are.”

The uneasy balance between civilian and military authority was demonstrated this month when the finance minister, Naveed Qamar, revealed details of the defense budget to Parliament for the first time in 40 years. While Mr. Qamar called it a “historic moment,” the document was a mere two pages.

Parliament, tied up with budget negotiations until next month, has not discussed security or militancy. “We do understand this is the biggest issue, and after the budget session it will have to be addressed,” said Farah Ispahani, a Pakistan Peoples Party legislator.

Meanwhile, the military under General Kayani has quietly pursued its own policies, politicians from the government coalition, diplomats and analysts say. The military and ISI negotiated a little-known truce with the tribes and militants of North Waziristan just days before the Feb. 18 elections, a senior government official in Peshawar confirmed.

The deal was so secretive that few in the government know its contents even today. “The civilian government is in the back seat, or not even in the back seat,” said the Western diplomat, who did not want to be identified because of the critical nature of the remarks. The military also began negotiations with the most powerful of the Taliban commanders, Baitullah Mehsud, in January, just weeks after the government accused him of masterminding Ms. Bhutto’s assassination.

An official agreement with the Mehsud tribe has not been completed, but the military has already pulled back from some positions, put in place a cease-fire and exchanged prisoners with the militants.

Western officials are suspicious of the deal. Mr. Mehsud is accused of dispatching scores of suicide bombers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the agreement initially included no prohibition on cross-border attacks.

Only after strong pressure from the United States and other allies did the military insert such a clause this month, according to a senior official close to the negotiations. In the meantime, cross-border attacks increased by 50 percent in May, NATO officials in Afghanistan say.

The provincial government in the North-West Frontier Province has also expressed its reservations about the deal. Officials from the Awami National Party, a Pashtun nationalist party that leads the government in the province and which is also part of the national coalition, complained that they have not been included in the military’s decisions.

“Our main demand is that we should be included in negotiations,” said Wajid Ali Khan, a party official. “We don’t know with whom they are talking.”

Moreover, the central government’s point man for counterterrorism, the acting interior minister, Rehman Malik, has appeared to have an uneven grasp of developments.

This month he announced in Parliament that the peace deal with militants in the Swat Valley, just outside the tribal areas, had been scrapped. But he retracted the statement the next day, after the provincial government insisted the deal was still on.

Officials of the Awami National Party have complained that his comments undermined their negotiating position. Afrasiab Khattak, a senior official of the party, and other party officials are confident they can make the peace deals in their province work. But few believe that the deals brokered by the military in the tribal regions will last more than a few months, including military officials themselves, senior government officials in Peshawar say.

More fighting and violence is almost certainly on the horizon. What the plan will be then, no one seems to know.

I am struck by how similar Pakistan and Mexico are. They both have weak police forces ill-equipped to handle well equipped thugs operating in friendly havens. The bad guys are so entrenched that they run police through a hamburger grinder. At some point, the military is required and if the bad guys are well-financed and equipped and have been unimpeded for years, the military could be overmatched.

When one side has no problem detaching hands or heads, there are no Geneva conventions which apply. The problem is that no one quite knows how to approach the situations we are seeing develop around the world. At one time, the necessary amount of brute force could be applied, the bodies buried and the rest would be history. No longer, though. With the proliferation of NGO's the days of simple solutions are over. Nowadays, COIN is the coin of the realm. For better or worse, governments and militaries better learn it. Strict written policies and Codes of Conduct must be written and strictly adhered to for practical as well as self-preservation issues lest one find him or herself hauled before a court or a government body.

Mexico has its hands full and for the most part, so far, the killing is inter-gang. Pakistan is in a vacuum, any bets as to who or what steps into that vacuum?

It may take some time for the world to figure out that it can't lawyer its way out this mess.

God Bless George Bush - (Bobal)

Perfect Pitch

The Bush Paradox


By DAVID BROOKS NY Times
June 24, 2008

Let’s go back and consider how the world looked in the winter of 2006-2007. Iraq was in free fall, with horrific massacres and ethnic cleansing that sent a steady stream of bad news across the world media. The American public delivered a stunning electoral judgment against the Iraq war, the Republican Party and President Bush.

Expert and elite opinion swung behind the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for handing more of the problems off to the Iraqi military and wooing Iran and Syria. Republicans on Capitol Hill were quietly contemptuous of the president while Democrats were loudly so.

Democratic leaders like Senator Harry Reid considered the war lost. Barack Obama called for a U.S. withdrawal starting in the spring of 2007, while Senator Reid offered legislation calling for a complete U.S. pullback by March 2008.

The arguments floating around the op-ed pages and seminar rooms were overwhelmingly against the idea of a surge — a mere 20,000 additional troops would not make a difference. The U.S. presence provoked violence, rather than diminishing it. The more the U.S. did, the less the Iraqis would step up to do. Iraq was in the middle of a civil war, and it was insanity to put American troops in the middle of it.

When President Bush consulted his own generals, the story was much the same. Almost every top general, including Abizaid, Schoomaker and Casey, were against the surge. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was against it, according to recent reports. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki called for a smaller U.S. presence, not a bigger one.

In these circumstances, it’s amazing that George Bush decided on the surge. And looking back, one thing is clear: Every personal trait that led Bush to make a hash of the first years of the war led him to make a successful decision when it came to this crucial call.

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals.

In fact, when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them. During that period in 2006 and 2007, Bush stiffed the brass and sided with a band of dissidents: military officers like David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and outside strategists like Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and Jack Keane, a retired general.

Bush is also a secretive man who listens too much to Dick Cheney. Well, the uncomfortable fact is that Cheney played an essential role in promoting the surge. Many of the people who are dubbed bad guys actually got this one right.

The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

Life is complicated. The reason we have democracy is that no one side is right all the time. The only people who are dangerous are those who can’t admit, even to themselves, that obvious fact.

Musharraf may not be the only one in trouble

While looking for some news story which would explain the sudden pessimism over Afghanistan, I found something pretty darn outrageous.

Put oil firm chiefs on trial, says leading climate change scientist

· Testimony to US Congress will also criticise lobbyists
· 'Revolutionary' policies needed to tackle crisis

www.guardian.co.uk

* Ed Pilkington in New York
* The Guardian,
* Monday June 23, 2008

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."

He is also considering personally targeting members of Congress who have a poor track record on climate change in the coming November elections. He will campaign to have several of them unseated. Hansen's speech to Congress on June 23 1988 is seen as a seminal moment in bringing the threat of global warming to the public's attention. At a time when most scientists were still hesitant to speak out, he said the evidence of the greenhouse gas effect was 99% certain, adding "it is time to stop waffling".

He will tell the House select committee on energy independence and global warming this afternoon that he is now 99% certain that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has already risen beyond the safe level.

The current concentration is 385 parts per million and is rising by 2ppm a year. Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, says 2009 will be a crucial year, with a new US president and talks on how to follow the Kyoto agreement.

He wants to see a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, coupled with the creation of a huge grid of low-loss electric power lines buried under ground and spread across America, in order to give wind and solar power a chance of competing. "The new US president would have to take the initiative analogous to Kennedy's decision to go to the moon."

His sharpest words are reserved for the special interests he blames for public confusion about the nature of the global warming threat. "The problem is not political will, it's the alligator shoes - the lobbyists. It's the fact that money talks in Washington, and that democracy is not working the way it's intended to work."

A group seeking to increase pressure on international leaders is launching a campaign today called 350.org. It is taking out full-page adverts in papers such as the New York Times and the Swedish Falukuriren calling for the target level of CO2 to be lowered to 350ppm. The advert has been backed by 150 signatories, including Hansen.

I told you... Pogroms....

Can We Change Afghanistan?

On his way to Jeffersonian Democracy.

I have argued against the long war concept for pragmatic reasons. Simply stated and IMO, the US temperament and political system will not sustain a long war. It has never happened. We pretend in the US that diversity and multi-culturism is a sign of strength. In countries such as Afghanistan, they know that tribalism means survival. The tribes in Afghansitan barely understand the concept of nationalism. For us to believe that we can convert them to our beliefs is hubris, dangerously unhinged.

The Democrats (and McCain) are arguing that Afghanistan is the war we should be focused on. They do not give a credible explanation for a reasonable achievable outcome. They are also not being challenged. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda should have been punished after 911. The punishment should have been violent, ugly and short. It should have been cold blooded revenge, nothing more, nothing less.

______________________________

From The Sunday Times
Simon Jenkins
June 22, 2008

Stop killing the Taliban – they offer the best hope of beating Al-Qaeda

The British expedition to Afghanistan is on the brink of something worse than defeat: a long, low-intensity war from which no government will dare to extricate itself. With the death toll mounting, battle is reportedly joined with the Taliban at the very gates of the second city, Kandahar. There is no justification for ministerial bombast that “we are winning the war, really”.

What is to be done? In 2001 the West waged a punitive retaliatory strike against the hosts of the perpetrators of 9/11. The strike has since followed every law of mission creep, now reduced in London to a great war of despair, in which the cabinet can do nothing but send even more men to their deaths.

In seven years in Afghanistan, America, Britain and their Nato allies have made every mistake in the intervention book. They sent too few troops to assert an emphatic presence. They failed to “hit hard and get out”, as advocated by Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary. They tried to destroy the staple crop, poppies, and then let it go to warlords who now use it to finance suicide bombers, among others.

They allowed a corrupt regime to establish itself in the capital, Kabul, while failing to promote honest administration in the provinces.

They pretended that an international coalition (Nato) would be better than a unitary command (America), which it is not. They killed civilians and alienated tribes with crude air power. Finally, they disobeyed the iron law of postimperial intervention: don’t stay too long. The British ambassador threatens “to stay for 30 years”, rallying every nationalist to the insurgents’ cause.

The catalogue of western folly in Afghanistan is breathtaking.

Britain went into Helmand two years ago on the basis of gung-ho, and gung-ho still censors public debate. Yet behind the scenes all is despair. A meeting of Afghan observers in London last week, at the launch of James Fergusson’s book on the errors of Helmand, A Million Bullets, was an echo chamber of gloom.

All hope was buried in a cascade of hypotheticals. Victory would be at hand “if only” the Afghan army were better, if the poppy crop were suppressed, the Pakistan border sealed, the Taliban leadership assassinated, corruption eradicated, hearts and minds won over. None of this is going to happen. The generals know it but the politicians dare not admit it.

Those who still support the “good” Afghan war reply to any criticism by attempting to foreclose debate. They assert that we cannot be seen to surrender to the Taliban and we have gone in so far and must “finish the job”.

This is policy in denial. Nothing will improve without the support of the Afghan government, yet that support is waning by the month. Nothing will improve without the commitment of Pakistan. Yet two weeks ago Nato bombed Pakistani troops inside their own country, losing what lingering sympathy there is for America in an enraged Islamabad. Whoever ordered the attack ought to be court-martialled, except it was probably a computer.

We forget that the objective of the Afghanistan incursion was not to build a new and democratic Afghanistan. It was to punish the Taliban for harbouring Osama Bin Laden and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for Al-Qaeda training camps. The former objective was achieved on day one; the latter would never be achieved by military occupation.

A moment’s thought would show that any invasion that replaced the Taliban with a western puppet in Kabul would merely restore the Taliban as champions of Afghan sovereignty. The Americans sponsored them to be just such a puppet in the 1980s, funding some 60,000 foreign mercenaries to join them against the Russians. Intervention reaps what it sows.

Two things were known about the Taliban at the time and they are probably still true. First, under outside pressure their leaders were moving from the manic extremism of their “student” origins, even responding to demands to curb the poppy harvest. The present Nato policy of killing the older leaders and thus leaving young hotheads in charge is daft.

Second, the Pashtun Taliban are not natural friends of the Arab Al-Qaeda, despite Bin Laden being given sanctuary by the Taliban’s Mullah Omar. Bin Laden helped the Taliban by murdering Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Tajik leader, but that put a Tajik price on his head, which no man wants. Then the 9/11 coup made the Taliban pariahs even within the region.

I have yet to find reason to doubt the Afghan experts who predicted in the aftermath of 9/11 that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had become “unwelcome guests” in 2001 and that his days in Afghanistan, and probably on earth, were numbered.

Seven recent books on relations between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban discussed in the current edition of The New York Review of Books scream one policy message: do not drive Al-Qaeda, set on crazy world domination, into the arms of the Taliban, set only on Pashtun nationalism. Do everything to separate them. Western strategy has done the precise opposite.

The only policy that meets the original objective is one that supports anyone in the insurgent areas with sufficient authority to deny sanctuary to international terrorists. There is now plainly no way that Nato can do this.

There is much murmuring among realists that “we” should talk to the Taliban, as if we were Her Majesty’s Government dealing with the IRA. The parallel is absurd. American special forces and Anglo-Canadian units in Afghanistan are, as they jokingly admit, rather like Taliban mercenaries, who snatch and hold towns for a while but are unable to command local loyalty. They cannot hope to garrison every settlement.

Hamid Karzai, the outgoing Afghan president, is the only one who can talk. He is no fool and has been attempting to do what Kabul rulers have always done: cut deals with whichever provincial commanders appear to control territory and can forge alliances with local Taliban or whoever. That may not be the grand strategy beloved of western think tanks, but it is the realpolitik of Afghanistan.

The same realpolitik applies to the other player in the game, Pakistan, whose civilian rulers are trying to contain an army of doubtful loyalty and seek peace in tribal areas way beyond their control. Here Al-Qaeda has again forged a lethal alliance with the Taliban, drawing on an inexhaustible supply of young militants from Pakistan and abroad, as in the 1980s. The best policy would be to hurl money at Pakistan’s impoverished non-madrasah schools, rather than starve them and pour 80% of aid into a corrupt Pakistan army.

The Taliban’s chief objective is not world domination but a share of power in Afghanistan. While they cannot defeat western troops, they can defeat Nato’s war aim by continuing to build on their marriage of convenience with Al-Qaeda, which supplies them with a devastating arsenal of suicide bombers.

What is sure is that Al-Qaeda, as a (grossly overrated) “threat to the West”, will not be suppressed without Taliban cooperation. This means reversing a policy that naively equates “defeating” the Taliban with “winning” the war on terror. Fighting in Afghanistan is as senseless as trying to suppress the poppy crop. It just costs lives and money.

While it is implausible for the West to withdraw from Kabul at present, the attempt to establish military control over provincial Afghanistan is merely jeopardising the war aim. Security within the country now depends on fashioning the patchwork of alliances sought, however corruptly, by Karzai. It means dealing with reality, not trying to change it with guns and bombs.

It therefore makes sense to withdraw soldiers from the provinces and forget “nation-building” in the hope that Karzai can exert some leverage over local commanders to separate the Taliban from the Al-Qaeda cells in Pakistan. This is a race against the most appalling strategic catastrophe, a political collapse in Pakistan that may open a new and horrific front involving Al-Qaeda.

It is madness to prolong an Afghan war that can only undermine the most unstable nuclear power in the world, Pakistan. The war is visiting misery on millions and destroying western interests across central Asia. As for the claim made in parliament last week that the war is about safety on Britain’s streets, that is ludicrous.

Ruled by Fools

Are Democrats foolishly playing a losing hand? This week a Dem talking point against US oil exploration was that the oil companies are exploring only a fraction of the existing lease areas in the Gulf of Mexico. To the 70% of Americans in favor of expanded drilling, this may not matter. They want relief. But for now, the Democrats continue to frame the issue in partisan terms:

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando, said speculators have been driving up the price of oil internationally — and that the industry has explored only 8 million of the 39 million Gulf acres it already has under lease. He said the Bush administration and the oil industry are using gas prices to hoodwink the public.

"Clearly, Americans are being gouged," said Nelson. "But we cannot allow the administration to take advantage of the situation to give away the store before the president leaves office."

Democrats seem to be united in their opposition to increasing US domestic oil production. Instead they once again accuse Republicans of being in bed with big business. Their solution is to impose more taxes on the oil companies for their "windfall profits" but they also agree that speculators have been contributing to the spiraling oil prices.

Saudi king blames oil prices on speculators, taxes

King Abdullah has blamed soaring oil prices on speculators, high fuel taxes in consuming countries and increased consumption in developing countries.

Abdullah said the kingdom is ready to meet any "additional needs in the future." But he did not specifically say Saudi Arabia would increase oil production beyond the 9.7 million barrels a day production it has already announced.

The king suggested the creation of an energy initiative to help poor countries confront the high cost of fuel.

The U.S. and other Western nations have put increasing pressure on Saudi Arabia to increase production, saying insufficient oil production has not kept pace with growing demand.

Goldman Sachs has been the golden boy of Wall Street as it continues, quarter after quarter, to show a profit even as lesser firms such as Bear-Stearns disappear altogether. Although their reported first quarter profits were less than a year ago, they are still in the black in large part due to their to speculation in the oil futures.

A convergence of circumstances and short-sighted policies has resulted in a perfect storm which will require more cooperation and less partisan politics. Democrats continue to blame the money grubbing capitalists but eventually they will have to face the political realities. As consumers pay higher prices at the pump, those who offer no relief will pay higher prices at the polls. Democrats are accusing politicians like McCain and Florida governor Charlie Crist of flip-flopping on the drilling issue but something tells me it won't be long before we see more and more poll reading, finger in-the-wind Democrats change their tunes. When it comes to drilling, it's a no brainer; either get on board or commit political suicide.

"Can America see through a racial charlatan?"

"They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

Obama Drops Pre-Emptive Race Bomb
Rick Moran American Thinker

The 2008 Presidential race finally got underway yesterday as Barack Obama used his race to try and innoculate himself against criticism:

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said on Friday he expects Republicans to highlight the fact that he is black as part of an effort to make voters afraid of him.

."It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy," Obama told a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. "We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid.

"They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?"

He said he was also set for Republicans to say "he's got a feisty wife," in trying to attack his wife Michelle.

We expected it, of course. It is his greatest political weapon and he will use it again and again, shamelessly accusing the GOP of bringing up his race (even, as this proves, when they don't) in order to deflect criticism away from he and his wife for anything they say or any associations in their past.

The press will let him get away with it because they are terrified of being accused of racism themselves.

Let me just say to those doubters who may believe otherwise, take a walk through the comments section of this blog and others. See how many Obama advocates simply dismiss any opposition to their candidate as "racism." It is this simple minded sophistry that the candidate will use in order to quiet opposition to his programs once he is elected as well.

It has been asked "Is America ready for a black president?" Maybe a more relevant question would be "Can America see through a racial charlatan who will shamlessly use the color of his skin to avoid debating the tough issues and call his opponents "racists" for disagreeing with him?

Placing Things in Perspective

Taliban announce suicide bombers have entered Kandahar .

The suicide bombing tactic eventually proved unsuccessful for AQ in Iraq. The tactic, aped by the Taliban in Afghansistan, seems to be having a similar affect if this report by Aljazeera is indicative. An operation by local and international troops appears to have cleared Taliban fighters from the outskirts of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city.

The Afghan National Army said more than 1,000 troops, aided by Nato soldiers and helicopter gunships, has driven insurgents out of Arghandaby. The Afghan defence ministry reports 56 rebels had been killed.

"We need a real Chocolate City...some folks need to get used to this" - Spike Lee

Spike Lee backs Obama
Fri Jun 20, 2008 8:08pm B
By Randall Mikkelsen

SILVER SPRING, Maryland (Reuters) - Director Spike Lee, whose movies often cast a sharp eye on U.S. racial politics, predicted a presidential victory for black Democrat Barack Obama that would mark a "new day" for the United States.

"It's going to be before Obama, 'B.B.,' and after Obama -- 'A.B.' -- and some folks need to get used to this," Lee said. "And I'm going to be at the inauguration -- getting my hotel reservation now."

The director of films including "Do The Right Thing," and "Malcolm X," spoke on Thursday evening at the Silverdocs film festival outside Washington. The festival is one of the major showcases for nonfiction films.

Silverdocs honoured Lee for his documentaries including "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," about Hurricane Katrina, and the Oscar-nominated "4 Little Girls," about the fatal 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, a milestone in the civil rights movement.

Lee said that like Katrina in 2005, the levee breaches now flooding the Upper Midwest were a sign of misplaced priorities by the national government. "That's going to change, though," he said. "We need a real Chocolate City," an apparent reference to the prospect of the United States under Obama, who would be the first U.S. black president if elected in November.

The term "Chocolate City" has been used affectionately by African-Americans to refer to Washington and other predominantly black cities, and was the title of a 1975 album by the funk band Parliament. Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was criticized for racial divisiveness after Katrina for urging residents to rebuild a "chocolate New Orleans."

Lee later explicitly endorsed Obama, as someone who would set the right course. "It's not an if ... he changes the world. He changes how the world looks at the United States," Lee said.

It would be good for artists, too, who he said reflect the atmosphere around them. "It's going to be a new day. Not just a new day, a better day."

(more here )

It may take some getting used to.

Did The Messiah Fly Too Close to the Sun?

McCain can beat Obama if he goes at him and continuingly keeps him on the defensive exposing him for what he really is, another ordinary very ambitious politician who will do anything, say anything and stage anything to get elected.

That will not budge the hard core Left who does not care. They share the same lust for power in their quest to complete their elitist world view.

It could help with a crucial three or four percent who actually believe in the Obama.

Here's hoping my guy has the steel teeth.

______________________

Obama’s Decision Threatens Public Financing System

By LESLIE WAYNE
Published: June 20, 2008

From the moment that the public financing system was created in the wake of the Watergate crisis, it was viewed as an imperfect way to rid politics of the excesses of special-interest money.

But now, with the decision by Senator Barack Obama to become the first presidential candidate to forgo public money, the system is facing the most critical threat to its survival.

At various times in its three-decade life, the public financing system has been declared close to its demise. Yet, every four years, it has continued to survive, with all presidential candidates since the system began in 1976 accepting public money to run their general election campaigns — and the spending limitations that come with it.

Yet, while candidates have accepted these limitations, large sums of special-interest money have continued to enter politics through inventive loopholes used by major contributors to get around the law’s restrictions.

Over the years, these loopholes have come in different names and different forms. Back in the 1990s, there was “soft money,” a flood of unlimited and unrestricted donations given to party committees, leading to influence-peddling excesses that were laid bare in a Clinton-era Senate investigation.

That type of giving was outlawed, and a few years later came the rise of “527 money,” named for a section of the tax code that regulates independent spending.

In recent years have come the “bundlers,” or wealthy individuals who gather donations from other rich donors. They are the Rangers and Pioneers and other titled donors that are the descendants of the Republican Team 100 fund-raising juggernaut of the first President Bush.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to opt out of public financing — along with the ability of the Internet to let candidates raise large sums of money from small donors — may do more to shatter the system than all of the loopholes it has spawned.

As structured, each presidential candidate stands to receive $84 million in public money. This money is gained from the $3 check-off on federal taxpayer returns, which the major party candidates can use to run a general presidential campaign from the end of each party’s convention to the November election.

Each political party can also raise and spend money to support its candidate. Donors can give up to $28,500 to party committees, as well as often-unlimited amounts to 527s, nonprofits and a bevy of other committees that exist outside the formal party structure, to influence the election.

Yet even candidates with as many wealthy connections as George W. Bush or who are as adept at fund-raising as Bill Clinton took public money for their general presidential campaigns. Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, has said he would remain committed to the public finance system, but he may well be the last major candidate to do so.

“Obama’s decision may not be the death knell of public financing, but it certainly is close to it,” said Anthony J. Corrado Jr., a campaign finance expert and professor of government at Colby College. “Public financing has become a system of last resort, rather than the jewel of the campaign finance system. Rather than being a source of funds, candidates accept public money kicking and screaming.”

Even the Supreme Court, in a 2003 decision upholding the McCain-Feingold measure that banned soft money from politics, recognized how difficult it is to shut off the spigot of special interest money in politics. “Money, like water, will always find an outlet,” the court wrote.

These days the outlet is the Internet, the tool that enabled Mr. Obama to break his promise that he would accept public funds.

But the use of the Internet to raise campaign money at least plays into the spirit of campaign finance reform, some analysts said, and possibly does more to rein in the influence of big donors and special interests than 30 years of restrictions imposed by federal law.

While collecting contributions through the click of a button has contributed to the record-breaking sums of money raised this election — for the Democratic primaries alone, Mr. Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton raised around $500 million — it has also made it easier for average Americans to participate in the financial end of politics.

Reformers have long said the current system forces candidates to spend a disproportionate amount of time raising money and courting the wealthy and others with special interests who can easily raise it.

But by showing that he could raise large sums from small donors — 47 percent of the $263 million Mr. Obama received has come in amounts of $200 or less — Mr. Obama has made the argument that he has achieved online what the public finance system has been unable to do. And he has been freed from the necessity of spending countless hours fund-raising.

“The reality is that the amount of money that comes from the government is not enough to run a modern presidential campaign,” said Larry Makinson, a consultant to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington group that tracks campaign donations. “The amount Obama has raised from small contributors has been unprecedented. There has never been an infusion of small dollar donors like this.

“And,” Mr. Makinson said, “he got there by snubbing the campaign finance system.”

Hooked

HE WAS A VERY GOOD BOY.

By Nick Allen Telegraph
Last Updated: 10:39AM BST 20/06/2008

Radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza lost his High Court battle today against extradition to the United States.

Two judges ruled that the decision to extradite Hamza was "unassailable" and he should be sent to the US where he faces terrorism related charges.

Egyptian-born Hamza, 51, from west London, who is fitted with hooks on both partially-amputated arms, is serving a seven-year jail term in the UK for stirring up racial hatred and inciting followers to murder non-believers.

The US authorities want him to stand trial there for allegedly attempting to set up an al-Qa'eda training camp in Oregon.

He could face a total of 11 terrorism charges in the US including sending money and recruits to assist al-Qa'eda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

At the High Court in London today Sir Igor Judge and Mr Justice Sullivan dismissed his appeal against extradition.

But they gave Hamza's lawyers 14 days to apply for leave to launch a final appeal to the House of Lords.

His lawyers had argued extradition is unlawful because evidence gained by torture is being used against him and that, if there is to be any further trial, it should take place in London.

They also contended that it would be "unjust and oppressive" to extradite Hamza because of the passage of time since the alleged offences and it would breach his human rights.

London's City of Westminster Magistrates Court had previously ruled that he could be extradited and in February this year Home Secretary Jacqui Smith gave her approval.

The July 7 London bombers were inspired by Hamza's sermons and the would-be bombers of July 21 were regular worshippers at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London where he was formerly the imam. In 2003 he was dismissed from his position there after making inflammatory speeches.

British Justice Bars Martha Stewart from UK and Frees an Al Qaeda Suspect.

Learned men all.

Martha Stewart refused entry to the UK
By Christopher Hope Home Affairs Editor and Alex Spillius in Washington

20/06/2008

Martha Stewart has been refused a visa to Britain because of her criminal convictions for obstructing justice, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

The UK Border Agency said it would not comment on individual cases. A spokesman added: "We continue to oppose the entry to the UK of individuals where we believe their presence in the United Kingdom is not conducive to the public good or where they have been found guilty of serious criminal offences abroad. The Telegraph

Al Qaeda suspect freed on strict bail
Wed Jun 18, 2008 Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - A Jordanian who defeated a government attempt to deport him as a "significant international terrorist" was freed from prison on bail on Tuesday but confined to his home for 22 hours a day.

Omar Othman, known as Abu Qatada, was among the highest profile terrorism suspects in a British jail.

A special tribunal dealing with foreign terrorism suspects published a seven-page document setting stringent conditions for his release.

He is forbidden from using any mobile telephone or computer, or connecting in any way to the Internet, and may leave home only between 10 and 11 a.m. and 2 and 3 p.m.

The document sets out a list of individuals that he may not contact or receive visits from -- headed by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Othman won a legal battle against being deported to Jordan when the Court of Appeal ruled in April he would not face a fair trial at home.

Whit's Crystal Ball

Yes, there! I see something. It's becoming clearer.... there it is, I see it! I see the future!

I hear more talk about inflation. I see very serious men at a business meeting. Oh, one of them is Ben Bernanke. It must be a Fed meeting... Yes that's exactly what it is. Wait, it must be a press conference or an interview, Bernanke is announcing that the Feds are holding interest rates steady in light of growing inflationary warnings. He warns that they may have to raise the rates.

Now I am seeing something else. What is happening? Why it's the economy roaring back to life!

___________________________

Counter intuitively, this is exactly what the market needs. Real estate is a buyer's market but the buyers have been hesitant to act. Faced with rising interest rates, many will. Real estate sales will pick up steadily as buyers move to lock-in more favorable rates. The banks, going back to more rigorous underwriting standards will be happy to make loans at the higher rates.

More good news is that even as the real estate market makes its comeback, the knock-on effect of higher rates will be a strengthening dollar and as the dollar rises, oil prices will fall. As oil falls, there will be no future in oil futures. Foreign countries like India, Malaysia, Iran and China have recently begun weaning their populations from government fuel subsidies and are not likely to go down that road again. More downward pressure on oil as third world demand weakens.

Remember, you first heard it from whit the soothsayer. For a private investment consultation call 555.......

"Dancing in the Dark" - Death of a Lady

Cyd Charisse

CYD CHARISSE AND THE MYSTERY OF DANCERS

By Scott Eyman | Wednesday, June 18, 2008, Culture Club

I interviewed Cyd Charisse in 2002, when I was writing my biography of Louis B. Mayer. A producer who had worked at MGM liked me and my questions, and on the spur of the moment decided to call up Charisse and tell her she really should talk to this nice young man - “young” being a loose term when used by octogenarians. She promptly scheduled the interview for the next day.

I have interviewed everybody from John Wayne on down, but I was frankly nervous about interviewing Cyd Charisse, simply because I’d always thought she was was - how to put this delicately? - smokin’ hot. Put it another way: if watching Cyd Charisse in “The Band Wagon” doesn’t turn you on, it’s time for the monastery.

We met in her Wilshire Boulevard condo. Because she had been raised at MGM, she dressed for an interview as if it were a formal occasion. The dress was superb, her makeup faultless. She still had her dancer’s body, was still beautiful, although there was a cast in her eye that hadn’t been there decades earlier.

Once, a long time before, she had been a little girl from Amarillo, Texas, but she had left that behind. She was drily funny about the business, affectionate about “Mr. Mayer” and the entire MGM experience, loved Eugene Loring, her favorite choreographer.

But she was very restrained and composed. She only really sprang to animated life when the name of Dore Schary came up. She loathed Schary, felt he had no taste for musicals. The passion that had always animated her elegance was suddenly present in the room.

The transition was an interesting corrollary to her career - in movement she was unparalleled, by far the greatest female dancer in the movies, but as an actress, standing still, she was inhibited and dull. This is why her movie career dribbled away when musicals died, even though she was only in her mid-30s at the time.

She never disappointed me in the movies, and she didn’t disappoint me in person either. I think I need to watch the “Dancing in the Dark” number from “The Band Wagon” right away. Click below and you can, too

Mr. Zebari's Message to Obama: Enemies of the United States -- "would celebrate." a US withdrawal.

Presidential Timbre

The Iraqi foreign minister is going to have to put our chosen one on an OJT program on foreign affairs. It seems that deeply imbedded doctrinaire leftist talking points have clouded Obama's thinking and judgment. This featherweight Afro-centric presidential candidate needs intense scrutiny on many issues, that will not come from the usual media controllers. McCain will have to crank it up a few more notches. I am more and more convinced this guy can be beaten.

____________________________

Iraq's foreign minister has a chat with Barack Obama.


Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Washington Post

SEN. BARACK OBAMA told Iraq's foreign minister this week that he plans to visit the country between now and the presidential election. We think that's a good thing, not because Sen. John McCain has been prodding the candidate to do it but because it will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to refresh his badly outdated plan for Iraq. To do that, the Democrat needs to listen more to dedicated Iraqi leaders like Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister -- who, it seems, didn't hold back during their telephone conversation.

Mr. Obama laid out his current strategy for Iraq in November 2006, shortly before announcing his candidacy for president. At the time, Iraq appeared to be on the verge of a sectarian civilian war, and Mr. Obama was trying to distinguish himself in the Democratic primary race by offering a timetable for withdrawal. Nineteen months later, the situation in Iraq has changed dramatically, with violence down 75 percent from its peak and the Iraqi government and army in control of most of the country. But Mr. Obama has not altered his position: He still proposes withdrawing most U.S. troops according to a fixed timetable, set to the most rapid pace at which commanders have said American forces could be pulled out.

Mr. Zebari, who has served as foreign minister in every Iraqi government since 2003, finds Mr. Obama's proposal worrying. In a meeting with Post editors and reporters Tuesday, he said that after all the pain and sacrifices of the past five years, "we are just turning the corner in Iraq." A precipitous withdrawal, he said, "would create a huge vacuum and undo all the gains and achievements. And the others" -- enemies of the United States -- "would celebrate."

Mr. Zebari said he told Mr. Obama that "Iraq is not an island." In other words, an American withdrawal that destabilized the country would also roil the region around it and embolden U.S. adversaries such as al-Qaeda and Iran. "We have a deadly enemy," Mr. Zebari said. "When he sees that you commit yourself to a certain timetable, he will use this to increase pressure and attacks, to make it look as though he is forcing you out. We have many actors who would love to take advantage of that opportunity." Mr. Zebari says he believes U.S. forces can and should be drawn down. His point is that reductions should be made gradually, as the Iraqi army becomes stronger.

The foreign minister said "my message" to Mr. Obama "was very clear. . . . Really, we are making progress. I hope any actions you will take will not endanger this progress." He said he was reassured by the candidate's response, which caused him to think that Mr. Obama might not differ all that much from Mr. McCain. Mr. Zebari said that in addition to promising a visit, Mr. Obama said that "if there would be a Democratic administration, it will not take any irresponsible, reckless, sudden decisions or action to endanger your gains, your achievements, your stability or security. Whatever decision he will reach will be made through close consultation with the Iraqi government and U.S. military commanders in the field." Certainly, it makes sense to consult with those who, like Mr. Zebari, have put their lives on the line for an Iraq that would be a democratic U.S. ally. Mr. Obama ought to listen carefully to what they are saying.

Osama's Advocates

Obama advisers say bin Laden can appeal to U.S. courts

BILL SAMMON, The Examiner
2008-06-17 19:48:00.0
Current rank: # 1 of 7,589
WASHINGTON -

Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers said Tuesday that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to U.S. civilian courts, a privilege opposed by John McCain.

Responding to questions from The Examiner, Sen. John Kerry and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said bin Laden would benefit from last week's Supreme Court decision giving terrorism suspects habeas corpus, the right to appeal their military detention to civilian courts.

“If he were to be brought back,” Clarke said of bin Laden, “the Supreme Court ruling holds on the right of habeas corpus.”

Kerry, who applauded the Supreme Court ruling, said it will be carried out by whichever candidate wins the presidency.

“The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that they have those rights,” he said. “If John McCain were president, he would have to give them those rights.”

Randy Scheunemann, McCain's senior foreign policy adviser, said those rights should not be extended to bin Laden or the hundreds of terrorism suspects being held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

“The individuals we hold at Guantanamo are very, very dangerous people,” Scheunemann said. “To give them full access to the federal courts and the criminal justice system is fraught with danger, moving forward, and likely to make America less safe, unlike Senator Obama's claim of supporting the decision that it made America safer.”

On Monday, Obama applauded the civilian prosecution of terrorists prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

“In previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center -- we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial,” he told ABC. “They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.”

Obama said President Bush has relied too heavily on military prosecution of terrorists, which has “given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.’”

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Obama wants “to take a step back to the failed policies that treated terrorism solely as a law enforcement matter, rather than a clear and present danger. Barack Obama appears to believe that terrorists should be treated like criminals -- a belief that underscores his fundamental lack of judgment regarding our national security.”

The attack sounded familiar to Kerry, who was the Democratic presidential nominee four years ago.

“This is exactly what they tried to say back in 2004, and the record absolutely contradicts it,” Kerry told The Examiner. “Every Democrat voted to go to war and attack the Taliban and al Qaeda, the people who attacked us. That is not a [legalistic] approach.”

bsammon@dcexaminer.com

SOFA Taking Shape With Iraq.

Hotel Del Ray, San Jose, Costa Rica

The Hotel Del Ray is the single most visited spot in Costa Rica by male American ex-patriots and tourists. It contains the means to most of the pleasures and vice known to man, much of it legal in Costa Rica. The beer is ice cold and the hookers, mostly in their late teens and early twenties, are hot. (Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica for those eighteen and older.) Gambling, Cuban cigars, Omaha steaks and Colombian drugs are all available at the Ray. It is something out of a Graham Greene novel.

A few come to watch and listen. Others come to talk.

In such places, men can be who they are. The combination of the beer and atmosphere is both intoxicating and exhilarating. They laugh, brag and share their stories and experiences. Shame is numbed and character exposed.

Lately, there are more than a few ex-Blackwater mercenaries hanging out and looking for jobs as bodyguards and personal security. They follow the dollar and will work for anyone. Their stories and bravado are presented as the curriculum vitae for their trade. If they are representative of some of the contractors we are sending to Iraq, the US would be wise not to provide such men immunity in the SOFA agreement. They should not be the face of America. 

America should stop the practice and use of these mercenary contractors.

_______________☂_______________

'No immunity' for Iraq contractors

Al-Maliki had said last week that talks with the US on the long-term pact had reached a "dead end" [EPA] Aljazeera

A controversial deal on the long-term US military presence in Iraq will not include immunity for US contractors working in the country, the Iraqi foreign minister has said.

Speaking exclusively to Al Jazeera, Hoshyar Zebari said on Monday that the US had accepted the demand and it would be stated explicitly in the agreement.
"There would be no immunity whatsoever for private contractors because of what we've gone through with them in the past and because of the sensitivities for the Iraqi people," he said.

Zebari said his country was making major progress in finalising the deal by the end of June and the US was showing "great flexibility".

The presence of tens of thousands of foreign private security contractors in Iraq has been heavily criticised, especially after the killing last year of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad by Blackwater, a US company which protects American officials in the country.

Iraqi anger

The US and Iraq are negotiating a new agreement to provide a legal basis for US troops to stay in Iraq after December 31, when their UN mandate expires.

However the Status of Forces Agreement (Sofa) has caused controversy and angry protests in Iraq after media reports said the US was demanding immunity for contractors.

There were also reports - denied by US officials - that the deal provided for the presence of up to 50 permanent military bases in the nation.

Zebari's comments contrast with remarks last week by Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, who said that talks with the US on the new long-term security pact had reached a "dead end" as the US had made demands that "hugely infringe" on Iraq.

However, David Satterfield, the US state department's senior adviser on Iraq, said last week that negotiations on the agreement were on schedule.

No 'offensive actions'

Zebari said the new agreement would also state that Iraq cannot be used for "any offensive actions" against "any" of Iraq's neighbouring countries, in reference to ongoing US tensions with Iran over its nuclear programme.

However, the US would be granted control of Iraqi airspace below about 9,700m, he said.

He added that the deal would not be binding for the next US president following elections in November, and that any new administration would have the right to review or terminate the agreement as it saw fit.

And the Iraqi foreign minister said he had spoken to Barack Obama, the US Democratic presidential candidate, who had assured him that, if elected, he would make "no reckless or drastic" decision to withdraw US troops from Iraq.

"Any decision for a timetable would be made through close consultation," he said.

Parallel Universes

Court Clears Away Bush's Gitmo Smoke
By EUGENE ROBINSON Posted Monday, June 16, 2008, Investors Business Daily

It shouldn't be necessary for the Supreme Court to tell the president that he can't have individuals taken into custody, spirited to a remote prison camp and held indefinitely, with no legal right to argue that they've been unjustly imprisoned — not even on grounds of mistaken identity.

But the president in question, sigh, is George W. Bush, who has taken a chain saw to the rule of law with the same manic gusto he displays in clearing brush at his Texas ranch.
So Thursday, for the third and apparently final time, the high court made clear that the Decider has no authority to trash the foundational principles of American jurisprudence. In ruling 5-4 that foreigners held at Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in federal court, the court cited the Constitution and the centuries-old concept of habeas corpus. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion seems broad enough and definitive enough to end the Kafkaesque farce at Guantanamo once and for all.

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Kennedy wrote.

Again, it's amazing that any president of the U.S. would need to have such a basic concept spelled out for him.

That reference to "extraordinary times" takes care of a specious argument that Bush and his legal minions have consistently tried to make — that when the nation is at war, as it has been since the 9/11 attacks, the president has extraordinary powers that allow him to do, well, basically anything he wants.

The Bush administration also has argued that the Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants" who have no legal rights; that while U.S. citizens detained in the "war on terror" may have some rights, foreigners do not; and that Guantanamo is foreign soil, beyond the reach of U.S. judges. The court had no trouble seeing through all this smoke.

Twice before, the court has ordered Bush to respect the rule of law.

In 2006, after the second ruling in favor of Guantanamo inmates' rights, the administration convinced Congress to pass a law stripping the inmates of any right to file habeas corpus petitions in the federal courts.

Thursday's ruling struck down this law—and since the decision was based on the Constitution, it seemed to eliminate the possibility of new legislation that would let Bush continue his program of arbitrary, indefinite detention without judicial review.

The court also deemed inadequate the kangaroo-court tribunals that are held for Guantanamo inmates in lieu of proper court hearings. In the tribunals, an inmate is allowed to have a "personal representative" but not an actual defense lawyer — and the inmate has no right to see the evidence against him or confront his accusers.

Is it conceivable that the evidence against certain inmates might consist of witness statements that were obtained through the use of interrogation techniques involving painful coercion that international agreements classify as torture? Amazingly, that scenario is highly conceivable.

Amazingly, it's also highly conceivable — even probable — that some of the estimated 270 inmates at Guantanamo, imprisoned for as long as six years, are innocent of any involvement in terrorism and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I say "amazingly" because it's still hard for me to believe that arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention and torture continue to be debated, as if there were pros and cons. The Supreme Court has now made clear that while justice and honor may be mere inconveniences for George W. Bush, they remain essential components of our national identity.

"The nation will live to regret what the court has done today," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a dissent, warning that the ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."
Everyone hopes he's wrong, of course. But if the only thing that mattered was security, why would we bother to have an independent judiciary at all? Why would there be any constitutional or legal guarantees of due process for anyone?

We could just lock up anyone who fit the demographic profile of the average armed robber, say, or anyone with psychological traits often displayed by embezzlers.

The Guantanamo decision will create headaches for the federal courts.

The process of granting hearings to the detainees will be messy, imperfect and at times frustrating. I'm confident that in the end, the system will work. George W. Bush may not trust America's basic values and highest ideals, but I do.

***********************

Dispelling Misconceptions: Guantanamo Bay Detainee Procedures Exceed the Requirements of the U.S. Constitution, U.S. Law, and Customary International Law
by Steven Groves and Brian Walsh
WebMemo #1556 , Heritage Foundation

Human rights activists, liberal media outlets, and Bush Administration critics have derisively characterized the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the "gulag of our times,"[1] a "legal black hole,"[2] and a "stain on our nation's character."[3] One need not dig too deeply into the facts, however, to discover that the detainees held at Guantanamo receive the most systematic and extensive procedural protections afforded to foreign enemy combatants in the history of armed conflict, including unprecedented access to legal representation and U.S. courts. In order to unearth the reality from the layers of hyperbole, half-truths, and outright lies that have been heaped upon Guantanamo Bay, this paper corrects a few of the more persistent misconceptions relating to the situation.


Misconception #1: The U.S. must either put Guantanamo Bay detainees on trial or release them.

Certain Members of Congress and parts of the self-described "international legal and human rights community"[4] labor to spread the mistaken notion that the United States has only two viable and legitimate options for dealing with the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay: (1) charge the detainees with crimes and then try them or (2) simply release them from U.S. custody.[5] There is, however, at least one other option, which just happens to have the most venerable pedigree in U.S. history, that the Guantanamo critics ignore: hold the detainees until the end of active hostilities.

As of May, approximately 380 detainees were being held at Guantanamo Bay.[6] Only about 60 to 80 of them are expected to stand trial before military commissions for their individual criminal acts.[7] This list includes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and Ramzi Bin al-Shib, the so-called 20th hijacker. The remaining detainees are being held not because of any alleged criminal conduct but because (1) they fought against U.S. and Coalition forces in Afghanistan and (2) U.S. special military tribunals have determined that they are too dangerous to be released back into the world and would likely rejoin the fighting against U.S. and Coalition forces.[8]

The United States is engaged in an ongoing armed conflict in Afghanistan and therefore has no obligation—legal, moral, or otherwise—to release captured enemy soldiers so that they may return to the battlefield. Indeed, the Geneva Conventions require that combatants be released from custody only "after the cessation of active hostilities."[9] The U.S. Supreme Court recently affirmed the principle that the detention of enemy combatants is a "fundamental and accepted…incident of war" and concluded that the President is therefore authorized to hold detainees for the duration of the conflict in Afghanistan.[10]

The obvious rationale for the detention of enemy combatants is to prevent captured belligerents from returning to the battlefield to take up arms again against Americans and American allies. The premature release of enemy combatants from Guantanamo Bay would likely prove deadly to U.S. forces still fighting in Afghanistan: At least 30 of the approximately 395 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo Bay returned to Afghanistan to engage in further hostilities against Coalition forces.[11]

Other than calling for the immediate release of all detainees and closing Guantanamo, critics provide no solution for how to prevent these former belligerents from returning to the battlefield and killing U.S. and Coalition soldiers. The only sensible solution is the one that the United States and other nations have long employed: hold detainees until the cessation of conflict.

Misconception #2: The Guantanamo Bay detainees received inadequate due process when they were designated enemy combatants.

In violation of the Geneva Conventions and the customary laws of war, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan wear no uniforms or insignia. Unlike the soldiers of every nation that seeks the protections of the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters refuse to carry their arms openly. Such choices drastically increase the dangers of war to the civilians among whom Taliban and al-Qaeda forces hide.

These choices also make it more difficult for U.S. military personnel to determine whether, upon a combatant's capture, the combatant is in fact a member of the enemy force. To address the problem, the U.S. military established a system to screen each detainee to determine whether he is an enemy combatant. The result is that detainees at Guantanamo Bay have received more procedural protections ensuring the fairness of their detention than any foreign enemy combatant in any armed conflict in the history of warfare.

Under the Geneva Conventions, enemy combatants who have committed a belligerent act but whose detainee status is in question are entitled to have their status determined by a "competent tribunal."[12] In accordance with that provision of the Geneva Conventions, prior to the September 11 attacks the U.S. military established Army Regulation 190-8, Section 1-6, setting forth procedures for the operation of tribunals to make such determinations—that is, whether a combatant may be held as a prisoner of war.[13] The U.S. Supreme Court recently cited Army Regulation 190-8 as an example of a procedure which would satisfy the due process requirements for determining the status of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.[14] In response, the Department of Defense established special tribunals modeled on Army Regulation 190-8—Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs)—to determine the status of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Consistent with Army Regulation 190-8, the CSRT hearing provides each detainee with a hearing before a neutral panel composed of three commissioned military officers. The tribunals make their decisions on the detainee's status by majority vote, based on the preponderance of the evidence. The detainee has the right to attend all open portions of the CSRT proceedings, the opportunity to call witnesses on his behalf, the right to cross-examine witnesses called by the tribunal, and the right to testify on his own behalf.[15] These procedures go far beyond what most nations provide and what the Geneva Conventions require.

Because unlawful enemy combatants violate the laws of war by employing deception to hide or confuse their identities and affiliations, the CSRT hearings were designed not just to meet but to exceed the due process protections provided by hearings conducted pursuant to Army Regulation 190-8. Specifically, Guantanamo Bay detainees are given the following rights as part of their CSRT hearings:

A military officer is appointed to serve as the detainee's personal representative and explains the CSRT process to the detainee, assists in the collection of relevant information, and helps prepare for the hearing.

In advance of the hearing, the detainee is given a summary of the evidence supporting his designation as an enemy combatant.

A member of the tribunal is required to search government files for any evidence suggesting the detainee is not an enemy combatant.

The decision of every CSRT hearing is automatically reviewed by a higher authority in the Department of Defense who is empowered to order further proceedings.[16]
There would be little or no doubt whether detainees are members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda if such forces simply followed the Geneva Conventions and wore uniforms, displayed insignias, and carried their arms openly. The resulting irony is that unlawful enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay have been given heightened due process despite, and as a direct result of, their repudiation of the laws of war.

Misconception #3: The Guantanamo Bay detainees are entitled to habeas corpus relief.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled over 50 years ago that non-citizen enemy combatants imprisoned outside of the United States during wartime do not have a right to the extraordinary writ of habeas corpus—a legal cause of action brought by a person who alleges he is unlawfully imprisoned. That case, Johnson v. Eisentrager, involved 21 German nationals who had been convicted of espionage by U.S. military commissions convened in China and then transferred to U.S. detention facilities in Allied-occupied Germany. Once in Germany, they petitioned a U.S. federal court to release them under a writ of habeas corpus, alleging that they had been wrongfully imprisoned. The Supreme Court ruled that the German prisoners did not have a right to be released under habeas corpus because they "at no relevant time were within any territory over which the United States is sovereign, and the scenes of their offense, their capture, their trial and their punishment were all beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any court of the United States."[17]

The large majority of Guantanamo Bay detainees today are in the same shoes as the German prisoners were 50 years ago. They are being held outside of the United States[18] for acts committed in Afghanistan, the location of most combatants' capture. As such, the detainees have no right to the extraordinary writ.

In 2004's Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court chose largely to ignore its own precedent[19] when it extended statutory (not constitutional) access to habeas corpus review to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Thereafter, Congress rightly "overruled" the Supreme Court by changing the statutory law to revoke federal court jurisdiction over habeas corpus actions filed by Guantanamo Bay detainees.[20] It is that legislation that Guantanamo Bay critics now seek to undo with yet another round of legislation.

Finally, to assert that the Guantanamo detainees deserve habeas hearings is to assert that the CSRT hearings that have been provided to each and every detainee have been fundamentally inadequate.[21] They have not. The CSRT hearings exceed the requirements for determination of combatant status under the Geneva Conventions and U.S. military regulations.

Recommendations for Congress

Congress should not interfere with the U.S. military's policy of detaining alien enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay for the duration of the war on terrorism. These detainees should not be released until the cessation of hostilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere or until such time that the detainees are no longer a threat to U.S. and Coalition forces. Calls by Members of Congress and the "international legal and human rights community" to release the approximately 380 detainees remaining in Guantanamo are reckless in the extreme and not supported by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, or customary international law.

Congress should decline to take the extraordinary step of providing the writ of habeas corpus to the unlawful enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay, none of whom are U.S. citizens or legal residents. Even if granting non-citizens who are unlawful enemy combatants the right to habeas corpus were the right decision for this war—and it decidedly is not—it would set a dangerous precedent for America's ability to fight future wars, including conventional wars in which enemy combatants are affiliated with nation-states. In any future conflict, the international community, including the United Nations, would surely demand that prisoners of war held by U.S. forces have access to U.S. courts to try their claims that they are being held unjustly. Further, granting the writ of habeas corpus to non-citizens who are unlawful enemy combatants is almost certain to embolden liberal and progressive jurists to "discover" new constitutional rights for U.S. enemies to access U.S. courts to try their claims. Finally, extending habeas corpus to Guantanamo Bay will impede the effectiveness of military operations and place an unnecessary burden on U.S. military forces in the field.[22]

Conclusion

While U.S. troops are deployed in the field in Afghanistan and Iraq, Congress should focus its efforts on strengthening their ability to succeed. Congress should not hamper our troops' efforts with shortsighted legislation extending unprecedented rights to foreign terrorists and other enemy combatants. Rewarding or releasing captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters is not any way for legislators on the home front to support U.S. troops fighting abroad.

Steven Groves is Bernard and Barbara Lomas Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, and Brian W. Walsh is Senior Legal Research Fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.

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[1] Irene Khan, Foreword to Amnesty International Report 2005 (Amnesty Int'l 2005), available at http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/message-eng.

[2] Gitmo: Still a "legal black hole,"The Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2007, available at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-gitmo1may01,0,7490666.story.

[3] Press Release, Senator Tom Harkin, Statement of Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) on Supreme Court Decision to Hear Terror Detainee Case (June 29, 2007), available at http://www.harkin.senate.gov/news.cfm?id=278179.

[4] The relevant community for determining what is reasonable and customary under the laws of war is the community of nations. The community of nations does not adhere to the radical, outlandish "norms" promoted by the international legal and human rights community.

[5] See, e.g., Press Release, Senator Tom Harkin, Harkin Introduces Legislation to Close Guantanamo (May 23, 2007), available at http://harkin.senate.gov/news.cfm?id=274983; Press Release, Representative Jane Harman, It Is Time To Close The Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility (May 8, 2007), available at http://www.house.gov/list/press/ca36_harman/May_8_07.shtml; Press Release, American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU Welcomes Guantanamo Closure Bill (May 23, 2007), available at http://www.aclu.org/natsec/gen/29864prs20070523.html; and Press Release, Amnesty International, Abandon Military Commissions, Close Guantanamo (July 4, 2007), available at http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR51118200 ("Those currently held in Guantanamo should be released unless they are to be promptly charged and tried in accordance with international standards of fair trial.").

[6] Press Release, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Detainee Transfer Announced (May 19, 2007) available at http://www.defenselink.mil/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=10898.

[7] Mark Mazzetti, Pentagon Revises Its Rules on Prosecution of Terrorists,The New York Times, January 19, 2007 (citing Pentagon officials), and Military Commissions Act of 2006, Pub. L. No. 109-366, § 950v (enumerating the specific crimes that may be tried by military commissions).

[8] Additionally, as of June approximately 80 current Guantanamo detainees had been determined to be eligible for transfer, subject to ongoing discussions between the United States and other nations. Press Release, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Detainee Transfer Announced (June 19, 2007) available at http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=11030.

[9] Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Aug. 12, 1949, art. 118.

[10] Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 518 (2004).

[11] U.S. divulges new details on released Gitmo inmates, Reuters, May 14, 2007, at http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N14322791.htm, and Press Release, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Detainee Transfer Announced (May 19, 2007), available at http://www.defenselink.mil/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=10898. Some detainees have been released to their countries of origin after the United States received assurances that they would not be allowed to reengage in hostilities or after they convinced U.S. authorities that they no longer posed a threat. Presumably, some of the least dangerous detainees were released after first agreeing to provide valuable intelligence regarding their pre‑detention activities.

[12] Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, art. 5.

[13] U.S. Dep't of Army, Reg. 190-8, Enemy Prisoners of War, Retained Personnel, Civilian Internees and Other Detainees § 1-6, October 1, 1997, available at http://www.usapa.army.mil/pdffiles/r190_8.pdf.

[14] Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507, 538 (2004).

[15] Memorandum from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, to the Secretaries of the Military Departments et al., Implementation of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Procedures for Enemy Combatants Detained as U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (July 14, 2006), available at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug2006/d20060809CSRTProcedures.pdf

. Cf.U.S. Dep't of Army, Reg. 190-8, § 1-6.

[16] Memorandum from the Deputy Secretary of Defense, to the Secretaries of the Military Departments et al., Implementation of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Procedures for Enemy Combatants Detained as U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

[17] Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U.S. 763, 778 (1950).

[18] In his solo opinion concurring in the judgment in Rasul v. Bush, Justice Kennedy asserts that Guantanamo Bay "is in every practical respect a United States territory." 542 U.S. 466, 487 (2004) (Kennedy, J., concurring). However, in addition to this assertion's being unpersuasive in light of the fact that the lease between Cuba and the United States for Guantanamo Bay expressly states that the base remains under Cuba's "ultimate sovereignty," Kennedy did not provide the deciding vote in the 6-3 decision and the assertion has no force of law.

[19] See, e.g., id. at 493–94 (Scalia, J., dissenting) (examining the convoluted logic the majority used to reach a holding otherwise foreclosed by the Court's on‑point precedent in Eisentrager).

[20] Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, P.L. 109-148, and Military Commissions Act of 2006, P.L. 109-366.

[21] Moreover, this assertion necessarily implies that each of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war held by the United States in World Wars I and II—as well as the Civil War, the Korean Conflict, and every other war in which the United States has ever engaged—were denied a fundamental right to which they were entitled. No POW in any of those wars was granted anything approaching the systematic and extensive process that has been afforded to the non-citizen, unlawful enemy combatants held in Guantanamo Bay.

[22] James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., The War on Terrorism: Habeas Corpus On and Off the Battlefield, Heritage FoundationWebMemo No. 1535, July 5, 2007, available at http://www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/wm1535.cfm.

September Surprise - McCain Drops Out (Huffington Post)

Arriana Huffington has always been the queen of the big top, but the queen's blog may have the top act of this election cycle. Step right up folks and be amazed.

When McCain Drops Out Huffington Post - Yahoo

When the Republicans choose their candidate on September 4th, there is a very real chance that they could throw the election into an unexpected chaos as they pull a genuine September Surprise.

I think there is every reason to believe John McCain won't be the nominee. Ok, let me say that again. McCain will not be the Republican candidate in November.

Here's how it could happen:

At some point in mid August, John McCain will announce that he has decided that he can not accept his party's nomination for president. The reason will be health-related, and that may turn out to be the truth. Anyone who's seen him on stage these days knows he looks like he's about to keel over. And anyone who's been on a presidential campaign knows the physical demands are grueling and can be a challenge for a young man.

But excuses or facts hardly matters. He won't be accepting his party's nomination.

The reasons are simple. He can't win. Now that Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee -- the polls all show that McCain's pro-war stance and Bush endorsement make him a lost cause in November. That combined with soft stand on litmus test conservative issues make him an unpopular candidate among the base. I know some Democrats that think the Republicans are planning to let McCain lose and 'sit this one out' so that they can hang the democrats with a bad economy and a war that is a morass. But that just isn't how they play. They play to win every hand -- think about 2000 with a popular Democratic president and good economy and a solid VP running for president. Why did they put up Bush? And why did they fight so hard? Because, you don't ever throw a game. And they're not going to throw this one.

McCain won't be the nominee.

By August, they'll have done something to try and pick away at Obama's popularity. They'll emphasis race, or whatever they can to get him to appear less than perfect. Then, they'll bring out of the woodwork a surprise candidate who can shift the story fast. With just two months before the election -- the new candidate will have little time to be 'vetted' but will be shiny and new, and will get a lot of media attention as Obama's newness will have become -- by then -- tarnished or at least no longer the surprise that it has been as he unseated Hillary.

So, who will be the Republican candidate that faces Obama in the fall?

I've spoken to a number of friends who -- when presented with this set of facts respond: "but they don't have anybody else." That's simply not the case.

Joe Trippi, campaign consultant and most notably Howard Dean's campaign manager, said of McCain dropping out: "While crazy, this may be the best shot they have."

There are a whole list of Republicans who in many ways are more likely to energize the Republican base. One thing is certain -- there are candidates that will play to the core issues in ways that McCain simply can't.

Here's a list of names. Some you know, some you don't. But each of them knows their name is in play. Among them --

• Condoleezza Rice (Secretary of State)
• Colin Powell (fmr Sec. of State)
• Marilyn Musgrave (Colorado Congresswoman)
• Mitt Romney (fmr Massachusetts Governor)
• Mike Huckabee (fmr Governor of Arkansas)
• Charlie Crist (Florida Governor)
• Tim Pawlenty (Minnesota Governor)
• Bobby Jindal (Louisiana Governor)
• Mark Sanford: (Governor of South Carolina)
• John Thune (Senator from South Dakota)
• Dick Lugar (Senator from Indiana)
• Chuck Hagel (Senator from Nebraska)
• MIchael Bloomberg (NYC Mayor)
  

Ok, go ahead knock them down. One by one. See if you can really remove ALL these names from a list of candidates that are more likely to give Obama a run for his money. They'll come on the scene late, with a press corps that is looking for a horse race and a new story. Obama's frontrunner status will be upset, and there will be a set of variables that need to be calculated -- and tested against a weary electorate.

Is this supposition? Sure, but one grounded with enough history and observation to take it beyond conjecture and into the realm of the possible.

So -- before the Democrats go and game out how to beat McCain, it may be worth thinking about what happens when he says he won't accept the nomination. For the Republicans, a wide open convention would be both good theater and good politics.

In your heart you know she is nuts. Drove her first husband into light loafers.

"We (Iraq) need this continued support of the U.S. forces" - Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshiyar Zebari

Barack Obama has built his campaign on judgment and change. What does he do if the change that is taking place is in Iraq? What does his judgment require from him if the lawful government of Iraq requests the continued presence of US troops in Iraq?

Newt Gingrich on CBS said that the Republicans will not beat Obama by running against Obama's experience but on his ideas and beliefs. I believe he is correct. John McCain owns the Iraq policy of the Bush Administration. He may as well use it to his advantage and the Iraq Foreign Minister may just have teed one up in the rough for my guy.

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Iraq says it still needs US troops to secure gains
Sun Jun 15, 2008

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) -

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said on Sunday his country still needs American troops to help secure progress achieved as a result of what he called a successful U.S. surge strategy.

"We need this continued support of the U.S. forces, of the multinational forces, because the gains we have gained, both security, military economic are still vulnerable," he told CNN's Late Edition, weighing into a major issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.

The surge of U.S. troops since 2007 -- currently there are around 150,000 in Iraq -- had dramatically curbed violence. Improved training of Iraqi forces would reduce Baghdad's dependence on foreign troops and eventually enable withdrawals, said Zebari.

"But this is a process. I think we are not there yet," he said in Washington.

Zebari avoided explicitly taking sides in the contest between Republican John McCain, who has vowed to keep American troops in Iraq until the war is won, and Democratic rival Barack Obama, who has promised to remove U.S. combat troops within 16 months of taking office.

Iraqis "respect the will of the American public, but for us it's very important to put both candidates in the true picture," he said after meeting McCain in Washington.

Zebari, who said he planned to discuss Iraq in a telephone call with Obama on Monday, said his message would be that things have turned around in the country.

"Iraq has been to hell many times, and back, and now we have the right policies, the right personnel and we have a committed government to accomplish its national agenda -- and the surge strategy has worked," he said.

"Both candidates have to look hard at the issues, because Iraq is not an island," he added in a reference to his country's strategic position in the Middle East.

McCain has built his campaign largely around his strength as a potential commander in chief. He has drawn contrasts with Illinois Sen. Obama, who McCain says is too inexperienced in foreign policy and military affairs.

The Arizona senator told reporters after meeting with Zebari that "there's no doubt that the surge has succeeded" but challenges remained because al Qaeda was on the defensive, but had not yet been defeated.

"We will be able over time to withdraw and come home with honor and victory, not in defeat," McCain said.

(Reporting by Paul Eckert and Jeff Mason; editing by Alan Elsner)

15,000 Captured, 4,200 Dead

Drugs cartel led by woman turns Mexican town into shooting gallery
Times Online

John Harlow in Tijuana, Mexico

It was a quiet Wednesday night in the Tijuana city morgue: only eight murder victims were on ice, including two young Mexican women shot through the back of the head and dumped on waste ground.

These are the latest victims of the United States’ seemingly insatiable demand for cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, which has sparked the bloodiest drugs war in the Americas and cost more than 4,000 lives in the past 18 months.

The war has pitted the Mexican government, with American help, against a ruthless drugs cartel led by a Mexican female mastermind who has a degree in business administration. The victims in the mortuary may have been smugglers who ran into a rival faction. Their stories are unknown: undertakers do not have time to find their relatives. “They’ll find us,” said one.

Morgue staff are so frantic that they have asked ambulance drivers with fresh corpses to cruise around for an hour or even return the deceased to the city hospital.

Gangsters get little sympathy from medical staff - not since the spring, when an armed gang attacked an operating theatre to snatch a wounded thug from police custody.

Doctors do, however, teach six-year-olds the most basic survival skill in Tijuana: how to bandage a gunshot wound. Many children are taught the best places to hide in school, preparing them for when the bad men arrive to kidnap the better-dressed tots for ransom.

The doctors comfort a traumatised housewife knocked over by a supermarket trolley that had rolled down a hill, its contents not groceries but a body. They patch up police besieged by a gang in their own police station. They collect the human heads arranged in pyramids by the roadside.

Doctors are also a hot target for kidnappers: about 40 have been kidnapped in Tijuana this year. They struggle to keep a semblance of civil order in a city which is being torn apart by a vicious drug cartel. It is known as the Arellano Felix cartel, or CAF, after its kingpins, a well-educated family that arrived in Tijuana in the 1980s.

Their escalating violence has turned this once prosperous border town, which feels safe and friendly during the day, into a shooting gallery at night.

In one recent fight, a CAF lieutenant called El Cholo (Street Boy) arranged a 3am meeting with El Muletas (Crutches), a rival CAF enforcer who had kidnapped one of his men. Insults escalated into gunfire, a battle and 13 dead.

The cartel has dominated Tijuana for a decade or more. It is an organisation forged by a policeman, Miguel Angel Felix, who honed his financial skills as a director of the government-owned Somex bank. Its mules and minions deliver up to a quarter of the United States’ drugs by boat, by lorry or through tunnels deep under the border. Now the CAF is under attack from all sides, resulting in a body count not known since the Colombian drug wars of the 1980s, which paved the way for the rise of the Mexican cartels.

Mexican police estimate that the CAF has lost half its 2,000 “foot soldiers” since October, when Felipe Calderon, the new president, signed the Merida initiative with the American government, designed to combat cross-border crime.

Over the next three years Calderon will receive nearly £1 billion in helicopters and technical aid: he has launched the first serious crackdown on the cartels for a generation.

He took crime investigations away from often corrupt police and handed operations to the army. The cartels are not going quietly: 15,000 gangsters have been arrested but 4,200 people have died and the death rate is accelerating. More than 200 people have been shot dead in Tijuana this year, a 50% rise on last year’s murder rate.

The CAF is under attack from four directions: General Aponte Polito, known to his men as Take No Prisoners Polito, and US antidrug agencies are a strong threat; but the most brutal attacks come from within its own ranks and rival gangs.

“The Arellano Felix cartel is splintering and this is resulting in the bloodshed we’re seeing,” said Alan Poleszak, of the American Drug Enforcement Administration.

Ten years ago the CAF was run by Miguel Angel’s seven nephews, with four nieces firmly in the background: after arrests and violent deaths, there are only two family players left. According to Mexican police, it is now led by Enedina Arellano Felix, a 46-year-old with a business degree - and probably the most powerful female criminal in the world.

They believe she has US citizenship and, like many middle-class Tijuanians seeking to escape the violence, spends much of her time in La Jolla, a California beach town. She partially inspired the rising drug lord played by Catherine Zeta-Jones in the film Traffic.

Today she “advises” her younger bother Eduardo. “She is a very smart woman and could save the cartel,” said Cesar Villalon, an executive on Zeta, a Tijuana-based investigative magazine, where journalists work behind bulletproof glass.

“The cartel has become far more brutal. Civilians used to be off limits but now it kills wives and children and tortures in new ways. Beheadings are recent, too. They walked into a disco and dropped three heads in the middle of the floor to prove the cartel still rules.”

Thanks to the Merida initiative, many murderous thugs will die and some cartels will be destroyed. But, critics say, while Americans are prepared to pay for drugs, the gangsters who supply them will never be defeated.

EU Solution to Losing Elections - Stop Having Them.

So far, the people of France and the Netherlands rejected the first try at imposing a treaty on Europe by the EU. The EUcrats, went back to the drawing board and only one country was to vote on the Lisbon treaty, the bloody Irish. They did, didn't like it, and rejected it. The EUcrats have again been flummoxed by the democracy on which the European Union is supposed to be founded. Imagine that.

The Telegraph sums it up:

"...It is very hard for the political elite in Europe to accept that their dream of ever-greater integration does not carry conviction with their own electorates. They refused to admit this when France and Holland voted "No" and instead pretended that public resistance could be overcome by committing themselves privately to not having any referenda.

Fortunately for the EU's democracy the Irish constitution demanded such a step and the Irish people have now spoken for millions in Europe. Yet still the elite try and pretend that they can avoid facing the reality that their dream of integration in many countries is unloved and unsupported."

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France's Lagarde: difficult to implement Lisbon treaty
Sunday June 15 2008

JEJU, Korea, June 15 Guardian

France's finance minister has strong hopes that the European Union will soon have another treaty on reforms to replace one rejected by Irish voters.

"We will certainly go through an in depth analysis of what took place and what did not take place," French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde told a seminar on Asian integration in South Koera.

She said implementing the Lisbon Treaty was "going to be difficult".
Irish voters on Friday rejected the treaty to overhaul the European Union's unwieldy institutions, putting the entire bloc's reform plan in peril and humiliating Ireland's political leaders.

The pact, known as the Lisbon treaty, failed by a margin of 53.4 to 46.6 percent in the only EU country to put it to a popular vote.

But just as the Lisbon treaty was drafted after France and the Netherlands rejected the previous treaty, Lagarde said she was "absolutely certain" there would be another Lisbon or some other agreement on reforms.

"We Europeans believe that it is either all of us or none of us," she said.
The treaty was an effort to resurrect EU reforms that were torpedoed by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

This time all countries but Ireland avoided a referendum. The "No" vote means a country with fewer than 1 percent of the EU's 490 million population could doom a treaty painstakingly negotiated by all 27 member states.

The treaty envisages a long-term president of the European Council of EU leaders, a stronger foreign policy chief and a mutual defence pact. It was due to take effect on Jan. 1, but cannot come into force if a single member fails to ratify it.

(Reporting by Vidya Ranganathan; Editing by Kim Coghill)

New US Ambassador to Costa Rica Will Try to Learn Spanish.

The new US Ambassador to Costa Rica, Peter Cianchette, who has never before visited Costa Rica, spoke to reporters yesterday in English while an embassy spokeswoman translated.

“I am now … going to work very hard at learning Spanish, and (will try) to learn as much as possible about the country and its culture and its heritage,” he said.

I have a hunch that the Chinese ambassador to Costa Rica can speak Spanish.

Who is Peter Cianchette?- just another political hack that lost elections and confirmations but is important enough to someone in a corrupt Washington to represent the US in a Latin American country. We could not find anyone who speaks Spanish.

__________________________

Tico Times

President Oscar Arias formally has accepted Peter Cianchette, a Maine businessman and politician, as U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica.

Cianchette, 46, who met with Arias yesterday at the Casa Presidencial, said his priority is to help Costa Rica join the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA). The country ratified CAFTA in an October referendum but has not yet passed all the laws required to enter the pact.

In the coming weeks, Cianchette (pronounced chin-KET) will meet with ambassadors and government ministers. He will speak to the Costa Rican-American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) and tour the country, said Magda Siekert, a public affairs officer at the embassy.

Cianchette, who has never before visited Costa Rica, spoke to reporters yesterday in English while an embassy spokeswoman translated.

“I am now … going to work very hard at learning Spanish, and (will try) to learn as much as possible about the country and its culture and its heritage,” he said.

Cianchette served in Maine's state legislature from 1996 to 2000 and was state chairman for George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 2004.

He is a partner in the private investment firm CHK Capital Partners and president of The Cianchette Group, a public affairs and business consulting firm.

He now lives in San José with his wife, Carolyn, and their children, Evan and Maria.

When I was young

When I Was a Boy, America Was a Better Place
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced, I said to my then-teenage son, "David, please forgive me. I am handing over to you a worse America than my father handed over to me."

Unfortunately, I still feel this way.

With the important exception of racial discrimination -- which was already dying a natural death when I was young -- it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.

When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one's illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a "hostile work environment" or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another's sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, all employers in California are now prohibited by law from firing a man who has decided to cross-dress at work. And needless to say, no fellow worker can say to that man, "Hey, Jack, why not wear the dress at home and men's clothes to work?" An employer interviewing a prospective employee is not free to ask the most natural human questions: Are you married? Do you have a child? How old are you? Soon "How are you?" will be banned lest one discriminate on the basis of health.

When I was boy, what people did at home was not their employer's business. Today, companies and city governments refuse to hire, and may fire, workers no matter how competent or healthy, who smoke in their homes. Sarasota, Fla., the latest city to invade people's private lives, would not hire Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy if they applied for a job.

When I was a 7-year-old boy, I flew alone from New York to my aunt and uncle in Miami and did the same thing coming back to New York. I boarded the plane on my own and got off the plane on my own. No papers for my parents to fill out. No extra fee to pay the airline. I was responsible for myself. Had I run away or been kidnapped, no one would have sued the airline. Today, fear of lawsuits is a dominant fact of American life.

When I was a boy, I ran after girls during recess, played dodgeball, climbed monkey bars and sat on seesaws. Today, more and more schools have no recess; have canceled dodgeball lest someone feel bad about being removed from the game; and call the police in to interrogate, even sometimes arrest, elementary school boys who playfully touch a girl. And monkey bars and seesaws are largely gone, for fear of lawsuits should a child be injured.

When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but because "family" courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers from their children's lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most important group of people in a boy's life -- adult men. The contemporary absence of men in boys' lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is probably unprecedented in recorded history.

When I was a boy, we had in our lives adults who took pride in being adults. To distinguish them from our peers, we called these adults "Mr.," "Mrs." and "Miss," or by their titles, "Doctor," "Pastor," "Rabbi," "Father." It was good for us, and we liked it. Having adults proud of their adulthood, and not acting like they were still kids, gave us security (as well as something to look forward to in growing up). Today, kids are surrounded by peers twice, three, four times their age.

When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about all identities -- African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay -- other than American.

When I was a teenage boy, getting to kiss a girl, let alone to touch her thigh or her breast (even over her clothes) was the thrill of a lifetime. Most of us could only dream of a day later on in life when oral sex would take place (a term most of us had never heard of). But of course, we were not raised by educators or parents who believed that "teenagers will have sex no matter what." Most of us rarely if ever saw a naked female in photos (the "dirty pictures" we got a chance to look at never showed "everything"), let alone in movies or in real life. We were, in short, allowed to be relatively innocent. And even without sex education and condom placement classes, few of us ever got a girl pregnant.

When I was a boy, "I Love Lucy" showed two separate beds in Lucy and Ricky's bedroom -- and they were a married couple. Today, MTV and most TV saturate viewers' lives with sexual imagery and sexual talk, virtually all of which is loveless and, of course, non-marital.

When I was boy, people dressed up to go to baseball games, visit the doctor and travel on airplanes. Today, people don't dress up even for church.

When I was a boy, Time and Newsweek were well written and relied little on pictures and illustrations. Today, those magazines often look like adult comic books by comparison. They are filled with large illustrations and photos, and they dumb down the news with features like "Winners and Losers" and "Who's Up and Who's Down." And when I was a boy, it would have been inconceivable for Time to substitute anything, let alone a tree, for the flag planted by the marines on Iwo Jima.

One might argue that these are the same laments that every previous older generation has expressed -- "Ah, when I was young" But in America, that has not been the case. In America, the older generations tended to say the opposite -- "When I was a kid, things were worse."

Can we return to the America of my youth? No. Can we return to the best values of that time? Yes. But not if both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court move the country even further leftward. If that happens, many of the above noted changes will simply be accelerated: More laws restricting "offensive" speech will be enacted; litigation will increase and trial lawyers will gain more power; the American military will be less valued; trees will gradually replace the flag as our most venerated symbol; schools will teach even less as they concentrate even more on diversity, sexuality and the environment; teenage sex will be increasingly accepted; American identity will continue to be replaced by ethnic, racial, gender or "world citizen" identity; and the power of the state will expand further as the power of the individual inevitably contracts. It's hard to believe most Americans really want that.



Dennis Prager is a radio show host, contributing columnist for Townhall.com, and author of 4 books including Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.

NBC, Who Would Have Been Too Old to be President, McCain or Russert?

McCain alive at 71, Russert dead at 58.

Neothinker, Obama and the Black Mainstream. Change You may Not Like.

I have watched this guy for some time. He is not out of the main stream in black thinking. He is the main stream as well is Obama and his wife Michelle. If you think not, listen to the black programming on NPR. Listen to the black callers on C-span. Black main stream thinking and ideology is not in the mainstream.

The liberal media is doing their best to cloak Obama and represent him as change, and they may be successful, because the left has had a free reign in the education and indoctrination of young Americans. They are hiding the facts that Obama is a mainstream black thinker and his friends and church accurately measure who he is.

Listen to Neothinker:

Five Vile Bastards in Black Robes...

The head of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo, welcomed the ruling.

“The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation's most egregious injustices," its executive director, Vincent Warren, said. “By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Supreme Court recognises a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation's founding."



"Today's Supreme Court decision ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice, while also protecting our core values . . ." said Obama.

The court's liberal justices were in the majority, with Justice Anthony Kennedy pivotal. Writing for the court, he said: "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."



"This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus." said Obama.

Someone needs a swift kick in the rear

Obama Riding High On Cocky Ignorance
By THOMAS SOWELL | Posted Wednesday, June 11,

Now that Sen. Barack Obama has become the Democrats' nominee for president of the United States, to the cheers of the media at home and abroad, he has written a letter to the secretary of defense, in a tone as if he is already president, addressing one of his subordinates.

The letter ends: "I look forward to your swift response."

With wars going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a secretary of defense might have some other things to look after, before making a "swift response" to a political candidate.

Because of the widely publicized statistic that suicide rates among American troops have gone up, Sen. Obama says he wants the secretary of defense to tell him, swiftly:

"What changes will you make to provide our soldiers in theater with real access to mental health care?"

"What training has the Pentagon provided our medical professionals in theater to recognize who might be at risk of committing suicide?"

"What assistance are you providing families here at home to recognize the risk factors for suicide, so that they may help our service members get the assistance they need?"

"What programs has the Pentagon implemented to help reduce the stigma attached to mental health concerns so that service members are more likely to seek appropriate care?"

All this sounds very plausible, as so many other things that Sen. Obama says sound plausible.

But, like so many of those other things, it will not stand up under scrutiny.

What's been widely publicized in the media is that suicides among American troops have gone up. What's not been widely publicized is that this higher suicide rate is still not as high as the suicide rate among demographically comparable civilians.

No one needs to be reminded that suicide is a serious matter, whether among soldiers or civilians.

But the media have managed to create the impression that it is military service overseas that is the cause of suicides among American troops, when civilians of the same ages and other demographic characteristics are committing suicide at an even higher rate at home.

Moreover, this is not the first time that military service overseas has been portrayed in the media as the cause of problems that are worse in the civilian population at home.

The New York Times led the way in making homicides committed by returning military veterans a front-page story, blaming this on "combat trauma and the stress of deployment."

Yet the New York Post showed that the homicide rate among returning veterans is a fraction of the homicide rate among demographically comparable civilians.

In other words, if military veterans are not completely immune to the problems found among civilians at home, then the veterans' problems are to be blamed on military service — at least by the mainstream media.

Does Sen. Obama know how the rate of suicides or homicides among military veterans compares with the rate of suicides or homicides among their civilian counterparts? Do the facts matter to him, as compared with an opportunity to score political points?

Perhaps even more important, do the media even care whether Sen. Obama knows what he is talking about?

Or is the symbolism of "the first black president" paramount, even if that means a president with cocky ignorance at a time of national danger?

The media have been crucial to Barack Obama's whole candidacy. His only achievements of national significance in his entire career have been media achievements and rhetorical achievements.

Perhaps his greatest achievement has been running as a candidate with an image wholly incompatible with what he has actually been doing for decades. This man who is now supposedly going to "unite" us has for years worked hand in glove, and contributed both his own money and the taxpayers' money, to people who have sought to divide us in the most crude demagogic ways.

With all his expressed concern about the war in Iraq, he has not set foot in Iraq for more than two years — including the very years when progress has been made against the terrorists there.

You don't need to know the facts when you have cocky ignorance and the media behind you.

Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The Pristine Wilderness of ANWR

Oh look! Are those mountains in the distance?

Since the charade over ANWR continues in Congress, it's worth a look back at this 2001 Jonah Goldberg article in National Review online.

Since my cover story on ANWR — and related columns — came out, I've gotten a lot of e-mail from people. I will get around to the critics elsewhere and later because I don't have the time here and now. But I will respond to one request. A number of people have mentioned that they'd love to see pictures of what the real ANWR looks like. Some people are especially distressed by the pictures in the latest issue of National Geographic that apparently show beautiful mountain vistas and the like.

Well, those pictures are accurate, I'm sure, even though I haven't seen them. They're just not pictures of the sliver of ANWR where the drilling would be. Unfortunately, I didn't take a lot of pictures while I was up there, and the ones I took weren't intended for publication so much as for visual note taking.

Still, I do have a few shots that will give you a sense of what it looks like up there on the coastal plain. They are of mediocre quality — taken from the cockpit of a small, very jerky plane — so don't give me grief about how I'm no Ansel Adams or how I'm being unfair by showing crappy pictures of what Joe Lieberman calls "one of God's most awesome creations." Also, I don't have time to check against my written notes, so some of these pictures may be of the Prudhoe Bay side of the Canning River, which forms the border of ANWR's coastal plain. The important thing is that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the ANWR side and the Prudhoe side without checking my notes and a map.

So, this and this [133, 134] are pictures of one of the spots where the Canning River lets out into the Arctic Ocean. Just beyond it is ANWR. And this and this [144, 145] are pictures of what I believe is a typical oil-loading facility on what amounts to the coastal plain on the Prudhoe side of the Canning River. This [142] is a typical pipeline running over the tundra and so is this [143]. This [140] is what the coastal plain and most of the tundra in Prudhoe look like, complete with the puddles I described. And so is this [141]. And so is this [137]. There some places without the puddles, however [196].

Now, as for the mountains in ANWR: There are many beautiful mountain ranges in this South Carolina-sized wilderness. But the ones closest to the coastal plain are not covered in lush trees, as you might think from looking at the media coverage. This far north it's too cold, dark, and bleak during the winter for trees to survive. So these mountains are impressive geologically, but — at least from what I saw — they look like barren, massive piles of gravel. For example: [169] [179] [171]. And some have really cool glacier-ice formations on them, like this [178]. But remember, these [180] are still very far from this [150].

I did see some caribou closer than this [150] but I didn't snap any good pictures. As you can see [151], they are hanging out on the shore of the Arctic Ocean trying to escape the bugs. I like to call the one on the very far left-hand corner Arthur. Speaking of the Arctic Ocean, the ice never really goes away [152]. Here you can see the dividing line between what were two giant sheets of ice [154]. That line is not man-made in any way.

And finally, this is me [131] looking like a doofus in hardhat and goggles at the Alpine Oil installation. The reason I don't look fatter is that standing against a large petroleum facility has a beneficial slimming effect, which is the real reason why I am favor of opening up ANWR. I do not pretend that you couldn't take prettier pictures up close on the tundra where the drilling might be, but that's not why I was there. And, besides, you couldn't take pictures of beautiful mountains where the drilling would be because, well, there are no mountains of any kind where the drilling would be.

________________________

I have a question. If, due to environmental concerns, we can't drill in this little sliver of ANWR, when are we going to shut down operations in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of California? After all, aren't these areas as sensitive as the tundra in ANWR?

Peak Oil, Oil Speculators, Off-shore Hoarding

ICE, ICE, Baby
Special to the Star-Telegram

"There’s a few hedge fund managers out there who are masters at knowing how to exploit the peak [oil] theories and hot buttons of supply and demand and by making bold predictions of shocking price advancements to come, they only add more fuel to the bullish fire in a sort of self fulfilling prophecy." — National Gas Week, September 5, 2005 as reprinted in the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report, "The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices," June 27, 2006

Fiddling While We Burn

There it is in plain sight for everyone to see, exactly what I’ve been reporting for the past few years: Many individuals who are investing in oil and natural gas futures are going out in the media and trying to convince the American public that either we are out of oil or there is a serious supply shortage of crude against worldwide demand. The question is: Does it surprise you to discover that the US Senate investigated the rigging of the oil market by speculators in the summer of 2006 – and concluded that there was no supply and demand problem with oil? Did you know that their conclusion was that speculators were responsible for a 70 percent overcharge in the price of oil in the months leading up to the summer of 2006?

This from page 1 of the Executive Summary of that Senate investigation, there is this one troubling line: "Today, U.S. oil inventories are at an eight-year high, and OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) oil inventories are at a 20-year high."

That’s odd because, in 2006, just like today, the media reporting covered the serious international shortage of oil and justified oil’s high price. Even more troubling is that the House of Representatives held a hearing this past December, ominously titled "Energy Speculation and Price Manipulation." How did it pass under the radar that both the Senate and the House studied the issue of price manipulation in our energy markets and both concluded that it was unregulated, massive trading in one futures market that was really driving up the price of oil and natural gas? And given that conclusion, why has Congress done nothing about it?

Investors Make the News, Literally

A week ago Goldman Sachs issued a new investor note, suggesting that somewhere between six months to two years, the price of oil could go into a "super spike" and prices jump as high as $200 per barrel. It became the major story of the night. Ignored in the reporting frenzy was that many legitimate and well-respected oil analysts dismissed Goldman Sachs’ prediction as groundless.

Get ready for the next shock to your system. In the past month we have added 11.9 million barrels of oil into our stock reserves, giving us 32.3 million more barrels of oil than we had on hand January 1. On May 5, we found out that for the second time in as many years, Iran was storing its excess crude oil on tankers in the Persian Gulf, because it had run out of storage space in the desert and was awaiting buyers for its heavy crude. That same day Saudi Arabia cut the discount price for its Arabian Heavy crude to $7.45, hoping to entice more buyers for immediate delivery. We didn’t hear that news, either.

While researching my third article for BusinessWeek online about the world’s oil situation in 2008, I asked for the most current report from Oil Movements. Because the oil industry is not transparent, Oil Movements tracks every tanker at sea, from both OPEC and non-OPEC oil countries, along with their cargoes’ final destinations. Anne O’Shea responded immediately to my request with their report dated May 8, 2008. Just so you will know, oil shipments are up from a year ago in almost every class, including Middle East oil in transit and Non-OPEC in Transit. The only class of oil shipment that has declined is covered on page 3 of that report. That chart is labeled, "4-Week Changes in Westbound Oil at Sea."

That’s right, shipments of oil headed west have shown serious declines during the month of April, down 800,000 barrels per day in the week before the publication of the report. Now, let me give you the first line from under the Westbound Oil shipments chart: "In the west, a big share of any [oil] stock building done this year has happened offshore, out of sight."

Could this be true? Oil Movements, the unimpeachable source for finding the real world situation on oil transits, is saying that oil is being hidden offshore, not declared in inventories? Yes, that is exactly what they are saying.

That same week our refineries cut their production runs back to 85 percent, down from 89 percent a year ago, to trim more gasoline out of our stock reserves, to increase their profits per gallon.

National Short-Term Memory Loss

It’s amazing how quickly we forget our recent history. Congressional hearings in 2001, blasting certain Wall Street executives for using the media to sell the public on stocks in order to bid up the price – so their firm could divest of its shares without taking a beating. Meanwhile, other trusted advisors pushed stocks that were fundamentally worthless, because their affiliated banks had large loan agreements with those companies.

The year before Enron had been caught manipulating the California energy market, even forcing rolling blackouts across the northern part of their state apparently just for effect – to support their claim that there just wasn’t enough electricity to go around. Again, we now know that claim was untrue. It was Enron shutting down certain power generation plants, while placing bets on their unregulated energy futures market. The net cost to California consumers was almost $8 billion.

It didn’t end there. Amaranth Advisors, a hedge fund, literally was cornering the market on natural gas futures, to make it appear that there was a shortage of natural gas, when the Commodities Futures Trading Commission told Amaranth to liquidate its position on the NYMEX because its bidding had already moved natural gas prices far beyond the reasonable limits of supply and demand. Now, remember this name: ICE, short for Intercontinental Exchange – the "dark futures lookalike market."

Once the CFTC told it to back off its natural gas futures contracts, Amaranth simply shifted gears, got out of the NYMEX, placed its massive bets outside of government regulation in ICE and managed to drive natural gas futures to $8.50 per MBtu.

As the Senate investigation into the manipulation of the energy markets showed, "Amaranth – the day before they failed, natural gas was about $8.50; the day after it failed, it went to $4.46 MBtu." That’s right, one major hedge fund managed to double the price of natural gas simply by loading up on futures contracts; when the government told them their bets were unwarranted, they simply moved their monies to a futures exchange that was unregulated. Only when Amaranth failed did natural gas prices fall back to what was considered normal for supply and demand.

Sadly, like oil today, when this was happening we were being told that natural gas supplies were tight worldwide. That statement simply wasn’t true.

Dark Future

Likewise, British Petroleum was busted for manipulating the propane market in the winter of 2004 and fined $373 million. Of course, in Texas, under deregulation of our public utilities, our electric rates can be set using the futures market for natural gas, so the manipulation of the natural gas market spelled trouble for us. Consider this, by 2006, according to www.powertochoose.org, electricity rates for us had climbed to 15 cents a kilowatt-hour due to the high cost of natural gas. But, that was the exact same time period that Amaranth was proven to be manipulating the market and sending natural gas futures through the roof. Two months later the hedge fund collapsed and natural gas prices fell. Therefore, most Texans paid higher electric bills for Amaranth’s manipulation of the natural gas market.

Professor Michael Greenberger of the University of Maryland, a former board member of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, testified in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on December 14 of last year. Under discussion that day was the manipulation of the energy markets and prices, but Professor Greenberger added these comments: "Three, four months from now, you’re going to have a hearing on the subprime meltdown, and you’re going to find that the very same legislation [deregulating energy] deregulated something called collateralized debt obligations, CDOs." That legislation, friends, directly ties the mortgage meltdown to the high price of energy today.

It was called H.R. 5660, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. At first this bill went nowhere in the House, not even up for debate. Then, a few months later, late one night a 242-page bill written by Wall Street lawyers, with the exact same name as the former House bill, was quietly added to an 11,000-page appropriations bill, and the Enron loophole was created. The power behind that bill was one Texas Senator, one Texas Congressman and their wives.

Next week: How the unregulated futures market pushes the price of oil, natural gas and gasoline far beyond those commodities’ market value, thanks to the creation of the Intercontinental Exchange. Worse, Congress knows this, but does nothing.

© 2008 Ed Wallace

Ed Wallace is a recipient of the Gerald R. Loeb Award for business journalism, given by the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and is a member of the American Historical Society. He reviews new cars every Friday morning at 7:15 on Fox Four’s Good Day, contributes articles to BusinessWeek Online and hosts the talk show, Wheels, 8:00 to 1:00 Saturdays on 570 KLIF. E-mail: wheels570@sbcglobal.net


Under discussion that day was the manipulation of the energy markets and prices, but Professor Greenberger added these comments: "Three, four months from now, you’re going to have a hearing on the subprime meltdown, and you’re going to find that the very same legislation [deregulating energy] deregulated something called collateralized debt obligations, CDOs.

Lift-off for Nasa space telescope - captured by Deuce

Click the photo to enlarge.

A Nasa space telescope has launched successfully on a mission to explore the Universe with "gamma-ray glasses".

I was muttering to myself about not having any food service on US Air in first class. I mean why call it first class? I was not interested in their snack tray so I ordered a drink and started to play with my new Nikon lens.

The pilot announced that NASA launched a missile off the starboard side of the plane. I was already focused on some clouds and guess what, I caught it! I have monitored many missile launches in real time on radar but have never seen one in real time other than on a radar screen, and never an American launch. Damn, that felt good.  Nice trip, even without the lousy food.

_____________✈____________

BBC

The Glast mission will shed light on some of the most violent events in the Universe, that release massive amounts of energy in the form of gamma-rays.
It will scan the sky for massive cosmic explosions, giant black holes that hurl matter across space, and dense neutron stars with powerful magnetic fields.
Glast blasted off from Florida on Wednesday atop a Delta II rocket.
The Delta II began its climb to orbit at 1605 GMT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

"Glast soon will be telling scientists about many new objects to study, and this information will be available on the internet for the world to see," said Dr Steven Ritz, the chief scientist on the mission, who is from Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

Glast stands for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, but Nasa is calling on the public to come up with a new name for the mission.

The $690m (£350m) space observatory will take high-resolution pictures of the gamma-ray sky.

These rays are the highest-energy form of light, which makes them ideal for exploring some of the most extreme environments in the cosmos.

These are places where nature harnesses energies far beyond anything possible on Earth.
They include supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. These black holes produce powerful jets of matter, moving at close to the speed of light, which can travel vast distances across space.

THE GLAST MISSION

But despite the staggering scale and speed of these jets, astronomers haven't been able to answer the most basic questions about them, such as how matter is accelerated to such fabulous speeds.

Glast will also seek to investigate the mysterious cosmic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs).

These events release about the same amount of energy in one second as a star like the Sun will release in its 5-10 billion-year lifetime.

"We've only scratched the surface of the how and why of these gamma-ray phenomena," said Dave Thompson, a deputy project scientist who is also from Nasa Goddard.

"We have a lot to learn about how they work, and, more importantly, how these objects and phenomena affect the Universe. This is where Glast comes in."
The mission will also go in search of new physics, aiming to shed light on the nature of the dark matter which makes up some 22% of the Universe.

Glast represents a major step up in capability on previous gamma-ray telescopes and will cover an incredible range of light at the high energy limits of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The super-cosmos

"If Glast were a piano, it would have about 23 octaves," commented Dr Ritz.
"With such a great leap in capabilities, the most important things for us are the surprises."
The main instrument aboard the spacecraft is the the Large Area Telescope, or Lat.
Gamma-rays carry far to much energy to capture in the conventional way, so this is a telescope without lenses or mirrors.

Instead, the Lat uses silicon detectors and layers of metal foil to track the energetic radiation from outer space.

Once Glast reaches orbit, about 14 days will be spent checking out the spacecraft. In the third week after launch, the spacecraft's instruments will be turned on for tuning and calibration.
The mission is a collaboration between Nasa and the US Department of Energy, with important contributions from partners elsewhere in the US, in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit.

The Mullahs, Allah, and 14 Year old Suicide Bomber

As three soldiers are blown up, teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops.

The 14-year-old Afghan suicide bomber



By Kim Sengupta in Kabul Independent
Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Shakirullah Yasin Ali: "Those who were instructing me said that if I believed in serving God it was my duty to fight against the foreigners."

The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan's feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.

Among the inmates: Shakirullah Yasin Ali; a small, frail boy, just 14 years old, arrested as he prepared to carry out a suicide bombing against British and American targets. "If I had succeeded, I would be dead now, I realise that," he said in a soft, nervous voice.

"But those who were instructing me said that if I believed in serving God it was my duty to fight against the foreigners. They said God would protect me when the time came."

It was a suicide bomber like Shakirullah who, on Sunday, claimed the lives of three more British soldiers in Helmand, bringing the total number of UK fatalities in Afghanistan to 100.

The Independent spoke to Shakirullah, a Pakistani Pashtun, one of the youngest ever suicide bombing suspects, after he was captured in a raid at the town of Khost in Afghanistan.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the prison run by Afghan intelligence, the NDS, Shakirullah said: "I do not know what is going to happen to me. All we were told was the British and the Americans were in Afghanistan and they were killing Muslims.

"All I know is what the mullahs told me and kept telling me, that the British and the Americans were against God," he said with his head bowed down, his hands twisting a handkerchief.

Shakirullah, one of four children of Noor Ali Khan, a farmer, lived at the village of Tandola in the Pakistani region of South Waziristan. He said his education was at a madrassa run by two imams, Mullah Saleb and Mullah Azizullah. About 50 students between 13 and 22 attended the school, where the syllabus consisted of learning the Koran by heart, interspersed with political lectures.

About two months ago, he finished a first course in Koranic studies. He was then approached by the two mullahs who told him that the time had come for him to serve God in Afghanistan.

"At first, I did not know what I was supposed to be doing, then Mullah Saleb said I would be striking a blow against the foreigners, the British and the Americans, and get justice for all the people being killed. I was told I must leave at once and they would talk to my family on my behalf. I wanted to see my mother and father but I was told that was not possible for security reasons. That upset me but I thought I will be seeing them again as soon as I got back. They said my family would get well paid for what I was doing."

On the way to Afghanistan Shakirullah said he was told by a mullah that his mission would involve driving a car bomb. "I said I did not know how to drive but they said they would teach me, they said I would not have to drive far. Mullah Saleb said it was too late to stop. He kept saying that to be a good Muslim I must fulfil my duty. I was missing my family but I did not know how to go back to my village and I did not know anyone in the area I could run to. There was nothing I could do except pray I would be all right and my family would be all right."

Shakirullah says he was driven across the border and taken to a house in the city of Khost. "There were a few more people there and the leader was a man they called the Doctor, he and Mullah Saleb took me for driving lessons and took me to sermons in the evening. The Doctor brought the explosives in two bags for the car and he was the one who made the bomb. I was told I would soon be ready to carry out my mission."

However, the car being prepared for the bombing, a Toyota Corolla, had stalled a few times while Shakirullah was being taught to drive and, on one occasion, he and the Doctor had been closely questioned by the police.

Forty-eight hours later, the house where they were staying was raided by Afghan and Nato forces. "I had been told by the mullah that I was ready to go, the time was right. But then they came during the night, the soldiers, and smashed down the doors. There were Afghans and foreigners. A gun was stuck to my face and I thought I was going to be killed. They dragged us all out and took us to a prison."

Shakirullah's attack may have been prevented but not that of the bomber who took the lives of Privates Nathan Cuthbertson, 19, Charles David Murray, 19, and Daniel Gamble, 22. They had been going to speak to local people when a bomber detonated an explosive vest strapped to his chest.

Last night, their families paid tribute to their loved ones. Pte Murray's family said: "David was the best son, brother, grandson, nephew, cousin and friend any of us could hope for. Although his time with us was short, he lived every second to the full and taught us the meaning of life."

The parents of Pte Gamble said: "Dan died doing the job he was so proud to do, with the regiment he was proud to be part of. He was special because he had trained in the Afghan Pashtu language. He was special to his family and friends – a true hero in every sense."

Pte Cuthbertson's company commander, Major Russell Lewis, said he was "a talented, motivated individual. He always had a smile on his face and relished the challenges faced by the professional soldier. "

"We will not let Iraq become a base for hurting Iran’s security"-Nouri al-Maliki

What an interesting dynamic place is the Middle East.  

Maliki allays Iran fears on US presence
By Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran and Steve Negus in Cairo FT
June 8 2008

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraqi prime minister, tried at the weekend to allay Iranian concerns about a possible US-Iraqi treaty that might provide for a long-term US troop presence in Iraq.

“We will not let Iraq become a base for hurting Iran’s security,” he was quoted as saying.

Mr Maliki met Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, and was scheduled to meet President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader.

His talks were likely to focus on the so-called “status of forces” agreement with the US, and Iran’s alleged support for militias in Iraq.

Iran has strongly opposed the agreement, which the influential former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani said last week would “turn the Iraqis into slaves before the Americans”.

Tehran fears that a long-term US presence in Iraq could be used as a base for military intervention in Iran.

A status of forces accord has also been controversial inside Iraq, where many fear that it will erode Iraq’s sovereignty, as well as extend the freedom of action and lack of accountability already enjoyed by US-led multinational forces inside their country.

Iraqi parties across the political spectrum have raised concerns about the agreement, while Mr Maliki’s government has signalled that it has a different “vision” of the accord from Washington’s.

Although the administration of US President George W. Bush reportedly wants the agreement to be approved quickly, many Iraqi politicians would be happy to see it postponed.

The multinational force is currently governed by a series of United Nations resolutions. Some have suggested that the UN mandate could simply be renewed once again.

Meanwhile, Mr Maliki is also likely to raise the issue of Iranian security agencies’ alleged support for Iraqi insurgents, particularly for splinter groups of the radical Shia Mahdi Army militia. In May, Mr Maliki formed a committee to document Iran’s “interference” in Iraq.

Iran officially denies the charges, but regime insiders privately admit such operations and say Iraq has turned into a battlefield between Iran, US and some regional countries that are against the ruling of a Shia government in Baghdad.

Analysts, however, say that Iranian strategists are careful not to overplay their hand and alienate Tehran’s potential allies in Baghdad.

The Islamic republic has also balanced any support to anti-government militias with strong diplomatic and occasionally financial support for the government.

“Iran has decreased its [militia support] operations in Iraq compared to a year ago, due to US pressure,” said a former senior official. “The US has been relatively successful in distancing Maliki from Iran.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

China Plans to be a Nuclear Export Powerhouse.

Global locations of nuclear power plants.

Maps are interesting things. It should be obvious that the US has a natural lead position to develop and exploit nuclear power. The country that dominates the market gets to define the standards.

Look at where nuclear power plants are. Look at where they are not. Do we want to allow the industry to be dominated by the Chinese and have them set the standards?

☭____________☢____________☭

China gears up civilian nuclear power
(Agencies/China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-09 10:51

China's nuclear power firms aim to join the auto and electronic companies as export powerhouses, analysts say, but massive domestic expansion plans may not leave them the capacity to make an overseas push for more than a decade.

A $1 billion deal signed late last month with Russia to build and supply a uranium enrichment plant in China was another step toward civilian nuclear independence, less than two decades after its first nuclear generator came on stream.

The country last year sealed deals with France's Areva and US-based, Japanese-owned Westinghouse for several third-generation reactors, and the blueprints to allow them to develop domestic version.

And they have mastered the construction of older models at a speed that is impressing Asian neighbors who cannot afford or are not allowed to buy nuclear models sold by Western firms.

Countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are keen to build plants to convey a sense of modernity and to cut their fuel bills.

"They know the Chinese have a lot of money and they're not necessarily as rigid as Western investors," says Eurasia analyst Bob Herrera Lim.

"The Chinese could be the accelerator. They could say 'we're willing to take a longer-term look because these countries have a strategic value to us'. And obviously there's a lot of policy behavior in many of their companies."

And the timing couldn't be better for China, as the fight against climate change and the search for cheaper energy sources revives global interest in nuclear power.

"Their technology will improve, and worldwide demand is big so when it starts to grow at a high pace again, Areva, Westinghouse and other nuclear reactor suppliers cannot meet it on their own," says Colette Lewiner, analyst at Capgemini.

"I know it is serious because (the Chinese) told me they are looking for partners to export the technology."

But China is also ramping up its domestic nuclear expansion plans, targeting a total of 60 gigawatts by 2020. Its current nuclear capacity is only 9 GW, under 2 percent of its total installed power generation capacity.

And its own experts admit they will have to devote most of the country's technical know-how and a large portion of both listed and State-owned firms' capital to what will be the fastest nuclear build-out the world has ever seen.

It will need to start construction on about 4 new generators a year through 2015 to meet its ambitious target.
"At present it's pretty hard for our building and design equipment to meet China's own development needs, so in terms of going overseas, it's not a big target for us," says an industry source close to the government who declines to be named.

China sees nuclear plants as a partial answer for its mounting pollution and energy security problems, although China's electricity use is growing so fast that even after the breakneck expansion nuclear will provide about 5 percent of its power.

The speed of the expansion is tying China to the second-generation models that have faced teething troubles rather than the safer third-generation plants it has begun buying.

"The majority of plants started before 2013 will be that model because China is quite familiar with it," the industry expert says.

But there is no shortage of bidders. Ambitious managers at all the country's big five listed power companies want to join the sector, once the preserve of two State-owned firms.

The country's second-largest listed electricity producer, Datang International Power Generation Co Ltd has already invested in the Ningde plan in southeastern Fujian province, with the first reactor due to come on line in 2012.

Nuclear is attractive because it diversifies their generating mix, adding a type of plant with a relatively predictable operating margin because fuel is such a small portion of costs.

Business in China

Despite its desire for a speedy expansion, China's focus on developing domestic technology means firms like Westinghouse and Areva are unlikely to repeat deals for entire plants.

But they will be rewarded for handing over some of their secrets by an ongoing stream of smaller deals for parts that Chinese companies are not yet able to manufacture, or cannot produce on a large scale.

"In the future, I see a two-way flow of business. There will not be so many sales of big third-generation plants but equipment sales to China will be good," Lewiner says.

"In the other direction Western firms will be re-exporting from China nuclear equipment and sharing skills," she added.

Another area where France's Areva looks set to pick up steady business in China is reprocessing nuclear waste.

"Fuel manufacturing and reprocessing of used fuel are areas where China needs Western technology, because they cannot do this on an industrial scale," she says.

F-22 Raptor, Greatest Fighter Ever

The F-22 is the most advanced and capable fighter in the world. It needs to be built and deployed because we cannot afford to have someone else (China) build it and deploy against us. That is a simple inelegant fact of life. Secretary Gates thinks differently:

______________

Air Force shakeup may spur spending shifts

Sun Jun 8, 2008 11:53am EDT
By Jim Wolf - Analysis Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The ouster of the Air Force's top two officials may spur even more Pentagon spending on equipment for current wars and end production of pricey F-22 jets designed for potential conflicts with countries such as China.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates forced the resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley on Thursday after gaffes involving nuclear and missile security.

The Air Force's accidental shipping of ballistic-missile fuses to Taiwan may have been the last straw amid strains over acquisition priorities, remotely piloted vehicles and other friction about post-Iraq needs, experts on the military said.

Starting months ago, Gates had singled out the Air Force's top-of-the-line Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) F-22 Raptor fighter jet as a prime example of what he deemed misplaced military priorities.

"The reality is we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theatre," Gates told a Senate committee in February. He later urged all the services to send more remotely piloted planes, such as General Atomics' Predator, to the battlefield, a step that feeds surveillance video to troops in real time.

Under Wynne and Moseley, the Air Force had sought to buy 381 radar-evading F-22s -- more than twice as many as the 183 budgeted by the Defense Department. The F-22 costs more than $132 million apiece.

Dov Zakheim, who retired as the Pentagon's chief financial officer in 2004, said the Air Force shake-up would prompt the Army, Navy and Marine Corps to rethink their big-ticket acquisition plans as well to make sure they met Gates' goals.

"What just happened underscores the secretary's concern that the (Defense) department pursue programs that are most relevant to the kinds of wars that he expects the United States to continue to fight," Zakheim said in a telephone interview.(more here)

Obama- Know a Man by his Friends

You really have to surrender all manner of common sense to believe that Barack Obama is anything but a left wing Afro-centric radical. Now that the Democrats have tied their future to this man, the examination as to who he is can begin. The exposure to the American public will expose the rift in just how far the US has moved to the left. Will the American people buy the friend, darling and messianic visionary love child of the American Radical Left?

_____________☂_____________

Obama's associations may haunt bid

Sunday, June 8, 2008

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)Washington Times Who's Tony Rezko? William Ayers? Few Americans know, but they probably will by Election Day.

Both men have ties to Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and may well show up in even more anti-Obama ads than they already have.

These days, presidential candidates can expect to have every personal relationship, new or ancient, investigated, and if there's political hay to be made, a version of the details is quickly out. All candidates have their associations questioned, but it's especially true for Mr. Obama, still a newcomer to the national scene. Voters haven't had years to form impressions based on what he has said or the legislation he's supported.

Associations already have produced one crisis for Mr. Obama — the furor over the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his spiritual mentor. Here are brief descriptions of some other people who may show up in ads, debate questions and Internet chatter over the coming months.


Antoin Rezko: "Tony" Rezko is a businessman who has helped raise campaign money for Mr. Obama and many other Illinois politicians. He was convicted Wednesday on 16 of 24 counts involving mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and aiding and abetting bribery.

The charges have no connection to Mr. Obama, but Rezko is tied to the Illinois senator in other ways.

Rezko and his family donated at least $21,457 to Mr. Obama and helped raise over $200,000 more, though not for his presidential bid. He also advised Mr. Obama on the purchase of a new Chicago home and, in his wife's name, purchased a vacant lot next door to the new Obama home when the seller wanted to dispose of both properties at the same time. Rezko then sold a slice of the property to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama has donated Rezko's contributions to charity and says it was a mistake to work with Rezko on buying the house.


William Ayers: Today, Mr. Ayers is a university professor and a member of Chicago's intellectual establishment. Forty years ago he was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical group that claimed responsibility for a series of bombings, including at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

Mr. Ayers was a fugitive for years with his wife, fellow radical Bernadine Dohrn. But after surrendering in 1980, the charges against Mr. Ayers were dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers served together on the board of a Chicago charity and were co-panelists on at least two academic panel discussions and an academic testimonial — two of them at the University of Chicago. In the mid-1990s, when Mr. Obama first ran for office, Mr. Ayers hosted a meet-the-candidate session for Mr. Obama at his home.


Emil Jones Jr.: Mr. Jones, the president of the Illinois Senate, amounts to Mr. Obama's political godfather and was an important part of his longshot victory for U.S. Senate in 2004. He helped the little-known politician meet the right people, and he picked Mr. Obama to handle high-profile legislation during the two years leading up to the election.

Mr. Jones is known for steering state money to a few favored institutions, including some that employ his relatives. Several of his relatives have gotten state jobs, and his wife's government salary jumped 60 percent after he became Senate president. He has played an important role in blocking ethics legislation in Illinois.


Rashid Khalidi: Mr. Khalidi is a Palestinian scholar and author on Middle Eastern affairs who has called Israel a racist state bent on creating "an apartheid system." He's also a friend of Mr. Obama.

They met while both were teaching at the University of Chicago and living in the same neighborhood. Mr. Obama and his wife sometimes had dinner with Mr. Khalidi and his wife, Mona. The Khalidis hosted a political fundraiser for Mr. Obama in 2000, and the Woods Fund charity gave money to the Arab-American Action Network, run by Mrs. Khalidi, while Mr. Obama served on the charity's board.

Mr. Obama has said they hold very different opinions on Israeli issues, though Mr. Khalidi praised Mr. Obama as "the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause" and for his willingness to hold talks with Iran, which has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

The Rev. Michael Pfleger: Father Pfleger, the white, longtime pastor of a mostly black Catholic parish in Chicago, has been protesting everything from gun shops to Jerry Springer. Mr. Obama has referred to him as a spiritual adviser and used him as a political supporter.

Last month, he visited Trinity United Church of Christ, Mr. Obama's church at the time, and preached a sermon in which he mocked Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as expecting to win the presidential nomination because she was white. Mr. Obama, who condemned the remarks and resigned from the church, was not nearly as close to Father Pfleger as he was to Mr. Wright.

Guess Who?

A young new neighbor, a well-spoken and good looking kid, decided his recently purchased three story Victorian Mansion could be put to better use by changing it into apartments. He was very enthusiastic about his plans to rent these apartments to low-income families. These families needed a break, he said. He was no do-gooder, he assured me. He had a business plan and was profit seeking. As an added bonus, the old neighborhood would be rejuvenated by young families with children. He said that he loved the sound of children playing. I asked him if he was going to live in one of the apartments? He said that he would love to but he had a house across town.

I asked the neighbor if he had any experience doing renovations. He told me, frankly, that he had none. However, he was confident that he could do the demolition part (how hard could it be, he asked?) and then turn over the reconstruction to the experts. And so, he hired a young lad to help him and set about his task, starting with the first floor.

Off came the outside cladding. Off came the inside lath and plaster. Out came most of the interior walls. In a couple of days only the framing remained. Then, since he was going to replace all of the windows and doors, out they came, too, along with their individual framing. And then, because he had a plan showing where the new windows and doors were going to go, he removed any studs that were in the way of their installation. After a while the place was looking pretty naked. Except for the top two floors and the massive roof.

I went over to the house one morning and told the young neighbor that by removing so much of the basic support structure he was in danger of the house coming down around him. I told him to start reinforcing the corners. The lad agreed but said that it was getting late and he would attend to it first thing in the morning.

Of course, all of you know what happened. That night the laws of physics decided to exert themselves and the house collapsed. Luckily, no one was inside. But that is all the luck the young neighbor had. The house was totally wrecked. The insurance company told the neighbor to go piss up a rope. And the bylaw officers came after him for not having a demolition permit.

The young neighbor lost his investment and off-loaded the balance of the loss by giving his keys back to the mortgage holder. Then he washed his hands of the whole mess.

Before he left he wanted to have a word with me. I had warned him that he was in dangerous territory with his amateur demolition efforts but he was angry that I hadn't been emphatic enough and, in fact, I had been derelict in my duty as a good neighbor. After dressing me down, he left and I never saw him again.

But I'll never forget his face.

See him Here

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US Based Human Rights Watch Dismayed at Turk Head Scarf Ban

The Turkish Court ruling on headscarves at universities seemed eminently sensible. Islamist dictum and influence result in a one way descent into intolerant, violent and sometimes deadly repression of human behavior. Only the American Left could be so blinded by ideology as to not notice. Their ideology and naivety will be well represented and presented in any Obama Administration. Hard core activists will rule.

HRW contradicts its own professed positions stated on its website:

...Our duty as activists is to expose and denounce as human rights violations those practices and policies that silence and subordinate women. We reject specific legal, cultural, or religious practices by which women are systematically discriminated against, excluded from political participation and public life, segregated in their daily lives, raped in armed conflict, beaten in their homes, denied equal divorce or inheritance rights, killed for having sex, forced to marry, assaulted for not conforming to gender norms, and sold into forced labor. Arguments that sustain and excuse these human rights abuses - those of cultural norms, "appropriate" rights for women, or western imperialism - barely disguise their true meaning: that women's lives matter less than men's. Cultural relativism, which argues that there are no universal human rights and that rights are culture-specific and culturally determined, is still a formidable and corrosive challenge to women's rights to equality and dignity in all facets of their lives.

We may be ruled by such fools.

______________☂______________

ANKARA (Reuters) NYT- A decision by Turkey's top court to annul a government reform which lifted a ban on Muslim headscarves at universities is a blow to freedom of religion and other fundamental rights, Human Rights Watch said on Saturday.

Turkey's Constitutional Court overturned late on Thursday a reform which would have allowed students to wear the Muslim headscarf in universities. Analysts said the decision increased the chances that the AK Party would be closed down for alleged Islamist activities in a separate case at the same court.

"This decision means that women who choose to wear a headscarf in Turkey will be forced to choose between their religion and their education," Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

"This is a truly disappointing decision and does not bode well for the reform process," Cartner said.

The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch also criticized the ruling AK Party for failing to redraft Turkey's constitution entirely, which it said failed to protect human rights, despite launching a plan to do so after it was re-elected last year.

The secularist establishment, including army generals and judges, suspects the AK Party of harboring a hidden Islamist agenda. The party denies the accusations.

(Editing by Ibon Villelabeitia)

"Strong smelling, but smoooooth." Trish.

Beyond The Rhetoric And Resignations
By THOMAS SOWELL

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Sen. Barack Obama's latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years.

But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Sen. Obama's belated resignation from that church.

For any politician, what matters is not his election-year rhetoric, or an election-year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.

Yet so many people are so fascinated by Obama's rhetorical skills that they don't care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state Senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate's personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations.

Despite clever spin from Obama's supporters about avoiding "guilt by association," much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger.

In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator, Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers' money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger's work.

Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association.

Are Barack Obama's views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before?

The complete contrast between Obama's election-year image as a healer of divisions and his whole career of promoting far-left grievance politics, in association with America-haters like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, are brushed aside by his supporters, who talk about getting back to "the real issues."

There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.

There is no office where the character and values of the person in that office matter more than the office of president of the United States. He holds the destiny of 300 million Americans in his hands and the fate of generations yet unborn.

That was never more true than today, with Iran moving ever closer to a nuclear bomb, while the United Nations wrings its hands and Congress fritters away its time on things from steroids in sports to earmarks for pet projects back home.

Does anyone seriously consider what it would mean for Iran to have nuclear weapons? They already are supplying terrorists with the means of killing people in other countries, including killing American troops in Iraq.

Sen. Obama has been downplaying the Iran threat, saying that they are just "a small country," not like the Soviet Union. The people who flew planes into the World Trade Center were an even smaller group than the Iranian government.

Half a dozen terrorists like that with nuclear weapons would be a bigger danger than the Soviet Union ever was, because the Soviet leaders were not suicide bombers. They could be deterred by the threat of what we would do to Moscow if they attacked New York. You cannot deter suicidal fanatics. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. Rhetoric is not going to do it.

Not only Sen. Obama, but too many other Americans, seem to have no concept of the seething hatred that can lead people to destroy their own lives in order to lash out at others. But terrorists have been doing this repeatedly, not only in Iraq and in Israel, but in other countries around the world — including the United States on 9/11.

Have we already forgotten how the Palestinians were cheering in the streets over the news of the attack on the World Trade Center? How videotapes of sadistic beheadings of innocent people by terrorists have found an eager audience in the Middle East?

Are we going to leave our children hostages to hate-filled sadists with nuclear weapons? Are we to rely on Barack Obama's rhetoric to protect them?

Sen. Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?"

Generational Ecology 101

bobal said...

I can't listen to KGO anymore. I can't take anymore of this praise the Lord Obama's the new JFK magnified crap. Obama the world traveler, Obama the man with the world in his very genes, Obama the intellect, ah man.

Thanks Bob, neither can I. Bobby Kennedy was a nasty little creep and his brother, JFK , in legend, far exceeds his rather mediocre presidency. The problem is that Obama is no more or less qualified to be president than the minor and ill-accomplished president he is replacing. An Obama Presidency would not be possible without a Bush Presidency. The Obama harvest comes from the seeds planted by the master of low expectations.

Enjoy the comedy played before you. Thankfully, we are watching the last gasp of the boomers and our last line of defense is manned by 72 year old pre-boomer, John McCain. But that is OK, everyone is sick of hearing about Viet Nam and all that went with it.

Viet Nam is no more relevant in 2008, than the Great Depression of 1928 was to the 1968 crowd.

Each new generation is not as interested in learning the lessons of previous generations as it is in creating new lessons to be ignored by the next.

Increasing personal irrelevance in army strength and formation, becomes generational irrelevance. Generational irrelevance is in a sense an accomplishment.

Decomposition begins. It is the ultimate 4H Club, Hubris, Humor, Humility and Humus.

Gates Wakes Up the US Air Force

NYTimes - "$1.4 Billion aid to Mexico is not enough"

Yesterday the NYTimes acknowledged the crisis in Mexico. They also indicated that the $1.4 billion aid package is "not enough." Let's see how long they support this "war."

Mexico at the Brink
June 4, 2008
NY Times Editorial


The War on Drugs may be fading from memory north of the Rio Grande, but south of the river, bloody battles are threatening to overwhelm Mexico’s democratically elected government. The timid assistance package proposed by the Bush administration and pared down by Congress suggests that Washington doesn’t grasp either the scale of the danger or its own responsibilities.

President Felipe Calderón’s decision to take on the traffickers shows great courage and a sound understanding of the threat they pose to his country. But he seems to be in over his head. More than 4,000 people, including about 450 members of the police department, have been killed in drug-related violence since he took office a year and a half ago. Just last month, four top security officials were gunned down in Mexico City, including the acting chief of the federal police.

Mexico cannot wage this battle alone. Its police forces are ill equipped, ill trained and riddled with corruption — and clearly no match for the drug barons, with their enormous wealth and firepower. President Calderón’s decision to turn to the military is understandable, but the army is not trained for the policing and intelligence tasks or for dealing with the civilian population. Human rights advocates are already accusing the army of abuses.

The United States has a clear interest and a clear obligation to help. This country is the main market for the methamphetamine cooked in Mexican labs and the cocaine moving through Mexico from the Andes. It is also the source of the traffickers’ weapons. And no fence will stop the gun battles from moving across the border.

The Bush administration is right to acknowledge the shared threat and the common responsibility. But the three-year, $1.4 billion aid package it proposed doesn’t do the job. It is too small, notably so when compared with the billions the cartels earn in the United States. And far too much of the aid is military hardware when Mexico has other more urgent needs.

Above all, Mexico needs help rooting out corruption and creating a well-equipped, well-trained and respected civilian police force. The Mexican police need help improving their skills in forensic investigations, prison security and witness protection. And Mexico needs a transparent, fair and competent judiciary to prosecute traffickers as well as officials and members of the police who have been bought by the traffickers or are guilty of human rights abuses.

Any aid would have to require close monitoring to ensure that it is not squandered and that reports of abuses are not swept under the rug.

Washington’s role does not end there. Mexico has no hope of defeating the traffickers unless this country is also willing to do more to fight the drug war at home — starting with a clear commitment to stop the weapons smugglers and to do more to take on the narcotics networks on the American side of the border.

Unfortunately, rather than bolstering aid to Mexico, Congress is shrinking it. The House approved a first installment of only $400 million, not the $500 million requested by the White House. The Senate approved only $350 million. Both have also attached sensible human rights conditions — but neither the administration nor Congress has made any effort to sell those conditions to Mexican officials. Some of Mr. Calderón’s aides are now suggesting that they might reject the help. After years of blaming each other, the United States and Mexico are finally ready to fight the traffickers together. Both governments need to work, urgently, to salvage the aid package and that cooperation. The threat to Mexico, and this country, is far too dangerous.

Chuck Hagel Talks to Spiegel

Senator Chuck Hagel spent 13 months in the Mekong Delta from 1967-1968. He was a grunt. He received the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal, and the Combat Infantryman Badge. After returning from Vietnam, Hagel worked as a bartender and radio newscaster while finishing college. He went on to become the senior US Senator from Nebraska and he is calling it quits.



In a March 2007 interview with the NY Times he said, "His faith in the rightness of the Vietnam War was worn down by reading history and traveling abroad, but what changed his mind most, he said, was listening to tape recordings released in the late 1990’s of telephone conversations in which President Lyndon B. Johnson confided that he saw the war as pointless. That was in 1964, and Mr. Johnson said he feared impeachment if he tried to withdraw.

“The dishonesty of it was astounding — criminal, really,” Mr. Hagel said. “I came to the conclusion that they used those people, used our young people. So I am very careful, especially now. We’d better ask all the tough questions. This administration dismissed every tough question we asked. We were assured, ‘We know what we’re doing.’ That’s what they said in Vietnam.”...

Hagel reminds me of most of my friends and contemporaries who actually served in the military and Viet Nam. Their views on war are several decibels below those that did not. Some interesting comments from Spiegel:

________☂________

SPIEGEL: It doesn’t look good for your own party. After seven years of George W. Bush, 81 percent of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track and only 27 percent have a favorable view. What went wrong?

Hagel: The party is in terrible shape and it is because we did not do a very good job of managing this country. We have gotten into two wars. We have run up a third of the national debt in the last seven years. So we have controlled the government and we have made a lot of mistakes. All the same, McCain and Obama are within the margin of error in the polls.

SPIEGEL: Is the era of the hawks in your party definitely over?

Hagel: I hope so. That segment of the Republican Party, the so-called neocons, held the Republican Party hostage much of the time. What this element has done to our party is clear now and I would hope that it will come back to the party of Eisenhower, even the party of Ronald Reagan. Today’s party is no longer Ronald Reagan’s party, who, contrary to his reputation, governed from the center. But he sat down with the Soviets, the great evil empire, and was able to get results, for example in nuclear disarmament.

SPIEGEL: You write in your new book about former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt visiting you in your office in the Senate, chain-smoking and complaining that “there are no more great leaders." Do you agree?

Hagel: Today, I don’t see any great global leaders of the stature of Reagan, Kohl, Mitterand and Thatcher. They were important, whether you agreed with them or not. But as Schmidt also told me in my office, there will come a time when we will find those new leaders again.

SPIEGEL: A lot of Germans hope Obama is that someone.

Hagel: He could be. But until he is in office, you don’t know.

The interview

Hillary In Or Out?

"I want to hear from you ... Share your thoughts with me."

I had a few hours to kill at Miami airport. The "D" terminal is plastered with large LCD screens of CNN (probably best watched under LSD). CNN was under its own ecstasy with their projection of Obama being the the Democratic Candidate and also bemoaning a reportedly inept speech by John McCain. I didn't see the speech but I got the drift.

Suddenly Hillary appears on all the screens to screaming banner waving supporters. I think she gave one of the best speeches of her candidacy, and it was a non-non-concession speech. The double non is in order because she is giving it some thought, but in the mean time she wants everyone to send emails and hopefully enclose some checks. She looked good and maybe her wait and see posture will work. She emphasized the Democratic Party should count every vote and by the way, she got more of them.

On a personal note, I watched the body language and facial expressions of black travelers and airport personnel. They were understandably moved and proud of their moment. So they should be. By the way, anyone see my guy's speech? How bad was it?

"Disappointment with Obama is a foregone conclusion,"

Today, thank God, marks the end of the Democrat primaries.

Yesterday, Father Pfleger had to apologize for his tasteless parody of Hillary Clinton. From Barack's "former" church, the monsignor portrayed a Hillary shocked at the come from nowhere and on-to-victory stealth candidate. "Damn," he has her saying to Obama, "Where did you come from?" Father Pfleger's parody was tasteless but in-part, true. Barack's ascendancy has been a phenomenon perhaps never before seen in the history of US politics.


Has a candidate for the United States Presidency ever said less with greater effect? Women swoon and world leaders fawn. And at what? Does anyone really know what the candidate stands for? Or has everyone simply projected their "hopes" into his message of change?"

Obamamania Infects Germany

By Ralf Beste

Berlin political circles -- both liberal and conservative -- are fawning over US presidential candidate Barack Obama. Many in Germany see him as a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., but expectations may be exaggerated.

Germans are intoxicated by Barack Obama's political message.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier had hoped to meet personally, but Barack Obama has a lot on his plate at the moment and Germany's foreign minister had to make do with a telephone conversation with the presidential candidate during his recent visit to Washington. Still, that's all it took to stir Steinmeier's enthusiasm for the candidate.

The American may be deep in the midst of a campaign, but members of Steinmeier's entourage told SPIEGEL that Obama's foreign policy questions were very engaged, and he peppered his conversation with questions about the German foreign minister's views on Russia, Iran and Afghanistan.

The conversation lasted about 15 minutes and was very focused. Obama's rhetorical "cruising altitude," was apparently quite high, an advisor to Steinmeier said. At the end of the conversation, the Democratic presidential candidate promised to come to Germany as soon as possible.

The few minutes spent on the telephone gave Steinmeier the impression that Obama is prepared to fundamentally reconsider the course of US foreign policy. Steinmeier was impressed, and only a day later he publicly outed himself as the senator's latest fan. "Yes we can," the minister, not known for his emotional outbursts, chanted, evoking Obama's campaign slogan during a speech at Harvard University. Steinmeier used the term to express his desire for a renewal of trans-Atlantic relations.

'Germany Is Obamaland'

But the foreign minister hasn't been alone in his admiration for the candidate -- Berlin has been teeming with Obamamania for weeks now. Even conservatives are taken by the Democrat. After the Bush era, Chancellor Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democrats can easily imagine working together with a liberal Democrat in the White House. And Norbert Röttgen, chief whip for the Christian Democrats in parliament, sees Obama as the messenger of a new wave of politics that could also provide a model for Germany.

"Germany is Obamaland," says Karsten Voigt, the German government's coordinator for trans-Atlantic relations. He says Germans see the African-American senator as a kind of "mixture of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr."

People are projecting their hopes and dreams on Obama, adds Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. He's perceived here as peace-loving and cooperative, and those are the kind of traits Germans admire in a foreign politician.

Obama's Republican contender John McCain is viewed with greater skepticism in Berlin, where the 71-year-old Vietnam veteran is considered by many to be a Cold War relic. McCain, for example, announced that he wanted to kick Russia out of the G-8 and instead found a "League of Democracies" that, in emergencies, could also circumvent the United Nations around the world. Those aren't the kind of words that get a warm welcome in Germany.

McCain is not an unknown quantity in Germany, either. As a dyed in the wool trans-Atlanticist, he regularly participates in the annual Munich Security Conference. The senator has a reputation there for his sharp attacks against German politicians -- his fits of rage are feared and his political positions are known because of the numerous debates he has taken part in.

Obama, though, is less known. The best even the most dialled-in US experts in Berlin have managed is a handshake with the senator. He routinely denies requests from members of the German parliament to visit with him in Washington. Most of the information they have on Obama comes either from YouTube films or the papers. "Obama has no relationship with Europe whatsoever," said Hans-Ulrich Klose, the foreign policy spokesman for the center-left Social Democrats.

Still, if Obama becomes president, many Germans are hoping for a political honeymoon that lasts for at least a few months. Veteran diplomats believe there will be a "window of opportunity" that will make new initiatives possible.

But most believe the honeymoon won't last too long, experts agree. "The Germans' hopes are almost excessive," says government coordinator Voigt. "Some trans-Atlantic problems won't simply disappear because Obama is president." Obama, too, he said, would be willing to deploy troops without first getting permission from the United Nations.

"Disappointment with Obama is a foregone conclusion," added the German Marshall Fund's Stelzenmüller.

PFC Ross A. McGinnis

How great the brave who rest in peace,

All blessings from heaven to earth.

They gave our country but their best,

Those destined to be brave from birth.
from Remembering our Fallen Heroes by Tom Zart.

*McGINNIS, ROSS A.

Rank and Organization: Private First Class, United States Army
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty:
Private First Class Ross A. McGinnis distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty while serving as an M2 .50-caliber Machine Gunner, 1st Platoon, C Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, in connection with combat operations against an armed enemy in Adhamiyah, Northeast Baghdad, Iraq, on 4 December 2006.

That afternoon his platoon was conducting combat control operations in an effort to reduce and control sectarian violence in the area. While Private McGinnis was manning the M2 .50-caliber Machine Gun, a fragmentation grenade thrown by an insurgent fell through the gunner's hatch into the vehicle. Reacting quickly, he yelled "grenade," allowing all four members of his crew to prepare for the grenade's blast. Then, rather than leaping from the gunner's hatch to safety, Private McGinnis made the courageous decision to protect his crew. In a selfless act of bravery, in which he was mortally wounded, Private McGinnis covered the live grenade, pinning it between his body and the vehicle and absorbing most of the explosion.

Private McGinnis' gallant action directly saved four men from certain serious injury or death. Private First Class McGinnis' extraordinary heroism and selflessness at the cost of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty, are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the United States Army.

Arlington National Cemetary Website

Add another citation to the headstone: Medal of Honor.

What Would Obama Do?

International Herald Tribune
Taliban leader flaunts power inside Pakistan
By Jane Perlez
Monday, June 2, 2008

PESHAWAR, Pakistan: With great fanfare, the Pakistani Army flew journalists to a rugged corner of the nation's lawless tribal areas in May to show how decisively it had destroyed the lairs of the Taliban, including a school for suicide bombers, in fighting early this year.

Then, just days later, the usually reclusive leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, held a news conference of his own, in the same region, to show just who was in charge.

He rolled up in an expensive-looking Toyota pickup packed with heavily armed Taliban fighters, according to the Pakistani journalists invited to attend. Squatting on the floor of a government school, Mehsud, clasping a new Kalashnikov, announced he would press his fight against the American military across the border in Afghanistan.

"Islam does not recognize boundaries," he told the journalists, in accounts published in Pakistani newspapers and reported by the BBC. "There can be no deal with the United States."

Mehsud's jaunty appearance in his home base, South Waziristan, a particularly unruly region of Pakistan's tribal areas, underscored the wide latitude Pakistan's government has granted the militants under a new series of peace deals, and its impact in Afghanistan, where NATO and American commanders say cross-border attacks have surged since talks for those peace deals began in March.

The impunity of Mehsud's behavior has outraged the Bush administration, which is pressing the Pakistani government to arrest and prosecute him.

"Bringing Baitullah Mehsud, the head of this extremist group in South Waziristan — capturing him and bringing him to justice, which is what should happen to him," is what the United States wants from Pakistan, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said last month in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But the Pakistani government, which at times has considered Mehsud an ally and is now fearful of his power, appears reluctant to hunt him down. Days before his news conference, Pakistani forces pulled back from his realm in South Waziristan as part of the peace deals.

American and Pakistani officials accuse Mehsud of masterminding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, in December and sending scores of suicide bombers here and in Afghanistan, while forging a symbiotic relationship with Al Qaeda on Pakistan's frontier.

Interviews with former military officials and government officials, local residents and a former Taliban member who worked in proximity to Mehsud's inner circle portrayed him as a militant leader who is barely educated, attracts more knowledgeable people to his side and is ruthless in his goal of an extreme form of Islamic rule.

He and his main ally, Qari Hussain, whom officials and associates have described as a highly trained and vicious militant, have methodically built up strongholds in North and South Waziristan — killing uncooperative tribal leaders, recruiting unemployed young men to their jihad and filling the vacuum left by a lack of government services. Now, they also have lieutenants and allies across the tribal region.

In South Waziristan, they run training camps for suicide bombers, some of them children, according to the former Taliban member. Their realm is so secure that in April Mehsud's umbrella group, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, held a conference of thousands of fighters that culminated in a public execution, according to a local resident.

Local Pakistani authorities say they are helpless to deal with Mehsud's group. In a measure of their despair, on Wednesday the authorities in the Mohmand district, where the conference and public execution were held, announced a truce with the Taliban.

Mehsud was once a minor figure in the small Shabikhel branch of the fierce Mehsud tribe that lives in South Waziristan, whose inhospitable territory remained a sliver of imperial India left unconquered by the British.

But he managed to enhance his stature through the ambivalence — or protection, according to some officials — of the Pakistani authorities, say former Pakistani military officials and tribal leaders. His strength grew quickly after February 2005, when the military, then under the control of President Pervez Musharraf, signed a peace deal with him.

"That was when I knew the army was not serious," said a tribal leader who has dealt with Mehsud and would not be named for safety reasons. "If the army took firm action they could crush him in two months."

Instead, the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence, the overarching Pakistani intelligence agency, wanted to keep Mehsud "in reserve," said the tribal leader, who is also a former military officer.

In essence, the Pakistani authorities stuck to a long-standing policy of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan as a bulwark against its enemy India, and Mehsud was a tool in that game, he said.

A retired brigadier, Mehmood Shah, said the 2005 peace deal amounted to a total "surrender" to Mehsud, from which he had advanced virtually unhindered. Against his advice, Shah said, army checkpoints in key areas of Mehsud territory — in particular, the Makin bazaar, a favored Taliban hangout, and the strategic Karama mountain range — were abandoned after the 2005 agreement.

During the January offensive against Mehsud, he hid among the civilians around the Makin bazaar, using them as shields and making it tricky to capture him, said Major General Athar Abbas, the spokesman for the Pakistani Army.

Much of Mehsud's strength lies in his alliance with Hussain, a militant groomed in the anti-Shiite group Laskar Jhangvi. Hussain, who turned up to greet the journalists, is younger than Mehsud and more confident. He belongs to the more prominent Behlolzi clan of the Mehsud tribe, Shah said.

Hussain organized the training schools for suicide bombers and a production site for making violent propaganda DVDs designed to encourage young men to join the cause of jihad, the former Taliban member said in an interview.

Introduced to The New York Times by an intermediary who vouched for his credibility, the former Taliban member, in his early 20s, could not be named for fear of retaliation.

Not all of what the former Taliban member said could be independently corroborated. Major points of his account conformed with public events and with details provided, separately, by former military and civilian officials.

He said he had worked in the propaganda wing of Mehsud's cohort from May 2006 to May 2007, and left after Hussain ordered the killing of eight of his relatives in a dispute. But he remained on friendly terms. "Baitullah Mehsud is nothing without Qari Hussain," he said.

He described Hussain as a kind of enforcer, a deputy to Mehsud who would order killings of tribesmen and often personally slit a person's throat. Fighters traveling to or from Afghanistan usually consulted with Hussain first, he added.

Hussain ran the school for suicide bombers where he would indoctrinate boys as young as 10, the former Taliban member said. "He called every child by his name, and talked to him about life in the next world," he said.

By the time the army began its assault on the Mehsud forces in South Waziristan in January, the results of which it showed off to journalists on the tour in May, Hussain was one step ahead of them, the former Taliban member said. Hussain had already moved the suicide bombing school to North Waziristan, he said. There, he said, Mehsud and Hussain enjoyed the protection of Sirajuddin Haqqani, a leader of the Afghan Taliban based in Pakistan who has ties to Al Qaeda, according to American intelligence officials.

The relationship between Mehsud and Al Qaeda was secretive, with Al Qaeda the dominant partner that treated the Taliban as supplicants, the former Taliban member said.

He described Al Qaeda as "the Arabs" who would help the Taliban in South Waziristan with military training. Taliban who wanted the training would be blindfolded so they would not know where they were going, he said.

In recent months, Mehsud's deputies have become entrenched in the tribal areas far from South Waziristan. Another deputy of Mehsud's, Fakir Mohammed, is in control of much of Bajaur Agency, the northern-most point of the tribal region, according to officials in Peshawar.

In the Khyber region, a transit route for NATO fuel convoys bound for Afghanistan from Karachi, Mehsud's allies have organized tribal killings.

The spread of the Pakistani Taliban threatens even Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province bordering the tribal areas, the inspector general of police, Malik Naveed Khan, warned.

"They are now on the periphery," Khan said in an interview. If nothing is done, it could be "a matter of months" before Peshawar falls, he said.

To woo young men away from the Taliban, he wants to create a broad "conservation corps" to employ 300,000 men — approximately one from every family — to build roads and bridges in the impoverished tribal region. The men would get a stipend to counter the generous 13,000 rupees (about $200) the Taliban pay some members each month.

"The economic effect will be immediate," said Khan, who says he is impatient with a slow-moving $750 million five-year American aid program that began a few months ago. He recites his ideas to the many American development experts who come through his door offering to help.

The Americans all say about his employment plan, modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s: " 'We are thinking about it,' " he said. "I say: 'Don't think about it, do it.' "

ht: Sam

Count every half a vote.

"We had our votes counted,"
US Representative Robert Wexler, D, Fl.

The Dems have stood by their mantra to count every vote. By unanimous decision, the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee have decided that Florida's and Michigan's Democratic primary votes will be counted. Never mind that their great compromise of '08, their "extraordinary victory" means that millions of people in these two states are only half a person with half a vote. The votes have been counted and like the Presidential race of 2000, the outcome is unaffected. Senator Obama is still the front runner and mathematically there is no way for Senator Clinton to affect the outcome.

The votes have been counted and the Democrat elites have stood true to their principal that every vote should be counted. This is another triumph for truth, justice and the American way.

________________________

Democrats have lost their minds.

Two items in my local dead-tree news known locally as "the mullet wrapper", reminded me once again of the effete snobism of the left. The first was a letter to the editor claiming that any talk of drilling for oil in areas such as ANWR and the Gulf of Mexico are misguided. It seems that the writer feels that oil is a thing of the past and plays no part in our energy policy. Like the debate over global warming, the debate over domestic drilling is closed. No more discussion needed and anyone who suggests it is just too neanderthal to understand that the future is green only. At least he threw nuclear into the mix.

The other article was a column by Garrison Keillor on his Memorial day visit to Washington, D.C. which was marred by the distasteful, jingoistic, flag waving display of "hollow patriotism" by the "Rolling Thunder" motorcycle club. His visit to the National Gallery and the Smithsonian was delayed by a loud parade of "fat men with ponytails on Harleys". He thinks these "patriots" should be air-lifted to Baghdad.

_________________________

Speaking of Baghdad, I was at a party last night. It felt as if I was behind enemy lines. I was surrounded by Democrats and let me tell you, they have all lost it. Eight years of Bush have left them apoplectic to the point of irrationality. They are like spoiled children pitching hysterical fits.

I'm afraid that the only way to avoid all out civil war is to allow them to run the country for a few years. Only by letting these petulant children have their way will the country be able to move forward after they and the Rockefeller/Bush Republicans have run the country into the ground.

Hunker down, boys.