Obama is "Kind of a Dick" - Mark Halperin on Morning Joe Scarborough Show

Have We Committed $4 Trillion to The 'War on terror' and What Has Been Accomplished?

"Osama bin Laden and his henchmen probably spent the pittance of just $500,000 on organising the September 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 people and directly cost the US economy an estimated $50bn to $100bn. In 2003, President George W Bush proclaimed that the Iraq war would cost $50bn to $60bn. Governments that go to war invariably underestimate the cost – but rarely on such an epic scale."


'War on terror' set to surpass cost of Second World War
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Independent

The total cost to America of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the related military operations in Pakistan, is set to exceed $4 trillion – more than three times the sum so far authorised by Congress in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

This staggering sum emerges from a new study by academics at the Ivy-league Brown University that reveals the $1.3 trillion officially appropriated on Capitol Hill is the tip of a spending iceberg. If other Pentagon outlays, interest payments on money borrowed to finance the wars, and the $400bn estimated to have been spent on the domestic "war on terror", the total cost is already somewhere between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion.

And even though the wars are now winding down, add in future military spending and above all the cost of looking after veterans, disabled and otherwise and the total bill will be somewhere between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion.

The report by Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies is not the first time such astronomical figures have been cited; a 2008 study co-authored by the Harvard economist Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, a former Nobel economics laureate, reckoned the wars would end up costing over $3 trillion. The difference is that America's financial position has worsened considerably in the meantime, with a brutal recession and a federal budget deficit running at some $1.5 trillion annually, while healthcare and social security spending is set to soar as the population ages and the baby boomer generation enters retirement.

Unlike most of America's previous conflicts moreover, Iraq and Afghanistan have been financed almost entirely by borrowed money that sooner or later must be repaid.

The human misery is commensurate. The report concludes that in all, between 225,000 and 258,000 people have died as a result of the wars. Of that total, US soldiers killed on the battlefield represent a small fraction, some 6,100. The civilian death toll in Iraq is put at 125,000 (rather less than some other estimates) and at up to 14,000 in Afghanistan. For Pakistan, no reliable calculation can be made.

Even these figures however only scratch the surface of the suffering, in terms of people injured and maimed, or those who have died from malnutrition or lack of treatment. "When the fighting stops, the indirect dying continues," Neta Crawford, a co-director of the Brown study, said. Not least, the wars may have created some 7.8 million refugees, roughly equal to the population of Scotland and Wales.

What America achieved by such outlays is also more than questionable. Two brutal regimes, those of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, have been overturned while al-Qa'ida, the terrorist group that carried out 9/11, by all accounts has been largely destroyed - but in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is democracy exactly flourishing, while the biggest winner from the Iraq war has been America's arch-foe Iran.

Osama bin Laden and his henchmen probably spent the pittance of just $500,000 on organising the September 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 people and directly cost the US economy an estimated $50bn to $100bn. In 2003, President George W Bush proclaimed that the Iraq war would cost $50bn to $60bn. Governments that go to war invariably underestimate the cost – but rarely on such an epic scale.

If the Brown study is correct, the wars that flowed from 9/11 will not only have been the longest in US history. At $4 trillion and counting, their combined cost is approaching that of the Second World War, put at some $4.1 trillion in today's prices by the Congressional Budget Office.

We Simply Cannot Help the Afghanis from This.

Kabul attack: Nato kills Taliban squad members who launched suicide assault

Kabul Police said 10 Afghan civilians, mostly hotel workers, have died in the attack

• Jon Boone in Kabul, and agencies
• The Guardian, Wednesday 29 June 2011
• Article history

Nato helicopters fired on and killed members of a Taliban squad who attacked a landmark Kabul hotel on Tuesday night where senior Afghan officials were staying.

At least six Taliban, some of them suicide bombers, were involved in the assault on the Inter-Continental, which began when militants in civilian clothes burst into the hotel while many guests were in the dining room and others were attending at least two receptions, including a wedding party.

The Nato rocket fire appeared to have brought an end to the fighting, which lasted for more than four hours. Kabul Police Chief General Mohammad Ayub Salangi said 10 Afghan civilians, mostly hotel workers, had died in the attack.

From miles across the city, residents could see the blacked-out hotel on a hilltop on the western outskirts of Kabul illuminated by red tracer bullets and explosions.

Afghan police and commandos flocked to the hotel to engage the attackers with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades soon after the attack began at about 9.30pm.

According to the authorities, at least two attackers were shot dead and four blew themselves up, a tactic that has been used several times before on fortified buildings, including hotels, in the capital.

The Taliban's spokesman was quick to claim credit for the assault, claiming he had been in contact with one of the attackers inside the hotel.

The spokesman told Associated Press: "One of our fighters called on a mobile phone and said: 'We have gotten on to all the hotel floors and the attack is going according to the plan. We have killed and wounded 50 foreign and local enemies. We are in the corridors of the hotel now taking guests out of their rooms – mostly foreigners. We broke down the doors and took them out one by one."'

His claim was denied by senior Kabul police officer Mohammad Zahir, who said the militants had been isolated on a "small section of the roof" and had not been able to go around the hotel, room to room. He said an unknown number of insurgents were firing from positions outside the hotel and that about five officers, including Zahir himself, had been wounded.

The insurgents were armed with machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, rocket-propelled grenades and hand grenades, according to Samoonyar Mohammad Zaman, a security officer for the interior ministry, who said there were 60 to 70 guests at the hotel.

Another Afghan official said a group of senior provincial officials had been staying at the hotel at the time.

Bette Dam, a Dutch journalist at the scene, reported on Twitter that he had seen at least four rocket-propelled grenades being launched from the hotel into the nearby house belonging to Mohammad Qasim Fahim, one of the country's vice-presidents.

Afghanistan's interior minister, General Besmellah Khan, was reported to be present and was overseeing operations along with the city's police chief and an Afghan army commando unit.

Jawid, a guest at the hotel, told AP he jumped out of a one-storey window to escape the shooting.

"I was running with my family," he said. "There was shooting. The restaurant was full with guests."

The 1960s hotel, which has at least 200 rooms and is no longer formally part of the Intercontinental chain, is not the magnet to western travellers it once was, many of whom now stay in more recently built hotels. But it is popular with well-heeled Afghans and leading political figures, and it hosts a number of important conferences each year.

The last major attack on a similar hotel used by foreigners was in January 2008, when several Taliban gunmen killed six people in a commando-style attack on the nearby Serena hotel, which has been hit in several random rocket attacks since then.

However, the latest attack on such a well-defended hotel, which is impossible to approach without going through at least two security checkpoints, is embarrassing to the Afghan government as it prepares to take responsibility for security in Kabul province as part of much vaunted "transition" strategy.

The attack came the night before the start of a conference about the gradual transition of civil and military responsibility from foreign forces to Afghans, although an Afghan government official told reporters that the hotel was not one of the venues to be used by the conference or its delegates.

Afghan authorities have already been nominally in charge of Kabul for some time.

Attacks in the Afghan capital have been relatively rare, although violence has increased since the 2 May killing of Osama bin Laden in a US raid in Pakistan and since the start of the Taliban's annual spring offensive.

On 18 June, insurgents wearing Afghan army uniforms stormed a police station near the presidential palace and opened fire on officers, killing nine.

Earlier on Tuesday, officials from the US, Pakistan and Afghanistan met in Kabul to discuss prospects for making peace with the Taliban.

"The fact that we are discussing reconciliation in great detail is success and progress, but challenges remain and we are reminded of that on an almost daily basis by violence," Jawed Ludin, Afghanistan's deputy foreign minister, said at a news conference.

Michele Bachmann is Simply Smarter than Dopey Barack Obama

If the Liberal Press wants to see the Constant Flubber Extraordinaire it need look no further than Barack Obama, but they won't. Obama is too special to be fairly examined. Questioning Obama's smarts would be, well, a little racist? The same cannot be said about Michelle Bachmann, who is the target de jour of the left wing media. Some Michelle's are open to ridicule, others get a special pass because they are so special... How do I know that? Because I just saw the Morning Moron, pig-eyed, no lips, Joe Scarborough, failing to be funny but never missing an opportunity to be stupid, this time about Michelle Bachmann.

____________________________

• President Obama’s lack of experience with royalty was on full display today in England as he mistakenly began a toast to the Queen of England at the wrong time, resulting in “God Save the Queen” blaring over his words and no one getting to drink what was in their cups. Awkward. “And now I propose a toast to the Queen,” President Obama began in London today, but only got as far as “To the vitality of the special relationship” before “God Save the Queen” cut him off. He kept reading the toast, however, and finally raised his glass to her. No one drank out of their glasses afterwards, however. The Queen herself looked over at him with a hint of contempt (confusion?) in her face, while the other members of the royal family stood stoically around them.

• President Obama flubbed his remarks to troops at Fort Drum Thursday when he told the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division about the time he awarded the first Medal of Honor to someone not receiving it posthumously. The medal, he said, went to Jared Monti. The only issue is that Jared Monti died in service in Afghanistan, and did in fact receive the medal posthumously.

• St. Paul--Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has been criticized in recent weeks for her unintentional revisions of history, but on Monday President Obama revealed he could use a refresher course in American history as well. In an interview Monday with reporter Brad Watson of WFAA-TV of Dallas, Obama seemed to confuse the state’s current political history with its Democrat past. “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state,” Obama said, when asked why the President was so unpopular in Texas. In fact, since the Civil War and until 1980, the Lone Star state swung toward the Democratic candidate in 23 of 27 presidential elections.

• WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama sees his secretary of defense just about every day, but he still flubbed Robert Gates' name on Thursday. Gates was in the crowd for Obama's national security speech. Pointing him out, the president said "William Gates" was on hand. Perhaps Obama was thinking of Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire. The defense chief, who goes by Bob, was also misidentified at a Pentagon ceremony on Tuesday. Then, he was introduced as Ronald Gates.

TSA SCUM - Update 4

95 Year old cancer-stricken Grandmother, in a wheelchair, patted down by the TSA VOPOS and then forced to remove her diaper.

The TSA released a statement Sunday defending its agents' actions at the Northwest Florida Regional Airport and answered in true Orwellian fashion:

"While every person and item must be screened before entering the secure boarding area, TSA works with passengers to resolve security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner," the federal agency said. "We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure."

Los Angeles Celebrates Mexican Soccer Victory Over US

How is that diversity thing working for you? How do you like paying for all those anchor babies? How will you like it when the next ten million Mexicans arrive with their demands?

Pandora's Cluster

What does it take to send a fool to blow himself up in a hospital?

A deadly car bomb has hit a hospital in Afghanistan's eastern Logar province, with women, children and elderly among the casualties.
The provincial health director told the BBC that 27 people had died and 53 were hurt, adding the toll could have been higher as many people took away the bodies of relatives.
The facility was destroyed and people were buried under rubble.