Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
In foreign policy, we’ve got the makings of the Obama Doctrine: coddling our enemies while alienating allies.
The administration eased sanctions on Cuba and sided with Chavez against Honduran democracy. They won’t bring up human rights with China because, quote, 'we know what they are going to say.' They offer tepid sanctions on North Korea and 'gold stars and cookies' for the Sudanese President. They send letters to Iranian mullahs but can barely muster a word of support for the Green Movement seeking freedom and women’s rights in Iran!
And President Obama, with all that vast nuclear expertise he acquired as a community organizer, a part-time senator, and a candidate for president, has accomplished nothing to date with Iran or North Korea.
Meanwhile, this administration alienates our friends. They treated Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai poorly and acted surprised when he reacted in kind. And they escalated a minor zoning decision into a major breach with Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East.
Folks, someone needs to remind the President: Jerusalem is not a settlement. Israel is our friend. And the critical nuclear concerns of our time are North Korea, who has nuclear weapons, and Iran, who wants them.
So, 'yes we can' kowtow to our enemies and publicly criticize our allies.
Yes, we can. But someone ought to tell the President and the Left that just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
Under President Obama's new policy ... however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is "in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)," explained Gates, then "the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it."
Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up to date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. (Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs and other conventional munitions.)
However, if the lawyers tell the president that the attacking state is NPT-noncompliant, we are free to blow the bastards to nuclear kingdom come.
This is quite insane. It's like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.
McLaren was born in north London on Jan. 22, 1946, and was raised primarily by his grandmother. An art-college dropout, he was impressed by the fierce political energy unleashed by the Paris student uprisings of 1968. He also admired the Situationist International, a revolutionary political group whose provocative sloganeering influenced McLaren's later forays in music and fashion.
McLaren's ears were attuned to the discontented undercurrents, both in popular music and in British society, that gave rise to punk. During the summer of 1977, Queen Elizabeth II's 25th-anniversary Jubilee year, McLaren procured a boat and had the Sex Pistols cruise the Thames River blasting out "God Save the Queen," their caustic riposte to England's national anthem of the same title. The stunt got McLaren arrested but helped fuel the band's growing fame, or infamy.
McLaren was known in the industry for his cunning, self- publicity and a business brain that ran rings around Virgin Group’s Richard Branson. Under his management, the Sex Pistols signed with Virgin Records in 1977.
“I don’t really care if bands can play guitars or not,” McLaren said in a 1984 interview. “I want them to say something. But, above all, I really want them to make money. Lots and lots of it.”
If you look at the Sex Pistols as just another band instead of the face of early punk rock, Never Mind the Bollocks (their only real studio album) is a pretty good album. Songs like Holidays in the Sun, Problems and Bodies are not bad. It’s not the not-so-great musical talent that bothers some punk rock purists, but the whole mystique of importance surrounding this album and the band. What they don’t want to own up to is that McLaren’s creation influenced thousands of punk rockers after them. The Sex Pistols defined the genre of punk for a time and, to an extent, still do. Even though the band was everything punk was not supposed to be – contrived, phony and commercial – McLaren’s grand experiment in exploitation is a lasting legacy in not just the punk genre, but the music industry in general.
While highly critical of the Pentagon, Danger Room emphasizes key information that hasn't been reiterated enough elsewhere:
According to an investigation by the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade (.pdf) , the aircrew “accurately assessed that the criteria to find and terminate the threat to friendly forces were met in accordance with the law of armed conflict and rules of engagement.” The report concluded that the attack helicopters positively identified the threat, established hostile intent, conducted appropriate collateral damage assessment and received clearance to fire.
What’s more, the military indirectly blamed the reporters for being in the company of “armed insurgents” and making no effort to identify themselves as journalists. An investigating officer with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 2nd Infantry Division, concluded that “the cameramen made no effort to visibly display their status as press (.pdf) or media representatives” and added that “their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the Coalition Ground Forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.” A long telephoto lens, the officer says, could have been mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade.
Meanwhile, the communist AGITPROP campaign continues, with Marxist revolutionary commentators weighing in from all sides. For example, at CounterPunch, "Dracula's Army: The Veils of Illusion":
In Afghanistan and Iraq the invaders have committed numerous atrocities: shooting unarmed locals at check points, on the street, even while they're tilling fields. We've bombed wedding parties, raided homes at midnight and murdered occupants of all ages, lying about it. We've stormed hospitals in Fallujah, unleashed chemical weapons (phosphorous), left a trail of depleted uranium … We've flattened the offices of Al Jazeera (twice), shoved “suspects” in dungeons, hid inmates from the International Red Cross and tortured prisoners to death …. and it’s still happening, day after day, with Drones wiping out remote villages, shredding their families, assassinating anyone we choose.
Actually, as I've repored here, the norm of non-combatant immunity has been universally internalized in the U.S. armed forces, and civilian casualties have been lower in America's current wars than any wars in U.S. history. But "imperialist atrocities" sell on the hypocritical neo-communist left. See also, at Workers World, "Leaked Pentagon Video Reveals Occupation’s Brutality in Iraq":
It is an absolutely chilling demonstration of cold-blooded murder. A U.S. Apache gunship circles a Baghdad neighborhood looking for “targets” — people to kill. A military video shows the intended targets through superimposed crosshairs: a group of men dressed in civilian clothes, no masks, no apparent weapons, casually sauntering along a street and into a small square.
The film is eerily silent except for staccato radio messages between the helicopter, command headquarters and nearby troops on the ground.
This is so poorly informed it'd be laughable, if it wasn't for the fact that the media's enablers won't debunk this communist bull, and the lies will be passed down the proletarian ranks. And from the International Committee of the Fourth International, "Leaked video shows US military killing of two Iraqi journalists." Plus, at the Committee to Protect Journalists, in a backgrounder, "Technicalities: 10 Questions on WikiLeaks," spread the lie that convicted communist Julian Assange is a "journalist.", And at the leftist London Independent, an absurd commentary from Joan Smith, "Now We See What War Does to Those Who Wage It."
Back stateside, CNN's Mohammed Jamjoom, offers a report on the children injured in the attack:
And the video and illustrated photo are added just for idiot Barret Brown, who like all hardline leftists, denies truth for a manufactured reality. Here he quotes me at my original entry, then responds (highlighted in bold):
I’ve watched the “Collateral Murder” clip above. Seeing the video and listening to the combat audio, the crew in the Apache are engaging an insurgent contingent, and at the distance the transmissions identify the fighters as clearly armed with AK-47s and RPGs.
Except that they’re not clearly armed with RPGs; there were no RPGs. Two of the men, like many Iraqi men living in cities in which violent things happen, are equipped with AK-47s.
No, Barrett, you ignorant prick. Behold:
And god, that's the lefty line du jour, "everyone carried a Kalashnikov." Wake up, Barrett. Even WikiLeaks has moved on. It's not whether there were armed insurgents, but whether the troops observed ROE. And on that point, when ALL the video and circumstances are included, there's no question.
But that doesn't stop the left's useful idiots. At the hard-left Common Dreams, we have the statement from Josh Stieber, who claims he was deployed with Bravo Company 2-16, "whose members were involved in the incident captured in Wikileaks' “Collateral Murder” video":
Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the “Collateral Murder” Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.
Obviously a tool.
In contrast, compare Stieber's statement to the online chat Tuesday with WaPo's David Finkel, who was embedded with the same Army Battalion 2-16 during "the surge" in 2007-2008." Check the link. But on the scope of civilian casualties in Iraq:
What's helpful to understand is that, contrary to some interpretations that this was an attack on some people walking down the street on a nice day, the day was anyting but that. It happened in the midst of a large operation to clear an area where US soldiers had been getting shot at, injured, and killed with increasing frequency. What the Reuters guys walked into was the very worst part, where the morning had been a series of RPG attacks and running gun battles.
And on the troops' adherence to ROE, especially with respect to the "rescue" van:
More context -- you're seeing an edited version of the video. The full video runs much longer. And it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight, in this case zooming in on the van and seeing those two children. The helicopters were perhaps a mile away. And as all of this unfolded, it was unclear to the soldiers involved whether the van was a van of good samaritans or of insurgents showing up to rescue a wounded comrade. I bring these things up not to excuse the soldiers but to emphasize some of the real-time blurriness of those moments.
And on the alleged bestiality and inhumanity of U.S. forces:
I remain in touch with many of the soldiers from that battalion, including one who picked up and held one of the wounded children, and he has been having a difficult time ever since he made the discovery. I won' go into details without his permission, but I can assure you that in his case he is haunted.
And on whether cameramen and insurgents on photography equipment of RPGs:
If you were to see the full video, you would see a person carrying an RPG launcher as he walked down the street as part of the group. Another was armed as well, as I recall. Also, if you had the unfortunate luck to be on site afterwards, you would have seen that one of the dead in the group was lying on top of a launcher. Because of that and some other things, EOD -- the Hurt Locker guys, I guess -- had to come in and secure the site. And again, I'm not trying to excuse what happened. But there was more to it for you to consider than what was in the released video.
I'm editing here for brevity, so readers should go back to the link and get the full context. Clearly, Finkel's not out to excuse the actions of any involved in this firefight. His recollections are extremely damaging to all of the allegations and talking points of the communist media-industrial-complex.
Hopefully this qualifies for some weekend FMJRA action from Sir Smitty!
P.S. I'm going to try to turn Friday's into a babe-blogger free-zone around here. Posting the hotties gets me in more trouble from the lefties than anti-jihad obliterations!
In Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East, populations long in the path, and in the shadow, of great foreign powers have a good feel for the will and staying power of those who venture into their world. If Iran's bid for nuclear weapons and a larger role in the region goes unchecked, and if Iran is now a power of the Mediterranean (through Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Beirut), the leaders in Kabul, whoever they are, are sure to do their best to secure for themselves an Iranian insurance policy.
From the very beginning of Mr. Obama's stewardship of the Afghan war, there was an odd, unsettling disjunction between the centrality given this war and the reluctance to own it in full, to stay and fight until victory (a word this administration shuns) is ours.
Consider the very announcement of the Obama war strategy last November in Mr. Obama's West Point address. The speech was at once the declaration of a "surge" and the announcement of an exit strategy. Additional troops would be sent, but their withdrawal would begin in the summer of 2011.
The Afghans, and their interested neighbors, were invited to do their own calculations. Some could arrive at a judgment that the war and its frustrations would mock such plans, that military campaigns such as the one in Afghanistan are far easier to launch than to bring to a decent conclusion, that American pride and credibility are destined to leave America entangled in Afghan troubles for many years to come. (By all indications, Mr. Karzai seems to subscribe to this view.)
Others could bet on our war weariness, for Americans have never shown an appetite for the tribal and ethnic wars of South Asia and the Middle East. The shadow of our power lies across that big region, it is true. But we blow in and out of these engagements, generally not staying long enough to assure our friends and frighten our enemies.
Zia ul-Haq, the military dictator who recast Pakistani politics away from that country's secular beginnings and plunged into the jihad and its exertions, once memorably observed that being an ally of the United States was like sitting on the bank of a great river where the ground is lush and fertile, but that every four to eight years the river changes course and the unsuspecting friend of American power finds himself in a barren desert. Mr. Obama has not given the protagonists in the Afghan war the certainty that he is in it for the long haul.
In word and deed, Mr. Obama has given a sense of his priorities. The passion with which he pursued health-care reform could be seen at home and abroad as the drive of a man determined to remake the American social contract. He aims to tilt the balance away from liberty toward equality. The very ambition of his domestic agenda in health care and state intervention in the economy conveys the causes that stir him.
The Tea Party Express rolled into the western Upper Peninsula on Thursday night, calling on voters to give U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak a forced retirement in November.
"After nine terms of Bart Stupak, you must be hungry for some representation," Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams told a crowd of as many as 200 people outside a VFW hall in Bessemer.
The group organizing the tour even offered Stupak $700,000 to step down.
A young Muslim mother wearing a hjiab was strangled in a freak accident while go-karting with her family in Australia yesterday.
The 26-year-old died when her headscarf became entangled in the wheel of the go-kart and tightened around her neck during a family day out at Port Stephens, 137 miles (220km) north of Sydney in New South Wales.
Police said that the woman, her husband and children had been holidaying on the coast when the accident occurred during a day trip to the karting track.
The woman’s scarf appeared to have been pulled across her throat from one side of the body to the other, and the longer part was wedged near one of the wheel axles of the go-kart, they added.
Witnesses told the Sydney Morning Herald that the woman’s clothing was “wrapped around her neck”.
Sharon Scott, who was waiting to use the track when the accident occurred, said: "The kart hit the wall and stopped and she was just slumped over."
Emergency workers were called to the circuit and the woman, who suffered severe neck and throat injuries, was transferred to a nearby hospital, where she later died
And when you watch the trailer below, note that's original documentary footage of Jim Morrison, not an actor's portrayal. As LAT notes:
The images in question, it turns out, were culled from outtakes of Morrison's self-financed 1969 film, "HWY: An American Pastoral." And according to Tom DiCillo, the writer and director of "When You're Strange," potential doubters wouldn't be the first to question the authenticity of the reel.
"We were showing it at Sundance and a distributor disgustedly stormed out of a screening," DiCillo recounted. "I ran down the street to ask why he'd left and the distributor replied, 'I can't believe you'd use an actor in this movie.' I laughed and told him that I'd never do such a thing." The proof, in fact, is in the mere existence of "When You're Strange." To gain use of the music, DiCillo had to appease the three remaining members of the notoriously fractious band, as well as Morrison's estate.
The film's narrated by Johnny Depp. Apparently a lot of legal infighting continues to this day, but get this, from drummer John Densmore:
"Watching the old footage reminds me of this crazy dream I had years ago. There's something magic there," Densmore said. "Maybe it's because it doesn't have any old geezers jabbering about their past. It's Johnny Depp taking you on a road movie with the Doors. You're going to live it, sit on the drum stool, and take the ride. It's got Vietnam, the assassinations, the events that affected us all. Artists don't exist in a vacuum. It's everything that happened before the tragedy. We all know the tragedy."
Okay, it's time to update my coverage on the WikiLeaks story. I especially want to emphasize some context that might otherwise get overlooked as developments continue. As I first reported, Julian Assange is a convicted computer hacker and communist activist. His agenda is nothing short of a worldwide delegitimation and destabilization program of the U.S. and its allies. And because he's being feted as a hero across the leftist-media-industrial complex, the naked truth of the actual events in Baghdad 2007 are getting shrouded in a fog of anti-American propaganda.
David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters, declined to run a story by one of his own reporters containing claims that the 2007 killings of two Reuters staffers in Baghdad by U.S. troops may have been war crimes.
Reuters staffers Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed by U.S. helicopter gunships in Baghdad in 2007. Video of the attack, which shows the journalists standing next to unidentified armed men on a Baghdad street and records the destruction of a van attempting to retrieve a wounded Chmagh, was published this week by Wikileaks.
The video has launched a debate about the legality of the attack, which also wounded two children (you can read our take here). Yesterday, Reuters' deputy Brussels bureau chief Luke Baker filed a muscular story repeating allegations from several human rights and international law experts that the killings may have constituted war crimes. But Reuters chief David Schlesinger, a tipster says, spiked the story because "it needed more comment from the Pentagon and U.S. lawyers." It never ran, but you can read it in full below.
Gawker has published a number of badly one-side stories on WikiLeaks. John Cook is the author of the one above, as well as a previous report on Tuesday, "Wikileaks Video Demonstrates Conclusively That Innocent People Get Killed in Wars." Cook's reporting is riddled with feigned objectivity (even generating a backlash against Gawker in the comments), but he's in fact just another leftist media-enabler attempting to renew the case for prosecutions against former Bush administration officials and former and current military personnel.
In response, I sent Cook an e-mail Tuesday, titled "WikiLeaks: Why Gunships Were Called In ...":
Sir:
You write:
"It's not discernible from the video what immediately preceded the slayings or why the gunships were called in, but according to a contemporaneous New York Times account, the military claimed that U.S. troops in the area called in air support after encountering small arms fire during a raid."
You should update ...
Gunships were called in for backup for the ground operation against insurgents. Even Reuters' own photos show ground contingents standing by:
And it's safe to say that it's not just Gawker that's actively suppressing available information disproving the war crimes meme. Indeed, it's quite frightening how extensive is the WikLeaks/communist/media alliance. Huffington Post is also running the "Reuters spiked story" report, and the Washington Post features yet another fawning MSM entry on convict Julian Assange, "The Man Behind Wikileaks." And yesterday's New York Times ran a completely lame piece on milblogs covering the story, but refused to link to bloggers who've debunked the WikiLeaks scam. See, "Reaction on Military Blogs to the WikiLeaks Video." The hardline World Can't Wait is cross-posting report's from London's left-leaning Guardian, "Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians." And the communist Smirking Chimp clearinghouse is running updates, "The F Word: Impossible to Ignore Wikileaks Tape."
The families of two Reuters news agency employees killed in a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad on Thursday demanded justice, telling AFP the Americans responsible should stand trial.
Graphic video footage of the shooting, which left several other people dead and wounded two children, was published on the Internet by WikiLeaks, a website that discloses information obtained from whistleblowers.
"The truth came out and the whole world saw. The American pilot should be judged by international justice and we want compensation because the act left orphans," said Safa Chmagh, whose brother Saeed Chmagh, a Reuters driver, died.
"He (the pilot) killed unarmed innocent people, among them a photographer whose camera was very visible. On top of that when they evacuated the wounded they opened fire again," said Safa, whose brother was 44 when killed.
The "unarmed" meme has been entirely discredited, in the Pentagon's own internal investigation, and by Doug Ross and Rusty Shackleford, among others. And because of this, the left continues to suppress conflicting information while constantly moving the goalposts. Selective editing is just the beginning. Communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! segment today pushed the "civilian murders" meme, and continued with the charge of war crimes. See, "EXCLUSIVE: One Day After 2007 Attack, Witnesses Describe US Killings of Iraqi Civilians." (This entry was cross-posted to communist filmaker Michael Moore's website as well.
Note how this disinformation then enters into a feedback loop, whereby WikiLeaks incorporates it and disseminates even more falsehoods and allegations:
And this Al Jazeera broadcast from a few days ago gives you a really good sense of what leftists are hoping to achieve. I can't thank Bill Roggio enough for all his reporting, but Glenn Greenwald and the others outflank him. Notice especially at about 22:00 minutes, where Greenwald makes the case that WikiLeaks is the new Abu Ghraib:
Fortunately, we've had a significant pushback among conservative bloggers, although the rebuttals need to gain more traction in the press.
These reports are a much-welcomed corrective to the WikiLeaks/communist/media propaganda machine, but it's not enough at this point. We'll see more stories claiming that U.S. forces attacked "civilians" (Roggio notes that the "rescue" van was patrolling all morning in nearby Baghdad streets while U.S. forces engaged insurgents), and the focus will be increasingly on the children who were wounded.
It'd be a grave miscarriage for U.S. military personnel, who meticulously observed ROE, to be charged with violating rules of war; and it'd be an even greater injustice to truth and common decency should this communist propaganda campaign gain even more domestic and international legitimacy than it already has.
A recent study of Britain's bloody withdrawal from Kabul in 1842 concluded that the first cause of that disaster was the reluctance of junior officers to tell their superiors the truth about the dire situation the British forces found themselves in. I know from my own discussions with diplomats and commanders in the field that such "happy talk" is no longer the order of the day. Getting Afghanistan right means getting down to ground truth. These are the facts as I see them:
• The Afghan people are tired of thirty years of war. They have been traumatized by the fighting and the denial of basic rights and opportunities. The majority of them hate, for good reason, the brutality of the Taliban. But sometimes they see them as their only protection from other brutal powerbrokers or warlords.
• The Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai faces competing demands from its own people, from powerful criminal and commercial interests, and from the international community. But it lacks the capacity to govern. The concerns about its credibility run deeper than last fall's elections, which were marred by widespread corruption and fraud. They also relate to the very structure of the political system.
• The Afghan insurgency is a broad but shallow coalition, with shifting relationships, geographical bases, and tactics. The Taliban is led by members of the former Talib regime under Mullah Omar, who has been based in Pakistan's border areas. A variety of other factions are also operating, including the Haqqani network, Hizb-e-Islami, and a range of smaller groups. These groups all trade on the uncertainties of the people and the weaknesses of the state.
• The Taliban are still despised—one recent poll suggests that only 6 percent of Afghans want them back in power. But they do now have organized cadres that enjoy some limited support—in the south, east, and north—and are able to mount operations in Kabul and elsewhere.
• Having fled Afghanistan, al- Qaeda's senior leadership is now also hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas. A significant number of its leaders have been killed or arrested. Despite the historical ties between al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, their relationship is predominantly tactical and local. Yet al-Qaeda retains the capacity—including through its affiliates in other countries, such as Yemen—to plan and carry out deadly attacks around the world.
• There has been a significant change in Pakistan in the last eighteen months under President Asif Ali Zardari's democratic government. The reality and threat of domestic terrorism has brought new purpose to civilian and military leadership, and new consensus between leaders and the Pakistani electorate. It is now realistic to talk about complementary pressure on the insurgencies on both sides of the border.
The Afghan and international strategy over the last eight years has been to focus on building up the key functions of the state and delivering better lives for the Afghan people. Despite many setbacks, there is a real record of achievement here, continuing today. The return of five million refugees in recent years is perhaps the greatest sign of the growing confidence of Afghans in their safety and security, and an important indicator of our own progress in protecting them. Still, polling shows that Afghans regard the lack of security as one of the biggest problems; last year more Afghan civilians were killed in insurgent attacks than ever ....
The achievements of the last eight years would not have been possible were it not for the tireless efforts and unstinting bravery of our troops. Without them, the insurgency would have overwhelmed the Afghan government and probably overrun Kabul. Our development work would have ground to a halt. And al-Qaeda would have seized more space to plan its terrorist atrocities.
The work ahead—on each of these fronts—is both clear and pressing. The additional troops that the United States, Britain, and others are deploying are vital if progress is to be made. Britain's commitment and determination will endure until we have achieved our shared objective—an Afghanistan that must not again be used as a basis for international terrorism.
If Democrat Rep. Bart Stupak, who sold his Obamacare vote and his pro-life principles for a cheap piece of paper, thinks voters in Michigan are willing to forgive and forget, he’s sadly mistaken.
The Tea Party Express is rolling through the state — and organizers expect record numbers ...
A record-low percentage of U.S. voters -- 28% -- say most members of Congress deserve to be re-elected. The previous low was 29% in October 1992.
The trend for previous midterm elections reveals that the 28% re-elect figure puts the sitting majority party in a danger zone. In the two recent midterm elections in which the congressional balance of power changed (1994 and 2006), the percentage of voters saying most members deserved to be re-elected fell below 40%, as it does today. By contrast, in 1998 and 2002, when the existing Republican majority was maintained, 55% or better held this view.
Additionally, 65% of registered voters -- the highest in Gallup history, and by far the highest in any recent midterm year -- now say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election.
This strong rebuke of congressional incumbents comes from a March 26-28 USA Today/Gallup survey. The same poll finds 49% of voters, a near-record low, saying their own member of Congress deserves to be re-elected. This marks only the second time since Gallup began asking this question in 1992 that the figure has dipped below 50%, and the first on the doorstep of a midterm election.
Look, I give the racemongering lefties a hard time, but this is inexcusable: "'Jail Playground’ at NYC Public Housing Property." It's Bed-Stuy, but no child and no family in America should have to deal with such degrading stupidity:
There is no kind, gentle, diplomatic way to describe the offense against a community by this ‘Jail Playground’ on a New York City Housing Authority property, located at Tompkins Houses (Park Avenue between Tompkins and Throop) in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Black and Latino children live and play. (Disproportionately, Black and Latinos enter the criminal justice system. Encouraging young Black and Latino children to first play in Jail until they may actually get to jail or prison is playing loosey-goosey with their young, impressionable psyche and something no community should stand for or be subjected to).
As the White House pushes for cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the Pentagon is developing a weapon to help fill the gap: missiles armed with conventional warheads that could strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour.
U.S. military officials say the intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as Prompt Global Strike weapons, are a necessary new form of deterrence against terrorist networks and other adversaries. As envisioned, the conventional missiles would give the White House a fresh military option to consider in a crisis that would not result in a radioactive mushroom cloud.
The Prompt Global Strike program, which the Pentagon has been developing for several years, is already raising hackles in Moscow, where Russian officials predict it could trigger a nonnuclear arms race and complicate President Obama's long-term vision of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. U.S. military officials are also struggling to solve a separate major obstacle: the risk that Russia or China could mistake the launch of a conventional Prompt Global Strike missile for a nuclear one.
"World states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Tuesday in Moscow.
The White House says that development of Prompt Global Strike is not affected by the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are scheduled to sign Thursday in Prague. Analysts say, however, that any conventional ballistic missiles would count the same as nuclear ones under the treaty, which places new limits on each country's stockpile.
At first "non-nuclear deterrence" sounded kinda impotent, but perhaps I was mistaken.
A tip sets the plan in motion — a whispered warning of a North Korean nuclear launch, or of a shipment of biotoxins bound for a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon. Word races through the American intelligence network until it reaches U.S. Strategic Command headquarters, the Pentagon and, eventually, the White House. In the Pacific, a nuclear-powered Ohio class submarine surfaces, ready for the president's command to launch.
When the order comes, the sub shoots a 65-ton Trident II ballistic missile into the sky. Within 2 minutes, the missile is traveling at more than 20,000 ft. per second. Up and over the oceans and out of the atmosphere it soars for thousands of miles. At the top of its parabola, hanging in space, the Trident's four warheads separate and begin their screaming descent down toward the planet. Traveling as fast as 13,000 mph, the warheads are filled with scored tungsten rods with twice the strength of steel. Just above the target, the warheads detonate, showering the area with thousands of rods-each one up to 12 times as destructive as a .50-caliber bullet. Anything within 3000 sq. ft. of this whirling, metallic storm is obliterated.
If Pentagon strategists get their way, there will be no place on the planet to hide from such an assault. The plan is part of a program — in slow development since the 1990s, and now quickly coalescing in military circles — called Prompt Global Strike. It will begin with modified Tridents. But eventually, Prompt Global Strike could encompass new generations of aircraft and armaments five times faster than anything in the current American arsenal. One candidate: the X-51 hypersonic cruise missile, which is designed to hit Mach 5 — roughly 3600 mph. The goal, according to the U.S. Strategic Command's deputy commander Lt. Gen. C. Robert Kehler, is "to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the Earth within 60 minutes."
The question is whether such an attack can be deployed without triggering World War III: Those tungsten-armed Tridents look, and fly, exactly like the deadliest weapons in the American nuclear arsenal.
I haven't seen these in a while. I've been moderating comments periodically, and this particular commenter is not new, although the focus is not so much the regular "neocon hatred" as generalized racism and anti-Semitism. Ugly to know, but it's out there ...
From the comments at my post WikiLeaks Update: How the Leftist Media Massacres Truth and Helps America's Enemies":
Anonymous said...
Dark skinned savage, it's not surprising that your inate [sic] law of the jungle sees nothing wrong in the video.
The race that inhabits Saudi Arabia and Yemen is the same race as Donald Douglas, a race of strange semitic grudges and sadistic posturing. Donald Douglas is genetic jihadism, the same biological impulses that drive an Arab (basically an ancient mix of black and white) to jihad drives Donald Douglas' ideology, an ideology that is foreign and disgusting in the eyes of anyone of European stock in tune with his own true blood based culture.
The demonic cuban Donald Douglas does not believe in Iraqi's right to bare arms to defend themselves against a foreign aggressor, this ideology is more in line with the Iraqis themselves, stable Arab society is based on authoritarian control. Where is your defense of Iraqi gun rights Donald?
His politics is genetically, inescapable authoritarianism, look at the governments of his racial equals! Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Cuba...
Apparently, this is an atrocity speaks to white blood.
Notice that the Cubanoid Donald Douglas justifies such acts in the name of "wrong place wrong time", the same excuse that someone Saddam would use while rounding up a dissident and his neighbors for execution. Donald Douglas is racially on the same page as the Arab tyrants, Arab authoritarianism runs through his veins because authoritarianism is the only way dark skinned people such as himself get a stable society.
Whites however, are uniquely genetically endowed with the stability for limited government.
The Jew-S military are not sky gods who decide who lives and who dies, "our will is law". That is semitic spearchuckerism.
You look dark and jewish as hell in your avatar, let your picture be a beacon call to deluted whites who still support the GOP, this is your party.
April 7, 2010 3:41 PM
This prick's been trolling the comments for years, always anonymous, and in fact he was banned previously when I used Haloscan. Future comments of this sort will be deleted, naturally, although I'm leaving them unmoderated for the moment, I'd appreciated if regular readers could flag these for me. My e-mail's at the Blogger profile in the sidebar.
P.S. These views are not that far from the ideological positions of folks like Mike Tuggle or Daniel Larison. Same hatred, same ideology.
Ben Smith has the announcement, "McDonnell Apologizes" (via Memeorandum). But the best commentary I've read on this is Paul's at Powerline, "The wrong proclamation in Virginia." The problem for me is not so much the damage the controversy might cause the GOP, but the damage to McDonnell himself. That guy was like gold last November. His handling of this episode, diplomatically, one hopes, will go a long way toward preserving his credibility as a national contender. That said, the left won't let go of this, for it's a classic card -- deployed remorselesslyagainst the GOP (even though slavery and segregation were institutions of the Democratic Party) -- that they can slap down endlessly in their recriminations over race. It's frankly all they've got:
If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn't "have had all these problems," this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.
Of all the ideological alignments I've come across, the left-libertarian is by far the strangest. If you look around at some of the websites, like What Really Happened, these folks can't stand Israel, which ends up putting them right along with the cadres of International ANSWER - and they claim to be about constitutional principles and freedom? Sheesh, they're pumping upthe WikiLeaks story at the website. It's hard to understand, but these folks aren't patriots, for all their talk. Here's an essay at The Militant Libertarian from Karen Quinn-Tostado, "Freedom Lovers Unite! National Strike – Tax Free 15." Lots of links there, and check especially Tax Holiday!
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