I don't often agree with Homegrown Boy or his colleagues at Resolute Determination, but today he's hit it dead on in reference to President Obama's continued waffling and vague promises on gay rights:

If the GOP is smart they will nominate someone who maintains what you do in your bed is your business.

Unfortunately, I think the sentence fails as prediction due to the first five words.

There is little to cheer about--ever--in seeing my fellow servicemembers killed or wounded, and even less reason for joy when a senseless loss proves my point that our troops are being squandered for political expediency rather than the legitimate defense of our country.

The Kamdesh evacuation cost at least eight American and three allied Afghani soldiers their lives last week, and the battle never should have been fought in the first place. Exposed, isolated firebases in hostile territory heavily dependent on air power for combat support have been losing propositions since Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh. Even an enemy with modest means will eventually be able to concentrate sufficient forces to overrun some small isolated base--or even take advantage of a planned withdrawal--to declare a major propganda victory, as the Taliban has done here. It is certainly worth it, in the grand scheme of things, for the Taliban to lose over 100 fighters in exchange for such a "victory."

All of this points to two central observations I have been making here for some time, and a third which should have been implicit but needs to be stated openly:

1) This is the wrong war for the United States to be fighting: even leaving aside the moral, ethical, and political questions of why we continued to occupy Afghanistan after the initial knocking out of the Taliban, we have (a) no reasonable definition of victory available; (b) no pretence of being able to create a stable democracy in an area that has been a tribal non-state for millennia; and (c) no excuse for fighing out a war that will allow China and Russia to become the primary benefactors of Afghanistan's natural gas resources even if we somehow did win.

2) Continuing to fight the wrong war rather than acknowledging the mistakes we've made does not keep faith with our troops: it treats their lives as meaningless. I understand that my fellow soldiers may well feel the desire to win through in order to honor those already fallen or because winning is simply what good armies do at virtually all costs. They have to feel that way in order to get up every day and risk their lives to do their jobs. That's why we are supposed to have civilian control of the US military: to make the decisions about when and how force will be used, and when it is justifiable to continue asking young Americans to sacrifice their lives and when it is not. Kamdesh represents our failure to act decisively in either direction.

3) There are limites to what military power can achieve--even ours. We arguably field the most technologically, battle-experienced military in the world today. There are few conventional forces the United States could not immolate on the battlefield with the proper combination of firepower, and our enemies know it. But they are also becoming increasingly aware that US military power can be whittled down by exposing it to the kind of warfare we have never done very well at: insurgency/counter-insurgency. Currently, if one dispassionately examines the situation in the Af-Pak theater of war, most of the traditional advantages fall directly to the insurgent, and our own technological supremacy is dramatically discounted. General McChrysal has argued [and I would probably have made the same argument in his boots] that what he needs is more numbers, more resources in order to offset the geographical, cultural, political, and logistical advantages of his opponents. In reality, additional resources are pretty much the only type of reinforcement we can give him, because we have entered a contest in which we cannot materially affect most of those geographical, cultural, political, and logistical advantages.

To be honest, I blame the current position of the United States almost equally on Presidents Bush and Obama.

In 2001, after deposing the Taliban and sending Al Qaeda scurrying to the hills, the pragmatic approach would have been to keep throwing money and resources at three or four well-positioned warlords so that they could have maintained Afghanistan in a state of near-perpetual civil/tribal war. Nation-building in Afghanistan? It was a fool's errand from the start. Bush blew Afghanistan when he was not out of there completely by mid-2003 at the latest.

In 2008, then-Senator Obama made talking tough the centerpiece of his campaign strategy to neutralize the perceive GOP advantage on foreign and military policy. Despite the fact that most of the time during the primaries [remember the debate in Texas] when he opened his mouth he got it wrong, the strategy worked. But it left the new President with a major campaign commitment that he had to honor: doubling down in Afghanistan. Which he has done for political advantage ever since....

Some day a military historian will deal with Kamdesh and other small battles against long odds that our troops have been asked to fight for the wrong reasons. We in the military family will honor our heroes as we always have--as the French Foreign Legion honors its own dead on Camerone Day.

But none of that justifies leaving those men and women with their asses hanging out in the middle of nowhere, without adequate support, for no reason that could possibly justify their sacrifice.

After a long, soccer-dominated weekend with light posting I have a number of things I want to write about today, some of which are actually time-sensitive and significant. Instead, I am going to spend most of the morning grading student papers....

But I thought this was funny at first, and then later I wasn't so sure.

On my younger daughter's bus [she's in eighth grade] there is a boy who can solve the Rubik's Cube in something like 15-20 seconds. He's been trying to teach my daughter, who is--[how shall we say this charitably?]--as three-dimensionally challenged as her Dad. But, with written instructions and patience, he has gotten her about three-quarters of the way through the process. She can now make a Rubik's Cube look three-quarters solved on all six faces simultaneously.

[The next move is conceptually pretty difficult it seems, and she has been stalled out there for several weeks.]

OK--you got it? She can sort of, incompletely, almost solve a Rubik's Cube.

So during the down-time between matches at a soccer tournament, a Rubik's Cube dropped out of somebody's backpack and she picked it up. It has become a reflex, so she started twisting and turning, and ... voila! A three-quarters' solved cube.

No, she told them, I haven't learned how to finish it, and tossed it aside to fish in her own backpack for her Ipod.

Except that the other girls then crowded around in awe, and then started calling their parents over to see the prodigy on their team--their own goalie!--who could nearly but not quite solve a Rubik's Cube.

I kid you not: for the rest of the day people made a big deal over a partially solved Rubik's Cube, even to the point of a parent coming up to me and telling me how proud I must be to have a daughter that smart.

Before you ask, this is not a soccer team filled with academic losers--just the opposite. This is a team filled with girls going to the pick of northern Delaware's public and private schools, almost of all of whom are riding honor roll grades.

But the Rubik's Cube made my daughter seem to be a genius...?

This happened a couple of months ago, but even last weekend a parent mentioned it to me again as if it were a significant indicator of mental superiority {It's great to have a goalie as smart as your daughter is.]

The dumbing down of American education is one thing: people discuss it all the time. This strikes me, however, as symptomatic of the dumbing down of our own expectations of what our children will achieve.

At middle-school open house last month I listened very carefully to parent talk about their expectations.

I heard one parent say to another that she hoped the science teacher didn't expect her to help with the homework, because she'd never gotten that science stuff. The other parent agreed, and added math to the mix.

I had a parent conference last year when my same apparently-near-genius daughter was having trouble with Algebra I. The school suggested she drop the class; I just wanted to know what parts I needed to help her with. The teacher got very uncomfortable at the thought of a parent actually helping with algebra homework. Most of our parents are not really equipped to help with algebra, I was told.

The same school awarded multiple--and I seriously mean multiple--academic awards at the end of the year, to the point where it seemed like everybody who managed to even stay awake in class received one. Most improvement in behavior during math class by a left-handed student of Lithuanian descent.... My daughter later confirmed for me that two students who received "D's" actually got awards in those classes.

And their parents were out there applauding and commemorating the happy event.

In my day job I meet parents all the time who will tell me--often in front of their own children--that this kid or that kid needs to major in something that does not involve a lot of math or science, because he doesn't do very well with "things like that."

I don't blame the schools or the teachers or the I-pod. I don't blame the government [which is probably one of the few times you'll hear a libertarian say that].

I blame us.

There has always been a deep vein of anti-intellectualism in American society, but lately parents--even those who seem to be pushing their children's education--have been mining that vein in earnest. We seem to have separated the two concepts of getting good grades and getting a good education. What drives public school reform is the necessity [at least we are told it is a necessity] to produce graduates with the skills necessary to corporate entry-level employees. Much the same mandate is now driving our colleges and universities.

The idea that a school system exists to create well-educated individuals with a background in the liberal arts and an understanding of their responsibilities as American citizens seems ... conspicuous by its absence.

In Delaware we have now reached the point--at least in the nothern end of the State--wherein the high-school selection process for our brighter children now has all the drama one used to associate only with applications to college. Why? Because only a few of our schools even make a pretence at real, tough education ... and we have accepted that reality.

My daughter's elevation to near-savant rank among her peers for being almost able to solve a Rubik's Cube is symptomatic of what we continue to do in America today on all sides of the political spectrum: settling for delusions of adequacy that we have managed to mislabel as excellence.

From the Times:

The Obama administration is considering outbidding the Taliban to persuade Afghan villagers to lay down arms as it struggles to find a new approach to a war that is fast losing public and congressional support....

One official said the key emphasis in the White House meetings had been to identify options that would prepare the way for American troops to leave. Apart from training more Afghan troops, the focus has shifted to accepting a political role for the Taliban, while also trying to weaken them by winning some over.

Afghans are known for changing sides back and forth during their long years of war — there is an old saying that “you can rent an Afghan but never buy one” — and battles have often been decided by defections rather than combat.

Paying Taliban foot-soldiers to switch sides could spare US lives and save money, say its advocates. A recent report by the Senate foreign relations committee estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000, of whom only 5% are committed idealogues while 70% fight for money — the so-called $10-a-day Taliban. Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day, compared with the $165m a day the United States is spending fighting the war.


That supposedly serious senior officials are even discussing this as an option in the real world is an indication that we have truly entered the bizarro world.

From the Gormogons:

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) unleashed his long-awaited "bipartisan" health care reform bill September 16 (since amended, with more goodies for everyone). Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its estimate of the Baucus bill's price tag: $829 billion over ten years, allegedly reducing the federal deficit by $81 billion over the same time frame. Mind you, the Baucus bill will only raise the insurance coverage rate 9%.

What the CBO does not highlight, however, is that Sen. Baucus cooked the books. Under the Baucus plan, revenue enhancement (taxes) goes into effect immediately. Coverage does not kick in for two and one-half years. So, to make the numbers work, Sen. Baucus has to collect ten years of revenue to cover seven and one-half years of cost.

'Puter thought the whole thing smelled a little fishy, so he gave Sleestak an abacus, a quill and some parchment and set him on the CBO math. Using the above numbers, Sleestak calculates that projected revenues will generate $910 billion over 10 years. Outflows will be $829 billion over 7.5 years. Based on Sleestak's math, that's an average yearly inflow of $91 billion and an average yearly outflow of $110.5 billion, or a average annual deficit of $19.5 billion each year the benefits are actually paid.

Nifty trick: we begin paying for the benefits years before anybody ever actually sees them, in an effort to hide the fact that they actually generate nearly $20 billion in deficit each year.

Here is what the supporters will say:

1) "Now you're claiming it's irresponsible for President Obama to try and pay for something up front, unlike Bush?" No, I'm saying that it is irresponsible to pretend that this program is only going to last for ten years, and that he's not using an accounting trick to jump=start it.

2) "Show me where they have deceived anybody--it's all right in the bill." Yeah, sure. Everytime somebody criticizes the current health insurance reform bill, the defenders respons with "which bill?" or "why don't you wait to criticize until there is actually something for the President to sign?" Both of which are political rather than policy arguments, and the people making them know that.

3) "$20 billion is not so much to add to the deficit to take care of the American people. You didn't have trouble with spending billions and billions for Iraq and Afghanistan when Bush was frothing at the mouth." Uh. Yes. Well, actually: I did.

The bottom line here is that this is not an indictment of President Obama, but a libertarian observation on the system: no matter who is in charge, governments--much like big corporations--see you and me as revenue-generating units and not much else.

From the Obama Department of Justice arguments in the telecom immunity case:

“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”

By this logic, Blackwater and Haliburton could easily be conceived of as part of the government and protected under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.

Fortunately for all of us concerned that the current administration has little interest in Constitutional protections of basic civil rights, the judge disagreed:

“Here, the telecommunications companies communicated with the government to ensure that Congress would pass legislation to grant them immunity from legal liability for their participation in the surveillance,” White wrote. “Those documents are not protected from disclosure because the companies communicated with the government agencies “with their own … interests in mind,” rather than the agency’s interests.”

But why am I not suprised that the administration is appealing his ruling?

Wow. Aside from the asshole [the grammar suggests that there was really only one of you] who has been celebrating Melanie Hain's death in the comment section of my previous post, there was this by Kim B.--which is clearly superior to anything I wrote, and which captures part of what I was trying to say quite nicely:

it's unfortunate that Melanie Hain's death is even being connected to the soccer game incident when the two are unrelated. She was the victim of domestic violence. Period. This is not an issue of gun control - her husband would have had access to weapons no matter what condition the second amendment was in - this is an issue of domestic abuse. Saying that she "deserved" to be shot by her husband in her own home while she was unarmed and unawares is something akin to saying that rape victims are "asking for it." One in three or four women in our country experience domestic abuse in their lifetime; justifying Ms. Hain's very tragic death in any way just perpetuates what is already a massive problem in the United States. If she thought the system were protecting her (and her children) from abuse, she may not have felt the need to carry a weapon.

I've been there. After I left an abusive situation, I found out the hard way that there is very little the law can do to protect you from further abuse after you get yourself out- I spotted the aforementioned ex-boyfriend letting himself into my house after breaking the lock. He'd been planning to wait for me to come home alone. The only thing that stopped the harassment in my case was very openly carrying a taser. I'm not condoning it, but I am saying that I wished we lived in a society where women do not feel like they have to arm themselves as a last resort.

Because it seems obligatory to have an opinion on President Barack Obamais winning of the Nobel Peace Prize, I will tell you mine: I agree with Malia Obama that the news is slightly less significant than her three-day, school-free weekend.

That said, here's my rather idiosyncratic round-up of the (a) most honest; (b) most Orwellian; (c) most ironically accurate; and (d) most humorously ironically accurate responses to this award from both Delaware and the world.

The first items are comment rescues from Delawareliberal where pretty much everybody has either pointedly ignored Donviti's acid assessment, or--in the case of Delawaredem--engaged in exactly the kind of Orwellian rebranding of President Obama's increasingly militarist foreign policy into an enlightened approach to world peace that explains why very few Democrats have any moral authority of foreign affairs these days.

First, Donviti:

Indefinite detentions.
Wants to extend sunsetting patriot act provisions
Guantanomo still open and no signs of going anywhere
bombing in Pakistan killing civilians
Still in Iraq, with very large footprint.
Afghanistan increase in troops.
Not doing anything about torture

War is Peace

Say what you want about DV (and I have, I have) the man is consistent, refuses to compromise on a key moral issue, and (I'd suspect) drives his co-bloggers crazy enough on occasion that they do what they did today: ignore him.

Now Delawaredem:

Ok, so in Christine’s world, spending taxpayer money for the President to travel overseas for diplomatic summits and multinational conferences is bad, but spending taxpayer money on a war with Iran, on an absurdly wasteful military boondoggle known as the missile shield, and on unnecessary F-22 fighter planes, not to mention escalating the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, well, all of that spending is ok.

Let’s be honest here. Republicans are in full freak mode today over the Nobel Peace Prize because they do not like the Nobel Peace Prize. They do not like diplomacy. They do not like international cooperation. They do not like the pursuit of a real peace. They will say they want peace, but the peace they seek is a Pax Americana, where America achieves peace through the forced subjugation of the entire planet. What they like is bombs, body counts and war. For that is what brings them their peace.

What's Orwellian about this? Let me count the ways:

1) It is President Obama who has escalated the war in Afghanistan and failed to live up to his promises on an Iraqi withdrawal.

2) It is President Obama who has continued the same operational planning for a war with Iran than the Bush administration started.

3) It is President Obama who has increased the Bush-era defense budgets.

4) It is President Obama who has continued drone attacks in Pakistan against the wishes of that government, who has authorized unilateral military intervention in Somalia.

5) It is President Obama who has quietly allowed the role of military contractors to increase in Afghanistan and Iraq.

6) It is President Obama who told the Afghan people the United States was overruling their constitution and that they would get no run-off in the presidential election.

Which is--by Delawaredem's definition--pursuing real peace.

What our friends in the Democratic Party fail to understand is that the most legitimate criticism of this award comes not from the GOP right, but from the anti-war folks who have now been officially gutted and hung out to dry.

Observation the first: Giving the man who has dramatically escalated the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan the Nobel Peace prize is the intellectual equivalent of defining Sharia law as gender justice for the women of the world.

Oh. Wait. One of President Obama's advisors just did that:

Miss Mogahed, appointed to the President's Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was "oversimplified" and the majority of women around the world associate it with "gender justice".

The White House adviser made the remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party....

She said: "I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media.

"The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance.

"The portrayal of Sharia has been oversimplified in many cases."

Observation the second: The Nobel Prize in Economics cannot be far behind.

To wit, this via Greg Mankiw [h/t Kids Prefer Cheese]:

Pfuffnick's Nobel Economics Prize triumph hailed by many

LONDON — The surprise choice of first-year graduate student Quintus Pfuffnick for the Nobel Prize in Economics drew praise from much of the world Friday even as many pointed out the youthful economist has not yet published anything in scholarly journals.

The new PhD candidate was hailed for his willingness to tackle difficult problems, his commitment to improving the economic system, and his goal of bringing efficiency and equality into harmony.

Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton, who won the prize in 2008, said Pfuffnick's award shows great things are expected from him in the coming years.

"In a way, it's an award coming near the beginning of the first year in grad school of a relatively young economist that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our economy a better place for all," he said. "It is an award that speaks to the promise of Mr Pfuffnick's message of hope."

He said the prize is a "wonderful recognition of Pfuffnick's essay in his grad school application."

Ah, Watchmen: the most celebrated graphic novel of all time, an amazing if fatally flawed movie, and a tough story that deals with genocide, psychosis, random violence, rape, lashing dead bodies into rafts, cutting off the hands of criminals, murdering people to keep secret the fact that genocide had been committed, killing pregnant women in bar fights, child abuse....

I don't mean to over-emphasize the fact that Watchmen is a disturbingly brilliant novel, just to point out that it deals in very graphic ways with horrifying, confusing, and morally ambiguous themes. It sure as hell ain't for the squeamish.



Which is why I find it more than a little perplexing that Cato at Delmarva Dealings thinks the inclusion of Dragonball in an elementary school library is peddling smut, but appears to have no objection to having Watchmen on the shelves in the high schools.

Here's what he actually said:


As a recent graduate of a first rate university, you well appreciate the difference between material read for recreational purposes and material read to learn. As an English major I am sure that you would agree that there is an immense difference between Dr. Seuss, Dragon Ball, Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon. I wouldn’t expect an average high schooler to grasp McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” or just about anything from Pynchon. I would expect them to understand almost anything of Hemingway’s. I would hope that their time wouldn’t be wasted on Dr. Seuss or Dragon Ball (even for recreational purposes). “Maus” or “The Watchmen” would be a different matter.



Which is useful clarification, because I now understand his intellectual position. A lot of things happen during puberty, and thus while this image is smut for nine-year-olds:



This series--at least in Cato's considered conservative opinion--is perfectly acceptable for high-school library acquistion to open shelves for fifteen-year-olds.



Oddly enough, I agree with him on that; I just think he really doesn't agree with himself.

For a lot of people the tragedy of Melanie Hain [controversial gun-toting mom at her child's soccer game last found dead in apparent murder-suicide at the hands of her husband] represents fodder rather than tragedy.

Mike W. quotes one:

"Her "constitutional right" put her six feet under....Why should we have respect? I have no respect for people who don't realize the danger of bringing a loaded gun to a kids' ball game. i have no respect for people who think they can get attention by pulling ridiculous stunts. I have no respect for people who think they have the right to intimidate others with threats of violence. By packing heat, you're implicitly saying "treat me with the respect I feel I deserve or I'll blow your brains out." People like that deserve no respect."

Another appears in the local blogosphere:

This was an Anon at Delawareliberal:

When this story first came out about the mom who openly wore a gun to a youth soccer game, the wingnuts went all out defending her. Well, we already had the conversation about open carry, so I don’t want to start that all over again.

My question today for the wingnuts is:

How come you couldn’t smell the crazy on this woman, and we (and the local sheriff) could?

To be fair, Liberalgeek challenged this interpretation, and Anon backed off--a little, maybe, sort of:

LG: Hmmm. What is unclear in the report about the gun-toting Mom is whether she was the murder victim or the suicider.

Probably best to hold your fire on “crazy” until all (or at least some) of the facts are in.

Anon: Agreed after a second reading of the story. I still like my question though. I thought she was crazy for bringing a gun to the soccer game and suing the sheriff.

More intriguing, and oh-so-carefully phrased (and defended) was Delawaredem's assertion in the original post that You live by the gun, you die by the gun..

In response to Liberalgeek's challenge of Anon, DD quipped back:

Geek–

I was not commenting on the woman’s political views. My only statement is “you live by the gun you die by gun.” Whether she took her own life or was killed by a gun, or whether she was crazy or not, my statement seems to be pretty true.

What sort of reasonable inference could one draw from this particular statement [resting assured that no matter what inference I draw it will be ridiculed as a straw man]?

It seems to be a statement that owning guns is an inherently unwise thing to do, regardless of your reasons, regardless of your rights. [I'm sure DD will show up at some point to correct me on this.]

What's unfortunate, as Liberalgeek cautioned, is that the story is much more complicated and much more tragic than early reports would have indicated.

First, her husband was a parole officer--a gun-wielding law enforcement officer. Had Melanie divested herself of her own firearms she still would not have been living in a house free of them. Does you live by the gun, you die by the gun also apply to law enforcement officers?

Second, it seems that Melanie had been living in a domestic abuse situation for some time, and that protecting herself [and possibly her children] was one of the reasons she became interested in firearms in the first place. Like far too many women in this situation, she could not be convinced by friends to leave the bastard--an often fatal decision on the woman's part no matter whether she is armed or not. Instead, she chose to try to protect herself and she failed.

Doesn't sound crazy to me, or even like an object point for or against gun control.

It sounds like a tragedy that not even the most stringent gun control laws under consideration today could have prevented ... because her abuser was a law enforcement officer.

No, having a firearms does not appear to have been sufficient to save Melanie Hain, but there is also absolutely no evidence that having one contributed to her death.

But complicated narratives are just too ... complicated ... for the people interested in characterizing gun-owners [or any political opponent, for that matter] as crazy or implicitly saying "treat me with the respect I feel I deserve or I'll blow your brains out."

As for that live by the gun, die by the gun BS, try telling that to the 74-year-old Lewes man who, about two weeks ago, used both a machete (!) and his handgun to defend himself successfully against two forty-something thugs breaking into his house.

This is what WaPo says, in the lead paragraphs of a new story, that the CBO scoring of the Baucus health insurance reform plan would do:

A health-care reform bill drafted by the Senate Finance Committee would expand health coverage to nearly 30 million Americans who currently lack insurance and would meet President Obama's goal of reducing the federal budget deficit by 2019, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade, but would more than offset that cost by slicing hundreds of billions from government health programs such as Medicare and by imposing a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost insurance policies starting in 2013.

All told, the package would slice $81 billion from projected budget deficits over the next 10 years, the CBO said, and continue to reduce deficits well into the future.

It would also expand coverage to 94 percent of Americans by 2019, the CBO said, up from the current 83 percent.

This is what an ebullient Max Baucus had to say:

"This is transformative. This is game-changing," Finance committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) said. "For two years now, that's exactly what we have been doing in the Finance Committee -- working to get this result."

This is the last paragraph of the story, which--by admitting that the CBO has not scored a piece of legislation but a speculative summary of a proposal that does not yet exist--renders the foregoing meaningless:

In a letter to Baucus and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the committee's ranking Republican, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf cautioned that the analysis is preliminary in large part because the committee has not yet drawn up the bill in legislative language.

Strangely enough, the fact that this so-called estimate did not really score an existing bill is either relegated to the status of unimportant, or is completely ignored in most coverage of the issue.

And as for the people who are jubilantly beginning to declare victory, what is the nature of their triumph?

Here it is, in sum:

We will cut Medicare benefits, raise taxes, force millions of people to purchase a product they may neither want nor need, and spend an additional $80+ billion per year for a plan that--by the best estimates--will still leave 16-25 million American citizens with no health care coverage at all.

[The bill's sponsors admit it would not cover 25 million people; there is some disagreement as to how many of those folks are here illegally.]

Once again, government lives down to my expectations.

He keeps doing shit like that to me.

First, here's what the Federal Trade Commission has decided to shred the First Amendment:

Bloggers who offer endorsements must disclose any payments they have received from the subjects of their reviews or face penalties of up to $11,000 per violation, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.

And here's what Tom Knapp says in reply:

Dear Federal Trade Commission:

Go f--k yourselves. This is my blog, not your blog. I will write whatever I choose to write, I'll write it for whatever reasons I choose to write it, and I'll disclose as much or as little about those reasons as I damn well please.

If you think you can squeeze $11,000 out of me over it, feel free to try. You won't get a dime you don't take at gunpoint, and the only way you'll stop me from continuing to write as I please is to stick me in jail or kill me.

Yours in liberty (hah!),
KN@PPSTER

Somehow it just doesn't have any impact to jump up and down shouting, "Yeah! What he said, damn it!!!"

But that doesn't make the sentiment any less accurate.

I wonder exactly how many of my Demopublican friends in the blogosphere [most of whom still have not found a voice on America's disastrous foreign policy] are going to take a stand for their own freedom from intimidation by the Feds.

Or is the idea that a personal media is just that--personal--only an idea that Libertarians champion?

From WaPo:

Stiff competition from thousands of mom-and-pop marijuana farmers in the United States threatens the bottom line for powerful Mexican drug organizations in a way that decades of arrests and seizures have not, according to law enforcement officials and pot growers in the United States and Mexico.

Illicit pot production in the United States has been increasing steadily for decades. But recent changes in state laws that allow the use and cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes are giving U.S. growers a competitive advantage, challenging the traditional dominance of the Mexican traffickers, who once made brands such as Acapulco Gold the standard for quality.

Almost all of the marijuana consumed in the multibillion-dollar U.S. market once came from Mexico or Colombia. Now as much as half is produced domestically, often by small-scale operators who painstakingly tend greenhouses and indoor gardens to produce the more potent, and expensive, product that consumers now demand, according to authorities and marijuana dealers on both sides of the border.

The shifting economics of the marijuana trade have broad implications for Mexico's war against the drug cartels, suggesting that market forces, as much as law enforcement, can extract a heavy price from criminal organizations that have used the spectacular profits generated by pot sales to fuel the violence and corruption that plague the Mexican state.

The market could help end the bloody rampage of Mexican drug cartels?

Who knew?

Oh. Yeah.

Those damn Libertarians and their weird ideas.

First, two significant quotations.

From Randolph Bourne's War is the Health of the State:

The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

From [Major General, USMC, retired] Smedley Butler's War is a Racket:

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Now, as if to prove the point of her critics that she is an idiot, Sarah Palin says:

We can win in Afghanistan by helping the Afghans build a stable representative state able to defend itself. . . . I recently joined a group of Americans in urging President Obama to devote the resources necessary in Afghanistan and pledged to support him if he made the right decision.

Note to Sarah: nobody has ever actually done this in over 2,000 years, and not for lack of trying.

Why is what Sarah Palin thinks--no matter how nutty--important?

Because it makes the point that even the political opposition has joined the corporate-military-industrial-driven insanity of sustaining a permanent war state.

Which makes the American people realize that, even though poll after poll finds a majority of our citizens (a) don't believe the war can be won, and (b) don't think we should continue it, the majority of our citizens also believes that the government will simply continue the war, anyway.

From Anti-War.com:

Showing an increasing resignation to America’s state of perpetual war, a poll conducted by Clarus Research Group shows that a vast majority of Americans, 68 percent, say the US will never win or lose the Afghan War, but it will merely continue unresolved.

The general consensus seems to be in keeping with comments from the Obama Administration, which has repeatedly ruled out settling on any sort of exit strategy. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates only yesterday declared that any withdrawal would give the appearance that the mujahideen had defeated a second superpower after a decade-long occupation.

Even officials within the White House have insisted that President Obama is being awfully vague about what he hopes to accomplish eight years into the war, the only thing Obama insists he’s not trying to accomplish is leaving.

Multiple polls have shown Americans firmly against the continuation of the conflict, and one would think this would portend an eventual end. Yet years of even larger opposition failed to end the war in Iraq, and today’s poll suggests Americans are now largely of the opinion that nothing they say can end a war their government is determined to continue.

So much for the theory that our elected representatives answer to us.

... or at least might have provided fodder for an eventual MacGyver remake:

An Alabama woman has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child after police say she let her daughter ride in a cardboard box on top of their van. Albertville Police spokesman Sgt. Jamie Smith said the 37-year-old woman was arrested Sunday after police received a call about a minivan on a state highway with a child riding on top.

Smith said the woman told police the box was too big to go inside the van, and that her daughter was inside the box to hold it down.

Smith said the mother told officers it was safe because she had the box secured to the van with a clothes hanger.

I'm thinking we have a definite contender for this year's Darwin Awards.

[h/t Kids Prefer Cheese]

Cato, at Delmarva Dealings, has discovered that (a) the Pittsville Elementary School has graphic novels [aka comix] and that (b) a 9 year old can check out Dragonball and take it home:

Many years ago, when I was a child, public schools had librarians. These kind, quiet ladies made sure that our schools were stocked with material that would help us learn AND was appropriate for our age. Today, at least in Wicomico County, schools don’t have librarians. They have MEDIA SPECIALISTS; and, as I have recently discovered, they don’t worry about making sure that what goes on the school library shelf is appropriate for the children they are charged with helping to educate.

A couple of weeks ago, a nine year old child came home from Pittsville Elementary School with a library book. It was a “graphic novel” (which is really a comic book bound as a book) called Dragon Ball. Fortunately, that child’s parent took the time to look through the book. What she found caused her enough distress that she paid a visit to her county councilman – Joe Holloway.

WARNING – The balance of this article contains pictures and attachments that many may (and should) find offensive.

Cato is massively offended by the fact that Wicomico County school librarians don't read every word of every book they put on the shelves [presumably including dictionaries].

I am just hoping that nobody tells him that kids can already watch Dragonball Z on television, and that--worldwide--the whole Dragonball franchise is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed examples of manga/anime of all time:

Dragon Ball is one of the most popular manga series of its time, and it continues to enjoy high readership today. By 2000, more than 126 million copies of its tankōbon volumes had been sold in Japan alone. By 2007, this number had grown to pass 150 million. It is the "quintessential mainstream manga" driven by an unending story. Its immense popularity resulted in the series being continuously extended, first through the use of acrobatic devices that regularly kept the series from falling into the routine characters and story lines, then by having the central characters surpass death itself using miraculous devises. In Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture Takashi Murakami notes that Dragon Ball's "never-ending cyclical narrative moves forward plausibly, seamlessly, and with great finesse." Goku's journey and his ever growing strength resulted in the character winning "the admiration of young boys everywhere". On several occasions the Dragonball anime series has topped Japan's DVD sales.

In a survey conducted by Oricon in 2007 between 1,000 people, Goku, the main character of the franchise, ranked first place as the "Strongest Manga character of all time." Manga artists, such as Naruto creator Masashi Kishimoto and One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, have stated that Goku inspired their series' main protagonists as well series structure. When TV Asahi conducted an online poll for the top one hundred anime, the Dragon Ball series came in place twelve. The first episode of Dragon Ball Kai earned a viewer ratings percentage of 11.3, ahead of One Piece and behind Crayon Shin-Chan. Although following episodes had lower ratings, Kai was still mantained as one of the most viewed anime series from Japan.

Ah, but none of that matters--either in nearby Maryland or Wassilla, Alaska--if somebody, anybody, is offended by it being in a school library, then it's time to burn either books, crosses, or librarians. Maybe all three.

On the other hand, this could just be how Cato decided to celebrate Banned Books Week with a spoof post.

Here's a hint for concerned parents: don't like what your children are reading? Then you check their book bags and engage in your own in-home censorship. But leave my own children's reading choices [and my choices as a parent] out of your family business.

Oh, and Cato? For the record: my son first read Dragonball manga when he was seven years old, not nine. I did not notice it create a rush on his part to masturbate in the bathroom or pull the panties off girls in his class. He thought those parts were pretty stupid. Probably should have stopped him from wasting his time on comix, however, because today in the eighth grade he's not reading on grade level.

He's been tested as reading on a junior college level.

Damn comix.

Via Waldo from the Anne Frank Museum, the only known film clip in which young Ann Frank can be glimpsed, alive and happy....



She was one of the first people in books to become real for my daughter, who cried in the fourth grade when she realized how Anne Frank had died.

... appears to be what we're doing:

In a taped speech intended to be aired tomorrow, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates blamed the lack of more US and NATO troops in Afghanistan for the growing momentum of the Taliban, chiding NATO nations in particular for their small commitments to the ongoing conflict.

The comments come as the Obama Administration is mulling a commitment of another 45,000 troops to the war effort, and inexplicably enough the same day that Secretary Gates chastized others in the administration for making public their positions on the proposed escalation.

Gates cautioned that the US could not afford to ever retreat from the nation, saying it would empower al-Qaeda and give the appearance that the mujahideen had defeated a second superpower after a decade-long occupation.

Whatever it would look like internationally, it seems apparent that eight years of occupation, as with the Soviets, has done little to strengthen pro-invasion forces in the nation and has rather riled up a growing number of people opposed to the ongoing presence of foreign forces. Though it seems hard to imagine that any number of additional troops is going to make the presence more palatable, the White House has ruled out even considering withdrawing from the nation.

There is practically no downside for Al Qaeda or the Taliban if President Obama doubles down in Afghanistan.

Hell, there's practically no downside for Al Qaeda or the Taliban if we leave.

Which is the classic definition of a win-win scenario.

Except that we are not the winners.

Castle's first bid for Governor was my first campaign as a near full-time volunteer, in 1984.

I will be lending everything I can to help elect Congressman Castle to the United States Senate.

Good luck, Congressman!

Regular readers know that I generally post something--usually several somethings--here every day.

For the past few days, however, the output has been off.

Partly [Hube taught me this a couple weeks ago] I have not been pushing it because I have not felt particularly ... inspired.

I'm tired of writing about health insurance reform, or the US misadventures in Afghanistan, or even Delaware politics, because there is actually very little chance that I will say something original enough here to actually ... matter.

So I am lightly blogging for a few days--maybe a week--while I do a little necessary rethinking of the whole process. I have been at this for nearly two years and nearly 3,000 posts, and while I've met a lot of interesting people and exchanged some neat ideas (and insults) I do spend time wondering if this is all anything more than mental masturbation.

I think it needs to be more than that, and I think it needs to be more original than it has recently become.

Just letting you know what's going on.