When Hamid Karzai issued his angry ultimatum to the United States over an airstrike that killed women and children in Helmand province on May 28, he left a crucial piece of the story out: The shooting death, also on May 28, of an anonymous U.S. Marine, which triggered the fighting that led to the airstrike.
I think I've found out who the Marine was. The American killed in Helmand province on May 28 was Lance Cpl. Peter Clore. He was 23 years old. Only six weeks in Afghanistan, Clore and his war dog Duke were leading a patrol to clear improvised explosive devices.
...in calling on Americans not to strike at Taliban-filled houses, Karzai is demanding a free-fire zone for insurgents.
By Diana West. A few useful statistics at the link, too.
We can oblige him. He should remember Najibullah. Obama should remember LBJ.
#2
"Someone" needs to ARCLIGHT Karzai's cottage. I'm sure he'll "get the message". Perhaps the people of Afghanistan will, also. We need to do this every time we're "asked" to fight a war with one foot in a bucket and our hands tied behind us.
My guess is, we're beginning to cut into Karzai's racketeering.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
06/05/2011 14:21 Comments ||
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#3
We're definitely hurting someone who owns a piece of Karzai. How about every time he opens his mouth we immediately oblige with two more strikes? Pretty hard to miss that message.
#4
Dover-New Philadelphia OH Times-Reporter: More than 400 area residents climbed the Tuscarawas County Courthouse stairs Saturday to pay their respects to Marine Lance Cpl. Peter Clore.
No doubt his seat at the University of Washington is being kept warm for him in case this little adventure ends in a fiasco. Eat your heart out Jesse James. Maybe you should have studied economics before getting into the business of holding up banks.
..."I'm sick and tired of this," he said, explaining legal hurdles that have kept the rebels from receiving pledged funds. "We literally have days before the lights are off."
As manager of the rebels' finances, Mr. Tarhouni is among the most critical players in the movement trying to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi, an effort that gains broader international recognition by the day. He has established himself as a pragmatic, and occasionally audacious, leader, who in the early days of the uprising ordered the rebels to rob a branch of the central bank in Bengazi where they found the equivalent of more than $320 million.
"Basically, we drilled holes," Mr. Tarhouni said, explaining how they opened the safe.
AMONG opposition leaders, Mr. Tarhouni occupies a unique place. As an economics professor with a populist streak, he bridges a divide between the technocrats who have returned from exile or remain abroad, and home-grown academics and former Qaddafi government officials. He is blunt when describing the rebels' desperate straits, using expletives to talk about donors lagging in their payments. At the same time, Mr. Tarhouni, who abruptly took a leave from his job teaching economics at the University of Washington to join the revolution, can appear a practiced politician. On a recent tour of the Benghazi courthouse, the emotional heart of the Libyan revolt, he was busy shaking hands and posing for pictures with children.
h/t Instapundit
Todays much weaker than expected employment numbers show that the presidents agenda of more regulation and increased spending has undoubtedly failed. However much money he throws at the problem, entrepreneurs are not going to start adding jobs to the economy while the burden of regulation is so high. Regulations cost the economy $1.75 trillion each year. It is regulation that is dragging us back to recession. And it is regulation that is the new elites principal source of income---so, good luck deregulating without a guillotine.
#1
By far the largest drag on the US economy is the many trillions in bad debts run up as the housing bubble collapsed, and then the dollar depreciation caused by Quantitative Easing (designed to conceal the role the bad debts play). $1.75 trillion is peanuts compared to that. The federal gov't has always had regulations against insolvent banks, fraud and Ponzi schemes, which it has failed to enforce for many years, instead enforcing important things like the illicit rabbit trade and No Child Allowed to Excel.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
06/05/2011 7:15 Comments ||
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#2
To HIM, it is. And to the MSM, now mobilized to enforce the twin memes that Obama has done everything right, and that everything his opponents propose or do is wrong.
#3
Jerry Pournelle: The President is apparently proud of giving Chrysler to Fiat after despoiling the stockholders and bondholders in favor of the unions.
#4
Let's keep this straight. It was a bailout of the UAW not the car companies. America's first Union Steward President came through for those who bankrolled him. Legally bought and paid for.
So the public employee unions have been on the defensive across the nation, and they've been losing battles in state capitols from Wisconsin, to Ohio, to Tennessee.
Although there have been some violent incidents and death threats, overall, despite the talk from many right-leaning pundits about "union goons," the actual danger posed by the union members appears to have been very small by labor-historical standards. Apparently, you just can't get good goons nowadays.
And that makes sense. In the old days of the labor movement, the unionized industries were, you know, actual industries, involving miners, steelworkers and the like. And those are trades that foster exactly the qualities you need in good goons.
Why? Because they're very dangerous activities that put a premium on teamwork. (Even in totalitarian countries, people know that it's dangerous to get the miners upset.)
Those kinds of work foster a mind-set that's not entirely different from what you find in successful combat troops: team spirit, the sense that you have to rely on your peers to cover your back, and you'd better do the same for them. (Also, in those lines of work it's easy for those suspected of shaky loyalty to have "accidents.")
When people who are used to dealing with cave-ins, or ladles of molten metal, hit the streets, they're putting those traits to work in an environment that's probably less dangerous than the one they work in every day. That makes them pretty formidable.
In fact, it made them so formidable that they were able to put together unions solid enough to send the industries they depended on overseas, where labor was more tractable, because the bosses weren't willing to face the headache of trying to get rid of the unions, and couldn't afford to pay the wages the unions, with their toughness, had managed to extract.
But miners and steelworkers are one thing. When the public employees of, say, Wisconsin hit the streets, it looked more like a bunch of disgruntled DMV clerks and graduate teaching assistants, because, well, that's what it was.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
