Byron York, of National Review, commenting on this happy event:
...I wonder: Where are the protests? If the U.S. had arrested these guys, and made them stand up for long periods of time while being questioned, or turned the air-conditioning way down in the interrogation room, there would be an outcry about their treatment. And yet when the U.S. blows them to bits, out of the blue, with a Hellfire missile fired from an un-manned drone controlled by Americans thousands of miles away, there's not much complaint. Now I'm sure the CIA took great care to make sure it had the right target in the crosshairs, but you can't get a much better definition of "no due process" than a Hellfire missile. Where's the outrage?
Posted by: Mike ||
01/09/2009 12:13 ||
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Top|| File under: al-Qaeda
#1
I wonder what the new rules will be for firing these Hellfire missles?
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
01/09/2009 14:03 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Outrage? We don' need no steenkin' outrage. Besides, we's too busy pasing out candy and ululating. Or is that ovulating? I can never keep them straight.
Thanks to desperate recruiting methods required to staff those wars, the U.S. Marines may be turning military service into a male sexual fantasy land, where recruits are paid actual money to cohabitate with drunk, stoned, horny teenage girls.
#4
Gotta tip my hat to utter clueless gall of any San Franciscan, the wellspring of debauchery and the incubator of all the world's VD strains, slagging the Marines for promiscuity and VD. Truly a case of glass houses build out of fun house mirrors.
The Sri Lankan flag is flying
today over Kilinochchi, but it waves over a ghost town. The only signs of life in Kilinochchi are stray dogs. Journalists who have visited Kilinochchi say that the LTTE left the city in ruins before withdrawing.
"Asbestos roofs, doors, windows and all conceivable fittings of every house and establishment in the town had been ripped apart and carted away. The civil and administrative apparatus had been razed to ground. The city's 40-foot-long main water tank was reduced to pieces with powerful explosives. The wires which supplied power had been slashed across the city and through the 8-km length of the town not many electric polls were seen," wrote B Muralidhar Reddy, The Hindu's correspondent in Colombo.
Of greater concern than ruined Kilinochchi is the fate of its 100,000 residents. But for some 30 remaining civilians, there is no trace its population. While it is likely that they fled in anticipation of the fighting between the armed forces and the LTTE for control of the town, the possibility that the Tigers would have forcibly taken them to Mullaitivu cannot be ruled out.
In 1995, when the LTTE lost Jaffna it took around 350,000 residents into the Vanni region in a bid to show the world that the Tamil people wanted to remain under LTTE rule. Thousands returned to Jaffna in the months that followed. If Kilinochchi's residents have been taken to the Mullaitivu jungles, it is possible that the LTTE will use them as human shields to defend its last bastion.
Once upon a time, terrorists had to hide from the forces of the free world and filch their living on the sly. That's changing, thanks to long-running efforts by the United Nations, bankrolled most prominently by the U.S.
In the current violence of Gaza, we are seeing the fruition of one of the most bizarre creations of modern diplomacy: a UN-supported welfare enclave for terrorists.
Behind this lies a straightforward equation. Gaza, with its 1.5 million people, runs almost entirely on international handouts. The UN ranks it among the top per-capita aid recipients on the planet.
Continued on Page 49
As Israeli troops encircle Gaza City, their commanders are faced with a painful dilemma: How far must they advance into the deadly labyrinth of slums and refugee camps where Hamas militants await with booby-trapped houses and snipers? With each passing day, Israel's war against Hamas grows riskier and more punishing, with the gains appearing to diminish compared to the spiraling costs to Israel's moral stature, to the lives of Palestinian civilians and to the world's hopes that an ancient conflict can ever be resolved. Ideally, in a war shaped by television images, Israelis would like a tableau of surrender: grimy Hamas commanders crawling from underground bunkers with their hands up. Instead, the deaths of at least 40 civilians taking shelter at a United Nationsrun school north of Gaza City are more likely to become the dominant image of the war. Israeli politicians and generals know that the total elimination of Hamas' entrenched military command could take weeks; it might be altogether impossible. The more realistic outcome is an unsatisfactory, brokered truce that leaves Hamas wounded but alive and able to regenerate and Israel only temporarily safe from attack.
Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has promised a "war to the bitter end." But after 60 years of struggle to defend their existence against foreign threats and enemies within, many Israelis may be wondering, Where does that end lie? The threat posed by Hamas is only the most immediate of the many interlocking challenges facing Israel, some of which cast dark shadows over the long-term viability of a democratic Jewish state. The offensive in Gaza may degrade Hamas' ability to menace southern Israel with rocket fire, but, as with Israel's 2006 war against Hizballah, the application of force won't extinguish the militants' ideological fervor. The anti-Israeli anger swelling in the region has made it more difficult for Arab governments to join Israel in its efforts to deal with Iran, the patron of both Hamas and Hizballah and a state whose leaders have sworn to eliminate Israel and appear determined to acquire nuclear weapons. (See pictures of grief in the Middle East.)
Just as ominous for many Israelis is a ticking demographic time bomb: the likelihood that Arabs will vastly outnumber Jews in the land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is a catastrophic prospect for a nation that defines itself by its faith. At some point, Israelis will have to choose between living with an independent Palestinian state or watching Jews become a minority in their own land.
As much as any other nation on earth, Israel is based on a dream: the aspiration to establish a home for the Jews in the birthplace of their ancestors. To a remarkable extent, that dream has been fulfilled, as Israel has grown into the most modern and democratic country in the Middle East and a dependable American ally. A strong, confident Israel is in America's interest, but so is one that can find peace with its neighbors, cooperate with the Arabs to contain common threats and, most important, reach a just and lasting solution with the Palestinians. But accomplishing all that will require Israel and its defenders to confront excruciating dilemmas: How do you make peace with those who don't seem to want it? How do you win a war when the other side believes time is on its side? And what would true security, in a hostile neighborhood populated with enemies, actually look like? As is always true in the Middle East, there are no easy answers. But it's never been more vital that Israel start looking for them.
How to Deal with Hamas
The most immediate challenge facing Israel is that posed by Hamas. Gaza's tragedy has for days been playing out on the world's TV sets. By Jan. 7, more than 700 Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, had been killed. But there's something tragic, too, in Israel's predicament: in any confrontation with its enemies, it is damned if it does and doomed if it doesn't. Across Israel's political spectrum there seems to be a consensus that Hamas' provocative rocket barrages could not go unanswered though whether Israel's response has been proportional to the threat is, at the least, questionable.
#3
How about for proportional we take one Arab/Paleo/Islamofascist supporter at random be it cleric or media or jihadi and put a bullet in their head for each rocket or mortar shell fired at Israel?
They take a shot then we take a shot just like the olden days of dueling
#2
Has anyone ever suggested making the West Bank a Paleo state? As kind of a reward for being LESS annoying than Gaza? An example of how acting human pays off might sink through all the layers of bone and gristle into their knobby heads.
#2
Of course, all those raising of minimum wage [which doesn't reflect the implied rise in workers comp, unemployment insurance, social security, et al] when times were a rolling will certainly encourage employers to start rehiring - particularly in the small businesses which sustains most of the employment. /sarcasm off
#4
The sharpness of the downswing and the "helpful" efforts of our government are going cause unemployment to do more than flirt with 10%. I predict that by spring unemployment is going to forcefully penetrate the double digits. Rape is more likely than flirting. I hope I'm wrong.
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
01/09/2009 11:57 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Well, krep... I've lost three jobs in 2008 alone - part-time jobs, of course, since I wanted to concentrate on writing. Let go from one, employer died in another, third one lost too much business to afford me, even part-time. My daughter also lost her part-time job in September - and couldn't even get hired on for the Christmas rush, as no one was hiring sales help for the holidays.
Guess I shouldn't let go of my most recent regularly paying part-time employment gig, I guess.
#7
If states keep raising their minimum wage farther and farther above the federal minimum, unemployment will continue to rise. You will note that unemployment is rising fastest in the states with the highest minimum wage.
Raising minimum wages doesn't provide people with "a living wage". It provides more people with unemployment.
The phrase refers to assumptions about the rate of new company / job startups and failures.
Small companies are not well reflected in actual job figures, especially as they rapidly add or lose employees. Or more accurately, they are not picked up on right away. Unlike large companies, which tend to lay people off in groups with advance notice and take time to go through a long formal hiring process, small companies can hire or lay people off quickly or even go under with no notice. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to make assumptions about the rate at which those are happening.
As it turns out, in the early part of an economic recovery, jobs are often created in small companies at a faster rate than in the economy as a whole. If those jobs aren't reflected in the BLS Current Employment Statistics model, then unemployment will be over-estimated until more accurate actual numbers are gathered.
But in a recession, it's quite likely that the small company job death is more rapid than in large companies. If those job 'deaths' are not accurately estimated, then the CES will underestimate unemployment as a whole in the economy until the actual job losses are logged.
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.
As Israeli troops encircle Gaza City, their commanders are faced with a painful dilemma: How far must they advance into the deadly labyrinth of slums and refugee camps where Hamas militants await with booby-trapped houses and snipers? With each passing day, Israel's war against Hamas grows riskier and more punishing, with the gains appearing to diminish compared to the spiraling costs to Israel's moral stature, to the lives of Palestinian civilians and to the world's hopes that an ancient conflict can ever be resolved. Ideally, in a war shaped by television images, Israelis would like a tableau of surrender: grimy Hamas commanders crawling from underground bunkers with their hands up. Instead, the deaths of at least 40 civilians taking shelter at a United Nationsrun school north of Gaza City are more likely to become the dominant image of the war. Israeli politicians and generals know that the total elimination of Hamas' entrenched military command could take weeks; it might be altogether impossible. The more realistic outcome is an unsatisfactory, brokered truce that leaves Hamas wounded but alive and able to regenerate and Israel only temporarily safe from attack. 
