Michael Clohessy returned from Iraq with a distinguished war record and ended up in prison. Our jails are swollen with former soldiers. Why can't they stay out of trouble?
What was the Cheonan doing in the shallow and rapidly flowing waters near Baeknyeong Island before it sank due to an unexplained explosion on March 26? The military says patrol ships operate only in areas designated by the upper command, and the waters where the ship sank are within normal operating areas of the Cheonan.
But that does not explain what it was doing there. Since being appointed to the helm of Cheonan in August of 2008, Caption Choi Won-il is said to have passed that region about a dozen times, or twice a month on average over the last 20 months.
This has led to speculation that the Cheonan was on some kind of mission or conducting a reconnaissance run following detection of unusual activity by North Korea in the area. Supporting those claims is the fact that some crewmembers were talking to their family members by mobile phone at around 9:15 p.m. Friday night, just before the ship began to sink, and abruptly ended their calls telling them an "emergency" had arisen. What kind of operational security is it to allow crew-members to use their cell phones?
There is also the fact that the warship Sokcho, which was near the Cheonan, fired a 76 mm cannons toward the north just after the blast.
But the accounts of survivors and announcements made by the military indicate the Cheonan was not on a classified mission when it began to sink. Some of the sailors were not dressed in battle gear but in normal clothes or underwear when they were rescued. The military in a briefing Thursday said the Cheonan was sailing in waters close to Baeknyeong Island, in order to "use peacetime conditions to familiarize itself with geographical vantage points to deal with any North Korean attack in the future." In other words, the Cheonan was navigating those waters to practice patrol runs in preparation for a North Korean missile or artillery attack.
An official at the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, "More flexibility was granted in terms of operational area this time" compared to the past when those routes were not usually included.
There were also claims that the Cheonan had been escaping high waves or bad weather. Defense Minister Kim Tae-young suggested to reporters on Wednesday that the Cheonan may have been on an escape course on the fateful night.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/03/2010 00:00 ||
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Steve, where would the cell towers be?
Posted by: Eric Jablow ||
04/03/2010 8:18 Comments ||
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CaptionChoi Won-il is said to have passed that region about a dozen times, or twice a month on average over the last 20 months.
huh?
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/03/2010 10:02 Comments ||
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#3
huh?
Posted by Frank G 2010-04-03 10:02
Don't think too hard about it Frank...it's Korean math. It has different standards.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
04/03/2010 13:31 Comments ||
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It couldn't have happened to a nicer country. On March 18, with very little pomp and circumstance, president Obama passed the most recent stimulus act, the $17.5 billion Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (H.R. 2487), brilliantly goalseeked by the administration's millionaire cronies to abbreviate as HIRE.
As it was merely the latest in an endless stream of acts destined to expand the government payroll to infinity, nobody cared about it, or actually read it. Because if anyone had read it, the act would have been known as the Capital Controls Act, as one of the lesser, but infinitely more important provisions on page 27, known as Offset Provisions - Subtitle AForeign Account Tax Compliance, institutes just that.
In brief, the Provision requires that foreign banks not only withhold 30% of all outgoing capital flows (likely remitting the collection promptly back to the US Treasury) but also disclose the full details of non-exempt account-holders to the US and the IRS.
And should this provision be deemed illegal by a given foreign nation's domestic laws (think Switzerland), well the foreign financial institution is required to close the account.
It's the law.
If you thought you could move your capital to the non-sequestration safety of non-US financial institutions, sorry you lose - the law now says so. Capital Controls are now here and are now fully enforced by the law.
Let's parse through the just passed law, which has been mentioned by exactly zero mainstream media outlets.
The only exemption to the rule? If you hold the meager sum of $50,000 or less in foreign accounts.
One thing we are confused about is whether this law is a preamble, or already incorporates, the flow of non-cash assets, such as commodities, and, thus, gold.
If an account transfers, via physical or paper delivery, gold from a domestic account to a foreign one, we are not sure if the language deems this a 30% taxable transaction, although preliminary discussions with lawyers indicates this is likely the case.
And so the noose on capital mobility tightens, as very soon the only option US citizens have when it comes to investing their money, will be in government mandated retirement annuities, which will likely be the next step in the capital control escalation, which will culminate with every single free dollar required to be reinvested into the US, likely in the form of purchasing US Treasury emissions such as Treasuries, TIPS and other worthless pieces of paper. Just as things were with the Russian Ruble and the German Reichsmark.
#4
You can be sure that large corporation campaign contributors have a superhighway to move 'investment' monies overseas not subject to these same level of taxes.
#5
Old Spook,
That is simply an oversight, expect an amendment to follow. I would eventually expect to see a similar control domestically, when they get around to it.
THE TROUBLED Assets Relief Program (TARP) goes out of business in October, and not many Americans will be sorry to see it fold. The $700 billion program, hastily improvised at the height of the global financial panic in September 2008, broke all the rules of free-market capitalism. It put taxpayer money at risk to bail out banks, auto industries and insurance companies, including one behemoth, American International Group, whose irresponsible gambling in the derivatives markets infuriated even the usually placid Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke. Small wonder that the original TARP legislation barely made it through Congress, amid rhetoric about Wall Street greed and creeping socialism.
Yet today it is clear that TARP not only has been successful but, in a real sense, also a great deal for taxpayers. The latest indication is news that the Treasury Department plans to sell its 27 percent stake in Citigroup by the end of the year, at a likely profit of $8 billion. To be sure, these estimates are subject to the volatility of the stock market; by announcing that it wants to exit Citi in the short run, the Treasury risks getting clipped by an unexpected price drop before its self-imposed target date. Still, the sell-off would wean the troubled financial giant off most public support much earlier and at a much lower cost to taxpayers than was once expected. Once the sale is complete, the government will have recouped about three-quarters of the $245 billion worth of capital it pumped into financial institutions.
The remainder will take longer to come back, because many smaller regional banks still need a capital cushion against expected commercial real estate losses. Nor did TARP rekindle bank lending as much as had been hoped. But Treasury officials now expect the ultimate cost of TARP to come in at less than $100 billion. Most of that, by the way, will reflect losses not at banks but at General Motors, Chrysler and AIG, the first two of which are not even financial institutions. Had Obama not bailed out the automakers you could have argued that TARP was a substantial success, with AIG as the only failure.
Bank lending should pick up once a sustained recovery generates more demand for loans. In short, for all its shortcomings, TARP has fulfilled its chief purpose: to stem the panic-induced collapse of a banking system that -- contrary to much conventional wisdom -- was indeed salvageable without total nationalization. The only fair measure of TARP's costs is in comparison to the costs of the averted collapse. And by that measure, it was a bargain.
There is another lesson here: TARP was a bipartisan policy. Conceived by a Republican administration, it passed Congress with votes from both parties and has been implemented mostly by a Democratic administration. When the country faced imminent disaster, political leaders suppressed ideology and partisanship -- and acted, in the national interest. If only they could apply some of that same spirit to problems before they reach the crisis stage. If it's bipartisan, will the Democrats give George Bush the credit he deserves?
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/03/2010 00:00 ||
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Oh, yeah, it's working all right - working to further bankrupt America while rewarding Bambi's cronies. >:-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
04/03/2010 0:29 Comments ||
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that is exactly as it was designed... :(
Posted by: abu do you love ||
04/03/2010 0:41 Comments ||
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TARP did not fix anything. It papered over the problems so the connected people could get their assets out. The real estate bubble has yet to really pop. The banks are virtually all insolvent at properly marked-to-market values and will be until productive employment can generate income sufficient to pay the price for houses and businesses. - and at an interest rate that can at least somewhat support the (we) aging baby boomers.
#4
What Glenmore said. TARP did nothing but rescue bank shareholders, ie precisely the people who should have lost their shirts.
Nor did TARP rekindle bank lending as much as had been hoped.
Understatement of the year. The real cost of TARP is shown in the ridiculously low cost of funds accorded to the insider mega-banks that have not used this massive giveaway to restore lending and credit.
In effect, there has been a massive transfer of wealth, perhaps as much as a trillion dollars, from hundreds of millions of depositors and borrowers to a few thousand mega-bank executives and big shareholders. Hard to imagine a more perfect example of regulatory capture. United States of Argentina.
#6
Did the money all get plowed back into the stock market? Is that why the market is so strong? Opinions please.
Most of it did.
Fundamentally the problem is that governments everywhere are addicted to the revenues from asset bubbles - stocks, real estate, etc. So they are desperately trying to reinflate these bubbles, ie stop deflation. Deflation is good for the economy and most people, for the simple reason, most stuff gets cheaper.
#7
So how many troubled assets did the Troubled Asset Relief Program relieve? The $700 billion dollar program was sold as the equivalent of the poorly managed, but ultimately effective bailout of S&L's many years ago. Instead it's turned into a political slush fund and the bad assets are still on the books but have been ignored (for now). If a private company did this kind of thing - people would be going to jail.
President Obama announced last Thusday that he had concluded a follow-on to the 1989 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia. He characterized the cuts that it would make in the two nations' nuclear arsenals as a major step towards his goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. In practice, however, the so-called New START' accord will contribute primarily to the denuclearization of the United States and to making the world a more dangerous place. Accordingly, it would be more accurate to call it False START.'
The first thing to note about the Obama treaty is that it confers real advantages on the Russians. For starters, the Kremlin will have to make essentially no cuts in the numbers of its deployed strategic launchers, whereas the United States will have to destroy several hundred of ours.
It is unclear at this writing whether such reductions by the U.S. will, as a practical matter, make it difficult if not impossible for America to preserve its strategic Triad' of land- and sea-based ballistic missiles and long-range bombers. If so, there could be serious implications for strategic stability as the confidence of friends and foes alike in the robustness of our deterrent declines markedly.
What is clear, though, is that we will be obliged to cut back our arsenal to match the lower levels that the Russians can afford to maintain at the moment. The advisability of such a step would be debatable even if it produced a genuine equality between the two parties.
Unfortunately, the seeming equality thus established is deceptive in at least three respects:
Posted by: ed ||
04/03/2010 16:31 ||
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...I have heard from several sources that the bombers - ALL of them - are going, and will be gone by the end of FY12. The timing will be perfect: it will be too late to save any of them, even with a Republican landslide, and the savings will go into ObamaCare.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
04/03/2010 17:42 Comments ||
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And the nuclear arsenal as a whole, plus the expertise required to maintain or recreate it.
He's serious about this and is making rapid headway by all appearances.
#3
It also puts the US in a serious inferiority position. All our potential targets require the use of limited strategic launchers and warheads. Most of the Russian targets are within range of thousands of shorter range missiles and aircraft not covered under this agreement with thousands of nuclear warheads not covered under this agreement. That leaves nearly the entire Russian arsenal free to target the USA.
And it's not like like the Russians to lie about something as serous as nukes. When the cold car ended it was discovered they only had 10,000 more warheads than declared by treaty.
Posted by: ed ||
04/03/2010 19:55 Comments ||
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It should be obvious to our Defense people that he is setting the country up for the kill. Why don't they do something? They are Constitutionally required to defend the country and the Constitution itself.
This guy is openly an enemy.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
04/03/2010 21:20 Comments ||
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Long opinion piece by Mark Bowden at Vanity Fair. Worth the read.
At 57, General David Petraeus has revolutionized the way America fights its wars, starting with the surge in Iraq and continuing into his current command, with responsibility for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen. Charting Petraeus's relentless challenge to the institution he reveresthe U.S. Armyand to himself, the author hears about the unceasing drive, groundbreaking methods, and darkest moments of a four-star rebel.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/03/2010 00:00 ||
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It's almost gushing in its praise of Petraeus. I can't imagine this appearing in Vanity Fair or anywhere else in the MSM while Bush was in office. Smells like Graydon Carter's boy is trying to persuade the lefties to support Barry's escalation in Afghanistan. I suppose that's not a bad thing, however nasty and hypocritical, but it's still deeply offensive to see them refusing to give Bush any credit.
At least the article opens by showing candidates BHO, HRC and Joe "Partition" Biden at their worst.
Maybe, just maybe, we'll get back to something like the Cold War-era bipartisan consensus on foreign policy now that Barry has adopted nearly the entire war on terror approach of his predecessor.
#2
OTOH, Barry's bizarre contempt for our allies in Europe and his embrace of our enemies in our backyard will mean that the consensus will go no farther than the war on terror.
Still, at least we might be able to get beyond the BS and posturing from the Dems during Bush's second term, now that it's obvious that Bush's surge won the war in Iraq.
#4
Subtle reference to Eisenhower. Petraeus might have the makings of a President. Would Palin take the Veep? Ah, politics....
So much to do and so little time.
But is always safe to say.."its gonna get worse." That's always a safe bet.
There WILL be a war...there always is. The Middle East is in for a world of hurt. And then it gets dark and you can either move or stay still...how much ammo do you have?
#5
Lex, Mark Bowden has been a rather independent voice for the last couple decades. He's written a number of books and articles where, best as I can tell, he calls it as he sees it. I don't always agree with him but he's an excellent writer.
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/03/2010 10:35 Comments ||
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Vanity Fair is owned by billionaire Si Newhouse, who hates Obama, loves the Clintons, and supports unions for everyone else but not his businesses. So it wouldn't be hard to suspect perfidy.
#7
Subtle reference to Eisenhower. Petraeus might have the makings of a President.
Bart, it looks like the General has closed the door on that idea himself. You won't see many statements more unequivocal than "I've tried quoting a country song 'What part of 'no' don't you understand?' but I really do mean that." Unfortunate - he'd have probably been a pretty good President, too...definitely better than any current member of the bipartisan rogues' gallery that both parties offer us every four years.
Posted by: RIcky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
04/03/2010 12:44 Comments ||
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And for the record, I'm still clinging to the hope of a Mattis/Arpaio ticket in '12.
Posted by: RIcky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
04/03/2010 12:49 Comments ||
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Thanks, Steve, I'll give Mark Bowden's work another look.
One of the surprising things about the piece is how carefully Bowden made the case that Petraeus certainly has all the mental attributes of a successful presidential candidate-- not least, an extraordinary determination to win, combined with self-confidence and a flair for dramatization. Bowden didn't say it outright, but his dwelling on the legends that have arisen around "King David" was a not-so-subtle hint that Petraeus wouldn't mind if a Draft Dave movement were to gather steam.
The man clearly has outstanding political instincts. At the same time, he's got a lot more courage of his convictions than Powell ever did, and he's far smarter: Powell couldn't see that "overwhelming force" doctrine was no longer relevant as early as 1998.
Petraeus + Paul Ryan (or maybe Mitch Daniels) would be a sure winner. Palin can continue cheerleading and rallying the base.
#10
Palin can continue cheerleading and rallying the base.
Bingo, Lex - that's the best place for Sarah, keeping the troops excited and the grass-roots donations flowing to the right candidates. Just like Newt's the guy to go to for the best big ideas and the best messages to promote them. But neither of them's national-ticket electable, IMHO.
Posted by: Ricky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
04/03/2010 19:37 Comments ||
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Just like Newt's the guy to go to for the best big ideas and the best messages to promote them.
I'm not so sure. Don't write the Newter off just yet. The outrage over this "healthcare" bill and the economy has yet to reach it's peak.
President -- Petraeus
VP -- Ryan or Pawlenty
WH Chief of Staff -- Daniels
Ambassador to UN -- Palin (just to watch heads explode)
Posted by: Steve White ||
04/03/2010 20:28 Comments ||
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I'm not so sure. Don't write the Newter off just yet.
I'm not ENTIRELY writing him off - I could see him winding up in one of the more important Cabinet positions in the next Trunk administration - but what I think made him unelectable to national office was his rather messy personal life, complete with TWO ugly divorces resulting from extramarital affairs. While that stuff might not matter to the average Republican guy, trust me - Republican WOMEN take shenanigans like that very seriously and very personally.
One of my favorite examples of this syndrome is the story of how my Congressional district wound up with its current Dem incumbent. Several years back, our Congresscritter was a Trunk, a prominent lawyer who promoted himself as a big "family values" advocate. Then he made the mistake of bringing his cute little 20-something side dish to some public event, which set off a firestorm among the local Republican women. Next election, they got on the jungle telegraph and made sure all their friends knew that Mr. Family Values was a skirt-chasing scumbag. A friend of mine estimates his wife personally cost this jackass at least a dozen votes.
Posted by: Ricky bin Ricardo (Abu Babaloo) ||
04/03/2010 20:45 Comments ||
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He's certainly a national treasure and one of the few General Officers with a PhD on active duty, but I don't think Petreaus wants any part of it. I suspect Pawlenty will get the nod. Just my guess.
#15
Newt is an ideas/issues guy - very smart - totally unelectable. His personal failings are enough to turn me off. He'd be a great Policy Advisor or Secretary of ....
he's not electable
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/03/2010 21:16 Comments ||
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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.
