Gains in Kandahar Came With More Brutal US Tactics is a very disturbing article, if true. Unfortunately, these stories often do turn out to be true.

[Col. David] Flynn [the battalion commander of a unit of the 101st Airborne Division] told reporters of London’s Daily Mail he had issued an ultimatum to residents of Khosrow Sofia: provide full information on the location of IEDs the Taliban had planted there or face destruction of the village, according to the account published Oct. 26.
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The threat to destroy a village if its residents did not come forward with information would be a “collective penalty” against the civilian population, which is strictly forbidden by the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.
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The new level of brutality used in the Kandahar operation indicates that Petraeus has consciously jettisoned the central assumption of his counterinsurgency theory, which is that harsh military measures undermine the main objective of winning over the population.

But there are tell-tale signs that higher-level commanders in Kandahar know that those tactics will not defeat the Taliban either. Col. Flynn, the U.S. commander in a section of Arghandab, told the Daily Mail, “At the end of the day, you cannot kill your way to victory here. It will have to be a political solution.”

If we have to commit war crimes to win, should we give up or should we commit war crimes?  I shudder to think how the majority of U.S. citizens would respond to that question.

Let us remember that the U.S. public vehemently rejected the idea of collective guilt of the people killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11.  This was the “justification” used by the “terrorists” for their action. I doubt that many U.S. citizens would recognize the parallel when applied to the innocents in Afghanistan.

Has Barack Obama become the third in line of the Bush Dynasty? Does he have any principles left?

The  final vote results for roll call for H.R.4853 with the latest misleading title: Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2010.

At least I had one of my members of Congress vote no on this travesty. See the vote of “Neal (MA)”.  My former Oregon Representative, David Wu, also voted no.

How did your Representative do?

Contrary to the usual pro-war propaganda published by The New York Times, they published the article Intelligence Reports Offer Dim View of Afghan War.

These few quotes don’t do the article complete justice, but they give you a hint at what you will see if you read the whole article.

The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.
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.Pentagon and military officials also say the reports were written by desk-bound Washington analysts who have spent limited time, if any, in Afghanistan and have no feel for the war.
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But in Afghanistan, the intelligence agencies play a strong role, with the largest Central Intelligence Agency station since the Vietnam War located in Kabul. C.I.A. operatives also command an Afghan paramilitary force in the thousands. In Pakistan, the C.I.A. is running a covert war using drone aircraft.

Anybody who was an adult during the Viet Nam War can see history repeating itself. (Actually I have read that “History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”).

The enemy has sanctuaries we can’t touch.  If we only go after them in their sanctuaries, the war will turn around.  The naysayers don’t have a feel for what is really happening on the ground.  Well, Nixon went after sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia and turned a bad situation into a horror show.  The naysayers were right, and the people who claimed to be closest to the war were the ones that really didn’t know what was going on.

Obama was just too young to have heard the first stanza of this poem.  Hundreds of thousands will die because of Obama’s youth.  When I voted for him, I did so because I thought he was good at listening to reason.  I thought he had the humility to ask for advice when he didn’t know the issue well enough.  I also thought he was good at telling the BS from the straight poop.  Again and again he has demonstrated that I was wrong about his talents as a manager.

I guess his campaign proved that if he were lucky enough to stumble across a winning strategy, he had the guts to stick with it. It wasn’t only guts, I thought.  His team was constantly measuring the effects of the strategy. I didn’t realize that if he stumbled across a bad strategy, he would stick to that one too. If he is still a manager that likes to measure results, his measurement of how his strategy is doing seems to be badly off target.

He seems to have the same nearsightedness when fighting the Republicans as he has with fighting the wars. Is this Obama’s character flaw that will be his Achilles heel?

These are apparently the words of President Obama himself. Oregon Representative Peter De Fazio saying Obama warns “This is the end of his presidency” if he doesn’t get tax deal.

DeFazio was not my representative when I lived in Oregon, but he did make me proud to live in the state that he helped to represent.

You wouldn’t know it by anything you might read at the following link, but I think this is the Senate Vote on Extending The Bush Tax Cuts For The Wealthy.

Question: On the Motion (Motion to Concur in the House Amdt. to the Senate Amdt. with Amdt. No. 4753 to H.R. 4853 )

Measure Number: H.R. 4853 (Airport and Airway Extension Act of 2010, Part III )

According to the H.R. 4853 Bill Summary:

Latest Title: Middle Class Tax Relief Act of 2010

This is a bill to give tax relief to the middle class (and oh by the way, we also give tax relief to the ultra-wealthy that will end all hope of ever balancing the budget without cutting Social Security and Medicare.  There is no positive economic benefit to extending this cut to the wealthy. All this is just a minor detail, though.)

Despite the news reports you may have heard, there is only 1 Independent in the Senate, Bernie Sanders, and he voted no.

If your Senator is not in the list below, then you can decide if this is really the type of person you want to vote for in the next election for that office. I have sent my emails to Senators Kerry and Brown to let them know that they have lost my vote for their re-election. (Well, Brown never had it to begin with.) I have emailed Representative Richard Neal to let him know of the consequences if he too caves to the demands of the Republicans.

This blog post will remain on this blog so that when the time comes, you can look it up.  (Use the search box at the top of this web site to find this article in the Novembers to come.)

Politically, I long for the days when we were living in Oregon.

I have already told Harry Reid and Al Franken that they can stop sending me any more email.  They were not on the above list.

If the elected officials that passed this abomination think this will all blow over by 2012, they are badly mistaken.  By then even the people who are willing to give them a pass on this vote now will know of the bad consequences of this surrender.  This won’t blow over, this will blow-up.

The introduction to the piece Rob Johnson Hunts for the Budget “Moby Dick” on Newdeal2.0 (which contains the above video) is:

So you’re concerned about the debt-to-GDP ratio? Then listen to Rob Johnson, who separates the real white whales to harpoon from the harmless minnows. A new paper he co-authored with Tom Ferguson points out that austerity and stagnation most threaten our fiscal future. The American people are angry, and “there is a lot of valid rage in our society,” Rob says. But “fears of magic thresholds like a 90% debt-to-GDP ratio or mythologies that have to do with the painlessness of cutting deficits are playing on those fears, but they’re not sending things in a proper direction.”

The warning that matches the headline of the story Soros Warns U.S. Could Be On Verge Of Dictatorial Democracy is pretty dire.

I found the following paragraph at the end of the article to be a nice complement to my previous post, True Motive For Tax Cuts.

In the U.S. Soros said that QE2 has created “bad side effects ” by pushing up the price of assets.

Industry won’t invest in new jobs, plant, and equipment because there is plenty of idle labor, plant, and equipment that could be pressed into service if there were sufficient demand.  So where is all this extra liquidity going to go if not to new jobs, plant, and equipment?  Where it always goes when there is too much liquidity, asset bubbles.

This is further proof, if we needed any, that monetary stimulus is no substitute for fiscal stimulus.  Fiscal stimulus needs to be in the form of government spending on the $2 trillion of infrastructure repair that is needed within the next 5 years to prevent the country from falling further behind in required maintenance.

The way Mitch McConnell sees it, apparently, is that the country’s infrastructure should just be allowed to fall into disrepair so that the government won’t be spending so much money.  I guess highways, railroads, airports, navigable rivers, and other infrastructure are not really needed if all you want to do is ship money around electronically.  Even then, good broadband service might be needed.

Encouraging financial industry instead of manufacturing industry is exactly how we got into the current predicament.  Maybe this is the old “Hair of the dog” remedy.  If a little wacky financial mania has caused a hangover, the solution must be another dose of wacky financial mania.

The Republicans don’t even wait to gloat.

In the story Tax deal passes Senate test vote, the Boston Globe reports:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in a speech yesterday that the tax compromise was an essential first step toward addressing the nation’s deficit, by “cutting off the spigot” of tax income to the federal government to force Congress to make spending cuts.

I suppose the Republicans will next want to whiten the snow falling in DC by painting it black.

Does Obama seriously think that in a Congress dominated by a minority of Republicans that the tax cuts will expire in 2012?  This is the last chance for the Democrats to stop the attack on the nation by the Republicans that want to live in a country where the government is too weak to control the excesses of the ultra-wealthy.

The Koch brothers might be surprised one day by what the Tea Party actually does when the Tea Partiers finally realize they have been had.

The article Groundhog Day: Judith Miller-Style casts serious doubts on the integrity of The New York Times for its shoddy reporting of the unsubstantiated claims that:

“Secret American intelligence assessments have concluded that Iran has obtained a cache of advanced missiles, based on a Russian design, that are much more powerful than anything Washington has publicly conceded that Tehran has in its arsenal, diplomatic cables show. Iran obtained 19 of the missiles from North Korea, according to a cable dated Feb. 24 of this year.”

The New York Times refused to let its readers know that the report was unsubstantiated or give the item the context .by which the readers could form their own opinion.

The article that casts the aspersion is on The Huffington Post which is not necessarily any safer to read than The New York Times.

Be that as it may, I want to record the links to this article for when hawkish The New York Times continues to beat the drums for war with Iran.  Maybe someone will remember the lies that led up to their call and just tell them to pipe down.

Richard Kirsch wrote the article, What Obama Can Learn From Reagan. The subtitle is “He must show real leadership on his core values, not weakness and waffling.”

What the president fails to comprehend is that his style of public vacillation and preemptive compromise is much more to blame for the disillusionment that so many Democrats share than the substance of what he gave up, whether it be on health care or taxes.

Kirsch goes on to show how different was the fight on Health Care from the tax cut capitulation, and yet how Obama’s style detracted even from that “win”.

The fact that so many people draw the line at the tax capitulation isn’t so much its absolute magnitude.  It is the cumulative effect of all his compromises.  In essence this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.