[HT:GC]

Face of Defense: Soldier Returns to Service After Two-Decade Break

In a room lit only by sunlight streaming in, a soldier bites through the plastic wrapper of a package of pencils. With children waiting excitedly in the adjoining rooms, there is not time to waste pulling out a knife. ...

Wilkerson decided to re-enlist after the Army raised its maximum enlistment age to 42 [he's 43].

“I’ve got a 21-year-old son, and there are kids (serving) who are younger than him,” he said. “I’m still in shape and capable of doing a good job. Maybe my service will mean that another young guy his age will be able to return to his family.”

In the long run, Wilkerson said, he plans to serve his country until retirement. Meanwhile, back in the Bayrk schoolhouse, smiling children swarm around Wilkerson and his fellow soldiers as they pass out school supplies and stuffed animals. The “Old Man” returns the children’s smiles with one of his own.

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Al-Qaeda Leaders: 'We are in Crisis'

Two captured letters released by the US military show Al-Qaeda in Iraq in desperate shape while local leaders complain bitterly about the success of "The Awakening" that has brought 80,000 Sunnis into an alliance with the Americans:

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group's security structure suffered “total collapse”.

These are the words not of al-Qaeda's enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group's stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.
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That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20...

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Arms & The Manpower

Analysts predict that equipment shortages in the military may become a source for debate in the upcoming 2008 Presidential election.

As America enters its fifth year in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a growing need to replace “worn out” equipment. Both the need for new equipment and calls to expand the number of military personnel have led to increased projected spending in the Department of Defense budget for 2008.

While promises for a stronger military abound, finding the money to fund equipment and training will not be easy, especially if the economy goes into recession. The future President will have to make tough decisions in the contest for funds between military and domestic welfare programs.

“The question is going to be—Where is the money going to come from?”

Already, new weapons programs for the Air Force and Navy have been put on hold in order to ensure that the Army and Marines are well-equipped first. The deferment comes despite President Bush’s original budget request to pump $38.7 billion into shipbuilding and $33.8 billion into new aircraft equipment.

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Iran plans to launch two more rockets into space

Iran is to launch two more rockets into space in the next few months, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced on Monday, after a firing of a rocket earlier this month sparked international concern. "Two other rockets will be launched so that we can then send a satellite into space," Ahmadinejad said at a rally in Tehran broadcast live on state television.

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Proposed Treaty Threatens Operations with NATO Allies

A proposed arms-control treaty banning use of cluster munitions and aiding countries that use them could affect U.S. operations with NATO allies, a Defense Department official said. A draft treaty to enforce the ban is now circulating among Oslo Convention nations, and it prohibits any form of assistance to countries that use cluster munitions...

“A complete ban would put at risk the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners, and make it more difficult to fulfill our security guarantees to others,” he explained. “And for certain types of targets, use of cluster munitions could, in fact, result in fewer civilian casualties and less damage of civilian infrastructure than would be the case if conventional unitary warheads were used against the same target.”

The Oslo process risks producing a “feel-good” arms-control outcome where nations without imminent need for cluster munitions produce a ban that has very little effect on their national security, but does have an impact on the security needs of the United States and its NATO allies. A NATO ally that signs the Olso Treaty would not be able to operate with U.S. forces in a NATO operation...

[a despicable sham designed to give our gutless 'allies' an excuse to never contribute to anything - while putting our sons and daughters at greater risk while they sit on the sidelines]

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China warns U.S. against plan to destroy spy satellite

Beijing - In response to a U.S. plan to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite, China has warned against threats to security in outer space, without mentioning its own successful anti-satellite missile test last year. The Chinese government also stopped short of linking the planned U.S. strike with Beijing's repeated calls for a complete ban on space weapons.

[China has never honored a treaty its signed. It uses them as a weapon against democracies who sign in good faith.]

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LINES FOR SWEDISH CARE GROW LONGER

If universal coverage can work anywhere, it should be Sweden, a small, homogenous nation where poverty is virtually unknown. Yet according to European think tank Health Consumer Powerhouse (HCP) in its Euro-Canada Health Consumer Index 2008:

> Waiting times for care, long a problem in Sweden and too often deadly wherever they're found, are now the longest on the Continent.

> While Sweden excels at medical outcomes, its accessibility to and quality of service are bad and worsening.

Long waits are a hallmark of government health care anywhere it's employed. When the perception exists that treatment is free (it is not; Swedes pay more than half their gross income in taxes to support the welfare state), system overuse is inevitable. People can think of no reason to self-ration care.

Swedes are accustomed to cradle-to-grave care provided by the state. But rather than deal with long waits, they're opting for private care, which got a boost from limited reform in the 1990s. In private care, patients self-regulate and put less stress on the system.

Thanks to the profit motive, private health care providers have an incentive to cut waiting times, lest they lose customers to the competition. Government providers have no such motivation.

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Saying No to CoerciveCare

Whether it's Mitt, Hillary, or Arnold doing the sales job

...Yet many California unions argued that a mandate would force uninsured, middle-income working families to divert money from more pressing needs toward coverage whose price and quality they cannot control.

The unions are correct: This is exactly what is happening in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney enacted a similar plan two years ago as governor. (And Mr. Romney's plan is the inspiration for both the Schwarzenegger and Clinton plans.) The experience in the Bay State deserves a lot more scrutiny than it has been getting.

...All this has inflated demand, which, combined with onerous regulations on insurance suppliers, has triggered premium increases of 12 percent for this year—double last year's national average. No one is escaping the financial sting. The state health-care bill for fiscal 2008-2009 is expected to be $400 million more than originally projected—an 85 percent increase.

...The government response to rising premiums is, unsurprisingly, price controls...

...Forcing people to buy substandard care they cannot afford is not universal care, she says. "It is a hoax." And so Massachusetts is marching toward a system of two-tiered medicine—the alleged market inequity that universal care is supposed to cure...

http://www.reason.com/news/show/124783.html

NYT Takes on Al Gore and Climate Alarmists

Moments after Investor's Business Daily presaged that "2008 just might be the year the so-called scientific consensus that man is causing the Earth to warm begins to crack," the New York Times of all entities published a rather shocking piece pointing fingers at folks like Nobel Laureate Al Gore for being part of a group of "activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels."

This from the New York Times? Hold on tightly to your seats, folks, for the shocks in this piece came early and often (emphasis added throughout):

A year ago, British meteorologists made headlines predicting that the buildup of greenhouse gases would help make 2007 the hottest year on record. At year's end, even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record - it was actually lower than any year since 2001 - the BBC confidently proclaimed, "2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend."

When the Arctic sea ice last year hit the lowest level ever recorded by satellites, it was big news and heralded as a sign that the whole planet was warming. When the Antarctic sea ice last year reached the highest level ever recorded by satellites, it was pretty much ignored. A large part of Antarctica has been cooling recently, but most coverage of that continent has focused on one small part that has warmed.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in 2005, it was supposed to be a harbinger of the stormier world predicted by some climate modelers. When the next two hurricane seasons were fairly calm - by some measures, last season in the Northern Hemisphere was the calmest in three decades - the availability entrepreneurs changed the subject. Droughts in California and Australia became the new harbingers of climate change (never mind that a warmer planet is projected to have more, not less, precipitation over all).

Checking that link to make sure it really goes to a Times piece? I understand - and there's {much} more...

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Border crossings cut by Texas crackdown

A strict policy to arrest, prosecute and jail illegal aliens who cross into the U.S. has shown significant success in reducing crossings and crime along the Texas border, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials said this month. The first 45 days of Operation Streamline — a collaborative effort of local, state and federal agencies in Texas — has resulted in decreased illegal border crossings and crime...

[who would have guessed? and note the inclusion of crime in the decreases]

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Grading Teachers: Kids' Test Scores Must Count

If you want good teachers in the schools, the first step is obvious: Figure out who they are. And not by relying solely on water-cooler chat and subjective judgments but by also looking at rock-hard data on teacher performance. Such common-sense thinking has led Chancellor Joel Klein & Co. to undertake a pilot project to measure and track teachers' results - based on their students' test scores. (Snip) Imagine teachers treated like other professionals - having their performance monitored and quantified, as is routinely done in other fields...

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The Ghosts of 2004...

California

The Sacramento Bee reports today that Prop. 58, the measure sponsored by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2004 as the so-called “California Balanced Budget Act” isn’t all it was cracked up to be. Schwarzenegger made a dizzying array of promises to skeptical voters in order to win passage of the measure. He said,

“California faces unprecedented budget deficits. Overspending has led to serious shortfalls which threatens the state’s ability to pay its bills and access financial markets. This proposition is a safeguard against this EVER HAPPENING AGAIN. Proposition 58 will prevent the Legislature from ENACTING BUDGETS THAT SPEND MORE MONEY THAN WE HAVE.”

As I told the Senate when it placed Prop. 58 on the ballot in December of 2003, the so-called “safeguards” were nothing more than an artful window-dressing of existing law – with one critical exception:

“Since statehood, the constitution has prevented one generation from passing on its day-to-day expenses to the next. This measure temporarily removes that provision so that you can do what no generation before you has ever dared to do: steal from the future.”

Four years later those warnings have borne out. While Proposition 58 is now being proven in practice to be a toothless watchdog, the Governor has just ordered another $3.3 billion of borrowing to finance his deficit spending – borrowing that Prop. 58 made possible with the promise it would only be used to retire Davis’ deficit and prevent it from “ever happening again.”

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Some helpful advice to those with fake IDs

When making a fake ID, attach a picture of yourself only... no matter how much you love your girl.