Al-Qaida's Vietnam

CIA Director Michael Hayden says the terror group has suffered "near-strategic defeat" in Iraq. It has been routed from Anbar, Diyala and Baghdad provinces, and now is getting a beating in its last stronghold of Mosul, in the north. It is reviled by the Iraqi populace, and its downward trajectory began with indigenous uprisings at its expense.

When the United States lost Vietnam, it lost credibility and saw an emboldened Marxist-Leninist offensive around the Third World. Al-Qaida is a global insurgency and not a nation-state -- and thus its circumstances are radically different from ours 40 years ago -- but it has suffered a similar reputational loss.

The Iraq War had been a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaida when it was winning. No more. Osama bin Laden rendered what is called the "bandwagon effect" in international relations -- the tendency of states to go along with the dominant power -- in his homespun Arabic analogy of people liking the strong horse over the weak horse. In Iraq, al-Qaida's proverbial horse is a broken-down nag... [snip]

Lately, the Iraq War has looked more and more like another Vietnam -- not for us, but for al-Qaida...

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Foe, Not Friend

[HT:RS]
The United States is in mortal peril from a false friend: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The peril emanates from the totalitarian legal-religious-military-political code the Saudis call Shariah and their assiduous efforts to impose it worldwide. The danger is enormously exacerbated by the almost-complete failure of American officials at every level of government to acknowledge, let alone act to prevent, the Saudis’ true agenda. [snip]

A recent expose by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon of congressional and independent investigations of the murderous September 11, 2001 attacks describes evidence of financial, logistical and other material support by Saudi government personnel...

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A Terrifying Decision

Remarkably, a court recently upheld a jury verdict that found the owners of buildings that were terrorized more culpable than the terrorists.

A New York state appeals court upheld the jury's allocation of 68 percent of the blame for the 1993 World Trade Center bombings on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the buildings. Citing the jury's finding that several explicit warnings were provided to the Port Authority by credible sources, including Scotland Yard, the majority of the blame (and corresponding damages) was placed on the Port Authority. Moreover, the court cited precedent that holds that an owner's negligence can be at least 50 percent to blame for harm even when the harm was caused by another party's deliberate actions.

"Defendant's negligence had been extraordinarily conducive of the terrorists' conduct -- so much so that the fulfilment [sic] of the terrorists' plot and the ensuing harm could with clear justification have been understood as primarily attributable to that negligence," the court ruled. "The intentional act [of the terrorists] causally did little more than bring the incipient catastrophic potential of the negligence to terrible fruition."

[we've a legal system broken at every level]

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Muslim children in Britain 'brought up to hate their homeland'

Radical British Muslims have formed chatrooms to discuss adopting orphans and bringing up children to be Islamic fighters, a study has found. Discussions on a number of radical websites have asked how children should be brought up to be "mujahideen" and whether they should be pulled out of mainstream schools...

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Russia rebuilding superpower military

Gen. Nikolai Makarov has replaced tough, old Gen. Yury Baluyevsky as the chief of staff of Russia's armed forces and has been tasked with rapidly modernizing them. Despite all the stories of a run-down and demoralized military that regularly appear in the Western media, Russia's armed forces remain the most powerful and effective land force across all of Eurasia...

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Why Irish Voters Rejected the Lisbon Treaty

Irish voters on June 12 said ‘No' to the superpower ambitions of European political elites, who want all 27 member-states of the European Union to ratify the 269-page (about 3000 pages with annexes) Lisbon Treaty that would turn the EU into a bureaucratic superstate.

Ireland was the only country to submit the "Reform Treaty" to a popular vote; all other member states of the EU intend to ratify the document through 'parliamentary procedures' [i.e., the very same bureaucrats who's power and job security will be enhanced by its passage][snip]

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "There will be no treaty at all if we had a referendum in France."

D'Estaing said: The approach "is to keep a part of the innovations of the constitutional treaty and to split them into several texts in order to make them less visible. The most innovative dispositions would pass as simple amendments of the Maastricht and Nice treaties. The technical improvements would be gathered in an innocuous treaty. The whole would be addressed to Parliaments, which would decide with separate votes. The public opinion would therefore unknowingly adopt the dispositions that it would not accept if presented directly."

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen said that it did not matter if people had not read the treaty (he had not read it either, he admitted) and did not understand it because they should trust their elected leaders. [snip]

Although by EU law the Irish vote (53.4 percent said ‘No' and 46.6 percent said ‘Yes') should kill the treaty (because it requires unanimous approval to come into effect), European politicians will almost certainly find a way to keep it alive.

[you gotta read this thing -- how do you say "jaw-dropping-chutzpah" in european? and evidently no one is threatening to hang them, {an aspect also addressed, in part} -- Highly Recommended > ]

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Dirty US Media Secret: 'Rest of the World' Rebels Against Climate Taxes

The supposedly surprising rejection of the Lieberman-Warner climate bill last week had an element that Old Media in the US hasn't covered, but is very relevant.

While the press is ever eager to jump on politicians who fly in the face of supposed "world opinion" when it goes against US positions and traditions, it has been virtually silent over how "the rest of the world" has been rejecting the true linchpin of government climate policies: supposedly climate change-related higher taxes and fees. Consider the following:

• Germany -- "German Car Tax Plan to Be Delayed: Government."
• In Canada, a sympathetic columnist cautions the Liberal Party, which seems to think that the road back into power is through green taxes, about "The Suicidal Allure of a Carbon Tax."
• Australia -- "The Sun Sets on Rudd’s Climate Change Credibility."
• New Zealand -- "Emissions Bill Hanging by Thread"

Each story is about how a government or party is finding that citizens/voters are not at all keen on reducing their living standards in the name of supposed environmental purity.

The biggest media blackout is over the political situation in Great Britain, where Tony Blair's successor Gordon Brown hangs by a thread, largely because of his radical environmental initiatives... [snip]

If most of all of this is news to you, it's because the US press is studiously ignoring it. New York Times stories about Brown's situation on May 14 and May 23 have not a word about the Green Road Tax, even though many Labour MPs have been calling it a "ticking time bomb" for several weeks...

[the most pervasive spin: story 'selection' (omission)]

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"SPLASH AND DASH" BIOFUEL SCAM COSTS AMERICANS MILLIONS

U.S. taxpayers are being bilked to the tune of millions of dollars by a biofuel subsidy that helps to lower gas prices - in Europe. The scam is known as "splash and dash." Here's how it works:

• The scam stems from an existing $1 subsidy for every gallon of biodiesel fuel blended with regular diesel in the United States.
• Biodiesel is produced abroad using South American sugar cane or Asian palm oil and shipped to the United States, where it's blended with just a "splash" of regular diesel.
• A typical tanker-load of about 9 million gallons of biodiesel requires just 9,000 gallons of American diesel to make it qualify for the subsidy.
• The ship then makes a "dash" for Europe, where its fuel is sold below market rates; that means each tanker-load that makes the dash nets importers about $9 million dollars in tax credits from the IRS.
• In 2007 this subsidy cost the American taxpayers $300 million; it's projected to cost them $600 million next year.

And while Congress and the National Biodiesel Board say they know the loophole is being exploited -- as America is exporting much more biofuel than it is producing -- they can't identify the guilty companies that continue to profit from this scam due to IRS rules...

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Judicial temperament?

A poster of Che Guevara hangs on the wall of a judge who found Ohio's death penalty law constitutionally lacking. But his idol Che was not very respectful of the niceties of justice, and loved to watch firing squads at work. Che once said:

"Judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. We execute from revolutionary conviction."

Judge James Burge, whose wall is graced by Fidel, and Barack too, just declared that Ohio must change its lethal injection death penalty procedure because the current method is not quick and painless enough.

Leaving aside the irony of admiring a ruthless butcher while being perhaps a bit prissy about executions, how is it consistent with a judicial temperament to revere a butcher like Che?

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MEAN TO TEENS

The hike in the minimum wage passed by the Democratic majority in Congress last year is a big reason teen joblessness is at its highest level in 60 years. Americans are now finding [again] out the true cost of the minimum wage increases.

Wall Street wasn't stunned when the U.S. jobless rate jumped to 5.5 percent in May from 5 percent in April. It expected a repeat of past arbitrary price hikes have had on hundreds of thousands of youths looking for summer jobs. Many, if not most, won't find jobs because they've been priced out of the market:

• The minimum wage was hiked 14 percent to $5.85 an hour last July.
• Next month, it will go up an additional 12 percent to $6.55 an hour.
• In July 2009, it's slated to rise 10.7 percent to $7.25 an hour.

If that sounds like a lot, the actual cost is much higher after you fold in taxes, benefits and Social Security that businesses pay on behalf of young workers. Economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, has found a 10 percent minimum wage hike cuts employment of young, unskilled workers by 8.5 percent. [historically, every 10% increase in the mandated wage has been followed by a ~2% decrease in entry-level jobs]

Employers forced to shell out an added 40 percent over three years to employ the least educated, least trained and overall least productive workers are finding a good reason not to do so. Young people should get paid more only after they work a while, gain some experience and actually become valuable to their employer -- rather than having higher pay mandated by the federal government.

[so why do they do it time and again if it hurts our lowest income earners the most? A: Government labor unions, virtually all of which have hard-wired their cost of living increases not just to inflation but also what the minimum wage is. It goes up, their pay goes up. sweet]

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Violent Attacks from Mexico on the Rise

Attacks against agents of the U.S. Border Patrol and tourists are on the rise.

“This fiscal year 744 incidents of violence have been perpetrated against Border Patrol agents, a 26 percent increase over the same time last year,” reported Department of Homeland Security Secretary Micheal Chertoff in his third “State of Immigration Address” Monday. [snip]

While DHS has witnessed more attacks on their staff, other government agencies have shown concern about attacks on U.S. tourists traveling in Mexico. Earlier this year, the State Department issued a travel alert to caution U.S. tourists against increasing violence in Mexico that will be in effect through the summer.

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Hunting Season for Whites

Between the night of May 31 and the wee hours of the morning of June 1, 2008, between 20 and 30 black teenagers formed a mob to terrorize the citizens of Mount Clemens, Michigan. These hoodlums robbed people of cell phones and wallets, threw a brick through the window of a moving car, and beat up their victims so badly that at least one of their targets was hospitalized with a fractured skull. In an article in the Macomb Daily entitled “Mob, Carnival Attacks May Be Linked” (6/5/2008), the mother of one of the victims told police that “her son was on the ground trying to fend off the attackers who were ‘about ready to kick his head in’ when deputies arrived.”

The horror of what transpired was articulated in another article in the Macomb Daily entitled “Mob of Young Men Attacks” (6/2/2008)... [see article, snip]

In every single article about the mob incident in which 20 to 30 black teenagers terrorized Mount Clemens, the journalists of the Macomb Daily, Detroit Free Press, and Detroit News neglected to mention the race of the perpetrators of this horrific crime spree. or that of their targeted victims... [snip]

When Beckmann inquired as to whether or not there is a “law to charge them with some kind of hate crime,” Hackel [the Sheriff] answered, “Well, that’s questionable. I don’t know if it applies to an unprotected class, and I don’t know if whites are part of that. I’m not sure.”

Beckmann was shocked to hear Hackel suggest that whites are not entitled to equal protection under the law. A taken aback Beckmann asked:

“You mentioned ‘unprotected class.’ You mean white people are not protected by hate crime legislation?”

Hackel answered that question by saying, “It doesn’t appear as such at this point and time that there is something that would qualify.”

Even though a horde of black thugs beat to the point of unconsciousness one innocent white man who was reported to have a fractured skull, threw a brick at a car that was driven by an innocent white woman, and beat up an innocent white man at a gas station to the point where employees had to clean up the bloody mess the following day, it is unlikely that the thugs will be charged with committing hate crimes, because the criminals were black and the victims were white.

Because of this simple fact, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton did not seemingly arrive in Mount Clemens the very next day after the altercation to protest “racism,” and there is no “Million Man March” scheduled to protest the black-on-white crimes that occurred.

If a mob of whites were to do to innocent black victims what the black mob did to innocent white victims, the American people would not hear the end of it...

[which is where the media, again, plays a part. Heard about this on TV? Any doubts had the races been reversed you would have? {think: Jena, Louisiana}. Worse than the media's duplicity is the fact that we, today, in America, have laws on the books literally establishing special 'protected classes' based on race {as well as sexual orientation}. What would Dr. King make of this? How much longer will we tolerate it? It matters who you elect.]

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Brown Comes through...
[credit where due;]

There were questions surrounding Gordon Brown when he became Great Britain's Prime Minister. Taking office with echoes of "lap dog" following his predecessor Tony Blair, many wondered just how committed Brown would be to the "Special Relationship" between the US and Great Britain and whether he would initiate a more independent course in foreign affairs.

Brown may yet eschew supporting the US on many issues. But on increasing sanctions on Iran and sending additional troops to Afghanistan - two things the US devoutly wished Brown would accede to - the British Prime Minister has come through.

Brown has also promised to stick with Bush on Iraq - something of a surprise but perhaps a little dose of reality about the situation there, and the consequences of failure, added some 'clarity'...

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[HT:GC]