Today from the Christian Science Monitor:

Did Jon Stewart hurt the Democrats in Election 2010?

Comedians like Jon Stewart took aim at candidates like Christine O'Donnell in Election 2010, and sharp political satire may have led to cynicism, suppressing the youth vote, experts say.

That is right find an excuse.  It couldn't possibly be that the voters disagree with the Democrat agenda.  Or that people do not like the President, the Congress and the Senate all to be from the same party.  Nope there must be some other reason that people across the country voted out Democrats and voted in Republicans.

Labels: election silliness

Labels: Democrat party, France

WikiLeaks Founder Describes Possibility of Casualties as Acceptable Risk

Labels: jerks

Afghanistan war: Deadly ambush of medical mission roils one of safest provinces

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the ambush of a medical mission that killed six Americans, one Briton, one German, and two Afghans. The attack highlights the difficulty of limiting the reach of insurgent activity in the Afghanistan war.

The six Americans, one Briton, one German, and three Afghans, were returning from a two-week mission providing eye treatment in Nuristan Province. All were found shot in Badakhshan Province except for one of the Afghans, who escaped.

It is time to shit or get off the pot in Afghanistan.  All of the money and lives that we have spent there trying to gain the hearts and minds of the people and this is what we get.  I say we either send Osama Bin Ladin a CNN reporter to tell him he won and we are giving up or we cut the binders off our military and send them in to fight a real war and we will worry about rebuilding the country when we are done.  Line up every single person in the country and ask them if they support the Taliban or if they want to send their daughters to school and have clean drinking water.  If they say Taliban then shoot them.  It may take 300,000 troops and a bunch of airplanes and bombs but this letting the locals fight our fight for us so we don't piss anybody off is just going to extend our misery and cost us more money and more US boys lives.

We whipped Germany and Japan at the same time within 4 years and now after 9 years we can't even hunt down and kill a rag tag group of people that most of the local population does not even like?  WTF?  We weren't worried about offending Buddhist sensibilities when we bombed Japan.  This whole politically correct half hearted war is not doing anybody any good.  The only thing these people understand is brute force and that is what we need to show them if we really intend to win this war.

Labels: Afghanistan, Taliban

More proof that maybe we do not know as much as we thought and that we don't have as much control as we thought over the atmosphere.

I got this from Face Book, where a friend had "Liked" it.  Interesting stuff.

Remember NASA? It once represented to the world the apogee of American scientific and technological achievement. Here is President Barack Obama’s vision of NASA’s mission, as explained by administrator Charles Bolden: “One was he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.”

Apart from the psychobabble – farcically turning a space-faring enterprise into a self-esteem enhancer – what’s the sentiment behind this charge? Sure America has put a man on the moon, led the information revolution, won more Nobel Prizes than any other nation by far – but, on the other hand, a thousand years ago al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra.

Bolden seems quite intent on driving home this message of achievement equivalence – lauding, for example, Russia’s contribution to the space station.

Russia? In the 1990s, the Russian space program fell apart, leaving the US to pick up the slack and the tab for the missing Russian contributions to get the space station built.

For good measure, Bolden added that the US cannot get to Mars without international assistance.

Beside the fact that this is not true, contrast this with the elan and self-confidence of president John F. Kennedy’s pledge that America would land on the moon within the decade.

There was no finer expression of belief in American exceptionalism than Kennedy’s. Obama has a different take. As he said last year in Strasbourg, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and theGreeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

Which of course means: If we’re all exceptional, no one is.

TAKE HUMAN rights. After Obama’s meeting with the president of Kazakhstan, Mike McFaul of the National Security Council reported that Obama actually explained to the leader of that thuggish kleptocracy that we too are working on perfecting our own democracy.

Nor is this the only example of an implied moral equivalence that diminishes and devalues America.

Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner reported that in discussions with Chinaabout human rights, the US side brought up Arizona’s immigration law – “early and often.” As if there is the remotest connection between that and the persecution of dissidents, jailing of opponents, suppression of religion routinely practiced by the Chinese dictatorship.

Nothing new here. In his major addresses, Obama’s modesty about his own country has been repeatedly on display as, in one venue after another, he has gratuitously confessed America’s alleged failing – from disrespecting foreigners to having lost its way morally after 9/11.

It’s fine to recognize the achievements of others and be nonchauvinistic about one’s country. But Obama’s modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America’s sins and the world’s to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the first-person pronoun – I.

Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to cabinet members and other high government officials as “my” – “my secretary of homeland security,” “my national security team,” “my ambassador.”

The more normal – and respectful – usage is to say “the,” as in “the secretary of state.” These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution – not just the man who appointed them.

It’s a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama’s exalted view of himself. Not surprising, perhaps, in a man whose major achievement before acceding to the presidency was writing two biographies – both about himself.

Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama’s modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence – yet not of his own country’s.