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13 Nov 09

On the White House - Obama Purposely Taking Time on Troop Decision - NYTimes.com

  • WASHINGTON — President Obama has not made a decision about his new military strategy for Afghanistan. And the White House is happy to say so.
  • It’s been 22 days since Mr. Obama was first accused by former Vice President Dick Cheney of “dithering” as he decides about sending more troops to Afghanistan. An announcement is still very likely at least two weeks away — perhaps more — and White House officials have purposely made no apologies for the extended timetable.

Barack Obama 'risks Suez-like disaster' in Afghanistan, says key military adviser | World news | The Guardian

"A key adviser to Nato forces warned today that Barack Obama risks a Suez-style debacle in Afghanistan if he fails to deploy enough extra troops and opts instead for a messy compromise.

David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama's delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been "messy". He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertainty the Taliban could exploit.

Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, he compared the president to someone "pontificating" over whether to send enough firefighters into a burning building to put a fire out."

www.guardian.co.uk/...s-troops-afghanistan-kilcullen - Preview

Belmont Obama Afghanistan

  • A key adviser to Nato forces warned today that Barack Obama risks a Suez-style debacle in Afghanistan if he fails to deploy enough extra troops and opts instead for a messy compromise.

    David Kilcullen, one of the world's leading authorities on counter-insurgency and an adviser to the British government as well as the US state department, said Obama's delay in reaching a decision over extra troops had been "messy". He said it not only worried US allies but created uncertainty the Taliban could exploit.

    Speaking in an interview with the Guardian, he compared the president to someone "pontificating" over whether to send enough firefighters into a burning building to put a fire out.

12 Nov 09

Top Republican says White House hiding info on Fort Hood - The Hill's Blog Briefing Room

  • The ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee on Tuesday night accused the White House of withholding information on the Fort Hood attack.

    Rep. Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) said administration officials delayed
    briefing members of Congress about the alleged gunman, raising "red
    flags" about what the White House was hiding.

    "When they withhold information, you always start asking questions," Hoekstra told Fox News. "That's what raises red flags. What do they know that they don't want us to know?"

Five Promises by Stephen Spruiell on National Review Online

  • GMAC, the company that finances car purchases for GM, has already received two infusions of taxpayer assistance totaling $12.5 billion. Now, the feds say it needs up to $5.6 billion more. Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was among the first to break the news. “There will be an infusion, I’m told, beyond what they’ve already seen,” he told the Dow Jones news service. “But I’ve also been assured by the administration that this is the last of it.”

Bitter Pills by Robert Costa on National Review Online

  • his summer, just when the health-care debate grew sour, Big Pharma struck a sweet deal. Or so they thought. By agreeing to pony up $80 billion to support Obamacare, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, assumed that they dodged a bullet. Ladle the Democrats some cash now, they reckoned, and maybe they could avoid some big bills later.

    Part of PhRMA’s handshake with the White House and Senate Democrats included the protection of a provision that prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. The health-care bill that finally emerged from the Senate Finance Committee last month nodded toward that agreement. All, it seemed, was well.

    Yet, while they palled around with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Senate Finance Committee chair Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) in the back rooms of Washington, PhRMA forgot about one thing: the House of Representatives. Now, after having left House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) on the sidelines, PhRMA is realizing that, deal or no deal, they may still lose.

UTV News - Brazil crime wars: Spiderman's story of drugs and Jesus in Rio's slums

  • Special report: How evangelical preachers are trying to stem the tide of killings in the Olympic city



    Thursday, 05 November 2009




    "If you add them all up I control 15 communities," boasted Spiderman as his shiny 4x4 hurtled through the narrow backstreets of western Rio de Janeiro. Behind the wheel was Juarez Mendes da Silva, 28, one of the Brazilian capital's most wanted drug lords, better known by the nickname Spiderman. The words "Jesus" and "Christ" were tattooed on to his forearms in black. In the boot his pet dog, Bloodsucker, shared space with an M-16 assault rifle.

Django | Making queries | Django Documentation

  • >> joe = Author.objects.create(name="Joe")
    >> entry.authors.add(joe)

Django | Managers | Django Documentation

  • A Manager is the interface through which database query operations are
    provided to Django models. At least one Manager exists for every model in
    a Django application.
09 Nov 09

Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan? : The New Yorker

  • Musharraf, who was forced out of office in August, 2008, under threat of impeachment, did not spare his successor. “Asif Zardari is a criminal and a fraud,” Musharraf told me. “He’ll do anything to save himself. He’s not a patriot and he’s got no love for Pakistan. He’s a third-rater.”

    Musharraf said that he and General Kayani, who had been his nominee for Chief of Army Staff, were still in telephone contact. Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, and remained in uniform until near the end of his Presidency. He said that he didn’t think the Army was capable of mutiny—not the Army he knew. “There are people with fundamentalist ideas in the Army, but I don’t think there is any possibility of these people getting organized and doing an uprising. These ‘fundos’ were disliked and not popular.”

  • Others are less sure. “Nuclear weapons are only as safe as the people who handle them,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, “the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine.” There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said.
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Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan? : The New Yorker

  • “Our worries are about the nuclear weapons in Pakistan,” one of the officials said. “Not because we are worried about the mullahs taking over the country; we’re worried about those senior officers in the Pakistan Army who are Caliphates”—believers in a fundamentalist pan-Islamic state. “We know some of them and we have names,” he said. “We’ve been watching colonels who are now brigadiers. These are the guys who could blackmail the whole world”—that is, by seizing a nuclear weapon.

Are nuclear weapons safe in Pakistan? : The New Yorker

  • Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “I don’t think there’s any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don’t tell us what we want to hear we’ll cut off their goodies.” Gelb added, “In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were ‘access.’ I don’t know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

    The former high-level Bush Administration official was just as blunt. “If a Pakistani general is talking to you about nuclear issues, and his lips are moving, he’s lying,” he said. “The Pakistanis wouldn’t share their secrets with anybody, and certainly not with a country that, from their point of view, used them like a Dixie cup and then threw them away.”

  • The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us,” he said. If the Obama Administration persists, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse. Every Pakistani will then be his own nuclear bomb—a suicide bomber,” Tarar said. “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage. People there will flee to the big cities like Lahore and Islamabad.”
05 Nov 09

Russia 'simulates' nuclear attack on Poland - Telegraph

  • The armed forces are said to have carried out "war games" in which
    nuclear missiles were fired and troops practised an amphibious landing on
    the country's coast.



    Documents obtained by Wprost, one of Poland's leading news magazines, said the
    exercise was carried out in conjunction with soldiers from Belarus.

    <!-- BEFORE ACI -->


    The manoeuvres are thought to have been held in September and involved about
    13,000 Russian and Belarusian troops.



    Poland, which has strained relations with both countries, was cast as the "potential
    aggressor".



    The documents state the exercises, code-named "West", were
    officially classified as "defensive" but many of the operations
    appeared to have an offensive nature.

Space arms race 'an inevitability' | The Daily Telegraph

  • A TOP China air force commander has called the militarisation of space an "historical inevitability", state media said today, marking an apparent shift in Beijing's opposition to weaponising outer space.
    <!-- google_ad_section_end(name=story_introduction) -->


    <!-- // .story-intro -->
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    In a wide-ranging interview in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily, air force commander Xu Qiliang said it was imperative for the PLA air force to develop offensive and defensive operations in outer space.

    "As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space... this is a historical inevitability and a development that cannot be turned back,'' Commander Xu told the paper.

'Gaza rockets can now hit Tel Aviv'

  • Israel's military intelligence chief has warned that Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip have successfully tested an Iranian rocket that can reach Tel Aviv, the Jewish state's largest urban conurbation.



    That adds a new urgency to Israel's efforts to develop an effective defensive system capable of shooting down short-range rockets that, if the warning by Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin is correct, are becoming a strategic threat.



    Yadlin says the rocket has a range of 37 miles, 8 miles longer than the Grad rockets Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip have been firing in recent months.

U.S. Needs Hit Squads, ‘Manhunting Agency’: Spec Ops Report | Danger Room | Wired.com

  • CIA director Leon Panetta got into hot water with Congress, after he revealed an agency program to hunt down and kill terrorists. A recent report from the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA didn’t go far enough (.pdf). Instead, it suggests the American government should set up something like a “National Manhunting Agency” to go after jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state.
  • Sometimes, that will mean operating “in uncooperative countries.” In those cases, the teams must be prepared “to act unilaterally, with no support or coordination with local authorities, in a manner similar to that employed by Israel’s Avner team in response to the Munich Olympics massacre.” (That was the controversial unit, fictionalized in Steven Spielberg’s movie, that allegedly roamed the world, assassinating Palestinian militants in response to the 1972 Olympic attack.)
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Roger’s Rules » More on NY 23

  • But back to Doug Hoffman. What happened? After super-RINO Dede Scozzafava crashed, burned, and dropped out of the race, many commentators supposed that by endorsing the Democrat Owens she merely underscored her own petulance and political irrelevance. Hoffman’s surge in the polls, they thought, would carry him all the way to victory. Well, it didn’t happen, Why? My friend Roger Simon spoke for many when he suggested that Hoffman’s patent social conservatism was the issue and, ultimately, the kiss of death. “America,” Roger argues, “is a fiscally conservative country — now perhaps more than ever, and with much justification — but not a socially conservative one.” Not, he hastens to add, that it is socially liberal: “It’s not. It’s socially laissez-faire (just as its mostly fiscally laissez-faire). Whether we’re pro-choice, pro-life or whatever we are, most of us want the government out of our bedrooms, just as we want it out of our wallets.”
  • I suspect that the real issues were not Hoffman’s conservatism but his heavy-handedness and public persona. Those are different things from his social conservatism. I am at one with Roger about the evils of the nanny state. As Marianne Moore said of modern poetry, “I too dislike it.” But moral vision is not something that can be completely privatized and survive. This is something that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great critic of John Stuart Mill, saw with penetrating clarity:

Afghan Army Tightens Operations | AVIATION WEEK

  • Sitting in his room at Camp Wilderness, a small outpost shared by soldiers from the U.S. Army and Afghan National Army (ANA) tucked away in Afghanistan's mountainous Khost province, Capt. Gada Mohamad of the ANA's 2/1 Kandak (battalion), talked about what his troops bring to the fight against the Taliban. "We know how to act with the people," he says. "The Afghan people are uneducated. We can explain to them that we're here for their security. Most importantly, we can read the people" in ways the Americans cannot.

Israel seizes ship, says Iran weapons aboard - Mideast/N. Africa - msnbc.com

  • Israeli commandos seized a ship Wednesday that defense officials said was carrying hundreds of tons of weapons from Iran bound for Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas — the largest arms shipment Israel has ever commandeered.

Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad. - Boing Boing

    • The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

      • * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
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