JustOneMinute

Default Is Not An Option

Sarah Palin opposes an increase in the debt limit but her budget proposal is not accompanied by hard numbers:

"Hells no. I would not vote to increase that debt ceiling," she said during an interview on Fox News, where she is a paid contributor.

..."It turns my stomach to hear this assumption articulated that we have to, despite the fact that we are raking in the federal government $6 billion a day," she said. "Take that money and service our debt first and pay down some of that debt. Make sure that we are showing the international financial markets and our lenders that we're serious about getting our debt and our deficit problems under control."

Hmm.  In order to avoid a debt ceiling problem the government has to reduce other spending, increase revenue, or sell assets.  I don't think Ms. Palin favors tax hikes, but I don't think anyone believes spending cuts alone can get this done (the Ryan budget reduces but does not eliminate projected deficits).

However, cool Reason guides us to some accounting machinations that may delay the fiscal apocalypse.  Another idea they do not describe was used once by Reagan - divert the payroll tax to the funding of general operations and meet Social Security obligations by selling trust fund bonds.  Debt held by the public would grow but net government debt would not.

The debt limit restricts gross debt, so if you reduce the amount of eligible debt that the government owes to itself, you can continue to grow the net debt while staying within the cap. It would be legally dubious to cash in the Trust Fund’s bonds to pay for general government operations, but even just redeeming bonds to pay Social Security benefits and then diverting Social Security tax receipts to general government could buy hundreds of billions of dollars a year in breathing space. We’ve been here before: Ronald Reagan used this strategy during a brief debt limit standoff in the mid-1980s.

Yet aother interpretation of Ms. Palin's position is to take it literally - she may simply mean that as a Senator she would not personally vote to raise the debt ceiling but instead would Vogue, as Obama and Reid did when voting against a ceiling hike in the dark Bush Era.

Go, West

The NY Times profiles Congressman Allen West, emerging Tea Party hero.

First, I deplore their violent eliminationist rhetoric:

Mr. West’s place in the Democratic crosshairs stems, he said, from the fact “that I scare the liberal establishment.”

Crosshairs is not in quotes so I blame the Times for inciting violence.

Secondly, the Times is a bit cryptic here:

But the most compelling part of Representative Allen B. West of Florida is his own biography, there for all to see: an African-American Tea Party activist Republican congressman and ally of hard-right Israelis who, after his beloved career in the Army ended under a cloud...

Cloud?  Eventually we get this:

Mr. West, 50, was born and raised in Atlanta, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee on an R.O.T.C. scholarship and holds two master’s degrees.

In the Army, he rose to battalion commander during the war in Iraq. His 22-year military career came to an end in that theater when he was relieved of his command after using a gun to coerce information from an Iraqi police officer during an interrogation.

First, if Democrats can run General Sanchez for the Senate in Texas, I don't want to hear about this. Second, Politifact (upon whom no one can rely) has more details of the incident.

The End Of The American Era

Superman is going to renounce his American citizenship and become a citizen of the world, thereby stealing a march on Barack Obama, who still has to wait a few years before he can take that path.

One Last Gasp On Obama's Birth Certificate (Until The Next One)

Some quick hits on reaction to the White House release of Obama's long-form birth certificate. 

TRUST, BUT DON'T VERIFY:  Team Obama could have engineered the release of the long form certificate any time in the last three years, but didn't.  Why not?  Who cares?!?  Dave Weigel explains his standards for investigative journalism:

The White House's position for more than two years was that all "birther" questions were answered by the COLB. And the long-form certificate proves that the COLB was legitimate and answered all reasonable questions about Obama's birth. If you were "just asking questions" about the COLB, you were not a truth-seeker. You were a fool.

If the White House says the documents they have released are sufficient, you are a fool if you want to verify it.  Really?  Well, maybe that standard is not universally embraced - Andrew Sullivan, in yet another screeching u-turn, calls for a more diligent press:

Why Did Obama Wait So Long?

So he had the power to get this into the public eye and yet resisted until the country's polity was almost paralyzed with distraction. I know this was an ethically legitimate position after releasing the short-form document proving that he was indeed born in the US. I know it was politically savvy because, by the rules of jujitsu, Obama allowed the nutty right (is there any other variety with influence now?) to make fools of themselves.

Nonetheless, I think this should have been done long ago.

Because a president has to put his public responsibilities before his pride and his privacy. That's the price of the job - to defuse or debunk conspiracy theorists or just skeptics with all the relevant information you have.

It's also the job of the media always to press for more information, not less. But so many spent their energy arguing that Obama need do no more and piling on the Birthers. They still seem to think they are gatekeepers, possessors of the power to decide what is or is not legitimate for citizens to ask of their public officials.

Get over yourselves, MSM. And do your job - not defending the right of people in power to protect themselves, but scrutinizing them relentlessly, with every fact and document you can get.

Hear, hear!  And please, just ignore this Andrew Sullivan from two weeks ago:

We have gotten all the data one can want out of the Obama administration on his birth certificate. He has delivered it.

And set aside Andrew from two years ago, when he was explaining the birther controversy to his British readers:

Why does this story stay alive? Some, like me, didn’t understand the Hawaiian intricacies at first: we thought there was a single long-form certificate that could resolve the question. But, as FactCheck notes: “The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department.” So Obama did all he could to make this go away.

Uh huh - Andrew seriously believed that neither Obama, with his rights as a private citizen and duties as President, could persuade Hawaii to do what is perfectly legal under their laws, namely, release the full record to someone with a legitimate interest in it.  Obama's Presidential Library would never see these documents, which would gather dust somewhere in a filing cabinet in Honolulu until the end of man.  Wow - that is asking the tough questions, unrelentingly.

Let's close with David Remnick of the New Yorker, an Obama biographer who, while assuring us that a lot of the stuff said about Obama is lies, sidesteps his own reporting of Team Obama deception:

What is truly disturbing is the game Trump has been participating in, the conspiracy thinking he was playing with. And here the polls—to the extent that they can be taken as hard fact—tell a disturbing story, in which no small part of the country has believed in a variety of tales about Barack Obama. There is the birther fantasy; the fantasy that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father”; the fantasy that the President has some other father, and not Barack Obama, Sr.; the fantasy that Obama got into Harvard Law School with the help of a Saudi prince and the Nation of Islam. There is a veritable fantasy industry at work online and in the book-publishing industry; there are dollars to be made.

The cynicism of the purveyors of these fantasies is that they know very well what they are playing at, the prejudices they are fanning: that Obama is foreign, a fake, incapable of writing a book, incapable of intellectual achievement. Let’s say what is plainly true (and what the President himself is reluctant to say): these rumors, this industry of fantasy, are designed to arouse a fear of the Other, of an African-American man with a white American mother and a black Kenyan father.

Hmm - maybe these rumors persist because people think Obama has lied about his past and gotten a pass from a love-sick media.  As evidence of just that, let's remember that the Obama campaign changed their story repeatedly about the Ayers-Obama connection.  Originally, Bill Ayers was just a guy from Obama's neighborhood; their final version was that, well, yes, Obama and Ayers worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (dedicated to school reform) and yes, Obama's appointment as chairman of that was surprising given his lack of a background in education, and yes, Bill Ayers had been instrumental in putting together the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but no, no,no, Bill Ayers had nothing at all to do with Obama's appointment as chairman.

That made no sense and was questioned at the time.  A few years later Obama biographer David Remnick included this throwaway line in his book:

“Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board.”

So Remnick has reported that the offical Obama story about the Obama/Ayers relationship is bunk, but assures us that the other weird stories are just weird. I can't tell the fantasies without a scorecard.

IF THE MEDIA HAD PRESERVED THEIR CREDIBILITY AND DONE THEIR JOB...: The NY Times editors bleat about the outrage of it all, and include this bit of ahistorical nonsense:

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

Well, I might have said it is inconceivable that a major news organization would rely on forged documents to make a case against the President.  As for "the other", surely the Times remembers their desperate attempts to cover for John Kerry, who wouldn't release his medical records or his military records?  The Kerry animus was hardly racial (more anti-French, presumably).  I guess part of the Times cover-up is to pretend there was no cover-up, and now they are all aghast when they learn that people trust neither the President nor the Times.  Reap, sow.

 

 

 

Petraeus And Panetta

Petraeus to head the CIA and Panetta to head Defense.

I should try to think of Panetta as something other than a poltical hack.

Trump Gets Results!

That was easy - Team Obama has finally bestirred themselves and requested a copy of Obama's original Certificate of Live Birth, presumably hoping to silence those pesky critics who thought Obama had something to hide just because he was hiding something.

My Official Editorial Rumination was that there was no reason for the White House to hide it other than Obama's practice of managing his brand by hiding everything (leaving critics and skeptics unsure which haystack actually conceals a needle which may or may not exist.)  Now Trump has moved on to Obama's school records.

ERRATA:  Worth checking - there were some very well researched guesses made about Obama's likely certificate number, based on the known number of someone else born the same day or week. It would be interesting to back-test that.

WHAT LIBS LIKE TO BELIEVE:  Ta Nehsi Coates, who thinks he understands the motivations of the birthers, offers this understanding of the legal background:

My understanding was that it was against the law for a person to give out copies of the literal birth certificate. I just looked up the law:

§338-18 Disclosure of records. 

 (a) To protect the integrity of vital statistics records, to ensure their proper use, and to ensure the efficient and proper administration of the vital statistics system, it shall be unlawful for any person to permit inspection of, or to disclose information contained in vital statistics records, or to copy or issue a copy of all or part of any such record, except as authorized by this part or by rules adopted by the department of health. 

(b) The department shall not permit inspection of public health statistics records, or issue a certified copy of any such record or part thereof, unless it is satisfied that the applicant has a direct and tangible interest in the record.

The law then goes on to define "tangible interests" as essentially the registrant, an agent of the registrant, their parents, spouse and some others. Apparently the Hawaiin government decided to make an exception in this case...

"Make an exception"?  The NY Times was quite clear that Obama was entitled to see his own records when they "covered" this a year ago:

By Hawaiian law, birth records can be released only to people with “a direct and tangible” interest in them — a person born in the state, say, or certain relatives or their estates. 

And CNN made a similar point earlier this week.

But people committed to Obama's faith-based initiative, such as Andrew Sullivan and, apparently, Mr. Coates, persuaded themselves that Obama's hands were tied.  Despite the clear language of the law, these true believers imagined that neither Barack Obama as President nor the Obama family in their inevitable role at the inevitable Obama Presidential Library would ever get their hands on these records, which would simply molder in some vault somewhere beyond the reach of history.  Seriously?

Well.  Since they knew Obama's hands were tied, they were able to deduce that the critics and skeptics had other motivations.  Back here in reality, people who understood Obama's options figured either he was hiding something or was playing this issue for political advantage.

Mr. Coates conclusion is inadvertently self-referential:

This isn't about facts.

Evidently not.

FWIW:  Here is the standard electronic summary; the original adds the name of the hospital and the attending physician to our store of knowledge, as well as background on the parents (age, place of birth, occupation).

CNN Goes To Hawaii

CNN sends a crack investigative team to Hawaii to flack for Obama on the birth certificate puzzle.  Their unsurprising conclusion:

A new CNN investigation reveals what most analysts have been saying since the "birther" controversy erupted during the 2008 presidential campaign: Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Period.

The closest they come to asking a tough question is with this:

Obama could file a Freedom of Information Act request to view his original birth certificate and make copies. But at this point, the White House maintains, nothing will satisfy the doubters.

The doubters?  How about the non-doubting CNNteam - did that answer really satisfy them?  Did they even ask Team Obama to FOIA up the original records?

Well - people who think that a man who is hiding something might have something to hide will not be persuaded by this la-di-da effort from CNN.

 

 

Sunday Morning Open Thread

Happy Easter.

This WaPo article on Obama's failure to close Gitmo looks, well, exhaustive.  And exhausting.

Worst Reality Show Ever

What he said.

A Difference In Tone

Today, the NY Times covers the Birther allegations by way of a vigorous roundtable debate in which academics discuss whether the Birthers are paranoid, racist, delusional, or delusional racist paranoids.  These worthies never get around to noting either Dan Rather's invention of facts to promote the "Bush AWOL" vision in 2004 or the routine and flexible lying by the Obama campaign about the Ayers-Obama connection.

Yet back in the day, the Times did not assemble a panel to question the sanity of the 9/11 Truthers.  Instead, we were given a wry, tongue partly in cheek appraisal of their "work".

I can only imagine your surprise.

ERRATA:  Here we have Howard Dean pandering to the truthers on NPR, and John Edwards doing the same at a town hall.

Zombies Dodging Bullets

Ann Althouse sends us to the reliably uncivil Paul Krugman, who explains (for the umpty-bumpth time) that people who disagree with him are liars and knaves.  Not to mention zombies:

The claim that only rich people pay taxes is a zombie lie — something that keeps coming back no matter how many times it’s killed by evidence.

So, let’s try another shot to the head.

Yes, high-income people pay the bulk of the federal income tax. But that’s not the only tax! And while the income tax is quite progressive, the payroll tax — the other major federal tax — isn’t; and state and local taxes are strongly regressive.

Yeah, yeah - his Big Liars and Knaves Finish:

And here’s the thing: the people peddling this stuff about those lucky duckies who don’t pay tax because their incomes are low know all this, because it has been pointed out many times. They are deliberately trying to deceive you.

That's us.  Well, in another context Krugman would note that the Social Security trust fund is deeply meaningful, from which it would follow that both Social Security and Medicare taxes are simply forced saving with a progressive, redistributionist tilt.  People who pay their Social Security taxes also increase their future expected benefit; Medicare likes to see a bit of a work history but the total contribution does not increase the total benefit.

So one might argue that Social Security and Medicare represent taxes I am paying to myself in a way that can be easily segregated and accounted, unlike taxes spent on, for example, defense or Medicaid.  And what about the courts, or the schools?  Don't ask.  people pay taxes and get services, and most of those linkages and net benefits are much harder to track than Social Security.

Saturday Morning Open Thread

A new day dawns.

Libya - Accelerating The Debacle

France and Italy will join Britain in sending advisors to train the Libyan rebels.  But no ground troops.  Not yet, anyway.

Geez, what kind of world are we living in when a country like Qatar can't fulfill its alliance obligation by hiring a thousand mercenaries and sending them to Libya?  Where is Blackwater when you need them?

From the Times:

The moves to send military personnel have been likened by some critics to America’s decision to send military advisers to Vietnam, raising worries in both countries that they are being drawn closer to a conflict with no clear resolution on behalf of a fractious and militarily ineffective insurgent force about which little is known.

I think that covers it.

Government ministers from all three countries stressed that they did not plan to send ground troops to support the rebels.

I think that a month ago there were no plans to send advisors.

Immigration Watch

In order to revive his appeal to Hispanics Obama needs to pretend that he is pushing immigration reform, which leads to Kabuki like this:

President Obama told a gathering of business, labor, religious and political leaders at the White House on Tuesday that he remains committed to an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws and wants to try again in the coming months to push Congress to pass a bill.

With his re-election campaign launched this month and Latino communities growing increasingly frustrated with his immigration policies, Mr. Obama summoned more than 60 high-profile supporters of the stalled overhaul legislation to a strategy session, looking for ways to revive it. Among those attending were Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, an independent; Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio, a Democrat; and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican.

Two big-city police chiefs, Raymond W. Kelly of New York and Charles Ramsey of Philadelphia, were there, as was Sheryl Sandberg, a top executive at Facebook, and Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the largest group of evangelical Christians.

Also in attendance was former Presidential candidate Al Sharpton, but the Times forgot to mention that.  That is simply the Times playing along with Obama's other goal - in addition to rallying Hispanics, he needs to appear calm and bipartisan in order to keep this issue off the radar of working class blacks and whites who seem to be unconvinced as to the merits of immigration and amnesty in the current economy.

But immigration reform is all about new jobs, don't you know?

In the closed meeting, Mr. Obama argued that the overhaul would bring immigrant entrepreneurs to the United States and was a crucial piece of the economic recovery, according to several people who attended. He sought views on whether to try to pass smaller pieces of the massive overhaul, such as a bill that would give legal status to illegal immigrant students, or one that would increase visas for highly skilled foreign workers.

Well - an overhaul that was limited to encouraging entrepeneurs and high-tech workers would be one thing.  But my strong impression is that the long term Democrat vision is to wave in millions of unskilled and uneducated in order to provide fodder for unions and votes for Democrats in favor of expanded social services.

But maybe Al Sharpton is looking for a whole new clientele among the wealthy foreign-born.  Maybe!

US Credit Watch Open Thread

S&P puts the US Treasury on credit watch with negative implications.  That does not mean a downgrade is inevitable - instead, it is sort of like a visit from the ghost of Christmas future.

Some stray thoughts - Obama will blame Bush, of course, but no one will listen.  Dems and others who raged that the rating agencies missed the housing meltdown will have a hard time doing anything other than putting a sock in it now.

On the other hand, maybe this gives Obama more leverage as he pleads for tax hikes.

In any case, we will be in good company if the ax falls - Japan was downgraded last January.  Then again, look how fate treated them subsequently...

Dash To Dumb (As A Fitness Drill!)

Gretchen Reynolds of the Times fills space with a column attempting to discover the single best exercise.  Best for whom - a sedentary sixty-something, an aspiring college athlete, a harried housewife?  Don't ask, since she never does.

But the real boost in blood pressure comes here:

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

She is describing an old school squat thrust - the burpee includes a push-up.  Please.

Since you ask, her final nominees are walking, squats (with or without weights), burpees, High Intensity Interval Training, and (her seeming winner) running up stairs.

If the criteria are easy access, sustainability, no coaching, no special equipment, and a low injury rate I would say walking is a winner.  However, folks living in the greatest city in the world do have plenty of stairs.

Try A Little More Shut-Eye

The Times describes an interesting sleep study with some troubling conclusions - it doesn't take much sleep deprivation to mesurably reduce a person's cognitive skills, yet the subjects were very poor judges of their own impairment:

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab.

Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects’ ability to sustain attention with what’s known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P.V.T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P.V.T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep.

The P.V.T. is tedious but simple if you’ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic.

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day.

But who knew?

Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. (But deteriorate it will.) There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.)

Still, while it’s tempting to believe we can train ourselves to be among the five-hour group — we can’t, Dinges says — or that we are naturally those five-hour sleepers, consider a key finding from Van Dongen and Dinges’s study: after just a few days, the four- and six-hour group reported that, yes, they were slightly sleepy. But they insisted they had adjusted to their new state. Even 14 days into the study, they said sleepiness was not affecting them. In fact, their performance had tanked. In other words, the sleep-deprived among us are lousy judges of our own sleep needs. We are not nearly as sharp as we think we are.

Next - The China Meltdown

Nouriel Roubini thinks the Chinese economy is far too reliant on investment and infrastructure spending and is a medium term worry:

China’s economy is overheating now, but, over time, its current overinvestment will prove deflationary both domestically and globally. Once increasing fixed investment becomes impossible – most likely after 2013 – China is poised for a sharp slowdown. Instead of focusing on securing a soft landing today, Chinese policymakers should be worrying about the brick wall that economic growth may hit in the second half of the quinquennium.

 

Trig Is Back And Sully's Got Him!

The "Palin faked her fifth pregnancy" rumor is back, prompting Andrew Sullivan to tip us off to the title of his autobiography with a post titled "Wimpy and Gullible".

The inscrutable logic is that, since Birthers are now being taken seriously, shouldn't the press dive into the other birther fantasy?  Geez, is it really that hard to find examples of the press refusing to probe behind the curtain of Obama's life?  My personal favorite is still the press refusal to engage the ongoing lies and evasions around the Obama/Ayers relationship (which reportedly included ghostwriting help on "Dreams" and an Ayers hand in Obama's appointment as chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge).

But if the subject is Hawaii and Kenya, let's turn back to Mr. Wimpy and Gullible, who tells us this:

We have gotten all the data one can want out of the Obama administration on his birth certificate. He has delivered it.

Either Sully is deliberately lying, or he is woefully ignorant of some basic facts that even the NY Times reported:

By Hawaiian law, birth records can be released only to people with “a direct and tangible” interest in them — a person born in the state, say, or certain relatives or their estates. So when questions about Mr. Obama’s birth first surfaced during the 2008 presidential election, his campaign posted a copy of his “certification of live birth” on a Web site; it states that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m.

When questions continued to pour in, the state’s health director, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, announced that she had seen the original records and that they showed that Mr. Obama was “born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen.”

So there is a more complete file of "original records" which could be released to Obama, but he has not requested it.  Why not?  Who knows? And Sully can't even grasp that basic issue.

My official editorial position is that Obama is hiding his complete file just because it is his brand management strategy to hide everything about his past - try getting his law firm billing records, or a college transcript, or a financial aid form, or his senior thesis, or any damn thing at all.  We will need to wait until he signs his eight-figure book deal to see some of that stuff, and then only if it fits his preferred narrative. 

GO WITH THE OBVIOUS ANSWER:  Obama won't request and release his whole file because, as he explained to George Stephanopoulos, he thinks this discussion hurts Republicans:

I thought the president would take a pass when I asked him about Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican field in my exclusive interview today.

Far from it.

He grabbed at the chance with a big smile – saying he thinks the whole issue will be a problem for Republicans.

“I think that over the last two and a half years there's been an effort to go at me in a way that is politically expedient in the short-term for Republicans.  But [it] creates, I think a problem for them when they want to actually run in a general election where most people feel pretty confident the President was born where he says he was, in Hawaii.  He-- he doesn't have horns…we're not really worrying about conspiracy theories or-- or birth certificates,” President Obama told me.

And in all my talks with Obama I think it was the first time he was one the same page as Karl Rove who thinks the “birther” controversy is hurting the GOP.

“The truth of the matter is that I think that the vast majority of Americans across the country – Democratic or Republican – really want this election to be about growing the economy, getting control of the deficit, preparing the future for our kids. And my suspicion is that anybody who is not addressing those questions…Is going to be in trouble. I think they may get a quick pop in the news. They may get a lot of attention. But ultimately, the American people understand this is a serious, sober time,” he told me.

Well, if the press, and folks like Sully, understood and reported that Obama has not doen all he can to end this and is keeping this division alive for his own political ends, the dynamic might change.

Leadership That's Shirking

How about Obama's leadership on the budget?  Raise taxes on the rich, cut defense spending, and appoint a commission headed by the dozing Joe Biden - who wouldn't fall asleep?

Now Sugar Causes Cancer?

Anti-carb crusader Gary Taubes has an article in the NY Times magazine focusing on sugar as the cause of insulin resistance.  This works as a bit of a response to Megan McArdle, who oversimplifies Taubes' position in her "Are Grains Making Us Fat?" post. 

(To briefly recap Taubes' view - something, possibly sugar or excess carbs, provokes insulin resistance; once a person has developed insulin resistance, all refined and easily digestible carbohydrates will cause a problem.  There is also a whole different set of arguments against grains, but Taubes is not making them.)

Back to the Times (Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this wall!):

Is Sugar Toxic?

By GARY TAUBES

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

Before we highlight the cancer scare let's have a little history:

This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes [over the last thirty years - TM] is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It’s more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic.

In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.

And the cancer:

One more question still needs to be asked, and this is what my wife, who has had to live with my journalistic obsession on this subject, calls the Grinch-trying-to-steal-Christmas problem. What are the chances that sugar is actually worse than Lustig says it is?

One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.

This goes along with two other observations that have led to the well-accepted idea that some large percentage of cancers are caused by our Western diets and lifestyles. This means they could actually be prevented if we could pinpoint exactly what the problem is and prevent or avoid that.

...

Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance. This was the conclusion, for instance, of a 2007 report published by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer.”

So how does it work? Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth.

As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.

What these researchers call elevated insulin (or insulin-like growth factor) signaling appears to be a necessary step in many human cancers, particularly cancers like breast and colon cancer. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells. Cantley is now the leader of one of five scientific “dream teams,” financed by a national coalition called Stand Up to Cancer, to study, in the case of Cantley’s team, precisely this link between a specific insulin-signaling gene (known technically as PI3K) and tumor development in breast and other cancers common to women.

Most of the researchers studying this insulin/cancer link seem concerned primarily with finding a drug that might work to suppress insulin signaling in incipient cancer cells and so, they hope, inhibit or prevent their growth entirely. Many of the experts writing about the insulin/cancer link from a public health perspective — as in the 2007 report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — work from the assumption that chronically elevated insulin levels and insulin resistance are both caused by being fat or by getting fatter. They recommend, as the 2007 report did, that we should all work to be lean and more physically active, and that in turn will help us prevent cancer.

But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that’s quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.

“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”

Obviously this is all preliminary and inconclusive, but still...

HOW INCONCLUSIVE?  On April 4, 2011 a link between metabolic syndrome and liver cancer was reported.  Another study showed a link between diabetes and the incidence of cancer:

SUNDAY, April 3 (HealthDay News) -- Diabetes is already linked to a number of complications, but emerging evidence suggests an increased risk of cancer can be added to that list.

A new study found that women with diabetes had an 8 percent increased risk of developing cancer generally, while men with diabetes had a 9 percent higher risk when rates of prostate cancer were excluded from the calculation.

The risk of dying from a cancer was also higher in people with diabetes -- 11 percent greater for women and 17 percent higher in men.

If it can be shown that excessive sugar consumption leads to metabolic syndrome and diabetes, then the sugar-cancer chain is forged.

ERRATA:  Sugar in the American diet is estimated by the USDA here (p. 8 of 10). The USDA describes trends in the American diet from 1970 to 2005 in this report; added sugars rose by 19 percent and that excludes the surge in apple juice consumption (fruit consumption rose from 241 to 272 lbs per person per year, but apple juice contributed 16 lbs of that 31 lbs increase.)

BOLD PREDICTIONS:  Within fifty years Coca Cola and the NFL will be the fodder of campfire stories meant to scare excitable pre-teens.  It can't happen?  Sixty years ago Frank and Dean were the Kings of Cool, smoking cigarettes live on national television; now they would get busted and the President of the United States is heckled in his own home for being a smoker.

If high school football were invented today, any school board listening to the injury rate and equipment expense would laugh out loud.  It's days are numbered.

And Coke?  Sales will be regulated as cigarettes are today, and sales to minors won't be legal.  And someone somewhere will be charged with child abuse for giving a kid a Coke.  Really.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN:  Here is Jack Lalanne decrying "sugarholics" back in the 50's (or 60's?).

THE GOOD NEWS:  Although individuals can opt for a low carb diet, no President or Surgeon General could endorse a diet free of corn, wheat, rice and potatoes - how would America (or the world) feed itself?  However, refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup are simply not essential to nutrition or subsistence.

REASONING BY ANALOGY:  Most cigarette smokers don't get lung cancer; most drinkers don't become alcoholics.  Would we conclude that neither tobacco nor alcohol have toxic potential?

The fact that some people consume a lot of sugar with no ill effect proves little.

Thought Du Jour

There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those who understand binary notation, and those who don't.

 

As The Libyan Stalemate Gets Stale

The NY Times reports that France and Britain want NATO to bomb more and faster in Libya.  They also shock us with the news that Obama's lack of a plan has caused strains in Washington:

Possible Libya Stalemate Puts Stress on U.S. Policy

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — Three weeks ago, President Obama  ordered American troops into the first “humanitarian war” on his watch, vowing to stop the forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from massacring their own people. Mr. Obama’s hope was that a quick application of power from the air would tip the balance, and the Libyan rebels would do the rest.

Now with the Qaddafi forces weathering episodic attacks, and sometimes even gaining, the question in Washington has boiled down to this: Can Mr. Obama live with a stalemate?

 Asked on Monday whether the United States could accept a cease-fire proposed by the African Union that would effectively leave Colonel Qaddafi in control of part of the country, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton hedged. First, she said, the Libyan government would have to allow food, water and electricity into cities it has cut off and allow in humanitarian assistance. Then, she added, “These terms are nonnegotiable.”

But she immediately reiterated that ultimately nothing could be resolved without “the departure of Qaddafi from power, and from Libya.” The statement seemed to underscore the limbo the administration finds itself in, with the rebels unable to achieve regime change on their own, and Washington and its NATO allies hesitant to leap deeper into a civil war.

Mr. Obama’s decision to join the military intervention in Libya may well be judged a failure if the initial result is a muddle or a partition of the country, an outcome that his own secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates,  declared less than a month ago would be a “a real formula for insecurity.”  If the country’s civil war drags on, Mr. Obama will almost certainly have to answer a rising chorus of critics that he entered the battle too late, began to exit too early, and overestimated a very inexperienced, disorganized rebel movement. 

The Times joins in the cheap-shotting:

In interviews, senior administration officials urge patience. The first NATO strikes, they note, were only 23 days ago. Colonel Qaddafi, they say, has been badly wounded by the rebellion and is still reeling from the defection of a few key allies and the loss of billions in revenue that he used buy loyalty. Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, argues that the key to ultimate success is “continued messaging to Qaddafi’s inner circle that the writing is on the wall.”

But, Mr. Vietor added: “Unilateral, open-ended military action to pursue regime change isn’t good strategy, and wouldn’t advance American credibility anywhere. Stopping a massacre, building an international coalition, and tightening the squeeze on Qaddafi as a part of an international coalition is in our interest, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

Over time, that strategy might yet work. But clearly the administration is gambling on catching a break — perhaps  an army uprising, the gradual starvation of a regime addicted to cash, maybe a stray bullet or lucky missile strike that ends a dictator’s 40-year rule.

But as Mr. Obama frequently noted when he was in the Senate criticizing the American approach to Iraq and Afghanistan, hope is not a strategy.

Hope is not a strategy?  Now they tell us.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Sorties

Glenn links to the normally astute Michael Ledeen, who wonders why Obama is OK with the brutality against civilians taking place in Syria:

I flunked arithmetic, so I’m not saying much about the Big Deal.  But it should be noted that last Friday, 194 Syrians in total died. 123 people were killed in Dara’a alone.

...

Which logically leads us to the question that should certainly be asked at tomorrow’s press conferences at the White House, the UN, and the Department of State:  what about that presidential statement to the effect that America cannot stand by silently when a tyrant is slaughtering his people?

If it’s good enough for Qadaffi it’s good enough for Assad, don’t you think?  Indeed, the Assad case is far more important, because he kills Americans.

Let's quote the President more carefully - here is Obama explaining the Libyan intervention to a puzzled nation:

[A]s President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.

I haven't seen images of slaughter and mass graves from Syria.  Sure, there are eyewitness reports of government violence, but until CNN provides video rubbing it in Obama's face, it's not a political reality.

 

Barry, We Hardly Knew Ye (Or Wanted To)

Obama whines to Hearst Magazine about the burdens of life in the White House:

The president said he loves his life in the White House but doesn't enjoy some of the ways of Washington, such as the "kabuki dance" among political partisans before serious policy discussions begin. He also regrets his loss of personal privacy.

"I just miss - I miss being anonymous," he said at the meeting in the White House.

Millions of others share the wish that he was stilll anonymous.

Updating Those New Kinetic Military Actions

How are the French-initiated kinetic military actions going?  The Times reports that in Libya Qaddafi's troops have adapted to NATO airpower and are rolling back the untrained, poorly led, under-equipped rebels.  Fortunately, that debacle reflects badly on NATO rather than the US since Obama is pretending we are not in a leadership role.

And in the Ivory Coast, we the US is really not involved, the embattled President is clinging to power and even regrouping:

Gbagbo Loyalists Regain Ground in Ivory Coast

By SCOTT SAYARE

PARIS — As the wily Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo remained cornered in the basement of the presidential residence in Abidjan on Saturday, his forces retook the offensive in a series of military actions, belying recent predictions of his imminent downfall.

Since Friday, forces loyal to Mr. Gbagbo have recaptured territory in Abidjan, the economic capital, repelled a French military operation, attacked his rival’s headquarters and recaptured state television and radio, which resumed broadcasting messages of defiance.

Mr. Gbagbo was still surrounded by forces loyal to his rival, Alassane Ouattara, the country’s internationally recognized president, which were backed by troops from France and the United Nations.

But on Saturday evening, his forces attacked the Golf Hôtel, where Mr. Ouattara has maintained his headquarters since winning the presidential election in November. A United Nations official said it was the first time Mr. Gbagbo’s forces had attacked the hotel.

 

The Government Will Come Out Tomorrow

The WaPo describes the deal that keeps Washington running:

...the measure would cut $37.8 billion from the federal budget through the end of September, congressional aides said.

Democrats had wanted to cut billions less: they assented to the larger figure, and in return Republicans dropped a demand to take federal funds from the group Planned Parenthood, according to aides in both parties.

However, Republicans did win the inclusion of a policy rider that forbids public money from going toward abortion procedures in the District of Columbia, a restriction that had previously been enacted when Republicans held power in federal Washington. The deal also adds money for one of Boehner’s favored projects, a program that provides low-income District students with money to attend private schools.

Michael Shear of the NY Times described the role of Obama as the "First Mediator":

President Obama has now assumed the role of mediator in chief in the efforts to avoid a government shutdown.

Over the course of 24 hours and three separate meetings, Mr. Obama has cast himself as the sober one in the room, prodding the two sides to get past their dispute — even though he is a key player on one of them.

...

Positions on both sides appear to have hardened overnight. But as far as the president’s role is concerned, it is a pattern that is becoming a regular one: He keeps his distance during long-running legislative disputes, largely reserving both his intense personal involvement and his imposing real estate — the White House and the Oval Office — for the final days or hours.

The president used that approach during the lame-duck session of Congress last December, when he negotiated with Republicans to seek a compromises on a bill that extended the Bush-era tax cuts.

Well, Obama also flipped the keys to Nancy and Harry rather than work on the original stimulus bill.  And more recently, the Libyan adventure has been subcontracted to NATO.

The immediate goal is clear. In the current dispute over the budget, Mr. Obama wants to try to show that a government shutdown, if it happens, would be the result of a disagreement between the two sets of lawmakers — not a failure of his own.

But there is a long-term goal as well: to convey to a restless public, and especially to moderate voters, that Mr. Obama is above the petty Washington bickering that many Americans say turns them off. That will be especially important for Mr. Obama as his re-election campaign tries to woo back independents who had become disillusioned with him.

For Obama to run once again as the telegenic outsider who can get Washington to work may not be quite so plausible.

 

Motionless Friday

We have a stalemate in Libya matched by a stalemate in Washington.  Fortunately, NATO, or at least the FAA, has intervened in the latter:

FAA sets up no-fly zone for Obama's planned trip to Williamsburg

Let's hope they can minimize civilian casualties.  Every time Obama travels I worry that someone will hurt themselves laughing...

More Madness In Madison

My goodness - the once suspensful recount in Wisconsin became markedly less so after a clerical error turned up more than 7,500 votes for the conservative incumbent:

In a political bombshell, the clerk in a Republican stronghold released new vote totals adding a net total of 7,582 new votes in the tight state Supreme Court race to Justice David Prosser, swinging the race significantly in his favor.

Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said Thursday that she failed to save in her computer and consequently report 14,315 votes cast in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial tally released after Tuesday's election. The new totals give 10,859 more votes to Prosser from Brookfield and 3,456 more to Kloppenburg, she said. Smaller discrepancies turned up in two other communities as well.

That is a notable margin, although with 1.5 million total votes it is still within the legal limit for either side to demand a recount.

AllahPundit takes charge of the gloating.  Since Charlie Sheen has taken the copyright, I guess no one can say "Winning!", but I like this:

Alternate headline via Mary Katharine Ham, ever mindful of developing media narratives: “Small, state-wide election with vital national implications soon to have no national implications whatsoever.”

 

The Libyan Rebels We Are Backing

Former Marine Corps officer CJ Chivers of the NY Times has an impressive military resume, and has recently spent a lot of time embedded with US troops in Afghanistan, so he knows a first class military operation when he sees one.  Reporting from Libya, he also makes clear that he knows a non-first class operation:

Libyan Rebels Don’t Really Add Up to an Army
By C. J. CHIVERS

...

What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.

...

But by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.

With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, or how to organize fire support. They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield’s persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.

Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which changes in a flash. When their morale spikes upward, their attacks tend to be painfully and bloodily frontal — little more than racing columns down the highway, through a gantlet of the Qaddafi forces’ rocket and mortar fire, face forward into the loyalists’ machine guns.

And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels’ transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks.

But a small fraction actually appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.

For the nations that have supported the uprising, the state of the rebels’ armed wing — known as the Forces of Free Libya — raises many questions. It seems unlikely that such a force can carry the war westward, through dug-in Qaddafi units toward the stronghold of Surt, much less beyond, toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And a sustained war of attrition could quickly bleed their ranks dry.

Unlike many antigovernment militias in other countries, the rebel-armed column has not had the benefit of years of guerrilla fighting, which could have winnowed and seasoned its leaders and given them a skeletal field structure to build on.

Instead, Libya’s rebels have entered the grim work of waging war almost spontaneously, and would need time, training, equipment and leadership to develop into even a reasonably competent force.

One hopes that this does not come as news to Samantha Powers, Hillary Clinton, and whoever else promoted the allied effort.  Since Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker wrote something similar late in March, I would bet that even Team Obama knew of the shortcomings of our Libyan allies.

But this is not Obama's problem, since NATO is in charge now, right?  Hmm...

Changing Libyan Tactics Pose Problems for NATO

By STEVEN ERLANGER

PARIS — Angry charges by Libyan rebels that NATO has failed to come to their aid point up a question that has haunted the Western air campaign from the start: how to avoid a stalemate and defeat the Libyan leader without putting foreign troops on the ground.

...

The rebels, of course, are a largely untrained, disorganized fighting force. But the nature of the battle has also changed since a United Nations resolution authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians.

In the early stages of the air campaign, allied warplanes blistered Qaddafi tanks, artillery and transport trucks in the desert outside the rebel capital, Benghazi. But American intelligence reports from Libya say that the Qaddafi forces are now hiding their troops and weaponry among urban populations and traveling in pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s rather than military vehicles, making them extremely difficult targets.

“The military capabilities available to Qaddafi remain quite substantial,” said a senior Pentagon official who watches Libya. “What this shows is that you cannot guarantee tipping the balance of ground operations only with bombs and missiles from the air.”

One hopes that Madames Powers and Clinton are not surprised to learn that Qaddafi's troops would rather adapt than provide target practice for NATO.  As to the diminishing involvement of the US:

The harder question is how NATO will respond to the changed tactics of the Qaddafi forces, which now seem to have achieved a stalemate against the combination of Western air power and the ragtag opposition army.

First, there is a question of whether without the participation of the United States, the rest of the coalition — France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Norway, Qatar and a few others — have the right mix of weapons or enough of them. In particular, the United States uses a jet called the A-10, or Warthog — which flies lower and slower than other airplanes but has cannon that can destroy armored vehicles — as well as the AC-130, both of which are effective in more built-up areas. The Europeans have nothing similar.

The United States has had C.I.A. agents on the ground with the rebels in eastern Libya for some time, and there are unconfirmed reports that they may be helping to train the rebel army’s raw recruits. Even so, forming a real army that can oust Colonel Qaddafi may take many months, and the coalition is unlikely to be that patient.

The coalition is unlikely to be that patient?  Is there an alternative to patience?  I don't foresee a commitment of foreign troops, and I don't see NATO declaring defeat and heading home.

We went to war with no plan to force a victory, and here we are.

THE READERS TAKE OVER:

Ranger: "You go to Kinetic Military Action with the Rebels you have, not the Rebels you wish you had."

Rick Ballard: I believe that Barry's Kinetic Humanitarian Aid Program ended Friday or Saturday. It was a complete success - millions of Libyan lives were saved or created in less than two weeks at a very reasonable cost.  

 

 

I Want To Hold Your Hand

Tom Brokaw says the Saudi rulers don't like the way Obama dumped Mubarak so they are looking for friends in China and Russia.  Geez, all of Obama's bowing goes for naught.

Recount In Wisconsin

More Madison madness.

Obama For President! (Foreign Wars Division)

Now that Obama has ducked out of leading the coalition against Qaddafi, NATO has left some slack:

Under Heavy Assault, Libyan Rebels Flee Brega

By C. J. CHIVERS and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

BREGA, Libya — Forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi battered rebel fighters on the road outside this strategic oil town on Tuesday with rocket fire, mortars and artillery, driving them many miles to the north and leaving them in disarray

A day after a senior Libyan rebel leader had criticized NATO for “a delay in reacting and lack of response to what’s going on on the ground,” there was still no sign of the air power that two weeks ago seemed to have the loyalist forces reeling toward the Qaddafi stronghold of Surt, more than 100 miles to the west.

The official, Ali al-Essawi, the foreign policy director of the Transitional National Council, the rebels’ coordinating group, said that the problems began after NATO took charge of the air campaign from the United States, Britain and France, and that he now foresaw a drawn-out battle. “They took the command; they will make it long,” he said in an interview in Rome.

While NATO seemingly had no presence on the battlefield here, a NATO official, Brig. Gen. Mark van Uhm, said at a news briefing that Western airstrikes had destroyed about 30 percent of Colonel Qaddafi’s military power, Reuters reported.

...

Throughout Monday and Tuesday, little or no air power was visible overhead. A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Darryn James, said that American air power had played a smaller role in the war since Sunday, and that with command and control of the air campaign officially shifted to NATO, by midnight on Monday in Washington the United States had no strike sorties planned.

American aircraft, Captain James said, would now be on a so-called standby mode and would fly only when requested by NATO and approved by the Pentagon. The withdrawal of American assets means, among other things, that the rebels will have less support from two classes of aircraft that made several successful attacks against the Qaddafi forces in eastern Libya — the AC-130 gunship and A-10 — than when the loyalist forces were turned back just short of Benghazi, the rebel capital, two weeks ago.

The quiet in the eastern skies on Monday seemed to underscore Mr. Essawi’s sentiment that the international military campaign, after initially turning back Colonel Qaddafi’s army and militias as they swept eastern Libya, had lost momentum, leaving adrift the ground war, waged by rebels with virtually no military experience or structure.

Geez, what happened to Obama's "Give war a chance" policy?  I guess that was so last week.

Obama For President!

Team Obama announces that their guy will be eeking re-election and needs your cash.

I'm pretty excited about their slogan - "We Are The BS We've Been Waiting For" should have even more appeal than "Hope You Didn't Expect Change" or "Keep The Change (We Want Your Folding Stuff)".  It's just too bad that "The Violent Torpedo of Truth" has been taken.

Eric Holder kicks off the campaign with the announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be tried in Gitmo, not Manhattan.  This must have been the comic highlight of his opening monologue:

"The prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his co-conspirators should never have been about settling ideological arguments or scoring political points," he said.

No, we wouldn't expect the whole military commission/Gitmo thing to be about political point-scoring.  Sure, President Obama has reversed course on most of the Bush-bashing done by Candidate Obama so some of us may suspect cheap political oportunism, but it's time to look forward.

FOUR MORE YEARS:  The people's choice is trouncing reality.

Back In Afghanistan

An Afghan policeman guns down two American soldiers there as trainers:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two American soldiers were shot to death by an Afghan policeman on Monday in northern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said.

The two Americans were involved in training the Afghan Border Police at a checkpoint in the city of Maimana, the capital of Faryab Province, according to Abdul Sattar Bariz, the deputy governor of the province. He said the two were shot and killed by one of the Afghan Border Police officers at the location.

...The attack took place while Col. Najmuddin, the deputy commander of the Afghan Border Police there, was in a meeting with two American trainers, the colonel said. A border policeman outside shot and killed two of the American soldiers providing security for the meeting, and then fled, leaving his weapon behind, Colonel Najmuddin said. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.

We do not seem to be winning hearts and minds quickly enough.

The Geniuses At Google Should Have Seen This Coming

Google's April Fool's joke turns into a plug for the other Evil Empire:

If you happened upon the Internet Friday, you would have been faced with what has now become an annual tradition online: Technology companies trying to one-up each other with April Fool’s jokes posted online.

Google, for one, takes its April Fool’s gags very seriously. This year was no exception. Users of Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, were told about a new product, Gmail Motion, which would allow people to “control Gmail with your body!”

The company created an in-depth video explaining how this new mock service would work, where users could literally bounce around in front of their computer to sift through their inbox. Swinging a fist backward through the air would allow you to reply to a message; swinging two fists would reply-to-all; licking your hand — intended to be a stamp — and then tapping your right knee would send the message.

Of course this was all a joke. But hackers at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies wanted to make it a reality. To do this, a team of developers took a Microsoft Kinect sensor and some software they had built for previous projects and tied them together to create a fully working version of Gmail Motion.

Now, why the former geniuses at Microsoft can't develop this sort of thing themselves remains a mystery.

Just Say "No" To Charlie Sheen

The LA Times reviews Charlie Sheen's one-man comedy show and inadvertent crusade against drug abuse, The Violent Torpedo of Truth, which opened in Motown:

Honesty is Sheen's touted value, so here goes: He didn’t bring the goods, and no amount of pandering to the spectators with his you-and-me against-the-trolls malarkey could convince them otherwise. The Malibu messiah’s stab at demagoguery died a quick and not entirely painless death.

...The funniest line all night came from someone seated behind me who hollered at the top of his lungs that the show had scared him straight. From now on, he promised, he would just say “no!” Clearly, for him, Sheen’s act was a “this is your brain on drugs” object lesson.

 

Health Reform Waivers - Not A Bug, But A Feature

The list of organizations that have received waivers from ObamCare continues to grow, but that is not a bug, that is a feature.

Middle class voters become eligible for a government check, and businesses and unions become eligible for waivers - everyone who remembers that the Democrats are their friends who can fix things will be better off.  Obama's political strategy is consistent with his commitment to transparency.

Sunday Morning Open Thread

Go, Huskies!

To The Shores Of Benghazi

The NY Times reports on a plot twist that will surprise Samantha Powers, Hillary Clinton and no one else - Qadaffi's troops are experienced, savvy, and not interested in being targets of allied aircraft:

BREGA, Libya — A NATO airstrike intended for the forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi apparently killed at least eight rebel fighters in the battle outside this pivotal oil port, an ambulance driver and news reports said Saturday.

The deaths underscored the challenge that the Western allies and the rebels face in relying on airstrikes to push back the Qaddafi forces as the two sides mix in the battle zone along the front.

Perhaps in response to the Western airstrikes, the Qaddafi forces are increasingly plunging into combat in equipment similar to what the rebels are using, mainly pickup trucks mounted with machine guns or artillery. The move makes it increasingly difficult for even the combatants to distinguish one group from the other at first sight.

Hmm.  From what has been reported about the poorly trained and led Libyan rebels, Qaddafi's troops would have to be prohibitive favorites in close engagements.  But surely we can bomb their tanks and heavy equipment, yes?  No:

The battle lines remained largely unchanged, centered to the east of Brega, as the fighting continued Saturday. A few rebels had established a light presence in the city, near the university, but the Qaddafi forces remained in solid control. Although airstrikes have taken out some of the Qaddafi forces’ tanks and heavy weapons, the militia had evidently held back some of its military equipment in the relatively dense urban area, where the NATO forces cannot strike without the risk of civilian casualties.

No kidding.

The WaPo reports that non-success is an option:

Stalemate in Libya increasingly viewed as a likely outcome

By Joby Warrick and Liz Sly, Friday, April , 9:07 PM

U.S. officials are becoming increasingly resigned to the possibility of a protracted stalemate in Libya, with rebels retaining control of the eastern half of the divided country but lacking the muscle to drive Moammar Gaddafi from power.

Such a deadlock — perhaps backed by a formal cease-fire agreement — could help ensure the safety of Libyan civilians caught in the crossfire between the warring sides. But it could also dramatically expand the financial and military commitments by the United States and allied countries that have intervened in the six-week-old conflict, according to U.S. officials familiar with planning for the Libyan operation.

Taking us where?

U.S. analysts have concluded that Gaddafi will likely not step aside voluntarily, despite recent defections by top aides. Nor is he likely to be driven anytime soon from his Tripoli base, where he has surrounded himself with highly paid fighters and tribal kinsmen who remain fiercely loyal, the officials said.

One likened the current conflict to an evenly matched football game, with two sides skirmishing over a few yards in midfield.

“Neither side seems capable of moving the ball down the field,” said the U.S. official. “It is also true that neither side has endless resources.”

A stalemate could mean an open-ended mission for the coalition of NATO and Arab countries now enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya, increasing both the financial and political costs for the participants. But analysts are increasingly confident that Gaddafi can be largely contained within a divided Libya, unable to significantly threaten his neighbors and gradually weakening over time.

One wonders - will Qaddafi become a more energetic sponsor of international terror from his reduced enclave?  His reasons for doing so should be obvious.  Then again, the benefit of restraint would be that the quicker he drops off Obama's radar the quicker NATO will turn its attention elsewhere.

It might have been better if Obama had not declared that ousting Qaddafi was US policy.

FIRE DISCIPLINE:  From the WaPo:

The strike, which killed 13 rebels and injured seven, illustrated the hazards of conducting an aerial bombing campaign against a fluid and fast moving front line. Several cars and an ambulance were also incinerated, and opposition leaders said rebels may have been responsible for the bombing because they had fired their guns into the air in celebration.

Foreign trainers would have plenty of material to cover.  "Don't shoot at your air support" would be one good rule to emphasize.  A bit later, we see this:

But Iman Bugaighis, an opposition spokeswoman, said a publicity campaign was underway in mosques and on the radio to try to stop rebels from firing their weapons arbitrarily into the sky, a common practice.

Safety concerns aside, she said, “these ammunitions are very valuable because we have to use them on the front lines. We are trying to get the message out.”

 

They Are Well Informed In Afghanistan

Here is disgraceful and disturbing news from a reputedly peaceful provice in Afghanistan:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Thousands of demonstrators angered over the burning of a Koran in Florida mobbed offices of the United Nations in northern Afghanistan on Friday, overrunning the compound and killing at least seven foreign staff workers, according to Afghan officials.

There were conflicting reports on the total number of people killed and whether two of the victims had been beheaded. Five Afghans were also reported killed.

The incident began when thousands of protesters poured out of the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif after Friday prayers and attacked the nearby headquarters of the United Nations, according to Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, spokesman for Gen. Daoud Daoud, the Afghan National Police commander for northern Afghanistan.

The proposed Koran burning by Pastor Terry Jones last year got a lot of attention, but I had no idea an encore had been scheduled:

Mr. Ahmadzai, the police spokesman, said the demonstrators were angry about the burning of the Koran at the church of Pastor Terry Jones on Mar. 20. Mr. Jones had caused an international uproar by threatening to burn the Koran last year on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and demonstrations at the time led to deaths throughout Afghanistan, but on a small scale. Mr. Jones subsequently had publicly promised not to burn a Koran, but then presided over a mock trial and the burning of the Koran at his small fringe church in Gainesville, Fla.

...Last year, even though Mr. Jones called off his burning of the Koran, a subsequent wave of protests at NATO facilities in Afghanistan led to at least five deaths. In several of those incidents, Taliban agitators played a role, allegedly spreading rumors that the Koran burning had taken place. However, the Taliban have had little or no presence in Mazar-i-Sharif, one of the most peaceful places in Afghanistan.

Some nobody that most people have never heard of burns a Koran and the local Afghans burn down a UN outpost.  That certainly suggests they have not developed a reservoir of goodwill for the US or the UN over the past decade.