Or anywhere else that isn't Muslim enough. Which, well, is pretty much anywhere.

All clear at the Taj Mahal hotel.

MUMBAI, India – Authorities finished removing bodies from the bullet- and grenade-scarred Taj Mahal hotel Monday, the final site of the Mumbai siege to be cleared, as schools and businesses reopened and commuters returned to work.

Security forces had been scouring the 565-room hotel for booby traps and bodies, and declared the landmark building cleared two days after they killed the last three militants holed up inside following a three-day rampage in India's financial center that left at least 172 dead.

"We were apprehensive about more bodies being found. But this is not likely — all rooms in the Taj have been opened and checked," said Maharashtra state government spokesman Bhushan Gagrani.

The army had already cleared other sites, including the five-star Oberoi hotel and the Mumbai headquarters of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group.

On Monday morning, parents dropped their children off at school and many shopkeepers opened their doors for the first time since the attacks began.

Mumbai returns to normal, and the AP returns to normal. Notice how the place for Jews to congregate in Mumbai has suddenly morphed into an "ultra-Orthodox Jewish group."

Never mind that five members of that "ultra-Orthodox Jewish group" were tortured in a horrific manner, and a 2 year old "ultra-Orthodox Jew" is suddenly parent-less.

You stay classy, AP.

See you next Open Blog, peeps.

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:54 PM | Comments (126)
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This Lightworker is truly amazing. He causes wars to end successfully and young democracies to strengthen before taking office.

HereÂ’s a story you donÂ’t see very often. IraqÂ’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

In the case of Iraq, though, the federal high court, in a unanimous decision, vacated the Parliament’s rescinding of Alusi’s immunity, with the decision delivered personally by Chief Justice Medhat al-Mahmoud. The decision explained that although a 1950s-era law made traveling to Israel a crime punishable by death, Iraq’s new Constitution establishes freedom to travel. Therefore the Parliament’s move was “illegal and unconstitutional because the current Constitution does not prevent citizens from traveling to any country in the world,” Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar, spokesman for the court, told The Associated Press. The judgment even made the Parliament speaker responsible for the expenses of the court and the defense counsel!

...

If Iraq can keep improving — still uncertain — and become a place where Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites can write their own social contract and live together with a modicum of stability, it could one day become a strategic asset for the United States in the post-9/11 effort to promote different politics in the Arab-Muslim world.

...

If he [Obama] pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic PartyÂ’s national security credentials than that.

Um, a decent Iraq has already taken root and is in fact growing. Obama and the Democrats cannot "pull this off," except if you mean "claim credit for a fait accompli."

The general pattern here is that after years of calling more or less explicitly for a cleansing defeat in Iraq, liberals are beginning to make the case that we shouldn't lose a war we've already won just to appease the netroots-- in other words, Bush was right.

But they didn't say that before. Only now that Obama has been elected to they admit it.

Partly because they are now willing to argue in the American interest rather than the liberal Democratic Party interest, and partly because politics continues well past the water's edge -- they want credit for a victory and won't permit the fallout from a defeat suffered on their watch.

Thanks to Mr. Wolf.

Posted by: Ace at 01:07 PM | Comments (150)
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The word has come down that they can't malign the soldiers whom they desperately wish to spit upon. Mostly they restrain themselves from doing that (mostly), but channel their hatred towards the non-forbidden focus of hate, civilian contractors.

You know -- security guards on the most hazardous duty on the face of the earth. Protecting unarmed civilians, relief workers, diplomats, and journalists from being murdered.

Obviously they're getting what they so richly deserve.

dsrobins wrote:
Sorry it doesn't wash. Laguna, like all who work for Blackwater was a paid mercenary thug. These guys come from the dregs of our society, losers who love guns and violence and are attracted by the high salaries in Iraq. They have committed countless atrocities there, murdered utterly innocent men, women and children and accepted to responsblility whatsoever for their crimes. They are criminals who have betrayed America and always will remain so.

bama510 wrote:
Marybeth, I am sorry for your loss. I presume that since your husband was fighting for all Americans, he was fighting for my right to disagree. Well trained men like your husband are draining the military of the well trained men we paid to train. They make it possible to run an illegally "justified" war and make an obscene amount of money while doing it. I myself am concerned that since Blackwater bows to the highest bidder, and are so close to Washington that the orderly transition of power is threatened. Your husband while a good man, was a mercenary. He did not take his orders from the U.S., but from an ultra-conservative billionaire and the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. He made a lot of money doing it. He in no way equates with the grandmother from Ohio, in the National guard who lost her life, she and those guardsmen, and all soldiers like them are heroes and to be greatly admired. They were following the orders of the U.S government and died carrying them out. Sadly there is a difference.

...

Deric1 wrote:
Dear Ms. Laguna: I am sorry for your loss, but no matter how noble your husband may have been, in many ways, the fact is that he was a thrill junkie who was being paid as a mercenary in a bad war at the time of his death. He loved to fly and to help people, but he also loved the adrenaline rush of watching tracer rounds go past his cockpit. Otherwise, he could have stayed right here in the US and flown and helped people. "Blackwater" and "hero" do not belong in the same sentence.

...

AMviennaVA wrote:
Husband was a mercenary. Pure and simple. Never glamorize the breed.

Layers.

Thanks to James W.

Posted by: Ace at 12:36 PM | Comments (90)
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The Thanksgiving weekend is wrapping up and it's snowing here in the Northeast (my part of it at least)...it's definitely time for some football.

Of course, there is something to be said for warm weather as well.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:55 AM | Comments (85)
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Not bad, for a country barely staving off the second Great Depression, right?

U.S. holiday retail sales increased 3 percent yesterday from a year earlier, the smallest gain for a “Black Friday” in three years, research firm ShopperTrak RCT Corp. said.

Sales rose to $10.6 billion, the Chicago-based company said in a statement. The increase was the smallest since a decline of 0.9 percent in 2005 and compares with a jump of 8.3 percent last year.

“So far, so good,” said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners LLC, a retail consulting firm based in New Canaan, Connecticut. “But a decent Black Friday figure doesn’t predict the whole season. The question is, how much momentum we can keep” in this “challenging” economic environment, Johnson said.

An increase, but not enough of an increase, so once again the sky is falling.

It's anecdotal, but shopping has been crazy around here. People actually slept in tents outside the West Hollywood Best Buy on Thursday night. It was still crowded when I stopped by yesterday looking for new headphones (no luck, buying them online). Last week, people had camp chairs in front of the Verizon store for the new BlackBerry when I walked by on my way to the Red Line.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:52 AM | Comments (70)
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Cowbell anyone?

The USGS estimates that there are 85.4 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable gas from natural gas hydrates on the Alaskan North Slope. This is the first-ever resource estimate of technically recoverable natural gas hydrates in the world...

Podcast here.

Current gas reserves in North America are estimated to be in the 280T cubic feet range. Adding another 85T to that is a pretty big jump indeed. more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:09 PM | Comments (115)
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We lost to these guys? These guys?

Good Lord. It's nothing but menstrual snapping and free-range guacamole. more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (354)
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He tried to escape dressed in the traditional Courageous Muslim Warrior garb, a woman's burka.

The Carmen Miranda fruit-hat was a bad choice of accessory. Sure, it showed off his hazel eyes, but at what cost?

Gunbattles and airstrikes by NATO and Afghan troops killed 53 militants in Afghanistan, including a wanted Taliban commander who tried to hide from soldiers under a woman's burqa, officials said Saturday.

The U.S. forces targeting the commander surrounded a house Friday in Ghazni province and ordered everyone inside to leave, a military statement said.

Six women and 12 children left the building, but while soldiers were questioning the women they discovered one was actually a man dressed in a burqa, the traditional all-encompassing dress that most Afghan women wear. The man, later identified as the targeted commander Haji Yakub, tried to attack the soldiers and was killed, the military said.

Read on. "Militants" are dying all over, especially when they come into contact with real militants.

Thanks to Josh.

Posted by: Ace at 03:43 PM | Comments (30)
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They didn't like it much.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (37)
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Above the Post Update: The NYT reports estimates of 20 to 40 terrorists -- the nine killed and one captured are just the hold-outs and the ones who didn't flee.

That's still not an awful lot of guys, though.

One reason for the nervousness is that it seems likely that not nearly all the terrorists were caught or killed — and so far the whereabouts of the rest are a mystery. At least eight were confirmed dead on Friday, although more might be found as soldiers and the police combed through the two hotels. Security officials declared that they had taken control of the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower on Saturday morning, killing three militants.

Estimates of the number of attackers have ranged from 20 to 40, with the number depending to a considerable extent on the number of boats involved. As security forces seek to reconstruct how the gunmen managed to inflict so much carnage so quickly, they have been turning their attention to how so many assailants managed to reach the heart of Mumbai undetected and with such a large collection of guns, ammunition and explosives.

I hope that an American response to this sort of thing (and remember, it has long been speculated that the terrorists would move away from mega-attacks like 9/11 to simpler but easier attacks like invading a mall and shooting it up) would be a lot better.

I suspect it would be. However, a couple dozen terrorists in a high-traffic area could kill a lot of people before cops could show up.

Americans tend to carry more personal defensive weapons than just about anyone else in the developed world, but the terrorists would not be hitting targets in rural Texas, but in areas like NYC or big suburbs which are unarmed.

Even if a group of terrorists encountered some armed citizens -- the citizens would not be acting as a coordinated group and would be out-gunned in any event.

While cops in America would, hopefully, shut down this sort of an attack within (at most) a half an hour, the success of the terrorists in Mumbai only encourages fresh attempts at this sort of thing in our own country.

A lot of people can be shot or blown up in ten minutes.

I'm pretty sure that the long-anticipated small-scale run-and-gun terrorist attacks on malls and theaters and even waterparks -- anywhere with large crowds of people -- just went from a possibility to a near-certainty.

Via Hot Air's headlines.

...

Hard to imagine that India's police reaction could be that slow-responding to 10 armed psychopaths. It's possible the terrorists were just that good at executing their plan, but it seems more likely the cops weren't good enough.

India strongly suspects Pakistan -- and Pakistan warns (perhaps hoping to enlist tUS pressure) that should India deploy its military to Pakistan's border, Pakistan will (of course) divert all forces used in the War on Terror to respond.

Commandos ended a three-day rampage by Islamist gunmen in Mumbai on Saturday, gunning down the last of the militants who killed nearly 200 people in a strike on India's financial heart.

Elite Black Cat commandos killed the remaining four militants after a running gunbattle through a maze of corridors, rooms and halls in Mumbai's best-known hotel, the Taj Mahal.

There were signs of mounting public anger over the attacks, most of it directed against Pakistan, and officials in Islamabad said the next two days would be crucial for relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

One senior security official said Islamabad would divert troops to its border with India and away from fighting militants on the Afghan frontier if tensions erupted over Mumbai.

"If something happens on that front, the war on terror won't be our priority," the senior security officer told journalists at a briefing. "We'll take out everything from the western border. We won't leave anything there."

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said "elements" in Pakistan may have been responsible for the attacks in Mumbai.

Other officials have said most, perhaps all, of the attackers were from Pakistan, a Muslim nation carved out of Hindu-majority India in bloodshed in 1947. The two countries have fought three wars since the partition, and relations have always been tense.

More on the massacre:

The commander said his men had had to literally feel their way through the hotel corridors and rooms in complete darkness.

The black-clad commando said it had been impossible to differentiate between dead bodies, the injured and people simply pressing themselves to the floor in terror.

“When an exchange of fire takes place in darkness and there are bodies strewn all over and blood all over, you’re actually not looking who is injured or killed,” he said. “You’re just looking for someone with lots of weapons on him.”

But if were just a case ofo shooting indiscriminately, one would assume they'd kill a lot of civilians, but also kill the terrorists somewhat early in the ordeal.

A lot more at the link, including the bonus treat that seven of the terrorists appear to be British-born Pakistanis.

Britain itself is rapidly becoming one of the world's preeminent exporters of Muslim terrorism. Maybe they should see to that at some point.

Denied: Off of Hot Air's headines, a denial that any British-born persons were among the terrorists at all, issued by Indian intel.

Booray For Bollywood: Bollywood actors react with mixture of introspective criticism of their own country and sappy renditions of John Lennon's Imagine.

Oh, wait, that was our cadre of actors. Bollywood actors are demanding better security and an in one case an "iron hand."

Shabana Azmi: I was on the phone with a friend in London when she asked me to switch on the TV. It's a diabolic war waged on our city and country. This isn't the time to place blame. We need to maintain peace and communal harmony and cooperate with the police. Our condolences to police officers who sacrificed their lives. Terrorism should be struck down with an iron hand.

Gleen Grenwald Now Worries the Indian Constitution is Being Shredded: He worries a lot.

He's quite an imbecile.

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 PM | Comments (96)
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