Yes, I know Ace posted a link to the speech last night but it's getting a lot of play today, so I thought I'd pull some excerpts and give the day crew a chance to chat about it.

On Afghanistan.

ItÂ’s time for President Obama to make good on his promise. The White House must stop dithering while AmericaÂ’s armed forces are in danger.

Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries. Waffling, while our troops on the ground face an emboldened enemy, endangers them and hurts our cause.

Recently, President ObamaÂ’s advisors have decided that itÂ’s easier to blame the Bush Administration than support our troops. This weekend they leveled a charge that cannot go unanswered. The PresidentÂ’s chief of staff claimed that the Bush Administration hadnÂ’t asked any tough questions about Afghanistan, and he complained that the Obama Administration had to start from scratch to put together a strategy.

In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team. They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt. The new strategy they embraced in March, with a focus on counterinsurgency and an increase in the numbers of troops, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy we passed to them. They made a decision – a good one, I think – and sent a commander into the field to implement it.

Now they seem to be pulling back and blaming others for their failure to implement the strategy they embraced. ItÂ’s time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity.

On interrogations. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 08:49 AM | Comments (167)
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Are you stimulated yet?

The number of newly laid-off workers filing claims for jobless benefits rose more than expected last week, after falling in five of the past six weeks, as employers remain reluctant to hire even with the economy showing signs of recovery.

Which signs? You mean the bear-market rally? The market rose under Bush for years and the media was unwilling to call that a sign of recovery, even though the economy actually was, formally, in recovery.

The Labor Department said Thursday that new jobless claims rose to a seasonally adjusted 531,000 last week, from an upwardly revised 520,000 the previous week. Wall Street economists had expected only a slight increase, according to Thomson Reuters.

Economists closely watch initial claims, which are considered a gauge of layoffs and an indication of companies' willingness to hire new workers.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out fluctuations, fell slightly to 532,250, the lowest since mid-January and about 125,000 below the peak for the recession, reached this spring. But claims remain well above the 325,000 that economists say is consistent with a healthy economy.

Posted by: Ace at 06:53 AM | Comments (94)
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Warrior Legacy Institute (WLI) has released a second paper on our options for Afghanistan and Pakistan explaining Counterterror (CT) strategy. Last week "A primer on population-centric counterinsurgency" was the first paper designed to help the public understand what possibilities are under consideration for the theater.

Gen. McChrystal has requested additional troops to implement the counterinsurgency strategy (COIN), but this does not mean that there is a choice between COIN and CT. Right now our efforts in Afghanistan are helping the CT efforts by generating intelligence and limiting the Taliban and al Qaeda from finding safe havens there. Ideally a fully-resourced COIN effort would safeguard the populace and assist the CT mission as noted. If we scale back our efforts in Afghanistan it will complicate and degrade our ability to effectively prosecute strikes against terrorists in the entire region. The idea that we can use CT as our primary effort and simply use drones to kill bad guys is completely misguided. It is telling that the prime proponents of that are Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden, while Gens. McChrystal and Petraeus believe that COIN represents the best possibility of success.

WLI offers these two papers and accompanying videos to allow anyone who wants to an opportunity to see what the competing ideas are and form their own opinions. Please help us inform as many people as possible by forwarding this to others. If you have an email list, let them know, Facebook it, Tweet it. You know the drill. We are social media.

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Posted by: Uncle Jimbo at 06:18 AM | Comments (19)
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I saw this yesterday somewhere but Drudge has a link to the video.

Someone want to tell this fool that he's not a candidate or even President-Elect anymore.

I don't care about the name calling. It doesn't hurt Republicans or even reflect the truth (have you heard about this special election in NY-23?) but it shows what a small, petty man Obama is.

Funny how he goes on about the value of independent thought and action he claims to appreciate in Democrats before telling them to shut up and get in line. Don't Democrats, of all people, know He won?

I'd be willing to put up with his juvenile insults and enemies lists if he would talk and act half as tough on Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela or even the Taliban as he does with Repbulicans and Fox News.

Added: I was looking to see if I could find a case where Bush ever insulted Democrats this way. I couldn't. I did find a number of cases where Democrats flipped out because Bush referred to them as the Democrat Party. It seems that sets them off for some reason.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:08 AM | Comments (147)
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I've been to Crossroads Mall and-- no, that's a lie. I've driven by Crossroads Mall many times and never gone in. Because there are few stores, bad selection, and it's in kinduva bad neighborhood (as bad as they get in Oklahoma City). It was failing even back before I moved to California as the anchor stores bailed one by one and the little shops followed. The shootings didn't help.

Why should you care? Oh. You own it.

That money was secured by a portfolio of Bear assets. Crossroads Mall is the only bricks and mortar acquired through bailout. The remaining billions are tied up in invisible securities spread across hundreds, if not thousands, of properties.

It is hard to be precise because the Fed has not published specifics on what it now owns. The only reason that Crossroads Mall has surfaced is that it went into foreclosure in April.

Noah Diggs, who had just successfully concluded a search for work here as a shop assistant, was surprised and somewhat alarmed to learn the U.S. central bank now owned the property.

"That is a bad thing, right?" he said, surveying the empty parking lot on a rainy morning in early October.

I think Doofus is getting the government he deserves.

Thanks to Jahiliyya.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:43 AM | Comments (43)
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The vote was 53 to 47. That's 12 Democrats and Joe Lieberman voting with the Republicans. Naturally, Reid blames the GOP:

Reid angrily blamed the loss on bad intelligence from the American Medical Association, which he said promised him 27 Republican votes (he got none), as well as Republican dirty tricks designed to impede Democrats' progress on meaningful reform.

He made no mention of the 13 Democrats who sided with Republicans with statements of concern over ballooning deficits and budget overruns, nor that the Medicare measure failed to get even a simple majority of senators.

"I want everyone within the sound of my voice to understand that Washington is being driven by a small number of people on that side of the aisle that are preventing us from doing things that help the American people," Reid said. "We're not trying to run over people with the 60 votes we have. We want to work with people. We want to get along."

A small number of people? Obviously, Harry Reid can't count. No wonder he failed to find out how many Republicans he really had before bringing this to a vote. Heck, he didn't even bother finding out how many Democrats he had.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:33 AM | Comments (64)
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We are far from daylight, my friends.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:20 AM | Comments (91)
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First of all, you probably are asking, "Who the hell is Eric Boehlert?"

Well, he's a nobody. An odious, twisted pathetic gollum.

But he's a loud-mouthed dishonest nobody currently employed to peddle lies on behalf of George Soros at Media Matters.

Here's what he said about Andrew Breitbart recently. He begins by quoting another liberal (but of course).

Mr. BreitbartÂ’s media empire, and the outlets with which he most closely associates himself, are thoroughly ideological enterprises, publish few if any ideologically heterodox pieces, seldom if ever correct factual mistakes, and ignore liberal insights entirely....

In his response posted at Andrew Sullivan's site, Breitbart remained completely silent about the fact that while attacking the mainstream media as being unfair and unprofessional, his sites regularly features falsehoods and almost never posts corrections when those falsehoods are detailed for all to see. And that was the Daily Beast's point: if Breitbart wants to be taken seriously, than he needs to start behaving seriously.

Right now, the junkyard of false accusations and pure fiction that litter his sites make it impossible to treat legitimately the right-wing critique of the press. i.e. Why should we listen to people who have no regard to fair play when they lecture the press about fair play?

And here is some months back whining that he wasn't getting a minor correction in a timely manner:

One of the Achilles heels of conservative opinion journalism is that most participants don't actually practice journalism. It's more like propaganda under the guise of journalism. Sure, they adopt the trappings of journalism. Meaning, they write opinion pieces for the New York Post and articles for the Weekly Standard, and they appear on Fox News and it all looks like journalism. But very little of it is.

And that's one of the great ironies in the right's long-running crusade against journalism and how awful and inaccurate and liberal it is. Conservative critics attack journalism even though virtually none of them actually practice it. They don't follow any of its rules and don't hold themselves accountable in any honest or meaningful way.

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There's nothing wrong with opinion journalism. And conservatives ought to publish and practice as much as they want. But more and more of it has nothing to do with journalism, and everything to do with intentional misinformation and propaganda. There are no standards or rules, which is why people at the Weekly Standard can't even accurately report what people say at the National Press Club.

So: How does the paragon of journalistic integrity which employs Eric Boehlert, Media Matters, handle the fact that it propagated the made-up "racist quotes" by Rush Limbaugh? Does it offer a retraction or correction?

What do you think?

Posted by: Ace at 04:56 PM | Comments (146)
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Good evening morons! Today is the third day of the week so our theme du noirof the night is 3. And 3 is the theme. And here's some classic funkadelic Sesame Street to reinforce the concept of 3 and three-ness.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:10 PM | Comments (1099)
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The Head-Pat Media.

Remember, FoxNews is biased. Here, Mika is corrected by her masters in the White House and immediately pushes the correction out there -- amplifying it, actually, absolving the White House from any bad behavior regarding FoxNews at all.

But it's FoxNews that has the problem. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:34 PM | Comments (188)
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