SENATE COMMITTEE VOTES TODAY ON HEALTH CARE; STEALTH AFGHAN ESCALATION, NBC READY TO SELL?

October 12th, 2009 - by: danny

OBAMA ESCALATES: MORE FORCES FOR AFGHANISTAN

WASHINGTON (AFP) — In an unannounced move, President Barack Obama is dispatching an additional 13,000 US troops to Afghanistan beyond the 21,000 he announced publicly in March, The Washington Post reported.

The additional forces are primarily support forces — such as engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police — the Post said, bringing the total buildup Obama has approved for the war-torn nation to 34,000.

“Obama authorized the whole thing. The only thing you saw announced in a press release was the 21,000,” a defense official familiar with the troop-approval process told the daily.

GOP’S NEW FOCUS: TRASH NANCY PELOSI
RANKS OF YOUTH JOB SEEKERS GROWS AND GROWS
IS LOU DOBBS FINALLY HEADING “HOME” TO FOX?

WSJ/Daily Beast: ATTACK PELOSI LATEST GOP STRATEGY

A week after the hoping that General Stanley McChrystal would put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “in her place,” it seems the GOP has found a place of its own for Pelosi: their attack ads for 2010. Attacks on Pelosi will be “a major part” of the GOP’s 2010 electoral strategy, according to The Wall Street Journal. During the August recess, the GOP ran a dozen ads linking members of congress to Pelosi, and an anti-Pelosi ad is currently running in an upstate New York district preparing for a special election. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found 44 percent of Americans had a negative view of Pelosi, while 27 percent had a positive one. The New York Times, meanwhile, sees a template for a Democratic 2010 strategy in the nasty New Jersey governor’s race: “Its shorthand description: winning ugly.”

GOP’S MICHAEL STEELE SUPPORTIVE OF ACORN

HEALTH CARE VOTE ON TUES: NEEDED LEAPS OF FAITH

The Hill: Finance health vote will require a leap of faith for several senators

Several members of the Senate Finance Committee will have to make leaps of faith if the panel is to approve a healthcare reform bill on Tuesday. Four Committees have already passed a bill.

Turning Up the Heat on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

NY Times: A proposed tax on high-cost health insurance plans has touched off a fierce clash between the Senate and the House over how to pay for a health care overhaul.

Jackie Newberry on new Health Insurance report warning of higher prices if reforms are passed:

There is a false premise when the insurance industry says they will have to raise their rates to make profits. The reason Germany has a successful health care system is because there is stringent price control on the insurance industry. Where are the price controls in these bills in the first place?

VIEW FROM LONDON IN FINANCIAL TIMES (GIDEON RACHMAN)

Obama must start punching harder

Just five years ago, Barack Obama was still a local politician in Illinois, preparing for a run for the US Senate. His office wall in Chicago at the time was decorated with the famous picture of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston, after knocking him out in a heavyweight title fight. Ali famously boasted that he could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” But now that Mr Obama is president, he seems to float like a butterfly — and sting like one as well.

Jackie Newberry, BSN, registered nurse, 20 years in the insurance industry

Peter Galbraith, TIME, THE “ELECTION” IN AFGHANISTAN

No one will ever know how Afghans voted in their country’s presidential elections on Aug. 20, 2009. Seven weeks after the polling, the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is still trying to separate fraudulent tallies from ballots. In some provinces, many more votes were counted than were cast. E.U. election monitors characterize 1.5 million votes as suspect, which would include up to one-third of the votes cast for incumbent President Hamid Karzai. Once fraud occurs on the scale of what took place in Afghanistan, it is impossible to untangle.

Afghanistan’s fraudulent elections complicate President Obama’s job as he weighs a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, his top commander there, to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to support a beefed-up counterinsurgency strategy. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. needs a credible Afghan partner, which Afghanistan’s elections now seem unlikely to produce. (See pictures from election day in Afghanistan.)

A war undertaken to defeat al-Qaeda is increasingly seen through the lens of these elections. In my home state of Vermont – where the National Guard is about to deploy to Afghanistan – people seek me out to ask why our soldiers should be fighting for a corrupt Afghan government clinging to power by fraud. I am quite sure the same question is being asked of political leaders in both the U.S. and Europe.

Unfortunately, I am unable to provide reassuring answers”

Insurgents Taking Charge in Kunduz by Gul Rahim Niazmand in Kunduz

The Taleban have complete control over the district. They have established their own brand of Islamic rule, and they can move around the villages and bazaars openly, with no fear. There is no government authority here.

Afghanistan – The Proxy War By Andrew J. Bacevich

As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe” obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial.

ANWAR HUSSEIN:KNOCK, KNOCK: BEHIND THE TALIBAN ATTACK ON PAKISTAN MILITARY HQ

With the audacious Taliban attack at the GHQ main gate this Saturday, the very portal wherefrom these creatures came slithering out more than two decades back, the affair between the creator and the creations has come full circle. Knock knock, said the hypnotized oddballs, rudely shaking their masters out of their reverie— perhaps fatefully and finally.
Why did these killers come calling on the doorsteps of their makers? The simple answer to this question is that while the creators may be experiencing a memory dump, the creations cling on zealously to their cherished past.

The masters may be trying to forget the time when back in the 80s, on the calling of the grand masters from distant lands, they were supplying almost 65,000 tons of weapons per year to these same godmen. The aims for the grand masters then—the Soviet Union had to be taught a lesson and the resources in its hinterlands accessed. And for the GHQ supremos suffering from majestic delusions—a strategic depth had to be carved out in face-off with India while having a go at the leftovers from the Manna once the grand masters had left the table.

GAZA: ISRAEL BLOCKS FAMILY REUNIONS

Amira Hass / In Gaza, only the dying get to see their Israeli relatives

Qassem al-Masri’s father has been suffering from liver problems for years. Sometimes he is hospitalized, and usually he doesn’t feel well (but then again, no one ever feels well in the Gaza Strip). But his condition is not grave. That is why Israel won’t let his 25-year-old son Qassem, an Israeli citizen and a medical student, to visit him in Beit Hanoun.

It has been seven years since they’ve seen each other. Even when he left for Berlin for his medical studies in 2002, Israeli authorities forbade the young man from visiting his father in Gaza. (Three of Kassem’s brothers live in Berlin, two of them are already doctors. Their parents decided to forgo building a house in order to provide their children with an education: medicine for the boys and law for the girls).

Three weeks ago, Qassem came to Israel, in the unfulfilled hope that this time he would be allowed to visit his father. He flew back to Berlin last week. The father and son, who were within 30 kilometers of each other, could have no more than a telephone conversation.

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Office told Haaretz that the authorities had studied Qassem’s request, and found that it “failed to meet the criteria to grant entry into Gaza.”

EJC: Arab group accuses Israeli police of posing as journalists

Palestinian photographers are claiming that undercover Israeli security officers have been posing as photojournalists covering the recent Muslim demonstrations in Jerusalem. Awad Awad, chairman of the Palestinian Photojournalists Committee, said a group of local residents had confirmed the presence of an Israeli police unit known to imitate Arab civilian dress, as well as Israeli security personnel posing as photojournalists and then arresting protesters. Residents of the Ras al-Amud neighborhood told the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms that they witnessed Israeli agents carrying cameras and disguised as photojournalists arresting “several” young men who participated in demonstrations last Thursday and Friday. The Center for Development and Media Freedoms claimed residents of the area have reported identical incidents. The Israel Police said the rumors were baseless. The Israel Police is known to employ undercover officers dressed to look like Palestinians, a tactic that goes back at least as far as the first intifada. Claims of Israeli officers posing as members of the press or medical personnel, however, are much more rare, and have led to campaigns by Israeli and foreign press associations to ban the practice.(Jerusalem Post)

SCARY: A NAZI MARCH NEAR MY HOME

Victor Grossman, Berlin
October 11, 2009

Today, close to my Berlin home, I saw a frightening
march of Nazis, calling themselves the Nationale
Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands – leaving out only
the word Arbeiter (Worker) from the name Hitler used.
Several thousand of them, almost all in black, many
skinheads but also many all too normal-looking
youngsters (and a smattering of very blonde girls),
with the loudest loudspeaker I’ve heard in years
blaring out their propaganda, agitating against
democracy, denouncing the Bundestag representatives,
even the cops, spreading hatred against all foreigners,
but above all against the Left and the Leftists. At
least one big banner contained a warning threat: “Make
sure you know where the nearest Antifascist club is
located”. They started at Alexander-Platz, halted at
the circle near my house to yell and chant for twenty
minutes, then marched along to Platz der Vereinten
Nationen (UN Square – once Lenin-Platz) and along
Landsberger Allee, once Lenin-Allee, stopping for a
meeting, perhaps by accident halfway between where the
big Lenin statue was torn down after the end of the GDR
and the quiet, hardly noticeable little memorial
cemetery with graves and a monument to those who died
in the Revolutions of 1848 and 1918-1919.

After a ranting speech in tones recalling Hitler or
Goebbels, too loud for me to understand much, their
leader read out 50 or more names of all their
“martyrs”, punctuating each name with a roll on a drum
and his loud call for “Rache” – Revenge. The only name
I recognized was, believe it or not, the big Nazi hero
Horst Wessel, who died 200 meters from here in the
hospital which the Nazis renamed after him (until
1945). The song about his alleged murder served the
Nazis’ as a main hymn and then as a second national
anthem.

The News Dissector