"They told me if I voted for McCain . . ."

Back in the 1970s, when I had not been on active duty in the Army long, a senior NCO told me in conversation one day, "The Democrats told me in 1964 that if I voted for Goldwater, I'd wind up being sent to to Vietnam. And they were right - I voted for Goldwater and got sent to Vietnam."

Republican Goldwater, of course, lost the election to Democrat Johnson. Today Glenn Reynolds writes,

NOW THEY TELL US: Obama’s “Not Black,” according to a piece in the Washington Post. Hmm. Gates reappointed at Defense, an Iraq-Hawk Secretary of State, keeping the tax cuts, and now the next President turns out not to be black — hey, they told me if I voted for McCain we’d get a third term for Bush, and I guess they were right!

Heh, as he sometimes says.

Why we eat turkey on Thanksgiving

"CHACUN à SON GOUT, OR, WHY WE EAT TURKEY FOR THANKSGIVING," by Art Buchwald. Explains it all.

What I'm thankful for

I put together a photoessay for Thanksgiving 2004 that got a pretty fair amount of attention around the internet, so I am reposting it here since it still sums up quite well my gratitude for that which has blessed my life.

Sorry to say that the original blog posting has disappeared, but uncharacteristically, I had the foresight at the time to author it also to WordPerfect Presentations and then write it to PDF. The first page says it will advance every eight seconds, but that's for the presentation, not the PDF.

Here is the first slide:



See the whole PDF file here. I also have put online a self-executing "Show on the Go" version, with soundtrack. It's 11 megs; just click run or save when you click the link and wait for it to download or execute.

Top 8 groups deserving a bailout

the Military Officers Association of America (I am a member) lists the "Top 8 Groups Most Deserving of a Government Bailout."

If our country can afford almost $1 trillion in bailouts for firms whose financial troubles were caused by their own mismanagement or recklessness, what about those in the uniformed services community suffering grievous circumstances imposed on them by the government through no fault of their own? Here are MOAA’s nominees for those most deserving a government bailout. Add your own views and nominations in the “rate this item” forum at the bottom of the list.

8. Currently serving uniformed services families – the only large group of employees denied use of Flexible Spending Accounts to deduct out-of-pocket health and dependent costs from income and payroll taxes. Who needs a child care tax break more than a family whose sponsor has been deployed?

7. Employers of Guard/Reserve personnel -- who deserve tax breaks to help ease the burden of hiring temporary replacements for ever-more-frequently deployed staff members. The government that imposes these requirements on them, and expects them to keep hiring Guard/Reserve members, needs to do more to assist them.

6. Guard-Reserve members deployed since 9/11 – whom the government has acknowledged deserve a reduced retirement age in return for frequent active duty callups, but has denied credit for those called up (for multiple combat tours in hundreds of thousands of cases) between 2001 and 2008.

5. Military families (again) – who’ve suffered terrible family separations because of past government resistance to manpower increases, despite predictions of a long war. Now, some congressional leaders have proposed cutting back on manpower increases, when the only possibility for relief is to accelerate them.

4. Severely disabled retirees with less than 20 years of service – who forfeit most or all of their military retired pay to fund their own VA disability compensation. Congress passed legislation to assist the combat-disabled, but a glitch in the law stymied relief for many. And a 100% non-combat disabled retiree has no relief.

3. Military widows whose sponsors died of service-related causes – thousands of whom must live on an annuity of $13,000 a year because their VA survivor benefits are deducted from their Survivor Benefit Plan annuities. Congress’ “first-step” relief action provided a mere $50 extra per month.

2. Separated wounded warriors – Thousands of wounded or potential PTSD/TBI victims were separated with low-balled disability determinations, “personality disorder” or disciplinary discharges that limited or denied benefits. Programs are changing now, but those already separated since 9/11 deserve reconsideration.

1. Caregivers for wounded warriors – hundreds of mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, and other loved ones have had to quit their jobs, sell homes, and cash in retirement funds – to provide full-time care to severely wounded servicemembers. The government owes training, respite, and compensation to those who never dreamed that a loved one’s wounding could put their own livelihood at such risk.

Doggone right, every one of them. Full disclosure: though I am retired Army officer, none of these fixes would affect me one way or the other.

Why Washington loves your misery

"On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. " Yes, indeed.

King Herod's tomb found?

Israeli archaeologists says that the evidence is mounting that the tomb and sarcophagus of King Herod - he whom Matthew's Gospel reports ordered the slaying of the babies in Bethlehem after Jesus was born there - have been found at a site known to be that of Herod's winter palace.

This is the same Herod of whom Caesar said, "It is better to be Herod's dog than his son," after Herod had executed three of his sons.

Unlike some other figures in both the Jewish Scriptures and the Christian New Testament, historians have never doubted that Herod was a real person. There are too many contemporary records of his long reign.

Cornell Univ: Global warming overestimated

Cornell University's Chronicle Online reports,

A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.

A new Cornell study, published online in Nature Geosciences, quantified the amount of black carbon in Australian soils and found that there was far more than expected ... .

Soils include many forms of carbon, including organic carbon from leaf litter and vegetation and black carbon from the burning of organic matter. It takes a few years for organic carbon to decompose, as microbes eat it and convert it to carbon dioxide. But black carbon can take 1,000-2,000 years, on average, to convert to carbon dioxide.

By entering realistic estimates of stocks of black carbon in soil from two Australian savannas into a computer model that calculates carbon dioxide release from soil, the researchers found that carbon dioxide emissions from soils were reduced by about 20 percent over 100 years, as compared with simulations that did not take black carbon's long shelf life into account.

The findings are significant because soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact.

"We know from measurements that climate change today is worse than people have predicted," said Lehmann. "But this particular aspect, black carbon's stability in soil, if incorporated in climate models, would actually decrease climate predictions."

And so another way all the climate-change models are wrong is exposed by the cold, hard light of, you know, actual empirical science. (Hat tip: Ben Cunningham, via email)

Gore effect hits whole planet

Wesley Pruden:

Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we've got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.

The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn't warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it's "climate change." ... On average, "climate change" covers every possibility. ...

It's clear now that the earth has been cooling for the past decade, to the sorrow of the special pleaders and despite everything Al can do about it. The solar cycle peaked, the sun is quieter, the sunspots have faded and everybody but Al is cooling off.

Even the United Nations says so. The director of the U.N.'s panel on climate change concedes that nature has overwhelmed everything man can do and it might even be another decade before man can rally and the warming resumes. Until then, like it or not, nature rules the cosmos.

Here is the definition of the Gore Effect.

Quote of the day

"If a man neglects to enforce his rights, he cannot complain if, after a while, the law follows his example."- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Quantum of Solace - a review

A series of poorly-edited action scenes tied very loosely together by a mostly-incoherent narrative. For gosh sakes, go to a matinee so you don't have to pay full price. This movie is as dumb as a box of rocks.

Hate now, love later?

Maybe repsect or admire would be better words than love when it comes to today's regard to Harry S Truman. Yet Truman was widely reviled in his day. Edward Luttwak writes that George W. Bush is "A Truman for our times."

Al Qaeda drops the N-word

Al Qaeda's number-two commander, Ayman al-Zawahri , has released an audiotape in which he uses a,

... demeaning racial term implying that the president-elect is a black American who does the bidding of whites.

The message appeared chiefly aimed at persuading Muslims and Arabs that Obama does not represent a change in U.S. policies. Al-Zawahri said in the message, which appeared on militant Web sites Wednesday, that Obama is "the direct opposite of honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s African-American rights leader.

Al-Zawahri also called Obama—along with secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—"house negroes."

The idea that the election of Obama to the presidency will open doors to a gentler stance toward America than before is, of course, simple ludicrousity. Al-Zawahiri took pains to point out that in his mind nothing has changed because of Obama's election. Al Qaeda's antipathy and designs against the USA in specific and the West in general far predate the Bush administration.

Our enemy's lethal intentions toward us have nothing to do with the identities or political affiliation of those who run our government.

Meanwhile, another senior al Qaeda leader,

... was among six militants killed overnight in a suspected US missile strike in northwest Pakistan, a senior security official told AFP Wednesday.

Security sources identified the militant as Abdullah Azam al-Saudi, a senior member in Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.

"He was a senior commander of Al-Qaeda and was involved in recruiting and training of fighters," the senior official said.

Iraq war is won - but was it right to have fought it?

A review of Arthur Borden's book, A Better Country - why America was right to confront Iraq

As some other commentators have said, you can tell the Iraq war is going well because the MSM are reporting hardly anything from the country. Furthermore, Michael Yon has reported that he recently visited an infantry unit whose soldiers, having been there eight months, have not fired a rifle shot in anger. I linked earlier this month to a story that the troops of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), based at Ft Campbell Ky., are are being brought home early because of a continuing decline in violence and increasing stability of Iraqi life where the brigades were deployed.

Success has a thousand fathers, goes the saying, while failure is an orphan. All indications are now that the Baathist dead enders in Iraq gave up a long time ago, the execution of Saddam Hussein having taken the wind out of their sails pretty completely. Besides, even the Sunnis finally figured out that the days of Sunni dominance were gone forever. As for al Qaeda, the ones left alive have either been rendered ineffective or have fled the country. Again, the Sunni sheiks and tribal leaders concluded that al Qaeda's brutality and murderousness took the shine off the promised Islamist utopia, so they joined, however warily, to ally with Shia-controlled Iraqi Security Forces or American forces. Al Qaeda's attrition rate has been so high that a Qaeda in Iraq is in the terminal stages of a demographic death spiral. Always consisting of more foreigners than native Iraqis, would-be jihadis are finding it more difficult to get into Iraq and less attractive to do so anyway. (The jihad in Afghanistan still beckons, but that's another story.)

So, with success in Iraq mostly, though not yet completely, achieved, the questions remains: was invading Iraq to topple Saddam the right thing to do?

That's the title question of Arthur Borden's book, A Better Country - why American was right to confront Iraq. Borden, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, writes that he was impelled to author the book after witnessing the attacks against the Bush administration and Bush himself after the Iraq Study Group reported finding no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Borden, a lawyer by professions, knew that the evidence against Saddam was much more extensive than just WMDs or their lack, and that the history of US policy buttressing the regime change had roots much deeper than the Bush administration.

Thankfully, A Better Country does not attempt to examine the conduct of operations in Iraq after the war. Its scope is limited to the casus belli, not the jus ad bellum. There are substantial critiques to be made of the latter, of course, but Borden is right to leave them to others. "While [Bush] made important mistakes after the invasion," Borden writes, "this book maintains that it our country's removal of Saddam there was and remains much to be proud of."

Whether Borden is Catholic I cannot say, but regardless he is master of the Aquinian method: define the problem full and well, state the facts bearing on it - and in this case, the facts that were known at the time - state the "pro" side, and finally offer honest brokerage of the opposition's case. This is not an ideological book. It is bereft of sensationalist language or the common tendency of ideologues to cast the other side into the outer darkness. Borden, with lawyerly precision, lays both sides' cases out and then demonstrates why the case to confront Saddam was and remains the stronger.

The Iraq war was in fact "a necessary war," that being the title of the first chapter. It is here that I think Borden makes a very valuable contribution to the debate. Far from being an innovation of G.W. Bush, based on imaginary connections to 9/11, toppling Saddam was a reasonable, natural and linear result of the Carter Doctrine, first enunciated by President Jimmy Carter in his 1980 State of the Union address. Carter said,

Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such as assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

Though the presumption of Saddam's WMD weapons and WMD programs came to dominate the debates over American intervention, President Bush actually made numerous references to the Carter Doctrine (though not by name) in explaining the danger Saddam posed.

Borden also spends three chapters delineating, in turn, "The Missing WMD," "Containment" (that is, could Saddam have been contained if not removed) and "The imminent Threat." These offer excellent summaries of facts relevant to those topics.

At 82 pages, A Better Country is a short but not casual read. Anyone who wishes to escape the shrillness of most debates over the war's genesis and review "just the facts, ma'am," should get this book.

The 50 worst cars ever

There's a list in chronological order, starting with the 1899 Horsey Horseless carriage, above. You can see why.

Quote of the day

“The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” - Will Rogers

More guns for the same people?

Some news stories and few bloggers have reported on the surge in firearm sales starting the day after Barack Obama was elected president. A blog called "Ride fast and shoot straight" has short compendium of news headlines to that effect.

The media's implication seems to be that Obama's election directly caused the surge in sales since Obama's public record on firearms is definitely not Second Amendment friendly. This conjunction led one commenter on the above cited site to write pithily, "Interesting. Obama has *nothing* to do with the meltdown of stock prices but he's the main force behind gun sales." Well, heh!

Slate.com says that whole gun sales are definitely up since last year, the differential is not much out of line with historical deltas year to year since 1999, the year the present sales regulations went into effect. And not all that many of the increased sales are being made to first-time buyers. Most guns, Slate says, are owned by relatively few Americans. And most of the increased purchases are made by repeat buyers. Furthermore, the number of households reporting gun ownership has been falling steadily since 1977.

[D]ata compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. NORC found that gun ownership in the United States has been falling since 1977 (PDF, Page 11), when 54 percent of households reported owning a gun, compared with 34.5 percent in 2006.

However,

During the week of Nov. 3-9, the FBI received 374,000 background requests, "a nearly 49 percent increase over the same period in 2007," CNN.com reports. Anecdotes collected in some of the news stories indicate that some buyers are keen on buying so-called "assault weapons," which were banned from 1994 until 2004.

Back to the Ride Fast blog, where another commenter reports,

I went into a gun store yesterday to get a shotgun - nothing special - and found out it was backordered a month! And that on a gun that has never been banned, and probably wouldn't be, except under the most draconian restrictions.

I asked the salesperson if business had been busy lately, but the evidence was all around me. There were 15 other shoppers in a gun store I had only previously seen no more than 2 or 3 at a time. The salesperson said this was "slow" compared to recent days. He said that week they had sold fifteen AR-15s and fifty 30-rd .223 magazines.

People are buying everything they can afford. Hey, if they do get banned, they'll go up in value... a pretty decent investment during a recession...

Well, Obama is unmistakably on the record as opposing so-called "assault weapons." Slate cites thus:

The Chicago Tribune reports that as "an Illinois state legislator [Obama] voted to support a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons and tighter restrictions on all firearms. He has said in the past that he opposes allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons."

The last gun I bought was a Browning BPS Trap shotgun in 2005. I bought it on Gunbroker.com, a firearms-auction site, like eBay (eBay doesn't let you sell guns there). The BPS Trap is, as its name implies, a specialized shotgun specially designed for trapshooting. For any other purpose, including home defense or hunting, it's quite unsuitable. I don't mean you couldn't use it for those purposes, but it is really too heavy, too big and too unwieldy (see here, the price also having risen quite a lot since I bought one). Other shotguns would serve those purposes much better.

Come springtime I intend to buy a semi-auto .22-caliber rifle, probably the Mossberg 702, and a .22 pistol, hopefully a Sig Sauer Mosquito or Mosquito Sport. Montgomery County, Tenn., where I live, has a first-class, public range complex that includes trap, skeet, Olympic trap and ranges for high-power and rimfire rifles and pistols. (Also an archery range for those so inclined.) My wife never took a shine to shotgun sports, but when we were young she enjoyed pistoleering.

Truth is, I pant for a modernized version of the classic M1911A1, the pistol I carried in the Army as an artillery battery commander. Its caliber is .45 ACP. But alas, large-caliber ammo for either pistol or rifle is just too expensive for me to buy in any quantity, so I'll stick to plinking with a .22.

This is NOT good news

The Jerusalem Post tonight is carrying the following story.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is among the candidates that President-elect Barack Obama is considering for secretary of state, according to two Democratic officials in close contact with the Obama transition team.

Clinton, the former first lady who pushed Obama hard for the Democratic presidential nomination, was rumored to be a contender for the job last week, but the talk died down as party activists questioned whether she was best-suited to be the top US diplomat in an Obama administration.

The talk resumed in Washington and elsewhere Thursday, a day after Obama named several former aides to President Bill Clinton to help run his transition effort.

The two Democratic officials who spoke Thursday did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Obama and his staff. Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines referred questions to the Obama transition team, which said it had no comment.

What is going on here? Has the office of Secretary of State turned into position requiring over zealous school marms? It stretches credulity that Senator Clinton would give up an assured slot of power and opportunity in the Senate for the chance to appear shrill and useless for the foreseeable future.

So, Hillary, hon, if you're reading this; don't do it. Just say no!

United Methodist Church opposes Obama's civilian service corps

As has been thrashed around for awhile now, Barack Obama favored a draft of high-school graduates into federal service for "community serv ice" of some kind or another, and also said that high school students should be required to perform 50 hours of community service per year. As for college students, they would have a 100-hour requirement.

Of course, he backed off the mandatory requirement as this concept bloated its way to proto-policy. Now the service will supposedly be voluntary (yah, shoor) and in exchange for a $4,000 tax credit for college kids. (Hmm... $40 per hour, an annual rate of more than $83K per year. Guess that will be the new federal minimum wage under Obama, 'cause fer durn sure the inmigrantes are doing harder work than community-service college kids.)

White House chief of staff designee Rahm Emanuel wrote a book, The Plan: Big Ideas for America, in which he called for compulsory service for all Americans from 18 to 25 years old. Wrote Rahm,

We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, All Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation and community service. ...

Here's how it would work. Young people will know that between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, the nation will enlist them for three months of civilian service. They'll be asked to report for three months of basic civil defense training...

"Asked to serve" is government-goonie speak for "report or go to jail."

At any rate, it's a draft by another name. And I am proud to report that my denomination, The United Methodist Church, has already stated its doctrinal opposition to the Obama-Emanuel plan.

V. Military Conscription, Training, and Service

(1) Conscription. We affirm our historic opposition to compulsory military training and service. We urge that military conscription laws be repealed; we also warn that elements of compulsion in any national service program will jeopardize seriously the service motive and introduce new forms of coercion into national life. We advocate and will continue to work for the inclusion of the abolition of military conscription in disarmament agreements.

Italics added. This paragraph is from the UMC's Social Principles, which have in the UMC the force of doctrine, though not of canon law, and this section goes back many, many years. I await with litle expectation, however, a contemporary condemnation, specifically of Obama's plan from the UMC's significantly left-of-center General Board of Church and Society.

Update, Jan 25 2009: "Voluntary? Not a bit. It's a draft, pure and simple.

"The most revered war hero you never heard of"

That would be retired US Marine Col. John W. Ripley, who died at home Oct. 28. He was awarded the Navy Cross for single-handedly blowing up a key bridge in South Vietnam to blunt the North's "Easter Offensive."

Going back and forth for three hours while under fire, Captain Ripley swung hand over hand along the steel I-beams beneath the bridge, securing himself between girders and placing crates holding a total of 500 pounds of TNT in a diagonal line from one side of the structure to the other. The I-beam wings were just wide enough to form pathways along which he could slide the boxes.

When the boxes were in place on the bridge, Captain Ripley attached blasting caps to detonate the TNT, then connected them with a timed-fuse cord that eventually extended hundreds of feet.

The cause of death has not been released.

Throwing it down

Just under four years from now, the Republican candidate for president will doubtless ask, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

If you think things are bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet. Herewith I throw down on the status quo, 2008-plus-four:

1. The national unemployment rate, as of Oct. 3, was 6.1 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The next release will be tomorrow.)

As of early October 1012, I predict the unemployment rate will be at least two points higher, and probably close to 10 percent.

2. The Gross Domestic Product will be lower than today, adjusted for inflation. The estimate for 2007's GDP is $13.78 trillion. Look for a GDP decrease of approximately $500-$700 billion.

3. Tax revenues to the federal government, adjusted for inflation, will be lower than today. As the Bush-era tax cuts are allowed to expire and other tax rates are raised, productivity will decline as more capital is taken from the economy.

4. That, in turn, means that the federal deficit will be much greater than today, and we're facing a trillion-dollar deficit next year alone.

5. That in turn will drive the US public debt much higher. The public debt is today almost $10.6 trillion. Of course, the debt has been rising for many years. Four years ago is was $7.4 trillion, for example, and $5.6 trillion four years before then. So the debt has risen by about 90 percent in just eight years under the Bush administration.

What will be the effects of the national debt surpassing the GDP? Not being an economist, I won't hazard a guess. But the effects can't be good. At any rate, Obama's administration will turn as blind an eye to the national debt as Bush's did. But, coupled with declining tax revenues and a great increase is statutory spending (which will not be much offset by spending cuts in defense, which will be the only cabinet department to see a cut), the Obama administration plus a spendthrift Democrat Congress will make Bush look like Scrooge.

6. Iraq will be effectively abandoned (see "Vietnam, South"). The key question is whether American security assistance will survive long enough to adequately finish training the Iraqis to defend themselves. My prediction: No. Al Qaeda in Iraq will be revived and the country will be embroiled in insurgency civil war.

7. Afghanistan: Obama has claimed that Afghanistan was the only legitimate target of US military response to 9/11. (Okay, he did say he would invade Pakistan, too.) This stance, of course, is proof of Obama's inability to think outside the box, especially on strategic issues. The war we are engaged in is not one against nations, but against ideology.

Obama's failure to understand the essence of the conflict will lead to severe mismanagement of operations in Afghanistan. Pakistan will become more radicalized and violence in Afghanistan will increase. I am not going as far as Steven Den Beste, who claims flatly, "We're going to lose in Afghanistan," but we won't be winning, either. However, enemy successes there will enable Islamists' renewed efforts against Iraq as recruitment of young, radicalized Muslims increases because of renewed successes in Afghanistan.

8. The Defense department's budget will be gutted of investments in major future-platform systems and high-technology programs. Current operations and maintenance accounts will be inadequate to sustain present force levels and equipment readiness (See "Carter, Jimmy."). The services' end strengths will be reduced. The armed services will face significant recruiting shortfalls as Obama's civilian-service corps are implemented and offer the same benefits as military service, but without the risks.

What will be the result of a visibly weaker American defense establishment in global affairs? Look for an even-more expansive Russia and movements, though not outright invasion, of the Baltic countries and Ukraine. China will flex also, though I shrink from predicting actual military operations by the Chinese. Basically, Russia and China will spend the next four years watching America' economy and apparent national will decline. Moves, if they make them, will come in the spring of 2012, if they assess Obama will not be re-elected, or deep into Obama's second term if he is re-elected.

Usually, prognosticators get to this point and hedge their bets. Not me. Yes, this all depends on whether the uniparty Congress and administration follow through on what they have said they will do. Steven Den Beste says they will shrink from it. I don't think so. They won't be able to push their platform through as completely as they want, but it will happen to a very high degree.

Iraq troops got nothing to do

So they are being brought home early.

WASHINGTON — Spurred by a continued decline in violence, the U.S. military will reduce its presence in Iraq from 16 combat brigades to 14 this month, at least two months earlier than planned.

Military officials say two brigades from the 101st Airborne Division will leave Iraq this month, and only one will be replaced. A brigade is roughly 3,500 soldiers. Initially the 3rd Brigade, 101st Division, was scheduled to leave this month, and the 2nd Brigade, 101st Division, was to leave by February.

On Wednesday, the military announced the 2nd Brigade will instead return this month to its home base, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, after serving 13 months in Iraq rather than the expected 15.

The unit served in northwest Baghdad, where violence has plunged, including a 50 percent decline in overall attacks in the area and a more than 90 percent drop in murders.

U.S. forces also have seen a dramatic decline in troop fatalities, with deaths falling to their second lowest monthly level in October.

Last month, seven US service members were killed in action.

The morning after

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. -- Genesis 1.11-12

Virginia's military ballots to swing election?

The McCain campaign filed suit claiming that absentee ballots were not mailed to the state's military members serving overseas in time for them to arrive back to Virginia today, the legal deadline. This afternoon the case's judge ruled that late-arriving ballots must be retained.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- A federal judge has ordered election officials in Virginia to preserve late-arriving absentee ballots that Republican John McCain's campaign claims should be counted.

The McCain campaign says in a lawsuit that absentee ballots weren't mailed on time to many military members serving overseas.

The complaint asks the court to order the state to count absentee ballots from overseas troops postmarked by Tuesday and received by Nov. 14. The deadline for ballots to be received is 7 p.m. on Election Day.

U.S. District Judge Richard Williams said Tuesday that he will hear the lawsuit on Nov. 10. He ordered election officials to keep the late-arriving ballots until then.

Now, suppose the in-person vote tally in Virginia today comes down to Obama leading by only few thousand votes. The absentee ballots would be crucial to the fortunes of either camp.

Is it possible that the election could swing on those votes? Personally, I don't think so, but the night is still young.

Retroactive abortion

UK Reuters: "Mother murdered her "inconvenient" baby"

LONDON (Reuters) - A mother who smothered to death her three-year-old son because she saw him as an "inconvenience" to her social life, was jailed for life on Monday. ...

"Tara Haigh saw her son as an inconvenience to the life of socialising and dating that she wanted to lead," said Detective Inspector Jo Sidaway.

"Her inability to put Billy's needs ahead of her own culminated in her taking his life prematurely."

Tara should have called the death a "retroactive abortion" and insisted that choosing to have it was a freedom she simply had to have.

After all, what, exactly, is the moral difference between killing your three-year-old and letting your child be born alive, but slaughtered just before its head exits the birth canal?

Do they know something we don't?

Quite likely, of course. Allahpundit writes of optimism in the McCain camp.

What’s got Maverick, Salter, and other senior aides suddenly so bubbly? Their internal polls, in all likelihood. Lead pollster Bill McInturff pronounced the race too close to call in a memo sent out late last week that claimed things were trending their way in the battlegrounds. They must have gotten more good news over the weekend.

Hmm... We know also that Wall Street does its own analysis and its own polling. And here is is election day, and the Dow opened about 120 points up, and as of the time I write this, is 284 points to the good.

Movement on the Dow results from many things, but chief among them is news of the financial future. Investors, brokerage houses and fund managers are first and foremost risk assessors and risk managers. Their assessments are reflected in how the cash in or cash out shares.

If the outlook is good for companies, you buy now anticipating that the share values will rise. If the outlook is bad, the reverse. Now, an index up by not quite 300 points does not a bull market make, but the fact is that financial managers are buying, not selling, on the very day that Barack Obama, whose tax plan punishes harshly every company listed on the Dow, is solidly predicted by media and commercial polling to win the White House in a walk.

Certainly, the Dow's investors have been paying attention to those polls. But they have their own polls and analysts whose results and work don't get published.

So again - do they know something we don't?

Update: An AP feed says that the reason for the rise is that "investors brushed off weak economic data and looked forward to putting the uncertainty of the presidential voting behind them." Well, that would certainly explain a rise tomorrow, but isn't the uncertainty just as great today as it was before?

“Rich” is like “racist” ...

"... the surest sign of the guilty is the failure to admit your problem." So screeds James Lileks.

If there are a lot of people who make less money than you do, you’re rich, and it doesn’t matter how you got where you are, or whether that poor fellow over there who works for Wal-Mart – and don’t worry, we’ll belittle him as a three-toothed inbred cousin-marrying NASCAR Oxycontin-popping gun-nut in just a minute – made some life choices that may have affected his earning potential; the existence of disparity is sufficient to prove that something is wrong. Or at least suggest that something must be done. As a wise man said: half the people in the country live below the median income level. Half. In this day and age.

So if you don’t want to help them - that’s what you mean when you oppose taxes, after all - you’re selfish.

Read the whole thing.