Month: October 2009

What Andrew Exum sees as the most likely endgame in Afghanistan (he also provides worst-case and best-case scenarios):

The most likely scenario in Afghanistan..is one in which the United States and its allies gradually tire of a costly counterinsurgency campaign and transition to a more limited engagement that, while not meeting many of the strategic goals articulated by the president in March, allows the United States and its allies to still influence affairs in Central Asia and prevent a total return of the Taliban and its allies to power in Afghanistan.

In this scenario, most U.S. allies withdraw their forces from Afghanistan in the next 18 months as the war becomes more exclusively a concern of the United States and its Afghan partners. Spurred by popular displeasure with the war in his own party, the president directs the commanders in Afghanistan to reduce the presence of U.S. general purpose forces and to shift the mission away from a large-scale counterinsurgency campaign to foreign internal defense (FID) making better use of U.S. Special Forces and other special operations forces. A limited and short-term “surge” into Afghanistan precedes this transition, with the goal of rapidly training more ANSF. A combination of U.S. and allied airpower and direct-action special operations support this limited surge.

Stephanie Tatel explains the danger of not vaccinating:

Ordinarily I wouldn't question others' parenting choices. But the problem is literally one of live or don't live. While that parent chose not to vaccinate her child for what she likely considers well-founded reasons, she is putting other children at risk. In this instance, the child at risk was my son. He has leukemia.

What does any of this have to do with vaccinations? While the purpose of chemotherapy is to kill the cancer, it also kills the good cells—most notably the infection-fighting white blood cells. That means my son has limited ability to fight off anything. A single unimmunized child in an ordinary child care setting is the equivalent of a toddler time bomb to him.

A game to kill the rest of your workday.

The Daily What writes, "Yo Balloon Boy, I’m happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but Edgar Allan Poe had the best balloon hoax of all time." Bill Lucey takes it away:

On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course and had traveled across the Atlantic in three days, landing safely on Sullivan’s Island near Charleston South Carolina, while riding an “egg-shaped gas-filled balloon’’, named the Victoria. The story caused such a stir that an excited mob quickly gathered outside of the editorial offices of the Sun, hoping to land a copy of the historic edition. Not until two days later did the New York daily publish a correction, noting the story was pure fiction. The published correction read: “We are inclined to believe the intelligence is erroneous.’’

Not only was the story untrue, but a balloon would never cross the Atlantic until 1978, when the Double Eagle II successfully landed in Misreay near Paris, 137 hours after departing Presque Isle, Maine.

(Hat tip: The Daily What)

Could he actually have been spying for India? And was it all a classic mid-life crisis?

Daniel Redman explains:

In 1983, New York's high court struck down as unconstitutional a 1960s-era provision that made it illegal to cruise—that is, to hit on someone in a public place. […T]he court's ruling should have killed off the statute. Instead, in the 26 years of this law's odd posthumous career, district attorneys brought 4,750 prosecutions and judges convicted 2,550 defendants. For violating an imaginary law, these defendants paid a decidedly non-imaginary $70,000 in bail and $190,000 in court fees and fines. In the last 10 years, NYPD officers also issued 9,693 citations, forcing citizens to pay $71,000 in fees. The criminal records of these victims have never been expunged and the fees and fines have not been refunded.

It's a good revenue raiser – because most people pay the fine for fear of being exposed. Every now and again, it's worth remembering that beneath the veneer of increasing gay acceptance, in many places in America, the attitudes and policies of the 1950s linger on – especially in law enforcement.

Amanda Sterling reports:

A former Congressman has joined with two retired generals and an Iraq war veteran in a push to pressure lawmakers to close the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. The group is calling upon Congress to “ignore the scare tactics” of former vice president Dick Cheney, who they accuse of leading “a concerted right-wing smear campaign” against closure of the facility.

Sign the petition here.