Will US commander in Afghanistan call for 15,000-45,000 more troops to be on the ground before January?

That's what the MSM is reporting (though not too loudly):

US media has reported that [General Stanley] McChrystal is considering three options, including a “high risk” strategy of adding just 15,000 troops to the 68,000 troops that would be on the ground by year’s end.

A “medium risk” strategy would add 25,000 troops and a “low risk” option would be to send in 45,000.

Meanwhile, in the face of growing popular disagreement with continuing to fight this war, Admiral Mullen trots out the old fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em over here argument:

WASHINGTON: Al-Qaeda remains “very capable” of attacking the United States, the top US military officer said Sunday as he tried to boost waning US support for the conflict in Afghanistan. Nearly eight years after the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed some 3,000 people, Al-Qaeda is “still very capable, very focused on it,” chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“They also are able to both train and support and finance, and so that capability is still significant,” he said.

Mullen added that the US military is “very focused on making sure that it doesn’t happen again,” referring to the potential for another such attack on US soil.

There are several dozen reasons why this argument is--technical term--utter horseshit, but let's just go with the most obvious: logistically it is far easier for Al Qaeda to kill Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan than it will ever be in the continental United States. Terrorists are not the superhuman shadow-like beings that TV programs like 24 and our government have portrayed them to be. They operate far better in familiar surroundings and a militarized environment.

But admitting that is not how you sell the Patriot Act, the TSA, the elimination of basic civil liberties, torture, and indefinite detention to both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Meanwhile, for those of you who naively thought that electing any new President would mean a rapid wind-down of our involvement in what now should be called the Iraqi Civil War, there is this:

With Pentagon officials continuing to work on contingencies for the increasingly unlikely event that President Obama actually fulfills his pledge to remove troops from Iraq, the enormous amounts of military equipment the US has shipped to the nation over the past six years is becoming an increasing topic of conversation.

Though the Pentagon has declined to give an exact price tag for removing what Major General Kevin Leonard says is “literally millions of pieces of equipment,” it is likely to run into the tens of billions of dollars.

Ah, but it's truly great that our foreign policy has changed so radically in the past eight months, isn't it?

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

More of This, Please

Or perhaps I should say, "Less of this one, please." Or how about just, "None of them. Ever again. Please....For the Love of God." Sunshine State Poll: Grayson In Trouble The latest Sunshine State/VSS poll shows controversial Democratic incumbent Alan Grayson trailing former state Senator Dan Webster by seven points, 43 percent to 36 percent. A majority of respondents -- 51 percent -- disapprove of the job that Grayson is doing. Independents have an unfavorable view of him as well, by a 36/47 margin. Grayson has ignored the conventional wisdom that a freshman should be a quiet member who carefully tends to the home fires. The latest controversy involves his " Taliban Dan " advertisement, where he explicitly compares his opponent to the Taliban, and shows a clip of Webster paraphrasing Ephesians 5:22 -- "wives, submit to your husbands." An unedited version of the clip shows that Webster was actually suggesting that husba...

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?

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