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Swampland has a post today about Adm. Mullen’s unpublicized comments to a group of journalists during a breakfast meeting. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was talking of the military’s ability to fight future wars Wednesday when he suddenly changed gears. “We had five suicides in the Army last weekend,” the nation’s top military officer abruptly volunteered. And, he warned, such horrors are only going to grow. He almost seemed to spit out these words, unbidden – as if to push them out quickly might temper their sting. “I think we’re going to see a significant...

Former Iraqi government spokesman Leith Kubbah lets the cat out of the bag on a developing U.S.-Iran deal. Leith Kubbah, a former Iraqi government spokesman who currently resides in Washington, told the Iraqi daily al-Zaman that the U.S. is preparing a major package deal with Iran for sharing influence in the region in which Iraq will the central element. The deal will be implemented within two years. He said that the Obama administration is preparing the working papers and documents for the negotiations with Iran. The first question that comes to mind is, should one read this as the US...

And last, but certainly not least, an analyst at ZeroHedge notes how the Federal Reserve is cooking the money supply books to hide what appears to be hyperinflation: From December 2002 until the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the quantity of deposit currency created by the Fed averaged $11.8 billion, an amount that is relatively insignificant compared to total M1. Presently, it stands at a record high of $1,246.2 billion, which of course is highly significant. More to the point, none of this deposit currency is captured in the traditional definition of the Ms. The quantity of dollar...

The Washington Post recently tried to defend the President's policies in the War on Terror against attacks from the Right that Mr. Obama has reverted to pre-9/11 policies of treating terrorism as a mere law enforcement issue. The Post framed their counterfire as follows: These critics have set up a straw Obama, a weak and naive leader who allegedly takes terrorism lightly, thinks that playing nicely with terrorists will make them stop, and fails to understand the threat that the United States faces from violent extremists. ... There are two ways to show how baseless these attacks are: examining Mr....

Yuri Zarakhovich at the Jamestown Foundation has an article on the impact of the dacha in Russia today that gives some insight into how the USSR managed to endure as long as it did. Indeed, it is the dacha that keeps Russians fed during the country's perennial crises -and curiously serves as the major indicator of the current state of the economic crisis. "The more potatoes people grow at their dachas, the worse things are becoming in Russia," Andrei Tumanov, editor of Vashi 6 Sotok ("Your 600 Square Meters," Russia's most popular gardening magazine) told Moscow's TV 3 channel on...

Is is just me, or is it a bit unsettling to have these two stories break on the same day? First came this story from the New York Post: During the first five months of this year, with the Senate under the control of its first African-American majority leader, Smith, top Democrats bemoaned the lack of minority Senate staffers. But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new...

If Ahmadinejad has the backing of Supreme Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in making these statements, this is a sign the conservative mullahs have realized they're in real trouble: IRANIAN President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed to make changes to his team and "respect" young people when his new government takes office after his disputed re-election. "The structure of government should change, the changes in the government will be considerable," Mr Ahmadinejad said in a televised address to the Iranian people overnight. He said his new government will put "housing, employment and economic reform" on its agenda. "I am against police confrontation with...

Politico blew the whistle this morning on a money for access scheme set up by none other than the Washington Post:Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors. The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it...

The AP reported the other day that the Secretary of Defense has ordered the military's top lawyers to basically find a loophole and cease enforcing a legal ban on gays serving in the military. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday he wants to make the law prohibiting gays from serving openly in the armed forces "more humane" until Congress eventually repeals it. He said he has lawyers studying ways the law might be selectively enforced. "One of the things we're looking at is, is there flexibility in how we apply this law?" Gates said. Having served as Secretary of Defense...

Obambi has found a way to get Joe out of town more: send him to Iraq.Press Secretary Robert Gibbs confirmed Tuesday that President Obama had asked Biden to begin “working with General [Raymond] Odierno and Ambassador [Christopher] Hill in working with the Iraqis toward overcoming their political differences and achieving the type of reconciliation that we all understand has yet to fully take place.”No doubt Mr. Biden's exemplary track record of building bipartisanship and facilitating reconciliation in Washington will be of value. After all, according to Rasmussen's most recent numbers, 50% of Americans think Wasington is more partisan, 31% thinnk...

Looks like the Wednesday hooha at the White House is going to be a regular thing: The White House is the place to be on Wednesdays. Since the presidency changed hands less than six weeks ago, a burst of entertaining has taken hold of the iconic, white-columned home of America's head of state. Much of it comes on Wednesdays. The stately East Room, where portraits of George and Martha Washington adorn the walls, was transformed into a concert hall as President Barack Obama presented Stevie Wonder with the nation’s highest award for pop music on Wednesday. A week before that,...

You have to give President Obama credit for one thing: he's a masterful politician. Examine how he's dealt with Hillary Clinton, for example. By naming her to be his Secretary of State, the President has consolidated his support with her constituency and virtually eliminated any chance she might challenge him in the primaries. But, he didn't stop there. He gave the Middle East Peace portfolio to George Mitchell, the Pak/Afghanistan portfolio to Richard Holbrooke, and the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia portfolio to Dennis Ross. In other words, Secretary Clinton will be chiefly responsible for maintaining relations with countries with...

With the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan dominating the military news for the last seven years, most Americans have little or no idea what their Navy does in a day. In an effort to provide background for the Navy’s leaders to use in their interactions with the media and public, the Navy’s Chief Of Information has been producing monthly “snapshots” documenting the Navy’s key activities on one day a month. This month, CHINFO chose February 19th, and it gives a great overview of the Maritime Strategy in action. Here are the key bullets: 331,676 Active Duty Officers, Sailors and Midshipmen;...

Just three weeks ago Eve Fairbanks at The New Republic tried to tell us why the tidal flood of scandals in the Democratic Party didn't matter. Her key arguments are: Most of the Democratic scandals have been on the state or local level.The Democratic scandals are not linked (and, to boot, are mostly so bizarre as to seem sui generis).The Democratic scandals do not involve top party leadership.People do not yet think the Democratic president sucks. But Eve is wrong; the scandals do matter, and will matter more and more as time passes. First, while most of the scandals have...

The Virgina House quietly turned back an effort by gay rights activists to make homosexuals a protected class with respect to housing in Virginia. [A] House sub-committee defeated HB 1625, a major homosexual rights agenda item. The bill would have created sexual orientation as a protected class in housing discrimination laws by allowing local jurisdictions to carve out their own housing policies irrespective of the Commonwealth’s current code. The House General Laws Sub-Committee on Housing, by a 4-3 vote, tabled the bill by Delegate David Englin (D-45, Alexandria), as amended. When he introduced the it before the committee Delegate Englin...

Somewhere around 2002 the amount of money governments in the United States pay out to employees surpassed the amount of money paid to manufacturing and construction workers: [go to post for graph] It would be easy to level a broadside at the Bush Administration, as they were in charge at the time, but one can easily see from the graph that the trend in government payrolls has been on a nearly straight-line march since 1969. Only during the Reagan Administration (1980-1986) was there a sustained decline and control on the expansion of government. If anyone wonders...

The Dems are firing the first salvo in the next redistricting cycle in, of all places, the stimulus plan. Check out this line item from the House Appropriations Committee summary:Periodic Census and Programs, Communications: $1 billion for work necessary to ensure a successful 2010 census, including $150 million for expanded communications and outreach programs to minimize undercounting of minority groups. "[P]rograms to minimize undercounting of minority groups"? Sounds to me like the Democrats are starting their play to manipulate the post-census redistricting.

Obama Team Owes Americans An Explanation David Brooks points out today in his column in the Times that Obama's chief economic advisor, Christina Romer, has executed a major flip-flop on her previous position that fiscal stimulus efforts have no measurable impact on economic recovery. Christina Romer is Barack Obama’s choice to lead his Council of Economic Advisers. In 1994, Romer and her husband, David, wrote an essay entitled “What Ends Recessions?” ... The Romers surveyed the recessions of the previous 50 years to try to reach some conclusions about what works. “Our central conclusion is that monetary policy alone is...

An ongoing post over at Fabius Maximus on solutions to the current economic crisis has helped sharpen my thinking on the problem. In general, I would echo commenter R Hendrick's priorities: 1. Size alone is insufficient, as Prez Bush and Henry Pauson have now reproven. Effectiveness is equally as important as dollar volume. 2. Providing lending capacity when consumers and businesses want to borrow less won't be sufficient. Fiscal policy will be more effective in the near term, 2009 & perhaps even 2010, than currently overemphasized monetary tools. Similarly, tax cuts will be less effective than govt. spending as much...

Some pictures aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Others are truly worth a 1,000 words. Or more. Like this one.