Hello All-
(cross posted on dailykos.com)

I haven't posted a diary here in a while but now is the time. The critical debate over universal healthcare is something I'm passionately involved with. My story has been used by HCAN in recent press conferences in my home state. First my story. A story that is fundamentally un American to me. More below...

A note to General David Petraeus and Obama: the offensive taking place to push the Taliban out of Helmand Province will fail unless there is a cash component to the economic strategy.  

Rewind.  The audacious, and in some ways brilliant, deployment in Afghanistan of 4000 Marines to "clear, hold, and build" has some merit.  No one likes the Taliban, and this will give the population some breathing room to escape their grip.  But no one is talking to the Americans because they are afraid we will soon leave, and the Taliban will return to settle up scores.  The danger is that the "hold and build" part of the operation will be a repeat of the practice of dropping schools and bridges all over where no one wants them or needs them, when what people really need is enough to eat, and a way to turn down the Taliban's $8 a day wage when they return after the troops are gone.  

Cash is easy to hide and hard to trace.  Anyone who accepts a school, bridge, or or other highly-visible American project is likely to have their village slaughtered before winter.

To my knowledge no kind of cash-for-work projects are planned, and its important because, if this offensive doesn't succeed, we are back to square one and looking at another 10 year quagmire from which we will never pull out.  There will be the real threat of a Taliban takeover, because of a vulnerable population with 40% unemployment and millions of young men who of necessity will take the Taliban's poppy money (they control the trade) to attack government and foreign targets.  Another trillion dollar war. There goes our healthcare.  There goes renewable energy jobs programs for us.  War is the killer of all progress, hopes, and dreams.

I'm going to say something revolutionary here, but carefully considered: of all the conflicts in the world, this may be the only one where if you dropped dollar bills over villages from helicopters (a dollar is often a day's wage for 12 hours of hard labor here), it would have a distinctly positive impact on security.  Those dollars would be squirreled away for food for the brutal upcoming winter, and put a brake on young men rushing to the Taliban just because they need the money.  

The Pentagon knows it.  Col. Tom Collins, the top Pentagon spokesman in Afghanistan, told PBS:

    "There is a low percentage of the total Taliban force who we would call ideologically driven. We refer to them as Tier 1 people who believe their ideology, that what they're doing is right. The vast majority of Taliban fighters are essentially economically disadvantaged young men."

And General Karl Eikenberry, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, told Congress in 2007:

       "Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families"

Why then is USAID, the "hold and build" part of the operation, announcing that

USAID plans to launch a new program in Afghanistan which will implement civilian-run stabilization projects in targeted areas, primarily during the clear and hold phases of counterinsurgency (COIN)...USAID...will manage an operational platform and an in-kind small grants mechanism aimed at promoting the objectives described above.

"in-kind small grants mechanism" means stuff, not money, that the Taliban can ferret out and punish you for.  It would be different if they were talking about paying Afghan crews cash to repair their own roads or dig their own ditches, but that's not how this reconstruction has worked, which is why we are in this fix.  They will bring in Bobcats and bulldozers leased from Halliburton to put it all in place, at a tidy profit, with Afghans standing back looking at their new road, as hungry as ever.  The UN reports that nearly 40% of all Afghans do not meet the minimum daily calorie requirement for prevention of malnutritition.  The upshot?  We're not going to shoot our way out of this.  And we're not going to Halliburton our way out of it either.

War is too important to be left to generals and politicians.  The people whose money it sucks up and whose children it kills have to take charge.  Do something patriotic this 4th of July weekend.  Tell them how to stop a war.  It's not their money they are playing with, it's yours.  Cut and past and forward this to the White House and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  We will soon find out what kind of Commander-in-Chief Obama is.

LINK TO CONGRESS EMAILS.   LINK TO EMAIL WHITE HOUSE.

The diarist is the co-founder of Jobs for Afghans.

Man begging in street in Kabul
Jobs for Afghans.

The Premise:

1)    One of the most passionate arguments made for Hillary over Obama was the idea that she would be better on health care reform.

2)    Millions of Hillary supporters - almost all of them - ultimately voted for Obama.

3)    Obama (in my opinion) needs a hard push towards being much more aggressive with arrogantly corrupt, corporate-owned democratic senators like Baucus, Landrieu, Feinstein, Lieberman, Conrad et al.

4)    People who voted for Obama after passionately supporting Hillary are in an ideal position to give him that hard push.

5)    Whitehouse:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
202-456-6213
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington DC 20500

full disclosure - I work for SEIU as a regional new media specialist

One day before we celebrate the birth of our nation, Nebraskans gathered at a scheduled healthcare roundtable to call on Senator Johanns to support an American solution to our healthcare crisis.

Instead of greeting the teachers from NSEA, veterans, and SEIU workers Senator Johanns' staff called the police, ordering the Nebraskans to leave the Medical Center grounds.

To paraphrase Gerturde Stein: A Thug is a Thug is a Thug.

A report from Amnesty International identifies IDF and HAMAS actions as crimes.

In its first in-depth human rights report on the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza, Amnesty International accused both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes during the fighting earlier this year. The group charged that the Israel Defense Forces killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians and destroyed thousands of Gaza Strip homes in attacks that amounted to war crimes, and denounced Hamas for firing rockets into civilian areas of southern Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1097 267.html

HAMAS response?  Quite predictable:

Hamas said in response that the report was "imbalanced and unfair."

In the mean time, the blockade of Gaza continues, preventing its civilian population from picking up the pieces.  Dueling diaries on this site concerning a ship carrying activists who sought to defy the blockade and draw attention to the plight of Gaza demonstrated a reciprocal hyperbole and partisan blindness that mirrors the conflict itself.  One diary labeled Israel's interception of the ship as an abduction and a kidnapping, as well as an effort to maintain the covert nature of an ongoing and very public military operation by a sovereign state.  The protesters were never hidden from public view and were escorted to the Israeli port of Ashdod, not stuffed away in some dark cellar or secret prison.  The other diary dismissed the activists as simply showboating and discussions resulted in proliferating obfuscations, including aspersions of anti-Semitism and accusations of narcissism.  Since the protesters were seeking publicity, it must be for themselves and their concern for Gaza's plight couldn't possibly by sincere.  Never mind that the very concept of civil disobedience almost always involves drawing publicity to what the protesters perceive as injustice.  Boy, those marchers on Sela were real grandstanding showboaters.  How could they have actually cared about civil rights?  Gazans are, in this view of the situation in question, merely instruments for the self-aggrandizement of anti-Semites.

more below...

Today, on the steps of the Minnesota State Capitol, US Senator Al Franken held a press conference to declare his intention to seek a second term as Minnesota's junior Senator.  Sen. Franken spent his entire first term in a lengthy court battle with The Party of "No".  With his wife Fran at his side, he addressed a large crowd of press, supporters and curious onlookers who seemed surprised to learn that Minnesota actually has two US Senators.

(Cross-posted at The National Gadfly)

Eric Boehlert agrees with William Kristol when he says that Todd Purdum's piece must be wrong when he says that Hit's simply not possible that multiple individuals would have concluded that she had Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

First, my background:  I lived in Alaska from 1963 to 1969, I was 7 when I left, and my father worked at various levels in the state and local government, being the head of planning for Governor Bill Egan, and head of the State Charter Commission.

He maintains the friendships that he made there, and as such, he is in touch with many people who are very much a part of the political scene there, particularly on the Democratic Party side.

The other thing to realize is just how tiny the political scene is there.  Everyone knows, and meets, everyone else on an almost daily basis when the legislature is in session, so if one person made a comment, like "I was looking through the DSM IV, and 'Narcissistic Personality Disorder' matched Palin to a 'T," it could rapidly become a talking point.

This makes this story likely, but the email that I got forwarded to me by my dad pretty much makes it a almost certainly true.

I would note that my dad quoted this individual to me in October saying essentially the same thing.

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: -------
To: Mr Ron Saroff <-------->
Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2009 8:31:38 AM
Subject: FW: Politico.com:

Further amusement --this time amongst the R's.  Lots of bad substantive stuff to say about Palin, but frankly I think the sexism is disgusting from both parties and elsewhere.

Check out this page:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/060 9/24392.html

I was one of the people who told TP [Todd Purdum] Sarah had a narcissistic personality disorder! And he told me I wasn't the first to say it.

Thank you,
THE POLITICO
Politico.com

Hamas, who have taken over Gaza and made it into the Islamic Republic of Hamastan, recently have been discovered to have tried to kill Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas activists arrested by the Palestinian Authority have admitted to tracking the movements of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and to gathering intelligence on his security, PA sources told Haaretz.

Their motive clearly was to assassinate Abbas, the sources said.

"Hamas' intention was to scuttle the reconciliation talks [between Hamas and Fatah] in Cairo and to create chaos in the West Bank, in contrast to the sense of security that has characterized the territory for the past two years," Fatah spokesman Fahmi Zarir told Haaretz.

Palestinian Authority Secretary Taib Abd-Arahim had said Monday amid the Cairo talks that Palestinian security forces had arrested 10 Hamas members planning to attack PA institutions. The detainees admitted they were planning to assassinate several senior Palestinian Authority officials on July 1, in order to halt the conciliation talks, he said