Civil and informative comments! I’m so impressed. I just found firedoglake today.
Thanks!

Welcome to the lake, Bonnie. We are currently on this thread if you would like to join us.

He told me they would have a response and it was just what he said on Monday at B/N Q/A.

Jo6pac

This isn’t your peace prize. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..61272.html

[quote]That begins with ensuring that America does have the world’s strongest and smartest military force. We’ve begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar province, it’s working.

We’re just years too late changing our tactics. We can’t ever let that happen again. We can’t be fighting the last war. We have to be preparing to fight the new war.

And this new war requires different tactics and strategies. We’ve got to be prepared to maintain the best fighting force in the world.[/quote]

Hillary is sounding like George, again. Give me the candidates that are not bought and paid for by war profiteers. They are slim in number.

Some of the surge IS in Al Anbar…BUT…Al Anbar “quieted down” BEFORE any surge took place. At that time, BEFORE the surge, the militias of Al Anbar decided to target Al Qaeda in Iraq first. In so doing, they got on the good side of the US and have hit the lotto: they are being armed by the US for their humanitarianism vis a vis focusing on foreign fighters and terrorists (first) before they get back around to trying to hasten the ejection of US occupiers.

Forgive my inept cutting and pasting of html.

brendan @ 94

The troubling phrase for me in the ex-CIA agent’s interview was “but it won’t be a war.”

The way this administration parses words, whatever they do will be what the rest of us call “war” (or “torture” etc), and they will define it as something else other than war that does not require Congressional approval. And screw world opinion, Dick would tell the whole globe to go cheney themselves.

The thing is, spurious legalisms won’t mean anything to the Iranians. Like I said, it’s “opaque”, but I suspect some shadowy “grownups” who wield power in ways forbidden to us to know have stopped the war because they have a clear understanding of the obvious military peril an attack would bring, made all the greater by British abandonment of the south.

By the way, the British withdrawal, and Gordon Brown’s big “fuck you” to the war is described here in the Post’s coverage:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…..01401.html

“The British have basically been defeated in the south,” a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad. They are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

Britain sent about 40,000 troops to Iraq — the second-largest contingent, after that of the United States, at the time of the March 2003 invasion — and focused its efforts on the south. With few problems from outside terrorists or sectarian violence, the British began withdrawing, and by early 2005 only 9,000 troops remained. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced further drawdowns early this year before leaving office.

The administration has been reluctant to publicly criticize the British withdrawal. But a British defense expert serving as a consultant in Baghdad acknowledged in an e-mail that the United States “has been very concerned for some time now about a) the lawless situation in Basra and b) the political and military impact of the British pullback.” The expert added that this “has been expressed at the highest levels” by the U.S. government to British authorities.

James @ 32, I work for a medical provider and often we will negotiate with patients who have a nonpar insurance. If you haven’t already, it is worth asking for a discount, lots of docs are willing to negotiate.

I used to discount all patients to “insurance” no insurance.. no charge. That is now against federal Law. I am not sure of the specifics now, but basically no Doctor can charge below Medi-Care rates or discount co-pays. A patient has to be sent a bill two or three time..there is no requirement that the patient has to pay or that the bill be sent to a collection agency.

OT – strange surfing news:

Surfing Childs Glacier’s tsunami on the Copper River in Alaska. Looks like the Darwin Awards competition has begun.

and, from Hawaii, a really cool story:

An 86-year-old Jewish surfing guru from Hawaii donated on Tuesday 12 surfboards to Gaza’s small surfing community, in a gesture he hoped would get Israelis and Palestinians catching the same peace wave.

Dynamite surfing