One of the amazing things about the Internet is the way people you barely know can affect your life. One of those guys was Captain (ret.) Carroll LeFon who blogged at the eponymous Neptunus Lex . Back in 2004, when the Iraq war was running hot and I was new to the idea of having actual people read what I’d written, Lex lent his help, good offices, and advice on any number of my war blogs. According to reports, Lex died when an Israeli-built Kfir fighter he was piloting crashed at NAS Fallon, NV. He was a major voice in the milblogger community whose good humor, level head, unfailing willingness to help, and amazing writing talent will be sorely missed. A better tribute than I could ever write can be found at the US Naval Institute .
View original post here:
Milblogger Neptunus Lex Killed In Plane Crash
On the main site, David Catron attempts to clear up what he considers conservative confusion about Medicare Part D. Catron calls Rick Santorum’s vote for the prescription drug benefit “a feature, not a bug” in the former senator’s free-market credentials, one that “bolsters” rather than undermines Santorum’s claim to be a fiscal conservative. Catron argues that the Medicare coverage of prescription drugs was so inevitable that by 2003 the Republicans’ only realistic options were to “(1) wait until the Democrats regained a congressional majority and pushed through a vote-buying scheme disguised as a drug benefit, or (2) beat them to the punch by enacting an alternative that introduced market reforms to an obsolescent entitlement program.” In passing Medicare Part D, however, Republicans actually chose a third option: they attached some market reforms to a vote-buying scheme. Conservatives who support or excuse Medicare Part D implicitly acknowledge the vote-buying aspect of the program when they attribute the GOP’s success in 2004 to the entitlement. You could nevertheless make the same argument for Romneycare, which Catron wisely opposes : a program passed once the Democrats regained the Massachusetts governorship would have been to Romneycare’s left. In fact, one could have made the same argument for Republicans passing a national Romneycare with a Stupak-like ban on abortion funding when it looked like Democrats were going to push for the public option if they retook the White House and Congress. For my money, the best course of action would have been for Republicans at both the state and federal level to have been more serious about free-market health care reform rather than punting on the issue as if it would never come up again after the defeat of Hillarycare. Originally the Bush administration and even some reform-minded Democrats like then-Sen. John Breaux wanted to offer prescription drug coverage to seniors who left traditional Medicare for private sector plans. Another option was a small, targeted benefit for low-income benefit for low-income seniors with high prescription drug costs. Instead what Congress passed and President Bush signed was an open-ended, non-means-tested program that was the biggest expansion of federal entitlements since Medicare itself. The political benefits of Medicare Part D are ambiguous. It should be noted that George W. Bush campaigned on a prescription drug benefit in 2000 and had not signed one into law when Republicans did well in the 2002 elections. Then in 2006, Republican supporters of the program like Santorum and Romney surrogate Jim Talent were thrown out the Senate at the voters’ first opportunity. I’m not suggesting that the electorate was responding favorably to Republican inaction on prescription drugs in 2002 and in a hostile manner to the program’s enactment in 2006; 9/11 and the Iraq war, respectively, obviously were the main issues. But whatever political benefits existed were clearly short-lived (the gratitude of the pharmaceutical industry to Republicans was equally short-lived ). What were not short-lived or ambiguous were the costs of Medicare Part D. Even with the savings produced by Medicare Advantage — a genuinely free-market, competition-based component of the prescription drug benefit — federal spending and Medicare’s unfunded liabilities are still greater than they were before the program passed. And while Medicare Advantage provides real-world examples for the competition-driven lowering of costs envisioned by Paul Ryan, it does not necessarily follow that Medicare Part D will result in Ryan-like reforms. The Democrats immediately tried to kill Medicare Advantage and use the prescription drug benefit to impose price controls, which for the time being remains as likely an outcome of Medicare Part D as further free-market Medicare reform. Some studies suggest that Medicare Part D’s net effect so far has to been to crowd out private sector prescription drug coverage and spending. In other words, the lack of a “proper funding mechanism” isn’t a small thing. It’s a big thing. Very few conservatives would consider a free-market reform of Medicare in general a success if it also increased the system’s unfunded liabilities by trillions of dollars and enlarged the federal role in health care. Neither should they so regard Medicare Part D as presently constituted.
Read this article:
Medicare Part D’s Bugs
Karma is a bitch. During the height of the Iraq war Syria allowed jihadists and weapons to flow into Iraq via its territory. Confirms an earlier report from U.S. intelligence. (Egyptian Independent) — Jihadists are moving from Iraq to Syria, as are weapons being sent to opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Iraq’s deputy interior
See the article here:
Iraqi Official Says Jihadists Moving Weapons And Fighters From Iraq To Syria…
U.S. officials have reportedly confirmed that deadly bombings in the Syrian cities of Damascus (in December and January) and Aleppo (Friday) were the work of al Qaeda in Iraq, whose members were acting with authorization from al Qaeda central head and Osama bin Laden successor Ayman al-Zawahiri. According to McClatchy : The Iraqi branch of al Qaida, seeking to exploit the bloody turmoil in Syria to reassert its potency, carried out two recent bombings in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and likely was behind suicide bombings Friday that killed at least 28 people in the largest city, Aleppo, U.S. officials told McClatchy. The officials cited U.S. intelligence reports on the incidents, which appear to verify Syrian President Bashar Assad’s charges of al Qaida involvement in the 11-month uprising against his rule. The Syrian opposition has claimed that Assad’s regime, which has responded with massive force against the uprising, staged the bombings to discredit the pro-democracy movement calling for his ouster. The international terrorist network’s presence in Syria also raises the possibility that Islamic extremists will try to hijack the uprising, which would seriously complicate efforts by the United States and its European and Arab partners to force Assad’s regime from power. On Friday, President Barack Obama repeated his call for Assad to step down, accusing his forces of “outrageous bloodshed.” The U.S. intelligence reports indicate that the bombings came on the orders of Ayman al Zawahiri, the Egyptian extremist who assumed leadership of al Qaida’s Pakistan-based central command after the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden. They suggest that Zawahiri still wields considerable influence over the network’s affiliates despite the losses the Pakistan-based core group has suffered from missile-firing CIA drones and other intensified U.S. counterterrorism operations. More will be said about this in the near future, and it remains unknown just how the U.S. government confirmed AQI’s involvement. However, the expansion of al Qaeda in Iraq beyond that state’s borders – evidently for the first time – demonstrates AQI’s strength in Iraq’s post-America phase. Despite years of hunting terror cells and individuals within AQI, the U.S. was not only unable to defeat the AQ franchise, but left it in good enough condition that it has now begun to carry out acts on an international (if still regional) scale. Along with a testament to AQI’s resilience, the three deadly attacks in Syria over the course of three months show the risk of assuming the makeup of the centers of protest or the active anti-regime population. The risk of al Qaeda and other criminals and terrorists having a presence among the Libyan opposition was intentionally ignored or glossed over during the NATO action there, and the ongoing fighting within that nation and the steady stream of weapons across its borders into neighboring countries in the weeks and months since NATO’s involvement ended demonstrate the problematic nature of that decision. As discussions about aiding the Syrian rebels in any number of ways (from arming them to intervening militarily on their behalf) continue, the likelihood that AQI is operating among the rebels (even without their approval) will need to be taken into very serious account. Finally, it is worth noting (even if only for its ironic value) that Assad played a role over the last near-decade in arming and supporting al Qaeda in Iraq. Additionally, counterterror analyst Leah Farrall notes that “the most recent place [al Qaeda] is known to have held a “summit” of leaders [circa 2004] was Damascus.” As with the rest of the developments in Syria, this will bear watching. However, the presence of an active AQI in revolutionary Syria should give all of us pause – particularly those calling for support of the rebels through such means as arms shipments, which have the distinct potential to put firepower in the wrong hands.
More here:
U.S. Officials: Al Qaeda in Iraq Behind Deadly Bombings in Damascus and Aleppo, Syria
Although I didn’t much care for Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , I should begin by giving it its due. The movie does a fantastic job of conveying what Britain looked, sounded, and even smelled like in 1973, which was the year I arrived there for what turned out to be a nearly 15-year stay spanning the transition from the Britain of the post-war era to the threshold of the post-Cool Britannia of today. The clothes, the cars, the general dinginess, and shabbiness of everything is captured perfectly, so far as I can see, in spite of the odd false note like having George Smiley (Gary Oldman) and an associate dining in a Wimpy Bar. Obviously, the Wimpy Bar has to be there in order to give us the full flavor of the period, but men of their class wouldn’t have been caught dead in one. Movies these days are generally pretty good at re-creating the material past, but this one is a reminder of the importance of also getting the moral and intellectual and spiritual past right as well, for it cannot be understood apart from that cultural context. In its case, that means the John le Carré novel of 1974 and the 1979 BBC television adaptation of it starring Alec Guinness as well as the history of the Cold War on which both purport to be a distinctive gloss. Unlike Mr. Alfredson’s previous film, Let the Right One In , which was a completely original take on the vampire legend, Tinker Tailor places itself squarely in the middle of the now well-established tradition of cultural customs and concepts with which it deals — partly, perhaps, in order to suggest a continuity between that tradition and current political realities with which it would otherwise seem to have little in common. In other words, now not only Cold War spies but spies in general are seen as inhabiting that famously “twilit” world invented by Mr. le Carré to express his own conviction of moral ambiguity and, in consequence, a near moral equivalence between Communist slave states and what used to be called “the West.” That this is an important preface to any discussion of Mr. Afredson’s movie is suggested by the unconsciously hilarious remark of Manohla Dargis , a reviewer for the New York Times , that ” Tinker, Tailor is set against a geopolitical (and movie) moment that is almost quaintly, reassuringly old-fashioned, a time when enemy agents had names like Boris, and a red flag with a hammer and sickle made the ideological and political stakes clear.” She is of course not alone in conveniently forgetting how very unclear the ideological and political stakes were to so many of her fellow lefties at the time, not excluding Mr. le Carré himself. But he, at least, has always been admirably consistent in preferring moral muddle to clarity — except, that is, when it comes to his implacable anti-Americanism. Fortunately, the economics of the movie business and the need for the film to make enough cis-Atlantic money to repay its production costs require that there should be no more than hints of Mr. le Carré’s views of the United States in this version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy . Anyway, I imagine he would agree with the editorialist for the Guardian
