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Three militants gunned down in Sopore encounter
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Page 4: Opinion
10 16:37 Procopius2k [4] 
3 11:23 Ebbang Uluque6305 [1] 
6 21:10 junkiron [1] 
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1 02:37 g(r)omgoru [1] 
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Page 1: WoT Operations
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Page 2: WoT Background
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3 22:50 USN, Ret. [7]
3 17:36 Shipman [7]
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3 23:23 Skidmark [4]
5 21:20 Secret Asian Man [3]
3 17:08 M. Murcek [3]
2 18:06 DarthVader [3]
3 21:43 JosephMendiola [9]
2 19:15 Bill Clinton [5]
4 22:58 USN, Ret. [8]
2 14:56 Uncle Phester [6]
1 08:30 Procopius2k [2]
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12 18:23 junkiron [8]
1 19:44 JosephMendiola [6]
2 16:57 Dopey Sinatra [3]
Home Front: Politix
Who Will Obama Blame For His Failed Iran Policy? The Jews, Of Course
[AmThinker]
Posted by: trailing wife || 01/14/2014 04:20 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I'm not sure who he'll blame, but it damn well won't be himself or any of his regime.
Posted by: Besoeker || 01/14/2014 6:04 Comments || Top||

#2  Blaming others is his modus operandi.
Posted by: JohnQC || 01/14/2014 10:03 Comments || Top||

#3  Likely he'll be out of office by the time the chickens come home to roost. But then, I think this deal he's making is on Bush. Bush should have bombed the bastards. He should have known that Obama wouldn't.
Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 || 01/14/2014 11:23 Comments || Top||


Beware the left-wing-funded "Main Street" Republicans
Moved to Opinion
Posted by: Grinetle Whaling2905 || 01/14/2014 01:12 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  When fiscal and social conservatives realize that neither can have what they want unless the other gets most of what THEY want, they win elections.

Otherwise, not.
Posted by: no mo uro || 01/14/2014 5:45 Comments || Top||

#2  I call them "Tame Republicans". Domesticated. No danger whatsoever to Democrats, the Left or big government. The sort of people who, when we controlled the Presidency, both houses of Congress and had a working majority on the Supreme Court decided to use that mandate to ban light bulbs. The folks who assured us that Dole, McCain and Romney were "electable".

Well, I have no use for them. One Ted Cruz is worth more than 20 John McCains. I will personally never vote for a Tame Republican again. Not in any race or against any opponent.
Posted by: Iblis || 01/14/2014 8:42 Comments || Top||

#3  Den of snakes.
Posted by: JohnQC || 01/14/2014 10:09 Comments || Top||

#4  When will they learn, the dems are NOT your friends.

Feds investigate NJ hurricane relief funding.
Posted by: Besoeker || 01/14/2014 10:22 Comments || Top||

#5  The Donks are trying to level the playing field early.
Posted by: JohnQC || 01/14/2014 15:50 Comments || Top||

#6  The one, and maybe the only, (but necessary), positive outcome of the Ted Cruz orchestrated government shutdown, was that it very effectively separated the RINO's from the true conservatives in the Republican party.

Of course the myopic, low info, (and left wing media saturated voter), neither sees nor understands the separation of ideology between the various political parties that played out during the shutdown.

Michelle Malkin once again provides troubling insight into what has apparently became a driving force behind the "Main Street" Republicans over at least the past eight years.

Disparaging comments issued by Mitch McConnell and the recent repudiation of "conservative think tanks" by John Boehner were heralded as music to ears of "old school" conservatives.

But it is obvious from posts on the left wing media outlets and social media that no one enjoyed that music more than left wing liberals.

There is nothing today that liberals fear more than the Tea Party Movement.

Old school Republicans today are just that... Too old to learn and their school's been out for a while.

But the Democrats are no better. The Republicans have a fine stable of rising new political stars compared to the Democrats upcoming political bench that looks pretty bleak.

I am only mildly in favor of most methods employed by the Tea Party and Ted Cruz.

But for me the shutdown was a defining moment. Never again will I ever support or vote for any republican who voted along with the democrats or sided along with Obama during the shutdown. Almost all of which, according to Michelle Malkin, have received political funding from left wing LaTourette affiliated organizations.
Posted by: junkiron || 01/14/2014 21:10 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
Who Is Behind The "Close-Gitmo" Push?
In short, the other red-green alliance: Communists and jihadis, each quite certain it is the senior partner.
[FoxNews] The key players:

Amnesia Amnesty International. Along with Human Rights Watch
... dedicated to bitching about human rights violations around the world...
, Amnesia Amnesty International was revealed as partner organization to Al Karama, a human rights
...not to be confused with individual rights, mind you...
non-profit run by Qatar's Abdul Rahman Omeir Al-Naimi.

Al-Naimi was recently exposed by the U.S. Treasury Department in December 2013 as a long-term major financier of Al Qaeda. According to an expose by Eli Lake in the Daily Beast, "Terrorists for Human Rights," the Treasury Department's designation said he, "oversaw the transfer of hundreds of thousands of dollars to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen over the last 11 years."

Center for Constitutional Rights. CCR was founded by far-left civil rights lawyer William Kunstler in the 1960s, a man who told the press his goal was to "destroy society from within."

Kunstler represented the "Chicago 7," a group that was charged with conspiracy to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and later he defended domestic bad boy/terror groups like the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, and Attica Prison Rioters.

CCR is currently funded by groups like the "1848 Foundation," named after the year Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto was published and revolutions swept through Europe.

Kunstler would be proud of CCR's signature work over the past decade in coordinating the "Gitmo Bar Association" of 500 lawyers representing detainees.

Reprieve. A British organization led by blogger Andy Worthington, it pressures release of British citizens and residents. Æthiopia's Binyam Mohammed, a British resident, allegedly plotted to blow up high rise apartment buildings in the U.S. with a dirty bomb; Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul, a.k.a., the Tipton Three, ethnic Paks went to fight for jihad in Afghanistan but were caught by the Northern Alliance in Nov. 2001; and Shaker Aamer, a Saudi citizen with British residence, alleged to have led a unit of Al Qaeda gunnies in Tora Bora, and reportedly a former close associate of Osama Bin Laden, shoe-bomber Richard Reid and 20th hijacker, Zacharias Moussaoui.
So, pro-Brit, a good thing. But brainlessly undiscriminating, which is not at all a compliment.
World Can't Wait. This organization is believed to have been founded by members and supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Party & Anarchists. It organized at least 24,000 supporters during Iraq War, including actor Sean Penn and anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan.

Jason Leopold. Leopold is a former Los Angeles Times investigative journalist with a checkered past. According to Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz, writing in a 2005 Washington Post feature, "Leopold says he engaged in 'lying, cheating and backstabbing,' is a former cocaine addict, served time for grand larceny, repeatedly tried to kill himself and has battled mental illness his whole life."
Posted by: trailing wife || 01/14/2014 00:00 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Fair is fair.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 01/14/2014 2:37 Comments || Top||


India-Pakistan
All recognise valour of Hangu hero but PTI govt
[DAWN] The 15-year-old Aitezaz Hassan Bangash is a hero. He laid his life on January 6 to save his Hangu schoolmates from falling victim to the devil designs of a jacket wallah.

Young Hassan did something that most of us, perhaps, would not even dare think about when a situation warrants. His parallel to none sacrifice is being eulogised by all except for some.

Foreign and local media has covered his valour with professional aplomb. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred || 01/14/2014 00:00 || Comments || Link || [7 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan


Ambivalent on militancy
[DAWN] THE attacks keep mounting, the state keeps dithering, the politicians keep squabbling and the public remains as confused as ever. Yesterday's attack on PML-N leader Amir Muqam in Shangla is just the latest in a seemingly endless stream of attacks across the length and breadth of the country -- and destined to become yet another attack that did not cause an inflection point in the national response to militancy and terrorism. Witness the pusillanimous response of the political class to the bravery of 15-year-old Aitezaz Hussain -- so much so that Imran Khan
... aka Taliban Khan, who is the lightweight's lightweight...
himself has voiced his disappointment at his own party's government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa
... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central...
. And while the prime minister and the army chief have shown some moral courage in recognising the ultimate sacrifice and unimaginable bravery of young Aitezaz Hussain, a more fitting response would be if the state finally developed some clarity on what the Taliban represent and why coexistence with their ideology ought to be unacceptable.

Yet, real change -- of the good kind -- is nowhere to be seen. So the questions have necessarily become grimmer too. What, exactly, will it take for the state to accept that the dialogue-first option is not a real strategy against militancy? A return to the devastating violence that wracked the country in the late 2000s and early 2010s? While the Taliban have proven they still have the ability to launch physically and psychologically devastating attacks, it is also almost certainly true that the sustained pressure put on them in various pockets across Fata and parts of KP by the military has affected their ability to achieve the level of violence of four or five years ago. Paradoxically, then, does a possible depletion of the Taliban's capabilities -- or at least a disruption of their network -- mean that the state is willing to settle for a long-term bloody stalemate now? A stalemate in which neither side is poised to inflict the final blow on the other and one in which society, the economy and national psyche are left in a continually perilous state?

To denounce that possibility as craven surrender or supine leadership would be to miss the point. While those characterisations may well be true, the point at this stage really is to try and understand how a different course can be encouraged. Imran Khan and the religious right have staked out their positions. The PPP, the ANP and the MQM -- essentially the secular left -- showed their lack of ideas over five years. Now, the PML-N appears sympathetic to the idea of dialogue without necessarily being enthusiastic about it. The army appears itching to take on the TTP, but continues to be ambivalent about the idea of jihad and proxies. Somehow, from those variables, a more effective policy against militancy has to be crafted. But from where exactly is the existential question of today.
Posted by: Fred || 01/14/2014 00:00 || Comments || Link || [7 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan


Southeast Asia
Allah: The word that's pulling Malaysia apart
Posted by: ryuge || 01/14/2014 00:00 || Comments || Link || [3 views] Top|| File under:

#1  As a student of ancient history, I can say with absolute certainty that Christians in Arabia were using "Allah" to describe God hundreds of years before Mohammed was born. If the Islamists want to argue that only one religion should be able the word Allah, then Christianity has ownership by original ownership.
Posted by: Frozen Al || 01/14/2014 12:40 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Culture Wars
Government of the Rich, by the Rich and for the Rich
h/t Gates of Vienna
We now live in a two-tiered system of governance. There are two sets of laws: one set for the government and its corporate allies, and another set for you and me.

The laws which apply to the majority of the population allow the government to do things like sending SWAT teams crashing through your door in the middle of the night, rectally probing you during a roadside stop, or listening in on your phone calls and reading all of your email messages, confiscating your property, or indefinitely detaining you in a military holding cell. These are the laws which are executed every single day against a population which has up until now been blissfully ignorant of the radical shift taking place in American government.

Then there are the laws constructed for the elite, which allow bankers who crash the economy to walk free. They’re the laws which allow police officers to avoid prosecution when they shoot unarmed citizens, strip search non-violent criminals, or taser pregnant women on the side of the road, or pepper spray peaceful protestors.
The lord's armsmen
These are the laws of the new age we are entering, an age of neo-feudalism, in which corporate-state rulers dominate the rest of us, where the elite create the laws which can result in a person being jailed for possessing a small amount of marijuana while bankers that launder money for drug cartels walk free. In other words, we have moved into an age where we are the slaves and they are the rulers.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 01/14/2014 05:37 || Comments || Link || [4 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I would ay Governemnt of the Ledt, by the Lest, for the Left.
Posted by: JFM || 01/14/2014 5:46 Comments || Top||

#2  Actually the weeds of a two-tiered system have historically sprouted. They've become prolific however as we massively enlarged the garden, stopped hoeing, and began referring to the weeds as flowers. I can still recognize the corn, but the turnips, carrots, and lettuce are no longer visible. Not much left to do but plow it all under and begin anew, or give up on gardening altogether.
Posted by: Besoeker || 01/14/2014 6:02 Comments || Top||

#3  It's all exasperated by the game that the Donks/Lefties play in which they demonize the rich, as in stealing as much money from the rich in their rhetoric and acts, to play the useful idiots in the lower tier of the economic population in the vote/power game. The rich, to protect themselves and as much as their assets as possible, turn to buying politicians. Thus, corrupt crony capitalism that is so much in favor in the Beltway.

Really, a government and society that is largely middle class, and thus largely self sufficient, doesn't really need a lot of government. However, a society that talks and spends an inordinate amount of time on the lower 15% seems to grow government exponentially, never acknowledging that poverty has as much of its foundation in human free will as to circumstances.

Do not covet
Do not bear false witness
Do not steal

- have been forgotten in practice, but their opposites have become the norm of political practice. In that process the rich have engaged in corrupting the system in self defense. It's the middle class that will in the end pay the price.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 01/14/2014 8:28 Comments || Top||

#4  The Chamber of Commerce is now pushing for cheaper imported labor which hammers the middle class. The left sees unbridled immigration as reinforcements to their brand of socialism rampant in the third world. The clear result will be greatly reduced living standards for all.

Rewind back to the 1930's.

Bonnie and Clyde gang who as young people crossed the line of immorality by stealing as an immoral response to what affected them, white poverty during the Great Depression. Incarcerated as teens in a brutal prison system upon release responded by killing numerous law enforcement officers one of the symbols of the hated Government, Main Street repressive element and other innocents in the young gangs subsequent crime sprees. First sympathized by many in the crisis riddled general public of the 1930's until their crimes spiraled too far out of hand.

This new dangerous socialist experiment continues its sordid problem riddled journey which started in 2009 has to be addressed for what it is, an immoral cancer attacking a free nation of people that, as Dr. Ben Carson has said, "... is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery," as he was addressing a messy component of the Socialization of America's renowned healthcare sector, Obamacare.

Call your reps, give them grief after grief if they are the problem, or get them off their asses if they claim they are in your corner. So far there has been no remorse, no sign of any retreat, just continued problem riddled evolution towards bigger and bigger problems without hesitation by the people of this dangerous socialist movement.
Posted by: Omavising Ebbemp9815 || 01/14/2014 9:58 Comments || Top||

#5  I don't mind so much if the Congress members made their money before they came to Congress. What ticks me off are the ones who became millionaires after they came to Congress by exempting themselves from the laws they pass and by obtaining/creating insider information. What ticks me off also are the ones who hang around Washington after leaving office (if they ever do) and becoming consultants or lobbyists--basically influence peddlers for money.
Posted by: JohnQC || 01/14/2014 10:00 Comments || Top||

#6  Getting rich while a government employee is a pretty good sign of corruption. Seems to be the status-quo with congress.
Posted by: CrazyFool || 01/14/2014 10:50 Comments || Top||

#7  I am reminded of the assessment of how much of their productive effort (labor) serfs were obliged to give their leige lords each year. Since their efforts were mostly agriculture, their tax obligations were in kind, not cash. Still, 1/3 seems to have been the consensus. In total, federal, state and local, taxes and fees for the productive half of America seemed to have passed that point. Hayek's road to serfdom seems very real......
Posted by: NoMoreBS || 01/14/2014 13:10 Comments || Top||

#8  When people spend millions of dollars to get a six figure annual income position, there may be an additional chapter in the book.
Posted by: Besoeker || 01/14/2014 13:18 Comments || Top||

#9  Indeed Besoeker, it's got to be a worthwhile endeavor or why do it?
Posted by: JohnQC || 01/14/2014 15:48 Comments || Top||

#10  ..except its usually not millions of their own dollars spent in the process. Which is why, all candidate funds unspent 90 days after the election should be forfeited to the Treasury. No carry over.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 01/14/2014 16:37 Comments || Top||



Who's in the News
31[untagged]
5Govt of Iran
4Govt of Pakistan
3al-Shabaab
2Hamas
2Ansar al-Sharia
2Commies
2Islamic State of Iraq & the Levant
1Arab Spring
1Abdullah Azzam Brigades
1Hezbollah
1Hizb-i-Islami-Hekmatyar
1Hizb-ut-Tahrir
1TTP
1PLO
1Salafists
1Seleka
1Govt of Iraq

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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
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Meet the Mods
In no particular order...
Steve White
Seafarious
tu3031
badanov
sherry
ryuge
GolfBravoUSMC
Bright Pebbles
trailing wife
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Two weeks of WOT
Tue 2014-01-14
  Three militants gunned down in Sopore encounter
Mon 2014-01-13
  Iran, world powers agree to nuclear deal terms
Sun 2014-01-12
  Djotodia seeks exile in Benin
Sat 2014-01-11
  Tribes, Police Retake Parts of Iraq's Ramadi
Fri 2014-01-10
  At Least 45 Syrian Rebels Killed in Homs Regime Ambush
Thu 2014-01-09
  'Prisoners Executed by Jihadists' in Syria's Aleppo
Wed 2014-01-08
  34 jihadists dead after rebel clashes in Syria's Idlib
Tue 2014-01-07
  10-Year Old Girl With Suicide Vest Detained in Helmand
Mon 2014-01-06
  ISIL Jihadists Kill at Least 50 Rebels in North Syria
Sun 2014-01-05
  Fallujah residents flee, fearing major battle
Sat 2014-01-04
  Majid al-Majid pegs out in custody
Fri 2014-01-03
  Qaeda militants control parts of Iraq
Thu 2014-01-02
  Syria misses United Nations deadline
Wed 2014-01-01
  Leb Army Arrests Abdullah Azzam Brigades Chief
Tue 2013-12-31
  Shamsher Mobin and 250 others arrested


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