Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

The operation will involve about 4,000 troops from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which was dispatched to Afghanistan this year by President Obama to combat a growing Taliban insurgency in Helmand and other southern provinces. The Marines, along with an Army brigade that is scheduled to arrive later this summer, plan to push into pockets of the country where NATO forces have not had a presence. In many of those areas, the Taliban has evicted local police and government officials and taken power.

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of mounting a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

The enemy hasn’t got a chance - as long as the political leadership in DC sustains our Marines and soldiers.

Americans lucky enough to still have a job are noticing something unpleasant in their paychecks: They’re making less money.

Employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, far more than expected, and the jobless rate hit a 26-year high of 9.5 percent. Just as worrisome, wages shrank to their lowest in nearly a year.

The bleak news Thursday from the Labor Department underscored one of the big threats to an economic turnaround: Rising joblessness and falling wages for those still working could send Americans back into spending hibernation and short-circuit any recovery.

What is really short-circuiting recovery is the fact that Obama is leeching every dollar he can out of the private economy and spreading it around to favored, liberal special interest groups…said groups never being noted for their contributions to GDP. Be that as it may, we’re in quite a pickle…and remember, back in 1983, that was the peak before Reagan’s economic policies cause the largest recovery in history…we’re not even to the bottom of Obamunism yet, and we can’t get anyone Reagan-like this side of 2013.

UPDATE: Unemployment? In effect, its official government policy.

Back in the majority, Democrats have not only gone back to their globe-trotting ways, they are traveling at the taxpayers’ expense this time.

Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That’s a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as “codels,” has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.

Truth be told, Republicans are taking these trips, too. But, it was these kind of trips, though funded by lobbyists and non-profits, that had Democrats either crying foul at Republicans for taking part in them, or excusing their own trips, saying “At least it isn’t the taxpayers paying for the trips.”

The storm they caused starting in 2005 ultimately lead to Mark and I writing Caucus of Corruption. That said, this newfound acceptance of travel on our dime wasn’t unexpected.  The question is, why, after Democrats said they’d conduct themselves more openly, honestly, and ethically, have actually done the opposite. I think we all know why.

Discuss this and anything else you’ve a mind to.

…the Faith and the use of the intelligence are inextricably bound up. The use of reason is a main part - or rather the foundation - of all inquiry into the highest things. It was precisely because reason was given this divine authority that the Church proclaimed mystery - that is, admitted reason to have its limits. It had to be so, lest the absolute powers ascribed to reason should lead to the exclusion of truths which the reason might accept but could not demonstrate. Reason was limited by mystery only more to enhance the sovereignty of reason in its own sphere.

When reason is dethroned, not only is Faith dethroned (the two subversions go together) but every moral and legitimate activity of the human soul is dethroned at the same time. There is no God. So the words “God is Truth” which the mind of Christian Europe used as a postulate in all it did, cease to have meaning. None can analyse the rightful authority of government nor set bounds to it. In the absence of reason, political authority reposing on mere force is boundless. And reason is thus made a victim because Humanity itself is what the Modern Attack is destroying in its false religion of humanity. Reason being the crown of man and at the same time his distinguishing mark, the Anarchs march against reason as their principle enemy. - Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies

California’s top accountant said the state would begin issuing IOUs to hundreds of thousands of creditors after lawmakers failed to meet its deadline this week to close a massive budget deficit.

California Controller John Chiang said Wednesday he planned to send out $3.4 billion of IOUs in July to state contractors and local governments, as well as to residents expecting income-tax refunds, welfare grants and college scholarships…

…Mr. Chiang said without IOUs, the state would run out of cash by the end of July. “It’s our last official step prior to defaulting,” he said. Mr. Chiang delayed similar payments in February because of another cash-flow emergency, but didn’t issue IOUs at that time.

Legislators have been deadlocked for more than a month on ways to close what is now a $26 billion deficit in a $92 billion general-fund budget. Late-night sessions failed to produce a compromise.

Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed deep cuts and some so-called revenue accelerations, which would include larger income-tax withholding. Democrats, who control the Legislature, countered with a $21 billion proposal that includes $11 billion of cuts and relies more heavily on accounting gimmicks and one-time fixes. Republican lawmakers on Tuesday rejected the latest Democratic plan, which Mr. Schwarzenegger said he would veto anyway. (emphasis added)

Gimmicks! The California economy is collapsing under an avalanche of tax and spend liberalism, and the liberals want to use sleight of hand to get out of it…knowing that it will only put off the day of reckoning to next July. Perhaps they hope the economy will recover, or Santa ‘Bama will come down the chimney with a hundred billion dollars of taxpayer goodies…more likely, they are just afraid and simply want to get to the next day without having to expose themselves to an unpopular vote.

This is what you want for us, liberals? This is your State - GOPers have only slight influence, and have had only slight influence for the past decade in California…and conservatism has had no influence at all (except at the ballot boxes when referenda come up for a vote, and even then, sometimes, it doesn’t come through). This should be a paradise - a place of education and health care for all, no more crime, no more pollution, steady “sustainable” growth, racial harmony…where is it, liberals? To use an old phrase, “where’s the beef”? If you can’t do it with 30 million people, why should we believe you that you can do it with 300 million?

A Puerto Rican civil rights organization advised by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor campaigned against seating conservative Robert Bork on the high court in the late 1980s, according to new documents that shed light on the group that’s become a key focus of Republicans questioning Sotomayor’s fitness to be a justice.

The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund officially opposed GOP nominee Bork in 1987, “because of the threat he poses to the civil rights of the Latino community,” its president reported in one of several documents from the group that the Senate Judiciary Committee released Wednesday. The 350-plus pages of material offer little evidence about Sotomayor’s role in the cases and causes the organization, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF, took up while she served on its board from 1980 until 1992.

So, she’s part of a group which slandered Judge Bork over his views, and now she wants to be on the Supreme Court? I don’t think so.

Of course, she’ll get confirmed - the questions are rising and its clear that Sotomayor is unfit to be a Justice, but Democrats will not want to hand Obama a defeat like this early on and the GOP can’t even slow things down, even if we wanted to “do a Democrat” and try for a filibuster…we simply lack the votes.

But we can hang this vote on vulnerable Democrats - she’s someone who has un-American views about justice and who thinks race more important than truth…for some moderate Democrats, this vote will be hard to explain to the folks back home.

Uh, governor - Pound sand. Get lost. Hit the road - the sooner you’re out of politics, the better.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised that he would “reboot America’s image” around the world. Indeed, many Americans who voted for Obama believed that his global popularity would somehow reverse the tide of anti-Americanism that so vexed his predecessor. Echoing this sentiment of Obama as savior of America’s image abroad, presidential advisor David Axelrod recently asserted that “anti-Americanism isn’t cool anymore.”

In Europe, where anti-Americanism was elevated to the status of a religion during the presidency of George W. Bush, the “chattering classes” have, by and large, toned down their criticism of the United States since Obama was elected. In general, European media coverage of Obama has been quite favorable and the vehemence of the anti-American rhetoric has been notably more muted than in recent years. But now, five months into the age of Obama, the highly vaunted transatlantic honeymoon may be coming to an end. During the past several weeks, European media have started publishing stories that criticize Obama and once again cast the United States in a negative light. Could this be a harbinger of things to come?

The linked article goes on to note the increasing stream of anti-Obama and/or anti-American articles pouring out of the European MSM - some of these articles I’ve seen, and what I catch from them is a sense of betrayal: the EU-niks were hoping, I guess, that Obama would immediately make us just like them and, perhaps, haul President Bush before a war crimes tribunal. Of course, we here at home view Obama increasingly as an Euro-weenie trying to out yellow-belly the most cowardly people in the world - but for the Europeans, its always been a choice: deal with Europe’s glaring failures, or condemn the United States for errors real and imagined. Almost invariably, the choice has come down to condemning the United States.

And, once again, it is because of what we are, not what we do. Obama is doing plenty to please even the most kooky Euro-leftist, and its not enough….because America is still America: still more powerful than any other nation, still richer than any other nation, still more dynamic than any other nation, still more free than any other nation. Deep in their heart of hearts, I think, they realize that we’ll transcend Obamunism in the by and by and we’ll once more be surging ahead while Europe tries to balance the need for workers with the worry about eventual Islamist beheadings. They really, really want to be on top of the world, and they can’t stand the fact that they’re not, and never will be. This resentment is now being turned on Obama.

All of this just illustrates that America can never set its policy based upon concern for what people think of us. It really doesn’t matter what we do - those who are enslaved to lies will hate us, come what may. Much better, than, to just do the right thing and realize that in the long run, these chatterers will be forgotten while the man who did the right thing will live on in memory for ages to come.