From the Guardian:

Barack Obama is set to reject the advice of the Pentagon by announcing on Wednesday night the withdrawal of up to 30,000 troops from Afghanistan by November next year, in time for the US presidential election.

The move comes despite warnings from his military commanders that recent security gains are fragile. They have been urging him to keep troop numbers high until 2013.

The accelerated drawdown will dismay American and British commanders in Kabul, who have privately expressed concern that the White House is now being driven by political rather than military imperatives.

“This is not something we feel entirely comfortable with,” a Whitehall official told the Guardian…

From what I’ve been reading, we have been gaining ground in Afghanistan but it is, indeed, fragile at the moment – that we’re just turning the corner and there is still very much to do before we can secure a peace which leaves in place some sort of decent regime which poses no threat to the United States. It could be that even after a draw down that our military forces will be able to keep up the momentum – but there is always the risk that we’ll lack sufficient forces to deal with the situation and the enemy will gain the upper hand.

But Obama needs to throw a bone to his anti-war left – they voted for him because he was supposed to end all of the Bush Administration efforts; thus far, Obama has batted zero in this. In order to keep the anti-war people from following some third party effort, Obama needs to show them that he’s still with them…a serious draw down of forces in Afghanistan would help Obama in this area. And what this means is that for personal, political motives, Obama might be getting ready to throw away everything we’ve fought for in Afghanistan.

From the AP:

Fewer people bought previously occupied homes in May, lowering sales to their weakest point of the year.

Home sales sank 3.8 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million homes, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday. That’s far below the roughly 6 million annual sales rate typical in healthy housing markets…

Except in a few markets, I wouldn’t buy a home right now if you put a gun to my head. While the boosters are saying, for the nth time, that we’ve now reached the bottom, I don’t see it. I figure there is at least another 20% on the downside for home prices, and probably more in the worst hit areas. We won’t hit bottom until unemployment goes down – and even when that happens, there will be little or no upside to prices because there are (a) too many houses and (b) ever fewer people in the housing market as boomers retire and start to die off.

The long term good news here is that housing will remain affordable for quite some time – this will help those who are just starting out. The bad news is that all those people over the past 20-30 years who counted on their house as a retirement nest egg are out of luck.

From the Wall Street Journal:

…In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl. By Ms. Hvistendahl’s counting, there have been so many sex-selective abortions in the past three decades that 163 million girls, who by biological averages should have been born, are missing from the world…

Do you want to see catastrophe coming right at you? Do you want some proof that tampering with life via abortion causes horrendous problems? Do you want to know why the Culture of Death – hiding behind “choice” – is an unmitigated evil? Well, here it is…all of the talk of abortion before it was legalized was predicated upon how it would help liberate women but it is, instead, ended up in the mass murder of women…and a global imbalance between men and women which absolutely dooms us to rapid demographic decline, with all the societal disruption that will bring. This whole thing is the same as if over the past 40 years we had led out 78,000 women a week and shot them.

Don’t talk to me about “life of the mother” when 163 million mothers have been deliberately and with malice aforethought murdered by the Culture of Death. Abortion is an absolute evil and must be banned – and only when we do so, worldwide, will any of us have the genuine right to be called civilized.

http://cdn.livestream.com/embed/jon2012?layout=4&autoplay=false

AWR Hawkins offers a suggestion:

…My point is not simply that Obama is out of touch and beatable, but that he is way out of touch and extremely beatable. Not, of course, by some moderate Republican, but by a conservative Republican: and particularly by Sarah Palin…

Hawkins ends his piece by going even further – asserting we need to start working on President Palin’s 2016 re-election bid. Now that is showing some guts in making a call. But, is he right?

In the sense that the GOP had better nominate a fighter, he certainly is. Perhaps Sarah Palin won’t be the person to lead us to victory – but if it isn’t her, it will have to be someone with her fire, energy and courage. If we nominate someone who is “electable” as defined by the MSM and the Ruling Class, then we will lose – and this is even if unemployment is at 15%. Remember, Obama is going to smear anyone the GOP nominates…a RINO will wilt under that assault and try to get Obama to like him; a Palin will just hand it right back to them, and pile on a bit more, in to the bargain.

Only the most vigorous and fearless campaign will bring us victory in 2012 – we have to get down in to the trenches, knock them over and then kick them when they’re down. Because that is the way they are going after us – if we don’t answer blow for blow, we’ll lose.

Palin, or someone like her – that is what we need in 2012.

Another blow to Obama’s dishonest “we aren’t fighting a war” in Libya assertion – from Post Politics:

The Defense Department decided in April to pay an extra $225 a month in “imminent danger pay” to service members who fly planes over Libya or serve on ships within 110 nautical miles of its shores.

That means the Pentagon has decided that troops in those places are “subject to the threat of physical harm or imminent danger because of civil insurrection, civil war, terrorism or wartime conditions.” There are no U.S. ground troops in Libya.

President Obama declared last week that the three-month-old Libyan campaign should not be considered “hostilities.” That word is important, because it’s used in the 1973 War Powers Resolution: Presidents must obtain congressional authorization within a certain period after sending U.S. forces “into hostilities.”…

In a nation of laws and courage, it would now be quite clear: Obama must get Congressional authorization or Congress must move articles of impeachment. Of course, we’ll likely get neither…there being little respect for law and not much courage in the American government these days.

The natural reaction to all this is to shrug it off but we really must not do that. A republic can only exist as long as the citizens feel themselves bound by laws of their own making. Just as soon as the citizens feel otherwise, dictatorship follows almost immediately. Ancient Rome was thick with laws prohibiting what Pompey and Caesar did – but by the time those two came along the laws had been so routinely violated (often to the applause of the people) that it was the most trivial of affairs for them to fight for mastery with only war as an arbiter of who won. If we let this sort of thing go on – this setting aside and/or making up of laws – by our politicians, there will eventually rise a complete disrespect of law, and then a dictator to rule a people no longer capable of ruling themselves.

Remember: I am in favor of intervention in Libya. I’m not saying this out of routine opposition to Obama. By intervening Obama, for once, did something he should have done (though he did it very badly). But Obama must obey the law – even a law as badly written as the War Powers Act (which was really written for no other purpose than to ensure that South Vietnam would be defeated). Laws can be stupid. Laws can be out of date. Laws can make things worse. A great deal of latitude is given to common sense in applying the laws. But as long as they are laws, they must be obeyed – only when they are properly, constitutionally altered or abolished can they be set aside.

I can’t emphasize enough how crucial this is to our future as a free people. Here is where we must draw the line. This is as clear a case as there can be. There is a law prohibiting the President from engaging in war beyond a date certain without Congressional approval. That date has passed – the War in Libya must end, or it must obtain Congressional approval. To do anything else puts at risk all that patriots have fought and died for.

We report, you decide:

Dovetailing neatly with my initial thoughts on the matter, Bob Owens over at Pajamas Media takes note of the disturbing truth about “Gunwalker”:

…ATF agents testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee could not explain how the operation was supposed to succeed when their surveillance efforts stopped at the border and interdiction was never an option.

ATF Agent John Dodson, testifying in front of the committee, said that in his entire law enforcement career, he had “never been involved in or even heard of an operation in which law enforcement officers let guns walk.” He continued: “I cannot begin to think of how the risk of letting guns fall into the hands of known criminals could possibly advance any legitimate law enforcement interest.”

The obvious answer is that Gunwalker’s objective was never intended to be a “legitimate law enforcement interest.” Instead, it appears that ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and Department of Justice senior executives specifically created an operation that was designed from the outset to arm Mexican narco-terrorists and increase violence substantially along both sides of the Southwest border…

When you put this together with the oft-repeated lie by the Obama Administration that a large portion of the cartel’s weapons are legally purchased in the United States, you can easily start putting two and two together – send weapons from the US to Mexico, wait for the mayhem, claim that the mayhem requires stricter gun control. As the official story that this was designed to provide traceable weapons to the cartels is clearly idiotic, I can only work on the assumption that the backdoor to gun control was the real purpose.

Of course, the only way to find out for sure is to thoroughly investigate – something which can’t be done as long as the Obama Administration continues to stonewall. We might not get to the full truth about this matter until after Obama is out of office.

2012 really can’t get here fast enough…

Very interesting result from Pew:

While the overall shift is notable, it is not surprising. After 10 years of intense, overseas military campaigns, the American people are weary of it. What is most remarkable to me is the similarity in both the conservative and liberal viewpoint – 55% of conservative Republicans and 57% of liberal Democrats would prefer a less robust US role overseas. It must be presumed that both sides are working it from different angles – liberals out of general (and immoral) pacifism while conservatives because of a wariness of the ability of the American people to sustain a drawn-out operation.

That is pretty much my view. In hindsight, we went about it with several fatal errors over the past 10 years. If there is one lesson of war to be learned it is that you must go to the heart of the problem. If we are to fight, we must fight all the enemies, all at once. In the aftermath of 9/11, President Bush should have made the case for and requested a declaration of war upon all the terror-sponsoring States. To leave even one of them out of the immediate equation is to provide a safe-haven for the terrorists – a place where they can build, plan and launch their attacks from. Because we left the Islamists safe havens, the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven costly and grueling. We’ve been fighting for ten years – five or less would have proved sufficient had we gone after the whole problem. Clearly, as long as Iran and Syria are untouched by American power, the terrorism of Islamists will never be defeated.

Additionally, if we fight it must be all out – any nation which is deemed an enemy must be given a choice between surrender and destruction. No two ways about it, no softening of the blow – the entire force of American power to be directed relentlessly until they are utterly destroyed, or surrender unconditionally. In the long run, it is mercy in war to hit with the hardest possible blows – the immediate destruction is worse, but the long run loss (for ourselves as well as the enemy) is less.

We live and we learn. But this lesson, I think, will not be fully digested until the terrorists manage another horrific attack upon us. It is to be hoped that our military and security forces are sufficient to the task of forever thwarting such an event, but it is unlikely we’ll prevail like that. We have to do it perfectly every time, they only have to get it right once. America is entering another period of isolationism, I believe – partially as a result of recent wars, partially because our economic problems are making us look inwards. We will not, however, be permitted to ignore the world forever…we cannot keep out the evil people forever.

HAT TIP: Hot Air

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A bit of sage advice from Charles Hugh Smith over at Zero Hedge:

…The Eurozone debt “crisis” is nothing but another credit cycle, in which debt expands beyond the carrying capacity of consumers and economies. Debt then contracts as uncollectable debt is written down; borrowers go bankrupt and their remaining assets are auctioned off (if they put up collateral; if not, then tough luck, lenders, you blew it and will have to suck the entire loss). Insolvent lenders are also declared bankrupt and dissolved.

There is absolutely nothing unusual about this cycle. Impaired debt is renounced and the system is purged of bad debt. Once the economy has been cleared of garbage, so to speak, then everyone can stop pretending and start dealing with reality. Businesses will be able to start up in a transparent and open market…

I agree with how that will work, but I disagree that we’ll be able to start fresh right away. In addition to clearing out the bad debts and letting the insolvent go belly up, we also need to engage in some genuine reform in order to better protect ourselves against the excesses which brought on the current crisis. But the main thing is: be not afraid.

This is not to say it won’t be lousy for a while. It will. Very much so. In fact, it’ll hurt a great deal. No illusion ever collapses without causing someone some pain. The illusion that we could borrow and spend our way to wealth will die hard, and it’ll hurt a lot as it dies. But die it must – first off because it is immoral, but also because we can’t start to rebuild until the illusion is gone. Only when we’re at rock bottom and as broke as we can be will there come the will to do the right thing – to build an economy based on hard work, savings and careful investment.

Right now we’ve got about a half dozen triggers around the world just waiting to set off the crash. If they manage to cobble together a deal for Greece then we still have to worry about Portugal. If something is figured out for Portugal then we have to worry about Japan’s deepening economic crisis. If Japan dodges the bullet then we have to be deeply concerned about runaway inflation in China. If China manages to put a lid on that, then our own debt crisis remains a gigantic risk. And if we get around our debt crunch then it will be time to turn back to Greece because no matter what is done, it won’t make it possible for the Greeks to ever repay their debt; or it will be Spain, or Italy, or Ireland, or the entire EU, etc, etc, etc…the problem of the world, too much debt, is intractable. It cannot be solved in the sense of everyone gets paid. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay everyone back. Someone has to take it in the shorts, eventually…and when it is so taken, it will trigger a global financial crash. The question is not if, but when.

But it won’t be the end of the world. At least, not for most of us. For some bankers and bureaucrats, it will be…but it will also be a chance for them to rethink their priorities and perhaps find a useful trade. So, even for them, it won’t be the end of the world. It’ll just hurt a bit – but it will also be over fairly swiftly if we just let it happen…no more attempts to backstop a failed system or bail out an insolvent bank. It doesn’t work. It can’t work. Better to just let the chips fall where they may and then get on with it.