“thanx so much for uhelp ican going to graduate to now”

A ghost writer of university essays- an “academic mercenary”- spills the beans on the shocking decline of American higher education…

Says it all…

The Washington Post is reporting that the Obama administration has substantially expanded the role of US special operations forces across the globe as part of what the paper calls Washington’s “secret war” against al Qaeda and other radical organizations. Obama, according to the paper, has increased the presence of special forces from 60 countries to 75 countries. US Special Forces, the paper reports, have about 4,000 people in countries besides Iraq and Afghanistan.

Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War by Andrew Bacevich.

This is an excerpt from Andrew Bacevich’s bestselling new book, Washington Rules, that focuses on how, as his army career was ending, his real education, which would turn him into a leading critic of American war policy, began. What follows below is the introduction to the book which stands on its own as a political essay about a personal odyssey into recent history and the realities of our moment; it also offers a powerful sense of the book itself.

Oops! The open borders crowd might find this statistic a bit inconvenient:

In 2007, 50 percent of Latinos surveyed told the Pew Hispanic Center that the growing number of illegal immigrants was a positive force for the existing Latino population. In a Pew survey released Thursday, that number had plummeted to 29 percent.

Joe DioGuardi is masquerading as an off-the-shelf, GOP, pro-life, small-government conservative. But what he also is — and the typical Tea Party candidate is not — is a supporter of a radical terrorist organization tied to Albanian organized crime, which is rampant in New York. 

Is this a cynical and discriminatory ploy to taint Joe DioGuardi, and an entire nationality, with the criminal element that every ethnic group is entitled to? If only. The sad fact is that the Albanian mafia and DioGuardi’s’s KLA are inextricably intertwined. And thanks to him, the United States is now intertwined with them both.

A group of Brooklyn teens this summer took to the streets of Bed-Stuy to count billboards and posters that promote alcohol in their neighborhood. The most frequently spotted ad? “A Spike Lee Collaboration” with Absolut Vodka. How shocking!

“You’re not supposed to be promoting stuff like that in areas that can barely afford food.”

In the spirit of settling the wild, wild West, some communities are giving away free land lots. What’s the catch? You have to agree to build a house (or park a mobile home) and live in it. For the most part, the places doing this are rural communities without much in the way of work opportunities. But there are definitely some upsides and we can think of worse places to wait out the recession than near a mountain stream in Alaska.

Oh dear. The militias are coming, the militias are coming:

“We call it somewhat of a perfect storm,” says a high-ranking FBI official who declined to speak on the record because of the political sensitivities of the subject. With an economy in free fall and rising anger about illegal immigration, Obama became “a rallying point” for dormant extremists after the 2008 election who “weren’t willing to act before but now are susceptible to being recruited and radicalized.”

Every decade seems to bring about a new militia scare…

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday he foresaw a day when the military would lift its ban on women serving in elite Special Forces… 

Gates said he expected the prohibition against women in U.S. special operations forces would be phased out in a deliberate manner similar to the way women have been allowed to serve on submarines since earlier this year.

After 8 years of brazen illegalities by the Bush administration, some neocons at National Review are all of a sudden developing qualms about the “War on Terror”:

If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones. The three most powerful people in government at this moment are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, a fact that should give pause even to the most hawkish conservative. I would hope that other conservatives see this at least as a matter of prudence, if not a burning moral question.

Repulsive neocon bullshitter and chickenhawk Sean Hannity exposed for the profiteer that he is:

For the last several years, Sean Hannity and the Freedom Alliance “charity” have conducted “Freedom Concerts” across America. They’ve told you that they are raising money to pay for the college tuition of the children of fallen soldiers and to pay severely wounded war vets. And on Friday Night, Hannity will be honored with an award for this “Outstanding Community Service by a Radio Talk Show Host” at Talkers Magazine’s convention.

But it’s all a huge scam.

Imaginative thesis. I don’t buy it, but interesting nonetheless:

The tea partiers are the hippies of our time. True, they tend to be relatively affluent — but so were the hippies. As Tony Hendra once told me, “You had to have a lot of money to take part in the Summer of Love.”

Prospects for a Coalition Against Empire:

A meeting of forty is not going to change U.S. foreign policy. A movement of forty million might. The potential is there. The American people have a deep “isolationist” streak, a common-sense nationalism that is wary of policing the world or meddling in other people’s business in distant countries with strange names. A Pew Research Center opinion survey released in December 2009 shows that a plurality of Americans think that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own” (49 percent—an all-time high). Of course, elite opinion stands in contrast to popular sentiment: 69 percent of Council on Foreign Relations members “support the United States playing an assertive role in global affairs.”

“Overnight, Parachute some bears into areas [bin Laden] might be,” the innovator wrote. “Attempt to train bears to take off parachutes after landing, or use parachutes that self-destruct after landing.”

The bears-in-the-air idea, and scores of others, came from people who clicked on the “contact us” button on the Defense Department’s Web site, which allows the general public to ask questions or make suggestions.

Not that the Pentagon needs any particular help in the idea department. Not long ago, for example, the agency spent $2 million to find out whether honey bees could be relied upon to sniff out roadside bombs.