Some 4,000 marines and 650 Afghan soldiers are sweeping into insurgent strongholds in Helmand Province. They have encountered little
resistance so far, which suggests that Taliban fighters are doing what smart guerrillas always do: melting away in the face of superior enemy
forces. The pattern in Afghanistan has always been that NATO forces march into villages then march out, leaving the Taliban to regain
effective control.

The difference this time is that the marines don’t plan to leave. Just as in Iraq, they are planning to establish small combat outposts next to villages that will allow them to dominate the terrain they are now occupying. That will present insurgents with a difficult choice: either (a) cede the ground to the marines or (b) attack them and try to dislodge them. The likelihood is that they will soon try option B. That will mean heavy fighting and more casualties than the marines have so far suffered. (One marine was killed in the initial operation.)

But assuming that marines stick it out — and with the marines that’s a pretty safe assumption — they will inflict heavy casualties on their
attackers and gradually gain control of the situation. The Taliban will have to shift their operations to other areas — and then those too will be targeted by NATO forces.

That is, in essence, the classic “spreading oil spot” strategy of counterinsurgency. It is a slow, difficult process, and we shouldn’t
read too much into early reports of success. There will be much hard fighting ahead, but the likely result will be, just as in Iraq, a
gradual extension of governmental control and eventually a decrease in violence. The key to success is to deploy enough forces to drive out
the Taliban altogether from substantial swathes of the countryside rather than simply pushing them from one area to another. Whether
there are enough troops on the ground to attain that goal remains to be seen, even with a total of 21,000 American reinforcements on the
way. But the strategy is a sound one and should over time gradually improve the situation.

Then canceled it because of a lack of bed space. Then they rescheduled it, and canceled it a second time for the same reason. And a third time. Her parents are hoping that the fourth time will be the charm.

The story is reminiscent of a recent development out of Canada. An infant was born prematurely in Hamilton, Ontario (population: 500,000) and needed to be treated in a neonatal intensive-care-unit. Unfortunately, such bed space (or incubator space, more accurately) was lacking in Hamilton. The call went out: was there anywhere in the province (population: 13 million — the largest in Canada) where the infant could be cared for? Did any hospital in the land of guaranteed free health-care have enough space for a tiny baby?

Nope. Instead, the only hospital that could save the infant was in Buffalo, New York (population: 300,000). This example shows what England lacks for making its health-care system work: a bigger neighboring nation without socialized medicine to pick up the slack. So, if the United States adopted the Canadian model, who’s going to be to us what we are now to Canada? Who’s going to be our emergency go-to nation for health care?

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Gov. Sarah Palin will resign her office in a few weeks, she said during a news conference at her Wasilla home Friday morning.

Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell will be inaugurated at the Governor’s Picnic at Pionner Park in Fairbanks on Saturday, July 25, Palin said.

There was no immediate word as to why she will resign, though speculation has been rampant that the former vice presidential candidate is gearing up for a run at the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Palin made the announcement flanked by Parnell and most, if not all, of her cabinet.

Hmm. This is a pretty standard way to downplay something and keep it out of the news cycle as much as possible— release it late Friday on a long weekend.

Internal campaign e-mails exchanged three weeks before Election Day offer a rare look at just how frustrated then Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had become with the manner in which top McCain campaign aides were handling her candidacy. The e-mails, obtained exclusively, also highlight the power struggle and thinly veiled acrimony that pervaded the relationship between Palin and the campaign’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt.

The episode in question began when an investigative report published on the left-leaning Web site Salon.com raised questions about Palin’s relationship with members of the Alaska Independence Party (AIP) when she was mayor of Wasilla. The AIP’s platform calls for a vote giving Alaskans the option to secede from the United States. It had already been widely known that Todd Palin was a registered member of the AIP from 1995 to 2002 and that Governor Palin had taped a recorded greeting at the party’s 2008 convention.

On the morning of Oct. 15, Palin was aboard her campaign jet and en route to New Hampshire when she happened to catch a disparaging CNN segment that touted the Salon.com story, complete with a provocative graphic at the bottom of the screen reading, “THE PALINS AND THE FRINGE.”

While shaking hands after a rally later that afternoon, someone on the rope line shouted a remark at Palin about the AIP.

The comment set her off. She worried that the campaign was not sufficiently mitigating the issue of her alleged connection to the party, which despite a platform that harkens more to the Civil War than the 21st century, continued to play a serious role in Alaska politics.

Palin blasted out an e-mail with the subject line “Todd” to Schmidt, campaign manager Rick Davis and senior advisor Nicolle Wallace, copying her husband on the message (all of the e-mails are reprinted below as written).

“Pls get in front of that ridiculous issue that’s cropped up all day today - two reporters, a protestor’s sign, and many shout-outs all claiming Todd’s involvement in an anti-American political party,” Palin wrote. “It’s bull, and I don’t want to have to keep reacting to it ... Pls have statement given on this so it’s put to bed.”

Her reference to a single protestor’s sign and “many shout-outs” was indicative of Palin’s occasional tendency to take anecdotal evidence of a minor problem and extrapolate it into something far more menacing. The final of the three presidential debates was just hours away, which would mark the unveiling of the soon-to-be canonized Joe The Plumber.

UPDATE at 7/3/09 12:20:26 pm:

Meanwhile, Palin appears to be positioning for a run at the presidency: Palin won’t run for re-election in Alaska, source says.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is expected to announce Friday that she will not seek a second term, a Republican source close to Palin tells CNN. ...

As the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, Palin is considered one of the front-runners for the GOP nomination in 2012. Her decision not to seek another term as governor is sure to stoke speculation that Palin is seriously eyeing a run for the White House.

UPDATE at 7/3/09 12:23:24 pm:

Todd Purdum has a lengthy (and not very complimentary) piece on Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair: It Came from Wasilla.

First, other than providing sanctions and instituting some “loser pay” reforms, employers will just have to buck up and defend nuisance suits when they refuse to discriminate by putting their finger on the scale to favor minorities with boisterous special interest groups behind them. Employers in the 1960’s also complained that customers wouldn’t frequent integrated restaurants. But we don’t buy the whole “people will make a fuss” defense. We have rejected in “customer preference” cases for years the notion that overt discrimination is permitted because the economic consequences of avoiding discrimination may be very steep.

Second, employers can and do “validate” these tests and provide themselves with more than enough data with which to defend the disparate impact suits. Again they still might be sued, but if they construct appropriate tests and defend the results, they shouldn’t face a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” dilemma.

But Kaus is right that employers face, not only on this front but from a myriad of potential statutory and common law claims, a legal minefield in hiring, firing, and promoting employees. We should be concerned about the adverse impact – on the economy as a whole and on those employees lacking civil rights advocates to cajole employers on their behalf. The ultimate solution is both to revisit disparate impact jurisprudence and reform the civil litigation rules. Oh — and shining a bright light on the intimidation by the likes of PRLDEF, MALDEF, La Raza, and the NAACP is a useful endeavor as well. If employers actually do fear being caught between contradictory discriminatory claims, they would be wise to do their utmost to expose and combat the kind of racial hucksterism that Justice Alito so aptly described in Ricci.

The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year’s disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman’s gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don’t need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

Emanuele is clearly on to something, and the developments since his post have only made clearer the role-reversal. Today there are reports indicating that the U.S. is actively blocking tough financial sanctions against Iran in the upcoming G8 summit requested by the Europeans.
Americans are unaccustomed to the decline of empire, but we might be seeing signs of a broad-scale correction of a fairly radical distortion that dates to the Cold War — an abandonment of the U.S.’s long-held role as Watcher of the Water. Americans have long bristled at the fact that it is they who provided the muscle to deter the Soviets, while the Europeans benefited from American investment in the problem, and had the luxury to advocate more universalist, passive, and peace-seeking ideologies. But from an American perspective, there was no choice back then: The Soviet nukes where every bit as much a threat to the U.S. as to Europe.

Today, however, Iran is not aiming ICBMs at the U.S., and the Europeans are far more at risk from an Iranian bomb than are the Americans. What the new American administration calls “engagement” may be little more than a form of strategic disengagement, a way of saying that an Iranian bomb is simply not their problem. With the protective big brother nowhere to be seen, many Europeans realize that it may actually be up to them to stop the bomb.

Is this the beginning of a new era, a kind of strategic American isolationism under the guise of peacemaking, a fundamental shifting of the clash of civilizations? Here in Israel, we sure feel that way. (If today’s Israeli naval maneuvers are any indication, Israel may indeed be taking steps to “go it alone.”) Maybe Europeans are starting to sense it as well.