Not sure exactly when I said it, but I did predict that Greece would exit the Euro. I also said that it should leave the Euro sooner, rather than later and do so on its own terms. Now elite opinion has decided it's okay for Greece to exit. Mostly because the neoliberals have already raped the economy there. You heard it here first.

Back in summer 2010 I suggested that there was a worrying emerging pattern of "green on blue" attacks in Afghanistan - that far from each being an "isolated incident" from which "it's very difficult to draw a generalisation", a comparison of the frequency of such attacks with those in Iraq might suggest it was going to be a whole lot harder to stand up the Afghan security forces than expected. That idea has taken on more credence within the past two years as the number of "green on blue" attacks has snowballed from a handful to dozens.

Today, the New York Times has a detailed report on just one of those attacks, on March 1 this year, in which two Americans and their two Afghan attackers died - and which destroyed an armored vehicle as well as half the base before a helicopter gunship ended the fighting. A third conspirator was caught and the NYT's Matthew Rosenberg writes:

The coalition and Afghan Army would now have a rare opportunity to interrogate an Afghan soldier who had turned on coalition forces; most are quickly killed in ensuing firefights. Why had three men attacked American soldiers they barely knew? Was it a personal grudge against Americans? Or had they turned to the Taliban?

Chuck Hagel pens an oped on "The Challenge Of Change" for the US:

The great challenges facing the world today are the responsibility of all peoples of the world. They include cyber warfare, terrorism, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, prosperity and stability, and global poverty, disease and environmental degradation."

I'm assuming that "environmental degradation" doesn't just mean pollution but is code for global warming/climate change in case Republicans reading get upset by the actual words*.

It's one thing to ignore an elephant, it's entirely another to avoid a tornado.

* At least I hope so, because the alternative - that the Chair of the Atlantic Council and co-Chair of Obama's Intelligence Advisory Board has written such a piece without mentioning climate change at all - is just too horrible a possibility to contemplate.

We all had a pretty good laugh at the woman who got up in front of the Lincoln, Nebraska city council and railed on about homosexuality in response to the proposed "Fairness Ordinance" extending anti-bias protections to the LGBT community.

Select quotes:
1. "A huge percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don't have AIDS yet."

2. "Whitney Houston was found without clothes in a bathtub. Every corpse found without clothes has a partner who did away with them."

Remember last summer's suspenseful adventures of the New Republican Tea Party? When they threatened to do something that even Greece hasn't quite done yet - default on the country's debt? When American bonds were downgraded?

Well, they love the country so much that they want to do it again. John Boehner said so yesterday.

It seems to me that deliberately sabotaging the country's financial standing verges on (is?) treason. It's like when a couple divorces and one of them manages to pull all the money from their joint bank accounts.

Except we're not so lucky to have the Republicans getting out of our lives with their addictions to racism and failed economics.

It looks like Ezra Klein will be following this. That's good, because it makes me sick.

One might begin to see the seeds of its decline here:

iMore reports that Google may make four times the ad revenue off of their use in iOS than they do from their own Android platform. Apple wants to change that. Apple has already begun intermediating search queries though Siri, effectively cutting Google out of the valuable identity information associated with those searches. Next up is that other large data components on iOS, maps.

Lindell Kay & Mike Mchugh | Camp Lejeune, NC | May 15

The (Jacksonville) Daily News - A wide-reaching investigation by military and civilian authorities has uncovered a criminal conspiracy within the Armed Forces to steal and sell nearly $2 million in guns and combat gear to gangs in the U.S. and foreign countries including China, military officials have confirmed.

The probe began more than a year and a half ago when agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began to conduct undercover operations to disrupt and reduce the theft, transfer, sale and possession of stolen U.S. Government property. With the aid of Marine and Naval authorities, NCIS has recovered $1.8 million in stolen guns and combat gear to include assault rifles, night-vision goggles, flashlights and other items, military officials said.

Via Ian Welsh, a must-read interview with Christopher Doyon, a.k.a. Commander X. If the Anonymous hacker group says it doesn't have real leaders, then Doyon is one of the major leader's they haven't got. "There’s a really good argument at this point that we might well be the most powerful organization on Earth" he says of Anonymous' 50,000 strong collective, who Ian calls "the only enforcer class the left has". Doyon refuses to accept the term "terrorist" applies.

Basically I decline the semantic argument. If you want to call me a terrorist, I have no problem with that. But I would ask you, “Who is it that’s terrified?” If it’s the bad guys who are terrified, I’m really super OK with that. If it’s the average person, the people out in the world we are trying to help who are scared of us, I’d ask them to educate themselves, to do some research on what it is we do and lose that fear. We’re fighting for the people, we are fighting, as Occupy likes to say, for the 99%. It’s the 1% people who are wrecking our planet who should be quite terrified. If to them we are terrorists, then they probably got that right.

“Information terrorist” – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized – they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, “Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake.”

This is just beyond tears.

I've been reading the rare posts on this blog for a while - and they should all be read - but I seldom comment simply because words are insufficient.

I'm sure there are many more women and probably gays in similar circumstances.

All I can do is agitate for better VA funding and programs and speak up for tighter controls in the military.

And weep.

Under Kansas law, it is perfectly legal for a pharmacist, a doctor, a nurse, a hospital, or just about anyone, to allow a woman to bleed to death if you think the woman's bleeding is caused by an attempted abortion:

With the signing of a new expanded conscience clause bill in Kansas, Republican Governor Sam Brownback has now legally blessed a virtually open-ended number of situations in which "religious" workers can refuse to assist women under the guise that they believe they "may be" terminating a pregnancy.

Go read David Axe on how Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti joined the dots to throw some new light on America's shadow wars along Africa's Indian Ocean coastline. F-15s based in Djibouti carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, spyplanes at the same airbase, Reaper drones with bases in the Seychelles Yemen and Ethiopia. Axe himself adds the possibility of a floating headquarters for special forces ops sitting somewhere of the coast.

America is waging more wars, with a bigger involvement, than it wants to admit.

After the EU delisted the MeK on the back of a well-funded lobbying campaign by the MeK and it's neocon allies, there was always going to be huge political pressure for the U.S. to follow suit. The MeK has poured large sums, millions of dollars, into paying for lobbyists and former government officials to speak up on its behalf. Now it seems their efforts are to pay off. The WSJ is reporting insiders who say the delisting is likely to happen.

Glenn Greenwald explains why this is not just a bad idea but encapsulates everything that's wrong with Washington. It will cheapen the terrorist listing into simply a means to punish those the U.S. sees as its enemies, show that the U.S. is indeed an agressor against Iran, prove that national security decisions are available to the highest bidder and make a mockery of the rule of law by showing that the law is "not even a purported constraint on the conduct of Washington political elites".

As Andrew Exum put it this morning: “I guess Hizballah and LeT just need to buy off more former administration officials.”

Sadly I expected this, but it makes it no less disgusting that yet again the Obama administration doesn't even bother to make a passing nod to legality or ethics.

Sandra Laville | May 15

The Guardian - Former News International chief executive, her husband and four others charged in phone-hacking inquiry

Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, has been charged over allegations that she tried to conceal evidence from detectives investigating phone hacking and alleged bribes to public officials.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that Brooks, one of the most high-profile figures in the newspaper industry, would be charged with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in July last year at the height of the police investigation. Scotland Yard later confirmed she had been charged along with her husband, Charlie Brooks, and four others.

Brooks is accused of conspiring with others, including her husband, a racehorse trainer and friend of the prime minister, and her personal assistant, to conceal material from detectives.

Brooks and her husband were informed of the charging decision – the first since the start of the Operation Weeting phone-hacking investigation last January – when they answered their bail at a police station in London on Tuesday morning.

The results of this poll sort of reflect my own feelings and experiences with Facebook:

According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.

While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.

I still think Matt Taibbi's takedown was the best on Friedman, but this is still pretty damned hilarious:

Adrienne Rich died March 27th. Her righteously deep-sea impact as a poet is bottomless. Here is one of the poems that made her famous for breaking through silences about gender, among other things.

Diving Into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

(MORE AFTER THE JUMP)

Byron York thinks he knows how Mitt Romney will respond to Team Obama's new campaign ad attacking Romney for destroying hundreds of thousands of high-paying middle-class jobs when he sold Bain Capital:

First, the campaign has carefully scrutinized Romney's entire record at Bain and believes it is a strongly positive one overall. But that is the big picture -- there are individual instances in which Bain investments failed. Given that, look for the Romney campaign and its surrogates to counterattack by focusing on an instance in which Barack Obama, in essence, took over a company and laid people off in an effort to save the larger enterprise.

The first big wildfires of the season in Arizona have struck.

Hundreds of firefighters battled several Arizona wildfires on Monday that charred more than 7,000 acres of parched Ponderosa forest, brush and grassland over the weekend, consuming half a dozen buildings and threatening a small town, authorities said.

The Sunflower Fire, the largest of at least four blazes in central and eastern Arizona, burned 3,100 acres in the Tonto National Forest, about 40 miles north of Phoenix, destroying two homes, a business and two outbuildings over the weekend, the Southwest Coordination Center said.

About 350 residents in the nearby community of Crown King were under mandatory evacuation on Monday after the human-caused Gladiator Fire burned 3,000 acres of ponderosa pine, brush and chaparral in the Prescott National Forest and destroyed three buildings.

With over half of the US still in a state of drought, the weather forcasts are "not optimistic".

Tina posted earlier today about the HRW report on NATO-caused civilain deaths in Libya. Here's more,from the Guardian. I can't help but feel this is just another sign that universal law is a joke and that what really operates is privilege in it's original meaning of "private law":

At least 72 civilians, including 24 children, were killed by Nato air strikes during the alliance's military campaign in Libya last year. Human Rights Watch has issued a report, based on extensive on-the-ground research and multiple visits to bombing sites where civilians died, in which no clear evidence of a legitimate military target was found. Nato and the nations that participated in the air campaign – including the UK government – have refused even to acknowledge these fatalities, to provide specific information on the military target or to conduct a field investigation into the incident. No compensation has been provided to any of the families of the dead and the wounded.

Nato's claim that it cannot investigate civilian casualties because it has no mandate to be in Libya is feeble and disingenuous. If Human Rights Watch can visit each of the sites – to inspect weapons debris, interview witnesses and examine medical records and deaths certificates, alongside reviewing satellite imagery and photographic evidence – Nato should certainly ask the Libyans for access to the sites to do the same. It has not done so.

Without investigations, Nato is saying it won't provide compensation to the victims of unlawful strikes, as required by the laws of war. Nor has it considered providing compensation for all civilian victims of Nato strikes, as it has done in Afghanistan. Many of the same countries that participated in the Libyan campaign make compensation payments in Afghanistan to families harmed by international military action without any claim of a laws-of-war violation. In a curious piece of logic, Nato's spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, said this morning that Nato was not obliged to pay compensation to affected Libyans because the international military operation was conducted from the air, without any international troops on the ground.

Sajjad Tarakzai | Islamabad | May 14

AFP - Pakistan said Monday it was time to "move on" and repair ties with the United States and NATO, the strongest sign yet that it may reopen supply routes into Afghanistan closed for nearly six months.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar made the remarks a day before Pakistani leaders are to discuss ending the blockade, and thereby cave in to a key demand from the West in time to attend a NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21.

Islamabad shut its Afghan border to NATO supplies after US air strikes killed 24 soldiers on November 26, provoking a major crisis in Pakistani-US relations on top of the outcry from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden the previous May.

"It was important to make a point, Pakistan has made a point and we now need to move on and go into a positive zone and try to conduct our relations," Pakistan's foreign minister told a news conference.

"We are trying to put this relationship, you know, in a positive zone and I am quite sure that we will be successful in doing so."

Nicholas Blanford | Abboudiyah, North Lebanon | May 14

CSM - A recent escalation in cross-border shootings and tit-for-tat kidnappings along Lebanon’s northern frontier with Syria is fuelling concerns that the year-long violence in Syria is spilling into Lebanon.

In the past week alone, several people, including an old woman, have been shot dead allegedly by Syrian soldiers firing into Lebanon, clashes have resumed between rival factions in Lebanon’s perennially tense second largest city, Tripoli, leaving four people dead, and some 40 Sunni Syrians have been kidnapped in reprisal for the abduction of three Lebanese Shiites.

The Lebanese government, which is backed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has adopted a policy of disassociation with the crisis in neighboring Syria, mindful that Lebanon is deeply polarized between supporters and opponents of the Assad regime. But Sunni residents of villages strung along the northern border with Syria accuse the Lebanese government and security services of either failing to block Syrian transgressions or actively colluding with the Syrian regime in some of the abductions.

“Any person who is wanted by the Syrians is easily picked up because the Lebanese authorities are working with the Syrian security,” says Ali, a 22 year-old resident of the border village of Abboudiyah. Like others interviewed here, Ali requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.

Sullivan links John Derbyshire's reappearance as a columnist - on VDARE - in which The Derb claims that "White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with." Ugh.

But apparently even the wrongest of racists can occasionally be right:

Conservatism, Inc. or otherwise, is a white people's movement, a scattering of outliers notwithstanding. Always has been, always will be. I have attended at least a hundred conservative gatherings, conferences, cruises, and jamborees: let me tell you, there ain't too many raisins in that bun. I was in and out of the National Review offices for twelve years, and the only black person I saw there, other than when Herman Cain came calling, was Alex, the guy who runs the mail room.

Indeed.

Barak Ravid of Haaretz writes that:

According to the evidence, Iran and the world powers are on their way to an “intermediate agreement.” Such an agreement would allow Iran to enrich uranium to the high level of 20%, approaching the levels for a nuclear weapon. Iran however, would be forced to stop enriching the uranium at the underground, fortified facility at Fordo, near the city of Qom, as part of the agreement. Iran would also have to rid itself of 100 kilograms of enriched uranium already it already possesses.

In return, the world powers will suspend some of the sanctions already leveled on Iran. The EU oil embargoes as well as the American sanction against Iran’s central bank are set to go into effect on July 1; however no further sanctions will be implemented. Iran will also receive a shipment of nuclear fuel rods to power its nuclear reactors.

The U.S. and the other powers explain that such an intermediate agreement would effectively halt Iranian progress toward a nuclear weapon, even if it will not completely solve the Iranian nuclear issue. Such an agreement will buy time for more talks, and tie Israel’s hands in terms of carrying out a unilateral strike.

Israel completely rejects any kind of intermediate agreement. Up until this point, the Israeli position has not held even an inch of flexibility on the subject. Most likely, any outcome from the next round of talks, save for failure, will garner furious reactions from Jerusalem.

Got that? Netanyahu's government is praying for the talks with Iran in Baghdad to fail, because it wants a war. It's not about any existenial threat to Israel, either - it's that a second nuclear power, even one that only has a capability to produce weapons rather than weapons in fact, would short-circuit Israel's ability to wage other wars in the region at will.

Barack Obama taking on Mitt Romney's abysmal job creation record is a little like critiquing Stalin's abysmal human rights record:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is casting Mitt Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate titan with little concern for the working class in a new, multi-pronged effort that seeks to undermine the central rationale for his Republican rival's candidacy: his business credentials.

At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.

Angela Merkel is a pleasant practitioner of the art of suffering. She loves to share the crackpot notion that belt-tightening in times of Depression represents sound policy. Reminds me of Krugman's statement of shock when, at a gathering of academic economists, he realized that about 1/2 of them knew little about John Manyard Keynes. Now Merkel is getting another message from the German public (this happened a few years ago but this is harsher).

Merkel's party humiliated by shock election defeat
German voters reject austerity programme in favour of pro-growth opposition in state poll Tony Paterson, May 14, Berlin The Independent

"Angela Merkel's ruling conservatives suffered a humiliating defeat in key elections in Germany's most populous state yesterday when voters rejected her party's austerity policies and handed a resounding victory to her pro-growth Social Democratic Party opponents.

"Ms Merkel's Christian Democrats were shell-shocked by the devastating result they returned in the poll in North Rhine Westphalia, which has a total population of 18 million. Exit polls showed that they secured a mere 25.5 per cent of the vote – their worst performance ever in the state.