Fallujah Assault

1. OODA strategy: It's nice to see that someone else besides me has studied the OODA Loop. It was the brainchild of the greatest fighter pilot the US Air Force ever had as well as the force behind development of the F-16, F-18, and A-10. Without John Boyd the defenses of the USA would be much different. Read the book Boyd - The Fighter Pilot That Changed The Art Of War.
2. The OODA loops analysis of warfare while on the surface seems simple, it is also a very deep one as well and demonstrates exactly how networked warfare will create the advantage over the enemy. One could think about it in terms of blogs and the MSM.....Blogs observation on a topic, then orientation to it, then decision to publish followed by the act of doing it is infintely tighter than the MSM right now. Consequently, the MSM is fighting a losing battle in many way against the superior OODA loop of blogs. Our forces right now, particularly the Marines who are big fans of Boyd (they adopted his teachings while the Air Force exiled him), are operating in a decentralized way with massive amounts of communication (re: battle field internet), superior observational tools, and the ability to immediately and precisely act on these sources of information. Think a MSM organizational resources coupled with the decentralized networked power of the blog. The results are disasterous for our opponents, and we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg as far as these capabilities go.
3. OODA loop...Observation - Orientation - Decision - ACTION!This technique, getting INSIDE the enemy's decision-response cycle, has been broadcast and taught at nearly all levels of American military decision-making, right down to units on the ground!Because of this, (and because of technological advances NOT available to Iraqis-Syrians-Sudanese) Americans are disrupting and destroying the best-laid plans of the mujaheddin on their home territory, and are doing so with very few casualties!
4. Fallujah Again (belmontclub)
5. 'I got my kills ... I just love my job': Toby Harnden in Fallujah observes American soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division taskforce avenging their fallen comrades as battle begins (telegraph.co.uk)
6. Bomb fiend was white: THE suicide bomber who killed three Black Watch heroes was a white al-Qaeda terrorist, Army chiefs said yesterday.
   The revelation came as soldiers reacted with outrage at an alleged home video of the attack — claimed by terror chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — aired on an extremists’ website.Troops from the tough Scottish infantry regiment called the video’s makers “animals” — and told of their disgust at images of insurgents supposedly stamping on body parts left near the scene (thesun.co.uk)

Election

1. Election '04 epiphanies: In 2000, Americans were reminded that electoral votes select presidents. In 2004, Democrats were reminded that Bruce Springsteen does not. Other Nov. 2 epiphanies include:
   In 1984, Walter Mondale's running mate was Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, a Catholic woman from New York. Ronald Reagan carried Catholics, women, New York -- and even Ferraro's district. Vice presidential nominees rarely sway this or that national demographic group. However, a running mate should help carry his or her state. But last week Bush carried North Carolina, getting 295,026 more votes than in 2000, and carried John Edwards' home county, as he did four years ago. Edwards was supposed to cut Bush's appeal in rural America. He did not.
   Republicans should send a thank-you note to San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom -- liberalism's George Wallace, apostle of ``progressive'' lawlessness. He did even more than the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to energize the 11 state campaigns to proscribe same-sex marriage. (george will)
2. Elizabeth Edwards DU'er? (polipundit)
3. Bush mandate (podhoretz, nypost)
4. The 51 percent nation: Love is stronger than hate. That is the lesson of the 2004 election results. Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him--one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results. But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before. They have watched the "old media" --the New York Times, the broadcast networks CBS, ABC, and NBC--beat up on Bush for the past year, and they have listened to the sneers and slurs directed at him by coastal elites for a long time. Now they had their chance to speak. They did so loudly and clearly, giving Bush the first popular-vote majority for president in 16 years. (michael barone)
5. Kerry run in '08 called conceivable: The former aide said Kerry plans to work closely with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is expected to replace Tom Daschle as Senate Democratic leader, to form the "loyal opposition" to Bush. He also plans to revamp his staff and meet this week with Senate and former campaign aides to plot strategy for his political reemergence. The Senate returns to business in a lame duck session next week, and Kerry is determined to have an agenda when he steps back into public view.
   Toward that end, "he has been working the phones like crazy," the aide said, and "is determined that he will never let Democrats get beaten again on the ground game." (boston globe)
6. 'Fired Up' Kerry Returning to Senate Aides Say He Wants to Act as Counter to Bush, and Possibly Run in 2008: Several Democrats expressed skepticism about Kerry's plans, saying they believe the party needs a fresh face and must turn a corner. One well-known Democratic operative who worked with the Kerry campaign said opposition to Bush, not excitement about Kerry, was behind the senator's fundraising success. "If he thinks he's going to capitalize on that going forward, he's in for a surprise," said the operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
   Another Democrat involved in Kerry's campaign strategy -- who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid -- said: "I can't imagine people are going to say, 'It worked pretty well last time. This is what we need next time.' "
   
   "I'm not in denial. Reality hit me," Carville said. "Let's take the greatest morality story of all -- we're born again," he added, in a play on words connoting both his view that the party needs a fundamental change, as well as the importance of evangelical Christians to Bush.
   "We have to treat the disease, not the symptom," Carville said. "The purpose of a political party is to win elections, and we're not doing that."
   Carville said that the party's concern about interest groups had resulted in "litanies, not a narrative."
   "The party needs a narrative," he said. adding later that one possibility would to become "an aggressively reform, anti-Washington, anti-business-as-usual party." (wapo)
7. Democratic Party must be 'born again' says Carville: Democrats are debating what went right and what went wrong in last Tuesday's election, in which President Bush won re-election over Sen. John Kerry, and Democrats also lost seats in both the House and Senate. Some have said there is no need for soul-searching, and blamed the losses on a difficult election-year map or a poor candidate at the top of the ticket.
   "The underlying problem here is, there is no call to arms that the Democratic Party is making to the country," said Mr. Carville, the architect of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign win. "We've got to reassess ourselves. We've got to be born again."
   "We can deny this crap, but I'm out of the denial. I'm about reality here," Mr. Carville told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. "We are an opposition party, and as of right now, not a particularly effective one. You can't deny reality here." He said the party is desperately in need of a compelling narrative to tell voters, rather than the "litany of issues" the party stands for now. (washtimes)
8. Magnanimous Defeat: I feel as if half the people in America have just forced a fat crow down my gullet. I am compelled to admit that I am genuinely out of touch with half my country.
   At the very least, I need to take the other side seriously. Dismissing them as a bunch of homophobic, racist, Bible-waving, know-nothing troglodytes, however true that may be of a few, only authorizes them to return the favor. I don't want somebody calling me a dope-smoking, fag-loving, one-worlder weirdo, however true that might be. We are all masks that God wears, whatever God that is. We might try to treat one another with according reverence. At least we might try to listen as though the other side might have a point.I truly think we all owe one another an apology.
   I have a terrible admission to make. I've been so fanatically opposed to this administration that I have taken dark satisfaction in their failures, even though they were American failures as well. I welcomed growing indications that the situation in Iraq was deteriorating into a sump-hole of back-alley insurgency. Good economic news was bad economic news as far as I was concerned, and vice versa. I was tickled to death with Al Qaqaa and its terrorist-purloined WMDs, and not just because the name was so great. Surely all these bad tidings would eventually add up to an indictment that would convict Bush in the eyes of the American people and they would rouse themselves from Fox-hypnosis and 'possum sleep and vote for change.
   But it didn't turn out that way. While I still believe that half of America is hallucinating on hot religion and bad TV, I can't say I have been any too sane, having been delivered into a condition where I took comfort in the successes of our enemies and frowned at news of economic recovery. Despite my own financial anxieties, and those of all around me, I have been so zealous that my own well-being was secondary in importance to the political damage bad times might do the Bush administration. Now that's hallucination. And I'm sorry. (john perry barlow, typepad)
9. Take a ride to exurbia: I was about to give a reading in Berkeley when I asked a few of the bookstore employees if they sold many copies of Rick Warren's book, "The Purpose-Driven Life." They weren't familiar with the book, even though it has sold millions and millions of copies. I realized there are two conversations in this country. I was in the establishment conversation, but somehow I needed to get into the Rick Warren conversation and I could never find a way.
   The Republicans won in part because Bush and Rove understand this culture. Everybody is giving advice to Democrats these days, and mine is don't take any advice from anybody with access to the media - including me, just to be safe.
   Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It's a new world out there. (david brooks, nyt)
10. Social issues shock Dems: Democrats might want to tone down the contempt for evangelicals in particular and religious people in general that increasingly flows through their secular-dominated party. This is a very religious nation. If the Democrats aspire to become the majority party, why do they tolerate so much antireligious behavior and expression? They also might have a word with out-of-control adjuncts of the party like People for the American Way, whose mission is apparently to hammer away at religious conservatives, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is always ready to descend on every 6-year-old who writes a school essay on Jesus or who says, "God bless you" after a sneeze. Do they think religious voters fail to notice?
    They might also have second thoughts about the strategy of getting judges to impose solutions that they want but that the voters are unwilling to accept. It is beginning to dawn on many Democrats that John Kerry may have lost the election on Nov. 18, 2003, when Massachusetts's highest court, by a 4-to-3 vote, conjured up a right to gay marriage that nobody else had ever located anywhere in the state Constitution. In a backlash, state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed easily in all 11 states that had them on the ballot last week, including Ohio. Incredibly, Democratic leaders and the media didn't see this coming, though polls keep showing opposition to gay marriage of around 60 percent.
    The other thing the Democrats might do is to acquire a copy of Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas? and then ignore everything he says. Frank seems to be saying that voters are ignorant to vote on social issues. The book is an argument for a return to the same old-time liberalism that has paralyzed the Democratic Party. Frank has no understanding of why cultural issues are important to so many Americans. The fact is that the Democrats are unlikely to win the presidency again until they do something about the cultural divide. (John Leo)
11. Why Americans Hate Democrats—A DialogueForget Starbucks—head to Wal-Mart instead: There are those—like Walter Dellinger—who argue that last Tuesday's events were less than disastrous for Democrats. In fact, things really aren't so bad, they say. After all, as Bruce Reed points out, we really won last time, and this time, well, Kerry nearly hit the finish line. "See, the people still love us Democrats" some will say. "We just need to tinker, and those of us in Washington will have plenty of time to figure it out. We'll have a confab. Eat croissants. Sip some tea. Eat health food. When not discussing politics, we can sit and discuss gyms, vacations, and how much we love our money managers."
    But Democrats don't seem to learn. They keep telling people what's good for them. And the people keep telling the Democrats they're wrong. In fact, this election probably concludes the critical realignment in American voting patterns that began in 1968 and resulted in the election of Richard M. Nixon. The legacy of that Democratic defeat is the nearly impregnable Republican coalition of Southern Protestants and Northern—especially Midwestern—Catholics. Voting as a result has been a fairly constant dynamic of region and religion. White men over 40 have been leading the charge with voting levers in hand as scimitars to slay nearly every Democratic messenger. They'll sacrifice better economics to protect icons and their sense of faith.
    So, dump the croissants and spend some time at a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall. Go to the local Wal-Mart, not to Starbucks. The Democrats might learn a lot more and then begin to understand the long road to winning this republic back.
    Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant, has worked on campaigns on four continents, in nine foreign nations, and in 46 American states at every level, and served on the creative team for President Clinton's re-election effort. (sheinkopf, slate)
12. Why did Kerry Lose? It wasn't "values": It is easy to explain the election. Too easy. Depending on your instincts and how much time you are given to think, you can say that the electorate has moved to the right or that John Kerry flip-flopped or that the Democrats were unable to appeal to the moral values of people. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that President Bush was re-elected by people who disagree with him on what America should be. His evidence is that "Christian fundamentalists" have used their "religious energy to promote divisions and intolerance at home and abroad." Garry Wills has said much the same thing.
    These explanations are wide of the mark. The nation did not undergo a rightward shift in 2004 any more than it had when it elected Reagan in 1980 and re-elected him in 1984. The policy preferences of Americans are remarkably stable, a fact that has been confirmed by virtually every scholar who has looked at the matter.
    There is no doubt that John Kerry showed great skill at embracing deeply contradictory positions, but that does not make him unusual; all politicians have mastered the art of self-contradiction. What was remarkable in this election is that one candidate, President Bush, never changed: He said what he meant and meant what he said.
    I draw lessons from the election, but not very deep ones. One is that the profound liberal bias among many big-city newspapers and most TV stations did not determine the outcome. Evan Thomas was wrong when he said that the left media would add 15 points to the Democrats' total, but may have been right when he later scaled down his projection to five points.
    What is most impressive about this election has been the extraordinary success both parties have had in registering new voters and getting them to the polls. Suppose the Democrats had done this better than the GOP. The result might well have been a Bush loss in Florida and Ohio, and thus the loss of the election. Our press would now be running columns about the liberal shift in public opinion, the defeat of fundamentalists, and the importance of antiwar sentiments. But in fact the Democrats did not do a better job than the Republicans. Perhaps the columnists should now just say that Karl Rove out-organized his opponents. (james q. wilson, aei)
13. Liberal lamentations: One liberal acquaintance, who had predicted John Kerry would crush George W. Bush, raised the ghost of Adolf Hitler and the Inquisition in the same sentence: "It's 1933 again" and "the theocracy is coming."
    Writing for the leftist Web page Slate, Jane Smiley expresses a theme heard often among many liberals: "The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry." Other disparaging labels, including "stupid" and "moron" were hurled at Bush voters by various lefties. If so many people - more than 59 million - who voted for President Bush are stupid, what does this say about our costly and monopolistic public school system?
    The New York Times' Thomas Friedman wrote a column headlined "Two Nations Under God." He, too, detects the strong odor of a coming theocracy. Can the beheaders be far behind?
    Other columnists - from Maureen Dowd to Paul Krugman - were apoplectic in their response to Bush's impressive victory. They demonstrate how clueless they are about a majority of Americans whose worldview differs from their own.
    The condescension and elitism expressed by the left displays intolerance at its worst. The left is again exposed as hypocritical, preaching tolerance and inclusion, but practicing intolerance and exclusion of all ideas not in conformity with their own. Has it never occurred to liberals that they might be objectively wrong?
    If you study this map, you have to conclude that America is not becoming more divided; it is slowly, but perceptively, becoming more conservative and Republican.
    It's difficult to select a favorite line from all of the insulting and insane comments made by liberal commentators, but Garry Wills had one of the best. Writing in The New York Times, Wills said: "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?"
    Maybe so, if you consider what a higher and really intelligent authority says: "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14:1). (cal thomas)
14. Polls apart: liberals alienated from mainstream America: There is a word for this sort of condescension, and it isn't fear, concern, or anxiety about the impulses of Middle America. It is anti-Americanism
    Critics of red America, needless to say, fancy themselves defenders of rationality. Or as Nation writer Eric Alterman puts it on his Altercation blog: "The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Neatly summarizing the views of this "reality-based community," Kerry volunteer Jessica Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts told The Boston Globe: "Many Americans have nothing between their ears. Americans are fat, lazy, and stupid. I don't like this country anymore."
    If this is what passes for rational discourse on the left--and for too many liberals these days, it is--then just who is it that belongs to the "reality-based community" and just who is it that suffers under the weight of what the left used to call "false consciousness"? The question merits an answer, since Wills and otherwise sensible voices on the left--such as The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who professes himself "alarmed that so many of our fellow citizens could look the other way and not hold Bush accountable for utter incompetence in Iraq" and "amazed that a majority was not concerned about heaping a huge debt burden on our children just to give large tax breaks to the rich"--see their task as raising the level of consciousness of Americans out of step with reality. But what if their own estrangement leads not to insight, but rather to blindness and, more important, to separation from the very Americans they mean to influence?
    To be alienated these days, after all, is what Todd Gitlin once described as "a rock-bottom prerequisite for membership" in an establishment of its own. That establishment, comprising much of the media, academia, the punditocracy, and indeed entire swaths of blue America, forms a cohesive community--with its own rewards, norms, and favorite enemies. And as the post-election commentary has revealed, one of those enemies happens to be mainstream America. The conceit, of course, is that none of its residents are listening when the likes of Smiley craps all over them. But they are, and have been all along. Moreover, as nearly every election going back to 1968 shows, the more liberals become estranged from Middle America, the more Middle America becomes estranged from them. The latter reaction, needless to say, generates far more votes. So long as the "reality-based community" denigrates the heartland's supposed ignorance, reality-based America will respond in kind. (lawrence kaplan, tnr)
15. Why Democrats are tagged as the party without values: According to the New York Times, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, reflecting on her party's recent losses in the presidential, Senate and House elections, asked: "How did a party that is filled with people with values – and I am a person with values – get tagged as the party without values?"
    Gov. Napolitano, your party does indeed have very many people with values in it. But the Democratic Party is no more representative of the average Democrat's values than the National Council of Churches is of the average Protestant's values. Both are far to the left of their membership.
    To most Americans, Michael Moore is a Marxist who has utter contempt for most of his fellow Americans, who goes abroad and tells huge audiences how stupid and venal his country is, and in his dishonest propaganda film, portrays the American military as callous buffoons. Yet, this radical was given the most honored seat at the Democratic Party convention in Boston, next to former President Jimmy Carter.
    To most Americans, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are race-baiting demagogues. Yet they are heroes to the Democratic Party. Most Americans do not see their country as the bigoted and racist nation regularly depicted by both black and white Democratic leaders.
    To most Americans, the American military is not only heroic – it is regarded as more important to safeguarding freedom than any other human institution, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the United Nations or the university, to cite three major Democratic Party affiliates. To virtually the entire Left, which includes the Democratic Party, the military is, at best, a necessary evil. Otherwise, the overriding doctrine is "Make love, not war." That is why Harvard still refuses to allow ROTC training – and it is unlikely that either of the Massachusetts senators even finds that wrong, let alone as reprehensible as most Americans do. (dennis prager, wnd)
16. An ominous Specter: The key turning point was the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 and the massive smear campaign against him. No nominee to the Supreme Court was ever more qualified than Judge Bork but Senator Specter voted against him.
    At one crucial point, Senator Pat Leahy took a cheap shot at Judge Bork by saying that he had earned large consulting fees in some years, when he was a law professor, as if that were something dishonorable. What was not revealed to the public was that those were years in which Professor Bork's wife was fatally ill and he needed that money to do all that he could for her.
    But, when it was proposed to end the hearings for the day, Senator Arlen Specter refused to agree. He wasn't prepared to wait to get his shots in against Judge Bork. Senator Specter's agenda was more important to him than common decency.
    Senator Specter is also one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. He has mangled the meaning of such basic concepts as "judicial activism" and "original intent." It would be a tragedy for him to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he could mangle nominees and in the process mangle the Constitution of the United States. (thomas sowell)
17. Bush lost PA because of Specter endorsement: Exit polls reveal that President Bush may have miscalculated in endorsing pro-abortion Republican Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in his primary battle against conservative challenger Pat Toomey.
    Needless to say, Bush's endorsement of Specter angered pro-life Republicans across the state, and now exit polls suggest that many of them did not show up to vote on election day.While national polls indicate that moral values was the number one priority for 22% of all voters, only 18% of Pennsylvania voters listed moral values as their top priority. Since 80% of these "moral values" voters nationwide supported the President, their lower turnout in Pennsylvania probably gave Kerry his narrow margin of victory in the Keystone State.Furthermore, while Catholic voters played a major role in Ohio and Florida, Pennsylvania Catholics did not turn out in force for the President.
    What do these numbers mean? That Bush will further alienate his base if he allows Specter to Chair the Senate Judiciary Committee.(seamax)
18. The political genius of George W. Bush: Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican or an independent, it is hard not to look at President Bush's re-election victory last week and conclude that he is probably one of the three or four most talented politicians of the last half of a century. (watson, cnn)

Other

• Unlucky in riches: For a lot of people, winning the lottery is the American dream. But for many lottery winners, the reality is more like a nightmare. "Winning the lottery isn't always what it's cracked up to be," says Evelyn Adams, who won the New Jersey lottery not just once but twice (1985, 1986) to the tune of $5.4 million. Today the money is all gone and Adams lives in a trailer.(bankrate, yahoo)(bankrate)
• Poll: French see Arafat as hero: The French regard Yasser Arafat as a hero rather than a terrorist, according to a new poll.
  Asked to choose whether the Palestinian Authority chairman is a "hero of national resistance" or a terrorist, 43 percent chose the former and 27% the latter.
  Ten percent said Arafat fit into both categories, while 9% said he was neither.
  The poll, published Monday and commissioned jointly by the Lib ration newspaper and a national public radio station, also found that three times as many French people hold Prime Minister Ariel Sharon more responsible for Middle East violence than hold Arafat.
  In addition, 34% said they had more sympathy for the Palestinians, as opposed to 13% for Israel. (jerusalem post)
• LOOK HOW FAR HARVARD HAS STRAYED:I have to remain anonymous, but on November 6, 2004, I went to see an acapella concert at Harvard. It was the Harvard Pitches, a female group, and the Din and Tonics, a male group. Often these two groups will group up to get larger audiences.They had a professor act as the MC. This is not unusual, but not common. I've seen other professors MC and make jokes before.
  He introduced himself as teaching Human Sexuality. It originally had 90 students. Then 150. And now, over 400 students. It was becoming a very popular course.
  Course Objectives This course is intended to challenge students to think critically, to understand that sexuality and responses to intimaterelationships occur in a psychosocial context, to appreciate the importance of examining key psychological and interpersonal issues from a scientific perspective, to identify research needs in the field, and to examine the implications of this knowledge on issues ranging from one's personal behavior to social policy. Much of your learning through this course may consist of uncovering myths, half-truths, factual errors, and distortions you have accumulated throughout your lives. Through dedicated participation in this course, you may become more knowledgeable and accepting of yourself and others as sexual beings. Ideally, you will be better able to view and appreciate sexuality as a normal, integral, and joyful part of being human, while becoming more aware and tolerant of others whose views and lives may differ considerably from your own. Many cultures convey few positive and affirming messages related to the discovery and expression of sexuality. (course syllabus). (spiritdaily.com)