With Halloween a mere two weeks away you may be scrambling, having remembered that you don't yet have a costume and every store in your neighborhood has already been plundered. Just remember, no matter how bad you may feel about whatever you come up with, as long as you're not dressed in one of the costumes below, you're all set.
"They told us to get in line so we can get in the building," said Kayla Kilgore, a second-grader at the school.
But when Bozo started nipping at police, an officer was forced to pull his gun and shoot Bozo, police said.
"I just heard a gunshot, and people were screaming," Kayla said
read moreSomalia's extremist Islamist militia has vowed to avenge the killing of an al-Qaeda's terror leader in a dramatic raid by American special forces
As an insider at Cigna for over 20 years Mr Wendell Potter became privy to a lot of the unsavory tactics and practices of the overly consolidated health inurance industry from it's deliberate selling of "junk insurance" that people pay for that doesn't cover them to spending more money on vilifying Micheal Moore's movie Sicko than MM spent to make it. How the industry used PR tactics to defeat health care reform last time and how they are doing it again this time.
read moreThe U.S. troops came to the hospital looking for Taliban insurgents late at night last Wednesday. Fange said they kicked in doors, tied up four hospital employees and two family members of patients, and forced patients out of beds during their search. When they left two hours later, the unit ordered hospital staff to inform coalition forces if any wounded militants were admitted, and the military would decide if they could be treated, Fange said. The staff refused, he said. "That would put our staff at risk and make the hospital a target."
In the book, Hillier described the Iraq war as a "distraction" for the Americans. "Perhaps more importantly, the war in Iraq gave the Taliban heart at a time when it was largely beaten."
Most Taliban who would later form the Afghan insurgency were hiding in Pakistan, their leadership almost entirely killed or captured, militants "soundly beaten" in battles with US forces and their source of funding from Muslim world supporters drying up.
But the Taliban saw from the few successes of "ragtag insurgents" in Iraq that "Western military forces could be hurt and maybe even have their will to fight destroyed."
"They watched, learned and soon began applying the tactical lessons from Iraq in successfully attacking Western forces," Hillier wrote. The Afghan insurgency got its second wind.
There's a story about a dog with a bone in his mouth who comes upon a small bridge over quiet waters. The dog looks down and sees another dog with a bone in his mouth.
He barks at the other dog (his reflection) and loses both bones.
Is famous story.
Point to Spud bringing this up here is that as Hillier sez in his new book, Afghanistan was largely won when the decision to start a second front in Iraq was implemented.
Had the bone, just had to bring it home, so to speak.
By diverting resources and seriously underplanning both ventures now it seems both wars are imperilled.
As Iran increasingly pulls political strings in Iraq and the Taliban establish themselves firmly on both sides of the Afghani/Pakistani border causing political turmoil in that third country it becomes imperitive to either give one last serious effort at stabilising Afghanistan before international pressure, runaway costs and sheer fatigue causes the west to hafta withdraw or just get out and watch the place carefully thereafter.
Hilliers a good guy.
Spud respects him and his opinion.
He's often floated as a populist political candidate in some parts of the country but as his blunt speech in this post retirement biography indicate the guy is too brutally honest to make it in a modern PCfied political world.
More's the pity.
Be Well.
/Yup, this book is most definitely on Spud's Big List o' Books to Buy.