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From the Anchorage Daily News we learn that Butcher loses cancer fight:

Far from her Alaska home and the dogs she loved so much, four-time Iditarod champion Susan Butcher died Saturday in a Seattle hospital.

She was 51 years old and the mother of two young daughters. She had been waging a battle against leukemia for a year and a half, but sometimes not even the toughest warriors can win.

On 17 of her 51 years, a third of her life, Susan Butcher was on the Iditarod Trail challenging the Alaskan wilderness and weather on the 1,100+ mile length. She also drove a dog team to the top of Mount McKinley.

She was more than a candle in the darkness – she was a torch. You don’t ride in a dog sled; you spend most of your time running. All you need to win is to be a world-class dog breeder and trainer, a marathon runner, an arctic survival specialist, and handy enough to fix a busted sled in the middle of a wilderness.

The problem for the powers that be when looking at the political bloggers is that bloggers still have ideals. It has been so long since the pundit class sold their souls that they have forgotten what it was like to care.

Liberal bloggers aren’t truly angry, they are indignant. They know how things are supposed to be done, and are outraged when people, including the pundits, ignore the rules. It’s not that the Republicans break the rules, laws, and norms of a civil society; it’s that they do it with impunity.

It is especially galling when the media creates “new history” and claims that the atrocity of the moment is the way “things have always been done.” When it gets so blatant that they are forced to acknowledge a problem, they act like it just popped up, and hasn’t been part of a deliberate campaign that has been ongoing for decades.

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The BBC reports that Israeli border strike ‘kills 28’, eliminating the threat to Israel posed by Syrian Kurdish warehouse workers putting vegetables fruit on trucks.

Within the report we learn:

In his televised speech Sheikh Nasrallah also said Hezbollah would end its rocket attacks if Israel stopped attacking what he called civilian areas in Lebanon.

Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman said that suggestion was “a sign of weakness” and that Hezbollah might be “looking for a way out”.

Dan, you are still an idiot and hanging around with Bolton doesn’t help. Hezbollah isn’t going anywhere; they’re home. Israel is the one who needs an exit strategy.

When Israel reduced its air raids, Hezbollah reduced its rocket attacks. When Israel went back to attacking Lebanon, Hezbollah redoubled its attacks. Hezbollah is the one that does what it says it will do: they have credibility.

A general note to Israeli spokeweasels: intelligent people have figured out that Hezbollah is spinning like crazy, but you have been outright lying. Back off and return to the highly distorted version of truth that is acceptable. Calling 14-year-olds “senior Hezbollah officials” isn’t going to cut it and you are on the verge of having killed more Hezbollah fighters than could exist.

With the exception of whatever they used against that Israeli ship, Hezbollah has been firing rockets at Israel. They have no guidance systems. They are aimed like artillery pieces with the direction they are pointed, the angle at which they are fired, and time their rocket engines last determining where they hit. They are affected by weather. They are not precision guided weapons.

Israel is using a variety of weapons, but most of them have guidance systems. Whether they are powered [missiles], or unpowered [smart bombs] almost all are hitting exactly what the individual who fired them intended.

The Israel aircraft may also be firing rockets, but those are used in “line of sight” attacks against a specific target.

Pierre has a post up on the problem in Iraq: Dude, Here’s Your Civil War. In it he points to his column, Bush’s Iraq war: Icarus on crack, that was published in the Daytona Beach News-Journal on March 26, 2003.

Another example disproving the “conventional wisdom” that everyone thought Iraq had WMDs, or that the war would be a good idea. I’m still waiting for someone to point me to a French or Russian official saying there were WMDs in Iraq in 2003.

Jo Fish came across a US offer to train the Lebanese military. After seeing what the Iraqi military looks like, I think Lebanon would probably not buy into the program.

If they accept US equipment, they get US strings, and I doubt the US would continue to supply Lebanon with materiel during a conflict in the same manner as Israel has been supplied. Lebanon should stay with their “homeboys”: Hezbollah seems to be winning its war.

With the French spearheading the UN effort to do something about the Lebanon crisis, the Israelis need to contemplate what life will be like next door to La Légion étrangère, the obvious choice for a non-peacekeeping, “you get to shoot people” mission along the border. These guys are rather well known for their loose “rules of engagement”, generally following the advice of Abbé Arnaud-Amaury of Citeaux.

Via Culture Ghost a Flash version of Bush’s information age.

Yes, that underhanded commie lover, Hugo Chavez, has hatched a truly despicable plot: Venezuela’s chocolate revolution.

That’s right he has stolen 10 million from the freedom loving oil companies and has used it to convince Venezuelan farmers to grow organic cocoa beans for world-class chocolatiers.

Is there any addiction he won’t feed?

This does justify his purchase of the Su-30s: to protect the cocoa fields.

A couple of days ago the Pensacola Beach Blogger recommended the blog of Daytona Beach News-Journal columnist, Pierre Tristam. I read Candide’s Notebooks and liked it.

I have been questioning the story of the original battle of the current round of the Israel-Lebanon War, and Holden picked up on it with Mom, He Hit Me First!.

Pierre’s post, A Premeditated War-Planned in 2005 adds more evidence that makes me doubt the official version even more by pointing to an article published before the incident.

Mideast Democracy: One Violent Group Finds It Works Fine is an article by Karby Legett in the Wall Street Journal on July 10, 2006 that indicates that Israel had put the border on “high alert” in anticipation of a possible Hezbollah attack. The WSJ is not exactly known as a hotbed of bleeding heart liberal haters of Israel, so I assume they are reflecting information from the Israeli government.

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From the BBC report:Israel hit by Hezbollah barrage

Hezbollah fighters have launched more than 230 rockets from Lebanon, the biggest single-day barrage since the conflict began, Israeli officials say.

One person was killed and dozens injured as some rockets landed up to 70km inside Israel, the deepest so far.

The upsurge came as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Israel had destroyed Hezbollah’s infrastructure.

Mr Olmert insisted there would be no ceasefire until an international force was deployed in southern Lebanon.

“I said I’d be ready to enter a ceasefire when the international forces, not will be ready, but will be deployed,” Mr. Olmert said of the timetable for a halt to the violence.

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CNN: Army Guard ‘in dire situation’

Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum spoke to a group defense reporters after Army officials, analysts and members of Congress disclosed that two-thirds of the active Army’s brigades are not ready for war.

The budget won’t allow the military to complete the personnel training and equipment repairs and replacement that must be done when units return home after deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan, they say.

“I am further behind or in an even more dire situation than the active Army, but we both have the same symptoms, I just have a higher fever,” Blum said.

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This is the video I mentioned in the ceiling fan comments.

Can you say “cat fit”…

‘Noz pointed to this piece by Lara Deeb, Hezbollah: a primer that gives another view on the organization and the history behind it.

As a former analyst I’m interested in the military segment of Hezbollah. Steve’s Artillery and Bunkers, Billmon’s Punching Above Its Weight, and Badtux’s Third Generation Thinking are all worth reading for their insights.

I’ve looked at the reporting and have formed an opinion that is complimentary to what these people see. This is a light infantry force that seems to operate independently at the platoon and squad level. They probably don’t have a command & control structure to destroy. It would appear that people are assigned to defend a specific zone and have their own supply caches to draw from, rather than a centralized system, meaning there are no supply lines or depots to destroy.

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