Month: April 2010

“Under a dusty hospital tent where doctors yell over the roar of jet engines, Dr. John York studied an electronic image of a blood vessel in the neck of a soldier wounded by an improvised bomb. It looked like a balloon ready to pop.”

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“Under a dusty hospital tent where doctors yell over the roar of jet engines, Dr. John York studied an electronic image of a blood vessel in the neck of a soldier wounded by an improvised bomb. It looked like a balloon ready to pop. Too delicate to operate on directly. Dr. York would have to try a procedure that had rarely been attempted so close to a battlefield.” – Alan Cullison, Wall Street Journal

First-rate article in the WSJ. (via Abu Muqawama Twitter feed)

I attended a conference a couple of weeks ago, where I had the chance to hear a few military surgeons discuss their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Amazing work being done.

Escalation

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Zenpundit has a post up about how gunmen employed by one of the drug cartels in northern Mexico have demanded that an entire town empty out. They want the people gone, or else they will start killing.

Zen thinks this is the start of the end for Mexico, and sees a potential flood of refugees from our neighbor to the south.

To anyone interested in the subject, thought you might appreciate the news that the cartels are now attacking Mexican army bases.

A last and hopeless act of desperation by criminals who are on the ropes, or a canny move to test the security of their greatest foes?

We shall see.

(Hat tip to Scott, who snarks like mad when he says “Man, this never would have happened without American gun shows.”)

Why the Democrats Raked It In

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On this Reason post [h/t Instapundit] about possible serious political warping of the “stimulus”spending, commenter nate made an interesting claim:

I work in a federal agency that had a good portion of stimulus cash and was part of the team that picked projects to get funds. We really didn’t look at unemployment in the area. Our main criterion was whether the project had been designed and engineered to a point that we could get construction going pretty quickly. Once we set out our list, we sent it up to OMB. They knocked some stuff out and changed it up some, but for the most part the final list looked like what we sent them. I doubt politics had too much to do with the selection of projects.

I actually think this is very likely. As much as I would gain emotional satisfaction from the idea that perfidious Democrats systematically channeled hundreds of billions of dollars to their cronies in old style big city machine corruption writ large…

… I just don’t think they’re that competent.

Instead, I think the asymmetry could largely result from the type of projects that nate and his colleagues were primed to fund. They didn’t fund projects because the projects fulfilled an important need. Neither did they fund projects that local areas could not afford and therefore had never started. Instead, they funded projects based solely on how far along the projects already were in their development.

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