AP:

Bubba Ludwig can’t walk, talk or open the refrigerator door — but he does have his very own Illinois gun permit.

The 10-month-old, whose given name is Howard David Ludwig, was issued a firearm owner’s identification card after his father, Howard Ludwig, paid the $5 fee and filled out the application, not expecting to actually get one.

The card lists the baby’s height (2 feet, 3 inches), weight (20 pounds) and has a scribble where the signature should be.

With some exceptions, the cards are required of any Illinois residents purchasing or possessing firearms or ammunition within the state. There are no age restrictions on the cards, an official said.

Illinois State Police oversee the application process. Their purpose, said Lt. Scott Compton, is to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons, those under an order of protection and those convicted of domestic violence.

“Does a 10-month-old need a FOID card? No, but there are no restrictions under the act regarding age of applicants,” he said.

Ludwig, 30, of Chicago, applied for the card after his own father bought Bubba a 12-gauge Beretta shotgun as a gift. The weapon will probably be kept at Ludwig’s father’s house until the boy is at least 14.

Senator James Inhofe, direct from the bottom of the Environmentalist Inferno where he was placed by Vanity Fair, released today a list of a dozen scientists formerly supporting the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming who have become skeptics.

There is a famous military history by Kenneth P. Williams, titled Lincoln Finds a General, describing the lengthy series of unsuccessful Union commanders and the dismal record of Union defeats in the Eastern theater of the war, before, after three years of fighting, Abraham Lincoln finally made Ulysses Grant general-in-chief.

In Grant, Lincoln found a general who had an unbroken record of victory in the West, and it was Lincoln’s decision to give supreme command to a fighting general with a habit of success which brought his war to a successful conclusion.

Burdened with a similarly protracted war, one happily unmarred by any American defeat, but nonetheless a war increasing dramatically in unpopularity with the electorate, George W. Bush has found not a fighting general with a record of victory, but a staff officer. He has appointed not a general-in-chief with unlimited authority to wage war, but rather “a war coordinator” whose role will be “to eliminate conflicts among the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies.”

Following Lincoln’s example would have been more to the point.

Associated Press story

USAToday recently reported an in-progress study by military historians commissioned by the Department of Defense demonstrates that insurgencies can be defeated, but doing so takes time and requires ingenuity and patience.

Insurgencies, such as the one the United States is fighting in Iraq, last an average of more than 10 years, according to a study commissioned by the Defense Department.

For the United States, the good news is that rebels lose more often than they win. Chances for stopping an insurgency improve after 10 years, the study shows. …

“The violence in Iraq is going to go on a minimum for at least three or four more years and in reality another five plus years,” said Christopher Lawrence, director of The Dupuy Institute, which is conducting the study.

The Iraq war is in its fifth year.

The Annandale, Va.-based Dupuy Institute is under a Defense Department contract to study insurgencies to help give commanders more information about what works and what doesn’t. The study is due to be completed in September.

The military recently produced a new counterinsurgency manual that establishes doctrine for waging a counterinsurgency.

According to the manual, defeating an insurgency requires:

•An understanding of local society;

•Good intelligence about the enemy;

•Establishing security and a rule of law;

•Establishing a long-term commitment.

The new doctrine points out the limits to using overwhelming firepower, which could anger civilians, and the need to find political solutions to win over the population.

The manual says counterinsurgency is much more complex than other forms of warfare, requiring the coordination of political, military and economic efforts.

As part of the study, the institute built a database of 63 post-World War II insurgencies, including Vietnam, the French in Algeria and the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The United States experience in Vietnam soured the U.S. military on insurgencies, Lawrence said. The prevailing military doctrine after Vietnam emphasized building conventional capabilities to counter the Soviet threat. “The subject (of counterinsurgencies) has not been seriously analyzed by the Army since the 1960s,” Lawrence said.

Not all insurgencies are quagmires, the report shows. Insurgents only win in 41% of the conflicts in the database, Lawrence said. The remainder were victories for the counterinsurgents, were inconclusive or are still going on.

One of the most successful counterinsurgencies was the British victory over communist insurgents in Malaysia during the 1950s.

Col. Timothy Reese, director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., cautions against reading too much into it.

Each conflict is unique, and the differences are as important as the similarities, Reese said.

“War cannot be reduced to a formula,” Reese said. “War is an art as much as it is a science.”

Washington Times:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is prepared to spend an unprecedented $1 billion of his own $5.8 billion personal fortune for a third-party presidential campaign, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Tuesday in The Washington Times.

“He has set aside $1 billion to go for it,” a long-time business adviser to Mr. Bloomberg tells The Times. “The thinking about where it will come from and do we have it is over, and the answer is yes, we can do it.”

The $1 billion would represent about one-fifth of Mr. Bloomberg’s personal fortune.

Last Sunday, RINO Chuck Hagel was speculating on Face the Nation about sharing a ticket with Bloomberg. link

Hagel is better-known nationally, so I naturally assumed that Bloomberg was considering the VP slot on that Third Party ticket, but if Bloomberg will be ponying up a billion dollars, his plans must be the other way around.

There is clearly something about the media-saturated atmosphere of Manhattan which induces excessive vanity. Not one, but two, NYC mayors think that their local office atop a governmental dunghill of corruption, bureaucracy, and political featherbedding is likely to be regarded nationally as an appropriate stepping-stone to the presidency of the United States. They are both sadly mistaken.

But if Michael Bloomberg is sufficiently self-infatuated and frivolous enough to waste that kind of money to get into the history books somewhere south of Alf Landon, more power to him. He will really wind up playing the role of Ralph Nader in recent elections, sucking away a small percentage of the votes of airheads who would otherwise be voting for the democrat.

I do think that he ought to ask Donald Trump to be his running-mate though, instead of Chuck Hagel.

ABC reports that US air marshals are currently “flooding” flights from Germany and Britain.

As many as five or six U.S. air marshals are now assigned to each U.S.-bound flight from airports in Frankfurt, London and Manchester, England, because of fears terrorists might attempt a coordinated series of mid-air explosions, law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

“We’re afraid someone in the back is going to mix something or light something up, so air marshals are being placed strategically through the plane,” said one senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the stepped-up security.

The stepped-up security on flights out of Britain’s Heathrow, Gatwick and Manchester airports began about two weeks ago, based on intelligence reports that another al Qaeda hijacking plot was in the making, the officials said.

The latest Gallup Poll finds

Congress Approval Down to 29%; Bush Approval Steady at 33%

Eric, at Classical Values, highlights Vanity Fair’s The Green Issue‘s carefully crafted packaging of environmentalist agitprop with fashion.

Highpoints include a typically fair-minded assessment of Rush Limbaugh by leftist windbag James Wolcott:

Global warming’s most popular denialist, talk radio’s most imitated showman, conservatism’s minister of disinformation, he has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership. He has given Republican lawmakers the rhetorical cover fire to do nothing but snicker as the crisis emerged and impressed itself on the rest of the world. He conscripted concern for nature as just another weapon in the Culture Wars. May the grasses of his favorite golf courses go forever yellow and dust storms whip from the sand traps.

Fawning profiles of celebrity activists Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Greenie version of Dante’s Inferno, with Bush, Cheney, and Senator James Inhofe at the very bottom in the mouths of Satan, and, slightly above them, a headless Michael Crichton trudging around a circle whose label I cannot read, but which must be the equivalent of the “Sowers of Discord” bolgia where Dante placed Mohammed.

Dean Barnett, in the Weekly Standard, notes that John Kerry did himself a lot of political harm with Packer fans when he spoke of “Lambert Field.”

Barnett clearly thinks that Howard Dean should have identified Stairway to Heaven as his favorite song, instead of Jaspora, an esoteric piece of Haitian reggae by Jean Wyclif.

Imagine what a candidate could get done if he achieved fluency in pop culture. Picture a candidate who could effortlessly segue from paying homage to Dale Earnhardt’s #3 to saying how much High Noon has always meant to him. Conjure up a contender who could unashamedly admit that if owning every George Strait record makes him a square, so be it, and then quickly pivot to the many times tears welled in his eyes when sports heroes like Curt Schilling or Willis Reed rose above pain to perform in an almost super-human fashion.

That guy wouldn’t just have a lot of admirers who wanted to have a beer with him. He’d also eventually be known as Mr. President.

But Professor Bainbridge rejects the proposed Barnett test.

That’s not pop culture. That’s rural Southern culture. Nascar. The opiate of the good ol’ boy masses. Gary Cooper. A great movie, but hardly au courant. George Strait, gawd help us.

Between Clinton and Bush 43 we’ve been ruled by Southerners for the last 4 presidential terms and Barnett wants to foist yet another good ol’ boy on us. Not that there’s anything wrong with Southerners, per se, of course. But maybe it’s time to let a Yankee city boy have a chance?

Personally, if I wanted to choose a President based on his or her fluency with pop culture (which is about the dumbest criteria I’ve ever seen anyway), I’d look for somebody who:

Can effortlessly segue from paying homage to Merlot Clone #3 to saying how much The Matrix has always meant to him. Conjure up a contender who could unashamedly admit that if owning every Bruce Springsteen record makes him a left-leaning pinko, so be it, and then quickly pivot to the many times tears welled in his eyes during the second quarter of Super Bowl XLI.

And proposes the following instead:

Knows which wine to match with the foie gras-stuffed quail being served at a state dinner

Won’t wink at the Queen

Doesn’t hunt, fish, or go with girls who do

Smokes cigars

Is sometimes accused of having a metrosexual streak

Only drinks beer with foods that would score at least 10,000 on the Scoville scale

Can credibly debate the relative claims of The Matrix, Star Wars, Bladerunner, and Star Trek II to be the greatest science fiction movie of all time

Can credibly debate the relative claims of The Who and Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band to be the world’s greatest rock and roll band

Came from a state that didn’t secede

Can recite at least one Monty Python skit from memory

Can credibly debate the relative claims of Blazing Saddles, The Producers, and Young Frankenstein to be Mel Brook’s best movie, while explaining why Spaceballs is a candidate for the worst movie ever

Has never sat through an entire Woody Allen movie, an entire Nascar race, or an entire Dixie Chicks concert

Wouldn’t camp out 5 days to get Garth Brooks tickets even if s/he was camping at the time

Went to Germany on vacation because s/he couldn’t find a highway with high enough speed limits in the US

Prefers football to basketball to baseball to soccer

Doesn’t play golf

Doesn’t bowl

Has no kids to foist subsequent generations of politicians on us

Has a spouse with no political ambitions

Lives with at least one golden retriever

Nebraska RINO Chuck Hagel, who has complied a record of anti-Republican votes and defeatism that Lincoln Chafee might envy, observed yesterday on Face the Nation that, in his view, the Republican Party had been hijacked away from its core values (presumably those of Liberal “Me-Too” Republicanism) by “extremists.”

In an interview with CBS’s Bob Schieffer, Hagel expansively speculated about running as a Third Party candidate, a move he predicted would be good for the American political system. Schieffer then turned the conversation to discussing prospects of a joint run with New York City’s Anti-Gun-crusading, Anti-Nicotine-Nazi Mayor Bloomberg.

Hagel was delighted by the idea, and grew misty-eyed over the generosity of the America which could offer such opportunities to some very rich and powerful “boys” from Nebraska and New York.

As John Wayne used to say: That’ll be the day.

The Telegraph reports the death of the head of the Taliban’s military forces.

The Taliban’s most prominent military commander has been killed by a combined Nato-Afghan force.

Mullah Dadullah, a senior lieutenant of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, was killed yesterday in the southern province of Helmand, an area which has seen intense fighting between British, American and Afghan troops and the Taliban.

Dadullah’s body was shown to journalists in the governor’s office in the city of Kandahar. Three bullet wounds could be seen on his body – one to the back of the head and two to the stomach.

Dadullah, who lost a leg fighting against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, is of the highest-ranking Taliban leaders to be killed since the fall of the hard-line regime following the US-led invasion in 2001.

His death represents a major victory for the Afghan government and the international coalition that has struggled to contain the Taliban insurgency destabilising the south and east of the country.

Brian Carney performs a useful postmortem on the Scooter Libby case in this month’s Commentary.

If a lesson about the Bush administration lies buried in this tale, it is close to the opposite of the accepted one. It is a lesson about an administration caught in an uncomfortable position as a result of one State Department official’s indiscreet remark to a skilled columnist, an administration straining to appear to be doing the right thing even at the expense of actually doing anything right. But the real lesson here has nothing to do with the Bush administration, any more than it has to do with prewar intelligence or with the First and Fifth Amendment rights of CIA officers.

The modern American government is a vast and largely self-sustaining bureaucracy. That bureaucracy acts, first and foremost, in its own interest, and not necessarily in the interests of its putative but temporary political bosses. The CIA, its intelligence having been challenged, sold out the White House on the sixteen words—even though that intelligence would later be upheld. The State Department, faced with the knowledge that one of its own was responsible for the Valerie Wilson leak, preferred keeping the White House in the dark to revealing what it knew. The Justice Department did what prosecutors do when ordered to investigate, which is to charge people with crimes.

In other words, the Republican party’s alleged “full control” of government prior to the 2006 midterm elections was more myth than reality. The Bush administration lost control of the Wilson story almost from the beginning, and while on a number of occasions it failed to exercise the control available to it, it was also denied the opportunity to control its fate by entrenched interests that no elected administration can ever fully master without the consent of the bureaucracy that supposedly serves it.

Whole article