† We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?: On the fifth anniversary of the September 11^th terror attacks, The Stiletto questioned the Bush administration launching an educational exchange program that aimed to quintuple the number of Saudi students in the U.S.:

The Stiletto doubts that exposing young Saudis to American education and culture will make them more sympathetic to us – it may well have the opposite effect, and reinforce the fundamentalist Muslim view of America as a decadent and immoral society. …

This program invites inside our borders thousands of young men already primed by their restrictive, intolerant culture to be jihadis.

This post was followed up a few months later with the observation that, “15,000 students steeped in Wahhabism are now ensconced at colleges and universities throughout the US taking engineering, chemistry and other subjects that will help the unknowable number among them who harbor dreams of jihad to become more effective mass murderers” (second item). The Stiletto also wondered (last item) why American students would want to participate in a reciprocal educational exchange program that required them to give up their freedom of speech, worship and association (particularly, with members of the opposite gender).

The Stiletto’s concerns remain relevant with revelations that Saudi national Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, who came to the U.S. on a student visa to study chemical engineering was arrested on charges of planning a terrorist attack using explosive chemicals (second item). Aldawsari (allegedly) came into this country as a committed jihadi, and he is not the only one – something that our government has known for years. Unlike, say, the Dutch government, which forbids Iranian students from studying nuclear science so as not to disseminate the knowledge necessary to further Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. places no restrictions on the subjects that students from countries that are known to sponsor terrorism can study.

† A New Form Of Tax Avoidance (second item): The grow-your-own movement is catching on amongst cigarette smokers who want to avoid the onerous taxes that well-meaning government officials have slapped on their cancer sticks to induce them to give up smoking.  “In the state with the highest cigarette taxes in the country, in a city that has become one of the hardest places in America to find a place to smoke,” Audrey Silk, a retired police officer and founder of smokers’ rights group New York City Clash (Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment), “has gone off the grid, growing, processing and smoking her own tax-free cigarettes from packets of seeds she buys online for about $2,” reports The New York Times:

She expects to produce a total of 45 cartons after planting two crops - the first in the summer of 2009, the second last summer - and estimates that she will have saved more than $5,000.

“It’ll make the antismokers apoplectic,” said Ms. Silk. “They’re using the power of taxation to coerce behavior. That’s not what taxation is supposed to be for.”

There are no federal, state or city laws prohibiting New Yorkers from growing tobacco at home for personal consumption. Still, Ms. Silk has kept her homegrown tobacco a secret for the most part since she planted the first crop, though she has offered cigarettes to her boyfriend and a few neighbors. This month, however, she changed her position on keeping quiet, after the City Council approved a bill banning smoking at parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas.

“The only way we’re going to win now, since you can’t reason with the irrational, which is the City Council or any lawmakers,” Ms. Silk said, “is you have to take the position of giving them the finger.”

Though she has become more vocal about her tobacco, she remains apprehensive. She said that she worried that antismoking advocates and the Bloomberg administration, which pushed to ban smoking in restaurants and bars, would make homegrown tobacco their next target. “We fear that the antismokers are so hysterical that if they start finding that people are doing this, they would craft a law to make it illegal,” Ms. Silk said. “I’m waiting for the black helicopters to start flying over my yard.”

It’s impossible to know how many other NYers are growing their own tobacco, but the MS company that supplied Silk with her seeds has more than 1,000 tobacco-seed customers in the NYC metropolitan area.

† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: With 29 states now having Republican governors – including deep blue states such as NJ, PA and OH – President Barack Hussein’s agenda is going to be undermined “at every turn ahead of the Democrat's 2012 re-election campaign,” reports The Associated Press:

Some are rejecting federal money for high-speed rail. Many are fighting the president's health care law. And several are going after the Democratic Party's bedrock constituency, pushing laws that would weaken the power of unions.

Not that any Republican governor will acknowledge that this is politics at play - even if it is.

"Republican governors are doing what they said they would as candidates," insisted Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who led the GOP's campaign efforts last fall and may seek the party's presidential nomination. "All this goes back to our commitment in the last election that we're going to get control of spending for the sake of the taxpayers."

"It's not a conspiracy. It's not that we're doing this for a political reason to go after the president," added first term Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett. "We have fundamental disagreements. We have different perspectives."

But left unsaid in interviews with governors attending this weekend's National Governors Association meeting was this: Republicans, particularly in places with many electoral votes, like the Midwest, are fully aware that stymieing Obama's plans in the states could weaken him just as he tries to make the case to the country that he should get a second term.

One Republican governor has gone so far as to privately liken GOP governors' efforts to providing "oversight of the Obama administration."

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: The country’s prolonged economic doldrums has switched on a thriftiness gene that has been dormant since The Great Depression, reports The New York Times:

Throw away the cellphone after two years? Not so fast. Ditch the flat-panel TV for an even thinner model? Maybe next year. Replace the blouse with the hole? Darn it!

Consumer spending has picked up, but for some Americans the recession has left something behind: a greater interest in making stuff last. …

Whether a broad, long-term shift in consumer habits is under way is a question tickling economists and analysts. Some insist that, as with the Depression, the recent downturn has made a lingering impression on how people view the propriety of, say, stuffing a still-working cellphone into a desk drawer in favor of a newer model.

But other experts and historians argue that as spending and credit return, so will yearnings to favor brands, fashion and novelty over practicality. …

Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at the Harvard Business School and a historian of consumer behavior, said she would bet her boot collection that the change was, if not permanent, at least lasting. She said it stemmed not just from a shaky economy but also from a sense that great institutions - like government and major corporations - might not be reliable saviors in a crisis.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Dispatch From Bizzaroland): President Barack Hussein Obama turns out to be a leader after all - as the head of the Dem party, he is the leader of the party that leads by not leading. The Washington Post reports that to avert a shutdown of the federal government on March 4th, Senate Dems tentatively embraced a stopgap measure proposed by House Repubs to immediately cut $4 billion in federal spending by targeting programs that President Obama has already marked for elimination [emphasis, The Stiletto]. Dems will be rewarded for their courage with a short-term spending bill that keeps the government running an additional two weeks. The bill, which cuts $1.24 billion in programs and $2.7 billion in old earmarks is expected to get to the House floor on Tuesday.

In a speech to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters Sunday night in Nashville, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) reiterated that he is trying to avoid a government shutdown:

“We have a moral responsibility to address the problems we face. That means working together to cut spending and rein in government – NOT shutting it down. The House has passed legislation - reflecting the will of the people - that would keep the government running through October while cutting spending. The leader of the United States Senate has refused to allow a vote on this legislation, so the House will pass a shorter-term bill that will also keep the government running while including reasonable spending cuts at the same time. This is very simple: Americans want the government to stay open, and they want it to spend less money. We don’t need to shut down the government to accomplish that. We just need to do what the American people are asking of us.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Today’s Letter Is “I.” As In Ingrate.): COIN is worthless in Afghanistan, argues former infantry officer and Vietnam vet Bing West, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. In its review of his latest book, “The Wrong War,” The New York Times notes that West came to his conclusions with boots-on-the-ground reporting, having been embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, “on patrols with the grunts, wad[ing] through the canals, [running] through firefights and hump[ing] up the mountains”:

In the nine years since the first American troops landed in Afghanistan, a new kind of religion has sprung up, one that promises success for the Americans even as the war they have been fighting has veered dangerously close to defeat. Follow the religion’s tenets, give yourself over to it and the new faith will reward you with riches and fruits.

The new religion, of course, is counterinsurgency, or in the military’s jargon, COIN. The doctrine of counterinsurgency upends the military’s most basic notion of itself, as a group of warriors whose main task is to destroy its enemies. Under COIN, victory will be achieved first and foremost by protecting the local population and thereby rendering the insurgents irrelevant. Killing is a secondary pursuit. The main business of American soldiers is now building economies and political systems. Kill if you must, but only if you must. …

No one in the Obama administration uses the phrase “nation-building,” but that is, of course, precisely what they are trying to do - or some lesser version of it. Protect the Afghan people, build schools and hold elections. And the insurgents will wither away. …

[T]he central premise of counterinsurgency doctrine holds that if the Americans sacrifice on behalf of the Afghan government, then the Afghan people will risk their lives for that same government in return. They will fight the Taliban, finger the informants hiding among them and transform themselves into authentic leaders who spurn death and temptation.

This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Jurist Gone Wild (Sex, Drugs & Stripper's Pole): Former Atlanta federal judge Jack Camp, who pleaded guilty to two drug-related charges after a stripper claimed he used cocaine with her, blamed his downward spiral on decades-long bipolar disorder that was not well-controlled with medication and brain damage from a bicycling accident in 2000, according to a court filing meant to provide the sentencing judge with mitigating factors, reports The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The filing noted that Camp began seeking treatment for depression in November 1999, and his condition involved "a mood cycling or bipolar disorder." Features of these afflictions are impaired judgment and excessive involvement in pleasurable activities, the filing said.

Camp's conduct "is certainly consistent with that characterization," the sentencing memorandum said. …

In 2000, Camp also suffered a serious head injury when he had an accident while bicycling without a helmet in rural Coweta County, the filing said, noting that to this day he has no memory of what happened.

Camp suffered damage to the impulse control part of his temporal lobe, "which would ordinarily inhibit impulsiveness or extremely reckless behavior," the filing said.

At the time of his arrest, Camp, who had become a senior judge, was feeling isolated and was dealing with a severely ill mother and sister, the lawyers said.

His mental health issues and the stresses he was coping with do not excuse his conduct, the filing said. "They do help explain, however, how in May of 2010 a lonely man in the twilight of his life became entangled with a seductive prostitute more than willing to take advantage of his needs and of his misguided impulse to be her friend and protector."

Camp could face up to four years in federal prison when he is sentenced next month. His attorneys asked for probation, a fine and community service.

The Stiletto’s no brain surgeon, but the court filing says that Camp suffered damage to his left temporal lobe, which controls some types of memory relating to spoken language, sensory processing and emotional stability (raising the question of whether the damage to which his attorneys refer in the filing is a result of his mood disorder or the concussion he suffered after his bike accident).

The frontal lobe, which sits just above the left and right temporal lobes, controls what neuropsychologists call “the executive functions” of the brain - higher-level mental processes such as judgment, impulse control and thinking through the consequences of your actions. A stroke that damages the frontal lobe can cause loss of executive function and can cause significant behavioral changes – for example, someone who’s always been known as “a perfect gentleman” may begin addressing women using very crude sexual terms and trying to force himself on them.

The Stiletto doesn’t know that a concussion involving the left temporal lobe would have an effect of the same magnitude on Camp’s behavior and whether it explains his actions. 

Quinnipiac University poli sci professor Scott McLean tells The Globe that Patrick’s comments would resurface in negative ads from primary opponents: “With compliments like that, you don’t need attacks from your own party.’’