THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Turning back the tide of information overload with a digest of the latest developments in news conservatives need to pay attention to:

† Today’s Letter Is “I.” As In Ingrate.: In an interview on the Pakistani TV channel Geo, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that in the event that the U.S. goes to war with Pakistan, his country will side with Pakistan, Reuters reports:

"God forbid, if ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan," he said in the interview to Geo television.

"If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you."

The New York Times observes that Karzai’s unfortunate comments were made two days after he stood alongside Secretary Clinton at the presidential palace as she warned Pakistan that it needed to crackdown on militant extremists along the Afghan border.

Karzai added: “Afghanistan will never forget, will never forget, the welcome, the hospitality, the respect and the brotherhood shown by the Pakistan people to the Afghan people.” But he has already forgotten the sacrifice of blood and treasure the American people made to free his people from the Taliban.

Wanna bet that the weapons and materiel Karzai would make available to Afghanistan would have been paid for by U.S. taxpayers and the Afghan soldiers who would be using them against our troops would have been trained by those troops (related article, seventh item on the page)?

This article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine notes that “selectively arming portions of any given population … can be risky” – referring to the 30,000 villagers who will be recruited to join the Afghan Local Police to keep the Taliban and insurgents from re-taking rural areas – and raises the question “what other purposes might their American-supplied guns and training find, especially after foreign troops leave the country”:

One highly positioned Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, was not optimistic. “When you have a headache, you take pills,” he told me. “Some pills will cure your headache but damage your stomach in the process. That is what we have with the A.L.P. The local police are a temporary solution. Long-term, they are poison.” …

Proponents and critics of the A.L.P., when arguing its merits or its faults, each invoke Afghanistan’s long history of irregular armed groups and diffuse, localized power dynamics. “Our idea was to use the Musahiban dynasty as a model,” Seth Jones, a former senior Cfsocc adviser, told me when I met with him near his office at the RAND Corporation in Washington. Encompassing the rule of Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah and Daoud Kahn, the Musahiban dynasty extended from 1929 until the communist coup of 1978, a period of relative peace often referred to as Afghanistan’s golden age. Jones argues that Nadir Shah and his successors were able to achieve such stability “because they understood the importance of local power” and refrained from trying to displace it.

Critics of the A.L.P. point to a different precedent. The senior Afghan government official who views local police as “poison” in the long term, for example, also told me: “Look at our history, especially the mujahedeen, and you see that the A.L.P. is the wrong program for our country. People are very tired here. Why did the people accept the Taliban? Most Afghans are not extremists. But they were tired of the militias, the mujahedeen.” For Afghans who see the local police as potentially uncontrollable, the strategy represents a distressing step backward, not toward the Musahibans but the chaos that came later, during the anarchic ’90s, when warlords and militias terrorized the country. Far from a golden age, this period is often called topakiyaan — “the time of the men with guns.”

In a country as fragmented as Afghanistan, no strategy can be expected to succeed or fail uniformly on a national scale, especially one, like the Afghan Local Police, that targets not the province or the district but the village.

Those 30,000 men we have trained and armed may yet find a common cause – fighting against American troops in Pakistan. Karzai has repeatedly made clear that he thinks “foreigners” (AKA infidels) are a greater enemy than Pakistan and its support of Haqqani terrorists ensconced along the border between the two countries.

† Is This Why We Fight?: This article in American Thinker is about how the GOP establishment needs to wake up to the reality that this time, the base isn't going to settle for whomever is "next in line" -- in this election cycle, Mitt Romney. Chet Arthur makes the case that Romney is “a terrible candidate.” However, these grafs on what we have "accomplished" in our decade-long war in Iraq and Afghanistan (related article, seventh item on the page) caught The Stiletto's eye:

How good does that $87-billion investment in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" look today? Maybe we should ask the hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians who have had to flee Iraq, where their ancestors lived since the Apostle Mark brought the Gospel to them.

Or maybe we should ask ourselves what kind of "Enduring Freedom" there is in Afghanistan, now that the last Christian church has been closed and there is but one Jew left in the country.

To appease our Afghan friends, our commanding general felt it necessary to burn Pashto-language Bibles. Ten years in, the U.S. command still provides security for Hamid Karzai, a man who admits that he is on the take from the mullahs in Tehran. For this, we have paid $457,000 per hour since 2001.

Mitt Romney wants to send another 100,000 troops to Afghanistan. This most pliable of candidates seems not to have polled that one. Americans have long since concluded that Afghanistan is not going to be a functional liberal democracy any time soon. Purple fingers as proof of having voted are meaningless if 99% of Afghan women and 99% of Afghan men join to vote in a government that wants to kill Abdul Rahman. That young man converted to Christianity and was sentenced to die by a government we had installed.

"Men of intemperate minds cannot be free," said Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism; "their passions forge their fetters." And Burke had never been to Kabul.

† A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ: Washington Times columnist Robert Knight, a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union, takes apart the Obama Justice Department’s argument that states like AZ and AL that assist in enforcing federal immigration laws are violating the constitutional separation of powers (related article, fifth item on the page):

I wonder if state police in Alabama are barred from arresting someone trying to pass counterfeit $100 bills because our currency is federal. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power "to provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States." It doesn't say anything about state troopers.

Likewise, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution authorizes Congress "to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization." State police arresting illegal aliens have nothing to do with deciding who can be naturalized. …

The attitude of U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s Justice Department in suing Alabama and Arizona and threatening to sue Indiana, is, "We're not going to enforce the law, and you can't, either, no matter what impact this is having on your state. And, we're going to pitch the idea to Hispanics that only racists would want immigration laws enforced. By the way, here are directions in Spanish to your local polling place."

† Multiculturalism: Jihad By Other Means: Safoorah Khan was a math lab instructor at MacArthur Middle School in the Chicago suburb of Berkeley – the only one in the school district. In August 2008, when she had been on the job just nine months, she requested the first three weeks of December off to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The trip would have coincided with the critical end-of-semester marking period, and exceeded the number of leave days granted to teachers under their union contract, so the district denied her request. The 29-year old Khan could make this pilgrimage at any time during her life, but chose to put her wishes above the needs of her students – most of whom were black and Latino – and quit her job to make the trip.

In November 2008, Khan filed a religious discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The following year EEOC found that her complaint had merit, and referred the case to the Justice Department, which sued the school district for violating Khan’s civil rights by “compelling” her to choose between her job and her faith. Officials of Berkeley School District 87 countered in court papers that Khan’s request was “unreasonable” and would have imposed an “undue hardship.”

The dispute, which raised the legal and practical question of the lengths employers must go to accommodate an employee’s religious practices, has now been resolved out with the school district knuckling under to the DOJ and settling the case with a $75K payment to Khan, which includes back pay and legal fees. Given the facts of this case, The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz notes that “even Americans accustomed to the relentless – more precisely the relentlessly selective – political correctness of the Obama Justice Department had to have been startled at … the deranged notions of equity that had impelled Eric Holder's DOJ to go rushing into battle against the school district.”

Oh, and here’s an Orwellian touch: “The District is now also required to establish mandatory training in religious accommodation for all personnel.”

A federal court must approve the settlement, and Rabinowitz holds out hope that the court “will take note of just what it is they are approving.”

† Rage Against … Whatever: When the OWSers were just hanging around the park trying to figure out what it was they had left their parents’ basements to protest, The Stiletto predicted that things will start to rock & roll as soon as the union thugs got there to whip their slacker butts into a mob (click here for related article). And so it has come to pass, The Washington Post reports:

Labor groups are mobilizing to provide office space, meeting rooms, photocopying services, legal help, food and other necessities to the protesters. The support is lending some institutional heft to a movement that has prided itself on its freewheeling, non-institutional character.

And in return, Occupy activists are pitching in to help unions ratchet up action against several New York firms involved in labor disputes with workers. …

The coordination represents a new chapter for the anti-Wall Street activists, who have expressed anger at establishment forces in both major political parties and eschewed the traditional grass-roots organizing tactics long deployed by labor unions. …

Some Occupy activists consider it a chance to push the increasingly weak union movement into a more aggressive posture.

The union involvement in Occupy Wall Street reached an apex last week, when the firm that owns Zuccotti Park asked New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) for help clearing the area so that it could be cleaned. The park owner eventually backed down.

Several labor groups, including Service Employees International Union Local 1199, dispatched thousands of members to the park by 6 a.m. last Friday to help protesters stand their ground. …

Leaders in both camps say the relationship is sensitive. Occupy activists have made it clear that they would reject any efforts by union officials to draw the new movement into the get-out-the-vote efforts that labor wages in election campaigns.

Unions mobilized in 2008 to help elect Obama, and, despite frustrations with the administration, unions are expected to follow suit again next year.

† Romney: The Sequel: Former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) has been caught flat-footed on the flat tax, and has reflexively responded by ... wait for it … flip-flopping. The New York Times reports:

As several leading Republican presidential candidates embrace a flat tax as a core campaign position, one contender stands out in not doing so: Mitt Romney, who has a long record of criticizing such plans and famously derided Steve Forbes’s 1996 proposal as a “tax cut for fat cats.”

Lately, though, his tone has been more positive. “I love a flat tax,” he said in August. …

Politically, Mr. Romney’s favorable comments about flat taxes speak to the deep frustration many Republican voters share about the current system. …

But flat taxes, despite Mr. Romney’s favorable comments, are not part of his campaign plan, which calls for extending Bush tax cuts and lowering corporate tax rates. Some conservative tax activists say his murky flat-tax stance highlights a broader complaint: his lack of consistency on conservatives’ core issues, like abortion.

“His problem is that people don’t have confidence that they know what he believes in, and I think there is a pretty good reason for that,” said Chris Chocola, a Republican former congressman from Indiana who is president of the Club for Growth.

† Republicans Rumble In Vegas: Former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) and Gov. Rick Perry (TX) during the Western Republican Leadership Conference debate in Las Vegas repelled viewers with a testy exchange over whose policies created a bigger magnet for illegals. Perry dredged up an old charge that Romney had hired illegals to do landscaping around his home. Romney pointed to Perry’s $100,000 in-state tuition credit to illegals and his opposition to using E-Verify to check the immigration status of new hires.

USA Today debunked Perry’s attack against Romney, and The Washington Post's "fact checker" Glenn Kessler debunked Romney’s attack against Perry.

But Los Angeles Times has unearthed a new magnet that Perry can cite in the next debate:

The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.

Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.

The program, widely supported in Massachusetts, drew little attention when Romney signed the trailblazing healthcare law. But now it could prove problematic for the Republican presidential hopeful, who has been attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting educational aid for children of undocumented immigrants in Texas. …

The Massachusetts program, which cost more than $400 million last year, paid for 1.1 million hospital and clinic visits. It's unclear how many undocumented patients benefited because the state does not record that data. [Emphasis, The Stiletto] …

Massachusetts funds its Health Safety Net with some state money and by assessing fees on hospitals and insurers. The money is redistributed to providers who file claims for the patients who sign up for the program. [Emphasis, The Stiletto]

As if RomneyCare wasn’t unpalatable enough, with its individual mandate and spiraling costs, fees are levied to raise money that is redistributed to providers – many of whom are undoubtedly providing services to illegals. For Romney, who said “We have to turn off the magnet of extraordinary government benefits,” at the Fox News-Google debate in FL a month ago, this is not going to be easy to explain away. He could argue that his successor, Gov. Deval Patrick (D), extended coverage to illegals when he implemented the law, but that wouldn’t have been possible if there was language expressly prohibiting that – therefore, the law had been written to allow it.

Interestingly, Romney’s rejoinder to Perry about hiring illegals to mow his lawn – that he emphatically told the contractor, “I’m running for office for Pete’s sake. I can’t have illegals” –also applies to RomneyCare’s covering illegal aliens since, as Boston Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis puts it, “the Mittster was running for president from the moment he became our governor.”  

Finally, note that there is no data on how many illegals may have been treated under RomneyCare and at what cost. Every time a state tries to include a provision in a state law to quantify taxpayer-funded services that illegals consume, the Obama Justice Department and the ACLU sue and some judge somewhere strikes the provision – AL’s attempt to find out how much it costs to educate the children of illegals in public school being the latest example (related article, eighth item on the page). Absent this data, illegal immigration advocates can make the absurd claim that illegals pay more in taxes than the services they consume without fear of contradiction.

† Only The Little People Pay Taxes: A series of reports by the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV have detailed “how the Illinois pension system has been manipulated for political purposes and personal gain” (click here for related article). A follow-up article focuses on Steven Preckwinkle, the political director for the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and fellow union lobbyist David Piccioli, “[t]wo lobbyists with no prior teaching experience [who] were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007”:

Preckwinkle's one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He's 59, and at age 60 he'll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.

 His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.

 His pay for one day as a substitute was $93, according to records of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System.

 Over the course of their lifetimes, both men stand to receive more than a million dollars each from a state pension fund that has less than half of the assets it needs to cover promises made to tens of thousands of public school teachers. With billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, the Illinois Teachers' Retirement System, which serves public school teachers outside of Chicago, is one of several pension plans that are in debt as state government reels in a fiscal crisis.

Now you know why IL lawmakers had to increase the state income tax by 66 percent.