"Worlds Apart."

His O ness is finally making good on his promise to get us out of Iraq, and it looks like September 1, 2010 is the target date. I say it's about damn time. We shouldn't have been there in the first place. That goes for Afghanistan as well. And with each passing day we are seeing why.

"The bullet-riddled bodies — including three women — were found Friday near three four-wheeled drive vehicles in a wooded area just off the main road that snakes through a narrow valley in the Kuran Wa Munjan district of Badakhshan, provincial police chief Gen. Agha Noor Kemtuz told The Associated Press.

One of the dead Americans had spent about 30 years in Afghanistan, rearing three daughters and surviving both the Soviet invasion and bloody civil war of the 1990s that destroyed much of Kabul.

'Spying for Americans'
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told the AP that they killed the foreigners because they were "spying for the Americans" and "preaching Christianity." In a Pashto language statement acquired by the AP, the Taliban also said the team was carrying Dari language bibles and "spying gadgets."

I heard a man I respect immensely say something to this effect on CNN, and it's true: The Taliban share the same ethnicity of the Pashtun Tribe, which represents half of the population of Afghanistan. And, apparently, their "influence extends far beyond the Pashtun heartland" in Afghanistan. They are never going to cooperate with us on a nation building mission, so if we are not there to bomb the place into oblivion (I am not saying that we should) then why are we there? What, exactly, is our vital interest in Afghanistan? To go after al-Qaeda? To catch OBL? To put a clamp on the world's heroin trade? What? It's a rhetorical question, because I know that none of the above makes any damn sense. OBL is either dead or in Pakistan. There is more al Qaeda in other Middle Eastern countries and places like Somalia than Afghanistan, and the president and his damn brother controls half of the drug trade in that country. So who are we kidding with this war?

Finally, these border states are going to have to do something about the killings of innocent law abiding citizens by folks who come into this country without proper documentation. This is what drove those poor people in Arizona to pass those seemingly draconian laws against immigrants. I mean we just cant let this type of thing continue to go on.

"Two men who escaped from a private Arizona prison and a woman thought to have helped them have been linked to the investigation of a couple's killing in New Mexico, authorities said Saturday.

New Mexico State Police spokesman Peter Olson said Tracy Province, John McCluskey and Casslyn Welch were linked through forensics but he declined to provide specifics.

He declined to say whether police believe the three were responsible for the killings, adding that "we don't know how involved they are."

Province, McCluskey and Daniel Renwick escaped from the medium-security Arizona State Prison near Kingman on July 30 after authorities say 44-year-old Casslyn Welch of Mesa threw wire cutters over the perimeter fence. Renwick was arrested in Colorado on Aug. 1.

The badly burned skeletal remains of Linda and Gary Haas, both 61, of Tecumseh, Okla., were found in a charred camper on Wednesday morning on a remote ranch in Santa Rosa in eastern New Mexico. " [Article]

Wait, did they say they are looking for two guys named McCluskey and Renwick? Well I will be damned! I was looking for names like Gonzalez and Rodriquez. Oh well, I am sure that this is just a case of reverse racial profiling. Sorry folks, nothing to seed here, move right along.