THE WEIRS TIMES, Thursday, March 25, 2010

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by Michelle Malkin

Syndicated Columnist

age. Democratic leaders leaked a solid-

seeming price tag -- $940 billion over 10 years -- before the CBO released any official com- ment or report. Liberal blogs and mainstream newswires started parroting Democrats’ claims that their plan “would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second decade of the plan’s implementation” -- again, before the CBO had released an iota of information, and hours before the House Rules Committee posted the long-awaited reconciliation bill.

If you cannot trust government’s num- bers, you cannot trust government’s words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats’ desperate promotion of a phony-baloney Congressional Bud- get Office analysis of their latest health care takeover pack-

THE DEEM-O-CRATS’ TOWERING DECEPTION

House Majority Whip James Clyburn pro-

nounced himself “giddy” over the supposed CBO scoring. Math lover and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed: “I love numbers. They’re so precise.” But “precise” does not mean “accurate.”

And the most “precise” numbers can be ut- terly worthless. That is basically what CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf pointed out in his summary of the unofficial preliminary analy- sis of Demcare: “Although CBO completed a preliminary re-

view of legislative language prior to its release, the agency has not thoroughly examined the reconciliation proposal to verify its consis- tency with the previous draft. This estimate is therefore preliminary, pending a review of the language of the reconciliation proposal, as well as further review and refinement of the budgetary projections.” Translation: Garbage in, garbage out. El-

mendorf’s weary number crunchers know they are just more stage props in the Oba-Ka- buki health care theater. Like the president’s partisan donor-doctors dressed up in their

White House-supplied lab coats, the CBO’s statistical authorities are being exploited to lend credibility and solidity to the Democrats’ legislative vaporware. The CBO didn’t release its non-report be-

cause it was finished. The agency released it because Democrats needed cover for their bogus transparency pledge to post the bill 72 hours before voting on it (which they still didn’t fulfill). The good news is that the number crunchers

say they may have a real, final, useful analy- sis done by Sunday. The bad news is that House Democrats -- moving forward with their “deem-and-pass” trickery -- are scheduled to ram this monstrosity through by Sunday. Pelosi touted fantasy savings from cutting

Medicare waste, fraud and abuse totaling some $500 billion over the first 10 years of the Demcare plan. But House Democrats are rely- ing on reaping massive dividends from Medi- care reimbursement cuts that no one in Con- gress has had the courage to make. They also set aside the projected $200 billion so-called

See MALKIN on 19

THE FIGHT FOR OPIUM CENTRAL

First in a series of reports from Afghani- stan

Camp Leatherneck, Af-

by Oliver North

Syndicated Columnist

ghanistan -- This for- ward operating base, “20 miles from no- where,” may be the fastest-growing mili- tary installation in the world. In the six

months since our Fox News team was pre- viously here, the base and its “population” have almost doubled in size. As one of our hosts put it shortly after we arrived, “it’s growing faster than opium poppies.” But then again, opium is one of the reasons this place is expanding so rapidly. If the long war here in the shadows of the Hindu Kush is going to be won, it will have to be won here in southern Afghanistan first. This forbidding terrain along the Helmand River basin is both the “spiritual heartland” of the Taliban movement and the primary

source of opium, which fuels their insur- gency. Southern Afghanistan is where the Tali-

ban movement began -- and nearly ended. Spawned with the help of Pakistan’s govern- ment in the 1980s to help defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the faction ini- tially was financed by oil-rich Islamists in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. By 1996, the Taliban, victors in a bloody half-decade- long civil war, had established a brutal, re- pressive theocracy in Kabul. Taliban leader Mullah Omar became a patron and protector of Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaida was granted near autonomy to establish bases for indoc- trinating and training “holy warriors.” The 9/11 attacks changed everything for

the Taliban. In less than three months, a hastily assembled U.S.-supported coalition dubbed the “Northern Alliance” forced the Taliban out of Kabul, and remnants of the regime fled south and east toward mountain redoubts and refuges in Pakistan. Kanda- har, the last city in Afghanistan held by the Taliban, fell to coalition troops on the 60th

anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Driven underground, Taliban leaders found

it increasingly difficult to finance their cause. As international pressure and aggressive monetary tracking dried up much of their foreign support, insurgent leaders turned to revenues from opium to sustain their move- ment. Shutting down Taliban-controlled opium

poppy cultivation, processing laboratories, caches, “delivery services” and money laun- dering operations has become a crucial mis- sion for the U.S.-led coalition. According to the United Nations, more than 90 percent of the world’s illicit opium, heroin and morphine base originates here in southern Afghanistan -- primarily in Helmand and Kandahar prov- inces. Refined “product,” estimated to be worth more than $3 billion, is then moved via “ratlines” through neighboring countries to consumers in Europe, Russia, Iran and the United States. According to intelligence officers here, the

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