links for 2009-07-30

India has plans to add about 100 warships to its navy over the next decade as it seeks to modernise its armed forces, and develop its low-cost shipbuilding capabilities.

Captain Alok Bhatnagar, director of naval plans at India’s ministry of defence, said on Thursday that 32 warships and submarines were under construction in the country’s shipyards. Work on 75 more ships, including aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates and amphibious vessels, would begin over 10 years.

The surge in British casualties in Afghanistan has left military surgeons so exhausted that a US surgical team has been drafted in to help.

The British doctors have also been overwhelmed with casualties from other nations, including US Marines, Afghan troops and civilians.

Extra British plastic surgeons have had to be sent to the field hospital at Camp Bastion in central Helmand along with additional X-ray technicians and specialist nurses.

The Ministry of Defence revealed that 57 soldiers had been wounded in action in the first two weeks of this month, the worst casualty figure since British troops deployed to Helmand province in 2006. The previous highest toll of those injured, 46, was in June — but that was for the whole month. In the same two-week period, 15 soldiers were killed.

A House leadership deal with Blue Dogs and an aggressive marketing push by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) shifted the healthcare debate sharply toward centrist positions Wednesday, sparking threats of rebellion from the left.

The day’s events left the Senate Finance Committee’s emergent bill as the most viable vehicle on Capitol Hill, but also made clear that House Democrats are still riven by bitter disagreements. Democrats postponed a floor vote until after the August recess, meeting a top demand of centrist Blue Dogs.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger earns the worst approval numbers of his tenure, according to a new poll, becoming another governor whose ratings have been dragged down along with the battered economy.

Today's poll from the Public Policy Institute of California shows just 28% of Californians give a thumbs-up to Schwarzenegger's job performance. Those are the lowest numbers for a Golden State governor since August 2003, when former Gov. Gray Davis was facing a recall election.

A smart Democrat points out the most alarming number, to his party, in the poll of Virginia voters Survey USA released today.

It's not the top line, which has McDonnell up by 15 percentage points. It's what the pollster figures as the composition of the electorate: 52% McCain voters, 43% Obama voters.

Obama carried Virginia with 51% of the vote, so the pollster's data suggests that — if voters are responding accurately to questions about their plans to vote in the governor's race — the electorate that Obama activated — young and African-American voters primarily — will sink back into passivity in the off years. Black voters were 20% of the electorate last November; they're 17% in that survey.

There are two ways to read this: The poll's sample is off; or this is a danger sign for Democrats heading into the midterms,. If the latter, it may affect legislators' calculations about how closely to align themselves with the president.

A day after formally delaying a vote on a healthcare bill and having to accept a further weakening of a public option to compete with private insurers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lashed out at the health insurance industry and urged her members to do the same during the August recess.

“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”

More than 90 percent of the nation's largest metropolitan areas saw their unemployment rates climb in June from the previous month.

Some of the biggest increases hit college towns, where the annual summertime exodus of students causes bars, restaurants and other businesses to cut staff. The Detroit area, hit hard by manufacturing layoffs tied to the beleaguered auto industry, also got stung in June.

Unemployment rates rose from May to June in 348 of more than 370 metro areas, according to an Associated Press analysis of Labor Department data released Wednesday.

The results of the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll are a major warning sign for Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress. On some key issues, the gains that Democrats had made on Republicans in the last couple of years have disappeared, and the GOP has begun to reassert itself. In other policy areas, traditional Democratic leads are diminishing.

The results are found in the answers to the Journal's questions about whether respondents believe the Democratic or Republican party would do a better job of handling a particular issue. In the past, Democrats have usually led in areas like health care and education, while Republicans have led in issues like national security and taxes.

Because of President Obama's frantic approach, health care has run off the rails. For the sake of 47 million uninsured Americans, we need to get it back on track.

His eloquence is a big part of the reason that Barack Obama got to the Oval Office. There's always been a sense that his ability to explain things was tantamount to his ability to fix them. But the sheer complexity of health care has so far defied both his ability to explain and his power to fix. And in this case, the latter is an even greater challenge than the former.
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GAD – the MSM loves Obama as his policies sink America.
Give it a rest time – 12 covers of Obama – WTF?