"Almost two-thirds of likely voters approve of President Obama's order that allows more than 800,000 young illegal immigrants to remain in the United States without fear of deportation, according to a Bloomberg poll published Tuesday."

By going on vacation, what I really mean is I'm travelling for a few weeks then spending the rest of the summer on an island waiting tables and taking care of my grandmother - then starting grad school in the fall.

I'm nervous/excited about starting over, but I figure now is the time to do it, since I'm young, I don't have kids, and I have been working in a decent job that bores the life out of me for 6 years in the midst of a bad recession.  I stuck it out 4 years longer than I would have if it weren't for the market crash, but now I'm done.

I have to say that I've enjoyed Dien Bien Phu immensely. It's a beautiful city with surprisingly colorful architecture and rooftops, and the fierce battle that took place in early 1954 provides a fascinating historical backdrop.

Honestly, one has to wonder what French Gen. Henri Navarre was thinking back in Nov. 1953, when he order the siezure by aerial assault of such a strategic but terribly remote locale in northwestern Vietnam, near the Laotian border. This city seems a rather curious place to build a major fortified military installation -- it's in the middle of a wide, long valley that's completely surrounded on all four sides by rugged hills and dense jungle.

In retrospect, Navarre could not have chosen a more militarily untenable and inhospitable site to lure the Viet Minh into what he believed would be an unequal battle. The military concept of the fortified airhead may have worked to the French advantage at the Battle of Na San in Dec. 1952 -- but Na San Air Base was located in the flat lowlands of the upper Red River delta, and not in the rugged highlands to the west, far from available French reinforcements.

Clearly, Dien Bien Phu could be -- and of course, subsequently were -- easily isolated from the French High Command and potential reinforcements in Hanoi, and its garrison in the valley would subsequently be reduced by Viet Minh forces and artillery operating from the surrounding highlands, almost at their leisure.

Once the Viet Minh commander, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, had rendered the valley's three airfields inoperable through concentrated shellfire from the hills, the thousands of French troops concentrated here in Dien Bien Valley were almost entirely at their mercy. Aerial drops of both men and supplies from French bases at Hanoi proved wholly inadequate to the task of reprovisioning and sustaining the garrison; most of these air-dropped supplies fell instead into enemy hands.

Nevertheless, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu fought bravely to the bitter end and died particularly hard, as our local guides took great pains to point out. They inflicting horrific losses on Gen. Giap's attacking Viet Minh forces during the protracted three-month siege, before the base finally fell to a Viet Minh infantry assault in early May 1954. Nearly 12,000 French troops were taken prisoner; over half of them were wounded.

We fly back to Hanoi later this afternoon, about a 40-minute flight. So close for us, yet for the French, so far ...

Here are a few of the recent ones. There are more. A steady 5 - 6 per week since the weather got warmer.

Pfc. Jarrod A. Lallier, 20, of Spokane, Wash., died June 18 in Zharay, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when individuals in Afghan Police uniforms turned their weapons against his unit.  He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.

------------

They died in Panjwa'l, Kandahar province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device.  They were assigned to the 18th Engineer Company, 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.

            Killed were:

            Sgt. Joseph M. Lilly, 25, of Flint, Mich., who died June 14, and

He was going off this weekend though about how the Nationalists drive him nuts and hippies drive him nuts.  He built a botanical garden to make the hippies happy he says.  Then a volcano erupted and burned it down.  It also destroyed his precious metal mines and he didn't have enough money to repair them.  He made a deal with the United States to import precious metals, make jewelry, and send it back to the states....trying to feed his people and earn their way toward repairing their own mines.  But that really upset the Nationalists he says.  And the hippies protest and protest with their botanical garden burnt down.

He says the rebels broke into his home and almost assassinated him and his only friends are the Communists.  But he looks at me gravely and tells me that he can't go full Communist.  There were some protesters though protesting poor wages, and when he decided that he had had enough he arrested them.

He had two old abandoned Forts, one at sea level and one tucked away in the Mtns.  He turned the sea level one into a museum and the one in the Mtns into a secret prison.  He sent his wage protesters there for awhile.

I asked him if they were linked to the rebels that attacked him and he said no.  Then I couldn't help it, I said, "Holy Cow, so you took all of your anger and frustration out on them?"  And he gets frustrated and says, "Mom, that is what happens when you are a dictator.  You wake up one morning and you are acting like a dictator."

In his reports to the Pentagon, my father was apparently highly critical of MACV's (Military Assistance Command - Vietnam) then-current efforts to prop up the merry-go-round of wobbly South Vietnamese military regimes, and lamented to his superiors, specifically Gen. Bruce Myers (commander of USMC Force Recon) and Gen. Wallace Greene, his own direct role in the Nov. 1963 overthrow of then-President Ngo Dinh Diem.

As a bit of background, my father was a USMC officer and counter-insugency expert, and was serving as the senior U.S. military advisor to the 4th Vietnamese Marine Battalion, which at the time was operating in the Mekong Delta, just to the south of Saigon.

According to my mother, his orders -- which apparently came direct from the Pentagon -- directed that on the morning of Nov. 2, 1963 he was to lead that battalion into Saigon itself, position the troops around the presidential palace, and then withdraw personally to the safety of the nearby U.S. Embassy for diplomatic cover, as the 4th Battalion commenced its assault on the palace.

President Diem and his brother escaped the South Vietnamese Marines' attack on the palace, but they were subsequently captured the following day in the province of Cholon (outside Saigon) by ARVN troops, and then summarily executed in the rear of a military transport vehicle by a man named Nguyen Van Nhung, an ARVN officer who was a personal acquaintance of my father.

From his embassy refuge, my father then sent the original copies of those orders via parcel post to my mother for safekeeping -- as a sort of C.Y.A. measure, I guess.

Four months later, good military wife that she was, at her own parents' recommendation and insistence, my mother dutifully burned my father's orders and all of his papers in the fireplace of my grandparents' house in Pasadena, three weeks after he was killed in a Viet Cong terrorist raid in Feb. 1964.

How different everything might have been, she wondered to us, had she not listened to my grandfather and grandmother. How much grief could have possibly been avoided, had she instead released those papers to the media, disclosing my father's key participatory role in the overthrow of South Vietnam's first president, a man who was ostensibly an American ally -- a coup d'etat that American officials had strenuously denied orchestrating at the time.

So, don't be so quick to readily accept our government's contentions that whistleblowing compromises national security. Nine times out of ten, such whistleblowing exposes nothing more than clumsy attempts to cover up what otherwise should rightly be considered national embarrassments.

Perhaps you can take some comfort in knowing that your position puts you in good company with President Obama, who has been relentless in pursuing all manner of government representatives who believe the people have a right to know what the hell their government is up to.  On the other hand, perhaps that makes you want to run screaming into the night, but it's not going to change the fact that your position is also Obama's.

It is my opinion that you really have no idea what "the left" stands for, believes, or has been fighting for for lo, these many years.  And I say this as someone who is as liberal as it is possible to be, and knows the difference between left and right.

As for George Zimmerman, he shot and killed someone.  Call me crazy, but I believe the taking of a life is at least deserving of a process meant to ensure that that action was justified.  At the moment, you know and I know that he's sitting in jail because he and those speaking on his behalf were less-than-forthcoming with the court about his assets.

If you're going to hold your own here with what are predominantly "leftist" commenters, I would seriously suggest you make an effort to come up with arguments that don't sound like right wing talking points.

In November 2010, found mid-page 1 in that google search, McClatchy had a piece stating:

U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyone's death.

Officials may be overstating the damage from WikiLeaks

This was months after the release of both Afghan and Iraqi 'war files', and after State Dept cables began to be, very slowly at first, released.

I will add one thing about this topic. I have a relative that works for the Dept of Defense. DOD was very aggressive disseminating to its own employees speculation  about how various WikiLeaks releases would lead to the death of 'innocents' and informants. If you work for DOD, or otherwise receive some of the emails and announcements my relative does, it wouldn't surprise me if you believe these things.

(Maraniss) notes that the story about the death of Mr. Obama's step-grandfather -- allegedly killed while fighting Dutch troops in Indonesia -- was "a concocted myth in almost all respects." Mr. Maraniss writes that he died trying to hang drapes.

Slate | June 19, 2012
Strategic Mumblespeak: Er, UVA's Teresa Sullivan was fired for what? -- "In the 19th century, robber barons started their own private universities when they were not satisfied with those already available. But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller's dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist values nor his monopolistic strategies. That's because for all their faults, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller knew what they didn't know. [...] On Thursday night, a hedge fund billionaire, self-styled intellectual, 'radical moderate,' philanthropist, former Goldman Sachs partner, and general bon vivant named Peter Kiernan resigned abruptly from the foundation board of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. He had embarrassed himself by writing an email claiming to have engineered the dismissal of the university president, Teresa Sullivan, ousted by a surprise vote a few days earlier. The events at UVA raise important questions about the future of higher education, the soul of the academic project, and the way we fund important public services."

I voted for Obama and will vote for him again, as a lesser evil. But his distortions and those of his marketers have been astounding. Here are a couple of my favorites: He suggested that Hillary had no real foreign policy experience, and then nominated her as secretary of state. He and his supporters said Hillary would just be a replay of Bill Clinton's administration, and then Obama appoints many who served under BC.