When I saw the photo a purported HUJI spokesman released with a fax acknowledging Ilyas Kashmiri had been killed in Friday's drone attack, I was skeptical. The other available photos of Kashmiri, who is 47, were taken ten years ago in 2001 and look nothing like the man in the dead photo -- unless it was his son. The photo of the dead man (don't look if you're squeamish) the group released claiming it was Kashmiri does not does not depict a 47 year old man. Also, he was clean shaven. When Syed Saleem Shazhad interviewed Kashmiri in 2009, he had a long white beard dyed with reddish henna. A side by side of Kashmiri and the dead guy depicted in the photo is here.

Long War Journal reports it's not Kashmiri. The dead person in the photo is Abu Dera Ismael Khan, one of the Mumbai suicide bombers and a Lashkar-e-Taiba fighter. He was 25 in the photo. Ismael Kahn was 25 when killed. Again, don't look if you're squeamish as this one has several dead people, but here's the photo correctly identified. [More...]

Geithner The Incompetent:

As part of the bank bailout, the Treasury Department was given $46 billion to spend on keeping homeowners in their houses; to date, the agency has spent about $1.85 billion. [. . .] “The money was there and they didn’t spend it,” said Mr. Davis, an associate real estate professor at the University of Wisconsin. “I don’t mean to sound outraged, but I am pretty outraged.”

If only the Czar President knew.

Speaking for me only

Apparently Paul Krugman faced some Chamber of Commerce hack this morning on TV repeating the missing confidence fairy argument about the economy:

So I didn’t have much time to take down the Chamber of Commerce guy on This Week today [--] you’ll see a lot of businesses complaining about the political climate — hey, a lot of them watch Fox — but very few actually saying that this climate is deterring expansion[. . .] It’s the weak economy that’s deterring growth, not the atheist Socialist secret Muslim Kenyan Hawaiian in the White House.

It reminds of me what former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O' Neill said last August:

I must say I'm kind of amused by some of the conversation about companies hoarding $1.5 trillion worth of cash, or something, because I had a rule when I was in the private sector for 25 years, including 13 running Alcoa, and that is, don't hire people unless you have somebody demanding goods that you can't produce with the people you already have. Right? So it seems patently unrealistic to me to urge people to spend money unless there's a demand that they're not able to satisfy with their existing resources. [. . .] Why would you? I mean, it's crazy. It's not a charitable function if you're running a business to say oh, my goodness, we have so many millions of people unemployed, I should rush out and spend my cash and hire more people if there's no demand for the goods. It's crazy to me. [. . . More]

It's a beautiful Sunday here. For those of you online, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

McClatchy reports on anonymously sourced accounts of the final plea negotiations between John Edwards and the Government. It's very detailed.

The essence: Edwards had a choice between a felony and the ability to argue for no jail time, or a plea to three misdemeanors and a six month sentence. If he took the latter, he couldn't argue for home detention or a halfway house instead of prison.

Because the misdemeanor deal would have precluded him from arguing for a non-jail sentence, he turned it down. The final negotiations lasted past Midnight on Thursday, and into Friday morning, just minutes before the grand jury returned the Indictment on Friday. [More...]

All day I've been reading two of the people killed with Ilyas Kashmiri are Amir Hamza and Mohammed Usman.

Recently tortured and killed journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote in October, 2010 that Mohammed Usman, who was an associate of Kashmiri and Osama bin Laden, had been killed in a drone strike. [More...]

What's on your mind this weekend? If it's something besides what we've covered, here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

U.S. District Magistrate Judge Hugh Brenneman Jr. in Michigan has ordered the state to turn over medical marijuana records to the DEA for its use in a federal criminal investigation.

The DEA had issued administrative subpoenas to the Michigan Board of Community Health.

[H]e said that “while the Michigan Legislature declared its intent not to penalize the medical use of marijuana under state law, it had to acknowledge its action did not alter the existing federal prohibition against marijuana....The use of marijuana remains a federal felony.”

[More...]

The timeline of the killing of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad and the drone attack that killed Ilyas Kashmiri is raising flags in my head. It could be coincidence, but then again, maybe not. Take a look.

Journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad was kidnapped, tortured and killed on May 29 or 30. It's widely believed Pakistan's ISI was behind it.

The Asia Times had just published Shahzad's last article on May 27, saying Ilyas Kashmiri was behind the attack on the Pakistan Navy base in Karachi.

Shahzad was the only journalist to have interviewed Kashmiri after Kashmiri surfaced following the 2009 false report of his death. The interview is here. [More...]

Via al Jazeera: A Pakistani formy army Brigadier says Pakistan's ISI was involved in the attack that reportedly killed Ilyas Kashmiri and others. He was on the "wish list" the U.S. gave Pakistan last week, when it imposed a one month deadline on Pakistan to capture Kashmiri and four others.

The United States has given Pakistan time till July to capture Al Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri and Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar. It has also warned of a military offensive in North Waziristan if they are not captured.

Also on the list: Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri, the operating chief of Haqqani network Sirajuddin Haqqani and the Libyan operations chief of Al Qaeda Atiya Abdel Rahman.[More...]

In 2009, the media reported the death of terrorist leader Ilyas Kashmiri in a drone strike. It was very upsetting to David Coleman Headley, who had been plotting with Kashmiri to conduct the Mumbai attacks and the planned attack on a Danish newspaper. The death report on Kashmiri turned out not to be true, and according to the U.S., which has indicted Kashmiri in the Headley/Rana case, Headley continued plotting with Kashmiri, LeT, and Major Iqbal.

Now Kashmiri is reportedly killed again, also in a drone strike, this time in Pakistan yesterday that occurred as he and his fellow terrorists were sipping tea in an apple garden.

A U.S. official says Kashmiri was the target of the drone attack but could not confirm his death. A local militant commander, Baitullah, says he wasn't killed. But HJI is reportedly confirming his death. [More...]

Paul Krugman's critiques of RyanCare have delivered questions as to how RyanCare differes from ObamaCare with regard to how Americans will pay for health care under ObamaCare. Here is Krugman's response:

[H]ow does the Ryan plan differ from the Affordable Care Act? After all, in both plans people are supposed to buy coverage from private insurers, with a subsidy from the government.

Well, the answer is that the ACA is specifically designed to ensure that insurance is affordable, whereas Ryancare just hands out vouchers and washes its hands. Specifically, the ACA subsidy system (pdf) sets a maximum percentage of income that families are expected to pay for insurance, on a sliding scale that rises with income. To the extent that the actual cost of a minimum acceptable policy exceeds that percentage of income, subsidies make up the difference.

This is an inadequate answer imo. Indeed, it provides an obvious retort - what if RyanCare incorporated provisions to "ensure that insurance was affordable[?}" Would it be okay then? No it would not. Because Medicare is superior to ACA. Because single payer public insurance is superior to ACA. Krugman implicitly says so here. Moreover, Krugman is all too sanguine about the efficacy of ACA's ability to make sure "insurance is affordable." A perusal of the article Krugman links to, written by Jon Gruber, demonstrates this: