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Do it now, son.

It’s an expression of disrespect, calling someone your “son” if they are not indeed your progeny. So when former lawmaker Sarah Palin closed a recent Facebook post with “Thank you, Mr. President,” surely she did not mean it, considering the contents of a letter she had just posted.

The missive was written by one Harold B. Estes of McAlpin, Florida, who attributes himself as an “old geezer” in a retirement home who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.

“I am amazed, angry and determined not to see my country die before I do but you seem hell bent not to grant me that wish,” he wrote. “I can’t figure out what country you are the president of.”

Estes goes on to blast Obama for allegedly declaring that America is “no longer a Christian nation,” which he did not. (Obama said America is a nation of all religions.) He also took issue with the president’s characterization that America has not yet lived up to its ideals.

“I realize you never served in the military and never had to defend your country with your life but you’re the Commander-in-Chief now, son. Do your job,” Estes continued. “When your battle-hardened field General asks you for 40,000 more troops to complete the mission, give them to him. But if you’re not in this fight to win, then get out.”

He concludes: “You’re not going to restore American greatness by bringing back our bloated economy. That’s not our greatest threat. Losing the heart and soul of who we are as Americans is our big fight now. And I sure as hell don’t want to think my president is the enemy in this final battle.”

The full letter is here, as sent to Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL).

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Palin finishes her Facebook post. “Please tell us on Tuesday that America is in it to win.”

Neither cared to offer a definition of what circumstances constitute victory for an occupation in its ninth year.

New York Governor David Paterson has said he would take executive action to prevent the state running out of money before the end of the year.

Paterson said negotiations at the state assembly in the capital Albany had not solved the problem, forcing him to take emergency executive measures to plug a 3.2-billion-dollar hole in a budget devastated by reduced tax revenues.

“If the Legislature won’t stand up for the people of New York because they’re worried about the next election, then I will do so on my own,” the Democratic New York governor said in a statement.

“That is why I am directing the division of budget to reduce payments to prevent our state from running out of cash this fiscal year.”

Paterson did not specify how much money he intended to hold back from education, health and other public services.

Talks with legislators on a comprehensive budget reduction plan have been bogged down for weeks, although there were contradictory reports from the assembly, which is renowned for internal feuding, over whether negotiations were continuing.

Some reports suggested a deal was possible and that further debate was expected Tuesday.

The Bush administration permitted the world’s most notorious terrorist mastermind to escape because it needed additional justification to invade Iraq, according to a Democratic lawmaker from New York.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) leveled the allegation during an interview with MSNBC host David Shuster on Monday afternoon.

“Look what happened with regard to our invasion into Afghanistan, how we apparently intentionally let bin Laden get away,” he said. “How we intentionally did not follow the Taliban and al-Qaeda as they were escaping. That was done by the previous administration because they knew very well that if they would capture al-Qaeda, there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq.”

“They deliberately let Osama bin Laden get away?” asked an incredulous Shuster. “They deliberately let the head of al-Qaeda get away right after he, right after the 9/11 attacks? You really believe that?”

“Yes, I do,” Hinchey replied. “There’s no question about that. The leader of the military operation in the United States called back our military, called them back from going after the head of al-Qaeda because there was a sense that they didn’t want to capture him.”

“…To suggest that they deliberately let Osama bin Laden get away so they could invade Iraq, that will strike a lot of people as crazy,” Shuster countered.

“I don’t think it will strike a lot of people as crazy,” Hinchey said. “I think it will strike a lot of people as very accurate and all you have to do is look at the facts of that set of circumstances and you can see that’s exactly what happened. When we went in there, when our military went in there, we could have captured them. We could have captured most of the Taliban and we could have captured the al-Qaeda. But we didn’t, and we didn’t because of the need felt by the previous administration and the previous head of the military — that need to attack Iraq, which is completely unjustified.”

Hinchy apparently based his allegations on a recently released Senate report that found then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements in December 2001, when the military allegedly had bin Laden trapped in Afghanistan.

“The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the marine corps and the army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report says.

“Instead, the US command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack Bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.”

Entitled “Tora Bora revisited: how we failed to get Bin Laden and why it matters today,” the report — commissioned by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — says Bin Laden expected to die and had even written a will.

“But the Al-Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected.

“Requests were also turned down for US troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.

“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after Bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, General Tommy Franks,” the report says.

“On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, Bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.”

This video was broadcast by MSNBC on Monday, Nov. 30, 2009, as snipped by Talking Points Memo.

With AFP.

After months of debate, President Barack Obama will spell out a costly Afghanistan war expansion to a skeptical public Tuesday night, coupling an infusion of as many as 35,000 more troops with a vow that there will be no endless U.S. commitment. His first orders have already been made: at least one group of Marines who will be in place by Christmas.

Obama has said that he prefers “not to hand off anything to the next president” and that his strategy will “put us on a path toward ending the war.” But he doesn’t plan to give any more exact timetable than that Tuesday night.

The president will end his 92-day review of the war with a nationally broadcast address in which he will lay out his revamped strategy from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. He spent part of Monday briefing foreign allies in a series of private meetings and phone calls.

Before Obama’s call to Britain’s Gordon Brown, the prime minister announced that 500 more U.K. troops would arrive in southern Afghanistan next month — making a British total of about 10,000 in the country. And French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose nation has more than 3,000 in Afghanistan, said French troops would stay “as long as necessary” to stabilize the country.

Obama’s war escalation includes sending 30,000 to 35,000 more American forces into Afghanistan in a graduated deployment over the next year, on top of the 71,000 already there. There also will be a fresh focus on training Afghan forces to take over the fight and allow the Americans to leave.

He also will deliver a deeper explanation of why he believes the U.S. must continue to fight more than eight years after the war was started following the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida terrorists based in Afghanistan. He will emphasize that Afghan security forces need more time, more schooling and more U.S. combat backup to be up to the job on their own, and he will make tougher demands on the governments of Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

“This is not an open-ended commitment,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. “We are there to partner with the Afghans, to train the Afghan national security forces, the army and the police so that they can provide security for their country and wage a battle against an unpopular insurgency.”

On a few of the bigger questions most on the minds of increasingly restive members of Congress and the public, such as how much the additional $30 billion to $35 billion cost will balloon the already skyrocketed federal deficit, how long the U.S. commitment will continue and how it will wind down, Obama was expected to make references without offering specifics.

Gibbs said detailed discussions on costs would be held later with lawmakers.

Even before explaining his decision, Obama told the military to begin executing the force increases. The commander in chief gave the deployment orders Sunday night, during an Oval Office meeting in which he told key military and White House advisers of his final decision.

At least one group of Marines is expected to deploy within two or three weeks of Obama’s announcement and will be in Afghanistan by Christmas, military officials said. Larger deployments will begin early next year.

The initial infusion is a recognition by the administration that something tangible needs to happen quickly, officials said. The immediate addition of Marines will provide badly needed reinforcements for those fighting against Taliban gains in the southern Helmand province, and also could lend reassurance to both Afghans and a war-weary U.S. public.

–Full story continues below–

Documents long classified but scheduled to be released at the end of 2009 will not see the light of day just yet thanks to the Obama administration, according to a published report.

Under pressure to grant an extension to intelligence agencies that have reviewed only a fraction of the “millions of pages,” the administration is allowing an undetermined amount of time for additional consideration of the materials, a report in The Boston Globe notes.

“The documents in question - all more than 25 years old - were scheduled to be declassified on Dec. 31 under an order originally signed by President Bill Clinton and amended by President George W. Bush,” wrote reporter Bryan Bender. Both presidents Clinton and Bush also granted the agencies extensions, in 2000 and 2003.

However, Bender added, “because [the Obama] administration has been unable to prod spy agencies into conformance,” no such release is scheduled any time soon and it may be years before they are disclosed.

This, in spite of the president’s repeated assurances of increased transparency. The decision to extend declassification deadlines for the agencies “would run counter to the Obama administration’s push for more openness in the federal government, including the declassification process,” noted ProPublica. “In May, the Globe points out, Obama ‘ordered a 90-day review by the National Security Council” of the classification process.”

In a memorandum to the heads of executive agencies, President Obama wrote that his administration will “take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use.”

The president has said he wants to establish a National Declassification Center that would review documents scheduled for release. The White House position has been that no government information should remain classified forever, with the president seeking to establish timelines of 25-75 years for the disclosure of secret documents.

According to the Globe, over 400 million pages of declassified, historical U.S. government documents are still waiting to be indexed in the National Archives for public viewing.