I think you should not hold your breath waiting for any of the four, although Colombia and the US should push for the Question one issue. It gives them both a chance to hold Venezuela and Ecuador to the same standard they wanted to hold Colombia. Colombia's cross border raid was much more legitimate than what Venezuela and Ecuador have done. It was purely a move against someone making war against Colombia, where as What Venezuela and Ecuador did was just the opposite.Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and his Ecuadorean counterpart Rafael Correa can scream and yell as loud as they want, but the fact is that they have been caught red-handed supporting a terrorist group that is trying to topple the democratically elected government of Colombia.
Last week, after Interpol -- the top international police body -- issued a much awaited report certifying the authenticity of 37,872 computer files from Colombia's FARC guerrillas containing hundreds of references to Venezuela's and Ecuador's active support for the armed rebel group, Chávez and Correa reacted -- as they always do -- with insults and accusations against the U.S. ``empire.''
Pretty much like he did a few months ago when a Venezuelan delegation was caught trying to smuggle $800,000 in cash into Argentina for his political allies in that country, Chávez claimed that the Interpol forensic investigation into the three laptop computers and two external hard drives seized by Colombia's armed forces in a March 1 raid into a FARC camp in Ecuador was ''a circus.'' Chavez called Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble a ''mafioso'' and a ''vagabond.'' Correa's discharge was similarly virulent.
Except that this time, it will be harder even for the most gullible Chávez and Correa supporters to take their claims of innocence seriously. The investigation carried out by Interpol's headquarters in Lyon, France, involved 64 police officials from 15 countries, led by forensic computer experts from Singapore and Australia, who were picked independently by their countries' police authorities. Together, they spent 5,000 hours examining the computers.
And the final report by Interpol not only said that the laptops had not been tampered with by Colombian authorities, as Chávez and Correa had claimed, but also certified that they belonged to Raúl Reyes, the FARC's No. 2 leader before he was killed in the Colombian raid into the guerrilla camp.
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The certification of the documents' authenticity raises many thorny questions.
Question No. 1: Will Latin American countries, which cited Organization of American States non-intervention treaties to rightfully reject Colombia's military incursion into Ecuador, now cite equally unambiguous OAS treaties prohibiting countries from aiding armed rebel groups abroad to condemn Venezuela and Ecuador? Or will they keep silent, fearful of losing the billions of dollars they get in Venezuelan oil and political aid?
Question No. 2: Will Chávez and Correa ask for forgiveness to their neighbors, like Colombian President Alvaro Uribe did at the March 18 OAS meeting where Colombia's incursion into Ecuador was debated?
Question No. 3: Will the OAS convene a general assembly under the group's 2002 Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism, which forbids member countries from giving safe haven or money to terrorist groups? And will the United Nations Security Council invoke its resolutions 1373 and 1566, which say the same, to condemn Chávez and Correa?
Question No. 4: Will Brazilian President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva take back his statement last week that Chávez is ''Venezuela's best president in 100 years''? Or does he think that supporting a guerrilla group that holds more than 700 hostages and killed 36 civilians attending a wedding party in 2003 at the El Nogal Club in Bogotá makes a good president?
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Sunday, May 18, 2008
What to do with Chavez
Anti foreigner mob kills 7 in South Africa
AP/San Diego Union-Tribune:
Mobs rampaged through poor suburbs of Johannesburg in a frenzy of anti-foreigner hatred over the weekend, killing at least seven people, injuring dozens and forcing hundreds to seek refuge at police stations.This violence is a by-product of Mbecki's failure to resolve the situation in Zimbabwe. In fact he has facilitated Mugabe's monstrosities toward his own people further encouraging the migration into South Africa. He apparently has also lost control of the situation in his own country as a result.Police said violence erupted after midnight Saturday in a rundown inner city area called Cleveland that is home to many immigrants. Two of the victims were burned and three others beaten to death. More than 50 were taken to hospitals with gunshot and stab wounds.
“It's spreading like a wildfire and the police and the army can't control it,” said Emmerson Zifo, who like many of the foreigners targeted was Zimbabwean.
The trouble began last week in the sprawling township of Alexandra. Angry residents there accused foreigners – many of them Zimbabweans who fled their own country's economic collapse – of taking scarce jobs and housing. The unrest has since spread.
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There has been sporadic anti-foreigner violence for months, mainly aimed at stores run by Somalis accused of undercutting local storeowners. But the violence of recent days was on a much larger scale.
In another inner city suburb, Hillbrow, on Sunday an Associated Press photographer saw the body of a man who had been shot dead.
Another person was shot dead and two more wounded in similar attacks on Saturday in Tembisa in another part of greater Johannesburg. Police spokesman Manyadza Ralidhivha said scores of Tembisa residents went on a rampage, destroying property that belonged to foreign nationals, according to the South African Press Association.
Edgar Gweru, from Zimbabwe, said he was robbed of cash, his passport and DVD player. He managed to escape by climbing onto his roof and hiding there until 2 a.m., but he does not know what happened to the three people sharing his accommodation.
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Don't know much about geography--Obama 2nd edition
Arkansas borders Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma, but it does not share a border with Kentucky. This is Obama's second big US geography gaffe. You know the big media would give Dan Quail and George Bush a lot of air time for this kind of statement, but for Obama, I suspect they will just say he was tired. He seems tired a lot lately for such a young guy. I think it raises questions about his energy level and stamina not to mention having a poorer memory than his 71 year old opponent. Hat tip Astute Blogger.Barack Obama is already explaining his anticipated loss to Hillary Clinton in the Kentucky primary this coming Tuesday. In part, Obama blames FOX News. In part, Obama invokes improbable geography:
Obama conceded that he has a steep challenge to get his message and background to voters in states such as Kentucky — where he trails Sen. Hillary Clinton by 27 points, according to a poll published earlier this week — and West Virginia, where voters chose Clinton over Obama by 40 points on Tuesday.Obama does not note that Illinois and Kentucky are close enough to each other that they share a border...."What it says is that I'm not very well known in that part of the country," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle."
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When negotiation is not appeasement
New Republic’s Scoblic beats conservatives with conservatives to defend Obama’s talk about talk with dictators. Talking worked with the Soviets, Scoblic opines, variously using a magnifying glass and a funhouse mirror to examine history’s miniscule details undistracted by any large inconvenient objects. LA Times....It is interesting to see how little liberals know about history when they start grabbing for analogies. The North Korean analogy does give an example of a liberal best case scenario. In some ways it reminds me of the Geneva Accords that was supposed to lead to a neutral Laos. Instead it led to a Laos where the US ground forces were excluded and the communist built a freeway to South Vietnam called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
...There are a couple of problems with his argument. Obama’s 2009 plan bears little resemblance to JFK’s 1962 stance or Reagan’s in the 1980s. In the cases he cites in which negotiations led to Soviets backing down it was in the face of strong, credible military threats, something he alludes to in passing. JFK and Reagan negotiated from positions of strength, and did not signal a willingness to give up prior to talks. Cuba was blockaded by the United States Navy and Gorbachev was confronted with a military buildup and technological develoment he couldn’t match, and determined support for resistance in various forms from Poland to Afghanistan to Nicaragua and elsewhere. The Carter era, cited as a banner success thanks to missile talks, also marked a period of Soviet escalation and expansion of its efforts, in Afghanistan, Central America and Africa.
The citation of Clinton and North Korea is a little bizarre. Presumeably Scoblic’s aware that North Korea not only continued its nuclear program, and apparently has been spreading the joy.
If Obama’s program of withdrawal and asking Iran for assistance in the dismantling of our influence in the Middle East bears any resemblance to any of that history, it would be the Clinton/North Korea part.
Even after it was an obvious disaster for our war effort in South Vietnam, Democrats were still looking at it as an example of what they needed to do to extract themselves from Vietnam rather than win the war. Ironically, even the North Vietnamese acknowledge taht if we had cut the trial, we would have won the war.
It is a mistake to imitate Democrats
Attempts to rebrand the Republican party will fail to attract conservative voters. Democrats got back into power by allowing the conservatives back into the party that had run them off for 30 years. What Republicans need to do is make it clear that these conservative Democrats will have no say in stopping the evils of liberalism.Republicans are and should be panicked over the fact that conservative Democrat Travis Childers just defeated Republican Greg Davis by a margin of 54%-46% in the race for a vacant Mississippi congressional seat. That seat is in a conservative district that had given President Bush a 25-point margin of victory over John Kerry in 2004 - it never should have flipped Democrat. This is the third double-digit loss in a row for Republican candidates in conservative districts across the United States.
Childers' victory came one week after Rep. Don Cazayoux won a House seat in the Baton Rouge, La., area that had been in Republican hands for three decades. Over the winter, Rep. Bill Foster won an election in Illinois to succeed former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who had been in Congress more than 20 years.
What we're watching is the culmination of the decade-plus deterioration of the conservative Republican brand. Put simply, no one, including base conservatives, trusts the Republicans to govern effectively while following anything even faintly resembling a conservative platform.
That's unfortunate, since the only time that the Republicans really took the country by storm was in 1994, when they all ran on a set of firm, well established conservative values and issues. When the GOP strayed from that, falling back on the Democratic Party tradition of retaining power through excessive pork barrel spending and questionable ethical practices, they first lost seats - then lost their majorities. To regain what they have thrown away they must return to those conservative principles. If successful, they then must reject the compromising allure of power and promise to govern in the future as conservatives, not as the Democratic Party Lite.
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The aforementioned disparity between self-identified Democrats and Republicans doesn't fully explain the losses suffered by the GOP in 2006. The Dems had to run conservatives to win their majority that year. They had to run conservatives to win the three most recent House special elections. Isn't the natural home of many of those voters who elected conservative Democrats really the Republican Party, rather than the party of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama? The GOP's problems have gotten so bad that even a prominent national conservative, Sean Hannity, is now publicly speaking of his plan to leave the GOP and re-register in New York's Conservative Party.
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The other thing the liberals did was demonize unrelentingly President Bush and Republicans. It is time to get back to pointing out how bad Democrats are and will be for the future of this country. They are wrong on taxes, energy and national security. On all three of those issues the Republicans should be winning.
Obama would prop up Iran's religious bigots
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:
It is far better to give hope to the oppressed in Iran than to the oppressors. Cutting off foreign investment would further cripple the regimes ability to sustain the subsidies that keep it in power. Propping up the kooks by legitimizing them is a huge mistake. It also is propping up a regime that has been at war with us since 1979 and is responsible for killing hundreds of Americans.President Bush is absolutely right to criticize sharply direct negotiations with Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Barack Obama’s embrace of the idea of direct negotiations is both naïve and dangerous and should be a big issue in the campaign.
The reason not to negotiate with Ahmadinejad is not simply to stand on ceremony or some kind of policy of non-recognition. It is based on the fundamental need to topple his regime by increasing the sense the Iranian people have — that he has isolated Iran from the rest of the world, to its severe and ongoing detriment.
The Iranian regime is almost entirely dependent on oil and gas revenues to pay for the vast program of social subsidies with which the government buys domestic support. Gasoline costs 35 cents a gallon in Teheran. Bread and all other staples are subsidized from public funds. But 85 percent of all government revenues come from oil and gas exports. There lies the regime’s vulnerability.
Iran is sitting atop the second largest oil reserves in the world. Only Saudi Arabia has more. But it can’t get at them. It lacks the foreign investment and technology necessary to increase, or even to sustain, its petroleum output. Under the Shah, Iran pumped upwards of six million barrels of oil a day. Now, Iran generates fewer than four million daily barrels. With domestic consumption of energy increasing at 10 percent a year — due in part to the massive subsidies which hold the price down — Iran is expected to see its oil exports cut in half by 2011 and entirely eliminated by 2014. If Iran cannot export oil, it cannot pay for social peace and the regime could be in dire trouble.
Without subsidies, the Iranian people, half of whom are under 30 and only 40 percent of whom are ethnically Farsi, will become restive and resentful. Already, many complain that Ahmadinejad’s policies have led to global isolation of Iran and stymied economic growth and social upward mobility. While opinion surveys in Iran indicate that the people support the nuclear aspirations of the regime, they are not willing to pay a price of international isolation.
If a President Obama were to meet with President Ahmadinejad, it would send a signal to the Iranian people that they are not isolated but that the rest of the world has come to respect them and to have to deal with them. The leading argument for toppling the current regime will have been fatally undermined.
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Climate intelligence failure bigger than the Iraq failure
It is certainly going to be much more costly in terms of treasure and lives if we follow the advice of the globo warmers. Me, I like warmer weather and I think the earth will be more abundant if it gets warmer. Whatever happens with the climate, I think we can adapt.What do you think was the most costly intelligence failure of all time? No, was is not the world's leading intelligence agencies' failure to notice that Saddam had few, if any, weapons of mass destruction. It was the failure of many leading climate model builders to be modest enough about their predictions, and the politicians' and media's failure to ask the tough questions of these climate experts.
As a consequence of what we now know was an overblown global-warming scare, everyone on the planet is paying substantially more for food and fuel than is necessary.
Despite the prediction of all the major climate models, the Earth has been getting cooler since 1998. At first, it was not considered a big deal because temperatures fluctuate from year to year. However, the drop has now been going for a decade, with another big drop last year.
The global warming zealots have just been handed another rude shock, when the peer-reviewed journal, Nature, reported on May 1 that according to a new (and hopefully improved) climate model, global surface temperatures may not increase over the next decade.
Roger A. Pielke, environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, and not previously a global warming skeptic, reacted to the Nature article: "Climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual authority in the promotional battle over global-warming policy."
Hudson Institute environmental economist Dennis Avery said: "The Earth's warming from 1915 to 1940 was just about as strong as the "scary" 1975 to 1998 warming in both scope and duration — and occurred too early to be blamed on human-emitted CO2. The cooling from 1940 to 1975 defied the Greenhouse Theory, occurring during the first big surge of man-made greenhouse emissions. Most recently, the climate has stubbornly refused to warm since 1998, even though human CO2 emissions have continued to rise strongly."
As a direct result of the global-warming hysteria, which, as noted above, was grossly overblown to say the least, governments reacted by restricting energy production from traditional sources, such as oil, gas and coal, and by enacting very costly regulations on CO2 emission sources. Governments also quickly jumped on the fad of "biomass" production, which, at least in the case of corn, does not result in less CO2 but more than standard oil and gas wells produce — a clear "intelligence" failure.
The restrictions on oil and gas have greatly increased the cost of gasoline and home heating oil, and the production cost of almost everything else, especially plastics and food.
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Al Qaeda says it fled Mosul
...Even if true the dislocation of al Qaeda leadership and its infrastructure disrupts the terrorist ability to plan and organize strikes. Also getting them on the move makes it more likely that they will be stopped at a check point and captured. By keeping them on the move, it is difficult for them to execute a movement to contact with a bomb. In any delaying operation like that described al Qaeda is using up what is left of its resources. It will soon be down to a few guys doing information operations by telephones at the current rate.In a phone interview, Abu Obaida al-Janabi, an al-Qaeda spokesman in Anbar province, said the group's top leaders, including Abu Ayu al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, are no longer in Mosul. He said they are in "quiet areas, not hot zones."
Janabi said that most fighters were warned in advance of the operation because the Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government had trumpeted its plans for the offensive for weeks. The fighters, Janabi added, had moved their heavy weapons, along with "our explosives experts" and "engineers of our missile attacks," to other areas, while a small group of volunteers stayed behind to fight "a war of exhaustion" against Iraqi and U.S. forces.
He said that those detained by Iraqi forces were not al-Qaeda fighters but merely men "with long beards and who attend mosques," who were known to be anti-American. "So far only eight of our men have been captured," Janabi said.
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Pelosi has to be stunned by even this call since she claims al Qaeda is not in Iraq and here they are calling while she is in the country..
Miami's Cubans not happy with Obama
Sen. Barack Obama will have to defend his support for easier negotiations with America's enemies when he addresses a leading Cuban-American exile group this week during his first campaign stop in Florida in nine months.The policy position is naive and will be unproductive. Cuba is still under the thumb of control freaks who would rather be poor than allow freedom. While Obama may like to emulate the Cuban health care system, many Cubans will risk death to get away from this oppressive regime.The professed desire by the likely Democratic presidential nominee to hold direct talks with Cuba's communist leaders if elected has evoked the ire of some Cuban groups in Florida, who maintain that no such talk should be held until real democratic reform takes place on the island.
"Barack said he would be willing to conduct talks with Cuban leaders to advance democracy and liberty on the island," a senior adviser to Mr. Obama's campaign told The Washington Times on the condition of anonymity.
"I recognize they may not be in total agreement with the means of this policy," the adviser said in reference to Cuban exile groups. "But there can be no disagreement on the goal."
Mr. Obama addresses the Cuban American National Foundation at a lunch meeting Friday in Miami as part of a three-day swing through Florida that starts in Tampa and Maitland on Wednesday and continues in South Florida on Thursday and Friday.
The Obama campaign has announced at least one large public rally in the state — at the St. Pete Times Forum in Tampa on Wednesday.
The Miami stop will follow Republican candidate Sen. John McCain's arrival here on Tuesday, the anniversary of Cuban independence, when he is expected to discuss his policy toward the communist island in a speech at the Sheraton Miami Mart Hotel.
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Competing to join the Gurkhas
AP/Houston Chronicle:
Two centuries later, young men are still being drawn from their poverty-stricken Himalayan hills by the thousands to fight — and die — with legendary valor for another man's country far away.A Marine buddy of mine told of a meeting with a Gurkha and asking to see his kukri knife. Before handing the Marine the knife the Gurkha sliced a cut on his finger and told the Marine they are not allowed to pull the knife without drawing blood.In an era when the world's armies are hard-pressed to fill their ranks, the Gurkhas are a recruiter's dream: Last year 17,349 applied to join the British military, and after grueling physical, medical and mental tests 230 were accepted — just one in 75.
These warriors could be regarded as Britain's mercenaries: good money and adventure are major attractions.
But ask almost any Gurkha soldier, and he is also likely to talk of history and upholding a tradition of being among the world's finest infantrymen.
This reputation was first acquired in the 19th century, after the British thought it wiser to recruit rather than fight foes as they moved northward out of colonial India into Nepal.
From those days, through the two world wars, to today's Afghanistan, the spine-chilling cry of Ayo Gurkhali! — "The Gurkhas are coming!" — has sent enemies quaking.
Some have even surrendered rather than face a relentless charge by the rugged soldiers wielding their trademark kukri knives.
"Afghanistan was a test for the modern Gurkha, to show our forefathers that we are still meeting the standards they set. It was our chance to show that we are continuing the tradition. So far, so good," said Sgt. Belbahadur Gurung, a third-generation British Army Gurkha back home after a widely lauded combat tour.
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Although this year's recruits will not be selected until December, already hundreds of aspirants reel off endless laps, push-ups, sit-ups and even yoga positions at one of the dozen private "academies" that have sprung up to prepare the applicants.
Pema Lama, a strict disciplinarian and ex-soldier who heads the Task Force prep school, said he regularly marshals his students in the hills to train for the toughest test of all — the doko race.
It's a hurtle up a steep hillside with 55 pounds of sand in a doko, the traditional cone-shaped basket carried on the back with a strap around the forehead.
The lung-busting three-mile course must be covered in under 48 minutes.
Women — to be recruited for the first time by 2010 — will be loaded down with 33 pounds.
In some years as many as 60,000 seek to join.
But most don't even get to the application stage while others are filtered out in regional screening because they fail to meet basic qualifications ranging from English and math skills and having no more than two teeth fillings.
"Getting into the British Army is like winning a lottery," said Capt. Rupert Anderson, operations officer at British Gurkhas Pokhara camp, the main recruiting center in Nepal.
The successful swear loyalty to the queen and are whisked away into an alien world — the moors of Yorkshire, England — for 37 weeks of intensive training including a course on the British way of life.
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My favorite Gurkha story was about a British officer looking for volunteers for an air assault and getting only a handful of Gurkhas. He then went back and explained that they would be using parachutes and how they worked. Suddenly the whole unit volunteered.
Don't know much about history--Obama edition
While, as I noted yesterday, Kennedy never negotiated with the Viet Cong, he did negotiate the Geneva Accords with the Soviets that was supposed to stop the North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam through Laos. While many liberals still hail these accords, they were a disaster for the US and especially the South Vietnamese.Barack Obama continued to display his surprisingly flimsy grasp of American history yesterday. “This whole notion of not talking to people,” began the longtime community organizer. “It didn't hold in the '60s, it didn't hold in the '70s ... When Kennedy met with (Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev, we were on the brink of nuclear war."
There’s only one problem with this analysis – Khrushchev and Kennedy met in the first months of Kennedy’s term. The Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t happen until 16 months later. Furthermore, if we really want to dig into the history, many historians believe that the Vienna Summit between the two leaders did much to trigger the Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev, relying on the Bay of Pigs fiasco and what he later saw at Vienna, determined that his American counterpart was a weak sister who could be bullied.
Since Obama obviously knows nothing about the Vienna Summit, he surely doesn’t know that in some circles it’s viewed as a cautionary tale regarding the inherent risks of diplomacy with malevolent regimes (or “talking to people” as Obama prefers to think of such activities). Besides, Kennedy at Vienna was quite frankly a much tougher and more hard-headed leader than one can imagine Obama being. At one point, Kennedy responded to Khrushchev’s blustering by declaring, “Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”
More on point, what are we to make of Obama’s ignorance regarding relevant historical events? Mind you, these are historical events that he chooses to talk about. I realize the senator is the victim of an Ivy League education, but he’s had decades to repair that damage.
Truth be told, in yesterday’s comments, Obama showed trademark characteristics of a callow, young Ivy League grad – he thinks he knows more than he does, and has the audacity to lecture others when he doesn't know what he's talking about. Obama seems perversely intent on transporting an old adage regarding Harvard over to the Crimson’s law school: “You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.”
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The North Vietnamese ignored them and the US refused to challenge them on it in a meaningful way, relying on a raiding strategy to fight the North Vietnamese in Laos rather than a combat persisting strategy which would have cut their supply lines and ended the war. The State Department, compounded the problem by putting an ambassador in Laos who was more interested in stopping effective action against the enemy and stopping the violations of the accords.
There is very little in Kennedy's discussions with the enemy that serve to bolster Obama's case for doing the same.
Bush notes Dem hypocrisy on oil production
The Democrats have been strangling domestic production of energy of all forms and are now demanding that Saudi Arabia increase its own production. It is about time that American voters hold Democrats responsible for the high prices at the pump. They cannot revoke the laws of supply and demand, no matter how omnipotent they think they are. Don't expect Democrats to take responsibility for the mess. They do not have that much integrity. They will instead blame you for not doing enough conservation production.President Bush yesterday characterized Capitol Hill Democrats as hypocrites for demanding that Saudi Arabia pump more oil while blocking attempts to increase domestic drilling in such places as Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.
Saudi Arabia announced on Friday that it would meet Mr. Bush's request to increase oil production, though the jump of 300,000 barrels per day was less than the president had wanted.
But rather than criticize the Saudis, Mr. Bush — after a round of meetings with Middle East leaders at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheik — instead heaped blame on congressional Democrats for skyrocketing gasoline prices.
"Those who are screaming the loudest for increased production from Saudi Arabia are the very same people who are fighting the fiercest against domestic exploration, against the development of nuclear power and against expanding refining capacity," said Mr. Bush yesterday after talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Mr. Bush called this combination "one of the interesting things about American politics these days."
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Saturday, May 17, 2008
The twilight of the al Qaeda gods
Juan Carlos Zarate, described as a senior US counterterrorism official by the Telegraph is quoted as claiming "that the demise of al-Qa'eda is in sight because its failure to adapt its violent ideology and tactics has provoked growing dissent across the Islamic world." This claim is not as outrageous -- even to those who believe ideologies are invincible -- as it might at first seem. While Islam has maintained its general militancy and aggressiveness over the centuries, the lifespan of individual fanatical movements is distinctly shorter. It is possible that the world has not seen the last of radical Islam; but it may be true that it has seen the last of Bin Laden's crew.Currently the Iraqis are rounding up al Qaeda's remnants around Mosul. So far over 1000 have been taken into custody. Iraq has gone from al Qaeda's central front in its war against the US and the seat of the new Caliphate to the graveyard of its ambitions. It is a significant strategic defeat in a place where a year ago the Democrats were ready to hand it to them. There forces are also losing in Afghanistan and having trouble finding a true "safe house" in Pakistan. While what is happening in Iraq should be an embarrassment for al Qaeda, it should also be an embarrassment for the Democrats. Hat tip to Larwyn.
...Yet if Zarate were correct in claiming that the US has, for the moment, beaten back al-Qaeda to what would it be due? To two things. The first is to inevitable excesses of the Mad Mullahs themselves. A movement like the Jihad eventually sustains itself by exactions and impositions on the population. A movement which aims at paradise can have little regard for daily concerns. Al-Qaeda gets real old, real quickly when you actually have to live under it. The reason it retains the sympathy of the Western intelligensia is because they don't have to live under it.
The second reason for al-Qaeda's decline has been their defeat on every battlefield on which they have been found. And as important as the material losses to them have been, far more serious has been the loss to their prestige. They have gone from godlike warriors who can topple skyscrapers in Manhattan to helpless bugs who are effortlessly incinerated despite their incantation. And that battlefield helplessness, to their adherents, is subliminal proof of the power of a greater magic: "the strong arms of science". It is the triumph in this battle of conjury, this wizard war, which in some sense has been the true metric of victory.
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Hezballah makes war on Sunnies in Lebanon
For two and a half days, Hussein al-Haj Obaid lay on the floor of a darkened warehouse in west Beirut, blindfolded and terrified. Militiamen loyal to Hezbollah had kidnapped him at a checkpoint after killing his nephew right in front of him.The Washington Post reports:Throughout those awful days, as his kidnappers kicked and punched him, applied electrical shocks to his genitals and insulted him with sectarian taunts, he could hear the chatter of gunfire and the crash of rocket-propelled grenades outside, where Hezbollah and its allies were taking control of the capital.
He returned to this northern village only after family members won his release just over a week ago by threatening the kidnappers with retaliation. By that time Mr. Obaid, a Sunni Muslim, had gained a whole new way of seeing his Shiite countrymen and his native land.
“We cannot go back to how we lived with them before,” he said as he sat with relatives and friends at home here. “The blood is boiling here. Every boy here, his blood is boiling. They push us, they push us, they push us.”
Those feelings are being echoed throughout Lebanon. After almost a week of street battles that left scores dead and threatened to push the country into open war, long-simmering Sunni-Shiite tensions here have sharply worsened, in an ominous echo of the civil conflict in Iraq.
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... after Hezbollah supporters humiliated Lebanon’s main Sunni political leader, Saad Hariri — crushing his weak militia, forcing his party’s television station off the air and burning two of his movement’s buildings — many of Mr. Hariri’s supporters were enraged, and they said they would look to another Sunni leader who would help them fight back.
That sentiment has stirred fears that moderate, secular Sunni leaders like Mr. Hariri could lose ground to more radical figures, including the jihadists who thrive in Lebanon’s teeming Palestinian refugee camps. Fatah al Islam, the radical group that fought a bloody three-month battle with the Lebanese Army in a refugee camp in northern Lebanon last year, issued a statement Thursday condemning Hezbollah’s actions. The group also gave a warning: “He who pushes our faces in the dirt must be confronted, even if that means sacrificing our lives and shedding blood.”
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...You have to remember that this is more about Iran than Lebanon. Hezballah is Iran's proxy army in Lebanon and Iran pulls the strings. The Hezballah action may have had pretexts in Lebanon politics but it coincided with a butt kicking Iranian forces were getting in Iraq and it served a purpose of distracting from that defeat in Basra and Sadr City. The tenuous hold that the religious bigots have on Iran would have looked much more fragile if they had on the news from Iraq to contend with.
... the new calculus in Lebanon, where tension is combustible and diversity is claustrophobic, may prove that Hezbollah's victory was Pyrrhic, as it inherits a country whose sectarian and political contradictions suggest another civil war ahead.Even its supporters cringed at the sight of Shiite militiamen sipping coffee at Starbucks, their rocket-propelled grenade launcher resting in a chair. Tension between Sunnis and Shiites echoes the sectarian divide in Iraq. And across Lebanon, a crisis that remains unresolved even now has inspired revulsion in a country that has only rarely been a state over its short, often nasty, usually brutish history.
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Brits race dog in Afghanistan
The story also includes a clip of the "race." I think these guys must really be bored.Soldiers in Afghanistan have found a new way of winding down from combat with the Taliban – competing to see how far they can run from a snarling german shepherd before it drags them to the ground.
The game, Beating the Dog, has been filmed and posted on YouTube and Ministry of Defence websites. It has been devised to raise money for Help for Heroes, the charity that supports wounded troops.
“Everyone wants to have a go. We’re fully booked for the next three weeks,” said Captain Martyn Thompson, commanding officer of the military working dogs unit at Camp Bastion in Helmand province. “Around 50 people have done it, donating around £5 each. The record is around 45 metres.”
Volunteers put on heavily padded antibite suits and a crash helmet to protect against the fangs of the dogs. They begin the course a few yards in front of the dogs, which weigh 9 stone and are first worked up into a state of aggression by their handlers. The goal is to run as far as possible before the dog pulls them down.
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Obama falls into JFK trap
ABC News has this headline:
Obama: Bush, McCain Should 'Explain Why They Have a Problem With JFK'
The more interesting question is why Obama has a problem with JFK on tax cuts and bearing any burden to see freedom survive. There is no record of JFK taking with the Viet Cong either. I think this is another Obama gaffe, of which there have been many in the last week.
Texas economy outperforms other states
The San Antonio area is prospering and showing great vitality. I have been there several times in the last year and the business along I-35 is solid all the way to San Marcos some 20 to 30 miles north. It would not surprise me to see Austin and San Antonio growth meet along I-35 in the next few years. Democrats in Texas are going to have a hard time running against the economy. Several reasons Texas is so much stronger is the tort reform in Texas and the state's low tax structure and right to work laws. Not being hostile to energy production also helpsSan Antonio’s job market, like Texas’, stayed ahead of the turmoil rocking the national labor market in April as employers added 3,700 positions for the month and 19,200 for the 12 months ending in April.
In addition, the area unemployment rate continued to drop, hitting 3.6 percent in April from 3.9 percent a month earlier and 3.7 percent a year earlier.
Statewide unemployment matched a record low in April, sliding two-tenths of a point to 4.1 percent.
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Gen. Sanchez--Strategy not my job?
To hear retired Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez explain it, the mistakes of the Iraq war that happened while he was in command there weren't his fault. Not Abu Ghraib, not the birth of the insurgency, not the decision to let rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr survive.This is an amazing attempt at upward delegation of responsibility by Sanchez. It is a good starting point for explaining why he did such a poor job as Iraq commander. Compare his attitude to Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Odinero and it is easy to understand why the results under the latter have been so much better.Sanchez was a soldier, and according to him, a general's job is to give advice. What the civilian leaders decide after that is out of a general's hands.
''It's our responsibility to provide the best judgment we can,'' Sanchez said in an interview with McClatchy. ``But when those decisions are made, if they are not illegal or immoral, civilian control of the military dictates that we comply.''
Sanchez argues that crafting a strategy wasn't his responsibility, even as the top commander in Iraq. That fell to the civilian leaders, such as the secretary of defense and the president.
But as part of the military's emerging counterinsurgency strategy, commanders now are calling their soldiers ''strategic corporals.'' That is, every soldier's decision is part of the broader strategy.
Captains serving in outposts throughout Iraq now are leading fiefdoms alongside local Iraqi leaders, deciding everything from who should protect the community to how local funds should be spent. Commanders now stress to corporals and captains stationed in those outposts that their decisions are part of the broader strategy.
''It's all well and good for a general to say I am not responsible for grand strategy,'' said retired Army Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan. ``But corporals can be strategic. They can make things happen.''
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Who has really prospered in the Bush economy?
Barack Obama's wealth has more than doubled during his presidential campaign -- and has shot up tenfold since he entered the U.S. Senate three years ago, his financial disclosure filed Friday shows.If the economy was as lousy as he and his campaign claim no one could afford to buy his books and make contributions to his campaign in mind boggling numbers. The man must not know anything about economics either. Nearly all of his accumulated wealth has come under the Bush administration. He did not do nearly as well under the Clinton administration. The GOP should have some fun with this this year if they only try.
Obama is the least wealthy of the three major presidential candidates. But with advances and royalties from two bestselling books, Obama's assets were worth between $2.02 million and $7.35 million at the end of 2007, according to a public financial disclosure report filed with the Federal Election Commission.
At the end of 2006, Obama's holdings were worth $455,000 to $1.125 million. When he entered the U.S. Senate in 2005, he reported assets worth between $200,000 and $400,000.
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Mosul offensive rounds up over 1000 al Qaeda suspects
Iraqi forces have detained more than 1,000 suspects in an offensive aimed at crushing al Qaeda in northern Iraq, the military commander of the operation said on Saturday.This may be a disappointment to Nancy Pelosi who is in Baghdad. She has been making the bogus claim that the war in Iraq is without end, but this operation is about to end al Qaeda's part of the war on any significant basis. The Iraqis and the US have also had success against the Mahdi militia. It is time for Pelosi to admit she has been wrong about the war in Iraq.Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki returned to Baghdad on Saturday after spending several days in the city of Mosul and surrounding Nineveh province to supervise the crackdown.
Many gunmen from Sunni Islamist al Qaeda have regrouped in Nineveh after being pushed out of other areas. The U.S. military says Mosul is al Qaeda's last major urban stronghold in Iraq.
Lieutenant-General Riyadh Jalal Tawfiq, head of the Iraqi-led offensive that began a week ago, said 1,068 suspects had been detained so far.
"This operation will last until we finish off all the terrorist remnants and outlaws," he said.
On Friday, Maliki said fighters who handed in their weapons within 10 days would be given an amnesty and unspecified cash rewards. His offer applies to gunmen who have not killed anyone.
Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Mohammed al-Askari said scores of militants had already handed over their guns.
"We are committed to the amnesty and have reassured them there will be no judicial pursuit against them," he said, adding the government would soon make public the compensation available for different kinds of weapons handed in.
Iraqi law states that each household may legally own one semi-automatic rifle.
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Oil cavity can be filled by drilling
These places are off limits because Democrats want to strangle production to drive up the price in hopes that it will cause conservation. Instead they are enriching people who don't like us when they could be paying down the deficit and reducing domestic prices of gas. They are lowering everyones standard of living to meet their wacky objectives. It is not just oil and gas production they are strangling. They also oppose nuclear production of electricity, coal wind and whatever is next. They oppose the use of shale oil. If it produces energy, the Democrats oppose it.Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the Mr. Magoo of American politics, stumbled onto the truth last week. He discovered the law of supply and demand. "We want to put [more oil] on the market to increase supply and lower prices," Reid said. "With oil and gas prices continuing to break record highs every day, much more needs to be done."
Indeed it does. But Reid won't allow it. His understanding of economics only extends to matters in which he might embarrass President Bush. The oil he wants on the market is the oil the administration is buying for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), now nearly full. Reid got his way. The administration now plans to stop oil shipments to the SPR next month.
Beyond that, Reid and his party are committed to suppressing increased oil production in this country, as they wait for that magical day when fossil fuels are no longer needed to supply the nation's energy needs.
That day may come in 50, 60, 70 years--or never. In the meantime, America needs oil, and the good news is we're awash in the stuff. If the oil reserves miles off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and in federally owned lands in the West and Alaska were tapped, our dependence on foreign oil could begin to be reversed. In 10 years, half of America's oil could be produced at home (up from 40 percent), with more coming from increased exports from Canada.
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So more oil production would strengthen America's national security. By increasing the supply of oil, it would reduce the price, or at least ease the pressure on price from rising world demand. And the mere commitment to boosting production would have a soothing effect on a world market easily spooked by threats to supply.
But there's a problem: Eighty-five percent of the untapped domestic sources of oil have been put off-limits. There's a federally mandated moratorium on drilling offshore, and huge roadblocks to exploiting the oil on the vast federal lands have been erected.
"What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity," wrote Robert Samuelson recently. Lifting the moratorium requires action by Congress and the White House. So don't hold your breath. The Democratic Congress is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environmental lobby, which regards oil exploration, much less drilling, as a sin against nature.
Advances in technology, however, make serious offshore oil spills a thing of the past. One hundred eight platforms were destroyed and hundreds more damaged in the Gulf of Mexico by hurricanes Rita and Katrina without a single major spill. Californians may remember the damaging spill off Santa Barbara, but that was 40 years ago and was the result of ancient technology.
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Polar bear pander
Washington Examiner Editorial:
The U.S. government says the population of polar bears has increased four-fold since the 1960s, so the bureaucrats whose job security depends on stirring up environmental distress have classified the huge white beasts as an endangered species. Surely Alice in Wonderland has donned a disguise that makes her look and sound exactly like Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne. Alice issued a decision last week under Kempthorne’s signature that effectively mandates nothing can be done anywhere by anybody in the lower 48 states if it increases the greenhouse gases that fuel the global warming that is allegedly melting the Artic ice the polar bears require for survival. It’s hard not to think the government’s left hand doesn’t know what its other left hand is doing on this issue.I oppose this anti Darwinism, attempting to revoke the survival of the fittest. In the case of the Polar bear it is even more ridiculous since they apparently like the warmer weather, like most animals and plants. This designation will only add to the disrepute of the environmental movement.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the polar bears have increased their numbers from as low as 5,000 in the 1960s to an estimated 20,000 today....
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A futile plea to "honorable" kidnappers
A former archbishop of Canterbury called Saturday for the release of five British hostages Iraq, appealing to their captors as "men of faith."If these were honorable men they never would have kidnapped these people to begin with. Carey is making the same mistake Carter made during the hostage taking from the US Embassy in Tehran. Carter wrote similar letters to Khomeini that were equally as futile. The religious bigots of Iran think that things like honor and truth are not owed to people of other faiths. They can lie cheat and kidnap the "other" with impunity. It is foolish to think otherwise."May I appeal to you as honorable people to release these men who have been away from their families for over one year," said Archbishop George Carey, in a video statement released through The Times of London newspaper.
"I appeal to you as good people to release these men who long to be back home once more."
The five Britons were kidnapped last May along with two Iraqis from an Iraqi Finance Ministry building in Baghdad.
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Texas tort reform brings doctors and business
It has made medical care more affordable and available. We still have our share of trial lawyers, but their efforts have been tamed. One other benefit of tort reform is that it has helped to defund the Democrat party in the state, since many of their contributions came from the tort lawyers and their big settlements. Talk about a win win deal.When Sam Houston was still hanging his hat in Tennessee in the 1830s, it wasn't uncommon for fellow Tennesseans who were packing up and moving south and west to hang a sign on their cabins that read "GTT" – Gone to Texas.
Today obstetricians, surgeons and other doctors might consider reviving the practice. Over the past three years, some 7,000 M.D.s have flooded into Texas, many from Tennessee.
Why? Two words: Tort reform.
In 2003 and in 2005, Texas enacted a series of reforms to the state's civil justice system. They are stunning in their success. Texas Medical Liability Trust, one of the largest malpractice insurance companies in the state, has slashed its premiums by 35%, saving doctors some $217 million over four years. There is also a competitive malpractice insurance industry in Texas, with over 30 companies competing for business. This is driving rates down.
The result is an influx of doctors so great that recently the State Board of Medical Examiners couldn't process all the new medical-license applications quickly enough. The board faced a backlog of 3,000 applications. To handle the extra workload, the legislature rushed through an emergency appropriation last year.
Now many of the newly arriving doctors are heading to rural or underserved parts of the state. Four new anesthesiologists have headed to Beaumont, for example. Meanwhile, San Antonio has experienced a 52% growth in the number of new doctors.
But if tort reform has been a boon – and it is likely one of the reasons the state's economy has thrived in recent years – it was not easy to enact.
In one particularly grueling fight in the legislature in 2003, an important piece of a reform bill went down to a narrow defeat in the state Senate after a single Republican switched his support to vote against it. Republican Gov. Rick Perry was so incensed that he bolted out of his office in the Capitol, sprinted into the Senate chamber, and vaulted a railing to come face to face with the defecting senator.
That confrontation fizzled, however, and before long Texas succeeded at enacting two simple but effective reforms. One capped medical malpractice awards for noneconomic damages at $250,000, changed the burden of proof for claiming injury for emergency room care from simple negligence to "willful and wanton neglect," and required that an independent medical expert file a report in support of the claimant.
This has allowed doctors and hospitals to cut costs and even increase the resources devoted to charity care. Take Christus Health, a nonprofit Catholic health system across the state. Thanks to tort reform, over the past four years Christus saved $100 million that it otherwise would have spent fending off bogus lawsuits or paying higher insurance premiums. Every dollar saved was reinvested in helping poor patients.
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Texas recently became home to more Fortune 500 companies than New York and California. Things are trending well for the Lone Star State. Anecdotally, we can see that while doctors are moving in, trial lawyers are packing up and heading west. They're GTC -- Gone to California.
Diplomatic support for terrorism
Seven years after al-Qaeda terrorists Jamal al-Badawi and Fahd al-Quso confessed to me their crucial involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole, and three years after they were convicted in a Yemeni court -- where a judge imposed a death sentence on Badawi -- they, along with many other al-Qaeda terrorists, are free. On Oct. 12, 2000, when I flew to Yemen to lead the FBI's Cole investigation, I had no idea how uncooperative the Yemeni government would initially be. Nor could I have imagined how disconnected from reality the U.S. ambassador to Yemen then, Barbara K. Bodine, would prove.
I have hesitated in the past to share my view of the conflict between Bodine and the FBI's counterterrorism leader, John O'Neill. I feel compelled, however, to respond to Bodine's recent comments, which slander the efforts of many dedicated counterterrorism agents and divert attention from the significant terrorist problem within Yemen, our "ally" in the "war on terror."
A recent Post report on Yemen allowing al-Qaeda operatives to go free offered insight into the challenges the FBI faced. Bodine was quoted in the article not urging the Yemeni government to rearrest the terrorists but, instead, denigrating the agents who investigated the attack. She faulted the FBI as being slow to trust Yemeni authorities and said agents were "dealing with a bureaucracy and a culture they didn't understand. . . . We had one group working on a New York minute, and another on a 4,000-year-old history."
In fact, our team included several Arab American agents who understood the culture and the region. Even so, such comments were irrelevant. The FBI left Yemen with the terrorists in jail.
It is true that while tracking the terrorists we worked "on a New York minute." We owed that much to the sailors murdered on the Cole and to all innocent people who remained targets as long as the terrorists were free.
It is also true that we did not trust some Yemeni officials. We had good reason not to:
When the FBI arrived in Yemen, some government officials tried to convince us that the explosion had been caused by a malfunction in the Cole's operating systems. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh even asked the U.S. government for money to clean up port damage the United States "caused."
After we took representatives from various security agencies aboard the Cole and proved to them that the explosion was caused by an external attack, some Yemeni officials claimed that those responsible had died in the attack and that there was no reason to keep investigating. Similar excuses and smoke screens were rampant.
We faced constant threats to our safety, not just from terrorists. Members of the Yemeni parliament, in fiery speeches broadcast on official television, called for "jihad" to be declared against us. The hotel where we stayed was shot at and received at least one bomb threat, prompting an evacuation.
Rather than supporting us, Bodine declared John O'Neill, a man greatly respected by his Yemeni counterparts, persona non grata.
Many American officials in Yemen, including members of Bodine's team, shared our frustration. Even victims of the Cole were offended by her. I'll never forget one sailor telling me t