PrairiePundit

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama appears to be consolidating a lead over Hillary Rodham Clinton among most constituent groups in Texas except Hispanics, according to a new tracking poll.

The survey found Obama leading 48.2 percent to 41.7 percent over Clinton statewide. The poll, conducted Tuesday through Thursday for the Houston Chronicle, Reuters and C-SPAN by Zogby International, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

On the Republican side, U.S. Sen. John McCain appears headed to victory in Texas over former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas congressman Ron Paul of Lake Jackson. McCain led with 53.4 percent support to Huckabee's 26.8 percent and Paul's 10.7 percent in a survey that had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points. McCain led among all groups, including self-identified conservatives.

The tracking poll, which will be conducted daily until next Tuesday's election, found Obama leading with both men and women. He and Clinton were essentially tied among Anglos, but he held 84.9 percent support among blacks and she had the support of 54.9 percent of the Hispanics surveyed.
That Hispanic backing helped give Clinton a lead in South Texas of 66.7 percent. She also led in West Texas, which would include heavily Hispanic El Paso.

Obama led in every other region and was supported by about 60 percent of those surveyed in Houston and Dallas — which have more nominating delegates at stake than all of the region from San Antonio to Brownsville to El Paso.
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Pollster John Zogby said the statistics that really show the momentum for Obama is the timing of when people made up their mind on how to vote. He said Clinton leads "substantially" among those who made up their minds more than a month ago, but Obama leads almost "two-to-one" among those who made up their minds recently.
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Blacks continue to treat Clinton as if she were a Republican, favoring Obama by 85 percent. In previous races, Clinton has won over the late decider's. That does not appear to be happening in Texas right now. The last quoted paragraph explains what has happened in the Democrat race in Texas. Obama's class envy demagoguery appears to be working with many voters.

Huckabee is really under performing in Texas. It appears that most Texas Republicans have resigned themselves to the McCain candidacy.

The audacity of the telecom law suits

Quin Hillyer:

Telecommunications companies in the crossfire between congressional Democrats and the White House face lawsuits so breathtaking that it’s a wonder they continue to help anti-terrorism efforts at all when other industries already have balked.
But it’s not just the telecoms at risk: If the plaintiffs receive everything they request, the telecoms could not even survive, and the nation’s entire, everyday communications network could fracture.
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Now consider Hepting v. AT&T, one of the dozens of class-action suits already filed against the telecoms. It reads like the account of a vast fishing expedition in which the plaintiffs claim that any small minnow they catch is a veritable Moby Dick of a privacy invasion.
It claims the surveillance program “intercepts and analyzes the communications of millions of Americans” in an “illegal domestic spying program.” Never mind, of course, that the only way “millions” of Americans could be said to be affected is if they are said to have been subject to unlawful “search and seizure” just by having their phone numbers show up as tiny data bits among “4,000 terabytes (million megabytes)” on the same network that is monitored for the targeted foreign calls. This is hardly a real privacy violation.
Moreover, the suit defines the class of aggrieved citizens as “all individuals” who were customers of the phone company “at any time after September 2001” that the program was in effect. In this one suit, that class is identified as consisting of 24.6 million people. How all 24.6 million Americans could possibly be harmed by this program aimed at suspected foreign terrorists is a question perhaps best answered in the Twilight Zone.
The suit gets wilder still. Not only does it ask for at least $1,000 for each class member for each of two alleged types of violation, but on each of two other counts it asks the companies for at least $100 per alleged victim per day of violation — plus punitive damages and attorney’s expenses.
Do the math: The total potential payout by AT&T for the first two categories of alleged violations is $49.2 billion. Meanwhile, at $100 per day for each day of the four years at issue after 9/11, the total potential liability for each of the two latter counts is $3 trillion, 591 billion.
That number times 2, plus the $49.2 billion, comes out to a potential grand liability of $7.243 trillion. That is half of the entire national economy! And that’s even before “punitive damages” are taken into account.
Of course, no court would ever approve payments so high. One wonders whether the plaintiffs’ lawyers themselves even did the math. But the sheer audacity of a suit anywhere near this size makes a sane observer shudder.
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This is what Democrats call privacy rights? These law suits are a disgrace to the patriotism challenged plaintiff's bar. They are also a disgrace to the Democrats who are trying to keep them alive. If either the Democrats or the plaintiff's lawyers were capable of shame they should be red faced with it. They are putting their greed above the national security of the US. Just in case they think they are doing this for me, I hereby opt out of their case.

The importance of William Buckley

Peggy Noonan:

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It is commonplace to say that Bill Buckley brought American conservatism into the mainstream. That's not quite how I see it. To me he came along in the middle of the last century and reminded demoralized American conservatism that it existed. That it was real, that it was in fact a majority political entity, and that it was inherently mainstream. This was after the serious drubbing inflicted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and the rise of modern liberalism. Modern liberalism at that point was a real something, a palpable movement formed by FDR and continued by others. Opposing it was . . . what exactly? Robert Taft? The ghost of Calvin Coolidge? Buckley said in effect, Well, there's something known as American conservatism, though it does not even call itself that. It's been calling itself "voting Republican" or "not liking the New Deal." But it is a very American approach to life, and it has to do with knowing that the government is not your master, that America is good, that freedom is good and must be defended, and communism is very, very bad.

He explained, remoralized, brought together those who saw it as he did, and began the process whereby American conservatism came to know itself again. And he did it primarily through a magazine, which he with no modesty decided was going to be the central and most important organ of resurgent conservatism. National Review would be highly literate, philosophical, witty, of the moment, with an élan, a teasing quality that made you feel you didn't just get a subscription, you joined something. You entered a world of thought.
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Buckley was a one-man refutation of Hollywood's idea of a conservative. He was rising in the 1950s and early '60s, and Hollywood's idea of a conservative was still Mr. Potter, the nasty old man of "It's a Wonderful Life," who would make a world of grubby Pottersvilles if he could, who cared only about money and the joy of bullying idealists. Bill Buckley's persona, as the first famous conservative of the modern media age, said no to all that. Conservatives are brilliant, capacious, full of delight at the world and full of mischief, too. That's what he was. He upended old clichés.

This was no small thing, changing this template. Ronald Reagan was the other who changed it, by being a sunny man, a happy one. They were friends, admired each other, had two separate and complementary roles. Reagan was in the game of winning votes, of persuading, of leading a political movement that catapulted him to two terms as governor of California, the nation's biggest state, at a time when conservatives were seemingly on the defensive but in retrospect were rising to new heights. He would speak to normal people and persuade them of the efficacy of conservative solutions to pressing problems. Buckley's job was not reaching on-the-ground voters, or reaching voters at all, and his attitude toward his abilities in that area was reflected in his merry answer when asked what he would do if he won the mayoralty of New York. "Demand a recount," he famously replied. His role was speaking to those thirsting for a coherent worldview, for an intellectual and moral attitude grounded in truth. He provided intellectual ballast. Inspired in part by him, voters went on to support Reagan. Both could have existed without the other, but Buckley's work would have been less satisfying, less realized, without Reagan and his presidency, and Reagan's leadership would have been more difficult, and also somehow less satisfying, without Buckley.
,,,
Bill Buckley lived a great American life. His heroism was very American--the individualist at work in the world, the defender of great creeds and great beliefs going forth with spirit, style and joy. May we not lose his kind. For now, "Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels take thee to thy rest."

Buckley also got to see the definitions of conservatism and liberalism switch places toward the end of his life. When he began National Review he remarked that he was standing athwart history yelling stop. Liberals tended to see this as stand for the status quo or a return to the status quo ante. But in the 80s and 90s it was the liberals who were defending the status quo and trying to stop things like tax cuts, welfare reform and entitlement reforms. In the 21st century it is liberals who still trying to prevent change. Conservatives have been the engine of change and new ideas. That has been one of the real triumphs of conservatives who were inspired by William Buckley.

George Will writes his ode to Bill Buckley too. " Those who think Jack Nicholson's neon smile is the last word in smiles never saw William F. Buckley's. It could light up an auditorium; it did light up half a century of elegant advocacy that made him an engaging public intellectual and the 20th century's most consequential journalist."

David Brooks remembers, "He led through charisma and merit. He was capable of intellectual pyrotechnics none of us could match. But he also exemplified a delicious way of living."

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Terrorist rights Euro courts thwarts deportations

Times:

Britain’s efforts to deport terrorist suspects including the radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada were dealt a serious blow by the European Court of Human Rights yesterday.
In a unanimous decision, the court in Strasbourg ruled against an attempt by Italy to return a Tunisian to his home country. The Italian authorities had sought to have Nassim Saadi deported on the ground that he had played an “active role” in an organisation providing support to fundamentalist Islamist cells in Italy and abroad.
The 17 judges decided that sending Saadi back would violate the European Convention on Human Rights because he faced a real risk of torture or inhumane treatment. Britain, which is seeking to send Abu Qatada to Jordan, had intervened in the case in the hope that the court would back the return of suspects regardless of their home country’s human rights record.
Ministers argued that the right of the British public to be protected against terrorism should be balanced against suspects’ right not to be illtreated on their return home. But the court rejected the Government’s argument and ruled that the protection against torture is absolute.
The judgment, from which there is no appeal, binds all countries of the Council of Europe, including Britain.
It also threw into question another part of the Government’s strategy for trying to remove foreign terrorist suspects. Ministers have sought assurances from several North African and Middle Eastern countries that deportees will not be subject to torture or inhumane treatment.
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This is nuts. What this really means is that the terrorist and human debris from Muslim countries can be shipped to European countries who must turn them loose among their population. Putting innocent non combatants at risk to avoid the discomfort of people who want to kill us makes no sense. It is clear that this court is not democratically elected because they would all be thrown out of office if they were. The best way to protect yourself in Europe is probably to abrogate the treaty which gives these terrorist rights judges their control over defending themselves.

Brit police required to learn Shari'a

Daily Mail:

Police will be trained on the importance of the Koran and Sharia law to Muslims under Government plans to tackle extremism.

Lessons in the Islamic faith and culture will become part of the formal training for recruits.
Chief constables said officers will build better relationships by understanding the communities they are policing.
This could prove crucial in rooting out extremism and preventing a terrorist attack, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers.
But critics expressed concern that the plan could foster division, rather than combat it.
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Knowing about mutilation and stoning may be effective in terrorizing confessions out of some, but I tend to think this is a wasted effort in dealing with the religious bigots who are threatening to terrorize anyone who does not agree with their weird religious beliefs.

Kabul may be focus of Taliban Spring offensive

Telegraph:

Taliban leaders have warned they are planning to strangle Kabul, targeting civilians with dozens of suicide bombings and using thousands of fighters to lay siege to road links to the Afghan capital.

Western officials have told The Daily Telegraph that intelligence reports warn of Taliban plans to increase pressure around the city, which saw more than 30 bombings last year. Some Nato officials predict that figure could rise above 100 this year.
The Taliban strategy will aim to cripple the city's economy through "spectacular" attacks in a new spring offensive, and erode international will to remain in Afghanistan.
Expatriate and diplomatic communities in Kabul have largely disappeared from public places since the targeting of the luxury Serena Hotel in the city in January, which killed eight staff and guests.
Speaking from an undisclosed location, one senior Taliban commander with the nom de guerre Abu Tayyub, told The Telegraph: "We have planned that 7,000-8,000 fighters will surround Kabul, to block the entrances to the city. Around 1,000 Fedayeen [suicide fighters] will mount attacks inside the city, both suicide and guerrilla attacks."
Western commanders see the increasing focus on suicide bombing on softer targets as a response to the failure of more conventional attacks on Western forces, during which the Taliban has suffered heavy casualties.
Another Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, said: "We don't make a difference between the foreign military forces and the civilians. They are all working for the occupying forces and we will kill them. We will target their residences and their places of work."
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So much for Taliban operational security and adherence to the Geneva Conventions.

Much of what they suggest is not within their capacity and what is would be a very foolish use of their shrinking number of troops. Massing their forces along the roads leading to Kabul is a good way to get them killed by US and coalition air power. That is the way many of the Taliban have been killed in recent years.

The Taliban may have the capacity to engage in mass murder of non combatants, but that is of limited value in a military operation and further alienates them from the population, which will mean that the population will be more likely to disclose their location and the location of their weapons.

A window on Harry's world in Afghanistan

Guardian:

Widow Six Seven had just given them the signal over the radio: "Cleared hot." Seconds later, a roaring could be heard as the US F15 fighter jets dropped two 500lb bombs on their targets. As one dropped a third bomb on a Taliban bunker, men could be seen on the ground scrambling out from their cover.
To the American pilots, the English public school voice responding to their "in hot" request and guiding their missile fire gave no clue that the army officer with whom they were communicating was a member of the British royal family.
The soldier they knew as call sign Widow Six Seven was Prince Harry, working in Afghanistan as a forward air controller [FAC] identifying Taliban forces on the ground, verifying coordinates and clearing them as targets for attack.
The prince's main location was forward operating base (FOB) Delhi, an austere outpost in the perilous Garmsir area close to the border with Pakistan. It is a helicopter ride away from a military hospital, food comes from 24-hour ration packs, known to soldiers as ratpacks or compo and far from fresh, and the water is almost exclusively for drinking and cooking.
Toilets here are plywood-constructed thunderboxes or urinal pipes stuck in the ground known as "desert roses". It was here that the third in line to the throne said he had the chance to be "normal".
"It's bizarre," he said. "I'm out here now, haven't really had a shower for four days, haven't washed my clothes for a week and everything seems completely normal ... I think this is about as normal as I'm ever going to get."
Until last night, the media had agreed to a blackout on reporting that the 23-year-old Household Cavalry officer has been in Afghanistan since just before Christmas.
The prince had retrained as an FAC after being refused permission to fight in Iraq alongside the men he had led in his regiment as troop leader. He admits now he was regarded as a "bullet magnet". As a compromise, he was allowed, under strict conditions of secrecy, to work from a fortified position a distance away from the frontline in Helmand province, calling in aircraft and observing enemy movements.
On screens known to the troops as Kill TV or Taliban TV, the prince watched live pictures of the action on the battlefield. Cornet Wales, the rank by which he is known in the army, would observe all movements within his own restricted operating zone [ROZ] and give jets permission to enter his air space when he felt it was safe to do so. The prince's job was to study the pictures, looking for body heat or movement that would help pinpoint the enemy.
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"It's good fun to be with just a normal bunch of guys, listening to their problems, listening to what they think. And especially getting through every day, its not painful to be here, but you are doing a job and to be with such fantastic people, the Gurkhas and the guys I'm sharing a room with, makes it all worthwhile."
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The story about Prince Harry breaks from the normal narrative about Afghanistan being a place where we are losing the war. It certainly does not sound like Prince Harry thinks he is losing. There have not been many warrior princes in recent times, but there is certainly an old tradition of such with the British thrown. The Prince deserves respect for putting himself in harms way and doing his part to win this war. There are certainly enough in the media and at home trying to lose it.

The Times says the Brit forces are now scrambling to move him to another location after his presence in Afghanistan was revealed. The Daily Mail has more on his deployment as well as several pictures.

Obama's NAFTA demagoguery

Steve Chapman:

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His campaign claims a million jobs have vanished because of the deal. That sounds devastating, but over the last 14 years, the American economy has added a net total of 25 million jobs -- some of them, incidentally, attributable to expanded trade with Mexico. When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent. Today it's 4.9 percent.

But maybe all the jobs we lost were good ones and all the new ones are minimum-wage positions sweeping out abandoned factories? Actually, no. According to data compiled by Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence, the average blue-collar worker's wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent under NAFTA. Instead of driving pay scales down, it appears to have pulled them up.

Manufacturing employment has declined, but not because we're producing less: Manufacturing output has not only expanded, but has expanded far faster than it did in the decade before NAFTA. The problem is that as productivity rises, we can make more stuff with fewer people. That's not a bad thing. In fact, it's essentially the definition of economic progress.

We're not the only country facing that phenomenon. China makes everything these days, right? But between 1995 and 2002, it lost 15 million manufacturing jobs.

Even if the candidates don't want to acknowledge the gains of the last 14 years, it's hard to see how they can blame NAFTA for economic troubles in Ohio or elsewhere. The whole idea was to eliminate import duties in both the United States and Mexico (as well as Canada). What everyone forgets is that we got the best of that bargain, since our tariffs were very low to begin with.
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Critics complain that while exports to Mexico have risen, imports from Mexico have risen even faster. But that's not because we embraced free trade. It's because our economy has been more robust than theirs. Prosperous consumers buy more goods, from both home and abroad, than struggling consumers. Absent NAFTA, the trade imbalance with Mexico would not be smaller. It would be bigger.
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I think one reason why Clinton has been falling behind is because she has not really challenged Obama's bogus remarks about issues like NAFTA, instead trying to imply that she is against it too. Obama is flunking econ 101 and Hillary is saying me too rather than pointing out just how wrong he is and how much her husband's trade policy has helped America.

Investor's Business Daily has more stats on the benefits of NAFTA trade. Why didn't Hillary say shame on you Barack Obama about the demagoguery instead of waffling on her earlier positions?

Human intelligence improving in Pakistan?

B. Raman, Outlook India:

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The strike of February 28 was apparently as precise as that of January 29, 2008, and would have been possible only with human intelligence (HUMINT) and not technical intelligence (TECHINT).A significant sequel to the January 29 strike was there were no major protest demonstrations against the US by the villagers in the targeted area. This was because the strike and the HUMINT on which it was based were so accurate that there were no collateral civilian casualties. The lack of major demonstrations showed that the villagers do not mind precisely targeted attacks on jihadi terrorists provided the attacks kill only known terrorists and not innocent civilians.

In the past, almost every suspected US missile strike in the tribal belt had been followed by violent demonstrations because the strikes were based on intelligence, which proved to have been inaccurate, and resulted in the death of a large number of innocent civilians. Recent strikes by the US forces on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border have been more precise and more successful in avoiding innocent civilian casualties.

It would be interesting to see whether there is any demonstration by the people of the area against the missile strike of February 28, 2008. It is not yet known whether there were any collateral casualties of civilians.

In an effort to improve HUMINT collection, the US intelligence had been announcing from time to time since 9/11 huge cash rewards amounting to millions of dollars to anyone providing accurate information relating to bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and other important terrorists operating from the tribal areas. Till the end of last year, there were not many takers for these reward amounts. Since the beginning of this year, there are indications that these offers of huge rewards have started helping in HUMINT collection.

bin Laden, Zawahiri and co must be worried men.

The speculation on the human intel is interesting. I think some of it is a result of our new bases on the border. We have also been making in roads with the tribes in Afghanistan who can freely move across the border and mix with the fighters in Pakistan. This has to be making the enemy very uncomfortable in what he thought was his safe houses.

The recent election in Pakistan also demonstrated substantial movement away from the Islamic supremacist. There is also a problem with the idea behind the supremacist philosophy. The basis of the philosophy is that the circumstances of Muslims is so bad because they are not pious enough. What they are finding is that those who cooperating with the US and the allies are doing better than those who have thrown their lot with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Many don't like living with the Islamic control freaks.

Al Qaeda's new tactics in Iraq

Perhaps someone should send this to Obama so he will know that al Qaeda is in Iraq.

Knowing not the enemy

David Ignatius:

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat -- and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign -- should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head, and helps you see the topic in a different light.
Sageman has a resume that would suit a postmodern John le Carre. He was a case officer running spies in Pakistan, and then became a forensic psychiatrist. What distinguishes his new book, "Leaderless Jihad," is that it peels away the emotional, reflexive responses to terrorism that have grown up since Sept. 11, 2001, and looks instead at scientific data Sageman has collected on more than 500 Islamic terrorists -- to understand who they are, why they attack and how to stop them.
The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into overexaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is now down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, who were well-educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for action.

"It's more about hero worship than about religion," Sageman said in a presentation of his research last week at the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank here. Many of this third wave don't speak Arabic or read the Koran. Very few (13 percent of Sageman's sample) have attended radical madrassas. Nearly all join the movement because they know or are related to someone who's already in it. Those detained on terrorism charges are getting younger: In Sageman's 2003 sample, the average age was 26; among those arrested after 2006, it was down to about 20. They are disaffected, homicidal kids -- closer to urban gang members than to motivated Muslim fanatics.
Sageman's harshest judgment is that the United States is making the terrorism problem worse by its actions in Iraq. "Since 2003, the war in Iraq has without question fueled the process of radicalization worldwide, including the U.S. The data are crystal clear," he writes. We have taken a fire that would otherwise burn itself out and poured gasoline on it.

...

Sageman is attempting to make the case for pulling back to the strategic defensive in the war being waged against us by al Qaeda. He is wrong on several counts. Bin Laden's strategy was to draw the US into a quagmire in Afghanistan. Just as he was being routed there and before he could rally jihadis to help him in Afghanistan, the US invaded Iraq which caused al Qaeda to have to divert its resources to a war that was not in an area as conducive to insurgency warfare. Bin Laden and al Qaeda have suffered a strategic defeat in Iraq as more and more Sunnis have been disillusioned by the tactic of killing non combatants. this led to the Anbar awakening and the spreading disgust with al Qaeda in Iraq as well as in other Arab countries.

While his forces are in retreat in Iraq, bin Laden has swung back to Afghanistan and Pakistan where he is creating even more enemies. In fact the war we are waging against radical Islam is creating a backlash against the movement that is resulting in the very weakening that Sageman describes as the third phase. Sageman's theory gets it just backwards when it comes to dealing with the threat of radical Islam. If we followed his advice, al Qaeda would see it as a victory. It is part of their magical thinking and Islam that makes them such an illogical enemy. If we go back to the strategic defensive as suggested, it will give al Qaeda time and space to regroup and plan more attacks.

What Sageman is suggesting is that we blow the end game.

Serbia withdrew police before embassy attacks

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

The Serbian government decided to pull back its police in Belgrade last Thursday so that demonstrators could attack the U.S. and British embassies, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee yesterday.

"We have good information that when the U.S. embassy and the British embassy and others were attacked, a decision was taken by the government of Serbia actually to pull the police back and allow them to be attacked, burn the embassy and conduct the violence they conducted," McConnell told the Senate Armed Services Committee in answer to a question during his testimony on worldwide threats.
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Although witnesses had reported that Serbian police had appeared to withdraw when demonstrators approached the embassies, this was the first time a U.S. official said the Serbian government deliberately permitted the violence to proceed.
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When you consider how much of a police state Serbia still is despite its turn to democracy, it is implausible that the police could not have stopped the mayhem , if they had been properly deployed. since the Serbs bussed the thugs in for the demonstration, it is reasonable to assume that the attacks on the embassies was a choreographed event. Is there any wonder that people in and outside of Kosovo do not trust the Serbs to treat them fairly?

Democrats want to be trade bullies

Democrats claim the world hates America because President Bush has behaved like a global bully. But we don't recall him ever ordering an ally to rewrite an existing agreement on American terms -- or else.

Yet that's exactly what both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are now promising to do to our closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada. At their Ohio debate on Tuesday, first Mrs. Clinton, followed ever so quickly by Mr. Obama, pledged to pull America out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if the two countries don't agree to rewrite it on Yankee terms. How's that for global "unilateralism"?

Democrats sure have come a long way from the 1990s, when Bill Clinton pushed Nafta through a Democratic Congress. And the truth is that both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have spoken favorably about Nafta in the past. Yet now they are sounding the loudest protectionist notes by a potential President in decades. More dangerous, neither is telling the truth about the role of trade in the U.S. economy. If either one makes it to the White House, he or she will carry the weight of this campaign protectionism while trying to lead the global economy.
While it is politically incorrect to say so, Nafta has been good for all of North America. By opening the continent to investment and trade, capital has found more efficient uses, with benefits to producers and consumers alike. In Nafta's first decade after 1993, trade between the U.S. and Mexico multiplied to $232 billion from $81 billion. Trade with Canada has also blossomed, with Canadian exports to the U.S. by surface transport rising 79% in a decade and U.S. exports to Canada increasing 38%.

The deal also increased U.S. productivity. U.S. firms found they could be more globally competitive by putting some manufacturing in Mexico or Canada while retaining high-end production in the U.S. This has resulted in what John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, has called "the highly integrated North American industrial base, particularly between Canada and the U.S." Such flexibility may have saved thousands of U.S. jobs from going abroad. In the first 10 years of the deal, the U.S. economy added 18 million jobs and the jobless rate sank to record lows.
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As the Democratic contest continues, it is becoming a race to the bottom on protectionism. Perhaps the best trade demagogue will win, but someone should point out that the last President who tried to govern as a protectionist was Herbert Hoover. It didn't turn out so well.

Unions are like a football team who wants the Super Bowl ring without having to compete for it. In fact protectionism is an uncompetitive practice that hurts all parties for the perceived benefit of a very few. What makes the case against NAFTA so ridiculous is when you step back and look at the big picture instead of a micro focus on a few people in Ohio. There you see that unemployment is significantly lower than it was before NAFTA and household income is up dramatically.

The only giant sucking sound coming from the agreement is the breathing of the demagogues whose predictions have been proved wrong. One of Hillary Clinton's problems in this race is she conceded ground that she should have made a stand on. Perhaps her pollsters told her that voters were too unintelligent to accept a rational response, but as McCain has demonstrated on the war, there are good reasons to stick with the right answer.

The other problem with the Democrat proposal is that it want work. Acting like the ugly American in South America would play into Chavez's hands hurting both this country and the countries of South America.

Leftist dog the war and trade for Democrats

Daniel Henninger:

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... The Vermont governor's quixotic 2004 presidential run did one big thing: It let the netroots out. It empowered the Democratic Left. Web-based "progressives" proved they could raise lots of political money and bring pressure, especially when allied with labor unions.
They didn't defeat centrist Joe Lieberman in 2006, but they drove him out of the party. They pushed the party's Iraq policy under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi into total, rejectionist opposition. In this world, the Petraeus surge is a failure, period. Thus, Obama calmly gives the surge little or no credit. Also in this world, trade and Nafta are anathema, as seen in the House refusal to pass the trade agreement with Colombia, the U.S.'s strongest ally in South America.

What the netroots has done is bunch up the party ideologically. While the Republican Party slices conservative ideology as thinly as aged prosciutto, the Democrats, in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, are all swinging a populist anvil -- with the left hand.

This pushed Hillary out of the Clinton comfort zone. She established her Senate career as a reasonable person, winning public compliments from GOP colleagues. Came the campaign and she finds herself onstage with wall-to-wall men of the ascendant populist left.

On trade, the Democratic Party is as far left as at any time in its history. Both Al Gore and John Kerry ran as economic populists, but there was nothing on trade like what we have heard in this campaign. In Al Gore's 2000 nomination acceptance speech, trade was the last issue mentioned: "We must welcome and promote truly free trade." His running mate was Joe Lieberman, also a Nafta supporter. Labor "held its nose" and voted for Gore.

The party next nominated another Nafta supporter, John Kerry, whose acceptance speech also reduced trade to a line, with a quick bow to "a fair playing field." There was talk that Kerry would cover himself by putting the ardently antitrade, prounion Dick Gephardt on the ticket. Labor lost that one, too, but with the selection of John Edwards, the party became more invested in left-leaning populism.
...
If you are selling a dream you need the best possible salesman to make it seem somehow possible. They found him in Barack Obama.

Hillary attacked Obama this week on exactly this basis -- for selling dreams: "And you know the celestial choirs will be singing . . . and the world will be perfect." In her world "none of the problems we face will be easily solved." In her world, the real one, mediocre pols must be worked and massive bureaucracies pushed to do the right thing. And you know what? She just might be good at it.

The bitter irony is that what the Democrats want is someone like the original Clinton, another figure who can make the old-time religion sound not like a government program, but personally uplifting. She can't. In the Cleveland debate Tuesday, even Brian Williams couldn't resist noting "a 16-minute discussion on health care."
...

The Democrats are about to get Mr. change for a nominee, but as Hillary points out, it is still going to be a hard sell when it bumps into practical problems like governing. George Bush has already proved you can't change the tone i Washington by failing to engage your critics. What Obama has shown is his form of engagement when challenged is snark and arrogance and that is not going to change minds either. When challenged the soaring rhetoric is no longer evident, instead you get the smart alec kid yelling something like the equivalent of "Oh, Yeah?" or "Yo Mama...." McCain will probably have more adult responses to this back and forth as yesterday's discussion on whether al Qaeda is in Iraq demonstrates.

Sweden, Norway nab Islamic terror suspects

Reuters/NY Times:

Swedish and Norwegian security services detained six people on Thursday on suspicion of offences related to terrorism.
Security services in the neighboring countries gave few details on the cases, but Swedish news agency TT said the raids were coordinated.
"Three people have been taken into custody," said Maria Martinsson, spokeswoman for the Swedish Security Service.
"They are suspected of preparing terrorist activity and of financing terrorism."
Norway's state security police said in a statement it had also detained three people on suspicion of funding terrorist activities abroad.
The raids took place around the Swedish capital Stockholm and also close to Oslo, Norway's capital.
Norway's intelligence agency said earlier this month that the threat of terror attacks by Islamic radicals was rising in part because of the country's military presence in Afghanistan.
...

I guess Osama can't brag anymore about not attacking Sweden. More an more of his plans and that of the jihadis are now being preempted for two reasons. Increased security and intelligence compounded by the degrading of al Qaeda's capabilities resulting from taking out several of its operational leaders. Zawahiri can brag about finding people to step up to the job, but they do not have the experience and the intelligence to take over immediately. If these people were not related to al Qaeda, it probably means they had even less training and skills. It would be a sign of the degradation of the overall jihadi effort.

Obama rides into box canyon on Iraq issue

Washington Times:

...

But new data from the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll showed that he has some ground to make up versus Mr. McCain on national security. The poll showed 55 percent of voters trusted Mr. McCain on the issue, 25 percentage points more than Mr. Obama.
On Iraq, specifically, Mr. McCain holds a narrower lead of 10 percentage points over Mr. Obama, according to the poll of 1,600 likely voters.
For months, Mr. Obama has sparred with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, his Democratic primary opponent, over her initial support for the war. And she has been forced to distance herself from her initial vote.
McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann said Mr. Obama's stance during the primary has left him nowhere to go and no way to react to changes in the situation on the ground.
"He's completely backed himself into a strategic corner where he realizes he has to say he wants to fight al Qaeda, but at the same time, because of the Code Pink-MoveOn.org crowd, he has to say he wants to get out of Iraq. And you can't reconcile the two," said Mr. Scheunemann, adding they see plenty of ground to fight on, going back to Mr. Obama's initial anti-war speech.
...

His response to McCain's challenge yesterday was both arrogant and ignorant. The current debate is not whether if was right to go into Iraq, but whether it is right to leave. It is not whether al Qaeda was in Iraq before, but whether we should leave them there now. In that context, Obama's position makes no sense.

Obama's response suggest he does not realize the debate has moved out of the Democrat echo chamber and into the real world.

Virtual border fence flops first test

The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear, federal officials said yesterday.

Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Department of Homeland Security officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee.

Though the department took over that initial stretch Friday from Boeing, authorities confirmed that Project 28, the initial deployment of the Secure Border Initiative network, did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol.

The announcement marked a major setback for what President Bush in May 2006 called "the most technologically advanced border security initiative in American history." The virtual fence was to be a key component of his proposed overhaul of U.S. immigration policies, which died last year in the Senate.

Investigators for the Government Accountability Office had earlier warned that the effort was beset by both expected and unplanned difficulties. But yesterday, they disclosed new troubles that will require a redesign and said the first phase will not be completed until near the end of the next president's first term.

Those problems included Boeing's use of inappropriate commercial software, designed for use by police dispatchers, to integrate data related to illicit border-crossings. Boeing has already been paid $20.6 million for the pilot project, and in December, the DHS gave the firm another $65 million to replace the software with military-style, battle management software.
...
The virtual fence was to complement a physical fence that the administration now says will include 370 miles of pedestrian fencing and 300 miles of vehicle barriers to be completed by the end of this year. The GAO said this portion of the project may also be delayed and that its total cost cannot be determined. The president's 2009 budget does not propose funds to add fencing beyond the 700 or so miles meant to be completed this year.
...
The pilot virtual fence included nine mobile towers, radar, cameras, and vehicles retrofitted with laptops and satellite phones or handheld devices. They were to be linked to a near-real-time, maplike projection of the frontier that agents could use to track targets and direct law enforcement resources.
...

The virtual fence was to operate in areas where real fence was deemed impractical. It appears that the virtual fence may be even more impractical and costly. In Texas Gov. Perry has experimented with putting cameras tied to internet sites on the border so that anyone can see the people crossing illegally. I guess he was hoping the border Patrol would monitor the videos.

I think the flop of the virtual fence will increase the pressure for an actual fence.

Missle strikes meeting of Arabs in Pakistan tribal region

Reuters/NY Times:

A missile struck a house in a Pakistani region known as being a safe haven for al Qaeda early on Thursday, killing 13 suspected militants including foreigners, intelligence officials and residents said.
The attack took place near Kaloosha village in the South Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border.
"The blast shook the entire area," said resident Behlool Khan.
A security official said he believed the missile was fired by U.S. forces who are operating in neighbouring Afghanistan, and the house belonged to a Pashtun tribesman, Sher Mohammad Malikkheil, known as Sheroo, who is believed to have links with militants.
"Ten people, most of them believed to be of Arab origin, were killed and seven wounded," said an intelligence official, who declined to be identified.
Another intelligence official later revised the death toll to 13 and said it included three Pakistanis.
He said the house, about 25 km (16 miles) inside Pakistan's border and opposite an American base in Afghanistan, was rented out a couple of months ago.
U.S. forces have fired missiles at militants on the Pakistani side of the border several times in recent years, most recently on Jan. 28 when one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, Abu Laith al-Libi, was killed in a strike in North Waziristan.
That missile was believed to have been fired by a U.S. pilotless drone.
...

It was certainly a quick response to Zawahiri's latest tape complaining about the previous attack that took out al Libi their number three man. If he was not in the house, he is probably sputtering with rage today.

The jihadis sanctuary is suddenly much less secure and the new border base that the US has set up in Afghanistan a few miles from the latest target is getting results that will be hard for al Qaeda to ignore. It is likely to push their operations even further from the border and it is also likely to prompt suicidal attacks on the base. Either way it has to debilitate al Qaeda and the Taliban operations in Afghanistan.

Louisiana throws off 3rd world governance

...

Six weeks into the term of Gov. Bobby Jindal, an extensive package of ethics bills was approved here this week, signaling a shift in the political culture of a state proud of its brazen style. Mr. Jindal, the earnest son of Indian immigrants, quickly declared open season on the cozy fusion of interests and social habits that have prevailed among lobbyists, state legislators and state agencies here for decades. Mostly, he got what he wanted.
Mr. Jindal, an outsider to that rollicking if sometimes unsavory banquet, a Republican with a missionary’s zeal to smite Louisiana’s wickedness at one of its presumed sources, called on the Legislature to reform itself and its high-living ways.
Grudgingly, pushed by public opinion and business pressure, it went along. When the legislative session ended Tuesday, lawmakers had passed bills aimed at making their finances less opaque, barring their lucrative contracts with the state — some have been known to do good business with them — and cutting down on perks like free tickets to sporting events. The bills, which advocates say will put Louisiana in the top tier of states with tough ethics rules, now await Mr. Jindal’s signature, which should come early next week.
Mr. Jindal overcame resistance by convincing lawmakers that no job growth would occur in the state until it cleaned up its act and brought its ethics laws into the national mainstream.
“I’ve talked to C.E.O.’s in New York, even the president of the United States,” Mr. Jindal said in an interview, and when “you ask them for more investment, more help on the coast and other areas, their first reaction always is: ‘Well, who do you need to know? Who do I have to hire? Is this money going to end up in somebody’s pocket?’ ”
That had to change, the governor said, and he was using his “narrow window” — his honeymoon at the Capitol — to do it.
The volume of grumbling suggested real change was afoot.
...
The new requirements will force all state legislators, as well as most other elected and appointed officials around the state, to disclose all sources of income, real estate holdings and debts over $10,000. (Judges are exempted.) Lawmakers and executive branch officials will no longer be able to get contracts for state-financed or disaster-related work. Lobbyists will also have to disclose their sources of income and will be limited to spending no more than $50 per elected official, per meal; splitting the tab, say among other lobbyists or legislators, will also be prohibited.
The new income disclosure requirements for legislators are comparable to those of Washington State, ranked first in the country by the Center for Public Integrity.
Mr. Jindal was unable to persuade lawmakers to pass another bill that would have ended retirement benefits for public officials convicted of crimes related to their state work.
...

He still has huge challenges ahead on specific projects that need to be cleaned up. Unions are a corrupting influence also in the state driving up the cost of living and lowering the standard of living for everyone. It is going to take a cultural change to go with the legal and ethic changes to make a difference in Louisiana, but in Bobby Jindal they finally have a political leader with the will to try to change the inbred culture of corruption.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Why is Obama so insensitive toward Muslims?

AP/NY Times:

For Barack Obama, it is an ember that he has doused time and again, only to see it flicker anew: links to Islam fanned by false rumors, innuendo and association. Obama and his campaign reacted strongly this week when a photo of him in Kenyan tribal garb began spreading on the Internet.
And the praise he received Sunday from Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan prompted pointed questions -- during Tuesday night's presidential debate and also in a private meeting over the weekend with Jewish leaders in Cleveland.
During the debate, Obama repeated his denunciation of Farrakhan's views, which have included numerous anti-Semitic comments. And, after being pressed, he rejected Farrakhan's support in the presidential race.
The Democratic candidate says repeatedly that he's a Christian who took the oath of office on a family Bible. Yet on the Internet and on talk radio -- and in a campaign introduction for John McCain this week -- he is often depicted, falsely, as a Muslim with shadowy ties and his middle name, Hussein, is emphasized as a reminder of Iraq's former leader.
''If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim,'' he told the Jewish leaders in Cleveland, according to a transcript of the private session.
The photo of Obama wearing Kenyan tribal raiments -- taken by an Associated Press photographer during his visit in 2006 to the country where his father was born -- resurfaced on the Internet amid unsubstantiated claims that it was being circulated by members of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. Clinton and her aides said they had nothing to do with it. The Obama campaign accused them of ''shameful, offensive fear-mongering.''
On Tuesday Republican candidate McCain denounced the introduction he got in Cincinnati that criticized Obama in vivid terms. Talk show host Bill Cunningham referred to Obama three times as ''Barack Hussein Obama'' and called him a ''hack, Chicago-style'' politician during the introduction of McCain.
The Obama campaign is closely attuned to the rumors and insinuations. Information on Obama's Christian faith is prominently available on the ''Know the facts'' page of his Web site. The campaign has distributed flyers to churches in states with presidential contests. And it encourages supporters to flag any attack that may make its way into cyberspace.
...

Does Obama think there is something wrong with Muslims? Why is he so insulted by being associated with them? Does he think Americans are too bigoted to elect a Muslim? It is a funny attitude for a guy who has been embraced as a post racial candidate. Why are Muslim grievance groups so silent about this apparent insult to Islam? Has CAIR weighed in on his embarrassment at being seen in Muslim garb.

Note that I said nothing about this garb tying Obama to the Muslim faith when I posted the picture. To me it was one of those funny hat moments that candidates learn to deal with. His less than light hearted response suggest he thought there was something wrong with either being in the garb or having someone see a picture of him in the garb. He needs to learn to lighten up on this subject.

Muslims complain in Nigerian nudity flap

BBC:

A female Nigerian politician badly beaten by a local MP is standing by the publication of a revealing photograph showing her injuries in a hospital bed.
Habiba Garba told the BBC she wanted people to see the reality of violence against women in northern Nigeria.
But Kano State authorities say they have received complaints the picture breaks Muslim rules about nudity.
Labaran Abdu Madari, who beat Mrs Garba in front of witnesses and police last week, is in jail and yet to be charged.
Kano is one of 12 mainly Muslim northern states to have implemented Sharia law since Nigeria's return to civil rule in 1999.
The BBC's Mustafa Muhammad in Kano says the state-owned Triumph newspaper, which published the picture showing Mrs Garba's injuries, has a very small circulation and few people in Kano have heard about the incident.
But he says the editor of the paper may come under some pressure from government to resign for publishing it.
"I want to show the people of the world what that man did to me," she told the BBC from her hospital bed in Kano city on Wednesday.
Mrs Garba, a women's leader in the opposition All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP), alleged Mr Madari, a Kano State lawmaker for the ruling People's Democratic Party, mounted a campaign of harassment against her.
She said that he paid youths to follow and heckle her after she switched political parties from the PDP.
They called her a "prostitute" and physically threatened her, she said.
Last week, she went to the police, who arrested one of the youths.
The politician heard about the arrest and came down to the police station where eyewitnesses told the BBC that he savagely beat Mrs Garba.
...

I think it is pretty clear that the picture is unlikely to appeal to anyone's prurient interest unless they are into seeing beat up women. I think she has got some pretty good physical evidence of the assault to go along with the eye witness accounts. Labaran Abdu Madari may just want to plead insanity, since it is hard to understand why a sane man would beat up a woman in front of the police station. Perhaps he will argue that it is a Muslim thing, but I thought just applied to wives.

Al Qaeda working with Hamas in Gaza?

Times:

Al-Qaeda militants have infiltrated the Palestinian territories with help from Hamas, according to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President.
The charges are the most serious yet in the war of words between Mr Abbas, who controls the West Bank, and Hamas, whose Islamist guerrillas expelled his Fatah-dominated security force from the Gaza Strip last summer.
“Al-Qaeda is present in Gaza and I’m convinced that they [Hamas] are their allies,” said Mr Abbas in an interview with al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. “I can say without doubt that al-Qaeda is present in the Palestinian territories and that this presence, especially in Gaza, is facilitated by Hamas.”
Israel has long accused al-Qaeda of infiltrating the Palestinian territories. The Israeli army’s intelligence chief said this week that more al-Qaeda members had entered the Gaza Strip after Hamas blew up the wall on the Egyptian border in January.
...
Hamas, a nationalist Islamist organisation whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, has been at pains to distance itself publicly from the fanatical al-Qaeda. “There is no truth in these allegations,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman, in turn accusing Mr Abbas — regarded as an Israeli stooge for his faltering peace negotiations with Jerusalem — of “seeking to mobilise international opinion against Hamas”.
Last year a group calling itself the Army of Islam kidnapped Alan Johnston, a BBC reporter, in Gaza and held him for more than three months while claiming to have links to Osama bin Laden’s organisation. The kidnapping took place before Hamas seized control in June, and the Islamist organisation — which had previously conducted anti-Israeli operations with the Army of Islam — forced it to release Johnston.
...
In January, another group calling itself the Army of Believers, Al-Qaeda in Palestine Organisation, ransacked the private American International School. A Christian bookseller was also recently murdered in Gaza, while a gunman shot up a YMCA centre. Western journalists have been alerted to possible kidnap threats.
Some independent analysts believe that al-Qaeda — losing ground in Iraq as local Sunni insurgents reject its ultra-violent tactics — may be seeking to establish itself in new areas. Osama bin Laden said that he was focusing on the protracted Israel-Palestinian conflict in comments disseminated on a jihadist website in December. “We will not recognise a state for the Jews, not even one inch of the land of Palestine. Blood calls for more blood and demolishing calls for further demolishing,” bin Laden said.
...

Al Qaeda has lost much of its unit cohesion since the fall of the Taliban and the fleeing of it leadership to the tribal areas of Pakistan. It has tried to build alliances with other terrorist organizations to make it look bigger and better organized than it really is.

The Palestinians have myriad terrorist groups they use to try to through off the Israelis and to avoid decapitation strikes. It is very likely that some of these groups might feel it can get greater prestige from claiming and affiliation with al Qaeda.

That they would want to associate themselves with a group that specializes in the mass murder of non combatants tells you something about their adherence to the Geneva Conventions.

Marine body armor too heavy, impratical

Fox News:

The Pentagon and Marine Corps authorized the purchase of 84,000 bulletproof vests in 2006 that not only are too heavy but are so impractical that some U.S. Marines are asking for their old vests back so they can remain agile enough to fight.

Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway wants to know who authorized the costly purchase of the nearly 30-pound flak jackets and has ordered the Marine procurement officers at the Quantico base in Virginia to halt the rest of an unfilled order, FOX News has learned.

"I’m not quite sure how we got to where we are, but what I do know is it is not a winner," Conway told FOX News at the end of his recent trip to Iraq.

"I think it is foolish to buy more."

• Click here to view photos.

Twenty-four thousand more vests were scheduled to be shipped to Iraq in the coming months, but Conway halted that order during his trip.

"I’ve asked them to tell me — to walk me through — the whole process ... how it evolved," Conway said.
...
The protective jackets, manufactured by Protective Products International in Sunrise, Fla., are known as Modular Tactical Vests, or MTVs. With heavy plates, known as sappis, on their sides, they provide more coverage than the older vests. That makes them much safer but also much heavier. The MTVs have more protection than the older "Interceptor," made by Point Blank, and they distribute weight more evenly.

The new vests, weighing in at about 30 pounds each, are three lbs. more than previous regulation body armor. Marines, who are already carrying up to 95 lbs. depending on the mission, say they feel the difference.
...

The vest must be slipped on over the head causing friction on the nose and ears. They also are difficult to get out of even with a "rip cord" that they come with.

The weight sounds like a problem. When troops are carrying that much weight they would prefer it be things they can use to defeat the enemy like ammo.

Tributes to William F. Buckley

The words of praise for the founder of National Review are pouring in at The Corner today. I remember reading magazine for the first time over 40 years ago and thinking it was a guilty pleasure. He influenced many with the magazine and with Firing Line where he challenged liberalism in an entertaining way. The link is the main one to the corner because there were so many tributes it did not make sense to do them individually, so catch while you can.

Is Obama about the future or the past in Iraq?

AP:

Republican presidential hopeful John McCain mocked Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday for saying he would take action as president "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq."

"When you examine that statement, it's pretty remarkable," McCain told a crowd in Tyler, Texas.

"I have some news. Al-Qaida is in Iraq. It's called `al-Qaida in Iraq,'" McCain said, drawing laughter at Obama's expense.

Obama quickly answered back, telling a rally at Ohio State University in Columbus, "I do know that al-Qaida is in Iraq."

"So I have some news for John McCain," he added, saying there was no al-Qaida presence in Iraq until President Bush invaded the country.

Noting that McCain likes to tell audiences that he'd follow Osama bin Laden to the "gates of hell" to catch him, Obama taunted: "All he (McCain) has done is to follow George Bush into a misguided war in Iraq."
...

Notice the snarky non responsiveness of the Obama response. First he continues his willful ignorance of whether al Qaeda in Iraq is really in Iraq, then slides over into if they are there it is because we went to war there. Which is it? And if the campaign is to be about the future what are you going to do about the fact that they are there? Is he really naive enough to believe that they will leave if the US leaves? Obviously al Qaeda decided to fish in the troubled waters of Iraq after Saddam was deposed. Does that mean we should ignore them?

Everytime Obama talks about Iraq he makes clear how little he understands about the situation in Iraq. McCain should keep up the conversation.

Zawahiri upset at loss of al Libi

Reuters:

Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri vowed revenge for the killing of a top group commander in a suspected U.S. attack in Pakistan, in a video posted on the Internet on Wednesday.

"No chief of ours had died of a natural death, nor has our blood been spilled without a response," Zawahri said in the video posted on an Islamist Web site, referring to the killing of Abu Laith al-Libi.

Libi, considered as one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants in Afghanistan, was killed in an suspected U.S. missile strike that killed up to 13 foreign militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan border area in late January.

"If one of our chiefs passes, another arises in his place," Zawahri said, without making a specific threat.

"So seek help O Americans and agents of Americans ... from those seeking a way out ... They will be of no help to you," he said, referring to Muslim clerics who have criticized jihadist militants.
...

O Zawahiri why are you hiding in a cave rather than calling a news conference to make your pronouncements? Could it be you fear being on the receiving end of a Hellfire missile to before you are introduced to the other hellfire? O Zawahiri why cower in your crude video studio when you can walk the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan where you claim you are winning?

It is nice to see that you will be naming the next target for an unnatural death.

Colonialism is not the source of Africa's problems

Walter Williams:

...

African leaders, and many people on the left, blame Africa's problems on the evils of colonialism. They sometimes blame the violence on the borders colonialists created that ignored ethnicity. Many African nations have been independent for four decades. If colonial borders were a major problem, how come they haven't changed them? And, by the way, colonialism cannot explain Third World poverty. Some of today's richest countries are former colonies, such as: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Some of today's poorest countries were never colonies, such as: Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan. The colonialism argument is simply a cover up for African dictators.
The worst thing the West can do to Africa is to give more foreign aid. For the most part, foreign aid is government to government. As such, it provides the financial resources that enable Africa's grossly corrupt and incompetent regimes to buy military equipment, pay off cronies and continue to oppress their people. It also provides resources for the leaders to live lavishly and set up "retirement" accounts in foreign banks.
Africa is the world's most natural-resources rich continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, and millions of acres of untilled farmland, as well as other natural resources. Before independence, every African country was self-sufficient in food production; today, many depend on imports and others stand at the brink of famine.
The only people who can solve the problems of Africa are Africans themselves. It is only they who can change their leaders, end corruption and bring about transparency in government and end the African wars. Only they can stop the continent's massive brain drain. This was brought home to me, a number of years ago, at a dinner I was invited to in honor of a new Nigerian ambassador to the United States. During his speech, he admonished the Nigerian professionals in attendance to come home to help the country develop. The Nigerians seated at my table, and nearby tables, fell into quiet laughter.
Most of what Africa needs, the West cannot give: rule of law, private property rights, fewer economic restrictions, independent judiciary and limited government. The one important thing we can do to help is to lower our trade barriers.

Colonialism is not responsible for the irresponsible and incompetent leadership in African countries. In fact, what leaders like Robert Mugabe prove is that there are many things worse than colonialism. Certainly colonial governments never treated the people of what is now Zimbabwe as badly has Mugabe and his government.

Bush's Millennium Challenge Accounts have induced some African leaders to build worthwhile projects with aid money rather than plunder it. He has also made many Africans healthier with his programs on malaria and Aids. However, many still oppose a part of his Aids initiative because it attacks the root cause of the spread of HIV Aids--promiscuity.

Obama against equal protection

Terrence Jeffrey:

When the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court came up in the Senate in 2005, Sen. Barack Obama argued that the role of a justice is to favor the "weak" over the "strong."
When the nomination of Sam Alito came up in January 2006, he made the same argument.
Obama does not want a Supreme Court that preserves the rule of law, he wants a Supreme Court that wages class war under color of law.
During the Roberts nomination debate, he argued that most Supreme Court cases involve no real controversy, "so that both a Scalia and a Ginsburg will arrive at the same place most of the time on those 95 percent of cases."
In the other 5 percent, he argued, the determining factor is not what the law in question says, or what the Constitution says, but the emotional disposition that the justices deciding the case have toward the parties disputing it. "In those difficult cases," Obama said, "the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart." Roberts and Alito were bad judges, he decided, because their hearts weren't in the right place.
"The problem I had is that when I examined Judge Roberts' record and history of public service, it is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak," Obama said in a floor speech on Sept. 22, 2005.
"When I examine the philosophy, ideology and record of Samuel Alito, I am deeply troubled," Obama said in another floor speech on Jan. 26, 2006. "There is no indication that he is not a man of fine character. But when you look at his record, when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I found that in almost every case he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful against the powerless."
Implicitly conceding that Roberts would be confirmed, Obama said, "I hope he will recognize who the weak are and who the strong are in our society."
...
In contrast to his soaring campaign rhetoric about bringing America together, Obama's Senate speeches against Roberts and Alito revealed a polarizing vision of America. Minorities, women, employees and criminal defendants were among the weak, majorities, men, employers and prosecutors were among the strong.
...
"Judges are like umpires. Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them," said Roberts. "I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat."
If Obama becomes president, he will try to stack the court not with umpires, but with players who put their heart in every game -- consistently pitching and batting for Obama's favorite teams.

The strong are also entitled to a fair trial and a fair appeal. If Obama does not understand that then he is not in favor of justice and equal protection under the law.

Democrats and anti competitive practices

Ruben Navarrette:

Recently, I spoke to a group of Hispanic high school students with plans to apply to Ivy League universities. The first thing I wanted them to know was that they wouldn't be the only ones applying. It's fine to have big dreams, I told them. But here's the catch: For everything you want in life, there are going to be others who want the same things. So you have to compete. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Competition is part of life. It makes you better, stronger, and -- ultimately -- more powerful.

That is what Democratic voters around the country should be hearing from their party's presidential candidates. But that's not likely to happen -- not when the Democratic Party has become the anti-competition party.
It's true in education where Democrats, with their slavish devotion to teachers unions, oppose vouchers even for constituencies they pretend to champion such as minorities and the disadvantaged. Vouchers would force public schools into competition.

It's true with immigration, where many Democrats advance the phony argument that illegal immigrants displace U.S. workers by lowering wages. For low-skilled workers who refuse to get more skills or learn a new trade, illegal immigrants amount to competition.

And it's certainly true in the area of trade, where Democrats do the bidding of organized labor by fighting trade agreements and advocating protectionism. Trade, by its very nature, encourages competition by opening up markets across borders and seas.

That sort of thing can be scary in economically depressed states, where blue-collar and low-skilled workers are looking for someone or something to blame for their woes. In states such as Ohio, leaders of organized labor have been working overtime to convince the rank and file that the North American Free Trade Agreement is singularly responsible for the economic uncertainty that a lot of people are feeling right now.

So, with the Ohio primary approaching on March 4, do you suppose Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are delivering the message that competition isn't something to fear?

Nope. Not even close. Instead, the candidates are competing to see who is the bigger protectionist and trying to demagogue the trade issue just as Republicans have done with border security. Apparently, in Ohio -- as in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other rust belt states -- the worst thing one Democrat can say about another is that he or she is in favor of (gasp!) free trade.
...

Too many Democrats want the Super bowl ring without having to play the game and compete for it. Are there any candidates in the Democrat party willing to tell these people what they need to do to succeed, rather than pander to them and their fears?

US civilian heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan

Natalie Sudman, a project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, had been in southern Iraq for 15 months when a roadside bomb exploded as her convoy returned from an inspection of water treatment plants and a new road.

She survived the October attack but was seriously injured. The explosion broke bones in her face, and she will undergo a year of treatment by eye doctors, who have assured her that her sight will return as the damaged retina in her left eye heals.

"I went over there because I felt like I wanted to be part of something that was helping people," Sudman said yesterday. "And on an individual level, a one-to-one level, with the Iraqis I worked with, I really did feel that is what we were doing."

Sudman was one of 15 Defense Department civilians honored yesterday with the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Global War on Terrorism, the first time the medal has been presented. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England presented the medals to the Defense civilians at a Pentagon ceremony.

More than 16,000 Defense civilians have served overseas in the fight against terrorism since 2001. They included intelligence analysts, business and economic experts, logistical specialists, auditors and others eager to support the military and the Iraqi government.

Of the 16,000, 118 have been injured and seven "have given their lives," David S.C. Chu, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, told the invited guests.
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The deserve the recognition. What they do requires a great deal of courage and it is helping us defeat the enemy.

The strawman argument on guns

John Stossel:

It's all too predictable. A day after a gunman killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to rethink its ban on guns in national parks.

The editorial board wants "the 51 senators who like the thought of guns in the parks -- and everywhere else, it seems -- to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth."

As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between "carefully controlling guns" and "arming everyone to the teeth." But no one favors "arming everyone to the teeth" (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.
As for the first option, "carefully controlling guns," how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.

While they search for -- excuse me -- their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless.

That's because laws that make it difficult or impossible to carry a concealed handgun do deter one group of people: law-abiding citizens who might have used a gun to stop crime. Gun laws are laws against self-defense.

Criminals have the initiative. They choose the time, place and manner of their crimes, and they tend to make choices that maximize their own, not their victims', success. So criminals don't attack people they know are armed, and anyone thinking of committing mass murder is likely to be attracted to a gun-free zone, such as schools and malls.
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Gun laws place the public on the strategic defensive where criminals are dealt with after the fact, as opposed to preventing the crime or stopping it in progress. This is not to say that everyone can have any weapon they want. An M-79 grenade launcher is no bigger than a sawed off shot gun, but you can't have either one legally. You can own a semi automatic pistol or rifle and in some states you can carry the pistol if you pass a concealed carry course. How many crimes are committed by people with concealed carry permits? Hardly any. If they were committing crimes, believe me you would have heard about it.

Beating Obama

Tony Blankley:

Quoted material removed. You may read the original at the link above.

Actually they do not need to attack all hundred at once. Pick the tree most egregious each week and hammer him on them. They should be the ones that are obviously liberal, wrong, and unfair. Start with how much higher peoples taxes will be. One fo my favorites is to pin him down on what percentage of taxes the top 10 percent of earners should pay. Even those well below the top ten will think that the top ten are already paying more than their fair share. How much would be too much?

Chasing the rich from the UK

Irwin Stelzer:

BRITAIN'S Labor govern ment has given New York City a gift - if only we know how to use it.
The lefties who've taken over since Tony Blair left have decided to change Britain's tax rules - which have lured some of the world's hardest-working, highest-income foreigners to London, including tens of thousands of New Yorkers.
No need to know the details. All Mayor Bloomberg and New York's business community have to know is that foreigners working in London - investment bankers, hedge-fund operators, insurance brokers and semi-retired types who spend their days managing their own money - are now all up for grabs. Even the UK government admits thousands will leave.
Lawyers and promoters of the virtues of other cities are descending on London to urge these people to flee to Ireland, Switzerland, the South of France or Dubai. But so far as I can tell, there's no sign of anyone from New York in town extolling the virtues of Gotham.
Remember: London has been bragging that it has overtaken New York as the world's leading financial center, with more IPOs, more currency trading, more bond trading - and a great time zone from which to do business around the world.
Meanwhile, New York has suffered from the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley is seen (wrongly, in my view, but perception counts) as a costly administrative nightmare that can be escaped by listing in London instead of on a US exchange. Britain's light-touch "principles-based" regulatory system was being touted as much more sensible than our "rules-based" system.
Then a funny thing happened. The world was treated to pictures of long lines of panicked depositors trying to get their money out of a bust British bank, Northern Rock. It seems that the UK regulatory system isn't such a paragon after all. Indeed, the government finally had to nationalize the bank in a desperate effort to get back the billions of taxpayer funds it has poured in to protect depositors and prevent a loss of confidence in the entire banking system.
So the stage is set for New York to go game, set and match on its leading competitor. It doesn't have to try to duplicate the old tax regime that Britain is repealing. All the city - with an assist from the state - has to do is roll out the welcome mat.
First, the governor and mayor should invite the mobile professionals now in London to watch their lips - no new taxes. They might mention that (unlike Britain) America will allow them to deduct interest on their mortgages and take a meaningful deduction for charitable giving.
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He goes on to cite several advantages that New York has over London including a lower crime rate and relatively lower rents and housing. Houston, Texas has even greater advantages on those scores plus it has no state income tax. With modern communications there is no reason why cities like Houston should not compete for these highly successful people. There big concern is that Obama will want to significantly raise their taxes and chase them to the Bahamas.

Virginia Imam tied to al Qaeda

Even before the 2001 terrorist attacks, American-born imam Anwar al-Aulaqi drew the attention of federal authorities because of his possible connections to al-Qaeda. Their interest grew after 9/11, when it turned out that three of the hijackers had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church, but he was allowed to leave the country in 2002.

New information later surfaced about his contacts with extremists while in the United States. Now, U.S. officials are saying for the first time that they believe that Aulaqi worked with al-Qaeda networks in the Persian Gulf after leaving Northern Virginia. In mid-2006, Aulaqi was detained in Yemen at the request of the United States. To the dismay of U.S. authorities, Aulaqi was released in December.

"There is good reason to believe Anwar Aulaqi has been involved in very serious terrorist activities since leaving the United States, including plotting attacks against America and our allies," said a U.S. counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

U.S. authorities were limited in how far they could push Yemen to hold Aulaqi, officials said, because they have no pending legal case against him. The officials said ongoing intelligence-gathering efforts here and abroad prevented them from providing details about Aulaqi's suspected activities.

Aulaqi, 36, was the spiritual leader in 2001 and 2002 of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, one of the largest in the country. In a taped interview posted this New Year's Eve on a British Web site, Aulaqi said that while in prison in Yemen, he had undergone multiple interrogations by the FBI that included questions about his dealings with the Sept. 11 hijackers.
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In several terrorism cases in Britain and Canada over the past 18 months, investigators found in the private computer files of some suspects transcripts and audio files of lectures by Aulaqi promoting the strategies of a key al-Qaeda military commander, the late Yusef al-Ayeri, a Saudi known as "Swift Sword."

Federal prosecutors in New York alleged in a 2004 terrorism-related trial that a U.S. branch of a Yemeni charity for which Aulaqi served as vice president was a front that sent money to al-Qaeda. Documents filed around the same time in federal court in Alexandria assert that a year after 9/11, Aulaqi returned briefly to Northern Virginia, where he visited a radical Islamic cleric and asked him about recruiting young Muslims for "violent jihad." That cleric, Ali al-Timimi, is now serving a life sentence for inciting followers to fight with the Taliban against Americans.
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Before his arrest, Aulaqi lectured at an Islamist university in Sanaa run by Sheik Abd-al-Majid al-Zindani, who fought with Osama bin Laden in the Soviet-Afghan war and was designated a terrorist in 2004 by the United States and the United Nations.

U.S. and U.N. authorities accuse Zindani of recruiting for al-Qaeda camps and raising money for weapons for terrorist groups. Students at his university, the United States said, are suspected in terrorist attacks and assassinations; among its attendees before he joined the Taliban was American John Walker Lindh.
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"America is in a state of war with Allah," he said, referring to the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. He praised the insurgency in Iraq and "martyrdom operations" in the Palestinian territories. Muslims must choose sides between President Bush and the "mujaheddin," he said. The solution for the Muslim world, he said, "is jihad."
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There is a certain arrogance about a man who claims that those who resist his preachings are at war with God. It gives away the Islamic supremacist views he espouses and also his pretensions to be a messenger of God. He is definitely an enemy of the US and should be treated as such. He is a guy who belongs in Gitmo if he survives in the battle space.

There is much more about his connections to other terrorist including Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik, responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing. Rahman was in jail with Zawahiri after the murder of Sadot, but they were part of different terrorist organizations. Ramzi Yousef, who was the main bomber is related to Khalid Sheik Mohammad, but the first bombing was not an al Qaeda operation. They did share similar motives in attacking the buildings.

No piling on our guy whether we like him or not

Steve Chapman:

A couple of weeks ago, John McCain strained to ingratiate himself with the activists gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was an uphill climb: By that point, some movement icons had publicly renounced the presumptive Republican nominee, and attendees were urged not to boo him. Some did anyway, and Mr. McCain was left to ponder the possibility of being abandoned by much of his party's base.
He shouldn't have worried. All it took to rally conservatives behind him was the intervention of the New York Times. Thursday, it published a flimsy, anonymously sourced story suggesting he may have canoodled nine years ago with a cute female lobbyist whose clients had business before his committee. How bad was the article? Years from now, if you type into Google, "Why do people hate the news media?" this story will pop up.
Those who were angered by Mr. McCain's gentle treatment by liberal journalists were angered to see him handled roughly by the same scribes. They quit attacking him and began blasting the New York Times, which had given them plenty of ammunition. Note to the Times: When Sean Hannity sounds like the voice of responsible journalism, you've done something wrong.
With that, the great Republican civil war pretty ended. Conservatives will never embrace Mr. McCain for his views on immigration, campaign finance or global warming. But they may come to echo what was said when Grover Cleveland was nominated for president in 1884: "We love him most for the enemies he has made."
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I am reminded of a Newsweek story from the 1060s talking about how sports had eased the transition from segregation. It was written before the "N" word was banished from such publications. The story described a football game where a man yelled from the stands, "Hey ref. Tell those 'N words' to stop piling on our colored boys."

Beer can house has ultimate aluminum siding

Call John Milkovisch a man ahead of his time.

No one talked about recycling or reducing their carbon footprint back when Milkovisch started covering his house with beer cans in the 1960s. And folk art was something you might find in Appalachia or Latin America, not a working-class neighborhood near Memorial Park.

Today, Milkovisch's creation is celebrated as one of those quirky, only-in-Houston experiences unknown to many natives but a draw for tourists from all over the world. Its $202,000 renovation will be unveiled Friday at a party billed as the Beer Can Opener, and it reopens to the public next month.

But what, exactly, is the Beer Can House?

"It's so many different things to so many people,'' said Stephen Bridges, who works for the Orange Show Foundation for Visionary Art, which owns the Beer Can House and has overseen its renovation. "To some people, they instantly recognize it as a piece of folk art. To others, it's just a house covered in beer cans.''

And that's OK.

The Beer Can House is, after all, an homage to individual vision, although Milkovisch, who died in 1988, might have preferred to call it an homage to Texas Pride and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Or a way to avoid painting the house.

Decide for yourself. People will be able to see it up close when the house reopens March 8, one of the few remaining bungalows in a neighborhood now filled with expensive, three-story townhouses. Docents will be on hand between noon and 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, showcasing what more than 40,000 beer cans and other whimsical additions can do for a house. (The house will be open by appointment, as well, and available for rental to groups of 25 or fewer.)

There are garlands made of pull tabs, the tops and bottoms of beer cans and cutouts from the sides of cans, all hanging from the eaves. That shaded the house from the harsh Houston sun, reducing Milkovisch's electric bills. The small yard is covered in concrete slabs, dotted with glass marbles. Just a way to get out of mowing the lawn, he insisted.

The mailbox and fences are covered with cans, and wooden sculptures are studded with metal letters — AMEN, reads the top of a wooden ladder — and elaborate cutouts.

"John Milkovisch never thought of himself as an artist," said Julie Birsinger, project manager for the Beer Can House. He was, instead, an upholsterer and a beer drinker.

But Birsinger describes his work as "very intricate. Very well thought out. Very well executed."
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This is sort of an "only in Houston" house, because of the city's lack of zoning. Even in Houston's other neighborhoods deed restrictions would have prevented the art work. In my old neighborhood in Clear Lake you could not even change the trim color of your house without the neighborhood committees approval. The interior of the house was off limits to Milkovisch's art work. His wife made him drink and decorate outside. Today you would have to wonder whether he would be celebrated for his recycling efforts.

Dems show ignorance of mortgage business with proposed changes

Congressional leaders yesterday gathered support for aggressive changes to bankruptcy laws that would help troubled homeowners, even as the Bush administration threatened to veto the plan and emphasized its opposition to any program that would risk tax dollars.

Democrats are calling for the government to do more than what the administration has done to date. They propose a range of initiatives that include the purchase of troubled mortgage securities by a federal agency and the empowering of bankruptcy judges to change the terms of high-interest loans held by homeowners facing foreclosure.

But the administration said that changing mortgage terms retroactively for a select group of troubled borrowers would only add to lenders' woes and lead to higher mortgage rates for everyone.

The clash highlighted the sharp differences between Democrats and the Bush administration over how to solve the nation's worst mortgage crisis since the Great Depression.

"Homeowners at risk of foreclosure are floating 50 feet from shore, and the Bush administration has thrown them a 30-foot rope," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the author of a proposal that would allow bankruptcy judges to change the interest rates on subprime, adjustable and other nontraditional loans for homeowners facing foreclosure.

The White House and Treasury Department officials took pains yesterday to communicate a broader message, aimed at Capitol Hill and Wall Street: The administration would oppose the use of tax dollars to rescue banks, investors and homebuyers who made foolish financial decisions. Instead, it is counting on a plan that calls for the banking industry to voluntarily work out new loans with homeowners.
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There is an unreality about this debate on the part of the Democrats. You should start with the premise that lenders do not want to own houses, particularly if their current market price is below what they are owed. The would much rather work with the borrower to keep him in the house and keep the house off its real estate owned inventory. The problem is not with the lenders, but with the incentives the government has already given to borrowers to walk away from the house and the loan.

There is a question I have on the "foreclosure crisis." Where are all these walk aways living now? There do not appear to be an refugee camps or tent cities springing up. So where are they living. did they move in with relatives or are they renting for less than their old mortgage payment? None of the stories appear to address these questions, but the answer may provide some answers to what it would take to work out their loan problems.

One more question is worth asking too. How many were illegal aliens who have self deported? If so how did they get a loan?

Holman Jenkins looks at what makes walking away a rational choice for some.

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For starters, many homebuyers in the last two years were rank speculators, taking out zero-down subprime loans, then walking away when the bet didn't pay off. A careful study of recent Massachusetts foreclosures by Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economists suggests that the key factor wasn't an inability to pay, but an unwillingness to pay, once falling house prices made homeownership no longer a winning speculation. These people are already skipping out, because that's their best option.

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Then on top of that is the predatory borrowers who worked scams to defraud lenders too. There is little chance than a workout of any type would work for them.

Black voters treating Hillary like a Republican

Wall Street Journal Editorial:

Hispanic voters may be a swing factor in next week's Democratic presidential primary, but an energized black electorate could decide this cliffhanger race.

In state after state, exit polls show the Sen. Barack Obama wave has wiped out Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from getting even close to the black electorate: 87 percent of the black vote in Georgia, for example.

Here in Houston, the city with the nation's fifth-largest black population, there likely will be no exception. In fact, the only question political analysts now are asking is how big of a boost he will get from this potent voter bloc on March 4.

"People should pay attention to the black vote because that's where all the action is," said Rice University political scientist Bob Stein. "But everyone is fixated on the Hispanic vote because that is where Hillary Clinton may be able to hold the line — but the black vote means a whole lot more."

Although blacks accounted for 19 percent of the state's registered voters in the 2006 general election, compared with 25 percent for Hispanics, Stein said, Hispanics haven't been able to capitalize on that advantage in the Democratic primary. Stein predicts blacks will represent 30 percent of the vote Tuesday, while Hispanics may account for 25 percent.
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Black voters exercise a disproportionate influence on the Democratic primaries in Texas. Party rules benefit districts that had high turnout in the last presidential and gubernatorial races. The senatorial districts of Rodney Ellis, of Houston, and Royce West, of Dallas — mainly black bases — had high turnout in those two elections.

In the two districts alone, Obama could gain 13 delegates. In two South Texas senate districts that had low voter turnout, seven delegates are at stake.

And it all wasn't supposed to happen this way. Last year, many blacks were not even hot on Obama, initially viewing Clinton — namely her husband — as a hands-down favorite. Some even questioned whether the freshman senator was "black" enough.

After the Iowa caucus showed that the Illinois senator had mainstream appeal, people started changing their minds, a validation that he can get elected, said Christine LeVeaux-Haley, a professor of American government and black politics at the University of Houston.

"They now got it," she said. "They woke up from their slumber and realized that now is the time they can have an impact."

But blacks say they are not supporting Obama because of his race, which has not been raised as an issue in his campaign.

"I think Clinton's platform is too narrow, and I think that Obama has a more broad platform that speaks to everyone," said Cherrelle Stokes, 23, a business major at Texas Southern University. "He's going for bigger changes than just relying on the (female) and the Latino vote."
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Yeah, right. And they vote for Democrats for the same reason in the same numbers against Republicans. They may not want to admit the tribal influence of voting for their own race, but it is there. The black vote has been as dependable for black candidates as the Hispanic vote has for Hispanic candidates when both are running against whites. Obama is winning because he is splitting the white male vote. They are apparently the only group that is not following a tribal voting pattern among Democrats.

Obama's ignorance of business

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Mr. Obama's proposal would designate certain companies as "patriot employers" and favor them over other, presumably not so patriotic, businesses.

The legislation takes four pages to define "patriotic" companies as those that: "pay at least 60 percent of each employee's health care premiums"; have a position of "neutrality in employee [union] organizing drives"; "maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time workers outside of the United States"; pay a salary to each employee "not less than an amount equal to the federal poverty level"; and provide a pension plan.

In other words, a patriotic employer is one which fulfills the fondest Big Labor agenda, regardless of the competitive implications. The proposal ignores the marketplace reality that businesses hire a work force they can afford to pay and still make money. Coercing companies into raising wages and benefits above market rates may only lead to fewer workers getting hired in the first place.

Under Mr. Obama's plan, "patriot employers" qualify for a 1% tax credit on their profits. To finance this tax break, American companies with subsidiaries abroad would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on profits earned abroad, rather than the corporate tax of the host country where they are earned. Since the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while most of the world has a lower rate, this amounts to a big tax increase on earnings owned abroad.

Put another way, U.S. companies would suddenly have to pay a higher tax rate than their Chinese, Japanese and European competitors. According to research by Peter Merrill, an international tax expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, this change would "raise the cost of capital of U.S. multinationals and cause them to lose market share to foreign rivals." Apparently Mr. Obama believes that by making U.S. companies less profitable and less competitive world-wide, they will somehow be able to create more jobs in America.
He has it backwards: The offshore activities of U.S. companies tend to increase rather than reduce domestic business. A 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study by economists from Harvard and the University of Michigan found that more foreign investment by U.S. companies leads to greater domestic investment, and that U.S. firms' hiring of more offshore workers is positively, not negatively, associated with the number of American workers they hire. That's in part because often what is produced overseas by subsidiaries are component parts to final, higher-value-added products manufactured here.
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Selling out to the same unions who have destroyed the domestic auto business with contracts that make them uncompetitive is no way to grow the economy. It is certainly not the kind of change we need. The guy who says he is opposed to the influence of lobbiest appears to be letting the union lobbies write legislation for him. Making American companies unprofitable is no way to improve wages.

Ultimately businesses do not pay taxes, they merely collect them from their customers. By forcing them to collect more from their customers to be profitable, they will have fewer customers, because foreign competitors will be given an advantage by the Obama plan.

Russert uses Saturday Night Live script for Dem debate

Adam Nagourney:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the final debate before Tuesday’s critical primaries with two imperative goals: Challenge Senator Barack Obama’s qualifications to lead the country and raise doubts about his ability to defeat a Republican opponent as experienced as Senator John McCain.

For most of 90 minutes, Mrs. Clinton grabbed at every opportunity to accomplish those goals. She questioned Mr. Obama’s foreign policy credentials. She attacked campaign mailings he had sent out about her as “misleading.” She criticized him as failing to reject explicitly the endorsement of his candidacy by Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader.
Yet by the end of the night, there was little evidence that Mrs. Clinton had produced the kind of ground-moving moment she needed that might shift the course of a campaign that polls suggest has been moving inexorably in Mr. Obama’s direction for weeks.
Instead, in contrast to other debates — where she mixed a warm smile with a sharp attack — she was stern and tense through most of the evening, speaking in an almost fatigued monotone as she recounted her criticisms of Mr. Obama, some of them new but many of them familiar. She often sat staring unsmiling at Mr. Obama and at Tim Russert of NBC News, who, yet again, presented himself as a tougher challenge to Mrs. Clinton’s credentials than Mr. Obama himself.
Her most memorable moment — the one that seemed destined to be replayed in the days ahead — was not, say, a sharp rejoinder to Mr. Obama that might undermine his credentials and tilt undecided voters toward her. Rather, it was when she invoked a “Saturday Night Live” skit from last Saturday that showed television journalists fawning over Mr. Obama, another example of her campaign’s increasing frustration over what it considers unbalanced coverage of the Democratic race.
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Indeed another writer for the Times, Alessandra Stanley, thought the comparison was apt.

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And for the rest of the evening, the MSNBC debate did look a bit like the “S.N.L.” parody.
Mr. Obama twice mispronounced Massachusetts (“Massatoosetts”), the state where he went to law school. Later, Tim Russert, a moderator, challenged Mrs. Clinton to name — and pronounce — President Vladimir V. Putin’s chosen successor in Russia.
“Who will it be?” he asked. “Do you know his name?” She managed, gamely, referring to Dmitri A. Medvedev as “um, Med-medvedova, whatever.”
Mrs. Clinton was under attack, but the toughest blows came not from Mr. Obama but from Mr. Russert, who fiercely questioned her about her past positions on Nafta, Iraq and even a campaign promise from 2000, in her first Senate run. But she was combative right back, and kept arguing, with ardor and sometimes anger, at times interrupting and overriding Mr. Obama’s words and even the moderators’. (At one point, Mr. Obama flashed the NBC newsmen a conspiratorial look, and complained that he was being “filibustered.”)
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Nagourney seem to prove his own bias by suggesting that Obama was the candidate with "relatively little to prove." Little to prove? This guy is a cipher who talks in platitudes to hide his liberalism. Just because Nagourney and the Times are comfortable with that does not mean the rest of the country should be.

In the fall McCain should start every debate by asking Obama if he is comfortable, just to get that part out of the way early, then proceed to make him as uncomfortable as possible about his liberalism.

Sorry terrorist who are not sorry

Jonah Goldberg:

'EVERYTHING was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon."
That excerpt from William Ayers' memoir appeared in The New York Times on 9/11 - the day al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground - the group that declared "war" on the US government in 1970 - told the Times, "I don't regret setting bombs," and, "I feel we didn't do enough." He recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com reported Friday that Barack Obama has loose ties to him.
Now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ayers is apparently a left-wing institution in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. Obama visited his home as a rite of passage when launching his political career in the mid-'90s.
The two also served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave money to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers' wife (and ex-Weather Underground compatriot who glorified violence) Bernardine Dohrn is the director.
I don't think Obama supports domestic terrorism, and I'm sure he can offer eloquent explanations for why he shouldn't suffer any guilt by association. But Hillary Clinton's campaign did try to score a few political points, meekly linking to the Politico story on the campaign Web site's blog.
The Clintonites probably couldn't be more aggressive without calling attention to how Bill Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican separatist terrorists - seen as a bid to gain support for Hillary's Senate bid from left-wing Puerto Ricans in New York.
What fascinates me is how light the baggage is when one travels from violent radicalism to liberalism. Chicago activist Sam Ackerman told Politico's reporter that Ayers "is one of my heroes in life." Cass Sunstein, a first-rank liberal intellectual, said of Ayers and Dohrn, "I feel very uncomfortable with their past, but neither of them is thought of as horrible types now - so far as most of us know, they are legitimate members of the community."
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Indeed, why is love of Che still radically chic at all? A murderer who believed that "the US is the great enemy of mankind" shouldn't be anyone's hero, never mind a logo for a line of baby clothes. Why are Fidel Castro's apologists progressive and enlightened, but apologists for Augusto Pinochet frightening and authoritarian? Why was Sen. Trent Lott's kindness to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond a scandal but Obama's acquaintance with an unrepentant terrorist a triviality?
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It is wrong that colleges and universities would hire people like this and refuse to hire people like the brilliant historian Mark Moyar author of Triumph Forsaken, which challenges the liberal assumptions about the Vietnam war. People guilty of felonies against the US have no business being the go to guy for political office in this country. That they are, tells you something about the corrupt soul of the Democrat party in Illinois. It is time the media starts asking questions about this association instead of more questions about health care and other liberal issues.

The Belmont Club comments on the article and says it is a matter of solidarity among liberals in academia.

ICE gets serious about deporting felons

Immigration officials are increasingly scouring jails and courts nationwide and reviewing years-old criminal records to identify deportable immigrants, efforts that have contributed to a steep rise in deportations and strained the immigration court system.

Long accused of failing to do enough to deport illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, federal authorities have recently strengthened partnerships with local corrections systems and taken other steps to monitor immigrants facing charges, officials said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, it placed 164,000 criminals in deportation proceedings, a sharp increase from the 64,000 the agency said it identified and placed in proceedings the year before. The agency estimates that the number will rise to 200,000 this year.

The heightened scrutiny, fueled by post-9/11 national security concerns and the growing debate over illegal immigration, has introduced a major element to the practice of criminal law in the Washington region and other parts of the country with large immigrant populations.

"It used to be two parties in the courtroom: the state and the defense," said Mariana C. Cordier, a Rockville defense lawyer. "Now you know immigration is waiting in the wings."

Two groups of people are now more likely to be placed in deportation proceedings: illegal immigrants who might once have been criminally prosecuted without coming to the attention of immigration authorities, and legal immigrants whose visas and residency permits are being revoked because of criminal convictions.

The number of deported immigrants with criminal convictions has increased steadily this decade, from about 73,000 in 2001 to more than 91,000 in 2007, according to ICE.

Julie L. Myers, the assistant secretary of homeland security who heads ICE, said in a recent interview that she has strived to use technology and improved relationships among local and federal law enforcement officials to multiply her agency's eyes and ears in all levels of the criminal justice system.
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... the agency has studied the demographics of correctional facilities across the country and has assigned more agents to check facilities with higher numbers of foreign-born offenders. ICE's Criminal Alien Program created partnerships between immigration officials and jailers at nearly 4,500 detention facilities. Federal agents now frequently visit courthouses and jails to comb through court files. In 2006, the agency opened a division in Chicago that is responsible for screening federal inmates nationwide for deportation.
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Probation and police officers are also tipping off federal authorities to cases involving suspected illegal immigrants, defense lawyers say.
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They appear to be getting organized better at all levels. Criminal aliens who are in the federal detention system were already targeted for deportation as well as those in large state facilities. In Texas for example, ICE has agents working at the Texas Department of corrections in Huntsville, as well as places like the federal facility in Big Spring. Coordinating the removal requires manpower and work with the airlines, some of which have their own rules on whether prisoners can be hand cuffed etc. San Antonio is also a hub of deportation for ICE in the Texas region.

Most of the prisoners who have served their time are cooperative and ready to go home. The big exception is the Nigerians, who usually get put in jail when they return. Perhaps that is where they work on perfecting their email scams.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Vets who want to stay on offense run for Congress

IHT:

Scott Radcliffe believes two tours of duty in Iraq gave him the stuff to serve in Congress. As a platoon commander, he helped spearhead economic development, built citizen coalitions and made many tough decisions, often amid enemy fire.
"I would be putting all I learned in that pressure-filled environment into practice. So it really cuts through metal," said Radcliffe, 28, who seeks to unseat a newly elected Republican in northwest Ohio.

He's among the dozen or so Republicans from across the country helping each other campaign under the banner of Iraq Veterans for Congress, cross-promoting each other and directing donors to a shared Web site. It's a response to the anti-war veterans whose campaigns drew attention in 2006, among them Patrick Murphy of Philadelphia, the lone Iraq war vet serving in Congress.

The platform of Iraq Vets for Congress grew out of the attitudes of the previous election: They believe in victory in Iraq, staying on the offense in the war on terror and taking care of all veterans, said founder Kieran Lalor, who's running for a seat in New York.

Lalor's pro-war band of brothers includes California's Eric Egland, a military intelligence officer who gained national attention for his book "The Troops Need You, America" and a charity of the same name. Other members of the group hail from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Indiana and Maine.
...

Democrats who want to lose the war are finding vets who feel likewise to also run. I will be rooting for the ones who want to win.

You can make a contribution to the winners here. Lalor gives the mission statement at the groups home page. In 2006 Republicans had only one vet running for Congress while the Democrats loaded up on anti war vets.

Crusher robot takes the O course

A robot that is given GPS coordinates to move from point A to point B appears to be a "smashing success." Some video of its performance complete with rock music is here. Fox News reports:

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (which brought you a little thing called the Internet), has nearly finished work on the Crusher, a six-wheeled robot that rolls through ditches, walls, streams, other vehicles and almost anything else that gets in its way.

"This vehicle can go into places where, if you were following in a Humvee, you'd come out with spinal injuries," Stephen Welby, director of DARPA's Tactical Technology Office, told the military-oriented Stars and Stripes newspaper. "Usually vehicles are set up to protect humans. Here, we didn't have to worry about that."
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It is pretty cool. I expect some interesting applications for it.

Haditha trial postponed for week

NCT:

The court-martial of Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich has been delayed at least a week so recent statements by witnesses and survivors of a group of Iraqi civilians slain in Haditha two years ago can be translated from Arabic to English.

The long-anticipated trial testing the proper application of the military's rules of engagement also is running into other witness issues and a renewed attempt by prosecutors to get the outtakes of a "60 Minutes" interview with Wuterich.
On Monday, one of Wuterich's two civilian attorneys, Mark Zaid, wrote in an e-mail that the Camp Pendleton Marine was in Iraq with other members of his defense team last week when the Iraqi witness statements were recorded.

Prosecutors also were in Haditha recently talking with witnesses and survivors of the killings that took place on Nov. 19, 2005.

Wuterich's court-martial was to begin on March 3 and is now tentatively slated to start on March 10, said Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a Marine Corps spokesman. Wuterich is charged with nine counts of voluntary manslaughter and related offenses arising out of the Haditha killings.

Prosecutors have said the Iraqi witnesses won't come to the U.S. for Wuterich's trial or the upcoming court-martial for one of Wuterich's squad mates, Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum. Tatum's trial on two counts of involuntary manslaughter for the deaths of two children at Haditha is scheduled to start in late April.

But the Iraqis agreed to talk with attorneys if they traveled to Iraq, prosecutors have said during pretrial court hearings.

Defense attorneys have complained that the Iraqis' refusal to appear in court harms their ability to confront them and challenge what they say. If their testimony is limited to recorded videotape, the Iraqis cannot be cross-examined and cannot be questioned by the jurors, a practice allowed in military courts.

Other witness issues are emerging as the trial nears. One surrounds whether Tatum will comply with an order that he testify against Wuterich under a grant of immunity, meaning anything he says on the stand cannot be used against him at his own trial.

Last week, a prosecutor, Capt Nicholas Gannon, said he had not been able to confirm if Tatum will abide by the order. Attempts to resolve the issue with his attorneys have not been successful, Gannon said.

Tatum's attorney Jack Zimmerman declined to comment when asked about the issue. But Zaid said the Wuterich trial team has been told that Tatum will not testify at their client's trial.

Another potentially key witness is Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz, who had murder charges against him dropped last April in exchange for his testimony.

Zaid said that Dela Cruz is resisting defense attorneys' attempts to question him in advance of Wuterich's trial.

...

The testimony from these witnesses present some interesting legal issues. Defendants are permitted to confront witnesses against them. Will a confrontation during a deposition be adequate to meet the constitutional test. I suspect defense attorneys will argue that it does not. Dela Cruz refusal to talk with defense attorneys is another interesting question. Sort of an order from the judge he is not required to talk with the attorneys. On the other hand Tatum has been ordered to testify for the prosecution but will apparently raise fifth amendment grounds despite the limited immunity contained in the order.

We now have another week to argue these issues while they translate the new transcripts from Haditha.

Iranians rebel against fashion police

Pajamas Media:

The Iranian regime does its best to keep a tight rein on news outlets, but new media – cell phone video, YouTube, and the countless number of blogs and news forums in Farsi means that when large-scale protests against the regime occur in public they are impossible to completely conceal.

This is apparently what happened over the weekend. Sources have told PJM of a major public uprising over the weekend in Tehran – an account corroborated by other reports on the Web.

This is the story they tell: at approximately 7 pm on Saturday, February 23, the Ershad patrol, modesty police assigned to enforce clothing regulations, accosted and attempted to arrest a young woman at Goldis Shopping Mall, located in western Tehran, presumably because her dress was not sufficiently modest.

In recent weeks, the police squads charged with enforcing modesty have become more rigorous in their enforcement, with thousands of women detained, questioned, and arrested for violating hijab standards.

Instead of meekly submitting to her fate, the woman fought back. A young man - it is unclear whether he was accompanying her - came to her defense and joined her in fighting the police. In an attempt to subdue – and humiliate him - the police grabbed the young man and threw him into the garbage can nearby.

That was when the large crowd, predominately made up of young people, rose up against the police and attempted to liberate the young woman themselves.
Faced with a full-blown riot - complete with angry crowds with garbage cans being set on fire - the frightened police jumped into the van and fled the scene, except for one unfortunate officer who was left behind. The policeman was reportedly attacked and beaten by the mob.

The police returned, reinforced by a full-fledged anti-riot unit. To gain control of the situation, members of the unit fired warning shots into the air and threatened to fire directly into the crowd. There were reports of between 10-15 arrests.

The incident documented by cell phone video that was uploaded to YouTube. While the quality of the video is extremely poor, the Farsi narration and background voices were intelligible and translatable.
Among the calls coming from the angry crowd after the police were first driven away:

“You have put us on since 1979 until now” (the Islamic Revolution of 1979) The crowd cheered after repeating the slogan multiple times.

Another slogan chanted repeatedly - accompanied by boos: “We do not want the Islamic regime”

The crowd continuously boos and heckles the police: “A revolution is happening” When a police vehicle approaches, there is a call: “Look this guy is entangled too” “He is going the wrong way”, “What the hell are you going to do?” “How many people do you think you can kill?”
...

The answer to the last question is that they hope to kill enough to terrorize the population into submission to their weird religious beliefs. the perverts who believe that women's hair has "sex rays" that must be trapped by a head cover are the real sickos who bring discredit on Islam and Iran. I suspect that this demonstration is just the tip of the iceberg.

Republicans messing with Democrat primary

At John's barber and styling shop in the historic downtown of this conservative community southeast of Austin, politics is clearly in the air these days.
What has particularly struck stylist Pete Campos is how many of his Republican customers are talking about voting for Barack Obama in the March 4 Democratic presidential primary, motivated more, he surmised, by a strong dislike of Hillary Clinton than a strong attachment to Obama.

"I think Hillary scares some people," said Campos, an independent who is leaning toward voting for the Illinois senator.

According to polling, as well as anecdotal evidence, an unusually large number of Republicans and independents may cast their votes in the Democratic contest next week, a prospect that could tip the outcome of what polls show is now a tight race. Such defections could also affect the many local and state legislative primaries around the state.

An American Research Group poll released Monday showed Obama leading Clinton, 71 percent to 25 percent, among Texas independents and Republicans who are likely to vote in the Democratic primary.

There is scattered evidence across the state that some Republicans may be voting Democratic, at least for a day. In one precinct in the suburban Houston neighborhood of Kingwood, where 82 percent of voters cast ballots for President Bush in 2004, Democrats were outvoting Republicans 4-to-1 last week in early voting.

Daron Shaw, a political science professor at University of Texas, said surveys he conducted in two state legislative districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area revealed that almost a quarter of voters with a history of voting in GOP primaries planned on participating in the Democratic primary.
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I think they are doing it for strategic reasons, but I think it is a bad idea. It is however skewing the measure of intensity and giving Democrats an unwarranted since of optimism. I did not like when Democrats were voting for McCain in the New Hampshire and other early primaries and I don't think Republicans should be picking the Democrat nominee either.

The further demise of Democrats in Texas

The Chambers County sheriff's race will spell the end of an era when Democrats once dominated the political scene here.
Sheriff Joe LaRive, the last countywide officeholder from Chambers County to run as a Democrat, has switched parties for the March 4 primary.

LaRive now faces only one challenger, Hugh Sigers, in the Republican primary. No Democrat has filed for the position.

Yet when the rice-farming county was originally formed in 1858, the political rulers liked Democrats and not Republicans. Most races were then decided in the Democratic primary because no Republicans bothered to run.

The shift started about 10 years ago as the county grew increasingly Republican from an influx of residents from Harris County.

"It happened quickly because our county is so small, only about 30,000 people," Republican Chairman John Havenar said. "New subdivisions were sprouting just across our county line and filling up."

The 344th state district judge and the tax assessor-collector joined LaRive in switching party affiliations within the past year. None of those who switched has an opponent except LaRive.

The only remaining Democrats elected countywide are District Attorney Mike Little and 253rd State District Judge Chap Cain. However, both live in Liberty County and are elected to represent both Liberty and Chambers counties.

Officials speculate that soon there could be none. The state has already decided Little will no longer handle Chambers County next year, and the governor is expected to name a Republican replacement.

While countywide-elected officials have diminished, a few constables, justices of the peace and commissioners continue to win elections as Democrats. This happens only in parts of the county not being affected by the new growth, officials said.

LaRive explained his reasons for switching: "Because I could see the obvious trend in county-wide races. Republicans are also more in line with my conservative beliefs."
...

What started happening state wide a few years ago is now taking place in the counties. With Democrats like Obama and Clinton heading the national ticket that makes it even harder for a Democrat to survive in Texas local races. The Democrat party just does not have much room for conservatives anymore and those who stay are constantly having to compromise their principals.

Bad Times at the Times

Thomas Sowell:

The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as "news" stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes.

Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men. Just a couple of years ago, it was the Duke University "rape" hoax that they fell for.

In between there were the various hoaxes of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, who was kept on and promoted until too many people found out what he had been doing and the paper had to let him go.
Last month the New York Times created its own hoax with a long front page article about how war veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were killing people back in the United States because of the stress they had gone through in combat.

That hoax was shot down two days later by the New York Post, which showed that the murder rate among returning war veterans was only one-fifth the murder rate among civilians in the same age brackets.

Undaunted, the New York Times has come up with its latest front-page sensation, the claim that some anonymous people either suspected an affair between Senator John McCain and a female lobbyist or tried to forestall an affair.

But apparently no one actually claimed that they knew there was an affair.

This did not even rise to the level of "he said, she said." Instead it was anonymous sources reporting their suspicions.

People who share the New York Times' political views are treated as "innocent until proven guilty." People with different views are condemned for "the appearance of impropriety," even if there is no hard evidence that they did anything wrong.
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In Clarence Thomas's confirmation it was not the evidence, but the "seriousness of the charge." That is a standard reserved for conservatives. It comes from the liberal mindset that conservatives are evil and therefore undeserving of fair treatment.

The Democrats' big lie about ending the war

John Podesta, Rakeyh and Lawrence Korb make the bogus claim that only Democrats can end the war. The fact is that Democrats can only order a retreat that will prolong the war and result in more American casualties. They would give al Qaeda bragging rights to defeating the US and boost al Qaeda's PR campaign while dispiriting allies who have joined our fight against al Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere.

The best way to end the war is to defeat the enemy and defeat his strategy so that we will not be faced with future adversaries who use an insurgency strategy. The Democrats are showing themselves to be ignorant of both warfare and strategy. It is why they should not be trusted on national security issues.

They want to go back to a strategy of absorbing blows and and responding with lawyers. They would put us on the strategic defensive. It would be a return to the failed policies of the Clinton administration. They would also put terrorist rights above the lives of Americans. Their concern for terrorist privacy is bazaar. Their belief that terrorist captured on the battlefield are entitled to a Miranda warning and a lawyer demonstrates they want to return to lawfare from warfare. It would be a return to the polices that gave us 9-11, the Cole bombing and the African embassy bombings.

The policies favored by the Democrats would be a good deal for al Qaeda, but bad for America and would squander the investments we have made in destroying this wicked enemy.

They want to invest instead in sink hole programs for greedy Democrat constituency groups. These vote buying schemes and appeals to selfishness ahead of national security are the opposite of what this country needs.

Stuff that white (liberal) people like

Gregory Rodriguez:

Six weeks ago, 29-year-old Culver City, Calif., Internet copy writer Christian Lander started a blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, on a whim, thinking he'd poke fun at himself and fellow white people.

Spending roughly two hours a day writing satirical posts about "stuff white people like," Lander had no idea how much his little inside joke would catch on. In the first week, the site received about 200 hits a day. The next week, it jumped to 600, and then to 4,000 the next. By last week, he was averaging 300,000 daily hits.

Lander, who arrived in Los Angeles from Toronto 2½ years ago, came up with the idea for the blog after talking to a Filipino friend about how much they both liked the HBO police drama The Wire. For some reason he's already forgotten, they both wished that more white people watched the show. Which got him thinking: What exactly do white people like?

By "white people," Lander doesn't actually mean the more than 221 million Americans who check that box on the decennial census. But that's part of the fun. Lander is doing to whites what scores of journalists and politicians do to non-white minorities every day, "essentializing" complex identities — that is, stripping away all variety and reducing them to their presumed authentic essences.

One irony-deficient reader complained that the blog was less about white people than it was about yuppies. And without knowing it, she was cutting to the heart of the joke. Lander is gently making fun of the many progressive, educated, upper-middle-class whites who think they are beyond ethnicity or collectively shared tastes, styles or outlook. He's essentially reminding them that they, too, are part of a group.

"I'm writing about the white people who think they're absolutely unique and individual," Lander told me. "I'm calling them out and poking fun of myself. The things I post are all the things I like too!"

And what are those things? Recycling, expensive sandwiches, standing still at concerts, Toyota Priuses, natural medicine, irony, public radio, breakfast places, vegetarianism, organic foods and being an expert on ethnic cultures are just a few.

Lander thinks that most of his readers are actually members of the elite group he's lampooning. Some of the comments on the blog suggest that he's right. "Oh, lord, it only hurts because it's true! Love the blog," one reader who calls herself White Lady wrote.
...

While I think The Wire is a great show, recycling, expensive sandwiches, standing still at concerts, Toyota Priuses, natural medicine, public radio, breakfast places, vegetarianism and organic foods, not things I particularly like. Almost all of those things in this list are for liberals who make up a minority of white people. For stuff that conservatives like, read PrairiePundit. This blog is for conservatives of all colors though.

Democrats do not understand the enemy

Pete Hegseth:

The Democratic leadership in Congress haven’t got their facts straight on Iraq. They continue in failing to account for the surge’s dramatic success here, and persist in using a public rhetoric stubbornly suited to conditions in the past. This week, Democrats will bring two bills to the Senate floor whose aim is to immediately redeploy U.S. troops out of Iraq under the mistaken notion that doing so will serve our broader (and presumably, legitimate) fight against al-Qaeda. If success against al-Qaeda is the goal, Senators Russell Feingold, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama need to catch up on their reading and acquire all the relevant facts. I know two important books that are a good place to start.

While traveling to Baghdad, I had plenty of downtime to re-read large portions of House to House, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia’s memoir of urban combat in Fallujah, and the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual authored by General David Petraeus and (new Vets for Freedom board member) Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. The two books highlight fundamental aspects of the Iraq war today — and are must-reads for anyone who wants to understand the enemy we face and the strategy we’re currently employing against them, with great success.

Congressional Medal of Honor nominee David Bellavia’s first-person account of deadly hand-to-hand combat in Iraq paints a realistic and detailed picture of the enemy he faced in Fallujah — what he called “an insurgent global all-star team” that included “Chechen snipers, Filipino machine gunners, Pakistani mortar men, and Saudi suicide bombers.” The insurgents were not ordinary Iraqis fighting for their freedom against an invading power — but international Islamic militants supported by al-Qaeda. “They seek not only to destroy us here in Iraq, but to destroy American power and influence everywhere. They revile our culture and want it swept clear, replaced with Sharia law.” If only certain U.S. Senators truly understood the global nature of our vicious enemy in Iraq.

The second book outlines the military doctrine behind our counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq — and is a testament to military adaptation and leadership. In the military theater, Petraeus’s manual calls for “securing and controlling the local populace,” but also for “providing essential services” and “supporting government reforms and reconstruction projects” — all of which requires “a high ratio of security forces to the protected population” (i.e., enough troops). Meanwhile, on the home front, the manual warns that “protracted counterinsurgency operations are hard to sustain. The effort requires a firm political will and substantial patience by the government, its people, and the countries providing support.” In light of today’s Senate fights, these words are painfully prescient.

...

The first bill would mandate that national-security leaders create “a comprehensive strategy to combat and defeat al Qaeda globally.” An excellent idea: We all want to defeat al-Qaeda wherever they exist — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, everywhere. America needs a more comprehensive military, political, and cultural strategy to deal with modern Islamic radicalism, which promises to be a Long War (as Maj. Gen. John Batiste and I have argued in the Washington Post).

But it’s not 2003 anymore. Given the fact that today we are facing a determined al-Qaeda effort to destabilize Iraq, wouldn’t any rational person include Iraq in their list of places where al-Qaeda must be defeated? Not Obama, Feingold, and Reid, who believe “we need to safely [i.e., immediately] redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq.” Whatever misgivings these senators may have felt about the invasion of Iraq in the first place, today we are there. And so is al-Qaeda. Any “strategy to combat and defeat al Qaeda globally” must begin there.

The second bill entails an immediate timeline for troop withdrawal, regardless of conditions on the ground. The supporting evidence for this approach is thin — “the key to ending [the violence] is political reconciliation, not a huge U.S. troop presence.” When Senate Democrats refuse to recognize the gains we’ve already made, it’s impossible for them to understand the way counterinsurgency warfare develops.

Contrary to Senator Obama’s assertion that Sunni sheiks in Anbar Province rose up against al-Qaeda because of the Democrats’ midterm election victory (yes, he actually said that), the reason for the “Sunni Awakening” was a commitment of troops in patrol bases throughout Ramadi (reported first by Wade Zirkle and Sgt. Bellavia in July of 2006 — months before the midterm elections), followed by an increase in troops and sustained commitment throughout Anbar and Iraq in 2007.

...

When you hear Democrats like Nancy Pelosi talk about "war without end" it is clear that she does not have an comprehension of counterinsurgency warfare. It appears that she and her democrat colleagues in the Senate or willfully ignorant on the subject and the progress we have made through using counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq. Obama's naive statement on Anbar should be an embarrassment since it shows how uninformed he is on the facts on the ground.

One of the tasks of the coming campaign is to educate the public on the use of counterinsurgency warfare and the benefits of winning. We are not challenged by conventional forces now because our adversaries know they cannot win. We need to demonstrate that insurgency strategies can also be defeated or we will be faced with more adversaries ready to use them to thwart US policy.

Why should Hillalry quit now?

Jay Cost:

Jonathan Alter has a thought-provoking article in the latest Newsweek. He writes:

If Hillary Clinton wanted a graceful exit, she'd drop out now--before the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries--and endorse Barack Obama...
Withdrawing would be stupid if Hillary had a reasonable chance to win the nomination, but she doesn't. To win, she would have to do more than reverse the tide in Texas and Ohio, where polls show Obama already even or closing fast. She would have to hold off his surge, then establish her own powerful momentum within three or four days. Without a victory of 20 points or more in both states, the delegate math is forbidding. In Pennsylvania, which votes on April 22, the Clinton campaign did not even file full delegate slates. That's how sure they were of putting Obama away on Super Tuesday.

The key word is "reasonable" - as in Hillary doesn't have a reasonable chance to win the nomination. While I agree that Obama stands a much better chance of winning the nomination than Clinton, I think Alter's conclusion is hasty. If she loses either Texas or Ohio next week - the race will end. Nevertheless, let's assume that she wins both, though not by the large margins Alter says she needs. What happens next?

Neither Clinton nor Obama can expect to win the nomination by virtue of the pledged delegates alone. Obama would have to win more than 75% of the remaining delegates. Clinton needs more than are available. Thus, the nominee will have to fill the gap via the super delegates.

This is critically important. The nominee will be the one who makes a compelling argument to a sufficient number of the 795 super delegates. This is the first reason not to be so quick to declare the race finished. Do we know what these delegates are thinking? We have no survey data on them - nothing that gauges their preferences or beliefs. We can easily track how candidates are doing when their audience is the American public. That's what opinion polls are for. We have nothing of the sort for the super delegates.
...
What could each candidate argue vis-à-vis McCain? Obama can point to his lead in the head-to-head polls as well as the "Obama-mania" that has overtaken part of the country. He can assert that his supporters are more dedicated, and will give him a better donor and volunteer base. Clinton has a good argument, too. She can reference the old adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Sure, Obama enjoys this enthusiasm now, but it only matters if it is there in November. Will the Republicans tear him down the way they "Swift-Boated" John Kerry? Clinton can argue that they won't be able to do this to her. They have been trying to no avail for sixteen years.
...

It would be a mistake for the Democrats to force her to quit before she is ready to, and it would be a disservice to Obama also, because he has not been tested yet the way he will be by Republicans. sure she will probably rough him up some more before it is over, but that will expose his weaknesses that Republicans would already be aware of and force him to learn responses. As long as she thinks she has a chance to win, there is no reason for her to quit just because Johnathon Alter wants Obama to start getting ready for McCain. The Primaries are a testing process and Obama has not finished the test yet.

Overcoming Obama

Steve Kornacki:

Late in the summer of 1976, President Gerald Ford and his inner circle huddled in Vail, Colorado, facing the grimmest general election outlook for a Republican since the L.B.J. landslide of ‘64.

An unelected president, Ford had barely secured the Republican nomination against a fierce challenge from Ronald Reagan, leaving the party’s conservative base dispirited and even more distrustful of Ford than they already had been. And the stench of Watergate—and Ford’s politically damaging pardon of Richard Nixon—stubbornly hung in the air. After eight years of Republican rule, an amorphous but potent yearning for change had taken hold.

At the Vail strategy session, the Ford team zeroed in on the chief vulnerabilities of their Democratic opponent, Jimmy Carter: His lack of experience, his lack of accomplishments and his lack of specificity on the issues. These had to be exploited mercilessly.

And they were. Ten weeks later, Ford came within an eyelash of a political miracle. After trailing by 33 points around Labor Day, he was edged out by a handful of electoral votes—and just two points in the popular vote. If the campaign had lasted even a week longer, many believe, Ford would have won.

Thirty-two years later, the G.O.P.’s chances of retaining the White House for a third straight term may hinge on recycling that old Ford recipe.

Once again, the fall landscape looks miserable for them. In John McCain, they are poised to nominate a candidate who does just as little for the base as Ford did. And twice as many voters—many of them independents, and more than a few registered Republicans—have participated in this year’s Democratic primaries than in the G.O.P. contests. After eight years of George W. Bush and five years of war in Iraq, change is once again in vogue.

And once again, the Democrats seem ready to nominate a candidate whose appeal is rooted more in the emotions that he stirs than in the details of his 12-point plans. For Jimmy Carter in 1976, the operative word was trust. For Barack Obama in 2008, it is hope.

Actually, the similarities between Carter and Obama are considerable. Like Obama, Carter’s resume included service in a state Legislature (rare for a president), and only a very brief stint in high-profile office, his single term as Georgia’s governor from 1970 to 1974. Obama, of course, has only been in the U.S. Senate since 2005, after an eight-year run in the Illinois state Senate.
...
But the ’76 example tells us that criticisms that don’t stick during the primary season can still work in the general election. Day after day in fall campaign, the Ford forces pounded away at the experience question and painted Carter as a political illusion, an affable-seeming politician who was terrified of expressing his opinion on any controversial topic.

“It is not enough to say, ‘Trust me,’” Ford said at one rally. “Trust must be earned. Trust is not having to guess what a candidate means. Trust is leveling with people before the election about what you’re going to do after the election. Trust is not being all things to all people, but being the same thing to all people.”

The media eventually caught on too, scrutinizing Carter with a daily intensity that was absent in the primary season, and Carter’s lead steadily eroded.

McCain is readying the same kind of attack against Obama.
...

McCain's advantage is that he is not 33 points behind going into the race. In fact his is within the margin of error in all polls and will probably be gaining as people get to know more about Obama's liberal positions and those of his advisers. McCain's challenge is to define his opponent and his policies and frame the debate in a way that Obama cannot escape with just rhetoric.

Collective punishment of Sderot for being Jewish

Bret Stephens:

The Israeli town of Sderot lies less than a mile from the Gaza Strip. Since the beginning of the intifada seven years ago, it has borne the brunt of some 2,500 Kassam rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian terrorists. Only about a dozen of these Kassams have proved lethal, though earlier this month brothers Osher and Rami Twito were seriously injured by one as they walked down a Sderot street on a Saturday evening. Eight-year-old Osher lost a leg.

It is no stretch to say that life in Sderot has become unendurable. Palestinians and their chorus of supporters -- including the 118 countries of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, much of Europe, and the panoply of international aid organizations from the World Bank to the United Nations -- typically reply that life in the Gaza Strip is also unendurable, and that Palestinian casualties greatly exceed Israeli ones. But this argument is fatuous: Conditions in Gaza, in so far as they are shaped by Israel, are a function of conditions in Sderot. No Palestinian Kassams (or other forms of terrorism), no Israeli "siege."
The more vexing question, both morally and strategically, is what Israel ought to do about Gaza. The standard answer is that Israel's response to the Kassams ought to be "proportionate." What does that mean? Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams -- to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams -- an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?

Surely this isn't what advocates of proportion have in mind. What they really mean is that Israel ought to respond with moderation. But the criteria for moderation are subjective. Should Israel pick off Hamas leaders who are ordering the rocket attacks? The European Parliament last week passed a resolution denouncing the practice of targeted assassinations. Should Israel adopt purely economic measures to punish Hamas for the Kassams? The same resolution denounced what it called Israel's "collective punishment" of Palestinians. Should Israel seek to dismantle the Kassams through limited military incursions? This, too, has the unpardonable effect of resulting in too many Palestinian casualties, which are said to be "disproportionate" to the number of Israelis injured by the Kassams.

By these lights, Israel's presumptive right to self-defense has no practical application as far as Gaza is concerned. Instead, Israel is counseled to allow goods to flow freely into the Strip, and to negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas.

But here another set of considerations intrudes. Hamas was elected democratically and by overwhelming margins in Gaza. It has never once honored a cease-fire with Israel. Following Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlements from the Strip in 2005 there was a six-fold increase in the number of Kassam strikes on Israel.
...
On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa attacked the border town of Columbus, N.M., killing 18 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson ordered Gen. John J. Pershing and 10,000 soldiers into Mexico for nearly a year to hunt Villa down, in what was explicitly called a "punitive expedition." Pershing never found Villa, making the effort something of a failure. Then again, Villa's raid would be the last significant foreign attack on continental U.S. soil for 85 years, six months and two days.

The suggestions of the Europeans for Israel's response to the Palestinian collective punishment of Sderot for being Jewish is not one they would find acceptable for themselves. Why they show such sympathy for a terrorist death cult is inexplicable. The targeted killing of Hamas leaders did have a positive effect on reducing human bomb attacks in Israel. The logical response to the war criminals who run Gaza right now is to destroy the Hamas infrastructure o f terror and its leadership. While defensive measures might give some relief, they will not change the hearts and minds of the death cult which will just look for other means of killing Israelis.

Obama thinks free trade is a hopeless change

Rich Lowry:

FOR Barack Obama, hope can triumph over anything - except for open trade with a neighboring country with an economy 1/20th the size of ours. Then, all is despair.
Obama's culprit is Mexico, our third-largest trading partner. It is trade deals like NAFTA - the 1993 accord eliminating tariffs among America, Mexico and Canada - that "ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with teenagers for minimum wage at Wal-Mart," Obama intones.
Feel inspired yet?
The big picture doesn't justify this Dickensian evocation of gloom. Since 1993, the US economy has grown by 54 percent. The jobless rate has dropped from 6.9 in 1993 to 4.9 today. Manufacturing output has increased by 63 percent. Canada and Mexico are our first- and second-largest export markets, and US merchandise exports to them have increased at a slightly faster clip than exports to the rest of the world.
NAFTA has clearly been a (small) benefit to the economy of both the United States and Mexico. Critics focus on the large US trade deficit that opened up with Mexico shortly after the adoption of NAFTA, but that had more to do with the decline of the peso and a steep Mexican recession that dampened demand for our exports. Since 2001, our manufactured-goods deficit with NAFTA countries has been stable, making the agreement an implausible villain in the hollowing out of America.
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To blame NAFTA for the long-standing trajectory of US manufacturing - the sector has been losing jobs since 1979 - is the politics of scapegoating. What is Obama going to do if elected? Browbeat Mexican President Felipe Calderon to return his country to the statist and autarkic policies of the 1970s? Bizarrely, Obama lately has directed more barbs toward Mexico than Iran, whose offense is only killing American servicemen and pursuing an illicit nuclear program rather than sending us imports and welcoming our investment.
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It's an odd time to demonize NAFTA. US manufacturing went through a deep recession from 2000 to 2003, shedding 3 million jobs. It has recovered since, and 2006 was "a record year for output, revenues, profits, profit rates and return on investment," Daniel Ikenson of the Cato Institute writes.
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Obama always says that politicians should tell voters what they need - not what they want - to hear. But no one in the Democratic Party will emphatically say that trade is a net benefit to the United States, even if it brings painful - and ultimately unavoidable - dislocations. Hillary Clinton always was lukewarm about NAFTA, and even Bill is skittering away from his legacy. On trade, Obama's opportunistic fear-mongering defines the new Democratic orthodoxy.

In the 1960's people who lived along the border with Mexico would go there to shop. Now Mexicans come to the US to shop and they do so in big numbers, whether it is at malls along the border or wealthy Mexicans flying to Houston to go to the Galleria. Obama seems to not comprehend this dynamic because he is pandering to union bosses in the Midwest who represent workers in declining industries who are scapegoating Mexicans.

Here is a question he needs to answer. If all of those jobs are going to Mexico, why are all those Mexicans still coming here in ever increasing numbers to find work?

Foreclosure aid unpopular

As the Bush administration and Congress consider proposals to ease the home foreclosure crisis, local governments across the country have been lending money to imperiled homeowners and confronting some opposition.

Some of these municipal and state efforts have met resistance from people who consider the assistance undeserved and adamantly oppose anything that resembles a taxpayer bailout.
Seattle, which has nowhere near the kind of foreclosure problem other cities have, began a modest program last month offering loans of up to $5,000 to help a few dozen homeowners avoid losing their homes.
Not only are people in Seattle relatively prosperous, but they have a reputation for being nice, too. Yet no sooner had Mayor Greg Nickels announced the program than opposition surfaced.
“Just can’t agree with using taxpayer dollars to bail out private homeowners, no matter how the mayor tries to justify it,” read a complaint posted on the “Soundoff” section of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Web site.
Mark Ellerbrook, who manages Seattle’s homeownership program, said that, aside from residents hoping to apply, few people were enthusiastic about the program. He said he understood that reaction, given the local housing market.
“People struggle to buy homes in this city, for sure,” Mr. Ellerbrook said. “And then you have what looks, on the face of it, like the city giving money to people who made bad decisions.”
In Massachusetts, MassHousing, a quasi-state agency, began a loan refinance program last summer that relies on bond revenue. After its initial public relations effort, the agency had to make clear “that this is not taxpayer-funded,” said Tom Farmer, an agency spokesman.
“The talk radio was all up in arms: ‘Why should we be helping these people out?’ ” Mr. Farmer said. “ ‘They should have known what they were doing.’ ”
The goal of these programs is not just to keep people from losing their homes, but also to limit broader economic fallout, including plummeting property tax revenues and widespread declines in home values. Still, they pit what some government officials say are practical economic solutions for the common good against individual ideals of fairness and personal responsibility.
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While the negative reactions have not stopped the assistance efforts, it has put some local officials on the defensive and forced them to try to sell the programs to the general public, not just to the intended recipients.
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When the Times says the fold in Seattle are nice that is their code for liberal. Lending people money to pay loan payments only digs them deeper into a hole. They would be better off working with a lender to restructure the loans and hope the housing market comes back strong enough to bail them out of an investment they cannot afford.

Seattle is one of those areas that has artificially raised the price of homes by restricting the supply of land where they can be built. That has in fact contributed to the subprime problem because the homes were not affordable using ordinary loans. Where ever you have severe use restrictions on building you will make the existing homes less affordable for new buyers. Where you do not have such restrictions like around Houston, Texas, homes are more affordable and there are fewer foreclosures.

Nicole Gelinas writing in the NY Post discusses the negative reaction to the Times first bail out story and notes many of the examples were not ones that generated much sympathy.

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he "solution" the Times writers seem to seek here isn't just merely guaranteeing every American freedom from financial losses or foreclosure - but freedom from any economic anxiety at all (plus a right to have a house whose value rises constantly).
One passage bemoans the millions of Americans "trapped in their homes": "The vast majority - embedded in their communities, their children in public schools, their reputations at stake - wait nervously in hope that prices will . . . rise once again, . . . restoring their freedom to sell or refinance."
But readers aren't biting. More than 400 vehement reader comments on the Times' site ran 20-to-1 against any taxpayer rescue - with fairness and basic economics the main objections:
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That probably explains todays article. It is also another example of how out of touch the liberals at the NY Times are.

The unknowing unknown about Obama

Washington Times:

Members of Washington's military and defense establishment are expressing trepidation about Sen. Barack Obama, as the Illinois senator comes closer to winning the Democratic presidential nomination and leads in national polls to become commander in chief.
But his backers, including a former Air Force chief of staff, say the rookie senator believes in a strong military, and with it, a larger Army and Marine Corps.
"Any military person who concludes he's a left-wing, hair-on-fire, Kumbaya child of the '60s has sadly misunderestimated him, to use George Bush's term," said retired Gen. Merrill McPeak.
Still, the mostly conservative retired officers, industry executives and current defense officials interviewed by The Washington Times cite Mr. Obama's lack of experience in national security. They also point to his determination to pull American combat units from Iraq at a time when a troop surge has reduced violence, damaged al Qaeda and allowed the Iraqi government to progress toward Sunni-Shia-Kurd reconciliation.
"We're very concerned about his apparent lack of understanding on the threat of radical Islam to the United States," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who is pro-Iraq war and a Fox News analyst. "A lot of retired senior officers feel the same way."
Mr. Obama also has stirred concern in national security circles by pledging to talk to the leaders of rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, without preconditions.
His urging of the Bush administration to conduct air strikes against terrorist targets in Pakistan without its approval is privately derided inside the Pentagon as the way to ruin relations with a good ally. Pakistan will not allow U.S. combat troops to operate on its soil.
Questions about Mr. Obama's commander-in-chief qualifications have reached the campaign trail. The Obama camp Wednesday sent out one of its advisers, former State Department official Susan Rice, to respond to charges from Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican nominee.
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No other Obama proposal brings more military criticism than his plan to bring home one to two combat brigades per month from Iraq — meaning all such units would be out by the end of 2009, his first year in office.
A senior Pentagon official said an Obama swearing-in "will give the Arab street the final victory, the best optics, and the ultimate in bragging rights. They win. We lose."
Retired Army Gen. John Keane, an architect of the Iraq troop surge, worries that talk of a U.S. pullout makes reconciliation more difficult. Gen. Keane has not endorsed any presidential candidate.
"Anyone who is advocating a precipitous pullout of U.S. forces, believing this will be a catalyst for political progress, does not understand the realities of Iraq and the minds of the key political leaders," Gen. Keane told The Washington Times. "The U.S. military presence is the glue that is holding things together in Iraq and is the fundamental reason for the recent political progress. If you remove this presence, the political leaders in Iraq will believe they are on their own and will fall prey to their own fears and paranoia. ... They will bunker down and the political progress will come to a dead stop."
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Defense industry executives worry that Mr. Obama will end six years of defense budget increases and, as he has repeatedly said on the campaign trail and in debates, tap into war and military funds to support his plan for universal health care.
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Obama would be a disaster on national security issues and his Euro view of spending defense funds on health care is a recipe for a hollow military and an investment in a sinkhole liberal program. His attraction of liberals like McPeak and Korb is another indication of how wrong he is on national security issues. Obama will make the war longer and more costly by his ill advised retreat from Iraq. He will make future insurgencies more likely by not having the determination to win this one. He would be the worst foreign policy president since Carter.

The many states of Texas

When Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton issued her gunslinger’s invitation to Senator Barack Obama recently, challenging him to “meet me in Texas,” the question many people here asked was, Which one?

The frontier-conservative Texas of Amarillo, in the Panhandle, where former President Bill Clinton stumped for his wife this month, sharing the civic center with the annual gun show? The vast, immigrant-heavy Texas of Houston, where more than 100 languages are spoken in the city’s schools?
Maybe the one of East Texas, with its Deep South ethos, a region one Democratic consultant described as being more like Mississippi than Texas? Or the profoundly unpredictable one found here, in the central part of the state, among the most heavily Republican areas in the country (and home to President Bush’s ranch), yet represented in Congress by Chet Edwards, a well-liked Democrat who recently endorsed Mr. Obama?
“It’s like running a national campaign,” said one veteran Texas Democrat, Garry Mauro, state director for Mrs. Clinton. “There are no similarities between Amarillo and Brownsville and Beaumont and Texarkana and El Paso and Austin and Houston and Dallas. These are very separate demographic groups with very diverse interests.”
In a 1968 essay, Larry McMurtry wrote that Texas was divided but “not yet fragmented to a degree that would raise difficulties for the novelist.” Forty years later, you could sympathize with the writer, but you should feel really sorry for the presidential candidate, trying to make sense of a state as large as New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina combined, and probably even more diverse.
With recent polls showing that Mr. Obama has cut deeply into Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Texas, or even erased it, the state has become a political battleground to a degree not witnessed in a generation. And the rapidly mounting fight has reminded national political strategists yet again of Texas’ strange largeness — or large strangeness — a state that Congress decided in 1845, the year it joined the Union, might well be later divided into four more states should it consent.
That provision stemmed from the debate over slavery, but it was an acknowledgment of the state’s unwieldy size and stark geographical differences, from prairie towns with plainly descriptive names like Notrees and Levelland to the swamps and cypress forests of the Big Thicket National Preserve in the southeast to coastal towns like Galveston, with old Victorian neighborhoods reminiscent of San Francisco.
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Austin is the most liberal area of the state. Harris county, the largest in the state which includes Houston is conservative Republican, but the city often votes Democrat. San Antonio has been traditionally a Democrat area, but with all its growth it is trending Republican now. The Midland Odessa area is conservative Republican. El Paso tends to be more tribal than party oriented. A Hispanic who happens to have an Anglo name will lose to a candidate with a Hispanic name regardless of party. In other words, if Bill Richardson was in the race he would have no advantage in El Paso. In the lower Rio Grande Valley, which is 90 percent Hispanic you don't find that strong a tribal influence. Lloyd Bentsen represented a congressional district in the valley for years. Dallas used to be very conservative, but is not so dependable these days. East Texas will still elect conservative Democrats occasionally.

What the article left out is the fact that Democrats have not won a statewide race in this century. What Obama and Clinton are fighting over is what is left of the Democrat party. Democrats are a discredited brand in Texas. That is why even Obama does not want to admit to being the liberal that he is. You can win in Texas as a conservative, but the only place you can win as a liberal is in Austin. That is mainly because of the student vote at UT. Before they lowered the voting age to 18, the city voted for conservative business oriented candidates.

Dem governors concerned about McCain

Washington Times Editorial:

Democratic governors from states likely to help decide the 2008 presidential election see Republican Sen. John McCain as a potentially formidable opponent whose life story and reputation for political independence make him a threat in November, despite conditions that they say now favor their nominee.

"To quote President Bush, McCain is never to be misunderestimated," said Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, McCain's home state. "He's a tough campaigner."

"In some ways," said Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania, a state that is considered a must-win for any Democratic nominee, "he's the ideal [Republican] candidate for Pennsylvania."

As Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) continue to battle for the Democratic nomination, McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has the luxury of beginning his general-election campaign.
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"He is appealing in Michigan," said Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who supports Clinton. "He does appeal to independent thinkers -- at least he did in the past -- and we have a lot of those in Michigan. Whoever the Democrat is, Michigan is a state where we're going to have to work."

Rendell, also a Clinton supporter, said McCain can compete for votes in southeastern Pennsylvania, where suburban voters generally favor abortion rights, and in western Pennsylvania, where many strongly oppose abortion.

"He's going to contest for those suburban voters that have been delivering Pennsylvania to Democratic presidential candidates for the last four elections," Rendell said. "He will be the strongest Republican to contest for their votes. And he does it without sacrificing the ability to go after conservative, pro-life Democrats in the western part of the state."

Napolitano, who backs Obama, acknowledged that with McCain as the GOP nominee, Democrats may face a stiffer challenge in winning Rocky Mountain states that have voted Republican in most recent elections but whose changing demographics make them Democratic targets.
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Other Democratic governors also balanced positive assessments of McCain with criticisms. Granholm said Iraq and the economy could undermine him in her state.

"Michigan is not in favor of 100 years in Iraq," she said, referring to McCain's statement that a long-term commitment in Iraq -- though not an all-out war -- might be acceptable to help stabilize that country. "He's got to be strong about not entering into new trade agreements that give away the store," she continued. "On those two issues, I think he's going to be vulnerable."

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said a McCain-Obama race would provide "the absolute matchup that contrasts the past and the future." Sebelius has endorsed Obama, and when asked how he would compare with McCain as a potential commander in chief in the eyes of voters, she pointed to the 1996 race between President Bill Clinton and former senator Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.).
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Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said McCain offers "a different face for the party" in a race in which "we're going to face the most left-wing presidential candidate, whichever it is, that the country has seen nominated."

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford supported McCain's candidacy in 2000 but remains neutral this year. Noting polls that show Obama leading McCain in general-election tests, Sanford said the campaign will look far different by Labor Day.

"As [Obama] beings (begins?)to fill in the blanks of what change means, a lot of the jet fuel that's been fueling his campaign is going to be taken out of his gas tank," he said.

As the Rasmussen poll indicated last night, McCain has the most upside of any of the candidates and the lowest negatives of any of the candidates. He has the potential to run a very strong race. He is going to have to educate some voters on warfare and the cost of losing in Iraq as well as the huge benefits of winning.

Monday, February 25, 2008

McCain has highest upside of any candidate

Rasmussen Reports:

Thirty-four percent (34%) of all voters say they will definitely vote for John McCain if he is on the ballot this November. Thirty-three percent (33%) will definitely vote against him while 29% say their support hinges on who his opponent is.

Barack Obama has the same number who will definitely vote for him--34%. But, more people are committed to voting against him than McCain. Forty-three percent (43%) say they will definitely reject him at the ballot box. For 18%, their support depends on his opponent.

For Hillary Clinton, 32% will definitely vote for her if she is on the ballot and 46% will definitely vote against. Core opposition to Clinton, the best-known of the candidates as the long campaign season began, hovered in the high 40s through most of the past year.
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If McCain can define Obama for the liberal loser he is, he can drive up his negatives and bring in the independents. One thing McCain needs to do is have a minimum of debates. The CNN polling in Texas shows significant movement for Obama after the debate with Clinton here.

McCain's people need to find a way to cut through the charisma and snark that has been so successful for Obama so far. The best way to do that is with specifics which demonstrate his naiveté and ignorance.

The Democrats' NAFTA slander

Bronwen Maddox:

Hillary Clinton is playing a tricky game in questioning the advantages of free trade in her attempt to win over blue-collar workers before the votes next week that will determine whether there is still life in her bid for the presidential nomination.
In attacking the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), one of her husband's proudest achievements, she does not have economics on her side; most studies show that the United States has done well out of the pact (even if the effects are small).
Even the politics is a gamble: she hopes that in the crucial votes on Tuesday, Ohio will listen to her, and southern Texas, fervently in favour of the trade pact, will not. Barack Obama has handled that footwork better, while still sounding cool on the benefits of free trade.
European officials, listening to this outpouring of scepticism about trade, are dearly hoping that both are doing no more than Democratic candidates have always done, in playing to the union vote, and would not be so protectionist in practice. But although the US has generally kept trade disputes separate from diplomacy, the threat of recession will do nothing to help.
It is remarkable that, 13 years after it came into force, Nafta is still so sensitive. The pact covers trade between Canada, the US and Mexico, but the American-Canadian part of it was never very contentious, as their cross-border trade was already extensive and their economies are similarly developed.
In contrast, American politicians projected every imaginable horror on the consequences of linking their economy with that of their poor neighbour to the south. Ross Perot is now best remembered for a single phrase — the “giant sucking sound” — his prophecy during the 1992 presidential campaign that Nafta would send American jobs southwards.
The truth is much less dramatic — which has led both the free-trade and anti-trade camps to wield it for their opposite purposes. Four detailed studies carried out on the tenth anniversary of the pact found that the boost it had given to trade between the US and Mexico was modest, although accelerating. Because Mexico was so much smaller than the US, the benefit was proportionately much greater for it.
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Nafta “had little or no impact” on employment overall, the survey also concluded, although one analysis, pointing out the difficulties of making estimates, suggested that perhaps it had created a quarter of a million American jobs.
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The fact is that US unemployment fell after NAFTA and household income rose. That giant sucking sound you don't hear is the wind coming out of the arguments of the opponents. Democrats have the problem of having to pander to the union bosses who want to blame their problems on others instead of their members benefits which make them uncompetitive.

Brit-Iraqi billionaire behind loans to Obama

Times:

A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.
The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi, one of Britain’s wealthiest men, helped Mr Obama buy his mock Georgian mansion in Chicago.
A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama's bagman Antoin "Tony" Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.
Three weeks later, Mr Obama bought a house on the city's South Side while Mr Rezko's wife bought the garden plot next door from the same seller on the same day, June 15.
Mr Obama says he never used Mrs Rezko's still-empty lot, which could only be accessed through his property. But he admits he paid his gardener to mow the lawn.
Mrs Rezko, whose husband was widely known to be under investigation at the time, went on to sell a 10-foot strip of her property to Mr Obama seven months later so he could enjoy a bigger garden.
Mr Obama now admits his involvement in this land deal was a “boneheaded mistake”.
Mrs Rezko’s purchase and sale of the land to Mr Obama raises many unanswered questions.
It is unclear how Mrs Rezko could have afforded the downpayment of $125,000 and a $500,000 mortgage for the original $625,000 purchase of the garden plot at 5050 South Greenwood Ave.
In a sworn statement a year later, Mrs Rezko said she got by on a salary of $37,000 and had $35,000 assets. Mr Rezko told a court he had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations."
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Asked if she used money from her husband to buy the land next to Mr Obama's house, she said: "I can't answer these questions, I'm sorry."
Asked how long she and her husband had known Mr Auchi, she replied: "I will not be able to answer this question."
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A prosecution document filed last month alleged that a "political candidate" - identified by the Chicago Sun-Times as Mr Obama - received a $10,000 campaign contribution from what is said to be a $250,000 kickback in the corruption case. That means Mr Obama's name could figure in Mr Rezko's trial, although he is not accused of any wrongdoing.
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Mr Auchi was convicted of corruption, given a suspended sentence and fined £1.4 million in France in 2003 for his part in the Elf affair, described as the biggest political and corporate scandal in post-war Europe. He, in a statement from his media lawyers, claims he is appealing against the sentence.
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There is more. The story adds some detail as to where Rezko got his money for this transactions some of which benefited Obama. With his 2003 conviction it is understandable why Mr. Auchi would want Rezko to act as a nominee for his investments in the US.

There is no indication that the Clinton campaign was a source for this story. Apparently the times did its own digging. Hillary Clinton may want to add some more adjectives to her description of Rezko now as well as question Obama about Mr. Auchi's contribution to his Chicago lifestyle.

Obama could be filled with hope that the NY Times and other liberal medias don't change the focus of their coverage from McCain and his past associations to those of Obama. The facts do sound more relevant to Obama's judgment about the appearance of his past associations and the personal benefit received from those associations.

Update: Captain Ed speculates that Obama's money ties to an Iraqi financier with ties to Saddam may have really been behind his anti Iraq war position.

Saudi sex cops accused of entrapment

Arab News:

The General Court of Makkah sentenced a famous local professor to eight months in jail and 180 lashes for being in a state of khulwa — a state of seclusion — with an unrelated woman.
Abdullah Al-Sanusi, the lawyer representing the professor, said that members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice had fabricated the case against his client to take revenge against him. He said a number of commission members were his client’s students and that the professor had fallen into an argument with them, during a lesson, on the importance of being kind to others.
Al-Sanusi said that some of the commission members had also failed in their final exams and had, therefore, developed enmity toward the professor.
The lawyer said that his client had received a phone call from a girl asking to meet him to discuss a problem, which she said could not be discussed over the phone.
The professor agreed to meet her at a coffee shop on condition that she brings her brother as a legal guardian. When the professor arrived at the coffee shop, he was surprised to find the girl alone. When asked about her brother, the girl said he had not come.
Soon a number of commission members surrounded the professor accusing him of being alone with the girl. The professor was handcuffed and handed into police custody.
The case was then passed to the Board of Investigation and General Prosecution, which did not press any charges, saying it had not seen any evidence of khulwa since the meeting took place in a public place.
During a later conversation, which was recorded by the professor, the girl admitted that the commission had sent her.
After having the case sent back by the prosecution, commission officials, on the advice of their chief, passed the case to the General Court in Makkah, where a judge sentenced the professor to jail and lashes, said Al-Sanusi, adding that the commission officials’ action was a violation of the law as they had proceeded with the case even after the BIGP had found his client innocent.
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This is pretty blatant evidence of the corruption of the sex cops. I am not sure what the judges excuse is once presented with the admission of the girl. The whole idea that meeting a female is a crime is absurd to begin with. The sex cops continue to be an embarrassment to the Kingdom. They should be put out of business.

Iraqi dog saved by Marine gets some love in San Diego

This is a video of Nubs' arrival in San Diego.

What the Times McCain story was really about

Micheal Kingsley figures it out.

I have come under some criticism for my criticism of the New York Times for its criticism of Sen. John McCain. Many readers of last week's New York Times article about McCain, including me, read that article as suggesting that McCain may have had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. The Times, however, has made clear that its story was not about an affair with a lobbyist. Its story was about the possibility that eight years ago, aides to McCain had held meetings with McCain to warn him about the appearance that he might be having an affair with the lobbyist. This is obviously a much more important question. To be absolutely clear: The Times itself was not suggesting that there had been an affair or even that there had been the appearance of an affair. The Times was reporting that there was a time eight years ago when some people felt there might be the appearance of an affair, although others, apparently including McCain himself, apparently felt that there was no such appearance.
Similarly, I am not accusing the New York Times of screwing up again by publishing an insufficiently sourced article, then defending itself with a preposterous assertion that it wasn't trying to imply what it obviously was trying to imply. I am merely reporting that some people worry that other people might be concerned that the New York Times has created the appearance of screwing up once again.
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There is more.

I am glad we cleared that up.

Somehow, I don't think the article in question will be considered for a Pulitzer, but Kingsley's critique may be a candidate in the satire category.

Obama edges ahead in new Texas poll

CNN:

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in a statistical dead heat in Texas, according to a poll released eight days before the state's crucial presidential primary.

In the CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Monday, 50 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said Obama is their choice for the party's nominee, while 46 percent backed Clinton.
But taking into account the poll's sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for Democratic respondents, the race is a virtual tie.
Clinton had a statistically insignificant 50 percent to 48 percent edge over Obama in last Monday's CNN/ORC poll in Texas.
"The 2-point gain for Obama and the 4-point drop for Clinton are both within the poll's sampling error, so although the survey appears to indicate some movement toward Obama, we cannot say for certain that he has gained any ground since last week," said CNN polling director Keating Holland.
Two recent polls by other organizations also show the race statistically even.
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It appears that Obama has gained some momentum in Texas. He apparently as been successful at adding to the personality cult that has been fainting at his rallies. His concert like appearances are still short on substance and big on creating buzz for his campaign. You have to read his web site to see all the really bad programs he favors and his wish list of expenditures. His absence of knowledge bout military history and strategy is still un questioned at this point. His favored policies on Iraq would create a disaster for the Iraqis and a longer war for the US against the Islamic religious bigots.

Obama's charisma at the debate last week apparently swung a lot of voters.

McCain is running ahead of Huckabee by a large margin. He is benefiting from the support of Texas Republican elected figures.

In a head to head contest between Obama and McCain, I think McCain would easily carry Texas. Hopefully the rest of the country will wise up about Obama's vessel of hope and change. How much longer an he keep quite about his liberalism.

Obama furious about funny hat photo

Fox News reports a furious response from the Obama account about the photo of him in Somali garb. It appears he did not have his funny hat rule down when he dressed in that costume. He blames the Clinton campaign, but they did not put the funny hat on him or doctor the photo. What he is finding is that politicians have to live with the decisions they made in the past and it was his decision to put on the outfit.

Aghan ammo and weapons are OK

Deebow at Blackfive exposes the impressive equipment he has in Afghanistan rebutting the claims of Obama's captain, who has also rebutted part of Obama's story.

Net neuters and net nutrality

Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal:

...

The idea of network neutrality is that all of our Internet packets are equal, and that the spirit of the Internet and its ability to create wonderful new applications like Google, MySpace and Facebook is predicated on open (albeit limited) access for all. Yet, despite an overabundance of bandwidth pulsing throughout the U.S., we are still stuck with rationing to our homes. Haven't we learned that advancing technology is never served by arbitrary rules to divvy up scarce resources? Look at the dearth of good cell phone applications: Rules make incumbents lazy.

...

We need policy to help cut a path for more competition, rather than protecting incumbents -- a Bandwidth Competition Act of 2008, not bogus net neutrality. All takers should be allowed access to poles or underground conduits. This is where neutrality should be enforced, instead of being a choke point.

Municipal or privately run wireless data services using Wi-Fi or WiMax should be sprouting like weeds. But they aren't being built because of lack of access to street lights, of all things, to set up access points. Verizon is busy rolling out a fiber optic service, FIOS, that will provide much higher speeds and real competition to Comcast. But it is slow going, as state by state video franchise rules still favor cable over any newcomers.

A stroke of a pen can cure these ills, incumbents be damned. They will adjust. I personally would climb telephone poles on my street to run fiber if I could get 100 megabit Internet service. Any takers? Talk about an economic stimulus; this is the type of infrastructure we need. The stock market will fund it all as well as resolve overbuild problems.

Don't think of Internet access as a static business -- someone put in phone lines 50 years ago or cable lines 20 years ago, and we are stuck with their limitations. Technology changes the game every few years. Even fiber lines put in today will be obsolete within 10 years and need upgrading. Same for wireless systems.
...

Japan just launched a satellite that is supposed to provide ultra high speed internet service. It looks like vertical envelopment may be a way around the forces that want to ration service. I remain skeptical of the intentions of the "net neutrality" crowd.

Democrats bring the politics of fraud to immigration "reform"

For months, leading Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chief Rahm Emanuel have tried to talk tough on illegal immigration. Mr. Emanuel told The Washington Post last year that immigration is "the third rail of American politics," adding that "anyone who doesn't realize that isn't with the American people," earning himself angry denunciations from the far-left fringe. Last month, Mrs. Pelosi joined House Minority Leader John Boehner in announcing that the House-passed economic stimulus bill would "not allow any taxpayer funds to be distributed to illegals." The Democratic leadership's efforts to sound tough on illegal immigration have created serious friction with some members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which believes the Democratic leadership is too timid about pushing for amnesty legislation.
If senior Democrats were really serious about a get-tough approach toward illegal immigration, we would be urging the Republican minority to reach across the aisle and work with the Democratic leadership to come up with a genuine bipartisan solution. But unfortunately, the Democrats are putting together an elaborate con job: using tough-sounding rhetoric while working behind the scenes with open-borders advocates in the business community to win support from from firms that have become very dependent on cheap foreign labor. The goal of these Democrats — and possibly the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well — is to defeat a bipartisan bill that takes a no-amnesty, enforcement-oriented approach to illegal immigration. Specifically, they are very worried about the fact that a growing number of moderate and conservative Republicans and Democrats (and even a few liberals) are cosponsoring the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) Act, H.R. 4088, introduced by Rep. Heath Shuler, North Carolina Democrat.
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Right now, Republican supporters of H.R. 4088 are circulating a discharge petition in an effort to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote. They need 218 members' signatures, meaning that at least 20 Democrats would have to take the supreme act of rebellion: directly defying Mrs. Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and the rest of the party leadership to bring to a vote legislation that the leadership wants no part of. Senior Democrats, worried that they may not be able to keep the bill tied up in committee, have come up with a Plan B — muddling the issue by attaching a killer amendment to the Shuler bill, which would come in the form of an amendment proposed by Rep. Joe Baca, California Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The Baca Amendment would give illegal aliens who pass a background check a "five-year temporary worker permit" that expires on Dec. 31, 2012. It would also provide employers who hired illegal aliens "safe harbor" (apparently some measure of immunity from prosecution) for past hiring of illegal aliens. If Mr. Shuler gets enough signatures to force his bill to the floor to be debated, Democrats hope to neuter it by attaching the Baca Amendment. If Mr. Baca's proposal were to become law, open-borders advocates could come back later and pass legislation putting these illegals on a path to citizenship. While not endorsing the Baca Amendment, a senior official with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told Congressional Quarterly that he believed there was "some kind of deal in the works."
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When it comes to immigration, the Democrat House leadership is not to be trusted. They are creating a track record to run against. They are also creating an opportunity for Republicans to work with some Democrats on bipartisan ways to thwart liberalism.

Enemy uses another disabled human bomb

CNN:

A man in a wheelchair blew himself up Monday in a northern Iraqi police station, killing three National Police officers, including a commander, police said.

The attack also wounded nine officers on the police force, which the Iraqi Interior Ministry operates.
The bombing in Samarra raises concern about the recent tactics employed by insurgents in Iraq. Bombs have been placed inside dead animals and hidden in carts. And in recent days, vagrants have been involved in bombings.
"As a sign of desperation, some of those terrorists resorted to some new methods and techniques," said Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for Baghdad's security plan.
One of the tactics is the use of remote-controlled "sticky" bombs, small enough to tape under vehicles.
A high-ranking Samarra police official said the disabled man came to meet with Brig. Gen. Abdul Jabbar Rabei Muttar, deputy commander of security, at the security operations building in Samarra. The pair met last week as well.
The man was searched when he entered the building, but police didn't look under his wheelchair seat, where the explosives had been placed. The man, who police say was cogent, detonated the explosives when Muttar approached him.
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The enemy in Iraq keeps plumbing new depths of depravity. As his situation worsens he worsens in his attacks. It makes you wonder why Democrats think we will be better off letting these people win. One thing they should understand is that our retreat will not the the war these people are making against us and our allies. Retreating will make that war longer and with greater US casualties.

Why are Globo Warmers afraid of debate?

John Fund:

John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all promise bold action on climate change . All have endorsed a form of cap-and-trade system that would severely limit future carbon emissions. The Democratic Congress is champing at the bit to act. So too is the Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of companies led by General Electric and Duke Energy.

You'd think this would be a rich time for debate on the issue of climate change. But it's precisely as sweeping change on climate policy is becoming likely that many people have decided the time for debate is over. One writer puts climate change skeptics "in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial," another envisions "war crimes trials" for the deniers. And during the tour for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore himself belittled "global warming deniers" as unworthy of any attention.

Take the reaction to Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg's latest book, "Cool It," which calls for a reasoned debate on global warming. Mr. Lomborg himself leans left, and he opens his book by declaring his belief that "humanity has caused a substantial rise in atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels over the past centuries, thereby contributing to global warming." But he has infuriated environmentalists by saying it is necessary to debate "whether hysterical and head-long spending on extravagant CO2-cutting programs at an unprecedented price is the only possible response." To do so, he says, it will be necessary to cool the doomsday rhetoric, allowing a measured discussion about the best ways forward. "Being smart about our future is the reason we have done so well in the past. We should not abandon our smarts now."

Mr. Lomborg's solution is to avoid discredited cap-and-trade programs, in which developing nations limit economic growth while they fruitlessly try to convince booming economies such as India and China to do the same. His alternative: "Let's focus on research and development. Let's focus on noncarbon-emitting technologies like solar, wind, carbon capture, energy efficiency and also, let's realize the solution may come from nuclear fission and fusion." He laments that the climate change issue has been demagogued by ideological groups on both sides, "and the ones who are making panicky or catastrophic claims simply have better press." At the end of the day, he ruefully acknowledges that potential progress and the sorts of solutions he advocates "are just boring things."
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The globo warmer's demonization of skeptics will not result in a more enlightened debate on the issue. Calling those who disagree with you or who are unpersuaded by your arguments corrupt is not likely to make them agree with you or halt their resistance to the ruinous policy positions proposed for a "problem" many are skeptical of. Personally, I like warmer weather and it does not frighten me at all.

Democrat dereliction of duty on intel bill

Adam Putnam:

DEMOCRATS in charge of Congress have a clear choice before them when they reconvene the House today: Will they act immediately to close significant gaps in America's intelligence capability - or not?
Ten days ago, their leaders chose to adjourn the House of Representatives without passing a Senate-approved anti-terror bill that had overwhelming bipartisan support. As a result, Democrats left America at significant risk and potentially blind to new terrorist plots.
The Democrats' dereliction of duty left our intelligence community without critical, 21st-century intelligence tools for unearthing those plots. Until the House passes this bill, our agencies are bound by the overly bureaucratic Vietnam-era law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
FISA was in effect on 9/11, too. A bipartisan congressional inquiry into why our nation was blindsided by those attacks later concluded that "difficulties with the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected al Qaeda operatives in the United States."
One of the main contributors to that report was none other than Nancy Pelosi - now the speaker of the House.
Yet since then, intelligence professionals and leaders in both parties have asked Speaker Pelosi to cooperate in modernizing the FISA law and putting our intelligence collection methods on a surer footing - and she has instead opted for stalling tactics and partisan rhetoric.
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The concern of Democrats for terrorist privacy makes no sense, unless you consider the contributions from trial lawyers to their campaigns. The trial lawyer's concern for terrorist privacy rights also makes no sense unless you consider the pay day they expect from suing companies who were patriotic in cooperating with the government's attempt to stop the next attacks. They have tried to justify these cases with by appealing to the paranoid who think the government is interested in their conversations. If they are not communicating with the enemy they should have no concerns and if they are they should have no expectations of privacy.

Obama's moral vanity

Bill Kristol:

Last October, a reporter asked Barack Obama why he had stopped wearing the American flag lapel pin that he, like many other public officials, had been sporting since soon after Sept. 11. Obama could have responded that his new-found fashion minimalism was no big deal. What matters, obviously, is what you believe and do, not what you wear.

But Obama chose to present his flag-pin removal as a principled gesture. “You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin. Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.”
Leave aside the claim that “speaking out on issues” constitutes true patriotism. What’s striking is that Obama couldn’t resist a grandiose explanation. Obama’s unnecessary and imprudent statement impugns the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose to wear a flag pin. But moral vanity prevailed. He wanted to explain that he was too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest.
Fast forward to last Monday in Wisconsin. Michelle Obama, in the course of a stump speech, remarked, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”
Michelle Obama’s adult life goes back to the mid-1980s. Can it really be the case that nothing the U.S. achieved since then has made her proud? Apparently. For, as she said later in the same appearance: “Life for regular folks has gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, through Republican and Democratic administrations. It hasn’t gotten much better.”
Now in almost every empirical respect, American lives have in fact gotten better over the last quarter-century. And most Americans — and most Democrats — don’t think those years were one vast wasteland. So Barack Obama hastened to clarify his wife’s remarks. “What she meant was, this is the first time that she’s been proud of the politics of America,” he said, “because she’s pretty cynical about the political process, and with good reason, and she’s not alone.” Later in the week, Michelle Obama further explained, “What I was clearly talking about was that I’m proud of how Americans are engaging in the political process.”
But that clearly isn’t what she was talking about. For as she had argued in the Wisconsin speech, America’s illness goes far beyond a flawed political process: “Barack knows that at some level there’s a hole in our souls.” This was a variation of language she had used earlier on the campaign trail: “Barack Obama is the only person in this race who understands that, that before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”
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It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

At the end of the column is a note that "Paul Krugman is off today." for many of us he is off even when he is there.

But, Bill Kristol is not only there, he is on today.

There is a misplaced self righteousness in the Obama campaign that hints at his liberalism. Liberals have always thought they were the arbiters of morality. Indeed, they see most opposition to their objectives as immoral. Thus those who support defeating the enemy who is trying to destroy us are fighting and "immoral war." Those who patriotically support the mission of the troops and wear lapel flags to demonstrate that support are not as patriotic as those who oppose victory? This moral preening may be attractive to liberals, but it is a real turn off those of us who think victory is the most moral of choices.

A victory in Iraq will mean there will be fewer wars in the future. Losing will mean that our enemies will continue to mount insurgencies in hopes that Democrats will retreat again. The reason we are not challenged to conventional wars is that adversaries know they would be defeated. We need to make them reach teh same conclusion on insurgency warfare.

The 'secular messiah' vs. the 'co-president'

Washington Times:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton further upped her criticism of Sen. Barack Obama's soaring rhetoric by accusing him yesterday of posing as a secular messiah who will bring about paradise on Earth.
The rhetoric got more biting from the other side too, with the Illinois senator accusing the former first lady of presenting herself as if she were "co-president" from 1993 to 2001 while being disingenuous about taking credit for only some of the Clinton administration's achievements.
At an arena rally at the Rhode Island College Recreation Center, Mrs. Clinton drew big laughs and thunderous applause with an impassioned criticism of Mr. Obama's "misleading" campaign mailings, and she borrowed heavily from religious imagery and language.
"Now I could stand up here and say: Let's get everybody together. Let's get unified. The skies will open. The lights will come down. And you know the celestial choirs will be singing. And everyone we know will do the right thing. And the world will be perfect," Mrs. Clinton said.
"Maybe I've just lived a little too long," she said, adding that those years of experience have left her with "no illusions" about how difficult the next president's job will be. "We are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear."
Mr. Obama pushed back, agreeing during a rally in Toledo, Ohio, that a president cannot wish away special interest power, but he said "it doesn't help" if you are taking millions of dollars from lobbyists as Mrs. Clinton has.
"They definitely won't go away then," he said.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Obama held a town-hall forum at a wallboard manufacturing plant in Lorrain, Ohio, and said his criticism of her position on the North American Free Trade Agreement is fair because she includes her time as first lady for eight years as part of her claim to "35 years of experience."
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Obama's criticism of NAFTA is pandering to union bosses and distorting the reality of the results of NAFTA. The fact is that unemployment is lower now than it was before NAFTA and employee incomes are up. Those results do not suggest the problem he is complaining about.

Donald Lambro points out how the US has benefited from these trade agreements with hard numbers on the growing export market.

That said, they have pretty well nailed each others campaign strategies.

Gramm softens the anger against McCain

The atmosphere was tense when former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm made a guest appearance at a closed-door meeting of House Republicans.
Just a few days before, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a fellow Texan and a fellow conservative, had denounced Gramm's close friend John McCain before the same audience and said a McCain candidacy would be disastrous for the GOP.

Gramm tried to quell the insurrection by pointing out, in his Georgia-Texas drawl, that he was not in lock step with McCain. "I didn't agree with the guy on campaign finance reform," said Gramm. "I don't agree with him on global warming.

"But on the things that are important to us, he's with us," said Gramm, who then launched into a litany of McCain's conservative positions on issues such as spending, defense, free trade, abortion and judges.

Gramm's soliloquy changed the mood in the room, according to several who were there. And it's just one example of the mostly behind-the-scenes work the Texas GOP elder statesman has been doing for his longtime friend and political colleague.
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Who gave McCain advice on his campaign's budget when he was broke and counted out by nearly every pundit in America?

Phil Gramm.

When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney aggressively courted the GOP's influential economic conservative wing, who was there to help McCain craft a tax-cutting, pork-busting agenda that would appeal to Wall Street and Main Street conservatives alike?

Phil Gramm.

And when the economy, a weak link for McCain, became the dominant issue in the campaign, who did he turn to for tips on humanizing the debate?

Yup, Phil Gramm.
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There is more. Conservatives trust Phil Gramm more than they trust McCain and that is why he has been so important for the McCain campaign. My favorite Phil Gramm moment came in the debate over Hillary's health care proposal when Michael Kingsley asked him if he wanted to be responsible for killing the health care bill. Gramm response was classic. "I will wear it like a badge of honor." Kingsley was expecting spin and excuses and got an honest answer which left him speechless.

Defeating enemy in Vietnam while media loses war

Arthur Herman:

CRITICS of the war in Iraq like to claim they "oppose the mission" but "support the troops." But the experience of Vietnam shows that turning our backs on the mission always means turning our backs on the courage of those who fought for that mission, and what they achieved through their skill and sacrifice.
Consider the battle that ended 40 years ago today, when US Marines and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops retook the Imperial Palace at Hue, South Vietnam's third largest city, from Communist forces after a 27-day siege.
The fight for Hue tested the Marines in Vietnam as never before - and still offers vital lessons as we contemplate wars present and future.
Hue demonstrated how the media could distort American courage and success into a narrative of stalemate and defeat, with tragic political consequences. It also revealed how that narrative cheated US servicemen of the recognition they deserved for their skill and valor.
Aside from those who served there, few now know what the Marines accomplished at Hue. After 40 years, it's time to set the record straight.
The communist attack on the city was part of North Vietnam's 1968 Tet offensive. Viet Cong units had infiltrated the city dressed as ordinary civilians and after midnight on Jan. 30, 1968, they seized key strongpoints. Five thousand North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops also swarmed down on the city.
There were no American units in or near Hue, and half of South Vietnamese troops were off duty because of the declared Tet cease-fire. The first inkling Americans had that the war had come to Hue was when a NVA rocket blew up a jeep outside Marine Maj. Frank Breth's window in the American command compound - which would be at the center of fierce fighting for the next six days.
Breth and others in the compound managed to beat off the initial attacks. Reinforcements arrived only piecemeal, company by company, starting with Company A of 1st Battalion, 1st Marines under Capt. Gordon Batcheller.
Beyond their limited numbers, the Marines were hampered by bone-chilling cold weather and rain that limited visibility and air support. And Hue's historic citadel and charming narrow streets, however charming to tourists, proved a nightmare for the men who had to fight for them.
Above all, the Marines suffered from strict rules of engagement that excluded the use of heavy artillery and air strikes within the bounds of the historic city until the very end. Apart from a handful of tanks, Marines had to retake Hue with the weapons they could carry on their backs.
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The Marines had to learn on the job how to charge a house with hand grenades, then douse it room by room with M-16 fire. They discovered how a 106 mm. recoilless rifle could blow a hole through a reinforced wall, so they could storm in under cover of the dust and smoke of the backblast.
Sgt. Alfredo Gonzalez typified the Marines at Hue. Just 21, he took command of A Company when its CO was wounded. For five days, he led his men with the skill and determination that earned him the battle's only Medal of Honor - posthumously.
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Though outnumbered from start to finish, the Marines cleared the enemy from the southern and eastern sectors of Hue by Feb. 11. Then they relieved exhausted South Vietnamese troops to retake the city's historic citadel.
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The city was declared secure after 147 Americans had been killed in action and 857 wounded, and more than 5,000 enemy had died.
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But Americans at home learned nothing about it. The media was so set on painting Tet as a US defeat that they largely ignored how the Marines at Hue had achieved a stupendous victory. They also ignored the discovery of bodies of 5,000 civilians who'd been ruthlessly murdered by Viet Cong death squads: teachers, doctors, nurses, businessmen, students.
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To many in the media still ignore the wickedness of the enemy and the heroic efforts of our troops. It is still happening in Iraq where to often the US media has played along with the enemy's PR script blaming the US for the wickedness of the enemy. At best they use the passive voice to describe the enemy's mass murder of non combatants. At their worse they blame the US for not stopping the enemy's war crimes, which they never describe as war crimes. In fact enemy war crimes is not a subject of much interest to the US media. While violations of the Geneva conventions are a routine aspect of the enemy's way of fighting, it is never mentioned in stories about their attacks.

Flip-flop wars between Hillary and Obama

Last week's Democratic debate in Austin had been underway for less than half an hour when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign zipped an e-mail to reporters headlined "Obama flip-flop on Cuba." The message noted that Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) had backtracked on earlier calls for normalizing relations with Havana, now making such a step contingent on progress toward democracy.

The Obama camp struck back minutes later with a message pointing out that Clinton (N.Y.) had changed her position on immigration. She was now calling for legislation giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship to be introduced within 100 days of her inauguration -- after earlier refusing to make such a commitment.

Charges of flip-flopping have become routine as the Democratic nominating contest heads to a crucial series of primaries and caucuses on March 4 in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island. While Obama and Clinton have largely succeeded in escaping the flip-flopper label that was pinned on Republican candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, they have provided each other with plenty of ammunition for accusations of inconsistency and pandering to the voters.

A review of the two candidates' records shows that both senators have shifted positions on numerous issues as the competition for votes has become more intense. In some cases, the shifts have been subtle, a change of emphasis rather than an obvious reversal. But on other issues, both candidates are saying things that are quite different from their previous positions.
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The article cites many examples of the "evolving" positions on various issues. This is what happens when your only core belief is electoral viability. You want hear either of these candidates say they would rather lose and election than lose a war. In fact they argue mainly over how fast to lose the war in Iraq. They flip flop because each new focus group and each new poll redefines their "core" beliefs.

Obama's "change" won't bring Americans together

Stuart Rothenberg:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) continues to promise change and stress his ability to unite Americans. It’s a feel-good campaign built on soaring rhetoric and good intentions.
Pardon me if all of the fawning from the national media, and the endorsements from Caroline Kennedy and Garrison Keillor, leave me less than convinced that he can bridge the deep divide that separates Americans.

Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq won’t bring Americans together. Nor will raising taxes on the affluent or enhancing the power of organized labor to recruit more members. Even a stem-cell research bill won’t bring Americans together, though a clear majority surely supports it.
In politics, the devil is always in the details, and except in rare cases, Obama has either avoided them or, more importantly, failed to note the obvious contradictions in his message and his record.

Yes, Obama is a wonderful speaker, and his calls for change obviously resonate with many Americans. With seven out of 10 Americans agreeing that the country is headed off on the wrong track, it isn’t surprising that every candidate has talked change. No one has promised a third Bush term.

The question, of course, is what kind of change? Does Obama want to find common ground between Democrats and Republicans? Will he push issues and alternatives only with a national consensus? Or is “change” simply a value-neutral word for liberalism?

In the spring of 2005, 14 Senators tried to make Washington run more smoothly by signing an agreement for the 109th Congress that had the effect of killing Democratic plans to filibuster President Bush’s appointees to the appellate bench and eliminating a GOP strategy that would disallow filibusters of judicial appointments.

Barack Obama, who talks about changing the tone in Washington, didn’t join that “Gang of 14.”

Part of the problem with Obama’s message — and part of the reason it has so far been successful in his White House bid — is that different people read different things into his message of hope and change.

During an interview on a Washington, D.C., radio station the morning of the Potomac primary, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) talked about why he is drawn to Obama’s message of change. One didn’t need to read very hard between the lines to see that Kennedy thinks “change” means a dramatically more liberal agenda.
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If Obama satisfies Kennedy and the Democratic Party’s most liberal constituencies, it’s unlikely that he is going to bring the country together. And if Obama does truly take steps to find a middle ground between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, he certainly will disappoint his party’s base.

The reality is that half of the country leans Democratic and half leans Republican. Yes, there are some issues on which many Americans agree, but if Obama limits himself to those, he’ll have a thin agenda.

Instead, Obama is likely to strike out in a different direction from Bush. And if he thinks his communication skills alone will bring along the whole country (as he seems to), he is deluding himself. America is divided because Americans have very different views.
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When he was asked by Leon Harris how he reconciles his support for the D.C. gun ban, which was declared unconstitutional by a federal court last year and which bars all handguns not registered before 1976, with his statement that he has “no intention of taking away folks’ guns,” Obama launched into a confusing explanation of “conflicting traditions in this country.”

He ended his monologue by saying, “We can have a reasonable, thoughtful gun control measure that I think respects the Second Amendment and people’s traditions.” But the D.C. gun ban is based on the premise that the Second Amendment doesn’t give individuals the right to own a gun.
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The fact is that Obama is an extreme liberal camouflaged by his rhetoric into a vessel of many peoples hopes. Those are hopes that he can never realize. The question is whether the voters will realize that before election day are be disappointed by him if he is elected.

Katrina Texans favor Obama

In a cramped guard booth on the edge of a community of luxury townhouses, the sense of helplessness that has become so familiar to Gregory Sam since Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from his home town of New Orleans can become all-consuming.

"I'm struggling," said Sam, 29, a college graduate who took an $8-an-hour post as a security guard after more than 20 job interviews led to nothing. "I feel like I'm isolated in the country somewhere . . . in a time warp."

For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the hurricane and its floodwaters left New Orleans devastated in 2005, powerlessness has been a constant theme, exacerbated by their reliance on goodwill and the government for help in starting over again. Angry at the Bush administration for failing them both before and after Katrina, many view the March 4 Democratic presidential primary as a chance to exert some control over their futures.

"The big thing is rebuilding," said Martin Jones, an evangelical pastor who lost his home and church on the edge of the French Quarter and has settled in Houston. His former parishioners, Jones said, "are looking for a solution, for restoration. People are looking for some semblance of life again. How are [these candidates] going to benefit the folk who lived there?"
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It is easy to understand why these people are struggling. They are still doing the things that made them poor to begin with like supporting Democrats. They were voting for Democrats in New Orleans even though they never were able to pull that city out of the mire of poverty and corruption. One of the reasons they were able to find shelter in Houston is because Texas has a Republican governor and Harris County is run by Republicans. While Houston has a Democrat mayor, he runs the city like a Republican. A vote for Obama is a vote for continued dependency by a group that needs to take responsibility for their circumstances and quit waiting for someone else to bail them out.

Following Obama to where?

Melanie Scarborough:

One can only hope that the majority of Barack Obama’s supporters are not as inane as actress Susan Sarandon, who announced last week that she supports Obama for president and “can’t wait to see what he stands for.”
No one need be mystified. On his Web site, Obama details precisely where he stands on issues from Iraq to infant education. (Yes, infant education. Never underestimate a leftist’s ingenuity in finding ways to spend your money.)
Yet the surprising — and somewhat disappointing — conclusion after reading through his proposals is that Obama suggests very little real change, calling mostly for the expansion of existing programs.
In person, Obama is eloquent and dazzling. In writing, he sounds like the candidate for class president pledging no more homework and free pizza. Among the senator’s fantastic promises:
» “Obama will make college affordable for all Americans.”
» “Obama will quadruple Early Head Start and increase Head Start funding. Obama will also provide affordable and high-quality child care to ease the burden on working families.
» “Obama will double funding for after-school programs.
» “Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society.
» “Obama will create a fund to help people refinance their mortgages and provide comprehensive supports to innocent homeowners.
» “Obama will create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods.
» “Obama will create 20 Promise Neighborhoods in areas that have high levels of poverty and crime and low levels of student academic achievement … which provide a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth violence prevention efforts and after-school activities, to an entire neighborhood from birth to college.
» “He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find a safe haven.
» “Obama will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion.”
And you will have even less money to pay for all that and his other spending proposals because Obama’s plan to ensure the long-term solvency of Social Security is to raise taxes on overburdened workers.
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Inexplicably, Obama plans to meddle in minutiae, such as radio programming in Topeka (“An Obama presidency will promote greater coverage of local issues and better responsiveness by broadcasters to the communities they serve”), yet his proposals for homeland security are extraordinarily meager.
Obama only suggests requiring (1) chemical plants to beef up their security, (2) the tracking of spent nuclear fuel, (3) mandatory plans for evacuating special-needs populations during disasters, (4) plans for reuniting families after emergencies, (5) keeping our drinking water safe and (5) protecting the public from radioactive releases.
What about a plan to make sure terrorists don’t get into our country and booting out the ones already here?
Indeed, his plans for dealing with the rabid elements of humanity sound alarmingly naive. Consider his position on Iran: “Iran has sought nuclear weapons, supports militias inside Iraq and terror across the region, and its leaders threaten Israel and deny the Holocaust. … If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation.” Yeah, that’ll show ’em.
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No wonder he does not talk about this stuff with the voters. It should, however, come to their attention in GOP ads this fall. Maybe even some GOP leaning 527s will focus on Obana's plans to ruin America. He will need devastating tax increases and deficits to accomplish half this wish list. Those tax increases will stifle the economy and hurt job growth.

Anger over Gang of 14 follows McCain bid