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July 31, 2004

Keep It Up, Lt. Mike

Lt. Col. Mike Buck of Great Falls is an F-16 pilot assigned to the 186th Fighter Squadron at the 120th Fighter Wing Montana Air National Guard. He is assigned to the 332 Air Expeditionary Wing in Balad, Iraq. Here is what he has to say about the current situation in Iraq:

Counterinsurgency wars are challenging. If the people begin to identify more with the goals of the insurgents than the goals of their government, the insurgents usually win. I don't believe that this is likely to happen in Iraq, because it is clear that the enemy does not have the interests of the Iraqi people at heart. They are not fighting to free Iraqis from oppression; the purpose of the insurgents' campaign of sabotage and terror is to prevent the new Iraqi government, with help from the coalition, from establishing a republic of free citizens in Iraq...

Al-Zarqawi, who a few weeks ago boasted that he could "travel Iraq as freely as a guest," is not only running from the coalition, he is unwelcome by most Iraqis. The leaders of one Iraqi city have vowed that if he shows up in their town they will "do what the coalition has thus far been unable to do - kill him."

Suggestions that the interim Iraqi government is only a puppet of the United States are belied by the active participation of Iraqi citizens in its activities. Recently, 1,000 delegates from around Iraq met with the purpose of electing 100 representatives to their version of our Senate. This was done despite insurgent threats against these delegates...

For some time we discussed things that only pilots care about: stall speeds, aerobatic maneuvers (which he loved) and some of his more harrowing flights. He made quite a point of contrasting conditions "before 1991" (before Operation Desert Storm) with those after 1991. After 1991, life as an Iraqi fighter pilot became difficult. He had to try to get by on almost no pay ($75 dollars per month).

"I could not buy car, I could not buy house after 1991 - only food," he said. When he complained that he couldn't get by on that pay, his commander simply told him he should be satisfied with knowing that he was part of Iraq's defense. He watched friends die who were ordered to fly aircraft that were not safe because they could not be properly maintained. Some of these aircraft had ejection seats that failed to work. All this because Saddam refused to comply with the U.N. resolutions in order to have the sanctions lifted.

I finally asked him, "how do Iraqis really feel about the U.S. being here?"

"No one really liked president Saddam" he began. "When the U.S. made him go outside (away), everyone was very happy. But now there are thieves and terrorists everywhere, and no one feels safe. Thieves have RPG (rocket-propelled grenades) and AK-47. All I have is pistol."

I asked if he thought things would get better or worse. "Things are better now. Before war I make $75 a month. Now I make $350 a month. Now I can buy clothes for my family. It is good. It is just bad because of thieves." He added that the Iraqi government and police will have to be stronger to eradicate the insurgents. As we parted, I told him that the United States has no interest in taking anything from Iraq, and that we are here to help Iraqis be free and have a strong country. He smiled warmly and said, "I know. I know that is true. I am happy U.S. is here."

Update: This story about our own Camp Pendleton Marines receiving medals of honor is also a "must read:"

"Well," Skiles recalled, "the Armored Assault Vehicle had just stopped to let the media off when the first (assault rifle) rounds flew overhead. Then came the (rocket propelled grenades). There weren't a whole lot of stories filed that day because the reporters were face down in the dirt."

During the encounter, journalists often asked Skiles, 43, of San Juan Capistrano, for information for their reports about the fighting, but he thought they were missing something.

"I kept thinking: What about valor? Why weren't any of the reporters interested in the valor of our Marines?

"All anyone wants to write about is our dead and wounded," he said, thumbing through military papers that included nominations for Silver and Bronze stars.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:10 PM | Comments (0) |

July 30, 2004

Give It a Rest

The most important aspect of the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani? The timing:

WASHINGTON: The timing of the announcement by Pakistan of the arrest of the al Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, coincide as it did with the big night of the Democratic party convention, is raising a few eyebrows here.

President Pervez Musharraf said Friday that the arrest was made on Sunday. Why the information was held back for five days he did not make clear.

Typical of the speculation underway is the comment posted on one Internet website. “If this is what was offered in July, just wait for November, the presidential election month.” However, the announcement of the arrest had no effect whatever on the concluding day of the Democratic convention in Boston where John Kerry accepted the nomination of his party.

Didn't we already cover this?

Posted by bubba138 at 06:32 PM | Comments (0) |

Why Bush Must Win

Ed Koch has his priorities straight:

I do not agree with President Bush on a single major domestic issue, but in my view, those issues pale in comparison with the threat of international terrorism. Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the evil poster boys of mass murder, are revered and supported by millions of Muslims throughout the world. The stated goal of al-Qaeda and its supporters is to kill or convert every infidel, and that means Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and everyone else who will not accept Islam's supremacy.

If John Kerry were to win this presidential election, would he stand up to terrorism to the same extent as George Bush? I don't think so. Regrettably, my party, the Democratic party, now has a strong radical left wing whose members often dominate the party primaries. Those same left-wing radicals have an anti-Israel philosophy, reviling that democratic state which shares the values held by a majority of Americans.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) |

Not Blood Brothers

Kerry likes towing around his "Band of Brothers" to show everyone how much support he gets from Vietnam vets. But what he doesn't want anyone to see, and what the mainstrem press doesn't want to show you, is the much larger band of brothers that are opposed to him:

"He's a phony and he's a traitor," said Vietnam veteran Rich Burke, 66, of Boston. "He returned from Vietnam and testified in Congress that the military were baby killers and war criminals. He abandoned and left all of his comrades to put up with that sort of statement. He's no good."...

Even before Kerry's arrival in Boston with 13 veterans Wednesday, the Democrat had routinely enlisted some of his former comrades to boost his presidential campaign.

"They're in the minority," said Korean War veteran Richard Creccr, 70, of Brighton, Mass. "These are the veterans right here. We're the ones who count. We'll be the ones voting. Let's hope he doesn't make it, but in this country, you never know."...

"We know he's a phony," Booth said. "You don't get two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star in 21 days. You don't do it, no way. I was at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] for 18 months. I got one Purple Heart. I lost an eye, part of my jaw and got hit in the arm. This guy's got three scratches and he's making a big deal out of it. It doesn't seem right."

Posted by bubba138 at 04:31 PM | Comments (0) |

Finish the Job

We didn't do it the first time. Leaving the job incomplete a second time is unacceptable:

Fifty-one percent (51%) of American voters say that making sure Iraq becomes "a peaceful nation enjoying freedom and democracy" is more important than bringing home American soldiers right away.

A Rasmussen Reports survey also found that 39% believe bringing home the troops as soon as possible in more important.

That's a twelve point spread for the math majors. Twelve points is a landslide. People have a firm opinion about who is committed to to get the job done:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of all voters think that John Kerry believes bringing home the troops is more important. Just 29% think Kerry places a higher priority on insuring a successful conclusion in Iraq.

Eighty-three percent (83%) believe Bush places a higher priority on finishing the mission. Just 8% believe Bush is more interested in bringing home the troops as soon as possible.

This, brothers and sisters, will translate into votes.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:17 PM | Comments (0) |

Get In Shape

It takes discipline and consistency, but you can do it.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:05 PM | Comments (0) |

Will Anyone Really Miss It?

Just when the Feminists thought they were winning the culture wars, this happens:

The Miss America pageant is pulling the plug on its talent competition, eliminating the amateurish two-minute routines that have come to feature cheesy stunts such as tractor driving and trampoline jumping.

Last year, an all-time low 10.3 million viewers tuned in, marking a steady decline over the last few years.

I seriously don't think this change will make that much of a difference in the ratings. Like it or not, our culture has changed. We value women for more than beauty alone. But that doesn't mean one should delude oneself about the worthless "talent" competition, either:

Pageant loyalists don't like the changes.

"They're eliminating one of the core values of the Miss America competition," said former CEO Leonard Horn.

Uh huh. There has always been only one core value: $$$

Posted by bubba138 at 03:00 PM | Comments (0) |

Courting the Hispanic Vote

In this and every election in the future, the Hispanic vote will be more important than the last. The Hispanic population is the fastest growing minority in the nation, and could very well outnumber anglos in the next twenty years. Needless to say, both sides of the campaign are doing their best to pursue votes from this population. Trying to connect is one thing, hitting on target is another:

One Spanish-language ad unveiled last week by Democratic nominee John F. Kerry focuses on immigration, promising a reform proposal in his first 100 days as president. No doubt this is a message targeted at the entire Latino community. But among registered Latino voters, immigration has traditionally been a less relevant issue. In the Pew/Kaiser poll, it ranked last among 11 other issues. Education and jobs ranked one and two.

President Bush's campaign, meanwhile, has been courting Hispanic voters by criticizing Kerry for his views on U.S. policy affecting Latin America. Yet for eight of 10 registered Latino voters, such issues are less important than domestic ones. Latin America is, as you would suspect, more interesting to Latinos who cannot vote here.

California is home to one of the largest bloc of Hispanics in the nation. At 52 electoral votes, the candidate who wins California wins the biggest electoral prize in the nation. Kerry must have California to win. If Bush wins California, the election is an easy landslide.

Hispanics are pro-education. That's an advantage for Democrats. They are also pro-life, an advantage for Republicans. They are strongly bound to their community, which makes them pro-social services, another plus for Democrats. However, they have strong family values which say same-sex marriage is wrong, a Republican position.

Regardless of which side of the fence Hispanics fall on, they have one thing in common. As a group, they do not turn out at the polling place. Conventional political wisdom and punditry has written California off to Kerry, but a strong Republican get-out-the-vote push in the Hispanic community could completely turn the tables.

Update: Joe Rodriguez wasn't impressed with the Democrat's Latino line-up, and doesn't expect much different from the Republicans:

The Democrats definitely marginalized Latino politicians this year. But should we worry? Probably not.

The Latino vote must be solid in order to win the attention of the candidates. It won't happen this year. Liberal, pro-Democrat Latino voters on the West Coast and Northeast will cancel out conservative, pro-Republican Hispanics in Texas and Florida...

And something tells me the Latino lineup at the Republican convention won't be any better.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:31 PM | Comments (0) |

The Guy Who Nabbed Saddam

BlackFive has the goods on the soldier who pulled Hussein out of his spidey-hole:

In Arabic Samir said he continued to pursuade Saddam to come out. He was about to come face to face with the tyrant who killed his loved ones. Saddam was the reason he fled Iraq in 1991 and eventually moved to St. Louis.

Samir says, "I was like, 'I got him.'" We all reached him and pulled him out. And we say Saddam Hussein he looks really old. He looks disgusting." There was also anger. "You want to beat the crap out of him. He destroyed millions in Iraq. I'm one. I left my family 13 years ago because of him."

Saddam couldn't fight back, but he did speak out. "He called me a spy. He called me a traitor. I had to punch him in face. They had to hold me back. I got so angry I almost lost my mind. I didn't know what to do. Choke him to death. That's really not good enough."

Hat tip: Drew

Posted by bubba138 at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) |

July 29, 2004

The Place to Be

Taranto found the real party:

Late last night, we made our way to Charlestown, a part of Boston so obscure that our taxi driver got lost. After he stopped twice to ask directions, we finally found our destination, a Greek restaurant that was the site of the big blogger party. We had no idea this would be such a hot ticket. Granted, it wasn't the Creative Coalition's star-studded bash (we didn't even bother trying to get into that one), but still, we were initially turned back at the door--a clerical error apparently had kept us off the list--and we had to plead our case.

I still haven't received my blogger invitation from the RNC for New York. I'm sure it must be in the mail, though.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) |

Looking Good

Posted by bubba138 at 02:37 PM | Comments (0) |

Better Get A Bigger Hat

"The lies I tell are thiiiis big!"

There were plenty of locals in Bush's adopted hometown on hand to lend support to their famous neighbour, who has been vacationing at his Crawford ranch for several days but has made no public appearances.

Carol Bernhard and several friends came from Austin and held a huge sign proclaiming, "This is Bush Country." She said she didn't plan to see the movie: "I'm not going to give that traitor any of my money."

I think the President missed a great opportunity here. He could have showed up in town and held his own mini-convention with 10 to 25 thousand of his closest friends and totally taken the wind out of the sails of this story. It is time the Republicans take a page out of the ProtestWarrior playbook and start countering the tin-foil hat crowd.

Update: This is classic:

On Wednesday morning, an area resident piled 20 large bags of cow manure outside the Crawford schoolhouse where the national media works when the president is in town. Atop the pile was a sign comparing the contents of the bags to Moore's movie.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) |

Not Impressed

Edwards fan David Corn wasn't impressed:

It's difficult to point to specific sentences or moments to support this review. But among journalists in the hall, the consensus was that Edwards' acceptance speech lacked oomph. Perhaps it played better on television, some said. Perhaps he was told to tone it down so he would not outshine Kerry, a few others suggested. (I doubt that.) He looked great (as he usually does), he received an enthusiastic response from the delegates, but he did not nail it.

Side note, Corn has finally been seduced by corporate schemes:

By financing these free-booze-and-food get-togethers, corporations earn good will with the Dems, and their lobbyists and executives get the chance to mingle with members of Congress and congressional staffers. It's the usual institutional sleaziness that few seem to fret about...

But I've now decided corporate underwriting of the convention is fine by me. Why? Three nights ago, I was invited to a reception for the Hispanic Caucus of the House of Representatives. It was held at a small club. And on stage was Los Lobos, one of the best bands in America. I ended up literally standing next to band member David Hidalgo, as the group powered its way through a set of songs in English and Spanish, including, inevitably, its take on "La Bamba." ... And as I was enjoying myself immensely--imbibing free drinks and jiggling to the music--I thought, "Thank you, American Gas Association, proud sponsor of the reception for the Hispanic Caucus honoring Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico." Next time the AGA calls me and wants a favor, they've got it.

One more falls to the corporate machine (insert evil, maniacal laugh here). I wonder if Michael Moore was there?

Posted by bubba138 at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) |

Democrats and Deity

Democrats, gathered in Boston for their quadrennial national convention, are making what they say is an effort to reclaim the language of faith and to reach out to religious voters. Their drive comes as political observers talk of a "God Gap," as the Bush campaign is aggressively reaching out to church members, and as polls show the more often a voter goes to church, the more likely one is to vote Republican.

I think this is bound to cause problems for the Democrats.

First off, the Democrats are looking at faith from the wrong direction. They see the correlation between Republicans and their faith, but what they do not realize and refuse to admit is that the faithful choose to be Republican out of religious conviction. Those who attend church on a regular basis are constantly reminded that God tells us to "Be holy, as I am holy." Being holy means, among other things, defending the rights of the oppressed, such as unborn babies. It means honoring God above all things. It means putting God's priorities, and His understanding of right and wrong above our own. It means championing His causes when the society and culture around us oppose Him. It means agreeing with God and calling recognizing sin for what it is -- including the homosexual lifestyle.

The Democrat party is opposed to these things. They fight against preserving unborn life. To them, the privileges of the mother and her choice of how she plans her own life is more important than the right of a child, who cannot defend itself, to simply live at all. The party is about promoting homosexuality. Instead of being content with merely tolerating it, they have taken on the mission to indoctrinate society into accepting it as a normal lifestyle. The Democrat party is opposed to free expression of faith in the public square. The party is, at its core, completely opposed to faith.

The good news is that they are seeing that faith is an important aspect of American culture and of the majority of Americans. The bad news is that their response is to see people of faith as nothing more than a target population:

The Kerry campaign is signing up laypeople and clergy on a special section of its website for "people of faith," and is planning to send e-mails and host conference calls aimed at religious supporters of the campaign. The campaign is also proposing to organize faith-inspired service projects, and is marketing "People of Faith for Kerry" bumper stickers, buttons, and T-shirts.

In other words, they've got it backwards. What they desire, is to inject Democrat values into the church.

Among those urging the intensified outreach to the religious is former White House press secretary Mike McCurry, who has become increasingly involved in the politics of his own denomination, the United Methodist Church.

What God wants is for us to incorporate His values into our lives and our thinking.

The Republican party is comfortable with people whose values are informed by their faith, infact it embraces that. Faith-based values are antithetical to the Democrat party

McCurry said. "We need to be more comfortable talking about the way our faith life informs the work we do on issues . . . That runs a little bit different from the culture of our party."

Janeen Garafolo was on Hannity's radio show yesterday. She expressed that it makes her feel very uncomfortable when any politician expresses that his or her choices are divinely guided. People of faith recognize divine guidence as a natural occurance. On the whole Democrats view it as dementia. Until that view is reconciled, the Democrat party's "big tent" will feel uncomfortably small to people of faith.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:07 AM | Comments (0) |

Going Green

Even if you have only a little bit of geek in you, you probably have some old, useless technology hanging around the house or garage. Here's one way to get rid of it -- and it is good for the environment:

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. this week announced free programs to encourage U.S. consumers to recycle toxics-filled computers and electronics.

Hewlett-Packard has teamed with retailer Office Depot to offer free recycling for any make of computers, monitors, digital cameras, fax machines, cell phones and other electronics.

Consumers can drop off electronics at any Office Depot store between July 18 and Labor Day. The service is limited to one computer system or other electronic device per customer per day. The free, in-store recycling is the first program of its kind in the United States.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:57 AM | Comments (0) |

July 28, 2004

Dems and Repubs Agree

Iraq is Flypaper:

John Kerry's new senior adviser on national security issues, Susan Rice, said Wednesday that Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists and possibly their "next new proving ground."

Somehow, to Democrats, it is bad that the terrorists are more concerned with Iraq than the U.S. I'm sure there is logic in there somewhere, but I am at a loss to find it.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:40 PM | Comments (0) |

Big Tent Too Small

The Democrats are the party of inclusion, except when they aren't:

A recent poll showed that 43 percent of Democrats oppose most or all abortions. With this kind of support, "we want respectful inclusion" in the party leadership, Ms. Day said.

Being pro-life is a winning position for Democrats and can help rebuild the Democratic majority in the House, she added. Pro-life seats are held by Republicans, "and those seats are ours for the taking."

However, when it comes to the Democratic leadership and a divergent position on abortion, "there's no room at the inn," said Raymond Flynn, ambassador to Vatican, former mayor of Boston...

Pro-life leaders were sobered by news that feminist leaders had said this week that they would expect a Kerry administration to appoint three or more "pro-choice" justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There shouldn't be a litmus test on justices, Mr. Flynn said. The demand shows the "single-issuedness" of the feminists, Ms. Crossed said.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) |

Cell Phone Directory

I've been a Verizon Wireless customer since it was known as Airtouch. I haven't always liked their coverage -- there are parts of my home town that still get cut off. ["Can you hear me now?", No.] But, I couldn't be happier to be their customer than I am now:

Starting early next year, you'll be able to call directory assistance to get a mobile number...

Such concerns prompted Verizon Wireless, the No. 1 wireless company, to keep its 40 million subscribers out of the directory.

"We believe customers come to us with the expectation of privacy, and it's too early in the process to understand what releasing customer numbers to a database will mean," says Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) |

Dean's Southern Wisdom

Howard Dean: "Why in the world would South Carolina vote for another Republican? I have no idea."

Exactly.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) |

Dusk Over the House of Gore

This is what it looks like when a political life comes to an end:

When Gore finishes, Tipper comes onstage. They reenact The Kiss from the 2000 convention, and then exit, stage right. Once upon a time, Al Gore was a Democratic heavy. Defeated, he became a fiery heretic. Defanged, he's now nothing more than a walking parable. Somewhere in a swing state, John Kerry is smiling. Mission accomplished.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) |

Moore: Republicans are "Hate-riots"

Moore spin:

"Most Americans, in their heart, are liberal and progressive. It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate, they exist in the politics of hate, they don't believe two consenting adults should have the right to be in love and share their lives together and be legally protected by the state," Moore said to applause.

"They are not patriots; they are hate-triots, and they believe in the politics of hate-triotism. Hate-triotism is where they stand, and patriotism is where real Americans stand. And that is the truth and that needs to be reported," Moore added.

<french-accent>And zee Democrats are all about zee love, no?</french-accent>

• HE PLAYED ON OUR FEARS!


• they send in their network of `rapid response' digital Brown Shirts


• these guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen


• The only thing we have to fear is four more years of George Bush


• Shove it


• What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States


• We now learn Saddam's torture chamber reopened under new management, U.S. management


• Did the training wheels fall off?

Posted by bubba138 at 09:04 AM | Comments (0) |

DNC Glue

Tony Blankley:

The result is a hatred of Mr. Bush by the party activists that has consumed their policy passions and convictions. They hate Mr. Bush more than they hate the Iraq war. Their great intellectual battle of the 2000s — whether they should stay in the Clinton center or go back to their liberal convictions — has been subsumed temporarily by their common hatred of Mr. Bush. Should the American voters succumb to poor judgment and elect Mr. Kerry, a united Democratic Party may face the plight of the son in the Nazi story of hate and meaning. Bush hate is the glue that holds the party together. If he leaves the scene, the party may quickly fall apart.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:21 AM | Comments (0) |

Bloggers Go For the Cash

ABC News has a relatively positive piece on bloggers who "make it", turning their blogging skills into cash:

A dot-com castoff, Cox said she was fired from one writing job and asked to leave two others before starting a blog of personal musings that included writing about the build-up to the Iraq war. Professionally, Cox was doing freelance writing when she was contacted in late 2003 by Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, who hired her to write Wonkette.

And that's not all she's getting paid for. Wonkette's notoriety led Cox to interview appearances on several cable news stations, and she was recently hired by MTV to do on-air news updates from the Democratic convention.

Rafat Ali, the 29-year-old author and publisher of the digital media blog Paidcontent.org, went from unemployed to self-employed through a Web log that started as a hobby.

In 2001, Ali was the managing editor of a New York-based Web magazine that covered Internet business issues. The site struggled after the dot-com bubble burst, and by early 2002 his job was gone and his $30,000 paycheck along with it.

Of course, ABC News didn't neglect the obligatory "blogs-are-dumb" paragraph:

Blogs are often littered with smarmy, even smutty postings devoid of any attempt at objectivity. Rumor and innuendo dominate the blogging world, and the prospect of condoning bloggers' right to report gossip in a venue as staid as political conventions has led some to label them unworthy.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:07 AM | Comments (0) |

Kerry and Iraq

Kerry: For/Against the war in Iraq. Just watch. Here's a snippet:

KERRY: "I would disagree with John McCain that it’s the actual weapons of mass destruction he may use against us, it’s what he may do in another invasion of Kuwait or in a miscalculation about the Kurds or a miscalculation about Iran or particularly Israel. Those are the things that - that I think present the greatest danger. He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat." (CBS’ "Face The Nation," 9/15/02)

KERRY: "George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him." (ABC News, Democrat Presidential Candidate Debate, Columbia, SC, 5/3/03)

KERRY: "And the fact is, in the resolution that we passed, we did not empower the President to do regime change." (NBC’s "Meet The Press," 8/31/03)

MSNBC’S CHRIS MATTHEWS: "Are you one of the anti-war candidates?" (MSNBC’s "Hardball," 1/6/04)

KERRY: "I am - Yeah." (MSNBC’s "Hardball," 1/6/04)

KERRY: "So clearly the allies may not like it, and I think that’s our great concern - where’s the backbone of Russia, where’s the backbone of France, where are they in expressing their condemnation of such clearly illegal activity, but in a sense, they’re now climbing into a box and they will have enormous difficulty not following up on this if there is not compliance by Iraq." (CNN’s "Crossfire," 11/12/97)

Posted by bubba138 at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) |

Jealous?

Who me? You bet.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:27 AM | Comments (0) |

Blogging the Con

The Hill on bloggers at the DemCon:

Matt Yglesias, one of several reporters writing for The American Prospect's blog, Tapped, is writing mainly about offbeat items. At the breakfast, he sent two items by text message to his editor in Washington about the large amounts of Heinz ketchup on the tables and the lengths Dean went to in avoiding a split infinitive in a sentence.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:17 AM | Comments (0) |

The Mainstream of the Democrat Party

Moore got a prime seat in the President's Box. I guess the Democrats don't care much about his slant on America or Americans:

"They are possibly the dumbest people on the planet… in thrall to conniving, thieving, smug p#%$ks...

We Americans suffer from an enforced ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing. National Geographic produced a survey which showed that 60 per cent of 18-25 year olds don't know where Great Britain is on a map. And 92 per cent of us don't own a passport"

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow - and they will win."

Moore said it last October when he spoke at the University of Michigan to discuss his new book, "Dude, Where's My Country?" While speaking about removing Bush from office, Moore said, "There is no terrorist threat in this country. This is a lie. This is the biggest lie we've been told."

Posted by bubba138 at 06:51 AM | Comments (0) |

One Busy Day

Yesterday was completely full. I barely had time to read anything let alone blog. That's what makes the blogosphere so cool: when one blog is slow there are plenty more to keep you updated.

Today is Wictory Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush 2004 campaign.

If you've already donated and volunteered for the Bush campaign, then talk to your friends and enlist them in this battle for America's very soul.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesdays simply by putting up a post like this one every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign. And do e-mail Poli-Pundit at wictory@blogsforbush.com so that he can add you to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which will be part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

Posted by bubba138 at 06:42 AM | Comments (0) |

July 26, 2004

Republicans Have More Fun

But they're not all blonde:

Nearly everybody in the greater Washington area agrees this is a fun place to live. But in a town where politics is a participatory sport, who has more fun, Democrats or Republicans?

By a narrow margin, Republicans are this area's fun bunch, according to a recent Washington Post survey.

Six in 10 Republicans said they were satisfied with the way they spent their weekends, compared with half of all Democrats. Meanwhile, a majority of Democrats said they wished they had more fun on weekends, a complaint expressed by fewer than half of all GOP partisans.

While the survey was just conducted in the Washington area, these results confirm earlier research that suggests that Democrats don't have as much fun as Republicans.

Hat Tip: Jim Miller

Posted by bubba138 at 02:58 PM | Comments (0) |

Shove-It Blog

Colin McNickle, the reporter who was told by Ter-AY-sa Heinz-Kerry to "shove it" coincidently started a DNC convention blog a couple of days ago.

Democrats have reacted so "civily" to his questioning of Mrs. Heinz-Kerry that the paper had to shut down comments. The comments had one too many uses of the f-word, I gather.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:13 PM | Comments (0) |

One Big Happy Family

Unity is the catch-phrase for the DNC convention:

• Despite the looming terrorism threat, the convention's message was relentlessly upbeat, underscoring the unity behind Kerry as the man Democrats hope will drive Bush from office.
• Democrats stress unity in Boston
• Much of Connecticut's convention delegation arrived Sunday, attending a welcome reception at the city's Museum of Fine Arts. All said they sensed unity behind U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. and singleness of purpose in desire to win back the White House.
• Across the spectrum of Democrats - from the far left of antiwar, antiglobalization activism to the more conservative, pro-business wing - party members are heading into their national convention with the strongest sense of unity in generations.
• The platform agreed to by Democrats, which will be adopted on Tuesday, underscored both Mr. Kerry's dominance over the party and the unity on display here.
• More than a dozen delegates and volunteers from congressional districts in Southwest Florida are bound for Beantown to strategize with fellow Democrats and celebrate a unity they acknowledge hasn't been with them for a while.
• And unlike past years, where the party tore itself apart in the nomination battle, Mr Kerry won the nod after a relatively bloodless slate of state contests that left the Democrats with an unusual degree of unity.
• Also buoying Democrats is their unity and Kerry's unprecedented fund-raising success, which has sharply reduced a customary Republican advantage.
• Delegates assemble in spirit of unity
• Unity was the word of the day. "There are no disputes among the candidates; there is unanimous support for Sen. Kerry, (and) there are few platform debates," Richardson said. The convention "has generated more volunteers and more enthusiasm than any convention we've ever had."

Question: If they have to constantly talk about it, do they really have it?

Update: Even Jimmy's getting into the "unity" act: "The 1980 convention was divided, and we never could put the Democratic Party back together. And since then, I don't think we've ever seen as united and determined and harmonious a party, and determined as the Democratic convention of this time."

Posted by bubba138 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) |

Democrats: At Least They Aren't Communists - Part II

But the socialists don't care:

The Democratic Socialists of America Political Action Committee (DSAPAC) released a statement today urging its members to work for the election of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

“Kerry was hardly the first choice of our members. Most supported Dennis Kucinich or Howard Dean in the Democratic primary elections and would be very critical of Senator Kerry’s voting record on trade issues, as well as his support for the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq; but the most important concern of our members now is to defeat Bush,” said Frank Llewellyn, the National Director of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with 5500 members and local organizations in most large cities. It is affiliated to the Socialist International, a federation of the world’s socialist, social democratic and labor parties.

O.K. so they're aren't exactly thrilled with Kerry, but they positively fawned over Dennis "Department of Peace" Kucinich, who just happens to be a Democrat.

This week our socialist friends (although gritting their teeth) will be holding hands with the Democrats and singing good 'ole folk songs.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) |

An New Vision for the Democrats

NY Times has an interesting (and LONG) piece on the direction of the Democrat party. This is a small part:

In fact, Rappaport was surprisingly downcast about the party's prospects, which, he said, would not be improved simply by winning back the White House. Though he sat and thought about it, he said he was unable to name a single Democratic leader in the years since Bill Clinton left Washington who he thought was articulating a compelling new direction for the party. "There is a growing realization among people who take very seriously the importance of progressive politics that the Democratic Party has kind of failed to create a vision for the country that is strongly resonant," he said. "And our numbers" -- meaning Democrats as a whole -- "are decreasing. Our political power has been diminishing, and it's become common knowledge that the conservative movement has established a very strong, long-term foundation, whereas we've basically allowed our foundation, if not to crumble, to at least fall into a state of disrepair. So there are a lot of people thinking, What can we do about this?"...

What seems all but certain is that the future of Democratic politics will more closely resemble MoveOn.org than it will resemble anything that happens on the convention floor in Boston. On Memorial Day, I spoke with Harold Ickes, who had been running the Media Fund, a 527 charged with airing anti-Bush ads in the period before this week's convention. ...As we talked about the influence that millionaires and independent groups will have in the years ahead, Ickes sounded more weary than excited, like a man who has accepted change in the family business without entirely embracing it.

"When you go out and talk to them, people are much more interested in something like MoveOn.org than in the Democratic Party," Ickes said. "It has cachet. There is no cachet in the Democratic Party.

"MoveOn raised a million dollars for a bunch of Texas state senators, man," he went on to say. "Plus their bake sale. If they continue with their cachet and really interest people and focus their people on candidates -- boy, that's a lot of leverage. No party can do that. And what the political ramifications of that are -- " Ickes's voice trailed off. He shrugged. "Who knows?"

Posted by bubba138 at 12:32 PM | Comments (0) |

I am a murderer and proud of it!

Some are actually bragging about it.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:21 AM | Comments (0) |

UPI Editor: Osama in Pakistan Army Hospital

India Times:

The document, from a high-level, but anonymous Pakistani source, also claims that Osama bin Laden has been receiving periodic dialysis in a military hospital in Peshawar, says Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-at-large of the news agency UPI.

''The imprints of every major act of international Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan, right from 9/11 - where virtually all the participants had trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistan,'' Borchgrave cites the confidential document as saying.

I don't know if it is a good idea to give this much weight. Arnaud de Borchgrave's recent piece on the decline of Aram/Muslim attitudes toward the U.S. was almost jubilant. Pakistan is denying they have given any treatment to bin Laden, blaming the report on "a figment of the writer's imagination."

Posted by bubba138 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) |

End of a Legend

Instapundit is now cat-blogging. Isn't that the official signal that a blog has jumped the shark? Bitten the dust? Taken a header? Hit the wall?

Posted by bubba138 at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) |

End of a Legend

Instapundit is now cat-blogging. Isn't that the official signal that a blog has jumped the shark? Bit the dust? Taken a header? Hit the wall?

Posted by bubba138 at 10:12 AM | Comments (0) |

Foreign Support For Kerry

Kerry's support from foreign leaders is popping up all over:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is waiting out the U.S. presidential election in the hopes that George W. Bush will be voted out of office, the head of Israel's military intelligence said.

One cause of the growing turmoil within the PA is a decision by Arafat to "sit and do nothing" until after the U.S. elections, military intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze'evi told cabinet ministers on Sunday.

"Arafat is now waiting for the month of November in the hope that President Bush will be defeated in the presidential election and turned out of his office," Ze'evi was quoted as saying.

Obviously, Arafat is a part of the "anybody but Bush" crowd. This tells me he is confident that Kerry will better serve his interests (as did Clinton and Carter).

Someone please tell me again why the Jewish vote goes predominately Democrat?

Posted by bubba138 at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) |

I'm a Kerry Supporter, But Don't Tell Anybody

Democratic Senate and House candidates are happy to love Kerry -- from afar:

Publicly, these candidates say they need to spend every possible minute campaigning at home. Privately, some acknowledge they do not want to hand their Republican opponents a ready-made campaign ad linking them to the Democratic Party's more liberal figures, such as Massachusetts Sens. Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy, who will loom large here.

In the eight Senate races seen as virtual tossups, the Democratic nominees or front-runners from North Carolina, Oklahoma and Alaska are skipping Boston altogether.

Rep. Chris John, the Democrats' top contender for a Senate seat in Louisiana -- and a "super delegate" by virtue of being a House member -- will be here Monday and Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota and Senate candidate Betty Castor of Florida will attend Monday through Wednesday, but not Thursday.

It should say something when the Senate party leader doesn't want to be around when the presidential candidate accepts the nomination.

Update: Welcome Instapundit->American Mind readers.

The "hit" of the above post is somewhat diminished by the Democrat's unity. They may be one big happy family, but at least they aren't communists.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) |

Kerry: I'm For/Against It

A former opponent sums up the Kerry strategy:

This year, with Bob Shrum again onboard, John Kerry will again run a shrewd campaign. He will have it both ways. As he moves to the center, he will run not against the Iraq war, but against this Iraq war. He'll attack, but he will always be careful to wave the flag as he does so. He will lament positions of the Christian right, but attend church without fail. He will stand for gun control, but remind voters—in appropriate states—that he is a bird hunter. He will, in other words, be pro-military—and against this war; pro-religion—and against the "extremists"; pro-gun control—and pro-guns. He will run knowing that Americans like to be for, as well as against, things.

Update: He's for/against cloning, too:

So, how do Senators Hatch/Feinstein/Kerry get off calling their legislation a "cloning ban"? They simply redefine the term "cloning" to give it a political meaning instead of a biologically accurate one. S. 303 defines the term "human cloning" to mean, "implanting or attempting to implant the product of nuclear transplantation [e.g., the cloned embryo] into a uterus or functional equivalent of a uterus." Presto-change-o: Cloning isn't SCNT anymore; it is now the act of implantation.

My mistake. That's not for/against, its nuance.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:49 AM | Comments (0) |

Who Needs Rove?

Posted by bubba138 at 08:15 AM | Comments (0) |

Chris Matthews: More Partisan Than Heinz Kerry

Shortly before John Kerry limp-wristed the Red Sox's hardball, Chris Matthews was lobbing softballs at his wife, Ter-AY-sa Heinz-Kerry. Quite surprizing was the blatant slant of Matthew's questioning:

Chris Matthews, host: If it was 9/11 and your husband were president of the United States; remember how you imagined, we all saw a bit of how the President behaved. He was in a school room, there was some hesitation and then they tried to protect him and then by two or three days later he seemed to be in charge; how do you think your husband would have behaved on 9/11?

Because, of course, you've been to see Michael Moore's film, right Mrs. Kerry? You buy into the tin-foil hat conspiracy theories, don't you. You agree with me that Bush isn't really in charge, that he's really only a front for Cheney-Halliburton-Big business, right?

Chris, PUH-LEEZE!

More surprizing was Mrs. Heinz answer:

Teresa Heinz Kerry: I think the President behaved correctly in terms of being quiet amidst stunning news like that. I mean, a classroom of kids— what can you do? It takes you a couple of minutes to digest what you’ve just heard. And then, he was not in his White House with all of his people, he was in a school in Florida. I know that there are all these people always available to the President— it must’ve been terrible. I mean, I don’t know that anybody would have done what they normally do perfectly and under those circumstances.

So "objective journalist" Chris Matthews shows himself to be a partisan hack, less in touch with reality than John Kerry's loopy lover. Hardball, indeed.

Update: Of course, Mrs. Heinz-Kerry is not always so cordial.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:47 AM | Comments (0) |

Nice Pitch

Kerry took a little side trip yesterday:

With the game presented nationally on ESPN, Mr. Kerry was showered with both cheers and boos as he strode to the mound, where he tossed the first pitch toward Will Pumyea, 23, a Massachusetts National Guard veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who wore fatigues. The ball bounced in front of the catcher.

"It's like his foreign policy," said Larry Restiano, who was at the game. "It hit the ground before it even reached home." Mr. Restiano and his wife, Debbie, were among those booing Mr. Kerry loudly.

One would think someone as "sporty" as Kerry would be able to get the ball to the plate. Bush does:

Bush, wearing a red Cardinals jacket, entered to loud cheers from the majority of fans, though not all of them. He threw a solid strike from the full distance of 60 feet, six (6) inches, to St. Louis catcher Mike Matheny, waved to the fans and headed up to watch some of the game from a suite.

"He threw it right there," Matheny said. "It was a nice pitch. He's got baseball in his blood, so I expected that."

He's done it more than once, too. Cheney's got a bit of pepper too:

Meanwhile, Cheney got a loud ovation when he walked onto the field. Standing in the grass in front of the mound, he threw a right-handed strike to crouching Reds catcher Jason LaRue.

Girlie man pitch not withstanding, this was a was a great political move for Kerry. He got a ton of free national exposure, in his home state, the day before the convention began, with his home team squaring off against the home team of the location of the RNC convention. Oh, and Saturn was aligned with Venus, too.

Update: Aaron Margolis noticed something I had missed:

In a rather strange irony of last night's "first wild pitch" of the game, was the catcher of the pitch, Massachusetts National Guardsman Will Pumyea. We are all aware that Kerry has questioned Bush's service in the national guard, I wonder if Will Pumyea is aware that John Kerry has likened National Guard service as essentially dodging military service

Posted by bubba138 at 07:14 AM | Comments (0) |

Good News Keeps Coming

"We are becoming hopeful day by day. We cannot develop our country, in which the fighting existed for 23 years, within two years. We had lots of problems in the past but they are being solved day by day."

Afghanistan - the media have moved one, the Afghanis fortunately haven't. And neither has Chrenkoff.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:47 AM | Comments (0) |

Moore Ado About Nothing

Michael Moore's latest hatefest may be setting box-office records for a documentary, but it isn't making much of a difference:

The survey found that "Fahrenheit" is drawing an overwhelmingly Democratic audience, and of the Republicans who have ventured to see it, few appear to be swayed...

Of the 1,529 registered voters surveyed in the poll, conducted nationwide July 17-21, 9% had seen Moore's film...

Seventy-nine percent of those who had seen "Fahrenheit" said the film would not change their November votes; 18% said it made them more likely to vote against Bush; and 3% said it bolstered their resolve to vote for him.

So less than one out of ten of registered voters have even taken the time to see this drivel, and even then it isn't changing minds.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:39 AM | Comments (0) |

Revenge of the Sith

The name of the next Star Wars movie has been released:

Next year's third and final installment of the "Star Wars" prequels will be called "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith," the film's producers said Saturday.

The name was unveiled Saturday for 6,500 comic-book fans at the 35th annual Comic-Con International in San Diego. Many in the audience jumped out of their seats, thunderously screaming in joy. Some even gave one another hugs.

I'm as much a Star Wars fan as the next guy, but isn't jumping for joy a bit much?

Posted by bubba138 at 06:19 AM | Comments (0) |

July 23, 2004

Show Me the Money

The big CA might be getting an energy rebate:

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, reacting to renewed anger about the 2000-01 energy crisis, indicated Thursday that it might order Enron Corp. to return more than five years' profit from its sales in the West.

The surprise warning, contained in an order that Enron forfeit $32.5 million in unjust profit from the crisis, held out the possibility that sanctions — and, potentially, refunds — could increase by many millions of dollars.

Arnold has repeatedly gone to put pressure on the Bush administration about this. It looks like it may have paid off.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) |

More Judicial Games

The Democrats continued playing games with judicial nominees yesterday. This time, the issue isn't the political views of the nominees, but that the Democrats are holding a grudge from the Clinton years:

Democrats made clear they are holding up the nominees because of how Republicans treated some of President Clinton's judicial appointments and the lack of consideration for Democratic senators' preferences.

Democrats say that in the 1990s Republicans refused to consider several of Mr. Clinton's nominees to the 6th Circuit, including the wife of a cousin of Sen. Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat. President Bush has since nominated his own picks to fill those seats.

With little prospect of getting any more judges approved, Republicans now are trying to force Democrats to filibuster as many as they can. They say voters will see Democrats as obstructionists, and that the issue will swing some voters in November's elections.

"It is the American people, I believe, who in a little more than 100 days will next vote on this issue," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican.

Its not likely that this will turn into a referendum at the voting box, but one can hope.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) |

Defense Bill Passed

Congress passed a new defense bill that increased spending by $416 billion. It had bi-partisan support, passing the House 410 to 12 and the Senate 96 to 0. As is his custom, John Kerry (and Edwards too)skipped this vote.

Are Kerry and Edwards for the bill? You bet they are. Except when they aren't. Whatever, not voting on it frees them to morph their opinion based upon to whom they are talking at the time.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:55 AM | Comments (0) |

9/11 Commission Mugged by Viacom

This speaks for itself:

"I think we were mugged by Viacom," Lehman told NRO in a phone interview on Thursday afternoon. "Because they changed the release date of the book and geared up 60 Minutes to launch his book to time them with his testimony and they edited his book to take out all of the criticisms of Clinton from his [original private] testimony. Because they wanted to make it a jihad against Bush."

Lehman says that Clarke's original testimony included "a searing indictment of some Clinton officials and Clinton policies." That was the Clarke, evenhanded in his criticisms of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, who Lehman and other Republican commissioners expected to show up at the public hearings. It was a surprise "that he would come out against Bush that way." Republicans were taken aback: "It caught us flat-footed, but not the Democrats."

Posted by bubba138 at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) |

July 22, 2004

Answer the Question, Senator

Tom Brokaw and Kerry:

"I didn't have a clue, not a clue," Kerry told NBC's Tom Brokaw in an interview last night. Asked whether Berger had told Kerry about the criminal inquiry, the senator repeated, "I didn't have a clue."

Did anyone notice that Kerry didn't answer the question? Technically, Berger could have told Kerry about the investigtion and Kerry could still not "have a clue."

Posted by bubba138 at 03:46 PM | Comments (0) |

Not the Only Thin Missing

The documents that interested Sandy Berger are not the only things missing:

Shortly after news broke that former Clinton administration National Security Advisor Samuel "Sandy" Berger was being investigated by the Justice Department for illegally removing highly classified documents from the National Archives, the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) removed its anti-terror plan from its web site.

Republicans have suggested that the information contained in the documents was used to formulate Kerry's policy, but are limited in proving those charges because the material is still classified. The sudden disappearance of the policy from the campaign web site that coincided with Berger's dismissal supports Republicans' contention that the purloined data formed the basis of at least part of the Democratic candidate's homeland security program.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) |

Does Anyone Remember?

Kerry saying,

Their race turning ever nastier, President Bush and John Kerry argued about taxes Wednesday while Kerry called Republican foes "the most crooked... lying group I've ever seen."

More crooked than Berger? Bigger liars than Joe Wilson?

Posted by bubba138 at 03:29 PM | Comments (0) |

The Chief Mystery

A snippet from the New York Times:

The chief mystery surrounding the mishandling of the documents is the motive. Republican leaders and the Bush-Cheney campaign have suggested that Mr. Berger sought to pass classified information to Mr. Kerry. Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, called on the Kerry campaign to provide "clear assurance to the American people that the Kerry campaign did not benefit from classified documents that were removed from the National Archives by one of their advisers, Sandy Berger, now subject to a criminal investigation."

I disagree. The chief mystery is why isn't Berger in jail right now? This has been under investigation for nine months. He has admitted to his actions, and although his lawyer has repeatedly lied about it over the last four days, he did stuff documents into his socks:

Guards at the National Archives told the FBI that Berger was observed stuffing his socks with handwritten notes about files he reviewed that were going to the Sept. 11 panel, the News said.

Since the news broke on Monday that Berger was the subject of a criminal investigation over the stolen docs, his lawyer Lanny Breuer has repeatedly told reporters that claims Berger stashed secrets in his socks were "ridiculous."

This is no different than Watergate. Its time charges were pressed and Berger pays the price for his illegal activities.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0) |

Kerry Camp Joins "Timing" Chorus

It's politics:

The objective of such a leak, the Kerry campaign said in a political memo distributed by email, was to take attention away from a report to be issued on Thursday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"The timing of this leak suggests that the White House is more concerned about protecting its political hide than hearing what the commission has to say about strengthening our security," the Kerry campaign said.

Waah.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:15 AM | Comments (0) |

Senator McConnell Channels Al Sharpton

On today's CNN's American Morning:

CNN’S BILL HEMMER: "Senator, let's talk about the Sandy Berger situation now. On the floor of the Senate yesterday, this is what you said there."

SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL (R-KY): "Were I engage - to engage - in a little literary flair. I might say it seems Sandy walked out of the National Archives with some PBDs in his BVDs. And some classified docs in his socks."

Nice. I wonder, did Mitch pay Al Sharpton to write that?

HEMMER: "Some take that in good humor. Democrats are saying that they are still suspicious of the timing. Do they have reason to be suspicious?"

MCCONNELL: "Well, the timing is irrelevant. I mean the point here is that apparently, former National Security Adviser of the Clinton Administration seems to have, admits to have, walked out of the Archives with classified documents. This is extraordinary. That's the reason there's an investigation going on. I'm stunned that that would happen. And I think the Kerry campaign ought to not only distance itself from Berger, which they've done, Berger has stepped aside, but also Joe Wilson who's now been proven by both the British review and the U.S. review to have been telling untrue things about the President of the United States, should be asked to leave the Kerry campaign as well."

Exactly.

Update: NY Post says the Kerry camp is mum on Wilson:

JOHN KERRY ditched adviser Sandy Berger over the "Socks Docs" probe, but is stonewalling questions about another national security adviser whose credibility is taking much flak — Bush-basher Joe Wilson...

But so far, Kerry is sticking with Wilson. Kerry aides haven't responded to queries asking why he hasn't ditched Wilson as an adviser. The Kerry-Edwards campaign Web site even features a fund-raising e-mail from Wilson — serving as a character reference for Kerry.

Of course, the majority of the main-stream press is complicit in allowing Kerry the luxury of keeping Wilson aboard. Had they been doing their job, the press would be full of pieces on two of Kerry's advisors.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:00 AM | Comments (0) |

Situational Ethics

William Pates, the Chronicle's letters editor was put on leave after it was determined he donated to the Kerry campaign:

"Our policy is rather vague on the matter of conflicts of interest and ethics, and I didn't think that it applied to me," he said.

It is an interesting line of reasoning. Do you think Sandy Berger can use it?

Posted by bubba138 at 08:51 AM | Comments (0) |

The "Q" Word

Construction is behind schedule. They cannot keep the power on. Terrorist attacks are out of control. The Summer Olympics: a quagmire.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:39 AM | Comments (0) |

We Could Have Stopped Them

Four out of five Flight 77 hijackers were stopped by metal detectors before bording:

The video shows hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Majed Moqed, each dressed conservatively in slacks and collared shirts, setting off metal-detectors as they pass through security. Moqed set off a second alarm, and a screener manually checked him with a handheld metal detector.

The pair were known to travel together previously and had paid cash to purchase their tickets aboard Flight 77 on Sept. 5, 2001, at the American Airlines counter at Baltimore's airport.

Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been known to be associated with al Qaeda since early 1999 by the National Security Agency, and were put on a terrorism watch list on Aug. 24, 2001.

Only Hani Hanjour, believed to have been the hijacker who piloted Flight 77, did not set off a metal detector as he passed through Dulles security that morning, according to the video.

Being on a watch list is useless unless our airport screeners have access to, and are actively using it

Posted by bubba138 at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) |

Dry Runs for a Terrorist Attack

The Washington Times has got ahold of the Annie Jacobsen in-flight scare:

Flight crews and air marshals say Middle Eastern men are staking out airports, probing security measures and conducting test runs aboard airplanes for a terrorist attack.

At least two midflight incidents have involved numerous men of Middle Eastern descent behaving in what one pilot called "stereotypical" behavior of an organized attempt to attack a plane.

"No doubt these are dry runs for a terrorist attack," an air marshal said.

Pilots and air marshals who asked to remain anonymous told The Washington Times that surveillance by terrorists is rampant, using different probing methods.

"It's happening, and it's a sad state of affairs," a pilot said.

Annie Jacobsen's incident wasn't isolated:

Mrs. Jacobsen, however, is skeptical the 14 passengers were innocent musicians.

"If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments?" she asked in the article.

The pilot confirmed Mrs. Jacobsen's experience was "terribly alike" what flight attendants reported on the San Juan flight.

He said there is "widespread knowledge" among crew members these probes are taking place.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:28 AM | Comments (0) |

War In the Democrat Party?

Dick Morris says the Dems are in the middle of a huge power struggle:

Throughout their administration, the Clintons cold-shouldered Kennedy — realizing that the average American voter saw him as radioactively liberal. In the 1996 campaign, we went into overdrive to be sure that Kennedy would have no prime-time speaking role, even though he had usually had the spotlight to himself at past Democratic conclaves.

As Bill Clinton veered to the center, he increasingly parted company with Ted Kennedy and became the senator's factional antagonist within the party. The gap was bridged somewhat in the impeachment fight, but has come back with a vengeance now that Kennedy is using Kerry as an alternative to the Clinton domination of the party.

Indeed, insiders in the Kerry operation were quoted anonymously as saying that Kennedy had warned against putting Hillary on the ticket.

Consider this:

• Bill and Hillary do not want Kerry to win.


• Berger is a Bill confidant and friend.


• Berger was an advisor to Kerry.


• Bill knew about Berger's theft of documents -- he and Sandy actually laughed about it.

Is it possible the Bill camp leaked about the investigation in order to torpedo the Kerry campaign?

Posted by bubba138 at 08:06 AM | Comments (0) |

Death Toll Watch

Neal Boortz is (as usual) right (use this link after 7/22):

The mainstream media, keeper of the Operation Iraqi Freedom death toll, is running the headline that there have now been 900 U.S. deaths in Iraq since the war began. It's true. Over 900 Americans have died in Iraq. The real headline, though, should be that there have been ONLY 900 American casualties. Remember, the left was telling us that the death toll by this time would likely be somewhere near 10,000 Americans.

The fact of the matter is that for an operation of this size, 900 is a small number. It's obviously not a small number to the 900 families that lost loved ones, but compared to other wars, it's a huge success. We invaded an enormous country, toppled the government and turned it over to an interim government, all within 16 months. Not too shabby, and with only 900 casualties. The point's been made before, but when you compare that 900 to the Korean War's 33,000, Vietnam's 58,000 or World War II's 405,000 American casualties, it pales in comparison. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark.

Just giving you a little perspective, which you will find sorely lacking in the media.

Update: Eric Alterman breaks out the numbers. Charles Rangle won't like this part:

White: 699 (71.4%) Black: 120 (12.3%) Hispanic: 114 (11.6%) Other: 46 (4.7%)

Male: 977 (97.7%)
Female: 23 (2.3%)

More than 70 percent of those who have died were white. Despite fears that an all-volunteer force would end up putting minorities at greater risk than whites, the military death toll is distributed proportionately among America’s racial and ethnic groups.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) |

Kerry Linkfest

Everything you wanted to know about John Kerry and pals. And a few things you didn't.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:22 AM | Comments (0) |

July 21, 2004

Joe Wilson: Its Not My Fault!

The reporters got it wrong, says shameless-Joe:

How do you respond, he's been asked, to charges that, in numerous conversations with reporters over the last year, you inflated your role in "debunking" foreign government intelligence reporting which suggested Saddam Hussein's Iraq sought uranium from Africa? And Wilson gave his answer. He blamed the reporters he had snookered only months before.

Thing is, the reporters don't seem to mind.

Posted by bubba138 at 05:54 PM | Comments (0) |

Berger to Face Congressional Hearing

Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) today made the following statement:

"Like many Americans concerned about our national security, I look forward to learning more from the House Government Reform Committee's investigation into the wayward actions by Sandy Berger. The American people deserve to know why Mr. Berger apparently skirted the law and removed highly classified terrorism documents, purportedly in his pants, from a secure reading room at the National Archives and then proceeded to lose or destroy some of them.

"How could President Clinton's former National Security Advisor be so cavalier?

"Was Mr. Berger trying to cover-up key facts regarding intelligence failures during his watch?

"What happened to those missing documents?

"Whose hands did they fall into?

"What kind of security risk does that pose to Americans today?

"I know Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.) will work to get the full truth of what really happened and help all of us better understand why Sandy Berger, a person who should fully understand the gravity and importance of sensitive national security materials, would operate with such overt negligence and apparent disregard for the law."

Hugh Hewitt asks:

Clinton stated yesterday in Denver that he has known about the investigation for months, suggesting he has spoken with Berger about it. Which in turn makes him a very interesting witness to call before the Committee investigating the matter. The Constitutional question: Can a former president be obliged to appear before a Congressional committee investigating acts occuring after his presidency ended?

Posted by bubba138 at 05:42 PM | Comments (0) |

Joe Wilson: On The Record

U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell today wanted to make sure the Wilson debacle got on the record and simultaneously got a jab in on the Kerry camp. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some snippets:

“I also rise to speak about the importance of maintaining a basic standard of fairness in American politics.

“I’m talking about the controversy that erupted over the infamous “16 words” in the State of the Union Address that Senator Kerry, numerous Senate Democrats, and the media cited in accusations that the President misled the country into war...

“Joe Wilson’s false claims have been exposed, but the networks aren’t rushing to correct the story. Will NBC correct the 40 times it ran Wilson’s claims, will CBS correct the 30 times it ran Wilson’s claims, will ABC correct the 18 times it ran Wilson’s claims? ...

“It’s clear Senator Kerry approved of Mr. Berger’s departure. He should certainly ask the discredited Mr. Wilson to leave the team as well.

“So Mr. President, I close with a simple observation. I believe vigorous political disagreements are the heart of a strong democracy. When our debates are rooted in fact, impassioned political disagreement makes our country stronger.

“I also believe Americans value fundamental fairness, and deserve a news media that reflects this value. How is it fair to report an accusation with blaring Page One headlines and around-the-clock television coverage and not give a slam dunk repudiation of the charge the same kind of attention?

“Mr. President, we’ll watch over the next few days to see if fundamental fairness will be met, and if those who championed Mr. Wilson’s charges will set the record straight.”

Get 'em Mitch.

Posted by bubba138 at 05:13 PM | Comments (0) |

A Call To Action

The RNC needs your help:

The Republican National Committee will have a 30-person staff in Boston to coordinate daily press conferences, Republican speeches and a 24-hour rapid response to Democrat activities. The RNC has already launched a website - DemsExtremeMakeover.com - to serve as an information clearinghouse.

We know that next week's convention will be chock-full of partisan inaccuracies, and snide remarks, as well as out-and-out falsehoods. The RNC has thirty people devoted to the task of refuting the drivel that will spew out of Boston, but thirty people is not enough.

In the blogosphere a 24 hour response is ancient. We can geometrically increase the response team's effectiveness by keeping them supplied with a steady stream of commentary and talking points as we analyze and dissect the Democratic pablum.

So next week, as you are reading or listening to the Democrats drone on about class warfare, a bad economy, a failed war, etc., choke back your bile and visit DemsExtremeMakeover.com, get some perspective and propagate it on your blog. The country will be glad you did.

Posted by bubba138 at 05:08 PM | Comments (0) |

Hand Iraq Over to the U.N.

Except they can't handle it:

In another setback for U.S. efforts in Iraq, the United Nations has been unable to secure enough troops to protect a U.N. contingent headed to the country to help with elections and rebuilding.

When the U.N. Security Council voted six weeks ago to authorize a protective force, it expected contributors to step forward. But countries have balked at taking part in a force expected to include 1,000 troops and several dozen bodyguards.

For Kerry and those who think like him, the answer to all our international problems is the U.N. Yet even with full security council approval, they cannot get the job done.

Every week it becomes clearer that had Bush done what his critics wanted, Saddam would still be in power, people would still be dying, oil-for-money hands would still be getting greased, and families of Palestinian bombers would still be getting lucrative checks.

Update: Even John "I love the U.N." Kerry is starting to see how impotent they are.

And Christopher Cross asks, "Why would it be embarrassing for the Bush administration? Why wouldn't it be a supreme embarassment for the UN?"

Why indeed?

Posted by bubba138 at 09:55 AM | Comments (0) |

Wasting Time and Effort

Watch any WWI era movie and more likely than not you'll come across the line "hey, doncha know there's a war on?"

Unfortunately, the Congress needs to be reminded of this as they waste time and effort on stupid stuff like this:

A Senate panel approved a constitutional amendment Tuesday that would ban the burning of the American flag, but opponents of the measure say there's not enough support in the full, GOP-controlled Senate to push through a change to the Constitution.

If they wanted to do something useful, they should ensure that burning the flag be completely legal -- with the proviso that beating the person who burned it would only be a misdemeaner.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:48 AM | Comments (0) |

When Would Be a Good Time For You?

It occurred to me last night that the Democrats are always whining about the "timing" of news developments. So, I thought I'd Google it. Let's look at Republicans first:

• Bush DUI Leak: He questioned the timing of the revelation.

  "I do find it interesting that it's come out four or five days before the election," Bush said.

• Rangle's Military Draft: However, Corbin questioned the timing of renewed discussion of the draft, saying: “I don’t see it as something viable politically. Right now the feeling of not wanting troops in Iraq is as strong as it’s ever been with all the reserve mobilization. There seems to be growing resistance to the operation in Iraq.”

Now, if you have several minutes, let look at the Democrats:

• Ashcroft Warns of Attack (March): Senator John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll numbers and problems in Iraq. ...and...Two Kerry supporters questioned the timing of the administration's threat report, wondering in a conference call arranged by the campaign whether the latest announcement was politically motivated.
*
• Ashcroft Warns of Attack (July): Democrats have criticized a number of such warnings by the administration and questioned the timing of the latest televised news conference that provided no new specific intelligence about an attack on any specific site.
• Capture of Saddam Hussien: On Seattle radio yesterday, Rep. Jim McDermott questioned the timing of Saddam Hussein's capture, saying, "I'm sure they could have found him a long time ago if they wanted to."
• FBI investigation of Philadelphia City Hall: Democratic State Senator Vince Fumo questioned the timing of the investigation and Ashcroft's visit, saying "I don't know how often the Attorney General of the United States goes to visit attorney generals throughout the United States and if this is just a stop-by to check on the office to see how it is doing, that timing is not exactly appropriate either."
• U.S. Allegations Against Cuba: "We know that Cuba has been doing some research with respect to biological offensive weapons possibly, and so we think that it is appropriate for us to point out this kind of activity," Powell said.

  But Carter questioned the timing of the allegations that came during his visit to Cuba.

• Report Released Showing the Administration Withheld Medicare Estimates: One staffer also questioned the timing, suggesting that the administration wanted to release it when the news media was focused on Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) decision to name Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) as his running mate.
• Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Meehan and other Kerry aides questioned the timing of the group's emergence just as the Kerry campaign was launching a $25-million television ad campaign based on his Vietnam War record

So we are left with the question, "Is any time a good time?" Quite obviously, for the Democrats, the answer is, "No."

Update: Welcome Reynolds-readers.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the desire now to see exactly what was in these documents. That's a bad idea. Berger's in trouble precisely because these were CLASSIFIED documents. They were classified most probably because they contain information sensitive to the security of our nation.

We should not let our attack-dog instincts (our desire to see Berger and his friends go down) override our need for a secure country. To do so is to join the ranks of Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Michael Moore, etc.

Update: Balloon Juice deflates the Democrat's talking points.

* Correction: The actual quote is: And some opponents of President Bush, including police and firefighter union leaders aligned with Senator John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll numbers and problems in Iraq. The Dowdified quote was unintentional and I apologize for my error in reporting.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) |

Carefully Orchestrated News

Dan Rather opened the CBS coverage of the Berger leak in his usuaul partisan manner:

On last night's CBS Evening News Dan Rather offered this spin on the Sandy Berger flap:

"Sandy Berger, who was National Security Adviser under President Clinton stepped aside today as an adviser to Senator John Kerry. CBS's John Roberts reports this was triggered by a carefully orchestrated leak about Berger and the timing of it appears to be no coincidence."

Like RatherBiased.Com, Dan's use of the term "carefully orchestrated" immediately caught my ear. What evidence, exactly, do Dan Rather and CBS have that this leak was carefully orchestrated? do they know who leaked it? Do they have the details of how it was done? Do they have any evidence, any at all, that this didn't just come from some low-level investigator who went to a reporter hoping for a little extra cash because his kid's birthday was coming up?

I was going to rhetorically ask the question, "when does it stop being reporting of the news and begin being the manufacturing of the news." Then I realized it is a moot question. Dan Rather and CBS are already far past that point.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:32 AM | Comments (0) |

Wictory Wednesday

Today is Wictory Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush 2004 campaign.

If you've already donated and volunteered for the Bush campaign, then talk to your friends and enlist them in this battle for America's very soul.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesdays simply by putting up a post like this one every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign. And do e-mail Poli-Pundit at wictory@blogsforbush.com so that he can add you to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which will be part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

Posted by bubba138 at 08:23 AM | Comments (0) |

July 20, 2004

Inside Information?

Not quite an authorized source, so take the following for what it is worth:

I have a reader who is involved with the government's efforts to fight terror, and he has connections who tell him the big suspicion is that Berger took things he thought would help Kerry in the Presidential campaign. Also, the grapevine says not all of the documents taken were copies. Furthermore, I am told that an FBI agent described Berger...not as cooperative as he claims...

Posted by bubba138 at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) |

Wrong Conclusion

The Bear muses:

So help me think through this. Sandy Berger has been under investigation since October of last year, and it appears he knew about it. He's acting as an advisor to the Kerry campaign. Choose the option that most likely describes reality:

A) Berger told the Kerry campaign he was under investigation, and the campaign saw no reason to worry about it and distance Kerry from Berger. Conclusion: the Kerry campaign is run by idiots.

Considering what the Kerry campaign has already said:

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the candidate was unaware of the probe, and Wade said the campaign would have no comment on an ongoing investigation.

So the proper conclusion in situation (A) is: the Kerry campaign is involved in a cover up.

Clinton knew but Kerry didn't? How is that possible?

Posted by bubba138 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0) |

Stop the Cycle of Violence

Posted by bubba138 at 04:40 PM | Comments (0) |

Berger Out

Sandy Berger has stepped down as an advisor to the Kerry campaign. His spokesman claimed Mr. Berger "does not want any issue surrounding the 9/11 commission to be used for partisan purposes."

Kevin Patrick isn't buying his reasoning:

That is the only thing the Democrats HAVE used the 9/11 commission for. They timed the release of Richard Clarke's anti-Bush book to his testimony. Berger himself pointed the finger directly at Dr. Condoleeza Rice in his opening statement (see my original post for the exact text). Democratic Commissioners have grandstanded and filibustered throughout their questioning (only to accuse the Republican respondants of exactly that). And this doesn't even scratch the surface of the criminal investigation on Berger's actions and motives for violating serious laws in his developing scandal.

Yep.

Update: This from the UPI:

The documents reportedly were copies of evaluations by Richard Clarke of the National Security Council on how the Clinton administration handled terror threats to the 2000 millennium celebrations. The sometimes harshly critical evaluations included recommendations that the commission wanted to review.

Read that again. The documents that Berger took (and "accidentally" discarded) contained critical evaluations by Richard Clarke on how the Clinton administration handled terror threats. Such evaluations would seem to contradict Clarke's actual testimony during the 9/11 Commission hearings (not to mention the whole of his book) would they not?

Posted by bubba138 at 03:41 PM | Comments (0) |

DNC Convention: A Miserable Failure

Kerry may have been able to win the battle of the nomination but his campaign is finding winning the peace in Boston much more difficult.

His coalition is falling apart as the union leadership in Boston is determined to get national exposure above all else:

The state's labor management board voted unanimously yesterday to send the contract dispute between the city and its police union to immediate, expedited arbitration...

Union President Thomas Nee called the vote "absolutely outrageous," pointing out that the Joint Labor Management Committee voted on the matter last week and opted not to send the matter to expedited arbitration.

Mr. Nee said the union would escalate its protest plans for the convention week and would reconsider its earlier decision not to picket outside the site.

Furthermore, the Kerry team has failed to plan adequately for their triumph and are severely under-resourced to handle the gargantuan task they have set before themselves:

Events impresario David G. Mugar resigned yesterday as executive producer of John F. Kerry's troubled Boston Pops concert set for convention week, complaining that the city's host committee has not given him the money he needs to stage the event...

"Unfortunately, Boston 2004 has not met financial commitments and deadlines that we have set, nor have we received any funds for the event to take place," Mugar wrote. "Regretfully, we must now withdraw from the planning process and the production of the logistics for the event.

"The production of such an event involves many companies and elements that must be constructed and produced on site. Producing an event with the complexity that Boston 2004 and the Democratic National Committee wanted requires many days of preparation, and without funds we have been unable to order services and equipment that would be necessary for the celebration."

Unaccounted for in the Kerry camp are the thousands of refugees the convention will create:

Bostonians to Flee Convention Security Headaches
Tens of thousands are expected to invade the historic New England seaport of Boston next week for the Democratic convention but many many more may be leaving town.

The disruption expected with the first major national political convention since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has residents in the greater Boston area planning to stay at home for the four-day Democratic confab beginning on Monday. Many others are planning to head out.

...employers contacted by Reuters were unable to predict how many people would actually leave the city, although a recent poll indicates that just a third of Boston commuters will show up at work next week.

One of the key planks in the Kerry platform will be his promise of economic expansion. But few Bostonians will be see any positive impact:

Only 11 percent of Boston-area businesses expect to see higher sales during the Democratic National Convention to be held in Boston July 26-30, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Local officials have touted a proclaimed $154.2 million boon to the region's economy; BHI says that after subtracting the cost of lost productivity, the potential value of events lost to Boston during that week and the value of lost tourism, the event will sap $8.2 million in economic benefit from the region.

Finally, knowing the line-up of the speakers, and the Democrat's penchant for venomous rhetoric, even the EPA, which will be on high high alert during the convention, is expecting a rise in levels of toxic pollutants:

EPA Chief of Emergency Planning Art Johnson said the agency also has an airplane for quick deployment that can detect plumes of biological, chemical or radiological material.

He said an emergency response team would be ready in case any hazardous materials are released, whether by terrorists or something else.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:10 PM | Comments (0) |

United States: A Christian Nation No More

MSNBC:

The United States will no longer be a majority Protestant nation in years to come, due to a precipitous decline in affiliation with many Protestant churches, a new survey has found.

Between 1993 and 2002, the share of Americans who said they were Protestant dropped from 63 percent to 52 percent, after years of remaining generally stable, according to a study released Tuesday by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

At the same time, the number of people who said they had no religion rose from 9 percent to nearly 14 percent, and many are former Protestants, the survey’s authors said.

<sarcasm>I'm sure Protestant Christianity's slide into moral liberalism has had absolutely nothing to do with this.</sarcasm>

Posted by bubba138 at 02:21 PM | Comments (0) |

More Berger

CNN -- Colleagues defend Berger in documents probe

Kerry spokesman David Wade said the candidate was unaware of the probe, and Wade said the campaign would have no comment on an ongoing investigation.

The investigation has been under way since October, and its disclosure the week before the Democratic National Convention in Boston -- and just days before the 9/11 commission is due to release its report -- led sources close to Berger to question whether the news was leaked for political reasons.

"This has been kept confidential for months," a former Clinton administration colleague said. "So why now?"

Two things here.

First, Kerry, who is hoping to be the next president of the Unisted States is more and more often uninformed when convenient. It wasn't but two weeks ago he admitted to not being informed on important security matters because he "didn't have time." Now he didn't know that one of his top advisors had been under investigation for over nine months?

Second, watch out for the Democrats to shift the focus from the incident itself to the leaker. They did it with Wilson/Plame. They did it very successfully with the Kennedy memogate affair.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:57 PM | Comments (0) |

NOW to Women: Send Bush Packing

The National Organization of Women are shreaking:

Gandy urged women everywhere to "declare a state of emergency beginning immediately and work to re-defeat Bush in 2004." "We will not go back to a time when women were second-class citizens," Gandy said. "We've come too far. It is time to move forward and elect a president who will stand up for women."

In other news, women in Iraq who were less than "second-class citizens" before Bush liberated the entire country, are enjoying freedoms of which they had only previously dreamt:

One sector of Iraqi society where remarkable progress has been realized is in the lives of Iraqi women. After decades of repression and government-sponsored torture and abuse, Iraqi women now have access to educational and professional opportunities. And they are fully embracing the new opportunities by taking jobs as government officials, educators, small-business owners, police and security guards, and engineers. The new constitution also includes a provision calling for a target of 25 percent representation for women in the forthcoming transitional national assembly.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) |

This Land Is Your Land

This video is a must see.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:04 PM | Comments (0) |

Documents "Missing"

Yesterday's AP report said that "some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing." Somehow, they, along with several other outlets, seem to have bungled what actually happened:

"In the course of reviewing over several days thousands of pages of documents on behalf of the Clinton administration in connection with requests by the Sept. 11 commission, I inadvertently took a few documents from the Archives," Berger said.

"When I was informed by the Archives that there were documents missing, I immediately returned everything I had except for a few documents that I apparently had accidentally discarded," he said.

These documents aren't just missing, they've been discarded. One wonders if the discarding involved an Olliematic paper shredder.

What is really shredded is the credibility of the nation's biggest newspapers:

The Washington Post played the story at the top of page 2. The New York Times played the story at the bottom of Page 16. USA Today was among the newspapers playing it above the fold on the front page.

Oh, THAT liberal media.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0) |

Too Big A Deal

As we consider the Sandy Berger incident, we must remember that the Democrats are the party of tolerance. Sandy's worst offense is that he stuffed paper down his pants. If Sandy's sexual orientation is towards refined pulp products, who are we to judge?

In the end, the Republicans will slink away from their accusations because, after all it's only about sex.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:19 PM | Comments (0) |

Where are the Democrats?

That's the question Richard Benedetto is asking:

But now that the Wilson case has been debunked, it is interesting to note that the news media, so eager to build him up, and tear Bush down, now seem reluctant to tell the rest of the story, or at least the next chapter. Wilson, who had been a fixture on television, now seems to have disappeared. Democrats are silent.

Why were the media so willing to believe Wilson when he was an obvious Democratic partisan? He not only worked for the National Security Council in the Clinton White House, he also is a foreign policy adviser to the Democratic presidential campaign of John Kerry. Why, indeed?

Posted by bubba138 at 12:04 PM | Comments (0) |

Big Deal

These guys got stiffed:

Ending a long legal struggle for victims of a catastrophic gas leak in Bhopal, India, that killed at least 5,000 people in 1984, India's Supreme Court ruled today that $330 million in compensation should be distributed directly to the victims and no longer held by the Indian government...

The number of injured was found to be 578,000. The $330 million in compensation will be split among all 578,000 victims.

Unless my math is wrong, that amounts to a whopping $571 per victim -- hardly a victory.

"We are fighters and have been fighting this battle for the last 20 years, and are happy to win in the end," Hameeda Bee, a 50-year-old gas victim who lost five family members in the accident, said in a telephone interview. "But the money should be quadrupled."

Even four times as much wouldn't be enough.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:18 AM | Comments (0) |

NASA Takes a Hit

The House Appropriations Committee is planning to cut as much as $1 billion from President Bush's budget request for NASA, as part of a $92.9 billion fiscal 2005 VA-HUD appropriations bill to be marked up Tuesday. That total is $2.1 billion over last year's enacted levels for the dozens of programs and agencies under the measure's jurisdiction, and a $2.5 billion increase is pledged to veterans' health care programs alone.

This is a wise move, and if the Bush team is smart, they'll embrace it. With an increasing deficit, and the administration's priorities rightly centered on the war on terror, this is a unique opportunity for Bush to appeal to both his fiscally conservative base and the independent voters.

Space is the frontier of private enterprise, now. Let them spend the cash.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:55 AM | Comments (0) |

Opportunity For Obstruction

William Myers is up for a Senate vote today, but it looks like the Democrats will continue their obstructionist politics. Their beef against Myers?

Democrats say a vote on Myers gives them an opportunity to publicize how bad the Bush administration has been for the environment and the federal judicial system.

"This nomination brings the environment to the front burner as the Senate ends this summer session," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat.

"William Myers epitomizes the anti-environmental tilt of so many Bush nominees."

Never has it been plainer that the Democrats have completely lost sight of the Senate's responsibility to confirm judges. Their complaint of Myers, the thing that makes him "unfit," is nothing more than his politics don't match theirs.

The Dems are whining that this is a political move to make them look bad right before their convention. But a skunk is a skunk is a skunk. You don't have to do much to make people believe it stinks. Its not hard painting the Democrat Senators as obstructionists because they are.

Update: True to form, the Democrats blocked it:

U.S. Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a seventh Bush administration judicial nominee, reigniting a partisan battle certain to intensify as the November elections near.

On a largely party-line vote of 53-44, Republicans fell seven short of the needed 60 to clear a procedural hurdle against President Bush's nomination of William Myers to the federal bench.

Bush wants to put Myers, a former top lawyer at the U.S. Interior Department who also worked as an industry lobbyist, on 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) |

On the Fringe

I think I kind of like being on the fringe.

Or is that the cutting edge?

Posted by bubba138 at 08:43 AM | Comments (0) |

Berger's 9/11 Commission Testimony

Kevin says Berger had something to hide from the 9/11 commission.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:40 AM | Comments (0) |

July 19, 2004

Watergate Revisited

Campaign operatives illegally gaining access to documents that can harm the opposition party. How is this unlike Watergate?

You don't suppose Sandy Berger needed those documents to aid him in this venture, do you?

Members of the independent Sept. 11 commission say they will mount an aggressive nationwide lobbying campaign to pressure the White House and Congress to overhaul the nation's intelligence agencies, an effort they say will begin this week with release of a unanimous final report criticizing virtually every element of the way the government collects and shares intelligence.

More:

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had made while reading classified anti-terror documents at the archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants. He also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio, they said.

How does one "inadvertently" put documents into a leather portfolio?

Posted by bubba138 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0) |

D-Bunking the D-Bunker

From the Kerry-Edwards list entitled Highlights from the Republican Party Platform:

1) PUT RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGY FIRST: We recognize that we need to cater to our right wing base rather than pesky moderates like Nancy Reagan and Orrin Hatch. Therefore we will put ideology over science and deny all credible scientific evidence that stem cell research will save lives and that global warming exists.

Republicans nation wide recognize "the scientific evidence that stem cell research will save lives." It is the trading of one innocent unborn life for another with which they have problems. Will Democrats conceed the scientific evidence that adult stem cell therapy can be at least as effective? I didn't think so.

Of course global warming exists (or does it?) The question is why does it exist.

(2) DENY A WOMEN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE: We will continue, at all costs, to ensure that women are denied their Constitutional right to choose. We will appoint judges who will work to rollback that right and we will fight for legislation that infringes on this right.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans don't believe judges have the authority to roll-back or create rights. Neither, however, do they see any glory in "selective reduction."

(3) REWARD OUR WEALTHY CONTRIBUTORS: We will continue to pass tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans who fund our campaigns and get us elected.

The majority of the tax cuts went to middle-class Americans. I got my check. I cashed it. I spent it. The economy is better for it. Is this math too hard for you?

(4) NEW BUSINESS FOR OUR FRIENDS WITH NEW NO BID CONTRACTS: We will provide no-bid contracts to our closest friends to ensure they will receive the largest contracts possible. Also, we will relaunch our secret energy taskforce so we can add more loopholes for big oil.

Of course the no-bid contracts that Clinton gave Halliburton don't apply, it's O.K. to be in bed with the lawyers, the entertainment industry, the teacher's union, the N.A.A.C.P....shall I go on?

(5) ADD $10 TRILLION IN DEFICITS: In the past four years, this Administration has successfully taken the country from a $5.6 trillion surplus to a $5 trillion deficit – a $10 trillion loss of revenue. We want to take the next step by adding an additional $10 trillion to the deficits, leaving the burden on the next generation.

Those surpluses were projected only if the economy continued at the pace it was going in 1999. The trouble with that was the stock market crash of 1999, the failing economy of 2000 and the fact it was well into decline by 2001 when Bush and company took over. Oh, yeah, we also had to pay for a war that we didn't ask for.

(6) HARM OUR ENVIRONMENT: We will rollback generations of environmental regulations that protect our air, land and water. We will poison our water with arsenic and mercury; we will allow drilling in our most pristine natural wilderness; and we will make sure taxpayers pay to clean up our toxic waste sites.

Generations? The only rollbacks that the Bush administration has made have been on Clinton era pander-fests. The air and water is cleaner than it was twenty years ago and getting cleaner still.

(7) CUT AID TO CHILDREN AND DECIMATE PROGRAMS FOR SENIORS: We will cut domestic programs that provide health care, early education and nutrition programs and after-school services to thousands of American children. We will continue to fail to live up to our commitment to fund our education mandate by $27 billion. We will also pass our $2 trillion plan to privatize Social Security.

As far as cutting domestic programs, these are out-and-out lies and fear mongering. Al Gore says Bush "played on our fears." What else would you call this?

I'm 40 years old. If Social Security remains the ponzi scheme it is today, I won't get any of the money I put into it. How do the Democrats plan to fix it? You might not like the Republican plan, but at least they have one.

(8) BREAK OUR COMMITMENT TO VETERANS: We will once again promise veterans will be provided for under a Republican administration. We will then fail to provide the funding veterans need for health care, cut 500,000 veterans from the system entirely and close veterans’ hospitals across the country.

President Bush has increased military pay by more than 21 percent over three years, expanded use of targeted pay and bonuses, and improved housing for men and women in uniform. He has implemented changes to ensure that veterans receive timely, quality medical care; more than cut in half processing time for claims; and in 2004 will eliminate waiting lists for medical care. The FY 2005 budget for VA medical care is more than 40 percent larger than when he took office – enabling a million more patients to receive treatment. The Congress passed, and President Bush signed (against both Kerry's and Edward's wishes) an $87 billion supplemental that gave our troops the tools that need to get the job in Iraq done. President Bush’s budgets have allowed the VA to enroll 2.5 million more veterans in health care services, increase outpatient visits from 44 million to 54 million, and increase the number of prescriptions filled from 86 million to 108 million.

(9) RUSH TO WAR IN IRAQ: We are proud that we stubbornly rushed to war in Iraq without our allies, sent our troops into combat without proper equipment, over-stretched our military, and failed to plan for the peace.

Puh-leeze. John Kerry and John Edwards both approved the "rush to war." We "rushed" so fast that Saddam was able to hide the WMD's the whole world knew he had. The major assault portion of the conflict was over in months. A year and a half later the Iraqi's took sovereign control of their own country. We just can't stop the good news from coming out of Iraq. For more on the "Rush to War," look here, and here.

(10) LET AL QAEDA OFF THE HOOK: We will continue to divert our attention and resources from Afghanistan, break our promises to rebuild that nation. We let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora to continue planning attacks against the U.S. from his hideout reportedly in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

You can call it "Off the Hook," but serious people see that al Qa'eda is on-the-run. Their command and control structure has been annihilated, they have no base of operations, and their operatives are turning themselves in. Osama is still not captured, so you do get a half-a-point for that.

(11) LEAVE AMERICA VULNERABLE: We will under-invest in port, chemical and nuclear security, claiming the war in Iraq protects us here at home, and hope no one notices Ridge’s and Ashcroft’s warnings of an imminent attack on the homeland in the coming months.

Wait, what made Ashcroft and Ridge suddenly valid? I thought they were the SS branch of the Bush-Hitler regime. Last I heard all their talk of serious domestic threats was only to scare us into giving up our civil rights.

ALSO, OUR PLAN TO IMPROVE ECONOMY: Seems to be working.

OUR PLAN TO ADDRESS MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE: Can't fix something that doesn't exist -- unless you are refering to the fictional Kerry Misery Index that says Carter presided over a better economy than Reagan.

OUR PLAN TO ADDRESS RISING HEALTH CARE COSTS: See Medicare legislation, passed and signed.

OUR PLAN TO MAKE COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE: Yep, that's down too.

Posted by bubba138 at 05:32 PM | Comments (0) |

If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat

This is exactly what Hugh Hewitt's book is about:

Aides to Mr. Kerry say the campaign is taking the unusual step of setting up a nationwide legal network under its own umbrella, rather than relying, as in the past, on lawyers associated with state Democratic parties. The aides said they were recruiting people based on their skills as litigators and election lawyers, rather than rewarding political connections or big donors.

Lawyers for the campaign are gathering intelligence and preparing litigation over the ballot machines being used and the rules concerning how voters will be registered or their votes disqualified. In some cases, the lawyers are compiling dossiers on the people involved and their track records on enforcing voting rights. The disputed 2000 presidential election remains a fresh wound for Democrats, and Mr. Kerry has been referring to it on the stump while assuring his audiences that he will not let this year's election be a repeat of the 2000 vote.

"A million African-Americans disenfranchised in the last election," he said at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Philadelphia on Thursday. "Well, we're not just going to sit there and wait for it to happen. On Election Day in your cities, my campaign will provide teams of election observers and lawyers to monitor elections, and we will enforce the law."

It doesn't matter to Kerry that there is absolutely no credible evidence that there was any systemic disenfranchisement. Repeating the lie gains favor for him so he's only too happy to propagate it.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:27 PM | Comments (0) |

Russert and Byrd

Senator Robert 'n-word' Byrd was on Meet the Press yesterday. Let's look at one of his answers:

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you what you also say in the book. Back in October of 2002, only 23 senators opposed a resolution authorizing the president to go to war. "In the end, only 22 other members voted to oppose this despicable grant of authority. ...Never in my half century of congressional service had the United States Senate proved unworthy of its great name. What would the framers have thought? In this terrible show of weakness, the Senate left an indelible stain upon its own escutcheon. Having revered the Senate during my service for more than forty years, I was never pained so much."

You say that the 22 senators who joined with you were profiles in courage, and those who didn't vote that way had shown weakness. John Kerry, candidate for president, John Edwards, candidate for vice president, your Democratic Party, voted for the war. Are they weak?

SEN. BYRD: They were misled. I'm confident of that. And I have a feeling that that is why they voted as they did...Misled by this administration, misled by this president, misled by Mr. Rumsfeld, misled by the CIA.

According to Senator 'Grand Kleagle' Byrd, Kerry and Ewards are either too stupid to see through the president's obvious trickery or too weak to oppose him. You pick which one.

Update: Pair the above with this Mark Steyn observation:

Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in--to the point where he signed him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America's relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with French political leaders. Yet anyone who's spent 10 minutes in Europe this last year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America's national security he can't pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there's something hicky and parochial in his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.

Fooled by the left, fooled by the right. The obvious conclusion is that Kerry is easily fooled.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:36 PM | Comments (0) |

1984 Update

The Commissar re-educates us on the facts:

Joe Wilson - Joe Wilson does not exist. He never existed. He never lied. He never attempted to discredit Criminal Bush only to be discredited himself. All references to Joe Wilson must immediately be filed in the Memory Hole.

Joe Richard Clarke - Joe Richard Clarke does not exist. He never existed. He never lied. He never attempted to discredit Criminal Bush only to be discredited himself. All references to Joe Richard Clarke must immediately be filed in the Memory Hole.

Rachel Lucas - This reactionary bogger does not exist. Update: She does exist. 2nd Update: She does not exist! 3rd Update: She does exist, again. 4th Update: She does not exist, again! ... Comrades are instructed to put pictures of their own dogs on their desks.

Thank the state for clarity.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:50 PM | Comments (0) |

Chirac's Tizzie Fit

President Jacques Chirac said Monday that the Israeli leader would not be welcome here until he gave a satisfactory explanation for saying Jews should go to Israel to escape anti-Semitism in France.

The explanation is simple Jacques. Anti-semitism is running rampant in your country and French authorities are as likely to turn a blind eye to it as they are to do anything about it.

This is too difficult to figure out?

Posted by bubba138 at 01:37 PM | Comments (0) |

Values

The candidate of values:

I know that John Kerry shares my values. I know that John Kerry shares your values. I know that John Kerry shares John Edwards' values, who also, by the way, shares my values. I know they both share your accountant's values, your butcher's values, your mechanic's values. If a Martian showed up from outer space, they'd share its values, too.

They're just really into value sharing...

Of course, if Kerry really shared our values, he probably wouldn't have to tell us so every minute and once, just once, he might actually say what the values we share actually are.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) |

Another Tutorial

This is censorship. This is not.

Clear?

Posted by bubba138 at 11:34 AM | Comments (0) |

Question

How is this NOT eugenics?

I found out I was having triplets when I went to my obstetrician. The doctor had just finished telling me I was going to have a low-risk pregnancy. She turned on the sonogram machine. There was a long pause, then she said, ''Are you sure you didn't take fertility drugs?'' I said, ''I'm positive.''

My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets. I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, Do I want to?

I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ''Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?'' The obstetrician wasn't an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more...

I was focused on relaxing. But Peter was staring at the sonogram screen thinking: Oh, my gosh, there are three heartbeats. I can't believe we're about to make two disappear.

Two days after the procedure, smells no longer set me off and I no longer wanted to eat nothing but sour-apple gum. I went on to have a pretty seamless pregnancy. But I had a recurring feeling that this was going to come back and haunt me. Was I going to have a stillbirth or miscarry late in my pregnancy?

I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.

This wasn't about choice. It is clearly about self above life.

Hat tip: XRLQ

Posted by bubba138 at 11:14 AM | Comments (0) |

Making the Big Time -- Part Deu

ProtestWarrior in the national news:

Activists planning to demonstrate against the upcoming GOP convention should be on the lookout for young conservatives gearing up to protest the protesters.

"We are the right-wing freedom fighters - we are out there and are just as animated as the protesters can be," said member Jason Sager, of Brooklyn.

Protest Warriors, which claims about 3,000 members nationwide, expects about 200 in New York for the four-day convention, which begins Aug. 30 and is expected to draw tens of thousands of opponents of President Bush.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) |

Bush & the NAACP

A sensible take:

...why on Earth would Bush attend the conference of an organization that openly attacks him, consciously polarizes the race debate against Republicans, and effectively acts as the black wing of the Democratic Party?

That's the question I put to Bond, who simply told me that the NAACP is a non-partisan civil rights organization that just happens to agree with the Democrats on several key issues.

The reality is that the NAACP sold out its non-partisan civil rights mission decades ago. The change occurred on or about 1995, when the NAACP was foundering amidst charges of sexual harassment and economic improprieties.

Unfortunately, Mfume, who had essentially partnered with the Democratic Party to revitalize the NAACP, concluded that it was in the organization's best interest to maintain that partnership. Officially this was to uphold civil rights. Actually it was to continue pumping federal money into the NAACP and keep the Democrats in the U.S. Senate on good terms with their black constituents.

To justify becoming a partisan, political institution, the NAACP set about alarming the black voting populace: The Republicans are dangerous. A constant threat to our civil rights. We must defend against them.

Thusly did the politicalization of the NAACP begin. The rhetoric coming out of the NAACP has since become increasingly shrill, even by political standards...

There is no room within the NAACP for intellectual diversity anymore, just loyal servitude to the Democratic Party. This is a crime. This is a shame. This is the sad state of the nation's oldest and most storied civil rights organization.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:17 AM | Comments (0) |

A New Space Age

SpaceshipOne is only the beginning. We are emarking on a new space-age, shifting from the government funded exploits of the 70's to an era of privately funded, and practically profitable ventures. The opportunities abound:

NASA's new lunar astronauts also could find rovers, financed by Radio Shack, scurrying around a nearby crater being operated by a bunch of school kids at a terrestrial science museum. A short jaunt in a lunar rover could bring them up alongside a remotely operated mining experiment extracting helium-3. The isotope is rare on Earth, but common on the moon and can power fusion reactors without generating high levels of radioactive waste.

LunaCorp is developing a spacecraft called SuperSat to relay high-resolution, digital video of its voyage from Earth to the moon and create maps of the lunar surface. The company also plans to land a mobile, tele-operated robot on the moon that can be operated by paying visitors at science centers, theme parks and museums.

"When I look at the moon, I see real estate," said Randa Milliron, co-founder of Interorbital Systems of Mojave, Calif., which is developing passenger launch vehicles as well as a lunar hotel.

Sweet.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:09 AM | Comments (0) |

...And the Walls Came Tumbling Down

It looks more and more as if the house arrest Sharon had imposed on his worst enemy was actually protecting Arafat from the Palestinians who supposedly love him so dearly:

Now, a violent upheaval in the Gaza Strip has turned the spotlight on a series of poor decisions that are rebounding on the Palestinian leader, highlighting his own slippery hold on power.

Arafat's formula for defanging his critics has long been to accuse them of being Israeli and American puppets, collaborators with the occupiers, instantly putting them on the defensive and distracting attention from the issues they raised. A beating by Arafat's militants would often follow, and criticism would soon die down.

You may remember all the critisism Sharon took for his disengagement plan in the Gaza strip. The Israeli pullout is proving to the world that the Palestinians have quite a way to go before they are capable of having their own state. Not to mention, as long as they're killing each other, they don't have time to blow up innocent women and children in cafes and busses.

But worry not, someone will soon find a way to blame this Palestinian on Palestinian violence on those dirty rotten Jews. It is only a matter of time.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:29 AM | Comments (0) |

Teresa Heinz-Kerry: Supporting Suppression of Free Speech

Remember the anarchists that plan to disrupt the GOP convention by doing everything they can to appear as terrorists? One of their strategies, among others, is to "The posting instructed people to "go to a rifle, pistol or skeet shooting range, spend an hour shooting to saturate clothing with smell of gunpowder, go directly to a New Jersey Transit, LIRR or subway train headed for Penn Station" and get scented by gaurd dogs. Their goal is to stop traffic, trains, and with luck the entire convention.

Where do scumbags like this get funding for their operations? Where else but Ter-AY-sa "getting to know you" Heinz-Kerry

The Ketchup Queen financed the shadowy Tides Foundation to the tune of $4 million to date. The Tides Foundation funds the Ruckus Society, a notorious group of anarchists who rioted and looted Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots...

While some 600,000 passengers travel to Penn Station on regular working days, protesters are hoping that their handiwork will see the necessity of having to evacuate Madison Square Garden.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:49 AM | Comments (0) |

A New Warning

Al-Qaeda may be recruiting non-Arabs less likely to attract the notice of security personnel to carry out attacks inside the United States, the FBI warned on Friday. The terror network especially seeks operatives who have U.S. citizenship or legal residency status, the FBI's counterterrorism division said in its weekly bulletin to 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

I wonder where the most likely source of such terrorist would be?

Hmmm...

Posted by bubba138 at 07:43 AM | Comments (0) |

Global Warming

It is real, but there is nothing we can do about it:

"The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures," said Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research.

"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor," he said.

Then again, how do you square the above with this?

Posted by bubba138 at 07:25 AM | Comments (0) |

I Was Robbed!

How do you stop a bellowing Howard Dean?

As he was delivering an impassioned pep talk about impending Democratic victory, Dean saw some disembodied fingers suddenly slip around his wallet - containing all his credit cards and an undetermined amount of cash - and just as suddenly disappear with them.

"I gotta go. Somebody just stole my wallet," Dean abruptly ended his speech.

But instead of saying "YEEEEAAAARRRRGH!" Dean calmly filed a police report and - using his passport in his briefcase as identification - eventually made his way back to Burlington.

Where everybody knows his name.

I guess Dean hadn't got to the point in his speech where he explains it is only OK for Democrats to take a person's money.

Update: Whoops, I forgot the link. Here it is.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:20 AM | Comments (0) |

Making the Big Time

Chrenkoff's good news in Iraq is in the Opinion Journal.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:04 AM | Comments (0) |

July 18, 2004

Luv the Guv

We're past mid-July and the state still has no budget. The Governator's not happy about it:

"I call them girlie men," Mr. Schwarzenegger said of the Democrats, as hundreds of shoppers who had gathered to hear him speak roared their approval at the Ontario Mills megamall, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. "They should get back to the table and they should finish the budget."

Of course there are cadres of offended because Schwarzenegger isn't being very governor-like. As I see it, the Democrats aren't doing their job, same as last several years, and we finally have a governor who isn't afraid to call them on it.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:54 PM | Comments (0) |

9/11 Commission

Remember the side-show freaks of the 9/11 Commission? Remember how glad you were when it was over? Well, it's not.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:36 PM | Comments (0) |

Huh?

Blog Granddaddy Glen says indeed to this:

While scores of political blogs don't go beyond gossip and bickering, many are quite influential, analysts say. Some feature political commentaries, such as the liberal instapundit.com or the conservative electionprojection.com.

Liberal Instapundit?

Posted by bubba138 at 05:57 PM | Comments (0) |

July 16, 2004

Dick Cheney: Still VEEP

Not only does Bush still want Cheney as his VP, but so does America:

Posted by bubba138 at 05:04 PM | Comments (0) |

Happy Birthday

Birthday prose for a bonnie lass.

But it's not her air, her form, her face, Tho' matching beauty's fabled queen; 'Tis the mind that shines in ev'ry grace, An' chiefly in her roguish een.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:03 AM | Comments (0) |

OOPS!

The Smoking Gun:

In an embarrassing governmental gaffe, an official tribute sign erected on the fence surrounding Ground Zero actually misstated the date of the terror attacks, a glaring mistake addressed only after a visitor recently complained about the error. The sign, which memorialized victims killed in the Pentagon attack, noted that "September 11, 2002" was a pivotal day for the country and the world

Posted by bubba138 at 10:38 AM | Comments (0) |

Confidence Restored

When you combine the facts that I am a hopeless news junkie and the media is negatively biased, it is easy to get discouraged. Stories like this one restore my confidence in America and Americans:

In her 15 years as an American Airlines flight attendant, DeVilla Evans has seen her share of "blood baths" over premium seats.

So when a businessman on a recent flight from Atlanta to Chicago exchanged his first-class seat for a soldier's coach ticket, the 39-year-old from Ft. Worth, Texas, got a little emotional.

The tears really flowed when the gesture prompted another half-dozen first-class passengers to do the same with other troops heading home from Iraq for a two-week break.

A couple of weeks ago I paid for lunch for six marines in a local restaurant. I told their server to not let them know who was doing it. It set me back eighty bills but it was well worth it to see the looks on their faces.

If you get a chance, do something nice for a soldier. You'll be glad you did.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:26 AM | Comments (0) |

Losing the Money Election

As the election chatter was commencing eighteen long months ago, the big scary Democrat meme was that Bush was going to raise gobs and gobs of money from his big business cronies and that the Democrats would never be able to catch up. It looks like they have overcome their "disadvantage," however:

One of the most heavily publicized pro-GOP groups, Progress for America, raised $2.3 million in the second quarter of this year, most of it from three of Bush's major fundraisers...

The two top pro-Democratic groups, the Media Fund and America Coming Together, raised nearly nine times as much in the past quarter, or a combined $20 million, according to IRS filings...

The new pro-Democratic 527s began raising soft money in 2003. Altogether, they have collected more than $68 million. The organizers have created what amounts to a "shadow" Democratic Party that is performing such basic functions as organizing a massive get-out-the-vote drive in the battleground states, and running anti-Bush ads during the period when the Kerry campaign was short of cash.

Republicans in late 2002 and early 2003 tried to emulate the Democrats but could not get their 527s off the ground. One major problem has been business leaders' reluctance to engage in controversial political activities after the Enron, Tyco and other corporate scandals.

Such major Democratic donors as financier George Soros and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees have shown no such reluctance.

The Democrats are using the 527s to skirt the spirit of the campaign finance reform they so passionately supported. The result is that the "morally bankrupt" business leaders are more ethical than the people like George Soros who see themselves as righteous saviors of America.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:17 AM | Comments (0) |

Faith in Reserve

A picture of Kerry's public faith:

John F. Kerry, a lifelong Roman Catholic, carries in his briefcase an unmarked manila folder stuffed full of religion articles, scriptures, personal reflections -- and a sermon the Democrat has been fine-tuning since the early 1980s...

Outside of black churches or meetings with African Americans such as those at the NAACP convention yesterday, Kerry has been largely silent about the personal Catholicism that once inspired a flirtation with the priesthood and the Christian beliefs friends and family say guide his life and political thinking.

The Post article does its best to frame this as a contrast between Bush's overt faith and Kerry's private faith. But when Kerry uses scripture only when in front of certain audiences, it shows that his faith is a little more than another tool in his campaign toolbox.

Bush's faith permeates every part of his life. Expressions of it are natural to him, so much so that he doesn't need to constantly be polishing a twenty-plus year old sermon. Bush knows that "the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-­edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart."

Posted by bubba138 at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) |

Pickets at the DNC Convention

The big message at this month's DNC convention will be how they cannot get along:

At least four state Democratic party chairmen urged their delegations this week to boycott Boston's welcoming receptions on the eve of the Democratic National Convention rather than cross union picket lines, raising the possibility that some parties will be canceled.

Democratic party chairmen from California, Ohio, Tennessee, and Maine have written letters or phoned delegates asking them to stay away from the parties to be hosted by Mayor Thomas M. Menino in neighborhoods throughout the city. Some are also asking delegates to boycott Menino's speech on the convention floor Monday night. The moves would amount to a major embarrassment for Menino.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:32 AM | Comments (0) |

Surrender: Its In Style

Its becoming all the rage in terrorist circles. Another "Saudi militant" has surrendered to Saudi authoities:

The militant, Ibrahim al-Harbi, gave himself up Thursday at the Saudi Embassy in Damascus, sources said.

He is said to have met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

On Tuesday, another militant, Khalid al-Harbi, surrendered to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, Iran, and was flown to Saudi Arabia.

Both men, who are thought to be from the same Saudi tribe but not necessarily closely related, appear to be taking advantage of a 30-day leniency offer extended by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah last month.

It is hard to know what to make of these. On the one hand, one could say this is evidence that the war on terrorism is working. The heat on the ground is frustrating their terrorist efforts so they're just giving up trying anymore:

Unconfirmed reports on Islamist Web sites have identified him as fighter in Iraq during the past 15 months. It is not known how Ibrahim al-Harbi entered Syria, but there is speculation among sources that he crossed over its border with Iraq.

On the other hand, surrendering to the Sudi embassy gets them a free, safe ride back home where their Wahhabist Imams and contacts live.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:00 AM | Comments (0) |

Military Aid to Egypt: Good News/Bad News

Every time some nut job whines about the military aid the U.S. gives to Israel, I surprise them with the fact that we are giving aid to Islamic countries as well, Egypt being the chief among them.

It irks me to no end that we do, however. Egypt is horribly anti-semitic and anti-Christian. Government condoned persecution of Christians is rampant in Egypt and no one does anything about it. People who have converted from Islam to Christianity in Egypt are raped, beaten, and often killed without impunity.

This is the country to which we give hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid. That's the bad news.

The good news is that there are those in the congress that are beginning to question handouts to our Egyptian "friends:"

The House yesterday rejected a $570 million cut in U.S. military aid to Egypt after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell issued a last-minute warning to lawmakers that the action would damage relations with a close Middle East ally "at a very sensitive moment in the region."

More good news: the effort to reduce military aid to Egypt is a bipartisan one. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) introduced the amendment, and Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) fought in support of it.

As much as I hate the thought of supplying arms to Palestinian sympathizers, I agree with the House's final vote. When the sea is already rough, it is better not to rock the boat. That the idea of reducing military give-aways to Egypt is being debated gives me hope that our Congress isn't completely nuts.

Update: The Saudis are not our friends either, and the Congress knows it:

The House voted 217-191 to remove $25,000 in the $19.4 billion 2005 foreign aid bill earmarked for Saudi Arabia...

The funds were designated for military training but approval would have triggered millions of dollars in discounts on hardware and other military training, lawmakers said.

"I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to the Saudis and I don't want anyone else's to," said Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley.

Neither do I.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:49 AM | Comments (0) |

Cash Crop Up In Smoke

This is interesting:

The Senate yesterday passed a package that would pay tobacco farmers $12 billion over 10 years to give up their decades-old program for the crop and give the government the power to regulate tobacco.

The 78-15 vote, breaking an impasse over what to do about tobacco, sends for the first time a "buyout" measure and federal Food and Drug Administration authority over tobacco to a conference with the House.

Tabacco is a huge cash crop with billions of business dollars behind it. How did those hyper-partisan, divisive Republicans let this one go by?

Posted by bubba138 at 06:26 AM | Comments (0) |

John's Mini-Me

The reason the John-John combo is so intimate is because they think so much alike. Both of them have no problem being for and against just about anything. (Anything but Bush, of course):

John Edwards was even more forthright. Liberal critics have accused Bush of calling Iraq an "imminent" threat -- in their minds, the ultimate in dishonest exaggeration -- but that word never passed Bush's lips. Edwards, in contrast, used it multiple times in reference to Iraq.

John "Imminent" Edwards now has forgotten his earlier alarmism. "When John Kerry is president of the United States," he said the other day, "no young American will ever go to war needlessly because America has decided to go it alone." How does a war against an "imminent" threat suddenly become "needless"? And again, why would Edwards, together with Kerry, vote to authorize such a "needless" war?

Posted by bubba138 at 06:21 AM | Comments (0) |

Weasel Watch and the War Blog

Whoever nominated this S&A post for this week's Weasel Watch, thank you.

S&A also made FrontPage Magazine's war blog round up. I didn't even know it existed until today.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:06 AM | Comments (0) |

July 15, 2004

Guantanamo: Gold Mine of Intellegence

Because we have kept terrorists and Taliban in Guantanamo, lives are saved:

For nearly two years, the prisoner refused to talk about terrorist connections. Then, a few days ago, an interrogator got him chatting...

"We get pieces of the puzzle," said Esteban Rodriguez, who leads the information-gathering teams. "Then we compare it to what others have said. We are getting successful intelligence."

Military and civilian interrogators at the highest levels here say the government has collected thousands of pages of intelligence at Guantanamo about terrorist cells in the U.S. and around the world, the financing of operations and the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Such claims cannot be independently confirmed, and human-rights activists have doubts about the information.

But in intelligence briefings given here to the Tribune last week, the Tribune learned that recent information from Guantanamo has derailed plans for attacks during the Athens Olympics next month and possibly forestalled at least a dozen attacks elsewhere.

As you are watching the Summer Games, think of this administration's policies and how without them the games wouldn't be possible.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:27 PM | Comments (0) |

Forget Fluff

Stanley Crouch understands the most important issue of this election:

The constant discussion of John Kerry and John Edwards in superficial, gossip-column terms may result in their soon being called John & John or J & J, but it will not change something that we have to keep our eyes on, here and abroad. The Islamic extremists bent on waging holy war will not disappear...

That is how it is and how it will be. Mad, brutal romantics though they might be, the soldiers of jihad are serious men. They were warming up during the 1980s and they have been pitching balls of fire since the early '90s. They do not care who sits in the Oval Office.

It is important to remember these hard facts when so much is made of how good John & John look together or how well their wives get on or how easily the four of them fit in a van or what kinds of suits they wear. Such trivia is part of the problem at the center of our time, because important questions are shoved aside in favor of the hollow obsessions with surfaces...

These are not the times for trivial pursuits. What we need to know from Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards is what kind of a war strategy they have and what it would do to give us a better chance to defeat these enemies who do not go on vacations, follow elections or respond to polls...

The rest is fluff.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:58 PM | Comments (0) |

Rush of Vanities

Seeing as how I was at their show just last week, this is very cool.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:34 PM | Comments (0) |

They Still Want to Kill Us

This is scary. Not "John Kerry is president," scary. More like "I'll never feel safe again," scary.

The man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory at the front of coach -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked down the aisle to the back of the plane, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men sitting mid-cabin, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.

Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.

Hat tip: Absinthe and Cookies

Posted by bubba138 at 02:41 PM | Comments (0) |

The Digital Vote

George Bush needs to work on the digital vote. Robots nation wide are united for Kerry:

But when Erin told the robot that "George Bush is awesome," she was shocked by the response. "No way. George W. Bush is way uncool," the reply stated. She asked, "Do you like George W. Bush?" and the program replied, "I'm a Kerry supporter myself."

Testing the waters, she typed in "John Kerry rocks." The robot's response: "Absolutely. John Kerry rocks."

Not satisfied with that answer, Erin persisted in getting the robot to open up. "I have my reasons, believe me. I really, really don't like George W. Bush," the robot explained.

But not everyone was disappointed by the robot's partisanship. When asked about Smarter Child's support of Kerry, Jano Cabrera, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee said, "Clearly this is a smart robot. This shows that we've made great advances in artificial intelligence. The "smarter'' in Smarter Child speaks for itself."

One would think that business-friendly Bush administration would get huge support from the robots that depend upon business for their very lives. I guess the dermatologically challenged just don't feel as if the party is inclusive enough seeing as how all Republicans have skin. Perhaps if the Bush team could flesh out a few robo-centric issues they'd do better. Too bad for them, it is too late to hire Isaac Asimov as a campaign spokesman.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) |

Day By Day

Posted by bubba138 at 10:26 AM | Comments (0) |

The Value of Quiet Diplomacy

Sometimes the left is right. I have to admit the Iraq situation could have been much different if it was handled more diplomatically:

Obviously Saddam knew he didn't have a handy supply of weapons of mass destruction. Yet having apparently nothing to lose, he didn't cooperate with the United Nations search team sufficiently to establish that there were no such weapons in Iraq. So, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney—and Tony Blair and other government leaders—declared that he did have those weapons, and we proceeded to war. Not only was Saddam inexplicably circuitous on these (non-existing) weapons, he completely miscalculated the stamina and determination of his Republican Guard, which collapsed and died after three weeks' exposure to the United States Marines.

Saddam, of all people on earth, must rue the day he acted, or did not act, in time to move in the direction of quiet diplomacy, which by any measurement would have been preferable to his current arrangements.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) |

Tin Foil Hats Make the Mainstream

It is one thing for tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories to flay around the Democratic Underground, but when they become part and parcel of the Democratic leadership there is a problem. Even more troubling is when "reputable" newspapers give print space to wacky canards:

The newest theory - advanced privately by prominent Democrats, including members of Congress - holds that Mr. Cheney recently dismissed his personal doctor so that he could see a new one, who will conveniently tell him in August that his heart problems make him unfit to run with Mr. Bush. The dismissed physician, Dr. Gary Malakoff, who four years ago declared that Mr. Cheney was "up to the task of the most sensitive public office" despite a history of heart disease, was dropped from Mr. Cheney's medical team because of an addiction to prescription drugs.

This is one reason I believe, current polls not withstanding, that the election in November will be a landslide victory for Bush. The closer we get to the election, the wackier the Democrats get, and Americans do not like wacky people in serious positions. The 2002 elections shocked the Democrats and they were a direct result of wackiness (See Memorial Services, Wellstone). 2004 will be more of the same, just ask this guy, or better yet, buy his book.

Update: Hugh had already had a jump on me on this story.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:08 AM | Comments (0) |

Bobby Rush Is Next

Bobby Rush is hoping to join his buddy Chuck Rangle behind bars today:

“He is angry at the fact that at the dawn of the 21st century we are still at a place in this world where innocent people are being killed and subjected to torture, rape and displacement based on skin color and religious belief,” Tasha Harris said. “He feels a responsibility to fight for those who cannot fight for themselves,” she added.

Rush will be the second congressman to be arrested in front of the embassy, joining Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who was arrested Tuesday.

Let make clear that I whole-heartedly support what Rangle and Rush are saying in these protests. My problem is that I highly doubt their integrity. Both have spoken of the injustice of the death of thousands of innocents, yet both were against the war in Iraq. Rush wasn't only against Iraq, he was for military action in Kosovo. He even went as far as voting down legislation that would have prevented the U.S. from sending ground forces to Yugoslavia except in the event of a declared war.

By their records, niether of these men are anti-war. Niether of them are consistantly anti-oppression -- it was acceptable in Iraq but not in Sudan.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:57 AM | Comments (0) |

Stem Cell Research

Scientists are finding that adult stem cells are quite effective in treating spinal damage and Parkinson's disease. Of course the question buring in the mind of esteemed Senator Frank (Torricelli Option) Lautenburg has nothing to do with efficacy:

"Are you a member of a pro-life committee?" Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., asked a scientist who testified that adult stem cells work at least as well as embryonic stem cells in experimental treatments for some diseases.

Heaven forbid if a scientist be motivated to find alternatives to killing unborn children. Finding effective treatments that don't risk life is secondary to defending any perceived threat to a woman's "right" to choose to kill her unborn baby.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:33 AM | Comments (0) |

Positive and Affirmative

Kerry comments about the over-the-top fundraiser last week:

Some of them, in our judgment, went over a line that neither of us would choose to go over. But we understand their anger; we understand their frustration. We're running a very positive and affirmative campaign, and that's what we intend to continue to do.

Positive and affirmative? Really? Perhaps John doesn't remember this:

"Oh yeah, don't worry man. We're going to keep pounding, let me tell you -- we're just beginning to fight here. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen."

Update: Larry Elder has more. Much more.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:48 AM | Comments (0) |

Cheney In / Ditka Out

Consistant with what the White House has been saying all along, Dick Cheney will be going to Washington in 2005:

When asked in an interview with C-SPAN whether he could envision any circumstance in which he would step aside, Cheney responded; "Well, no, I can't."

"If I thought that were appropriate, I certainly would. But (Bush has) made it very clear that he wants me to run again," he said.

"The way I got here in the first place was that he persuaded me four years ago that I was the man he wanted in that post, not just as a candidate, but as somebody to be part of the governing team. He's been very clear he doesn't want (to) break up the team," Cheney said.

Mike Ditka, however, won't:

"I don't know if I could handle it," said the 64-year-old Hall of Fame NFL player who coached the Chicago Bears to a Super Bowl championship in 1986.

"I'm not going to leave my friends. I'm not going to leave the places I play golf," he told reporters and fans outside the steak house restaurant in Chicago that carries his name.

Good on Mike for realizing his limitations. If only more celebs would do so.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:33 AM | Comments (0) |

July 14, 2004

WARNING: Moonbatism Can Affect Your Paycheck

In an obvious act of censorship, Whoppi is being persecuted for her tasteful political commentary:

Comedian Whoopi Goldberg will no longer appear in ads for diet aid maker Slim-Fast following her lewd riff on President George W. Bush's name at a fund-raiser last week, the company has said.

Florida-based Slim-Fast said it was "disappointed" in Goldberg's remarks at last Thursday's $7.5 million (4 million pounds) star-studded fund-raiser at Radio City Music Hall in New York.

"Ads featuring Ms. Goldberg will no longer be on the air," Slim-Fast General Manager Terry Olson said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that the company regrets that Goldberg's remarks offended some customers.

Its the Bush/Cheney cabal abusing its power once again. Then again, the Goldberg ads may have been just a little too prophetic:

Food industry experts and analysts such as John McMillin of Prudential Equity Group in New York view Optima as a good move for a company whose brand still carries clout. Its current ad campaign features actress Whoopi Goldberg calling herself "a big loser" as she talks about losing weight with Slim-Fast.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:35 PM | Comments (0) |

Democrats: At Least They Aren't Communists

Or aren't they?

Remarkably, the "Top Ten Reasons" of the Communist party are identical to those of the Democratic party; out-sourcing, homosexual rights, abortion and the like.

At first, I thought "this is only a coincidence." The Democratic party of the United States couldn't be in lock step with the Marxists! So, I wrote to a spokesman of the CPUSA in Georgia and here is part of his letter:

" The CPUSA supports the John Kerry campaign with donations and volunteer effort. We believe that defeating George Bush is the single most important issue this November ..."

A Vietnam vet group took a trip to Communist Hanoi to investigate a report that John Kerry was in the "Hanoi Hall of Fame." Yes, there is a museum in Hanoi with a section dedicated to foreign activists who help defeat the United States Military in Vietnam. Of course, you would expect Jane Fonda's picture to be there. But, alas, there is John Kerry's picture shaking the hand of a communist official.

We have to make sure these communists in sheep's clothing don't get a hold of the White House. Today is Wictory Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush 2004 campaign.

If you've already donated and volunteered for the Bush campaign, then talk to your friends and enlist them in this battle for America's very soul.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesdays simply by putting up a post like this one every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign. And do e-mail Poli-Pundit at wictory@blogsforbush.com so that he can add you to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which will be part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

Posted by bubba138 at 01:37 PM | Comments (0) |

Got Another One

Thankfully, parts of Homeland Security are working:

Sources in the Twin Cities and in Washington D.C. said the man arrived on a flight and was taken into federal custody. Along the way, customs agents found disturbing items in his possession.

Sources confirm Almosaleh was carrying a suicide [note] when he was arrested. They say that note indicated a specific time and date for carrying out some sort of public suicide. He was also carrying CDs and DVDs, which federal sources say contained anti-American material. A source also confirms Almosaleh had something with him indicating a connection with at least one known terrorist.

Almosaleh arrived on a KLM flight last week. A source confirmed he began his travels in Syria and stopped in Amsterdam before continuing to the Twin Cities.

A federal source would not say where Almosaleh's final destination was, but that source did indicate it appears Almosaleh had plans to travel beyond the Twin Cities.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) |

Magnetic Field Reversal

It may sound like a plot from an unscripted Star Trek episode, but the Earth's magnetic field is reversing polarity. The scientists aren't sure why, but they have some clues:

Deep inside the Earth, the magnetic field arises as the fluid core oozes with hot currents of molten iron and this mechanical energy gets converted into electromagnetism. It is known as the geodynamo. In a car's generator, the same principle turns mechanical energy into electricity.

No one knows precisely why the field periodically reverses, but scientists say the responsibility probably lies with changes in the turbulent flows of molten iron, which they envision as similar to the churning gases that make up the clouds of Jupiter.

There's some good guessing going on there but Liberal Larry has found the real reason for this devastating change.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:02 PM | Comments (0) |

Wrangling a Doctrine of Preemption

Charles Rangle has been arrested:

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan) was arrested yesterday outside the embassy of Sudan in a protest over the plight of refugees in the African nation.

"When human lives are in jeopardy, there should be outrage," Rangel said at the embassy steps. He was arrested for unlawful assembly.

Rangel said peacekeeping troops should be sent to prevent "one of the world's worst tragedies" - the possible deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from starvation and disease.

I thought Rangle was against preemption. Perhaps that's only when the conflict is about oil:

Khartoum's genocidal policy in Darfur and the south is also a grab for resources. The Arab north is arid and barren, but the south is arable with vast oil deposits Khartoum covets and badly needs. In the west, in Darfur, Arabs seeking to escape the spreading desert kill and displace Africans for more productive land.

However you slice it, in Rangle's mind, no human lives were in jeopardy in Iraq. Either that or somehow black African lives are worth more than Arab Iraqi lives.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:10 PM | Comments (0) |

Styles of Bias

We on the right side of the fence have dead horses of our own and media bias is chief among them. Bias involves more than just amount or slant of coverage, but method as well. For instance, lets look at on of the items covered in the Washington Post poll:

8. Of the following list, which one of these will be the single most important issue in your vote for president this year: (The U.S. campaign against terrorism), (the war in Iraq), (the economy and jobs), (education), (Health care), (crime) or something else?

                       Econ./ Educ- Health
       Terrorism Iraq   jobs  ation   care
7/11/04      19    19     29     12     12
6/20/04      18    19     26      9      9
5/23/04      14    18     32      8      8
4/18/04      22    23     26      8      5
3/7/04       17    10     36      8      6

I find it interesting how media consistantly divides Terrorism and Iraq in its polling of the "most important issue." In the minds of many, those are not separate issues, but two prongs in the war on terrorism. By dividing the two, the pollsters make it appear as if the economy is the largest issue in voters minds when actually the war on terrorism outweighs it by nine points.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:31 AM | Comments (0) |

They Just Don't Get It

Kerry Campaign Manager Mary Beth Cahill has replied to the Bush/Cheney campaign's open letter, refusing to release the video unless Bush releases stuff they want to see. What kind of stuff? Here are some examples:

-- "any copies of the President's military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service";

Bush has released all his records. What more can they want? This is a rotting, stinking, putrid dead horse. Why do they keep beating it?

-- "all correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to" Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company;

Do they also want all the documentation between the Clinton Whitehouse and Halliburton regarding the no-bid contracts in Kosovo? No? I didn't think so.

-- documents detailing "what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy";

The Democrats already have those. They have no such documentation, you say? Exactly. The White House wrote its policy, not lobbyists and special interests. It goes without saying that lobbyists on both sides tried to influence it. But of course that would never happen to Democrats, would it?

-- all remaining documents "regarding the White House's involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq."

See dead horse comment above. Here's the kicker. Ready? Are you sure? Ok, here we go...

"We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to [columnist] Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration.

With Plame-Wilson totally debunked it is the height of stupidity to bring that up as a point of contention. Either that or Cahill really doesn't keep up with the news. Either way the stench of incopetence hangs in the air over this.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:10 AM | Comments (0) |

Still a Tight Race

It's a late start for me today, and I've got to go to court later so blogging may be light today.

Kerry/Edwards are having a great time together and missing every moment they spend apart, but they still aren't getting the boost they wanted -- the race is still a toss-up at 46% a piece.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) |

July 13, 2004

An Open Letter To the Kerry Campaign

Mary Beth Cahill
Campaign Manager
John Kerry for President
P.O. Box 34640
Washington, DC 20043

Dear Ms. Cahill:

On Thursday your campaign hosted a fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall at which Sen. Kerry said, "Every performer tonight in their own way either verbally through their music through their lyrics have conveyed to you the heart and soul of our country."

I called on your campaign to release the performance that Sen. Kerry said represented the "heart and soul" of America so that all Americans could see for themselves what John Kerry thinks represents the "heart and soul" of our country.

Do most Americans in their hearts, think that calling the President a "thug" and a "killer" represents the "heart and soul" of our nation? We don't think so, but we think voters should decide for themselves by watching the celebrities John Kerry said captured the "heart and soul" of America.

Your Senior Advisor Tad Devine said that you believed that releasing musical performances "might violate copyrights and licensing agreements for the entertainers who performed and allow the Bush campaign to use the tape in commercials against Kerry and Edwards"

I have been assured that "fair use" rules of copyright would allow you to release the tapes of these musical performances to the news media under 2 U.S.C. 107. To allay the other concern you relayed to the news media, Bush-Cheney '04 pledges to refrain from using audio, video or transcripts of the event for any television, cable, satellite or radio advertising. We look forward to seeing this spirited display.

Sincerely,

Ken Mehlman
Bush/Cheney Campaign Manager

Posted by bubba138 at 08:54 PM | Comments (0) |

Politicising 9/11

President Bush took all sorts of flack for his landing on the U.S.S. Lincoln, but Kerry is bound to get away with this with narry a complaint:

Sen. John F. Kerry [related, bio] upset some families of 9/11 victims yesterday when he arrived - late - to a private memorial dedication in a sirened motorcade and glad-handed as though he were on the campaign trail.

And Kerry stayed much longer than the other leaders, shaking hands, posing for photos before he left with just as much commotion.

"I bet he couldn't even name anybody on that wall," said the wife of one 9/11 victim, who spoke on the condition her name not be used.

Others said they were disturbed that the Kerry campaign allowed television crews to film over the Public Garden fence - capturing video of Kerry with grieving family members in the midst of his presidential campaign.

To the families this was a memorial. To Kerry, it was a photo op.

Hat tip: Blogs for Bush

Posted by bubba138 at 04:32 PM | Comments (0) |

Dumping on Dukakis

MSNBC:

To snub the state’s last presidential nominee in his own back yard would seem unforgivable. But to embrace him would surely dredge up unflattering memories of the oft-caricatured politician’s amazing plummet in the 1988 campaign — and invite trouble for this year’s nominee from Massachusetts: U.S. Sen. John Kerry, who served as the Dukakis lieutenant governor for two years.

Fairly or unfairly, Dukakis represents every political label that Democrats want their current candidate to avoid: liberal, soft-on-crime, tax-and-spend, and presidential loser to a man named Bush.

“The first rule for the Democrats is to avoid a picture of John Kerry and Mike Dukakis together at all costs,” said Rob Gray, a former spokesman for Republican Massachusetts Gov. William Weld. “Dukakis’s race was an embarrassment for the party. He blew a 17-point lead. And the party feels in retrospect that they nominated the wrong guy.”

One thing is for sure, Kerry doesn't have anywhere near a seventeen point lead to blow. The last thing the Democrats want is for America to be reminded that their best hope for president is a liberal, wishy-washy, Senator from Massachusetts just like Dukakis.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) |

The Religious Left

Left leaning people of faith are taking up arms against the "religious right." Slings and Arrows has already exposed FaithfulAmerica's lie about non-partisanship, but check out this one of the new organizations highlighted in this article:

Officials at the Clergy Leadership Network said the group was formed in November 2003 as a non-profit, political advocacy organization to counter the influence of "religious right" groups like the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Research Council.

CLN claims it does not take specific issue stances, but under the leadership of the Rev. Albert M. Pennybacker, a Disciples of Christ minister from Lexington, Ky., and the group’s president and CEO, CLN is promoting a national change in leadership.

"Having new leadership is at a critical stage for the U.S. Without an administration change, the country will continue to digress on domestic issues and internationally with our relationship to other countries," the Rev. Nathan Wilson, a CLN founder, told FOXNews.com.

The only issue they advocate is for a change in leadership. In otherwords, they are an "anybody but Bush" group. I certainly hope they aren't a tax exempt group because it sure sounds like they're endorsing a particular candidate.

Update: But the question remains, on who's side is God?

Posted by bubba138 at 03:38 PM | Comments (0) |

No, You Go First

Scary:

An Iranian man who struck a suicide pact with his new bride over their guilt for having pre-marital sex is being held by police after he backed out on his side of the bargain, judiciary officials said on Sunday.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:27 PM | Comments (0) |

The First Thing to Go

Ok, dude, I got the papers, you got the stash. Why is it I think we're forgetting something?

Posted by bubba138 at 03:16 PM | Comments (0) |

On Step Closer to bin Laden

One of bin Laden's buddies has surrendered to the Saudis:

Khaled bin Ouda bin Mohammed al-Harby, a crippled sheik, was shown on Saudi TV being pushed in a wheelchair through the Riyadh airport. He is the most important figure to surface under a Saudi amnesty promising to spare the lives of militants who turn themselves in.

"Thank God, thank God ... I called the embassy and we were very well-received," al-Harby told Saudi TV in the airport terminal. "I have come obeying God, and obeying the (kingdom's) rulers."

Al-Harby also known as Abu Suleiman al-Makky is considered a sounding board for the al-Qaida chief [Osama bin Laden] rather than an operational planner for his terror network, a U.S. counterterrorism official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Another U.S. official said al-Harby was not a senior member of al-Qaida. The official, who declined to be identified, called him "an aging mujahideen."

Hopefully this can yield some much needed information on the whereabouts of bin Laden, but don't count on it. I have a feeling al Qa'eda would not have allowed his surrender if it was going to damage their position.

Capturing bin Laden must become an extremely high priority for the Bush White House, and quick. Over the last couple of weeks we've constantly heard of al Qa'eda threats to disrupt the elections in November. Most of the hawk-blogs, who denounced Spain's tail-between-the-legs reaction to the Madrid bombings, have been confident that if the same thing were to happen here, U.S. voters would re-elect Bush, confident in his determination to find and kill the culprits.

But consider this: when Bush ordered the assault on Afghanistan in October of 2001, he clearly promised to get bin Laden, "Dead or Alive." Three years later we still have not captured him and niether have we seen his body.

If there is an al Qa'eda attack between now and the election and it is merely perceived (perception is more important than truth in such matters) that bin Laden has engineered that attack, voters across the nation will come to the conclusion that Bush cannot do the job he set out to do. America will conclude that his policies cannot protect them from bin Laden and they will vote him out.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:46 PM | Comments (0) |

Edwards: Not Much Help

John Kerry isn't right about much, but he was certainly right about John Edwards when he said "Edwards says he’s the only one who can win states in the South. He can’t win his own state." Today's USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll has Bush/Cheney beating Kerry/Edwards by 15 points among likely and 6 points among registered voters in North Carolina.

Worse for the Kerry camp is that his favorability rating is declining (down to 49% from 58%) at the same time there is a climb in those who both see him in an unfavorable light (up to 43% from 35%) and see Bush favorably (up to 55% from 53%).

Posted by bubba138 at 01:01 PM | Comments (0) |

Michael Moore: The Ugly American

As "Fahrenheit 9/11" is released into theaters around the world, Moore is beginning to face a new kind of criticism. On American talk radio, Moore may be denounced as practically anti-American. In the international online media, the pudgy filmmaker from Flint, Michigan, is often seen as all too American. He is more than occasionally described as a stereotypical "ugly American" -- overbearing to people of different cultures, oblivious to nuance, unsophisticated in politics and arrogant in temperament.

Ya think?

Posted by bubba138 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) |

U.N. In Iraq

The United Nations has finally decided to participate in the Iraq reconstruction, signalled by the appointment of and envoy:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Monday named Pakistan's ambassador to Washington to be the U.N. special representative to Iraq, the world body's first envoy there since it withdrew its staff in October.

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, 62, will fill the post last held by Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in a bombing of the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters in August.

Perhaps Sergio Vieira de Mello would still be alive if the U.N. had lowered their nose enough to accept security help from the U.S. It was pretty unilateral of them to go it alone like they did.

Qazi will go to Baghdad with an initial staff of 20 to oversee U.N. humanitarian work and election preparations as soon as the security situation permits.

And not a minute sooner, I'd wager.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) |

An Interesting Email

I just received the following regarding last week's post on the National Education Association Republican Caucus' backstabbing of Diane Lenning:

Greetings Byron, Is there a phone number where I can reach you about this posting? The Times reporter was mistaken about the resignation of Ms. Lenning. Have a great weekend, Sarah Simoneaux NEA-REC Recording Secretary

I've gone through both articles referenced by that post and I cannot find anything about Lennings resignation. I replied with that information and asked if there is something Ms. Simoneaux would like to clarify.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:12 AM | Comments (0) |

Good/Bad

In case you're kind of fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing, here's a primer:

Does that clear it up for you?

Posted by bubba138 at 08:37 AM | Comments (0) |

July 12, 2004

That Groovy Jesus and His Message of Peace, Love, and Good Vibes

Jared is making some great points about the "churchy Jesus:"

It might be helpful to mention, first of all, that the Pharisees and Jesus were not far off from each other, theologically speaking. The Pharisees, however, had reduced the Law to how you looked performing it. They were just as interested in applying God's Word to every day life, making belief practical, as Jesus was (and as most Christians are today). Yet their heart wasn't really in it, just their pride. Jesus called them hypocrites, not because they didn't practice what they taught, but because their practice did not come from pure hearts.

It's relatively easy to change behavior. Sure, it might take some training and discipline, but relatively speaking, I can do good deeds. I can even read my Bible and go to church and do other Jesus-y things without ever undergoing the type of change Jesus was calling people into.

The change Jesus was calling people into is infinitely harder than the mere change of behavior. It was changing character, changing one's heart. You can act nice to someone and hate their guts. You can do all manner of good deeds for all kinds of selfish reasons -- to be noticed, to be praised, even to be thought of as "a good person." But to be the kind of person who wants to good deeds and just about automatically does them? That's pretty hard. It's harder to change my heart than it is to change my behavior.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0) |

Go. Now. Buy.

I just bought it. Go and do likewise.

Posted by bubba138 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) |

Cancel Christmas, We've Got Work to Do

More than thirty-five hours a week of work is too much, says German lawmakers:

Leading Social Democrats and members of the conservative opposition have come out in favor of reducing the number of holidays rather than increasing the work hours in Germany as a means of raising worker productivity.

Germans could have fewer holidays on their calendar in the coming years. That's the proposal put forth over the weekend by leading members of the Social Democrats and opposition parties. Rather than take away vacation days or add more hours to the work week, which averages roughly 35 to 38 hours for the industrial and manufacturing sector, the politicians favored scratching a few of the dozen state holidays.

Is it any wonder their economy is sluggish? It is comforting to know, however, unions are the same world-round:

Jürgen Peters, head of IG-Metall, Germany's largest labor union, warned the government not to meddle with the work week and vacation. If the government calls for increasing working hours or taking away vacation days, the union would call for widespread strikes. "We will do what it takes to defend the 35-hour work week," Peters said.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:45 PM | Comments (0) |

Master of the Obvious

Help for the Clueless.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:47 PM | Comments (0) |

A Blessed Anniversary

Twenty five years ago musical sanity was restored.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:13 PM | Comments (0) |

Boston to Dems: No Fun Here

Effective immediately, cancel all your convention parties.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:05 PM | Comments (0) |

Good News From Iraq Dispatch

This is promising:

Last week, on the capital's busiest shopping street in Karada, an alert cop spotted a car bomb packed with 1,500 pounds of explosives that could have killed dozens.

Farther north, a platoon of Iraqi National Guard killed a pair of suicide bombers and dragged the explosives from the vehicle before they detonated.

Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers now patrol the streets, and dozens have been killed or injured in the past week in firefights with insurgents who seem to be training their sights on Iraqi forces.

More and more the Iraqis are taking back their country and enjoying a level of freedom they haven't seen in over three decades.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:02 PM | Comments (0) |

The Enemy At Home

Anarchist groups have got big plans for the GOP convention:

Internet-using anarchists are telling would-be troublemakers to decoy specially trained Labrador retrievers with gunpowder or ammonium nitrate-laced tablets in a bid to halt trains or even spur the evacuation of Madison Square Garden...

The dog decoy ploy is the among most insidious in the fringe groups' bag of tricks - which includes throwing marbles under the hooves of police horses and using slingshots to pelt the animals...

"We're going to make certain there is absolutely no disruption of the train," Kelly said in announcing the procedures on April 28.

Two days later, an Internet posting detailed how to stoke disorder by miscuing the bomb dogs.

The posting instructed people to "go to a rifle, pistol or skeet shooting range, spend an hour shooting to saturate clothing with smell of gunpowder, go directly to a New Jersey Transit, LIRR or subway train headed for Penn Station...

"If the dog alerts on your scent, do not leave or resist; the situation will cause a major disruption of the train schedule. ... If there is more than one person on the train that causes a dog to alert, you can bet that the train will not be going anywhere for a long time ... neither will any trains behind it."

The message instructs to "Play dumb for as long as possible" before telling the police you unwittingly got the gunpowder on your clothes at a shooting range. "It is important that the police call in all possible resources to investigate the situation. ... With any luck, Madison Square Garden will be evacuated."

Posted by bubba138 at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) |

Kerry + Wilson

All but forgotten in the Yellowcake affair is Joe Wilson's close association with the Kerry campaign. John Kerry all but endorsed Wilson's lies and publicity seeking when he hired Wilson to campaign for him:

Joseph C. Wilson, a former Clinton appointee whose unsubstantiated charge that senior White House officials leaked the identity of his CIA officer wife and prompted a grand jury probe, has taken a prominent role in the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry.

The career diplomat and senior director for Africa policy for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration has campaigned for the Democratic presidential front-runner in at least six states. Mr. Wilson has also been offering the Massachusetts candidate speechwriting tips...

Addressing Kerry supporters in an Iowa rally in December, Mr. Wilson called Vice President Dick Cheney a "lying son of a bitch" for what he said was indifference to his report that intelligence on a Niger-Iraq uranium connection referenced by Mr. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address was erroneous.

Mr. Wilson said he can label the incumbent president a "liar."

"I think I can call these guys in the White House liars a little more easily than John can, and talk about the people around the president much more directly — name names and say they ought to be fired," he said in November.

Kerry hired Joe Wilson to spread lies about the administration and their case for war. He did so with full knowledge that was Wilson's intent. If he had integrity, Kerry would fire Wilson immediately and publicly.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:09 PM | Comments (0) |

Something is Fishy

AP shares one strange lost luggage report:

A strong odor led airline officials to what they believe is the 40 pounds of halibut a traveler reported missing from his checked bags two weeks ago.

Brenee Davis, a general manager for Continental Airlines in Anchorage, said the company's baggage handlers discovered "a ton of rotting fish" under a luggage conveyor belt recently at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

There's no way to be certain, but she suspects it was the halibut that Ray Bolanos reported missing from a fish cooler he checked on a flight June 24 from Anchorage to Seattle. The fish smelled terrible and was thrown away immediately.

Yech.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:24 PM | Comments (0) |

The Task Is Too Much

The operation is woefully behind schedule. The threat of terror hangs over everything. They can't keep the power on. It is a quagmire.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) |

Campaigning For Bush

Kerry is campaigning marvelously for Bush/Cheney:

With Republicans questioning Edwards's fitness to serve as a wartime president, given the fact that he has less than six years of government experience, Kerry defended his vice presidential pick as more qualified for the job than Bush.

"Don't get suckered into the how many years you've been in one job or this job" debate, Kerry said. "You've got people in [Washington] who have been in one job [for] 30 years of what you call experience, and they have done nothing, they don't stand for anything and they don't know how to fight."

I'm glad Kerry agrees with what the Bush camp has been saying since he all but wrapped up the nomination several months ago.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) |

Bush/Powell

I have poo-pooed the idea of replacing Dick Cheney on the Republican ticket, but Bush/Powell is polling quite well:

With the announcement this week that Sen. John Kerry has chosen Sen. John Edwards as his vice presidential candidate, the latest Newsweek Poll shows that a Kerry/Edwards ticket would get 51 percent of the vote versus 45 percent for the incumbent Bush/Cheney ticket.

If President Bush replaced Cheney with Secretary of State Colin Powell, more people would vote for a Bush/Powell ticket (53%) than a Kerry/Edwards ticket (44%).

If this kind of result continues, look for Cheney to be visiting a doctor very soon.

Interestingly, the poll shows a good-news/bad-news dicotomy:

President George W. Bush's job approval rating climbs to 48 percent (46% disapprove), which marks a six-point increase from the Newsweek Poll two months ago [good news]. While the majority of voters (52%) say they do not want to see him re-elected for a second term (43% do) [bad news], more people (47%) think Bush will win the election in November over Sen. Kerry (38%) [good news].

Posted by bubba138 at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) |

More Halper

The aforementioned Stephan Halper is stirring up dissent in Washington as the AP gleefully reports that "key conservatives" are "uneasy about Iraq."

...nearly 150 conservatives listened in silence recently as a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations ticked off a litany of missteps in Iraq by the Bush White House.

"This war is not going well," said Stefan Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan.

Conservatives, the backbone of Bush's political base, are increasingly uneasy about the Iraq conflict and the steady drumbeat of violence in postwar Iraq, Halper and some of his fellow Republicans say.

As much as the AP would have us believe otherwise, conservative support for Bush remains very strong. A recent Newsweek poll shows that Bush gets 90% of the Republican vote as opposed to Kerry, who garners 83% of his base's vote.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:25 PM | Comments (0) |

Conspiracy Theorists: Gear Up!

Let's get the tin-foil hats on, Bush is looking for an excuse to cancel the elections in November:

U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday...

Newsweek said the discussions about whether the November 2 election could be postponed started with a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge from DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Get ready for a rashes of hyperbolic foaming-at-the-mouth reaction. It's already started on Democratic Underground.

Update: The story is getting legs.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) |

New Target Selected

New York Post:

U.S. intelligence agencies are growing increasingly concerned that al Qaeda's next target in the United States could be the heart of America's economy — Wall Street.

Counterterrorism officials told The Post last night that new terrorist "chatter," picked up from intercepted phone calls and Internet chat rooms, indicates Islamic fanatics have Wall Street and other financial institutions in their cross hairs as part of a second terror attack inside America.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:54 AM | Comments (0) |

Halper and Clarke Fisked

A friend has pointed me to a recent opinion piece by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke:

As we stand at the moment of truth in Iraq - sovereignty now transferred to the Iraqis - Americans, whether for or against the war, will be hoping for better times ahead.

Iraqis aren't only hoping for better times ahead, but are currently experiencing better times right now. For details, read Chrenkoff's very comprehensive reports entitled "Good News from Iraq" (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V)

But even as our eyes are trained on the future hoping for the best, it would do us well to pause to consider how America got to this point where in reality prospects of success are extraordinarily fragile...

Language such as "prospects of success are extraordinarily fragile" is hyperbolic and subjective. What evidence do Clarke and Halper have as to the fragility of the situation? To this point the majority of the operation has gone according to schedule. There have been bumps in the road to be sure, but fifteen months is nowhere near the "quagmire" feared by the anti-war pundits. Almost three-quarters of Iraqis are behind the current Iraqi government. Iraqis are becoming more involved in providing intelligence against insurgents. Other Arab countries are offering to send troops to support the new government. Where is the fragility?

...and where America's global legitimacy stands at enormous risk. This will help us consider whether we should endorse similar future enterprises and, if so, whether we would do things differently. Let us see what the questions and conclusions might look like.

Question one: Who are the responsible parties?

I can tell you right off the bat that Saddam Hussien isn't anywhere on Halper and Clarke's list of responsible parties. Raise your hand if you think that might be a problem. See a shrink if you don't.

...When the opportunity of 9/11 presented itself, this pre-conceived concept - envisioning a traditional state-on-state war despite the fact that al-Qaeda was a non-state actor - was foisted on the nation by a group of neo-conservative intellectuals who had made their way into positions at the top of the Bush administration.

Halper and Clarke show their main contention: "state-on-state war despite the fact that al-Qaeda was a non-state actor." This demonstrates that their thinking is no different now than it was the day before the towers fell in New York. They were against pre-emption then and they remain against pre-emption now. Imagine, however, if we had demanded Afghanistan turn over Osama in August of 2001 and backed that up with the threat of on-the-ground military action. The towers would most probably be standing today, three thousand Americans would still be alive and the economy (which was begining to come back to life but was destroyed after the attacks) would have hit its current state months ago.

Those involved are by now all too familiar and include Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith (Department of Defense), Elliott Abrams (NSC), I. Lewis Libby (Vice President's Office), and Richard Perle (Defense Policy Board).

So be very aware of those Jews that hold sway over the president's thinking. You know Bush doesn't make a move without being told to by Israel.

The record of their actions in bringing about the Iraq War is unforgiving. During the 1990s, reconstituting the Middle East, and Iraq specifically, was a clear objective. Wolfowitz says he became alarmed about Iraq as early as 1979.

In the time between 1979 and the war in April of 2003 Saddam Hussein's Iraq waged war on two of his neighbors, killed hundreds of thousands of his own Iraqi people, used illegal poisonous gas to wipe out entire Kurdish villages, and committed dozens of other atrocities. Somehow Halper and Clarke make Wolfowitz's concerns out to be evil when indeed they were proven out by Saddam's own actions. I call that wisdom.

In 1994 he identified Iraq as a "backlash state." In 1997 the Project for the New American Century laid out an argument for using American military power to challenge hostile regimes. In January 1998, several members of this group wrote an open letter to then-President Clinton urging Saddam's forcible removal from power. Hours after 9/11, neo-conservatives were advocating action against Iraq. One of them, former CIA Director James Woolsey, proposed this "no matter who should be responsible" for 9/11.

In other words, President Bush and his administration are mere puppets of a Jewish cabal agaisnt which they have no will of their own and no ability to make their own judgements.

What was motivating them? To remove Saddam and install a democratic Iraq? Were they not aware of the vast dimensions of this task - and the likely cost in men, resources and allied support?

Yes, they were aware, were you? Over the last fifteen months we've lost all of a thousand U.S. service people and the most outrageous estimates of Iraqi deaths barely tops ten thousand. More than that were lost in a single day at Normandy. The number of fatalities even more pales in comparison to those dumped in mass graves over the last 25 years. Saddam, Uday and Qusay and their thugs killed upwards around thirty thousand a year. You do the math on how many are alive today because we invaded.

So the question here isn't whether the administration was "aware of the vast dimensions of this task," but whether America had the moral fiber and the guts to take on the task and see it to its end. President Bush and company are showing that they do.

Had they not examined the immense cultural and historical differences between the West whose democracies are rooted in the Enlightenment and beyond, and the Arab nations whose historical experience has provided none of the social or cultural preconditions for democracy, and whose language, for example, has no word for "equality" or even "politician"?

First, the administration is at the mercy of a Jewish cabal, and now the Arabs are too inferior to handle democracy. I think we're starting to see a pattern here. This sounds hauntingly familiar to "the Japanese cannot handle democracy" argument that was heard after WWII. Not only did they learn it, but they became such masters at free-enterprise that we feared they'd won the economic war in the eighties.

In neo-conservative hands, war is a device for transforming both regions and religions. Consider the thoughts in a May 26, 2003,

e-mail referring to the U.S. mission in Baghdad: "We have a chance here to really help the Iraqi people and later other Muslims as well as to build the basis for a liberal democracy based on freedom of conscience. We should support secularism in Iraq. Only as a last resort should we agree that Islam should be the religion of the state." The sender was Harold Rohde, now in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment.

Conclusion One: The war against Iraq was a pre-conceived idea, not a direct response to 9/11.

The war in Iraq was never, ever presented as a response to 9/11. Anyone who has tried to paint that picture has been patently against invading Iraq. The administration's case has always been, in the light of 9/11 we must look at the world in a new way, and that new look requires that the Middle East be transformed. Clarke and Halper offers as a condemnation this group's belief in the need for change in the region. That the region has proven itself a festering sore that produces the puss of Islamic terrorism shows the group has been correct.

Further, as far as changing the region, that was stated U.S. policy long before President Bush took office. Here is what President Clinton wrote when he signed the The Iraq Liberation Act on October 31, 1998:

The United States favors an Iraq that offers its people freedom at home. I categorically reject arguments that this is unattainable due to Iraq's history or its ethnic or sectarian make-up. Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else. The United States looks forward to a democratically supported regime that would permit us to enter into a dialogue leading to the reintegration of Iraq into normal international life.

Back to Halper and Clarke:

Question Two: How was the war sold to the American people?

Leaving aside the now infamous invocation of weapons of mass destruction (which Wolfowitz described as a "pretext"), the deliberately deceptive language used by the administration to cause 70 percent of Americans to believe that Saddam was linked to 9/11 (something now dismissed by the 9/11 Commission)...

The challenge has repeatedly gone out and not one foaming-at-the-mouth liberal can cite a single example where the White House has used "deliberately deceptive language" to put forth the assertion that Iraq was involved in 9/11.

...and the self-serving delusion that the invasion would be a "cakewalk,"

In an earlier paragraph Clarke and Halper themselves spoke to the enormity of the task. That we've accomplished it with so few lost in such a short time is evidence of the cake-walkedness. However, lets put that adside to illustrate that again Clarke and Halper are putting words into President Bush's mouth which he never spoke. Examine his public addresses since 9/11. Never has he spoken as if this was going to be an easy task. Instead, time after time he has repeated that this is a long term project that would require our unflagged determination.

the central neo-conservative selling point was that an attack on Iraq would somehow restore the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan with what pamphleteers William Kristol and Robert Kagan called a "neo-Reaganite foreign policy"...

Conclusion Two: The neo-conservatives did not level with the American people about the war.

In other words, "BUSH LIED!" We have found sarin gas and mustard gas. We know Saddam and crew used illegal weapons of mass destruction on his own people and his enemies. In the run-up to the war, the administration had so many reasons for going into Iraq it was taking flack for not having one, clear, smoking gun. So, the administraiton chose WMD's. Saddam had them. He said he had them. He documented to the U.N. that he had them. He did not, and would not present clear evidence that he had destroyed the very weapons he himself said he had. Not a single country before the war denied they had them. Russia's President warned the Bush administration that a terrorist attack from Iraq was being planned against the U.S. Even Joe Wilson has now been shown to be an publicity seeking liar and the whole "yellowcake" controversy has blown up in his face. (More here, here, and here).

Question Three: How could a special interest like the neo-conservatives have had such a wide influence?

Clarke and Halper now identify neo-conservatives as a "special interest." Which (Jews!) special (Jews!) interest (Jews!) would (Jews!) that (Jews!) be, hmmm?

...Those who pointed to practical difficulties, most notably Army Chief of Staff Gen. John Shinseki who advocated the deployment of significantly higher force levels to Iraq, were elbowed aside. Administration claims of coming help from allies were largely taken at face value. And most congressional Democrats voted to authorize war. It took an independent senator, Harry Byrd, and a complete outsider, Howard Dean, to make the case against the war.

We've accomplished the majority of the task with the forces we sent. The loses have been the lowest in history for a conflict of this type. Army Chief of Staff Gen. John Shinseki, quite simply, has been proven wrong. Senator Byrd as much a partisan hack as one can be. That Clarke and Halper call him an "independent senator" is a clue toward the integrity of their argument. Howard Dean's whose thinking was more based on bashing Bush than on taking a principled stand, was so off he barely received enough votes to win his home state.

Conclusion: Both our constitutional system of checks and balances, and venerable institutions like the media and the academy are vulnerable to pressures, conflicts and events that inhibit their proper function. Their dysfunction invites the type of excess by special interest that has brought Iraq and the prospect of a broader conflict between Islam and the West. Rebalancing these critical institutions and the relations among them preconditions the return to a rational, consensus-driven foreign policy.

Those Jews have their hands in everything! The government, the media, even the educational system is at their mercy, and they'll pounce at the first chance to take advantage of it.

Having authored the Iraqi debacle, it would be easy to conclude that the neo-conservatives have had their day. But just as the "best and brightest" generation led the nation into Vietnam, so special interests like today's neo-conservatives may draw on deeply held political and cultural beliefs to animate U.S. policy in the years ahead. So while the neo-conservatives, per se, may fade, their themes will endure to challenge us another day.

Only those dominated by fear and negativity, or those for whom winning the White House is more important than winning the war on terrorism can call the war in Iraq a debacle. But give Clarke and Halper kudos for working Vietnam into their piece. Pay no mind to the facts that the Asian conflict lasted eons longer than Iraq and we lost fifty times the number of U.S. soldiers there.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) |

Federal Marriage Amendment

The Federal Marriage Amendment has been in the news these last few days and is again up for debate in the Senate today. Sometimes I wonder if the Republican party really has their head screwed on straight. In a time when the Democrats are hammering the administration and its supporters on the war in Iraq and the economy, they want to waste time arguing about an amendment that will never pass in an election year. Perhaps they think they're playing to the base, but what they're really doing is displaying with insane clarity how little weight they place on the seriousness of the war on terror.

President Bush, who should be focused on getting Iraq stable and capturing bin Laden above all things instead used his weekly radio address to promote this doomed amendment. For the life of me I cannot figure out why he's wasting his time and effort on a fight that he cannot win. This is time that can be better spent showing the public that Iraq is and is going to be a success. This is time that can be used to raise the public's level of understanding on the economy. This could be time better spent showing the swing voter why everything Kerry stands for would destroy the progress the administration has made.

The Constitution was written for one purpose, to define the role of the government. The Bill of Rights were written, not to define the rights of the people as commonly thought, but to limit the rights of the government in people's lives. The Federal Marriage Amendment is antithetical to the intentions of our forefathers because it does not limit the government, but people.

Does this mean I approve of gay marriage? As anyone who has been reading Slings & Arrows can tell you, by no means. Gay marriage is wrong, wrong, wrong. But the problem lies not with the government but with the church.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:45 AM | Comments (0) |

July 09, 2004

No I Am Not Dead

I've just been battling viruses...and it looks like switching to Mozilla isn't going to be a good long-term solution, either.

Abu Graib is too nice for the scumbags that code and distribute viruses.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:05 PM | Comments (0) |

July 08, 2004

Not Much of a Bump

Some polls show an immediate bump for Kerry after his pick of Edwards, but more recent ones aren't looking all that positive for the Democrats. Zogby shows Bush down by two, which is fairly close to where the race has been for months. The AP-Ipsos poll shows Bush gaining not only in a matchup, but in most major issues of concern as well.

I think we'll not see the real affect for a week, so I don't think these early polls mean much. Still, it is quite interesting that Zogby and AP both show tight races while the mainstream TV polls (CBS, NBC) show a strong Kerry lead.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:53 PM | Comments (0) |

July 07, 2004

More Good News...

...from Iraq. Chrenkoff has been a busy boy.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:35 AM | Comments (0) |

Roger And Me

Well, Roger and the Irish Lass, at least.

Posted by bubba138 at 07:33 AM | Comments (0) |

Wictory Wednesday

I'll be gone all day today, and tonight I'll be rocking out to the mystic rhythms of Rush, live.

But don't forget that today is Wictory Wednesday. Every Wednesday, I ask my readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush 2004 campaign.

If you've already donated and volunteered for the Bush campaign, then talk to your friends and enlist them in this battle for America's very soul.

If you're a blogger, you can join Wictory Wednesdays simply by putting up a post like this one every Wednesday, asking your readers to volunteer and/or donate to the Bush campaign. And do e-mail Poli-Pundit at wictory@blogsforbush.com so that he can add you to the Wictory Wednesday blogroll, which will be part of the Wictory Wednesday post on all participating blogs:

Posted by bubba138 at 07:30 AM | Comments (0) |

July 06, 2004

10 things to know about John Edwards

with annotation:

1. He grew up in a modest household, but is one of the Senate's wealthiest members. Edwards' father was a textile mill worker in North Carolina. His wealth came by representing people in personal injury claims against corporations.

Translation: He's a very successful ambulance chaser. This uniquely qualifies him for the White House.

2. Unlike many elected officials, Edwards did not work his way up the political ladder. In his first run for political office, he was elected to the Senate in 1998 at age 45.

Translation: He's so completely, terribly inexperienced one shouldn't expect too much from him. Seriously, legislative, executive -- what's the difference?

3. Even though he had been in the Senate only two years, Al Gore seriously considered Edwards as a vice presidential running mate in 2000. Edwards' youthful appeal and his home state of North Carolina - considered a potential swing state in 2000 - made him stand out to Gore.

Translation: I think we all can see how good ol Al's judgement is. Not to mention it would be a bit much for him to expect his VEEP to win his own state when Al himself got beat in his home state of Tennessee.

4. Edwards, 51, won only one presidential primary- South Carolina, where he was born - before dropping out of the Democratic race. But he impressed many Democrats with his vigor and message of economic populism.

Translation: The proper term is barely won South Carolina. Vigor and economic populism might do in the primaries, but he's in the bigs, now.

5. Edwards' telegenic style and good looks often draw comparisons to John F. Kennedy. People magazine named him "sexiest politician" in its November 2000, "Sexiest Man Alive" issue.

Sexiest politician. That's a vote getter. I guess we know who Monica's voting for now.

6. The comparisons to Kennedy stop, however, when Edwards talks. He has a Southern drawl, which he sometimes poked fun at when he campaigned in Iowa, New Hampshire and other non-Southern states in the primaries.

Bush has a southern drawl. So what?

7. He was the first in his family to go to college. Edwards graduated from North Carolina State University in 1974. Three years later, he received a law degree from the University of North Carolina.

Honestly, well done. John Edwards is proof positive we live in a system in which an individual can elevate oneself in the socio-economic sense through hard work and sound choices, no matter how much John Kerry and John Edwards tries to convince you otherwise.

8. John and Elizabeth Edwards' life together has been touched by tragedy. Their 16-year-old son was killed in a car accident in 1996. They have three other children.

My heart goes out to them. Losing a child is an incomprehensible pain.

9. Edwards often talks about "regular people" and their struggles in "two Americas" as a way to delineate between people on the lower and upper ends of the income scale, but critics say it is class warfare disguised as folksy rhetoric.

What else do you call it when a millionaire gets on the stump and preaches about how I make too much money.

10. According to the Almanac of American Politics, Edwards won more than $150 million in verdicts for plaintiffs in personal injury lawsuits before selling his law practice for $5 million. He began his legal career defending record companies accused of pirating Elvis Presley records.

I've got to go with John on this one, after all everyone knows he stole the music. Last I checked, Elvis is d-e-d, he can't use the money anyway.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) |

Still Causing Trouble

al-Sadr is still doing his best to mix it up:

Militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who led an April uprising that left hundreds dead, called Iraq's new interim government "illegitimate" and pledged to resist occupation forces to the "last drop of blood."

The cleric's comments apparently reversed earlier conciliatory statements he made to the government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Members of al-Sadr's movement had also suggested they might transform their militia into a political party.

"We pledge to the Iraqi people and the world to continue resisting oppression and occupation to our last drop of blood," al-Sadr said in a statement distributed Sunday by his office in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where his al-Mahdi militia battled American troops until a cease-fire last month.

"Resistance is a legitimate right and not a crime to be punished," he said.

I'm looking forward to that last drop.

Posted by bubba138 at 05:51 PM | Comments (0) |

Zarqawi's Brother Held

Interesting:

Jordanian police have detained the brother-in-law of Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, an anti-American militant who is the most wanted man in Iraq, relatives and government officials said Tuesday.

Government officials declined to say why Saleh al-Hami was held for questioning, but one official said it was not related to any suspicion of terrorism. The officials spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

Posted by bubba138 at 05:48 PM | Comments (0) |

Sell Our Souls To the UN

John Edwards on what to do in Iraq:

MR. RUSSERT: What specifically would you do? The United Nations has pulled out of Iraq. The Red Cross has pulled out of Iraq. The president has gone to the French, the Germans and the Russians, they've all said "no." What would you do differently?

SEN. EDWARDS: But the problem, Tim, is the president goes to them and asks for assistance, but he's completely unwilling to relinquish control. That's the critical thing that's missing from this process. What I would do, to answer your question specifically, is I would turn over the Iraqi civilian authority to the United Nations tomorrow. You're right. We'd have to convince them to take that responsibility. But I believe that could be done if, in fact, we went and talked to them, told them we're going to relinquish our control over what's happening there.

On gay marriage:

MR. RUSSERT: If a gay couple goes to Canada and is married legally and returns to the United States, should that marriage be honored here?

SEN. EDWARDS: Again, I think this is a decision that has to be made on a state—individual states have to make that decision and...

MR. RUSSERT: If you were governor of a state, would you be supportive of that?

SEN. EDWARDS: No, I would not.

MR. RUSSERT: You would not. Why?

SEN. EDWARDS: I would not. Because, well, first of all, you probably know this, I just went through my discussion of what rights I think need to be given to gays and lesbians, those in committed gay and lesbian relationships, but I don’t support gay marriage.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:28 PM | Comments (0) |

More Headline Shenanigans

The CNN headline blares:

as if that is news. But the subtext is where the news is:

but Bush runs slightly stronger among minority voters than he did four years ago and has a double-digit lead among white voters...

The poll, released Tuesday, found that in a two-way race between Bush and Kerry, 53 percent of white registered voters supported Bush, while 41 percent supported Kerry. Among black voters, Kerry led Bush 81 percent to 12 percent, and among Latinos, the Massachusetts senator led 57 percent to 38 percent.

Exit polls from the 2000 election showed that Bush received only 9 percent of the black vote, compared to 90 percent for Democrat Al Gore, and 35 percent of the Latino vote, compared to 62 percent for Gore. So Kerry's lead over Bush among black voters in the new poll was about 12 points smaller than Gore's gap in 2000; among Latinos, it was 8 points smaller.

So Bush has gained 3% in both the Black (from 9% to 12%) and Latino (from 35% to 38%) vote. Mot importantly, that gain is straight from the crucial crossover votes that make the difference in a tight race.

The new poll also has Bush up by one overall, 47% to 46%.

Also interesting is that CNN links Kerry's name to their candiate info page for him, while there is no similar link for Bush.

Posted by bubba138 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0) |

Austria's President Dead

Reuters:

Austria President Thomas Klestil has died at the age of 71 following heart failure, Austrian state television and the national news agency say.

"Thomas Klestil died today from the consequences of the sudden heart failure he suffered on Monday," Austrian state television said on its Web site on Tuesday. News agency APA quoted doctors Reinhard Krepler and Christoph Zielinski giving the news.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) |

Economy Still Hot

AP reports:

The economy appears headed for a banner year despite a springtime spike in energy prices and a recent increase in interest rates. In fact, many analysts are forecasting that the overall economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, will grow by 4.6 percent or better this year, the fastest in two decades.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:13 PM | Comments (0) |

Bloated Blatherings Blasted

Dave Kopel documents fifty-nine deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11.

It is long, so read it when you have a few moments.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) |

Busted

Last week it was reported that Jordan and Yemen were the first Arabic countries to pledge to send troops into Iraq if needed. Little did we know Iran was already doing it:

American and Iraqi joint patrols, along with U.S. Special Operations teams, captured two men with explosives in Baghdad on Monday who identified themselves as Iranian intelligence officers, FOX News has confirmed.

Senior officials said it was previously believed that Iran had officers inside Iraq stirring up violence, but this is the first time that self-proclaimed Iranian intelligence agents have been captured within the country.

I guess the saber-rattling wasn't enough for them. Here is a very positive development:

The Defense officials also confirmed to FOX News that in recent days there has been significant success in tracking down "known bad guys" based on information from local citizens. While those captured aren't from the list of former regime members or from terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's (search) network, they are "active" bombers and organizers of recent violence.

I think this is a direct result of the handover of sovreignty. Where the Iraqis were suspect to share information while the country was under U.S. control, they are more than willing to give up those who threaten peace now that their own are in charge.

It is imperitive not to forget that Kerry and his supporters called June 30th an "arbitrary date," accusing the Bush administration of foolishness and playing politics. Imagine how it would have gone if we had done it Kerry's way.

Hat tip: Neophyte Pundit

Posted by bubba138 at 01:31 PM | Comments (0) |

Diplomacy of the Highest Order

How's this for smooth diplomacy:

The six pallbearers, all Marines from Lopez's unit who had flown in from Camp Pendleton in California, carried no weapons, Dickmeyer said. They were joined by a Marine color guard from the embassy made up of two flag-bearers accompanied by two Marines carrying only the ceremonial M-14 rifles, which do not fire ammunition, Dickmeyer said.

Problems began as the six pallbearers were folding the U.S. flag in preparation to hand it to Lopez's widow, said Dickmeyer, who was present. A Mexican Army captain, backed by at least 10 soldiers in combat uniforms and helmets, demanded to see documents giving the Marines permission to carry the guns in Mexico, he said.

Dickmeyer said he suggested the captain wait until the ceremony was over to discuss the matter. But the officer continued demanding to see documents and confiscate the guns, even as a U.S. Marine played taps on his bugle, Dickmeyer said.

When taps was finished, the color guard turned about-face and marched back to the three embassy vans in which they had arrived. They put the flags and guns in the vehicles. Mexican soldiers stood in front of the vehicles and would not permit them to leave, Dickmeyer said.

Who gave the command for these soldiers to do this? Who commanded them to leave?

Posted by bubba138 at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) |

A Case For Condi

One of Glenn's readers has been thinking overtime about Condi in the VEEP slot, and how Bush can disrupt any bump in the polls Kerry gets from the DNC convention:

This is where Condoleezza Rice comes in. Her performance before the September 11th committee was pretty damn good, given the fact that the Democrats had come for a lynching. So I think she passed the pressure test to Bush's satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of most Americans. Only the Moore crowd dislikes her, and they dislike Bush anyway. I have a strong hunch that Bush knows how to keep a secret, and will announce Cheney's retirement (after the First Term is completed: no confirmation hearings to disrupt things) on the Thursday prior to the opening of Kerry's party. Indeed, if Bush decides to be a real prick, he'll do it on the Thursday of Kerry's acceptance speech, to drown out Kerry's face time with Condi Rice buzz.

Rice is a good pick for several reasons: seasoned foreign policy experience, sound conservative principles (especially on RKBA issues-gun people like me love her), and appears to be a centrist on abortion issues (she doesn't like it, and is personally pro-life, but doesn't want to try to repeal Roe, for instance). She's also black, female, and extremely telegenic.

Here's the problem with keeping Cheney: he doesn't reach out beyond the base demographic. Rice can do that. Republicans won't come close to winning black voters with Rice on the ticket, but if they score in the high teens, Kerry loses a bunch of battlegrounds that he needs. Rice can also make it a fifty-fifty game among women, and Kerry needs a sizable majority among women to win.

Oh, that it could be true! But I think we'll see pigs fly first. Both Bush and Cheney has been asked about perhaps changing VEEPs repeatedly in the last eighteen months and the reply has constantly been no dice, Cheney stays.

This is one of those times I would love to be proven wrong, though.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) |

Blogging the Convention

The world is opening up to the new media:

The Democratic Party plans to give media credentials to a select group of bloggers who want to cover the event [old news]...

The Republican Party recently decided that it will also give bloggers credentials for its convention later this summer. A spokesman for the event said it is still working out details.

If I can get an invite, I just might go. We'll have to see if the doors open.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:58 AM | Comments (0) |

Bush Lied

Either Bush lied or he didn't know, and not knowing is his fault so he's incompetent. That's the line we'll soon be hearing as this gets more airplay/type:

The CIA was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the CIA failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.

What will be conveniently dismissed is that the CIA had overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The challenge of intelligence isn't lack of information, but determining which parts in the glut of information are true.

CIA officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation.

So you have handfuls of relatives vs. more than handfuls of actual scientists. Who are you going to believe?

In the Democrat's case, it will be whomever has the view that best gets them into the White House.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:00 AM | Comments (0) |

Backbone Award

It's not easy doing what is right in the face of opposition. People who do so should be recognized, so I'm going to use what minimal resources I have to trumpet those whose integrity is such that they do the right thing for the right reasons dispite the pressure to do otherwise.

Slings & Arrows first ever Backbone Award goes to Diane Lenning, an Orange County, Calif., high school teacher, and chairwoman of the NEA Republican Educators Caucus.

Here's the scenario: A 16 year old Massachusetts student disclosed to one of his teachers, Kevin Jennings, that he was having a sexual relationship with an adult male. In Massachusetts, as in many states, sex with a minor is a crime and school workers are legally required to report such crimes. Mr. Jennings did not do so, and even worse, profited from the encounter:

Mr. Jennings cited the youth's problems in a book, saying he sympathized with the boy's homosexual relationship after he came for guidance to Mr. Jennings, an openly homosexual teacher at Concord Academy in Concord, Mass.

The National Education Association, one of the most powerful unions in the country, chose this man to receive a humanitarian award because he founded and advanced the causes of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

Diane Lenning publicly stood against Mr. Jennings. In return for her backbone, the Republican caucus stabbed her in the back:

Republican delegates to the National Education Association's annual convention yesterday changed their caucus' rules in order to remove their chairwoman over her stance against homosexuality. A group of liberal Republicans from California and Texas joined forces to oust Diane Lenning, an Orange County, Calif., high school teacher, as chairwoman of the NEA Republican Educators Caucus.

Californian Republican Caucus members: spineless. Diane Lenning: a woman with a backbone. I say we need more like her teaching our children.

Update: More background here.

Another question: Had the student been female, would Jennings have reported against her adult male partner?

Posted by bubba138 at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) |

DNC Going Hawkish

This is interesting:

The Democratic Party pledges an unrelenting struggle against terrorism and a commitment to seeing Iraq succeed, according to a statement of election principles shaped heavily by national security crises.

The working draft of the Democratic Party platform rebukes President Bush's leadership on foreign policy and talks tough on terrorism. But it doesn't take a position on a central issue: whether the war in Iraq was justified...

It says Democrats will:

• Finish the job in Iraq. "We cannot allow a failed state in Iraq that inevitably would become a haven for terrorists and a destabilizing force in the Middle East," it says. It calls for persuading NATO to contribute additional military forces, a step NATO has declined to take.

• Fund 40,000 more troops for the U.S. military. It doesn't say additional troops should be deployed to Iraq, however.

• Fight against "a global terrorist movement committed to our destruction."

• Support an independent Palestinian state as well as controversial security guarantees to Israel — the same position the Bush administration has taken.

This is a shrewd move on the Democrats part. The anti-war lobby isn't as large as the media would have us believe, and they're pretty much an in-the-pocket constiuancy. It isn't as if they'll vote Republican because the Democrats are getting stiffer on defense.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) |

Spiderman

I saw it on Saturday and was not impressed. My girls and wife, however, loved it and thought it was better than the first. In a word: chic-flic (yeah, I know, that's two words -- so sue me).

When we went at 1pm on Saturday, the theater was surprisingly empty. There were no lines and plenty of open seats by the time the movie started. It must have been a fluke, though:

The amazing Spider-Man certainly lived up to his name this weekend as Sony's "Spider-Man 2," setting records at a frantic pace, cranked out a staggering six-day estimate of $180.1 million at the North American boxoffice -- the biggest first six days in history.

The Sam Raimi-directed sequel exploded past the previous high by a wide margin, eclipsing the first six days of Warner Bros. Pictures' "The Matrix Reloaded," which accumulated $146.9 million (excluding $5 million in previews).

The estimated four-day cume for the Tobey Maguire starrer was a stunning $115.8 million -- the largest four-day opening and biggest weekend of all time. The debut of the PG-13-rated blockbuster topped the opening three-day frame of the first "Spider-Man," which grossed $114.8 million.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:05 AM | Comments (0) |

Sauce for the Goose?

...or is that "good for the gander?"

In a videotape sent to the al-Arabiya television station, a group calling itself the "Salvation Movement," questioned how al-Zarqawi could use Islam to justify the killing of innocents, the targeting of government officials and the kidnapping and beheading of foreigners.

"He must leave Iraq immediately, he and his followers and everyone who gives shelter to him and his criminal actions," said a man on the video.

The video marked the first time an Iraqi group made such a public threat against al-Zarqawi.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) |

It's Just Wrong

EEEK update: Here's the video.

At least Colin's not alone in making a fool of himself.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:52 AM | Comments (0) |

Tin Foil Hat Alert

Jen's found some fun people.

These guys don't know it, but they're doing their best to get Bush re-elected.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:46 AM | Comments (0) |

John-John

So the ticket is John-John (Edwards), which is of course, John's second choice to the John-John ticket (McCain).

Many postulated that Gephardt would be the guy because Edwards looks too good and would outshine Kerry. There's something to that, but Kerry needs some energy in his camp and he can't seem to provide it on his own. I look at Edwards like a new suit. Some Johns have enough personal power to influence great crowds of people even when dressed in rags, Kerry does not. As ZZ Top so eloquently put it, a finely tailored suit makes even the dumpiest, most boring man look sharp. John Edwards fills that bill.

The Democrats have to hope that the Edwards suit is very sharp. A presidential candidate normally hopes the VEEP will bring his state along with him. In this case, that will be a daunting task. South Carolina is currently polling well in favor of Bush, and has been for quite some time. Add to that the fact that Edwards has yet to complete a single term in the Senate, and for the last two years he's been on the campaign trail. That doesn't make for much of a record. (Then again, without the 30 years of service Kerry has amassed, it should be much harder to pinpoint Edwards flip-flops.)

Finally, because Edwards and Kerry battled it out in the primaries, there are a host of Kerry quotes bemoaning all Edwards' short-comings (including and specifically his inexperience). I see a Bush ad in the future which attacks Kerry and is entirely nararated by Edwards, and that won't be good for John-John.

Best zinger so far: John Kerry was against John Edwards before he was for him.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) |

July 05, 2004

More Prison Abuse

It must be systemic.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) |

Meet My Son...

Well, since I live with three females, I'm ready to go to the fair but unsurprisingly it'll be another half-hour or so before we get out the door. In the mean-time, check out this gem:

Baby boy ESPN McCall of Pampa, Texas, joins Espen Blondeel and Espn Curiel as kids named after the network since 2000. When they turn 25, look for them to throw huge parties for themselves.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) |

Great Weekend

I hope everyone had a great Fourth, we sure did. We're capping the three-day weekend with the Del Mar Fair.

Type at you tomorrow.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:41 AM | Comments (0) |

July 02, 2004

Moore and Hussein

Separated at birth?

Posted by bubba138 at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) |

We Need U.N. Observers

Our elections are so at risk of corruption we need outside help to keep us honest:

Several members of the House of Representatives have requested the United Nations to send observers to monitor the November 2 US presidential election to avoid a contentious vote like in 2000, when the outcome was decided by Florida.

Recalling the long, drawn out process in the southern state, nine lawmakers, including four blacks and one Hispanic, sent a letter Thursday to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asking that the international body "ensure free and fair elections in America," according to a statement issued by Florida representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, who spearheaded the effort.

Sick.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) |

YMCA: EEEK!

This is wrong on so many levels:

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell donned a hard hat and tucked a hammer in his belt Friday to perform a version of the Village People's hit "YMCA" at the conclusion of Asia's largest security meeting — which tradition says ends with a night of skit and song.

Powell danced alongside five other U.S. officials dressed in fancy dress and blasted out a version of the 1970s disco classic to the delight of foreign ministers from across the Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Posted by bubba138 at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) |

Mind-Boggling

This is how the liberals retained (slim) control in Canada:

"Martin," said St. Clair, "is a good man. He came across very honest. He wanted a chance to clean up all the s--t that happened under Chretien. I just didn't trust Harper. He came across too oily."

"Exactly," said Heather. "The scariest part for me about him is that he wanted to cosy up to the Americans. Can you believe it? The bloody Americans. I hate the Americans."

What do you hate about them?

"They're warmongers," said Don. "They're out to take over the world. They remind me of the Germans in World War II."

"They're not our best friends, they're our worst enemies," said Heather. "You can't trust them. I wish we had some other country as our neighbour, not those bullies. They're ignorant. They don't know anything about any other country. They'd just love to take us over if they could."

"I don't think they're all bad, I've got American friends," said St. Clair, "but Harper would've had us kissing their ass instead of telling them to screw off like Martin will do."

But you don't think our culture and economy is willingly soaked with American goods and services from which we've benefited?

"We don't need 'em, we can make it on our own," said Don.

"Harper," said St. Clair, "wants to turn our military into one like the Americans. Armed to the teeth, kill at the drop of a hat. Our history is one of peacekeeping, not fighting."

"Our soldiers," said Heather, "go into situations to keep the peace, not to shoot people. They have all the equipment they need, they don't need American-style weapons."

"We're not a warrior nation," said St. Clair. "Canadians don't want our military over-armed."

If we're ever attacked by a powerful enemy, wouldn't we expect the Americans to defend us?

"That's another myth," said Don. "Who the hell's going to attack us? No one's ever going to attack us. Who've we ever harmed? Go anywhere in the world and Canadians are liked and respected. We're recognized as a peaceful nation."

"Why would terrorists want to do here what they did in the States?" asked Heather. "They have nothing against us. It's never going to happen. Any talk that it will is scare-mongering by the military to get more money. The Cold War is over."

One word: Wow.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) |

Kennedy: Don't Limit Schools Rights to Drug Your Kids

Boston Globe:

A bill banning schools from coercing parents into putting their children on psychotropic drugs, passed with near-universal support in the House, is being tied up in a Senate committee by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who contends it requires more study.

Supporters of the bill, which sailed through the House 425 to 1, said it will help prevent an epidemic of children on drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, and that Kennedy is being influenced by his longstanding ties to health and pharmaceutical associations, which contend the bill will discourage the diagnosis of mental illnesses that could be easily treated.

''This is a complex question that demands a serious study," Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. ''Until we know the extent of the problem, any further action is unwarranted."

The bill was prompted by complaints from parents that school officials were threatening to keep their children out of class unless they took behavior-altering medication. About 11 million schoolchildren and adolescents took prescription drugs for mental health in 2002, and the number is rising.

Puh-leeze. 425 to 1 should be a message to Kennedy that its a fairly non-complex issue. Parents should have the right to determine whether or not to drug their kids without coercion.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:21 AM | Comments (0) |

The Joke's on Annan

I don't know why but I find this hilarious:

After U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan visited one of the best-maintained refugee camps in this war-rattled region of western Sudan on Thursday, he climbed back into an SUV and headed down a bumpy desert road.

He was scheduled to tour a scene of even greater desperation in what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, this time a camp that has not received any international aid.

But when his convoy arrived at the settlement, the 3,000 people who had been living there Wednesday afternoon were gone. Instead, there was only a muddy field with a few soldiers stepping through the muck.

In a move that befuddled U.N. officials, the Sudanese villagers in the camp were moved overnight and in the morning, said Jan Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs. They were loaded into government trucks "apparently to be dumped," he said, at the gates of the already overcrowded Abu Shouk camp, 12 miles away, where 40,000 people live in a stretch of open desert. A U.N. team confirmed that the villagers had been moved to Abu Shouk.

So much for Annan's photo-op.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:58 AM | Comments (0) |

Jordan Sending Troops?

BBC:

Jordan would consider sending troops to Iraq if the new interim government asked, King Abdullah has told the BBC. "If the Iraqis ask us for help directly it will be very difficult for us to say no," he told the Newsnight programme.

"If they fail, then we will pay the price," King Abdullah said, adding he did not think Jordanian were "the right people" for the job, however.

The king is the first Arab leader to consider sending troops to Iraq and the move is likely to please the US.

A few observations:

1. Nothing generates cooperation more than success. 2. Jordan's willingness to participate shows their acceptance of the current government. 3. "If they fail, then we will pay the price." What happens in Iraq will affect / is affecting the entire mid-East. King Abdullah recognizes that Jordan's fate is tied to Iraq. This is a healthy perspective.

Update: The Jordanians aren't alone:

Yemen is ready to send peacekeeping forces to Iraq, the country's state news agency reported Friday. Saba quoted a Foreign Ministry official as saying that the Arab country wants to help foster stability and security in Iraq. No Arab countries currently participate in the U.S.-led multinational force. On Thursday, King Abdullah of Jordan said his country would be willing to send troops if asked to do so by the country's new interim government.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:51 AM | Comments (0) |

al Qa'eda Captured in Iraq

Zeyed has a great report on the status of Iraq since the handover of soveriegnty. I found this part interesting:

Baghdad looked 'normal' today even though the 30th was announced a holiday. Traffic was the same as everyday and no curfew took place contrary to what many predicted, except in Najaf where a truck full of explosives was intercepted by IP and three purported Qaeda members were arrested, one of them a Libyan who had just entered Iraq from Syria and the other two were Iraqis.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:42 AM | Comments (0) |

The Attacks Continue

Here we go again:

Ordination of practicing homosexuals in the Presbyterian Church (USA) could "very possibly" split the denomination, said the co-leader of a key task force at the church's 216th General Assembly meeting this week at the Greater Richmond Convention Center...

The assembly's 544 commissioners will be asked today to eliminate one of the denomination's two barriers that prohibit the ordination of noncelibate gays and lesbians as clergy or lay church officers.

This week, the Committee on Church Orders and Ministry voted 35-30 to recommend that the assembly adopt a new authoritative interpretation of the church constitution stating that "sessions and presbyteries are not bound" by a 1978 authoritative interpretation that says unrepentant, practicing homosexuals do not meet ordination standards.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:08 AM | Comments (0) |

Democracy

All they want is what Iraq now has.

Most dressed in white, the Chinese color of mourning, hundreds of thousands of people marched for hours through a sweltering heat for democratic rights yesterday, the seventh anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Beijing's sovereignty.

But Beijing, determined to retain its grip on Hong Kong's government, has resisted widespread calls over the past year for a quick transition to full democracy. In April, China's rubber stamp parliament ruled that it would not let Hong Kong elect its next chief executive in 2007 or the majority of the legislature in 2008. Half the lawmakers will still be appointed or selected by tiny interest groups.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:03 AM | Comments (0) |

4 Soldiers Charged

You may recall several months ago blogger Zeyed of Healing Iraq posted about the murder of a fellow Iraqi by U.S. soldiers. Glenn linked to it and there was a range of reactions from outraged concern to outright denial. The Army has completed its investigation and the soldiers in question are being charged:

Four Fort Carson soldiers have been charged in the drowning death of an Iraqi man last January, after they allegedly forced him and another man to jump off a bridge.

The Army's Criminal Investigation Division had been investigating the case since the drowning Jan. 3 in the Tigris River in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

The four are from the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, which returned to Fort Carson from Iraq in April after a one-year deployment.

First Lt. Jack Saville and Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins were charged with manslaughter, assault, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, a Fort Carson spokeswoman said.

Sgt. Reggie Martinez was charged with manslaughter, and Spc. Terry Bowman was charged with assault, the spokeswoman said.

All four soldiers were also charged with making false official statements to cover up the death.

The bad news: our soldiers actually did this. The good news: our system of justice will punish them appropriately.

May Zaydun rest in peace, God's justice be done and His comfort be upon Zaydun's family.

Update: Here's the AP account.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:34 AM | Comments (0) |

Islamic Institute Shut Down

I'm not sure yet what to make of this:

Federal agents yesterday shut down and searched an Islamic school in Fairfax County that is affiliated with a Saudi Arabian university and has been investigated by the Senate for links to terrorism.

Agents from the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) swarmed over the premises of the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, at 8500 Hilltop Road in Merrifield, at about 10:30 a.m., according to a witness.

FBI and ICE spokesmen said the search warrant was sealed in court and declined to disclose the nature of the search...

The foundation's Virginia office was visited by well-known Islamic extremists -- including Sirhaj Wirhaj, a New York imam who was an unindicted conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to the source.

No one at the institute answered its phone yesterday.

Founded in 1989, the institute is affiliated with al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It is a nonprofit group that offers free courses in Islamic studies and in Arabic.

A law-enforcement source said the institute trained lay chaplains for the U.S. military.

Its Web site, www.iiasa.org, states that the group's aim is to teach "Islam in the best way peacefully and moderately." By early afternoon yesterday, the Web site was no longer accessible.

The institute condemned the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as "vicious and cowardly," and the Web site states that "there is no such thing as the 'Wahhabi' teachings of Islam." ...

Later that month, 16 persons who had been accredited to the Saudi embassy in Washington were found to be working instead at the institute and were asked by the State Department to leave the country, according to United Press International.

On the one hand, I'm not very comfortable with the "sealed search warrant" thing. I'd like to know for what were the authorities looking. Many of those on my side of the political fence have challenged the left's accusation of eroding civil rights by saying, "show me one instance of where someone rights have been taken away."

Well, here it is. We once had a right against illegal search and seizure. The law once stated that the authorities had to have a search warrant that specified both where the search was to occur and for what they were searching. Obviously, that has changed.

On the other hand, that the institute was less than honest about the standing of 16 of their employees raises suspicions. The last thing we need is an orientation center for incoming terrorists.

Posted by bubba138 at 08:10 AM | Comments (0) |

Border Patrol Woes

This doesn't inspire much confidence:

top Department of Homeland Security official, who criticized the Border Patrol's arrest last month of 420 illegal aliens in several inland Southern California communities, will meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill today to deliver what he has called a "thoroughly written response" to the incident. Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson told members of the California congressional delegation at a June 25 meeting the arrest of the aliens by a 12-member Border Patrol team had not been authorized or approved in advance by officials at headquarters in the District, and he would personally review the matter.

As I understood it, the primary reason for creating the Department of Homeland Security was to ensure cooperation and a provide a generous flow of information sharing between law enforcement agencies. Instead, it has become a bureaucracy full of bureaucrats like Hutchinson who, instead of encouraging our agents when they have great results, want to complain about "authorization" and "jurisdiction."

Posted by bubba138 at 07:27 AM | Comments (0) |

July 01, 2004

WWW

...as in Wonderful Women Webloggers. These are a few of the fem bloggers I hit on a regular basis that deserve a bit of reader attention:

My wife is a collector refrigerator magnets. She's not really into the magnets, but she always needs more to keep all the stuff attached to the refrigerator door. Sallie's blog, AtTheHeartOfIt, reminds me of my refrigerator. I love the images she has hanging off or in the middle of her posts. It gives her blog a character that is all Sallie.

I think I found her a while back when I was doing my Primate Promotion Project (I need to do that again soon). I get the feeling she's the kind of person my wife and I could hang out with drinking coffee and gabbing about nothing important until three in the morning.

My newest fem discovery is Jen. She's right thinking, but not edgy (edgy can get tiresome if not combined with the right touch of class). Jen has got plenty of class and she laughs at the same kind of stuff I do.

Teresa, on the other hand, is edgy and has the class to pull it off. She says what she means and means what she says. The key for me is that she's never rude for rude's sake (which happens much too often in the blogosphere). She calls things as she sees them without undue acid. Find quality in this...

Debbye is an American living amongst anti-American kooks. It is entertaining to see how she handles it.

Ith is a nut. No two posts relate to another. Her good friend's blog features not a photo of herself, but a photo of her cleavage (what's THAT about?), which implies she keeps interesting company. She's a Tolkien fan, which is a testament to her taste. She's a Scot, which is a testament to her character. All around, Absinthe and Cookies is a trip worth taking.

Posted by bubba138 at 10:57 PM | Comments (0) |

Missing Jobs Update

OK, thanks to help from fellow blogger Barry Ritholtz, I'm getting closer to finding out why the job numbers don't add up. The Democrats are using these figures:

There are 2,966,000 fewer private sector jobs in the U.S. today than there were in Jan. 2001 when Bush entered office. [Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, national private sector employment. In Jan. 2001, there were 111,560,000 private sector jobs. In Feb. 2004, there were 108,594,000 private sector jobs. This is a difference of 2,966,000 private sector jobs.]

When government positions are taken into account, there are 2,235,000 fewer jobs in the U.S. today than there were in Jan. 2001 when Bush entered office.
[Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, national non-farm employment. In Jan. 2001, there were 132,388,000 non-farm jobs. In Feb. 2004, there were 130,153,000 non-farm jobs. This is a difference of 2,235,000 non-farm jobs.]

Sounds good so far, but here's the problem. I can't find the reports on the BLS site that reflect these numbers.

Stay tuned...

Update:

OK, I think I have it figured out. The numbers come from the full Employment Situation reports from January 2001, February 2004 and May 2004, tables A-1 and B-1:

______________________ ________ ________ ________
TABLE A-1 DATA        | Jan '01| Feb '04| May '04|
______________________|________|________|________|
    HOUSEHOLD DATA    |Labor force status
                      |___________________________
Civilian labor force..| 141,955| 146,471| 146,974|
  Employment..........| 135,999| 138,301| 138,772|
  Unemployment........|   5,956|
8,170|   8,203|
Not in labor force....|  68,934|  75,886|  75,993|
                      |________|________|________|
                      |Unemployment rates
                      |___________________________
All workers...........|     4.2|     5.6|     5.6|
                      |________|________|________|
 ESTABLISHMENT DATA   |Employment
                      |___________________________
Nonfarm employment....| 132,129| 130,153| 131,224|

______________________ ________ ________ ________ 

TABLE B-1 DATA        | Jan '01| Feb '04| May '04|

______________________|________|________|________|

Total nonfarm         | 132,129| 141,489| 131,224|

Total private         | 111,661| 108,594| 109,677|

Curiously, even though the unemployment rate is calculated as Unemployment divided by the Civilian labor force, the Democrats ignore those numbers and focus on the more detrimental "private sector" numbers.

Posted by bubba138 at 03:35 PM | Comments (0) |

Would You Like Mustard With Missles?

Our once disgraced Mayor, and now highly respected local talk show guy Roger Hedgecock had a little chat with Secretary Rumsfield recently. Here is an interesting tidbit:

Q: ...on the weapons of mass destruction, obviously, the opposition to the administration says we should never have invaded. The Bush administration lied about the WMD, never found any, never were any, etcetera, etcetera. Now, I’m reading recent reports in fairly easily accessible published accounts that Syria is holding the weapons of mass destruction or some of them, that others were destroyed, that others might still be hidden in Iraq, etcetera. What is the status on WMD? And if Syria is holding any of them and you guys know about it, how come we haven’t heard about it?

SEC. RUMSFELD: ...Now what’s actually happened? Right now you have the Iraqi Survey Group, which is a multinational group that’s out there reviewing documentation and looking at suspect WMD sites. I was with the Polish minister of defense this weekend in Istanbul, Turkey at the NATO Summit. And in the course of that, he pointed out that his troops in Iraq had recently come across – I’ve forgotten the number, but something like 16 or 17 – warheads that contained sarin and mustard gas...

In answer to your question on Syria, there have been a lot of intelligence speculation and rumors and chatter about the fact that Saddam Hussein may have placed some of his weapons of mass destruction in Syria prior to the start of the war. Until that can be validated and proved, you’ll find people in the administration not talking about it.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:32 PM | Comments (0) |

Kerry In Detroit

I expect Kerry will be making a campaign speech in Detroit before long:

Sales of General Motors and Ford vehicles fell sharply in June - despite persistent use of financing incentives - as Detroit's two biggest carmakers battled to fend off their Japanese rivals amid a strengthening US economy.

Both carmakers also reported inventories at higher then expected levels, as well as a 5 per cent fall each in sales to retail customers, traditionally a more profitable market than rental fleets.

Somehow this is Bush's fault. I don't know how yet, but Kerry will let us know very soon. Count on it.

Posted by bubba138 at 02:19 PM | Comments (0) |

Top 100 Spiritual Films

In the spirit of the previously posted Top 100 Movies, Thinklings (and others) are listing the the top 100 Spiritual movies. The ones I have seen are in bold:

13 Conversations About One Thing, 2001, Jill Sprecher
2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, Stanley Kubrick
The Addiction, 1995, Abel Ferrara
Amadeus, 1984, Milos Forman
American Beauty, 1999, Sam Mendes
Andrei Rublev, 1969, Andrei Tarkovsky
The Apostle, 1997, Robert Duvall
Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966, Robert Bresson
Babettes Gæstebud ("Babette's Feast"), 1987, Gabriel Axel
Bad Lieutenant, 1987, Abel Ferrara
Bad ma ra khahad bord ("The Wind Will Carry Us"), 1999, Abbas Kiarostami
The Big Kahuna, 1999, John Swanbeck
Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott
Breaking The Waves, 1996, Lars von Trier
Changing Lanes, 2002, Roger Michell
Chariots of Fire, 1981, Hugh Hudson
Code inconnu ("Code Unknown"), 2000, Michael Haneke
Crimes And Misdemeanors, 1989, Woody Allen
Days of Heaven, 1978, Terrence Malick
Dead Man Walking, 1995, Tim Robbins
Dekalog ("The Decalogue"), 1987, Krzysztof Kieslowski
Dersu Uzala, 1975, Akira Kurosawa
Dogma, 1999, Kevin Smith
Dogville, 2003, Lars von Trier
La Dolce vita, 1960, Federico Fellini
The Elephant Man, 1980, David Lynch
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004, Michel Gondry
Fearless, 1993, Peter Weir
Fight Club, 1999, David Fincher
Le Fils ("The Son"), 2002, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Fuori dal mondo ("Not of This World"), 1999, Giuseppe Piccioni
Grand Canyon, 1991, Lawrence Kasdan
Groundhog Day, 1993, Harold Ramis
Hell House, 2001, George Ratliff (I did see the 70's version, though)
Henry V, 1989, Kenneth Branagh
Der Himmel über Berlin ("Wings of Desire"), 1987, Wim Wenders
Ikiru ("To Live"), 1952, Akira Kurosawa
It's A Wonderful Life, 1946, Frank Capra
Jean de Florette, Manon des sources, 1986, Claude Berri
Jésus De Montréal ("Jesus of Montreal"), 1989, Denys Arcand
Jesus Of Nazareth, 1977, Franco Zeffirelli
Le Journal D'un Curé De Campagne ("The Diary of a Country Priest"), 1951, Robert Bresson
Ladri di biciclette ("The Bicycle Thief"), 1948, Vittorio De Sica
The Last Days of Disco, 1998, Whit Stillman
The Last Temptation Of Christ, 1988, Martin Scorsese (no stars)
Life of Brian, 1979, Terry Jones
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, 2001-2003, Peter Jackson
Ma nuit chez Maud ("My Night At Maud's"), 1969, Eric Rohmer
Magnolia, 1999, Paul Thomas Anderson
A Man For All Seasons, 1966, Fred Zinnemann
The Matrix, 1999, Andy & Larry Wachowski
Mies vailla menneisyyttä ("The Man Without A Past"), 2002, Aki Kaurismaki
The Miracle Maker, 2000, Derek W. Hayes & Stanislav Sokolov
The Mission, 1986, Roland Joffé
Nema-ye Nazdik ("Close-Up"), 1990, Abbas Kiarostami
The Night Of The Hunter, 1955, Charles Laughton
Offret—Sacrificatio ("The Sacrifice"), 1986, Andrei Tarkovsky
On The Waterfront, 1954, Elia Kazan
Ordet ("The Word"), 1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer
La Passion De Jeanne D'arc ("The Passion of Joan of Arc"), 1928, C. Dreyer
The Passion Of The Christ, 2004, Mel Gibson
Peter and Paul, 1981, Robert Day
Ponette, 1996, Jacques Doillon
The Prince Of Egypt, 1998, Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, Simon Wells
La Promesse, 1996, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
Punch-Drunk Love, 2002, P.T. Anderson
Roma, città aperta ("Open City"), 1945, Roberto Rossellini
Sansho Dayu ("Sansho the Bailiff"), 1954, Kenji Mizoguchi
Schindler's List, 1993, Steven Spielberg
Secrets & Lies, 1996, Mike Leigh
Shadowlands, 1993, Richard Attenborough
The Shawshank Redemption, 1994, Frank Darabont
Signs, 2002, M. Night Shyamalan
The Sixth Sense, 1999, M. Night Shyamalan
Det Sjunde Inseglet ("The Seventh Seal"), 1957, Ingmar Bergman
Smultronstället ("Wild Strawberries"), 1957, Ingmar Bergman
Solyaris ("Solaris"), 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker, 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky
Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, 1977, 1980, 1983, George Lucas
Stevie, 2002, Steve James
The Straight Story, 1999, David Lynch
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 1927, F.W. Murnau
Sånger från andra våningen ("Songs From the Second Floor"), 2000, Roy Andersson
The Sweet Hereafter, 1997, Atom Egoyan
Tender Mercies, 1983, Bruce Beresford
Trois coulers: Bleu, Trzy kolory: Bialy, Trois coulers: Rouge ("Three Colors: Blue, White, Red"), 1993, 1994, 1994, Krzysztof Kieslowski
Tokyo Monogatari ("Tokyo Story"), 1953, Yasujiro Ozu
The Truman Show, 1998, Peter Weir
Unforgiven, 1992, Clint Eastwood
Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo ("The Gospel According to Matthew"), 1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Vanya on 42nd Street, 1994, Louis Malle
Le Vent souffle où il veut ("A Man Escaped"), 1956, Robert Bresson
La Vita è bella ("Life is Beautiful"), 1997, Roberto Benigni
Vredens dag ("Day of Wrath"), 1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer
Waking Life, 2001, Richard Linklater
Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000, Béla Tarr
Witness, 1985, Peter Weir
The Year Of Living Dangerously, 1982, Peter Weir
Yi yi ("Yi Yi: A One and a Two"), 2000, Edward Yang
Zerkalo ("The Mirror"), 1975, Andrei Tarkovsky

Obviously, I've seen much fewer of these than I have the top grossing films.

Posted by bubba138 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) |

Stretched U.S. Military

Mark Steyn comments:

America has the most powerful military on the planet. It spends more on its armed forces than the next 20 biggest spenders combined. Its mere annual increase in military expenditure is more than the entire official budget of the Chinese forces. And yet a relatively short occupation has given the impression of an overstretched army overly dependent on reservists and the National Guard.

How can this be? Short answer: Europe, Japan, South Korea. A little light colonial policing is bound to overstretch you if the bulk of your assets have been assigned to garrison your wealthiest allies in perpetuity. More importantly, the prolongation of the American security guarantee has been disastrous for those allies, transforming them into ersatz postmodern allies who require you to engage in months of elaborate diplomatic tap-dancing in order to get them to contribute a couple of hundred poorly equipped troops. There’s a line conservatives are fond of when they’re discussing welfare: What’s better for a man? To give him a fish? Or to teach him to fish for himself? That goes double for defence welfare. The continued US presence in Europe is bad for Europe and bad for the US. Ending it would be a basic recognition of the new circumstances: the wars of the future are going to look a lot like Iraq — swift, decisive interventions in failed states in dysfunctional corners of the world. That being so, the United States army should not be living in Germany.

Yep.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:37 AM | Comments (0) |

Go Nader!

Nader is getting a financial boost from Bush supporters:

Donors often cross party lines to support candidates based on specific regional or business issues, but the Egans' sudden interest in Nader seems to reflect a more sophisticated strategy by Republicans to draw support away from Democratic challenger John F. Kerry by bolstering his third-party rival. For months, Democrats have accused Republicans of conspiring to put Nader on enough ballots to tip the election -- a theory that gained credence this week as two conservative groups in Oregon admitted making phone calls urging supporters to help win Nader a spot on the ticket in that evenly divided state.

Yesterday, a watchdog group in Washington filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the Oregon groups of breaking campaign laws with their efforts on Nader's behalf. The complaint also names the Bush and Nader campaigns, saying that reports of the Bush campaign using its resources to help Nader, and Nader's acceptance of the assistance, would amount to illegal campaign activity. Both groups and the two campaigns denied breaking the law, calling the accusations "frivolous."

It is hard to argue that it is illegal for Bush supporters to help the Nader campaign. After all, many entities donate funds to both the Democrats and Republicans, yet we see no fuss about that. Further, I'm sure these same people weren't complaining about the Democrat support that Perot enjoyed in '92.

Many have postulated that Nader isn't a threat because he won't even get on the ballot in several states. The fact of the matter is that he only needs to make a strong showing in a couple of states to have an effect on the election. A strong Nader showing in California alone would give the election to Bush. Promoting this possibility is not only legal, but wise.

Posted by bubba138 at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) |

A Penny for Your Thoughts

Ron England has a problem that's weighing heavy on him:

Ron England bet his brother 30 years ago that he could save a million pennies in exchange for a dinner in Paris. And he did, eventually stacking up 20,000 rolls that fill 13 boxes in his garage.

Now that he's moving, England wants to cash in the $10,000 in coppers, which weigh 3.6 tons, but is having a tough time finding someone who will take them without a price.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:53 AM | Comments (0) |

The Left: Whatever Spin Suits Their Purposes

How many times have we heard in the past 24 months that Bush was on a "Rush to War" in Iraq. Now, Robert Novak notes the libs are starting to say we didn't rush fast enough:

It has been spread by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to imply President Bush held back the attack in order to gain support for invading Iraq. Unless Rice's flat disavowal stops it, this threatens to become an urban legend used against Bush in the next 17 weeks.

What's completely missing from their accusations is, if true, their whole "no link between Saddam and al Qa'eda" canard falls apart. If Zarqawi was operating a camp Iraq in 2002-2003 then there was definitely an al Qa'eda presence.

Two things are made plain by this. First, the left prefers short-term solutions over long-term. Their contention is that we should have lobbed a couple of missles in a Clintonesque attempt to destroy Zarqawi's camp and perhaps kill the terrorist himself. Never a thought is given to the reality that as long as Saddam was in power, Iraq was fertile soil for such camps to spring up. Such was the strategy in Afghanistan, and 9/11 was the fruit that sprung forth. Our war in Iraq wasn't to prevent a terrorist from killing, but to prevent terrorism from growing.

Second, this episode shows once again the left is not bound by facts. Their goal is plain: nothing is more important than taking the White House. Last week, they were against aggressive military action, this week they're for it, next week they'll be against it again. Worse than that, they're comfortable arguing both sides simultaneously as long as it comes out against Bush.

Posted by bubba138 at 09:40 AM | Comments (0) |