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It's amazing how Barry's complete turnaround hasn't affected the moonbats
Barack W. Bush?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama's flip-flops, as the Senate's most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.
But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain's efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts.
Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court's overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns.
The senator, also like Bush, supports the death penalty. He recently objected to the court's rejection of a state law that allowed for the execution of child rapists.
And although Obama is still pro-choice, he now, like the president, thinks "mental distress" should not justify late-term abortion.
In addition, the new Obama would like to continue -- and even expand -- Bush's controversial faith-based initiative program of involving churches in government anti-poverty programs.
In fact, Obama is sounding a lot these days like those red-state, small-town conservatives he once caricatured in his infamous comment about Pennsylvanians who "cling" to such hot-button, but extraneous, social causes.
Consider also the campaign trail. Like a Republican in good standing -- but unlike the maverick John McCain -- Obama has, by his sudden forgoing of public funds, rejected the idea of campaign-finance reform.
In fact, he's the largest raiser of private cash in American political history, and seems to have dropped opposition to accepting pernicious "special interest money." Like a Republican, he raises the most among the nation's wealthiest on Wall Street.
During the primaries, Obama seemed to advocate the dismantling of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But now candidate Obama has little desire to overturn the present Bush trade policies.
On foreign policy and the war against terror, Obama once leaned left in his primary battles against Hillary Clinton. But his latest mutations move him once again closer to George Bush.
For all his prior talk of the loss of civil liberties, a President Obama, like a President Bush, would give telecommunication companies exemption from lawsuits over tapping private phone calls at government request.
Obama wants to continue Bush's successful multilateral efforts to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, and now praises the Bush-inspired six-party talks with North Korea that led to the apparent dismantling of Pyongyang's nuclear program. Like Bush, he advocated expanding the military after the Clinton-era troop cuts. Obama once advocated lifting the embargo against Cuba -- but no longer. Like Bush, he thinks that it is wise to leave it be.
There is suddenly not much difference when it comes to the Middle East, either. Palestinian supporters were dismayed to hear Obama promise that Jerusalem must be Israel's eternal and undivided capital.
Obama once criticized Bush for his unwillingness to meet directly with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and exaggerating the danger from Iran, which supposedly didn't "pose any serious threat." Lately though, he agrees with the president that Iran now in fact is a "grave threat."
Obama's most serious about-face is on Iraq. He once promised a rigid and rapid timetable for withdrawing our troops. But given the radical success of Gen. David Petraeus' surge and change in tactics, Obama is now calling for withdrawals to be based on the conditions on the ground in Iraq. How different is this plan from the present administration's policy of incrementally sending home brigades as Petraeus hands off security responsibilities to Iraqis in additional provinces?
It makes political sense that Obama is moving to the center since he knows that a Northern liberal like himself has not won a presidential election since 1960. So don't expect Obama's metamorphosis to stop now. Before this campaign is over, he may well flip some more; would anybody be surprised if he starts supporting some of Bush's proposal for expanded domestic oil drilling or backtracks on raising trillions in new payroll taxes?
In fact, replace George Bush's Texas twang, cowboy strut and evangelical Bible thumping with Barack Obama's mellifluous "hope and change" rhetoric, easy grace and leftwing Christianity and we may discover a flashy new cover to an old book.
A final question: If, even as Obama trashes Bush, he seems to agree with him on so many fronts, why don't conservatives and Republicans adopt Obama as a welcome convert?
Some may, but most I've talked with don't think Obama is sincere and feel he will flip back to being left wing if elected. Or they think that Obama is changing so fast and so radically that it's hard to believe he really knows who he is -- or would be as president.
I don't see any.
Surprise, surprise
Then you're a blind idiot
I guess it's OK with you that they are supporting HEzbollah in Lebanon and are helping to destabilize an elected government
The exact same actions with the exact same justification done by Israel are genocide and they deserve death.
When the Iranis do it, it's heroic
YOU wish them best of luck in their plan to inflict maximum damage on Israel
Your hatred is pathetic
Hey Queenie,
Wonder why you never commented on the actions of your " poor innocent, picked on Iranis " in Lebanon and Syria
Don't know why as thier actions make it easier for them to reach your and their goal- killing more Israelis
Stadium move may cost Democrats coverage of convention
posted at 4:30 pm on July 9, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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The DNCC announced yesterday that they would move the last night of their Denver convention to Invesco Field in order to accommodate a large throng of cheering supporters. The move is intended to give Barack Obama a big boost for his acceptance speech, the final event of the convention, but it may mean a lot less coverage for the rest of the festivities. Networks spent months planning their coverage, and the additional cost will force cutbacks:
According to several broadcast executives, the networks will still cover all the major speeches. But beyond that, all options are open as they look for savings to balance out the anticipated costs surrounding the stadium event. The acceptance event is an unexpected departure from the traditional convention hall format for which they have spent months planning.
Network executives expect Obama’s relatively late-breaking decision to speak at Invesco Field at Mile High, a 76,000-seat football stadium, could add hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs to already cash-strapped news divisions. Each network has budgeted millions to cover the political conventions, but that spending is already accounted for in specific costs ranging from hotel rooms to staffing to building convention platforms.
As Paul Friedman of CBS News put it, the move and its additional cost calls into question whether the networks should cover the convention at all. He calls it a “non-event”, which is true of most conventions. For this one, most of the interesting news stories will come long before Obama’s speech at Invesco. If Hillary Clinton decides to conduct a floor challenge, that will grab attention, but that’s a long shot at best.
For a campaign short on cash and long on organizing troubles, this move complicates matters beyond belief. For a short-term benefit of having some good optics for Obama’s speech, the DNCC has added layers of costs for security and access that could easily have been avoided. They have also risked the national coverage they need for the big bounce candidates usually get from conventions, all to highlight a speech that viewers could have seen just as easily from the Pepsi Center. Had they planned this from the beginning, it might have made more sense, but now it’s just a costly vanity.
If this is the kind of planning that an Obama administration would bring to government, voters may well wonder what vanities will follow next.
Blowback
The same whining occurred when the Japanese were doing the same thing in the 80's/90's
Turns out they bought at the top
Why do you have a problem with this?
Former CIA Agent in Iran Comes In from the Heat
Former CIA Agent in Iran Comes In from the Heat
Going public for the first time in an article and interview on Pajamas Media, an Iranian who infiltrated Iran's Revolutionary Guard for the CIA accuses the mullahs of orchestrating — among other things — the 1988 explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
July 8, 2008 - by 'Reza Khalili'
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[Editor’s note: Pajamas Media has spoken with “Reza Khalili’s” attorney in Washington, D.C. who confirmed Khalili “had a working relationship with a US intelligence agency.” We have also seen a copy of the June 5, 2008 email sent by the agency’s “Manuscript Review” department authorizing the publication of this article.]
In an interview with Roger L. Simon, “Khalili” further amplifies his accusation of Iranian involvement in Lockerbie and addresses the controversial question of whether the Shiite mullahs would form alliances with Sunnis. A transcript of the interview is here. More interviews with “Khalili” in disguised video form will be coming in the future from PJM. ]
The men who ordered the destruction of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie and the bombings of the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia are pursuing the nuclear program in Iran and with one goal in mind: to obtain The Bomb.
And they want to destroy you.
After the Iranian Revolution, I was an officer in the Revolutionary Guards. I was also a spy working for the CIA, code name Wally. My position in the Guards gave me access to the Khomeini regime’s deep secrets and a firsthand look at the unfolding horror: torture, rapes, executions, assassinations, suicide bombers, training of terrorists, and the transfer of arms and explosives to other countries to support terrorist attacks. I risked my life and my family’s trying to expose this regime because I believed it should be stopped. Once again I incur such risks to bring awareness that lack of action endangers the world.
In the mid-80s, I reported to the CIA that the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence unit had information that Saddam Hussein had made a strategic decision to acquire nuclear arms. I heard this from several sources within the Guards and also in a conversation with a member of the intelligence unit, who told me that the Guards were informed through arms dealers in the black market that Saddam was desperately looking for an atomic bomb. It was then that the Guards’ commanders and Iranian leadership decided to go nuclear and actively shop for components in the black market because they made a determination that the Iran-Iraq war could not have been won without a nuclear bomb. Mohsen Rezaei, then-commander of the Revolutionary Guards, requested permission from Ayatollah Khomeini to make Iran a nuclear power. Khomeini agreed.
Some years later, while I was stationed in Europe working for the CIA, I met with three Iranian agents who were shopping for nuclear parts. The agents confirmed what I had heard through the Guards: that Hashemi Rafsanjani had promised retaliation for the downing of an Iranian civilian jet by a U.S. warship over the Persian Gulf on July 3, 1988, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war. According to the U.S government, an inexperienced crew mistakenly identified the Iranian Airbus as an attacking F-14 fighter; 290 people were killed. The agents said it was Rafsanjani who ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988, which killed 270 people. They also talked about involvement of a Palestinian man and the radio transmitter that carried the bomb, information that I passed on to the CIA. I made an assessment at that time that Iran had ordered, through surrogates, the bombing of the Pan Am flight.
There was not much of a follow-up on Iran’s involvement in that incident because Rafsanjani had become the president of Iran, and my CIA contact told me to consider Rafsanjani the new king of Iran. It was apparent to me that President George H.W. Bush was going to support and trust Rafsanjani as the new ruler of Iran. He was promised cooperation and good relations by the mullahs, and the U.S. administration and the CIA in turn were convinced that the mullahs were open to a new chapter in Iran-U.S relations.
I believed then, as I do now, that the mullahs would never abandon their ambitions, and that after 29 years of negotiations by Europe and world powers, the world has yet to understand that the mullahs will not change direction or behavior. In the early ’90s, the senior Bush administration and the CIA finally realized they were being duped — the mullahs’ promises never materialized. The CIA asked me to look for an Iranian who could testify that Iran was in the process of making a nuclear bomb. That request was later withdrawn.
Iran remains the main sponsor of terrorism around the world. Iranian consulates, embassies, airlines, and shipping line offices are the main hub for terrorist activities. Money, arms, and explosives are transferred through these centers to fund terrorist groups and jihadists. Quds Force units of the Revolutionary Guards use the Iranian consulates as their command and control centers to plan and carry out assassinations, kidnappings, and terrorist activities. The mullahs even transferred money and arms in state visits using their high-ranking officials, knowing full well that because of diplomatic immunity they would not be subject to search during such visits. As I reported to the CIA, these activities were closely coordinated through Iran’s foreign ministry, the ministry of intelligence, and the Revolutionary Guards.
And then there is the Syrian connection, which facilitates the Revolutionary Guards in training and arming Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, and Hamas, based in the Palestinian Territory. Syrian facilities and political channels are at the Revolutionary Guards’ disposal, expanding their terror network. The mullahs not only support Syria with massive financial aid in hundreds of millions of dollars but also share missile-delivery technology and other military armaments. The Quds Force leadership is in close contact with Syrian military leaders, coordinating terrorist activities throughout the Middle East.
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As Iran pursued its nuclear ambitions over the past few years, it needed to keep U.S. forces on the defensive in Iraq so Washington would not think of invading Iran. Tehran’s strategy was to use the mullahs’ connection to the Shiite clergies and population in Iraq that had been built up years before the U.S invasion. The Guards had established Badr brigades that had been expanded into a division with Iraqi recruits during the Iran-Iraq war and had helped Ayatollah Hakim in establishing the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, currently one of Iraq’s most powerful political parties. Its goal is to put as much pressure on U.S. forces through terror attacks as it can so the U.S. administration won’t think of expanding the Iraq war, giving Iran time to accelerate its nuclear research and development. Tehran knows full well it is in a race, and if it is able to perfect the technology, the West will have no choice but to live with a nuclear Iran. It also believes that after the current President Bush, the next U.S. administration (if led by a Democrat) will most likely reduce forces and slowly move out, leaving it for the Iraqis to sort things out, which ultimately will result in Iran’s domination of the region, with catastrophic consequences for the Free World. This has already happened with Hezbollah. Iran armed and trained Hezbollah into a political force in Lebanon which controls events on the ground, limiting the power of the Lebanese government and even confronting Israel as we saw in the 2006 Lebanon war.
Iran’s current defense minister, Mostafa Najjar, was in charge of the Revolutionary Guards forces in Lebanon that facilitated the attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, killing 241 U.S. servicemen with the largest non-nuclear bomb in history. The current deputy defense minister, Ahmad Vahidi, was the commander of the Quds Forces and the chief intelligence officer of the Guards, in charge of the terrorist activities outside of Iran. He had received authorization for taking the fight to the U.S forces and Israel’s interests around the world directly from Imam Khomeini, the supreme leader at the time. The operations in Lebanon were coordinated by these two men.
Four years after that bombing, Iran’s then-minister of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rafiqdoost, boasted that, “Both the TNT and the ideology, which in one blast sent 400 U.S. officers to hell, were provided by Iran.” Vahidi is currently on Interpol’s Most Wanted List for the attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994. That attack killed 87 and injured more than 100.
There is also strong evidence of the Quds Forces’ involvement in the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen and wounded 372 more on June 25, 1996. The attack was carried out by the Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah, but led back to the leadership in Tehran. In 2001, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the attack was inspired, supported, and supervised by elements in the Iranian government.
The most radical Islamists control the government in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards’ reach is all-encompassing: they control the vital industries in Iran, serve as ministers in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet, are members of the Parliament, control events in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territory through their Quds Force, and expand their terror network throughout the world, all the while making inroads in nuclear enrichment and missile-delivery technology.
It is not an exaggeration to claim that the radicals belonging to the secretive society called “Hojjatieh,” who are devoted to the 12th Imam, have taken control of all vital positions in Iran. Ayatollah Janati, the head of the Guardian Council in charge of interpreting the constitution, supervising elections, and approving of candidates running for public office, has been very vocal about his opposition to the West: “We are anti-American and we are America’s enemy,” and “Non-Muslims are animals roaming the planet.” They believe that the 12th Imam supports their agenda of obtaining nuclear weapons and destroying Israel in order to start the chaos necessary for the final destruction of what they see as American imperialism and Israeli Zionism.
The Revolutionary Guards, with the help of North Korea, are making advancements in their ballistic missile program by expanding the reach of its Shahab missiles and the successful launch of its long range Kavoshgar 1 missile on February 4, 2008. These missiles are capable of reaching Europe. At the same time, they are moving full speed ahead with their nuclear enrichment activity by installing the new IR-2 centrifuges which can enrich uranium at a faster speed than the P1 model. Iran has installed 3,000 P1 centrifuges with the goal of expanding that number to 50,000 within five years. It is estimated that it will take 1,200 of the new centrifuges to produce enough material for one nuclear weapon in one year as opposed to 3000 units of the P1 model that does the same job. The Guards always believed in a dual process in their operations for their military projects, so if one failed or was sabotaged, the other would carry on. They are doing just that. There is word that in the mountainous region of Mazandaran province, in the north of Iran, the Guards are pursuing nuclear arms underground.
Mostafa Najjar, the current defense minister, is overseeing the enrichment process and the missile-delivery advancements, and his deputy, Ahmad Vahidi, is overseeing the proliferation of arms and missiles to terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas in coordination with Syria.
Today, trying to fool the world, the current supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has publicly declared that pursuit and acquisition of atomic bombs are against Islam. But it was Khamenei himself, along with Hashemi Rafsanjani, Rezaei, and others in the leadership, who ordered the start of research and development of nuclear technology in the mid-80s.
Khamenei put out a statement to the world in 2008 that God would punish Iranians if they did not support the country’s disputed nuclear program, and any stop in the continuation of the nuclear work would be against God’s will. Ahmadinejad, in a recent 2008 speech, told the audience that the “enemy” (referring to the U.S. and Israel) and their superficial power are on a path to destruction, and that the countdown to their total destruction has begun.
The rulers in Iran believe it is their duty to prepare the circumstances for the reappearance of the 12th Imam. “Our Revolution’s main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, Imam Mahdi,” Ahmadinejad said during a speech in 2005 to leaders from across the country. Shiites believe the reappearance of the 12th Imam will bring justice and peace to the world by establishing Islam throughout the world. They believe he will reappear when the world has fallen into chaos. It is believed the chaos will start in Afghanistan and then move into Iraq, where there will be blood and destruction everywhere (already in the works) and from there to the world with burning dark clouds (nuclear war). The 12th Imam will then come to destroy the “Dajjal,” the False Messiah, free the world from oppression and aggression, and then bring justice where it will be heaven on earth for many years to come. It is said Jesus will reappear at the same time and fight alongside Mahdi.
Members of the Iranian leadership say they have a “signed contract” with the 12th Imam and are doggedly pursuing nuclear weapons to bring on that catastrophe. Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad, has said that Israel must be destroyed (2005 “World without Zionism” speech, “Israel must be wiped off the map”). This is no idle threat.
If the mullahs’ true intention is to provide electricity through nuclear energy for the Iranians (which they claim) — the same Iranians whose women, students, teachers, writers and union workers are being flogged, beaten, tortured and stoned to death, the same Iranians who are denied a free election or freedom of speech — then why wouldn’t they accept the comprehensive incentive package offered by the world leaders in full, scrap the enrichment process, and bring peace and prosperity to their nation?
The reason is that their belief in Islam’s conquest of the world through the coming of the 12th Imam mandates their actions, and — just as a suicide bomber — they are not even interested in their own survival and cannot be diverted from their chosen path. The question is: Can the world afford to sit idly by and wait for Armageddon?
Next Page: transcript of “Reza Khalili’s” interview with Roger L. Simon
MR. SIMON: This is Roger Simon for Pajamas Media and I am here with Reza Khalili. Khalili is not the gentleman’s real name, he is a former CIA agent who infiltrated the
Revolutionary Guard of Iran. This may be a first on the radio or on the internet to reveal a former CIA agent to infiltrate that organization. Welcome to Pajamas Media, Mr. Khalili.
MR. KHALILI: Thank you.
MR. SIMON: How long did you work for the CIA?
MR. KHALILI: Well one thing is, Roger, I can’t be specific on the time, location, so forth and so on, to protect my identify but I’ll give you an estimate which was from the ’80s through the ’90s.
MR. SIMON: And you worked as a member of the Revolutionary Guard?
MR. KHALILI: I was, and I was working as a member of the Revolutionary Guard, yes.
MR. SIMON: And how did you come to work with the CIA?
MR. KHALILI: I went to Iran after the revolution since I had my education here in the United States, and I went with the hope that things are going to move along on — on a freedom for all political parties and so forth and so on. But what I witnessed was killings of the opposition, torture of the opposition, radical idea taking place in Iran forcing Iranian people, ordinary citizens to give into very restricted laws of Islam.
As the time went along, I became totally disgusted and I lost some good friends to the revolution, I had people dear to me die in the revolution and I basically took it upon myself to take action and make a difference. So I flew back to the US. Actually, I got the hope of the Revolutionary Guard to facilitate my trip. I made up some story which was partly true and flew to US, contacted the FBI, got in touch with the CIA and went through training and then back to Iran to the Revolutionary Guard, starting my new job as a CIA agent.
MR. SIMON: Had you joined the Revolutionary Guard before you came back to the US?
MR. KHALIL: Yes. I was in the Revolutionary Guard before I came in the US, yes.
MR. SIMON: Are there other members of the Revolutionary Guard who are US agents.
MR. KHALIL: Well, really I can’t comment on that. I can’t comment on that.
MR. SIMON: Reza Khalili is going to be doing a series of interviews, many on video — disguised video of course — for Pajamas Media, in which we will get into a great deal of detail on the workings of the Revolutionary Guard and so forth.
But let us turn now to an article, the first article that Mr. Khalili has done for Pajamas Media, which is appearing now and has a very sensational charge right at the top, a very controversial charge, that Iran was behind the Lockerbie disaster.
Now, this has usually been ascribed to Gaddafi and the Libyans. How are you sure that this is an Iranian caused event?
MR. KHALILI: Well, right after the disaster in the Persian Gulf, the US war ship shot down an Iranian civilian jet which caused, you know, more than 290 people were killed in that incident. That coincided with an ultimatum from President Reagan to the leadership of Iran to accept peace with Iraq. That ultimatum was very powerful, very — it was in the lines that if you do not accept peace, we’re going to come all out on you.
So the Libyans got together with Khomeini — Rafsanjani, Khomeini and the rest and they decided it was time to accept piece. And both Rafsanjani at that time, and the others in the leadership, promised the
Revolutionary Guard that they’re going to take revenge for the shooting down of the Iranian airliner. That was — I heard that from my sources within the Revolutionary Guard — that they were going to take revenge and hit a blow to the U.S. interest.
Now, shortly after that — shortly after the Pan Am incident I was in Europe on a mission and I had met with Iranian agents somewhere in Europe. I knew specifically who they were tied to and how high up they were connected. And it was right after the Pan Am bombing. We talked about the incident, they verified that Rafsanjani had ordered the Pan Am bombing and the retaliation for the Iranian airliner incident and they talked about a Palestinian suspect and the transistor — that the bomb was in the transistor radio. And then went on and talked about some of the investigation of one of the European governments that was in the process and which was not publicly available to people.
In my conversation with them I was convinced that this was an Iranian act. It was delivered, as promised, through their proxies. I reported my findings to the CIA, gave the names of the agents. They were traced — their travels were traced; where they were before, what countries they had visited. I told them of their connection to the Iranian hierarchy and so that’s where we left it off.
I expected a follow-up; nothing happened because six, seven months after Rafsanjani became the president Khomeini had died. Khamenei became the new supreme leader and CIA and US — the new US administration, President Bush Senior, made an assessment that
Hashimi Rafsanjani, the new president, is ready for a change in diplomatic relations as Rafsanjani had sent signals to the new US administration, as they always do they’re the master of deception.
So they changed their policies. They had traded my vision and opinion under Iranian government that they can never be trusted. Each one of them are a terrorist, and I’m not exaggerating. Everyone one of them have blood on their hand, either an American, Israeli or Persian.
So I was a foot soldier. I was somebody at the front lines reporting the facts and my opinion. Obviously they have their own analysts and organization that comes up with these opinions that they thought Rafsanjani was going to be a new leader and they told me, specifically, that Rafsanjani — consider Rafsanjani as the new king of Iran.
Well, about a year later they came to the conclusion that they were duped into such relations and they asked me to look for an Iranian who would testify that Iran was making a nuclear bomb at that time. Now I’m talking about early ’90s. That goes to show that the CIA And the US government knew that Iran was working on a nuclear bomb. I had reported in the mid ’80s that they were going to do that. They had come to a conclusion to do that because Saddam was looking for a nuclear bomb and technology during the war and as always, their policies of negotiation and trusting the Iranian leadership was false and hence the result and where we are right now.
MR. SIMON: Now, let me ask you a question about this. Does this mean that you think that the Iranian were working with Gaddafi on some level?
MR. KHALILI: Well, if — there was an article published June 2007, it was by Judd Scotland on Sunday and the evidence that the investigation was steered away from pointing to Iran and some of the evidence was actually interfered with to point to the defendant. Now, I don’t know who did it, as far as the specific person, but I know that Iran controls, and has under its command, several proxies throughout the world and they’ve shown that over and over again with the Beirut bombing, with the Khobar bombing, with the Pan Am bombing. In the ’90s they did a suicide bombing in Argentina on the Jewish community.
Some of the leaders, the current people in the Iranian government, are on Interpol’s most wanted. The Argentinean judge has an arrest warrant on Rafsanjani and several others; Rezai, Ahmad Vahidi, Velayati, Fallahian the minister of intelligence at that time.
The German prosecutor has arrest warrants for several of them. They are under arrest warrants by the three — they have done many, many assassinations and terrorist activities that are all streamed through the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Intelligence and the leadership in charge. And that’s the case right now. They’re still there. They’re still working the government with one goal in mind.
MR. SIMON: Reza Khalili, I am going to ask you a question that relates to the current presidential campaign in the United States because John McCain came under a certain amount of fire, supposedly for confusing Shiah’s and Shiites and Iran. In this fire they said that Iranian Shiahs would not work with Sunnis, do you think this is true?
MR. KHALILI: Well, it’s important to state that the Iranian government has been working with the Iraqi courts. That happened all along the Iran/Iraq war. Even though they did not share same ideology, the Iraqi courts and the Iranians were hand in hand to topple Saddam. They’ve been working with the Ba’athist regime of Syria since the revolution.
MR. SIMON: Who are Sunnis, of course, yes.
MR. KHALILI: Right. So they’ve been helping the Syrians and they’ve been expanding their power in the Middle East through the joint cooperation with the Syrians. Also the Taliban, their sworn enemy, they’ve been helping them in the uprising, after the invasion of Afghanistan, to counter attack the neutral forces and keep the pressure on the Americans.
They’ve got a long history with working with the leftist, with every terrorist group that they can to promote their agenda.
MR. SIMON: What about working with the biggest Sunni of all, Al Qaeda, do you think they’ve worked with Al Qaeda?
MR. KHALILI: Well, Ahmad Vahidi, the current deputy of the Defense Department. And he used to be the head of the Qods forces. He had — he’s had new things with Al Qaeda. He’s had contacts with Al Qaeda and they — of course they do share common goals but the enemy of my enemy is my best friend. Then, you know, that applies. They’ve had contact, they’ve helped and they have facilitated every different group as long as it promotes their agenda.
MR. SIMON: Well, thank you very much, Reza Khalili, for talking with Pajamas Media. We look forward to talking with you soon on podcast and in video form. Thank you very much.
MR. KHALILI: Thanks so much, bye bye.
MR. SIMON: All right. Bye.
Transcribed by Pnina Eilberg, eScribers
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Did Obama walk into a trap on Iraq?
posted at 9:30 am on July 9, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Roger Simon at Politico believes Barack Obama allowed himself to walk into a big trap on Iraq by agreeing to tour the country and talk to the commanders on the ground. Why go at all if Obama planned to stick to his policy of withdrawal? Making the trip concedes that he didn’t know what he talking about in the primaries, and it sets up a conundrum for Obama’s future policy:
Today many Americans are asking themselves if their summer driving vacations are really necessary because of the high cost of fuel.
But I am wondering about a trip that has nothing to do with the cost of fuel. I am wondering about Barack Obama’s planned trip to Iraq.
Is it necessary? Why? What is he going to learn from it?
The problem for Obama is that he constructed his policy stand on Iraq based on his one trip in 2006 and the explosion of violence at that time. He has stuck with his withdraw-regardless-of-consequences position ever since entering the race in January 2007. He opposed the surge, arguing that the addition of 20,000 more troops would not improve matters, and even suggested it would make things worse.
Now we know that Obama got it wrong on the surge, but his base of voters still refuse to acknowledge reality. Hillary Clinton tried explaining it in this year’s primaries, and lost the contest to Obama in large measure because of it. MoveOn and Code Pink lifted Obama to victory on the basis of his refusal to recognize the progress being made in Iraq, and they do not want to see Obama shift away from that position.
The trip to Iraq will force Obama to recognize the progress, both in security and in politics. He will have to confront the fruits of a strategy he fought to oppose, and the security brought by American troops that he insisted should have been withdrawn two years ago. And after doing that, Obama will have to explain how American voters should trust his judgment on the war when he got the most critical call of it wrong, and continued to insist on surrender when the opportunity for victory presented itself.
When he does, how will he explain it? Simon already knows:
A few days later, Obama said all the “confusion” over his Iraq statement was not his fault but rather the media’s. “I was surprised by how finely calibrated every single word was measured,” Obama said. “I was a little puzzled by the frenzy I set off.”
Bad media. (Asking candidates to say precisely what they mean and mean precisely what they say is ruining this country, if you ask me.)
Obama issues a statement on the biggest foreign-policy issue in this campaign, and he’s “surprised” and “puzzled” that people wanted to figure out exactly what he meant? So much for the superior judgment.
Again, an impressive knowledge of warfare demonstrated by the media
Posted by: McQ
Michael Shear claims:
Sen. John McCain, who has repeatedly derided anyone who advocated a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, now suddenly finds himself in a political box as the American-backed Iraqi leadership yesterday raised the prospect of exactly that.
You know, it's pretty sad when you have journalists who can't think beyond the current "gotchya" headline and understand the world of difference between a unilateral announcement of a timeline for withdrawal when a war isn't going well (and the probable effect it would have) and a timeline for withdrawal when you're winning and the country in question believes they are ready to take over the task.
As I said previously:
2 years ago, timetables for withdrawal were a bad idea because there were viable enemies still operating in Iraq.
Today? Not so much. Today we're talking about withdrawal timetables in the wake of victory. Then we were talking about timetables in the face of possible defeat. If you can't get you head around the difference, then I'd suggest you haven't much worthwhile to add to any discussion of the matter.
And I'm seeing a lot of worthless discussion on this faux point.
Today an Iraqi spokesman said:
A deadline should be set for the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Iraq, and the pullout could be done by 2011, an Iraqi government spokesman said Tuesday.
But he also said:
Ali al-Dabbagh said any timetable would depend on "conditions and the circumstances that the country would be undergoing." But he said a pullout within "three, four or five" years was possible.
Sounds to me like they're looking for an end-date for successful operations and full transition of the AO to the ISF before they'll commit to a timetable.
And any withdrawal will have a timetable. That's how you phase the operation. What you don't do, if you're in a conflict that can go either way, is announce it. That's what the Democrats insisted on.
Memo from Leni Riefenstahl
By Clarice Feldman
Rally Memo
From: Leni Riefenstahl
To: Barack Hussein (dare I say it?) Obama
Subject: Ideas for the rally
Dear Mr. Obama: I've been reading of your plans for the Invesco Field mass rally in Denver. I've had some experience documenting such things and am delighted to offer my suggestions. You are the one I've been waiting for.
1. You need a name for this rally.
Surely this will be the hallmark of your governance -- large, well-staged events in which you make very impassioned, high-minded speeches which do not bear parsing for content and which permit no impudent questioning by the media or participants. This, I can tell you, is a successful strategy.
My first thought about a name is Democratischeparteitag der Einheit und Starke or, as you would say, Democrat party Rally Day of Unity and Strength.
2. Make the Rally Very Long.
In my experience you cannot speak too long or be accompanied by too many cadres of supporters. Start around 5:30 and continue speaking until considerably past dusk. Have lots of torches. This makes for a dramatic and memorable effect. It may well be that the television crews will not be able to broadcast over such a long period, but never mind that. We can make a movie and ads out of it, whether they use it all or not.
3. Have Lots of Marching.
Before you start, have lots of marchers carrying banners of their affiliation. I notice on your website you have 17 groups backing you. I'd start with the LGBTs if only for the costumes. Follow on with the First Americans for much the same reason and continue down the list. (I notice you have no white men listed. Good thing. The last rallies we had like this were just seas of white men. It's time for rainbow fascism to come out of the closet and show its face.)
3. Remember the point of the rally.
The thing about the rally is that it is sure to strengthen the Obama cult, which I must say has proven an astonishing development to me. I thought that surely America was immune to such things outside of sports and entertainment, but to someone like me it's a delightful surprise. Undoubtedly it was a good idea for you to speak to higher order things like change and hope while your wife -- undoubtedly working the masochist vote -- stresses the order and discipline you expect of your supporters and then the nation. You need to bring in the gullible idealists and the anti-democratic self-punishers.
4. Film The Rally.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Lots of torches, banners, close ups of youth and of your face as you hit the high points of your peroration. Unfortunately, I'm in no shape to do this, but there's that nice Michael Moore or maybe Bill Moyers and a cadre of music video makers. They have lots of experience with this sort of thing.
5. Leave the Young With a Task.
Undoubtedly much of your audience will be young and impressionable .Give them an assignment to carry out or they'll just wonder off, drink, dope-up and dance and forget to work for you. Maybe your neat idea to have them work for nothing -- probably as community organizers as you did -- might appeal. (For goodness sake though shut up those folks who tell them how you and Ayres ran through $50 million of Annenberg money without in any way shape of form improving the Chicago schools, but merely enriching your pals. Ditto the use of tax money to subsidize slum landlords.) Keep their eyes on the skies and away from the realities. Surely you can find ways to use your newly created youth corps. We did.
6. Get a catchy Song.
Very important. I've tried my hand at it for you, but my head doesn't work well with hip hop. Maybe 25 cent or whatever that guy's name is can help.
7. Line up Lots of Celebrities.
It's obvious your followers are not linear thinkers. They need images. But I see you're working Hollywood already and know how too handle that. Keep Kerry and Carter off the stage and far away from the event. Ditto McGovern and Dukakis and that nitwit Wesley Clark.
Remember, my darling, The Future Belongs to You.
UFB another brain dead lib pining for the golden days of SH's rule in Iraq
I guess I've missed the part where Maliki is robbing the country through an oil for food scandal, has killed 100's of thousands of his own and set up rape rooms and is cutting off the hands of his opponents
And you question someone elses intelligence
Too f'n funny
Wonder how you feel about the Dems trying to limit free speech?
Nancy Pelosi Wants to Shut Down Member Blogging
Democrats in the House Want Representatives to Only Post to "Approved" Websites
By The Directors
We've had the pleasure to host many Representatives here at RedState, where they've written about issues that interest us all. But that may all be about to change if Nancy Pelosi has her way.
Via Congressman John Culberson's (R-TX) twitter feed, we learned today of an incredible threat to Congressional activity on the internet.
johnculberson: Before I could post a Tweet I would have to get approval of the twits that run the House! 25 minutes ago from web
johnculberson: They want to require prior approval of all posts to any public social media/internet/www site by any member of Congress!!! 26 minutes ago from web
johnculberson: Dem "Supreme Soviet" leadership of House would have to approve every Twitter before I could post it!!! 26 minutes ago from web
johnculberson: I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen's ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc - outrageous and I will fight them about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Culberson and John Boehner have spoken out on the issue already, and Reps. Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and Tom Price (R-GA) are leading the opposition. Under the rule, any kind of site that involves posting - including miniblogs on Twitter, podcasts, video on Youtube, etc. - would all have to be on sites "approved" by the House Democrat leadership as complying with House regulations. As the release states:
"Under the proposal, the House Administration Committee would develop a list of "approved" websites, and Members of Congress could only post content on such websites."
Whatever intention the Democrats have, this idea is ridiculous. Congressmen should be able to decide for themselves where and how they interact with their constituents and the American people.
Tell Nancy Pelosi and the House Rules Committee to stop trying to block transparency and openness in government. Call them at 202-224-3121
Congress hits single digits: Rasmussen
posted at 2:00 pm on July 8, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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When Democrats won majorities in both chambers of Congress, they pointed to the falling approval ratings of the legislature as a mandate for change. They have certainly provided it — albeit in the wrong direction. Rasmussen’s latest polling shows the approval ratings for Congress have reached a new low, and a new achievement … single digits:
The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category. …
The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.
Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.
When Democrats first took control of Congress, its approval rating sat at 15%, which explained quite a bit about the electoral victory Democrats achieved. They managed to push it up to 26% after four monthsin charge, but it has gone downhill ever since May 2007. People used to joke about it hitting single digits, but the day has finally arrived under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
Oddly, at the same time Democrats have maintained their lead on Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot. Last week’s poll shows a 12-point gap, slightly narrower than the 14-point gap in mid-June, but wider than the six-point gap in April. The GOP has obviously not done a good job in explaining the lack of progress on issues and tying it to Democratic leadership, which seems like an opportunity missed — at least this far.
With energy on everyone’s mind, the Republicans have a chance to change that. Democrats have decided to “wait for the wind” rather than do anything to ease the supply crisis that has driven prices at the pump out of sight. If Republicans can take charge and implement a rational energy policy that includes robust domestic production — a position that has gained popularity with voters — they can both increase their standing and expose Reid and Pelosi as the true obstructionists.
Outside of the partisan considerations, having the people’s branch of government in such disrepute seems somewhat dangerous. Congress needs to take action to restore confidence in the most representative branch of the federal government, which should include an end to corruption mechanisms such as pork. We cannot afford to wait for the number to sink to zero before repairing its credibility.
Secret US-Iranian Dialogue Brings Oil Prices down, Shakes up Mid East Alliances
From DEBKA-Net-Weekly 354 Updated by DEBKAfile
July 8, 2008
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Oil prices suddenly slumped Tuesday, July 8, as predicted by DEBKA-Net-Weekly on June 27, under the impact of the secret American-Iranian talks embarked on last month to solve burning issues by diplomatic engagement.
These talks between the US and Iranian delegations, representing President George W. Bush and Iranian supreme ruler Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have yielded ad hoc understandings on controversial issues. One is an agreement not to allow the price of oil to rocket past $150 the barrel.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive Gulf and Iranian sources disclosed that the bilateral negotiations were deliberately masked by the war fever engineered by Washington in the form of a stream of leaks indicating that a US or Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations was imminent.
At the same time, neither nation has sheathed its military option. Those understandings are ad hoc and could well break down in the volatile climate generated by hard-line elements of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which are dead against deals with Washington.
The last in a string of belligerent statements issued by IRGC chiefs came from Ali Shirazy, senior Navy cleric, who said Tuesday, July 8: If the US attacks Iran, “we will immediately strike back at Tel Aviv. Our first target is Tel Aviv and only then will we attack US shipping in the Persian Gulf; their destruction will represent Iran’s crushing reprisal.”
Behind the saber-rattling, however, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources reported common ground was covered for three key objectives:
1. The American side was willing to refrain from military action against Iran before the end of the Bush presidency in January 2009, but could not promise Israel would not act unilaterally. In a bid to hold Israel’s hand, sources in Washington have been putting out semi-official comments that Israel is short of the intelligence and military capability for striking Iran without help.
2. Iran undertook to open the way for the US military to continue to go from strength to strength in fighting al Qaeda and the Sunni guerrilla insurgents in Iraq, to allow President Bush to claim his Iraq campaign had ended successfully before leaving the White House. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Tehran ordered Iranian intelligence officers working undercover in Iraq to halt attacks on US troops by pro-Iranian militias, including Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army. This has left US and Iraqi government force with free hands for large-scale operations against al Qaeda.
Iranian officers are also sharing useful intelligence on conditions in the field with American commanders.
3. In the background of the secret dialogue is the Bush administration’s ambition to help fellow-Republican Senator John McCain get elected to the White House.
DEBKAfile’s Iran experts comment that the revolutionary regime in Tehran has traditionally preferred a Republican over a Democrat in the White House since the days when its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, helped Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter.
Some of these understandings are still work in progress, but the oil price ceiling of $150 was definitely agreed and resulted in the sharp fall in prices Tuesday, July 6 by $3.92 a barrel. Some traders attributed it to an ease in geopolitical tensions related to Iran’s nuclear program and a strengthening US dollar.
DEBKAfile’s sources question the first part of this assessment, finding no real ease in tensions around Iran’s nuclear program.
Monday, July 8, the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet announced American, British and Bahraini vessels were to launch a new exercise in the Gulf called “Stake Net,” to practice tactics and procedures for protecting maritime infrastructure such as gas and oil installations.
The exercise was launched in response to threats by more than one Iranian military chief to control shipping in the Gulf and Strait of Hormuz if Iran was attacked or its regional interests jeopardized.
The ball was picked up by the Revolutionary Guards which launched a retaliatory naval maneuver the next day.
Tuesday, too, the New York Times ran an article called “Nearer to the Bomb” by nuclear physicist Peter D. Zimmerman, former chief scientist of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He wrote that all of Iran’s activities, especially in uranium enrichment, are evidence that its “near-term ability to make nuclear weapons is gathering strength.”
He further warned that once Iran begins enriching uranium to weapons grade on an assembly-line basis, “it could transfer this material to groups such as Hizballah and Hamas.” They could then “fabricate low-technology nuclear explosives with yields nearly as high as the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima.”
The understandings unfolding between Washington and Tehran have clearly impacted on Syria and Lebanon. One result was last month’s Doha accord for the election of Lebanese president Michel Sleiman, which has produced a new government in Beirut headed by the pro-Western Fouad Siniora with veto power for Hizballah ministers.
Washington has for the moment lowered the heat of political, economic and intelligence pressure on Iran’s close ally, Syrian president Bashar Assad and even Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, permitting them to assume a role in political processes in Lebanon and the Middle East at large.
The bilateral understandings on Iraq have strengthened its Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, but even more dramatically revalued the Syrian president’s international legitimacy, although some aspects of his position are still under discussion between Washington and Tehran.
All the same, a senior Saudi official conversant with Lebanese and Syrian affairs put it this way: “On the face of it nothing has changed in Washington’s attitude towards Damascus, but in reality, it has undergone a transformation.”
The threats to the Assad regime have receded, notably the international tribunal for prosecuting the assassins of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and Washington has withdrawn its support for Syrian opposition factions.”
The Saudi official further commented: “A US-Iranian earthquake is rumbling under the surface of the Middle East, especially in Syria.”
Nancy Pelosi’s energy policy
Posted by: McQ
I sometimes wonder (in fact I often wonder) about the real mental acuity of the Speaker of the House. She does not impress me as the brightest bulb in the pack:
The speaker blames what she labels the Bush-Cheney big oil agenda, using graphics to point out gasoline prices have more than doubled in the Bush administration.
"This is a scam of the greatest magnitude," says Speaker Pelosi.
You have to remember that when Ms. Pelosi and the gang were running for reelection in 2006 they promised that if the people would give them a majority, they'd take care of gas prices. Standing in front of a gas station with posted prices in the $3 range, she and the others implied it was as simple as that. They had a "common sense plan", remember?
Now, with gas prices over the $4 mark, about all the Democrats seem capable of doing is attempting to blame Bush. And don't even talk about increasing domestic production:
"You know full well if you could drill in the Arctic Refuge it would save two cents 20 years from now," says Speaker Pelosi.
Ah, goal-post shifting (or just the usual hyperbole, you decide) - now it's "20 years" instead of 10. Of course, unsaid is the point that drilling elsewhere coupled with ANWR would yield much more than "two cents" on down the road, wouldn't it?
As for Pelosi's "common sense plan", well, it appears to be a two pronged attack. The first part of her solution then is:
"Mr. President, do not fill the strategic petroleum reserve with oil at record highs. Instead, take out the oil that we brought at a lower price to bring down the price of oil, to reduce the price at the pump," says Speaker Pelosi.
Right. Instead of drilling, Ms. Pelosi would instead like to see us without a SPR in a time in which we import 60% of our oil and are subject to interruption or cut-off at any time. Brilliant.
And what would pushing this oil onto the market do for the price of gas - not that much. Maybe a few cents per gallon.
But I mentioned a two-pronged attack by the speaker, didn't I? Well here's the second:
Building on last month's bipartisan legislation passed overwhelmingly by the House requiring the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to use its emergency powers to curb excessive speculation distorting the energy markets, the House Agriculture Committee this week will hold three days of hearings on oil market speculation. The goal is to present the House with strong legislation this month to bring transparency to the markets and to end speculators' ability to artificially inflate the price at the pump.
The House Ag Committee is holding three days of hearings on oil speculation? Brilliant! I'm sure the folks at the London futures market (and other foreign venues) are shivering in their boots. And, of course, I'm sure the faux problem of "speculators" will somehow be laid at Bush's feet as well.
So there you have Nancy Pelosi's solution to our gas price woes. Don't drill in ANWR (or anywhere else), deplete the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (a brilliant national security strategy) and go after speculators with Ag Committee hearings.
Wooo Hooo - we'll be down to $2.50 a gallon in no time.
If Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aren't the greatest arguments against seniority as the primary qualification for a leadership position, I don't know who would be.
McCain on Obama on Iraq: "I hope that he will reach a position."
John McCain on Obama's recent wobbling on Iraq and Obama's concession that he would go to Iraq after McCain called him out on not visiting or meeting with our commander there:
Well, I think you know that I opposed the failed strategy of the Bush administration. I argued for the strategy that is succeeding. I have been to Iraq 8 times. I know the situation on the ground. I predicted we would succeed and we are succeeding. And, we are winning. That victory is fragile, it can be reversed. Sen. Obama opposed the surge. He said it would fail. He still is saying that it would fail. Now, last Thursday or Friday, it seemed for a while there he was agreeing with the surge, then maybe he’s not. So, I’m glad he’s going to Iraq for the second time. He hasn’t been there in 900 days. I’m glad, for the first time, he’s going to sit down with General Petraeus--for the first time, a sit-down briefing, if you can believe that. And, I hope that he will reach a position. I don’t know what position, because he’s been all over the map, calling for immediate withdrawals, back in the primaries to now saying you know--so it’s hard to know. I hope that he’ll go over there and get the kind of information he needs that he hasn’t requested in the past...But, have no doubt what my position was when I called for additional troops, it was a very unpopular thing to do and many people said my campaign was dead and I said I’d rather lose a campaign then lose a war. He said it would fail, it has succeeded. [The] American people should take notice of that. So, I’ll see what he has to say when he gets back from his visit to Iraq. And, I’m sure he’ll be impressed with a sit down with one of the greatest generals that America has ever produced, General David Petraeus.
Of course, Obama has now apparently decided that the perception that he's a flip-flopper with no principles is an even more devastating demonstration of weakness than the perception that he would sell out our allies and abandon the mission in Iraq to pander to the anti-war left - really, it's just a choice of who he surrenders to first - so his surrogates are now claiming that it's a lie that Obama ever wavered in his commitment to abandon Iraq. Oceania was never, we repeat never, at war in Iraq! But in political campaigns, as in war, the enemy gets a say in your game plan, and McCain is unlikely to let Obama simultaneously escape responsibility for being wrong about the surge and for belatedly trying to escape the consequences of being wrong.
Read On...
As for McCain's own strategy, I agree with Ross and Patrick that the Iraq issue is a winner for McCain on multiple levels despite the war's overall unpopularity, given the contrasts it presents between McCain and Obama. The narrative of McCain's role in advocating for the surge is crucial to McCain's general-election story just as it was in the primaries, and dovetails perfectly with McCain's biography and contrast with Obama.
Of course, as close observers of the situation in Iraq can tell you, the McCain narrative is somewhat oversimplified - many of the conditions that made the surge successful (e.g., Sunni cooperation, sufficient numbers of trained Iraqis with a government willing to use them) did not exist until Iraqis had been through the experience of living with the consequences of Sunni extremism and sectarian warfare in 2004-06, whereas some of the conditions for improving the situation were well underway before the surge came on line. And, of course, there are many other examples that could be cited of the gradual progress that was made in the 2004-06 period despite the setbacks. In other words, it's unfair to Bush and his civilian and military advisers to suggest that his strategy was a total failure that was singlehandedly rescued by McCain and Gen. Petraeus.
But while it would be nice indeed if the history of the 2003-07 period could be written accurately, McCain has to deal with the facts as the media and the general public believe them to be, not as they really are; he has to campaign in the real world, not conduct a history lesson dedicated to defending a Bush legacy that Bush himself could never be bothered to defend (or hire people competent to defend). Within that context, it makes all kinds of political sense to declare the Bush strategy a failure in toto and champion McCain's genuinely courageous and significant role in building political support for a doubling-down in Iraq. Even granting that the surge did not do it all by itself, it was a necessary condition for building on the opening that the "Anbar awakening" and other markers of progress had made possible, and it has proved the decisive difference in much the same way that the arrival of US troops proved the decisive difference in Europe in 1918. Thus, the McCain campaign narrative - McCain as the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance - is built around a significant and consequential truth, while Obama's narrative is based entirely on denying the facts on the ground. I know which I prefer.
When in England at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the
Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of
'empire building' by George Bush.
He answered by saying, 'Over the years, the United States has sent many of
its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond
our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is
enough to bury those that did not return.
You could have heard a pin drop.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Then there was a conference in France where a number of international
engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break
one of the French engineers came back into the room saying 'Have you heard
the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to
Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intended to do, bomb
them?'
A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: 'Our carriers have three
hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear
powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they
have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a
day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water
each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting
victims and injured to and from their flight deck.. We have eleven such
ships; how many does France have?'
You could have heard a pin drop.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A U.S.. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals
from the U.S. , English, Canadian, Australian and French Navies. At a
cocktail reception, he found himself standing with a large group of Officers
that included personnel from most of those countries.
Everyone was chatting away in English as they sipped their drinks but a
French admiral suddenly complained that, 'whereas Europeans learn many
languages, Americans learn only English.' He then asked, 'Why is it that we
always have to speak English in these conferences rather than speaking
French?'
Without hesitating, the American Admiral replied 'Maybe it's because the
Brits, Canadians, Aussies and Americans arranged it so you wouldn't have to
speak German.'
You could have heard a pin drop.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A group of Americans, retired teachers, recently went to France on a tour.
Robert Whiting, an elderly gentleman of 83, arrived in Paris by plane. At
French Customs, he took a few minutes to locate his passport in his carry
on. 'You have been to France before, monsieur?' the customs officer asked
sarcastically. Mr. Whiting admitted that he had been to France previously.
'Then you should know enough to have your passport ready.'
The American said, 'The last time I was here, I didn't have to show it.'
'Impossible. Americans always have to show your passports on arrival in
France !'
The American senior gave the Frenchman a long hard look. Then he quietly
explained. 'Well, when I came ashore at Omaha Beach on D-Day in '44 to help
liberate this country, I couldn't find any damn Frenchmen to show it to.'
You could have heard a pin drop
The sorcerer's apprentices
Barack Obama’s campaign grows more “refined” by the day. On issue after high profile issue – Iraq, abortion, gun control, Reverend Wright – Obama changes positions the way most people change clothes. It’s gotten so bad that even E.J. Dionne has noticed. (Dionne’s column about Obama’s flip-flopping on Iraq is called “The Stand That Obama Can’t Fudge.” Dionne thus simultaneously recognizes and excuses Obama’s fudging on everything else).
The more Obama fudges, the more he confirms his status as the true heir to Bill Clinton. As I wrote back in April:
Hillary is the nominal Clinton in this year's presidential race, but it's Obama who increasingly bears the resemblance to Bill. . . .[R]ecently it’s become clear that, like the former president, Obama is fundamentally unserious about vital issues, including even those pertaining to war and peace. For both men, issues are not at root substantive problems to be addressed on their merits, but formal matters to be navigated and, to the extent possible, manipulated. . . . How else to explain [Clinton’s] statement about how he would have voted on the first Gulf War: “I would have voted for [the war resolution] if [the vote] was close, but the Democrats had the better arguments”?
At one level, this approach to issues is post-modern -- a variation of the academic school that sees texts as infinitely malleable instruments with no fixed meaning, just waiting to be put to whatever use we find amusing. Substitute “issues” for “texts” and “expedient” for “amusing,” and you have described the essence of the Clinton-Obama political school.
At another level, though, Clinton and Obama are doing what politicians have always wanted to do and often did in the pre-modern era, when communications hadn’t developed to the point that such chicanery would likely be exposed.
Perhaps the real question, then, is: what has convinced Clinton and Obama that they can get away with the "self-triangulation" they practice so shamelessly? After all, politics isn’t literature; the electorate isn’t a doctoral thesis panel; and the communications system of today is capable of exposing deceit faster than ever before.
I think three factors are at work here. The first is modern legal education. Law students are trained to make and to contest distinctions. This means explaining how things that appear to be substantially the same are actually significantly different, and how things that appear to be significantly different are actually substantially the same. This is the sort of thing Obama has been doing a good deal of lately.
This ability to transform things so fundamentally (like into unlike; unlike into like) resembles magic, and to a certain kind of personality, it can be intoxicating. Among these types, one imagines, is the future politician. The risk of such intoxication is heightened by the fact that the post-modernism I described above has seeped into legal education, which means that too many law professors behave less like the retrained “sorcerer” and more like the sorcerer’s apprentice. Clinton and Obama both were law professors when they were young.
The second factor is the boundless (and largely justified) self-confidence Clinton and Obama possess. Both are entirely self-made. Both came from the periphery of society and, seemingly without much effort, grabbed its most glittering prizes. For both, glibness was a key to the success itself and to the appearance of its ease. No wonder both believe they can magically talk their way out of contradictions.
To appreciate Clinton and Obama, it is instructive to consider their precursor, Richard Nixon. He too benefited from a top-notch legal education and he too was a self-made man who possessed self-confidence. But Nixon was educated in a different, less facile era. Moreover, Nixon wasn’t glib, and therefore didn’t make it look easy. As Jackie Mason put it, “Nixon lied, but at least he had the decency to sweat when he did it.” Thus, while Nixon was known with justification as Tricky Dick, he was far more constant than Clinton and Obama on a given issue. Nixon tended to triangulate by putting new issues on the table. He lacked the deep self-confidence to triangulate regularly through out-and-out self-contradiction.
Nixon was also substantially encumbered by a hostile press, and this brings me to the third factor that I think explains the audacity of Clinton and Obama – they believe the press will cover for them. Nor is this confidence entirely misplaced. For while new media outlets such as blogs increase the likelihood that campaign contradictions will become known, the liberal sympathies of the still dominant outlets provide hope that they will not become widely known.
Even so, Clinton ran, and Obama is running, a substantial risk. Whatever may be true in academia, the general public still doesn’t like slick talkers and it certainly doesn’t like slick talkers who sound like lawyers. The MSM may be able, up to a point, to obscure the specifics of this or that flip-flop, but it can't obscure the fact that a presidential candidate is slick.
This helps explain why, pre-Lewinsky, Clinton failed twice to capture a majority when running for president. If Obama fails in 2008, a year tailor made for a Democratic victory, it will likely be because of the same kind of slickness born of the same kind of outsider’s self-confidence.
Rezko calls straw-donor claim reckless
By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 7/2/08 6:20 AM EST
Text Size:
Antoin “Tony” Rezko
Rezko’s lawyers assert 'there is no evidence whatsoever' that Rezko, an early political patron of Obama’s, reimbursed an associate for a $10,000 contribution to Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.
Photo: AP
Lawyers for disgraced Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko accused the government of “recklessly” whipping up a “media frenzy” by alleging that Rezko used a straw donor to contribute to Barack Obama.
In a filing unsealed this week, Rezko’s lawyers asserted “there is no evidence whatsoever” that Rezko, an early political patron of Obama, reimbursed an associate for a $10,000 contribution to Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign.
The prosecutors who tried Rezko on a series of corruption charges had alleged that he steered a kickback from a state contract to one-time business partner Joseph Aramanda, then instructed Aramanda to contribute part of it to Obama, because Rezko had already maxed out to the campaign.
“Given the fungible nature of money and the fact that the government will not call Aramanda” as a witness, Rezko’s lawyers wrote in the unsealed document, “the government will have difficulty proving that the donated dollars came from any particular source.”
Additionally, they assert “there is no evidence whatsoever that Rezko reimbursed Aramanda for this contribution, or even that Rezko had any role in or awareness of Aramanda’s donation. Aramanda and Rezko were certainly not alone in supporting Obama’s campaign, and the mere fact that both did so should not support an inference that Aramanda’s contribution was made on behalf of Rezko.”
See also
* Cindy’s fortune: An asset and a liability
* McCain game plan worries insiders
* Obama not running as movement
The document was originally filed in January to ask the judge to block three witnesses’ statements from the trial, which concluded last month when a jury convicted Rezko of 16 corruption-related counts including fraud and money laundering.
In their filing, Rezko’s lawyers pointed out that “in the media frenzy that followed” the government’s straw-donor claim, media reports revealed that Aramanda’s son had an internship in Obama’s Senate office in Washington during the summer of 2005.
So, Rezko’s lawyers asserted, “Aramanda has ample independent reason to support Obama’s campaign.”
Still, Obama donated to charity Aramanda’s $10,000 contribution, as well as another $149,000 in contributions his campaign said "could be reasonably credited to Mr. Rezko's political support."
Obama was not implicated in any wrongdoing in the Rezko case, but his name was mentioned sporadically during the two-month trial.
Last week, the judge unsealed a document showing prosecutors had considered calling witnesses to link Rezko to Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The newly released document blasting the straw-donor allegation is the second filing unsealed since Rezko’s conviction in which he or his team alleged prosecutors unfairly steered the trial toward Obama.
Last month, the judge released a letter Rezko wrote from jail during the trial in which he accused prosecutors of improperly pressuring him to implicate Obama, as well as Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
“They are pressuring me to tell them the ‘wrong’ things that I supposedly know about Gov. Blagojevich and Sen. Obama,” Rezko wrote in the letter. “I have never been party to any wrongdoing that involved the governor or the senator. I will never fabricate lies about anyone else for selfish purposes. I will take what comes my way, but I will never hurt innocent people.”
After that letter became public, Obama’s campaign released a statement stressing that Obama hasn’t been accused of “any improper action or conduct involving Tony Rezko” and reiterating that he hasn’t been contacted for an interview or for any information about Rezko. “Nothing in this letter indicates anything to the contrary.”
But Republicans have seized on the relationship between the two, which includes a real estate deal that enlarged the Obama’s Chicago homestead, to question Obama’s judgment.
OBAMA STRIKES FIRST
Friday, July 04, 2008
By Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
The campaign of 2008 started on July 1 when Obama launched his first national advertising buy of the season. How McCain responds and whether or not he does, will have a big impact in determining whether Obama can solidify or expand his current lead in the polls. As always, the media fails to cover the significant events of the campaign — but this is one of the most critical.
The Obama ad, which introduces him as someone who worked his way through college, fights for American jobs, and battles for health care also seeks to move him to the center by taking credit for welfare reform in Illinois which, the ad proclaims, reduced the rolls by 80%.
But there's one problem - Obama opposed the 1996 welfare reform act at the time. The Illinois law for which he takes credit, was merely the local implementing law the state was required to pass, and it did, almost unanimously. Obama's implication — that he backed "moving people from welfare to work" — is just not true.
With Obama running the ad in all the swing states (Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia), this gross usurpation of credit affords the McCain campaign an incredible opportunity for rebuttal.
For the past two weeks, Obama has moved quickly toward the center. He has reversed his previous positions for gun control, against using faith based institutions to deliver public services, against immunity for tele-communications companies that turn records over to the government in terror investigations, for raising Social Security taxes, for imposing the fairness doctrine on talk radio, and a host of other issues.
Related
McCain has watched passively as his rival repositions himself for November. Indeed, he has watched from afar as he took the time out to travel to Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil, even though they have no electoral votes.
But now, there is a heaven-sent opportunity for McCain to strike. In his effort to move to the center, Obama has distorted his own record, meager though it may be, and is taking credit for a program he strongly opposed. McCain should immediately run an ad in all of the states in which his opponent is advertising setting forth the facts and explaining Obama's distortion.
A good tag line for the ad would be: "John McCain: when you have real experience, you don't need to exaggerate."
But, if McCain doesn't answer, or just replies with his own positive ad, he will let Obama move to the center, a key mistake from which he may never recover. If Obama can hold his 5-10 point lead until the conventions, he will have set in place a pattern that will be very hard to change. With his new ad, Obama could even elevate his lead to double digits.
On the other hand, if McCain calls him on his distortion, he can do grave damage to Obama on three fronts: credibility, centrism, and experience. By catching Obama in a lie, he can undermine the effectiveness of any subsequent ads the Democrat runs. By showing that he opposed welfare reform, McCain can do much to force Obama back to the left and cast doubt on his efforts to move to the middle. And by emphasizing Obama's limited experience, he can strike at a soft spot --- made softer by Hillary's attacks in the primary.
The move is right there for McCain. Now lets see how good his campaign really is.
McCain: I’ll balance the budget by cleaning up entitlement programs
posted at 9:29 am on July 7, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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John McCain will send a message to fiscal conservatives this week: he’ll take on entitlement programs in his first term. Pledging to balance the budget in four years, McCain will cut waste and begin overhauling Social Security and Medicare, a bold vision that presents an opportunity and a risk for the Republican. George Bush saw his second term run aground on the shoals of Social Security reform:
McCain is making the pledge at the beginning of a week when both presidential candidates plan to devote their events to the economy, the top issue in poll after poll as voters struggle to keep their jobs and fill their gas tanks. …
McCain’s emphasis on balancing the budget is likely to excite conservatives, who have remained skeptical of his candidacy, and provoke derision from Democrats, who will argue that it’s a warmed-over version of proposals that President Bush failed to enact.
The Democrats shrug off McCain’s pledge as unrealistic. He has a $400 billion gap to close, as the CBO predicts that kind of deficit in 2013 under current budget plans. Can McCain possibly do that with a combination of entitlement reforms and surgical excision of waste? McCain believes he can, and points to the essential problem in a speech he will deliver this morning:
This Congress and this Administration have failed to meet their responsibilities to manage the government. Government has grown by 60 percent in the last eight years. That is simply inexcusable. When I’m president, I will order a stem to stern review of government, modernize how it does business and save billions of dollars. I will veto every single bill with wasteful spending. We aren’t going to continue mortgaging this country’s future for things Americans don’t want or need.
My opponent has a very different record on this issue. He has sought millions upon millions of dollars in earmarks since his election to the Senate. In 2007 alone, Senator Obama requested nearly $100 million for earmark projects. I have never asked for a single earmark in my entire career. He supported the $300 billion pork laden agricultural subsidy bill. I opposed it. He voted for an energy bill stuffed with give-aways to oil companies at a time of record profits. I voted against it.
We grew spending by over 35% from 2000, when we had a $2.0 trillion budget. Some of that went to the war effort, but plenty of it came in other discretionary spending. And, as McCain tells Politico, the real spending problem isn’t in discretionary programs but in entitlements. The explosion of spending threatens to overwhelm the federal budget over the next few decades, but already accounts for 58% of federal spending.
In real terms, we have increased entitlement spending by 759% over the last 43 years. In 2007 dollars, we spent $582 billion in 1965, and in 2007 that has transformed into a $2.5 trillion boondoggle. What’s worse, the rate of increase has speeded up. We have added more than a half-trillion dollars over the last five years. It took 43 years to add a half-trillion 2007 dollars to discretionary spending.
McCain at least puts entitlements on the table as a problem in the bloated federal budget. Barack Obama has only mentioned entitlements in terms of expanding them, adding new taxes as a way to redistribute capital through the federal government. A real agent of change would offer solutions rather than the hair of the dog.
More Good News From Iraq
Posted by: McQ
Prime Minister al Maliki:
"Today, we are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty," Maliki told Arab ambassadors in blunt remarks during an official visit to Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.
"One of the two basic topics is either to have a memorandum of understanding for the departure of forces or a memorandum of understanding to set a timetable for the presence of the forces, so that we know (their presence) will end in a specific time."
I have no problem with either and I say, the sooner the better.
AQI is all but finished, the Sunnis are invested in making the government work and al Sadr, from his front-line position in Iran, has much less influence than he formerly had due to Maliki's crackdown on Shi'ite militias. The ISF is very close to being a completely viable and self-supporting force, we just turned over Anbar province to the Iraqis (Anbar!)and it is indeed time to begin talking about withdrawal.
Reuters, of course, wants to make an issue of al Maliki's mention of a "timetable":
The Bush administration has always opposed such a move, saying it would give militant groups an advantage.
Uh, hello! It makes sense to oppose such talk when you have a viable enemy who is willing to go to ground to wait you out and then strike after you've left.
Reuters may want to review what I just said about how viable what is left of AQI and the Mahdi army are in that regard.
2 years ago, timetables for withdrawal were a bad idea because there were viable enemies still operating in Iraq.
Today? Not so much. Today we're talking about withdrawal timetables in the wake of victory. Then we were talking about timetables in the face of possible defeat. If you can't get you head around the difference, then I'd suggest you haven't much worthwhile to add to any discussion of the matter.
Why globalization ameliorates income inequality
Posted by: McQ
Christian Broda addresses the conventional wisdom which says globalization has increased US income inequality and declares the thesis to be dead wrong.
In fact, he declares in his title that China and Wal-Mart are actually champions of equality and that, in fact globalization helps ameliorate income inequality instead of exacerbating it.
How rich you are depends on two things: how much money you have and how much the goods you buy cost. If your income doubles but the prices of the goods you consume also double, then you are no better off. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom on US inequality is based on official measures that only look at the first half, the income differential. National statistics ignore the fact that inflation affects people in different income groups unevenly because the rich and poor consume different baskets of goods.
Those baskets of goods include the higher cost (and higher percentage) of services consumed by the rich which aren't affected by trade vs. the consumption of goods, by the poor, whose cost are held down by trade.
Poor families in America spend a larger share of their income on goods whose prices are directly affected by trade - like clothing and food - relative to wealthier families. By contrast, the higher your income, the more you spend on services, which are less subject to competition from abroad. Since 1994 the price of goods in the U.S. has risen much less than the price of services - and, yes, this includes the recent surge in food prices. Paradoxically, focusing only in the last few quarters of high relative food prices misses the fact that the main trend we have observed for decades is exactly the opposite.
So, per Broda, globalization has had a positive effect for lower income buyers:
Inflation differentials between the rich and poor dramatically change our view of the evolution of inequality in America. Inflation of the richest 10 percent of American households has been 6 percentage points higher than that of the poorest 10 percent over the period 1994 - 2005. This means that real inequality in America, if you measure it correctly, has been roughly unchanged.
Two of the major players in this scenario which sees the poor actually benefiting from globalization? Wal-Mart and China:
This trend can partly be explained by China. In U.S. stores, prices of consumer goods have fallen the most in sectors where Chinese presence has increased the most. Take canned seafood or cotton shirts, for instance. Exports of China to the rest of the world in these categories have increased dramatically over this decade. Inflation in these sectors has been negative over the last decade, while in other sectors with no Chinese presence inflation has been over 20 percent. Moreover, as China produces goods of relatively low quality, sectors with strong Chinese presence are disproportionately consumed by the poor.
The expansion of superstores - like Wal-Mart and Target - has also played an important role in accounting for the inflation differentials between rich and poor. Superstores sell the same products as traditional shops at much lower prices. Today the poor do roughly twice as much of their buying of non-durable goods in these stores than the rich. So poor consumers have been the biggest beneficiaries of Wal-Mart coming to town.
Of course, for populist political candidates, this isn't something they want to hear. Globalization is "bad". Wal-Mart kills the local mom-and-pop stores which don't have the buying power or global connections Wal-Mart has. And besides, they're non-union. And don't get them started on China.
In reality this is a situation created by demand. And that demand comes from the poorer among consistently shopping in stores like Wal-Mart because of the purchasing power increase doing so gives their dollar. Because of having that choice, the inflation differentials found in the different shopping baskets purchased by rich and poor are maintained, keeping income "inequality" at a much lower level than "conventional wisdom" likes to admit.
But, don't count on hearing that on the campaign trail.
Disconfirmations Disconfirmed: Saddam Had Nuke Program (Updated)
By Randall Hoven
The media have been telling us for years that Saddam had no WMD, so "Bush's War": was based on a "lie." And those who believed Saddam did have WMD or WMD programs were delusional or worse.
But today, on July 6, 2008, the Associated Press reports that
* Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program
* At the Tuwaitha nuclear complex just south of Baghdad
* Which included 550 metric tons (over 1.2 million pounds) of "yellowcake", or concentrated uranium
* And multiple devices that could be used in a nuclear weapon.
The AP does not say alleged nuclear program. It does not add "according to military experts." It simply says "Saddam Hussein's nuclear program."
That's pretty big news, isn't it?
For about five years now, those of us who thought Saddam Hussein probably had at least WMD programs, if not WMD themselves, have been called not only wrong, but illogical and insane.
One example was an article by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal titled People Believe a 'Fact' That Fits Their Views Even if It's Clearly False . (Her article series is called, without irony, the "Science Journal".) Ms. Begley reported that "six months after the invasion, one-third of Americans believed WMDs had been found, even though every such tentative claim was discomfirmed [sic]." She cited psychologists to explain this strange behavior. They used terms like "world views" and "mental models."
Jim Lobe at CommonDreams.org (Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community) reported that "Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them." He went on to quote the director of the polling company as saying
"To support the president and to accept that he took the U.S. to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."
These findings on people's beliefs were based on a survey that asked people if they believed Saddam had WMD or WMD programs . Apparently, Sharon Begley, Jim Lobe and a whole lot of other people not only believed Saddam had no WMD programs, but that anyone who did believe such a thing was clearly illogical or insane. In fact, the only interesting question to them was what is wrong with our minds.
World views. Mental models. Cognitive dissonance. Suppressed awareness.
Fast forward to today. Now we hear from the Associated Press that "The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program -- a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium -- reached a Canadian port." That last "remnant" was 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium. That is over 1.2 million pounds of yellowcake! Also, the military had previously withdrawn "four devices for controlled radiation exposure ... that could potentially be used in a weapon." All this was located at "the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad."
The AP even reminds us that
"Accusations that Saddam had tried to purchase more yellowcake from the African nation of Niger -- and an article by a former U.S. ambassador refuting the claims -- led to a wide-ranging probe into Washington leaks that reached high into the Bush administration."
By the way, is it illogical or insane to think that Saddam could not possibly obtain yellowcake, and did not even try to, because one former ambassador went to one country in Africa and said he couldn't find it there? What about after they found over a million pounds of it just south of Baghdad? Is it now considered reality-based to think Saddam "sought" yellowcake, just as President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address ?
Should psychologists study Sharon Begley's brain now that the disconfirmations have been "discomfirmed"? Should the CIA send Joe Wilson to Canada to monitor the destruction of the yellowcake he could not find in Africa?
Update: The AP article states "U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said."
While this 550 tons of yellowcake was news to some of us, it was not news to Douglas Hanson or Rick Moran at American Thinker.
As Douglas Hanson asked in 2004:
"Why did the IAEA allow Iraq to retain such massive amounts of nuclear material, when its three nuclear facilities had been destroyed over 12 years ago, and have never been repaired?"
In another AT piece , he went on to say
"How many nuclear weapons can you build [with 500 tons of yellowcake]? The answer is 142."
They got their inof from the IEA
What interest would they have in lying
Why not just admit you were wrong
Well, if you didn't hurt yourself rolling on the floor read this:
Iraqi oil exceeds pre-war output
Iraqi oil facility
Iraq's oil infrastructure appears to be getting back on track
Iraqi oil production is above the levels seen before the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The IEA said Iraqi crude production is now running at 2.3 million barrels per day, compared with 1.9 million barrels at the start of this year.
It puts the rise down to the improving security situation in Iraq, especially in the north of the country. [/i
But I'm sure you know better than the BBC, right??
Yglesias Picks Up Shovel, Digs
by Armed Liberal at July 6, 2008 7:25 AM
In a more thoughtful followup (not hard!) to his earlier paean to Mother England, Yglesias goes on to say one sensible thing about patriotism:
American liberals and American conservatives are both Americans so our American patriotism is very similar. We just have different ideas about politics.
He then drives directly off the rails.
Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there's something arbitrary about it -- we're just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don't see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren't.
All of which is to say the liberal doesn't, as a political matter, confuse the emotions of patriotism with a description of objective reality or anticipate that the citizens of Iraq or Russia or China or wherever will drop their own patriotisms and come to see things our way. Patriotism is a sentiment about your particular country but it's also a sentiment that's much more widespread than any particular country, and if you can't understand the full implications of that then you're going to go badly wrong.
No Matthew, you marvelous Harvard-trained Atlantic columnist you, you're describing something far closer to nationalism, not any kind of patriotism I would recognize - or that Schaar, Wolin, or a host of others I could name would recognize. They actually are different things, you know.
And here's a clue, which you spent several hundred thousand dollars to miss but which was available to you for two-fifty in library late charges.
There actually is something unique and well worth celebrating in American patriotism. First because we were among the first to throw off the yoke of hereditary privilege and substitute the rule of the governed. Second - and most important - because we are not a patrimony defined by land or by blood - not an accident of geography or a nation bound by a common heritage but instead a people animated by a set of ideas. That Yglesias thinks those ideas are worth as much as the ideas motivating - say, China's polity, or Iraq's - speaks volumes about what he sees when he looks around him.
And volumes about what I see when I look at him. I see someone who thinks love of country is not dissimilar to love of the Celtics. Why would anyone die for the Celtics? Why would anyone owe anything to the Celtics?
Iraq's Oil Surge
July 5, 2008; Page A10
Here's a thought experiment: Assume that Iraq's democratic government declared it was nationalizing its oil industry, a la Venezuela or Saudi Arabia, while excluding American companies from the country. How do you think U.S. politicians would react? With angry cries of "ingratitude" and "this is what Americans died for"?
[Charles Schumer]
Of course they would, led no doubt by that critic for all reasons, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. So it is passing strange that Mr. Schumer and other Senators are now assailing Iraq precisely because it is opening up to foreign oil companies, especially to U.S. majors like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. For some American pols, everything that happens in Iraq is bad news, especially when it's good news for the U.S.
Iraq announced this week that it is inviting global competition to develop its major oil reserves, with 35 oil companies invited to bid. By tapping outside capital and expertise, Iraq hopes to increase production by 60%, providing a much-needed boost to its own coffers and the world's tight oil supply.
This is welcome news. With elections looming later this year and next, the temptation for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government must have been to play the nationalist card – the way that Mr. Schumer did against Dubai Ports World's proposed U.S. investment in 2006 (see, for instance, "Ports of Gall"). Many Iraqis remain suspicious of outside oil companies – the legacy of a colonial past in which Iraq felt exploited for its oil.
Instead, Iraq chose competitive bidding that will bring in the best expertise to exploit its national resource. Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani is predicting that, with outside help, Iraq could become the second or third largest oil-producing country in the world. Today it produces about 2.5 million barrels a day, compared to 11 million for the world-leading Saudis. Foreign companies will be required to have an Iraqi partner, and to hire Iraqis, while most oil revenues will still flow to the Iraqi people.
What seems to irk Mr. Schumer – and running mates John Kerry and Missouri's Claire McCaskill – is Iraq's decision to sign shorter-term, no-bid service contracts with Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total and Chevron. Most of these firms had extensive experience in Iraq prior to Saddam Hussein's nationalization, and were chosen because their knowledge will help Iraq boost near-term production. The contracts will run no more than two years, and all five firms have spent the past three years providing training, analysis and advice to Iraq – free of charge.
The Democrats nonetheless stomped their feet in a letter last week to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They demanded that she intervene to stop the Iraqis "from signing contracts with multinational oil companies until a [national oil law] is in effect in Iraq." Their complaint is that a hydrocarbon law is one of the Bush Administration's "benchmarks for reconciliation" in Iraq, and that these oil contracts would only "further deepen political tension in Iraq and put our service members in even greater danger." They also griped that the five firms would get an "insider's advantage" to later oil bidding.
[Henry Waxman]
Also piling on is House baron Henry Waxman, who is upset with a separate contract that the Kurdistan Regional Government has signed with Texas's Hunt Oil. Mr. Waxman thinks the Bush Administration didn't do enough to stop the deal. Then again, this is old news, as the contract was signed last year. And while the Baghdad central government wasn't pleased the Kurds had moved on a contract without national approval, the deal hasn't impeded Iraq's broader progress.
We doubt French politicians are objecting to Total's contract, but American Democrats are so blinkered about Iraq that they now object even to U.S. companies getting business on the merits. The hydrocarbon law would help to clarify revenue-sharing between Baghdad and Iraq's outlying provinces. But even without that law, oil revenues are already flowing throughout the country, including to Sunni-majority areas.
The faster and more efficiently the oil deposits are developed, the more revenue there will be to distribute. And the faster Iraq will be able to rebuild on its own – which is what Democrats say they want. Meanwhile, by inviting foreign partners, Iraq is avoiding the trap of nationalization that has harmed so many countries. It concentrates political power, undermining democracy. National oil companies also tend to underinvest in technology, letting harder-to-exploit oil become a wasting asset.
What the U.S. should promote in Iraq is some kind of oil trust, or stock or revenue dispersal, that would give individual Iraqis a share of their oil wealth. This would be both a tool to build national unity and to prevent any one political group from dominating Iraq's main revenue source. If Mr. Schumer wants to help on that score, he might do some good.
Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda
Marie Colvin in Mosul
American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.
After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.
A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.
Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.
Related Links
* Al-Qaeda driven from Mosul after bloody siege
* Al-Qaeda finds three safe havens for training
* We're winning the War on Terror
The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.
Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.
Even in the district of Zanjali, previously a hotbed of the insurgency, it was possible to accompany an Iraqi colonel on foot through streets of breeze-block houses studded with bullet holes. Hundreds of houses were searched without resistance but no bomb was found, only 60kg of explosives.
American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.
Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had “defeated” terrorism.
“They were intending to besiege Baghdad and control it,” Maliki said. “But thanks to the will of the tribes, security forces, army and all Iraqis, we defeated them.”
The number of foreign fighters coming over the border from Syria to bolster Al-Qaeda’s numbers is thought to have declined to as few as 20 a month, compared with 120 a month at its peak.
Brigadier General Abdullah Abdul, a senior Iraqi commander, said: “We’ve limited their movements with check-points. They are doing small attacks and trying big ones, but they’re mostly not succeeding.”
Major-General Mark Hertling, American commander in the north, said: “I think we’re at the irreversible point.”
Iran, Syria sign secret new intelligence cooperation accord
DEBKAfile Exclusive Report
July 6, 2008, 1:20 PM (GMT+02:00)
Iranian intelligence insignia
Iranian intelligence insignia
Under the intelligence cooperation agreement Iran and Syria signed secretly in Tehran on June 27, thousands of Syrian intelligence and police officers will receive special training in Iran, DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report. It was signed at the end of an unpublicized five-day visit to Tehran of Syria’s clandestine and security service chiefs headed by Gen. Fouad Sultan, superintendent of internal security. His opposite number was the director of the Iranian interior ministry’s external affairs department Ahmed Hosseini.
The accord they concluded is a crucial element in the deepening strategic relationship between Tehran and Damascus. It belies the contention by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and prime minister Ehud Olmert, accepted also by Washington, that the Syrian regime is about to desert its close alliance with Tehran and embrace the West. On the strength of this false premise, Olmert is pressing forward along his peace track with Syria, and Sarkozy invited president Bashar Assad to be his guest of honor at the Bastille Day parade of July 14.
While secretly bolstering his partnership with Iran, Assad has no trouble spreading the illusion of his willingness for a turn to the West, especially when his propaganda effort is promoted by none other than former Israel foreign ministry official Alon Liyel.
Liyal, calling himself “an Israeli diplomat” asserted in an interview to the July 6 Sunday Times that Damascus would sever its strategic ties with Tehran, Hizballah and Hamas for substantial American military and economic aid and Israel’s renunciation of the Golan. All this would happen, the ex-official promised, on Assad’s behalf, after the change of presidents in Washington.
DEBKAfile’s sources report that Liyel spoke without authority or factual corroboration about Assad’s intentions. He omitted to mention the fact that the Assad regime would have acquired a facility to produce fuel for Iran’s nuclear weapons program, were it not for Israel’s pre-emptive strike in September 2007. He also forgot that Damascus has for years provided friendly hospitality for the headquarters of the most extremist Palestinian terrorist groups and shown no sign that he means to evict the
Seriously?
I think he'll do anything or say anything to win
A Man of Seasonal Principles
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 4, 2008; A17
You'll notice Barack Obama is now wearing a flag pin. Again. During the primary campaign, he refused to, explaining that he'd worn one after Sept. 11 but then stopped because it "became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism." So why is he back to sporting pseudo-patriotism on his chest? Need you ask? The primaries are over. While seducing the hard-core MoveOn Democrats that delivered him the caucuses -- hence, the Democratic nomination -- Obama not only disdained the pin. He disparaged it. Now that he's running in a general election against John McCain, and in dire need of the gun-and-God-clinging working-class votes he could not win against Hillary Clinton, the pin is back. His country 'tis of thee.
In last week's column, I thought I had thoroughly chronicled Obama's brazen reversals of position and abandonment of principles -- on public financing of campaigns, on NAFTA, on telecom immunity for post-Sept. 11 wiretaps, on unconditional talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- as he moved to the center for the general election campaign. I misjudged him. He was just getting started.
Last week, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, Obama immediately declared that he agreed with the decision. This is after his campaign explicitly told the Chicago Tribune last November that he believes the D.C. gun ban is constitutional.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton explains the inexplicable by calling the November -- i.e., the primary season -- statement "inartful." Which suggests a first entry in the Obamaworld dictionary -- "Inartful: clear and straightforward, lacking the artistry that allows subsequent self-refutation and denial."
Obama's seasonally adjusted principles are beginning to pile up: NAFTA, campaign finance reform, warrantless wiretaps, flag pins, gun control. What's left?
Iraq. The reversal is coming, and soon.
Two weeks ago, I predicted that by Election Day Obama will have erased all meaningful differences with McCain on withdrawal from Iraq. I underestimated Obama's cynicism. He will make the move much sooner. He will use his upcoming Iraq trip to finally acknowledge the remarkable improvements on the ground and to formally abandon his primary season commitment to a fixed 16-month timetable for removal of all combat troops.
The shift has already begun. Yesterday, he said that his "original position" on withdrawal has always been that "we've got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable." And that "when I go to Iraq . . . I'll have more information and will continue to refine my policies."
He hasn't even gone to Iraq and the flip is almost complete. All that's left to say is that the 16-month time frame remains his goal but that he will, of course, take into account the situation on the ground and the recommendation of his generals in deciding whether the withdrawal is to occur later or even sooner.
Done.
And with that, the Obama of the primaries, the Obama with last year's most liberal voting record in the Senate, will have disappeared into the collective memory hole.
Obama's strategy is obvious. The country is in a deep malaise and eager for change. He and his party already have the advantage on economic and domestic issues. Obama, therefore, aims to clear the deck by moving rapidly to the center in those areas where he and his party are weakest, namely national security and the broader cultural issues. With these -- and, most important, his war-losing Iraq policy -- out of the way, the election will be decided on charisma and persona. In this corner: the young sleek cool hip elegant challenger. In the other corner: the old guy. No contest.
After all, that's how he beat Hillary. She originally ran as a centrist, expecting her nomination to be a mere coronation. At the first sign of serious opposition, however, she panicked and veered left. It was a fatal error. It eliminated all significant ideological and policy differences with Obama -- her desperate attempts to magnify their minuscule disagreement on health-care universality became almost comical -- making the contest entirely one of personality. No contest.
As Obama assiduously obliterates all differences with McCain on national security and social issues, he remains rightly confident that Bush fatigue, the lousy economy and his own charisma -- he is easily the most dazzling political personality since John Kennedy -- will carry him to the White House.
Of course, once he gets there he will have to figure out what he really believes. The conventional liberal/populist stuff he campaigned on during the primaries? Or the reversals he is so artfully offering up now?
I have no idea. Do you? Does he?
Reflection Day
These two truths should be self-evident.
By Victor Davis Hanson
On this Fourth of July of our discontent — with spiraling fuel prices, a sluggish economy, a weak dollar, mounting foreign and domestic debt, continuing costs in Iraq, a falling stock market, and a mortgage crisis — we should remember two truths about America. First, the United States remains the most free and affluent country in the history of civilization. Second, almost all our problems are lapses of complacency, remain relatively easily correctable, and pale in comparison to past crises.
By almost any barometer, the United States remains the most fortunate country in the world. We continue to be the primary destination of immigrants, who risk their lives to have a chance at what we take for granted. Few in contrast are flocking to China, Russia, or India. The catalyst for immigration is primarily a phenomenon of word of mouth, of comparative talking among friends and families about the reality of modern-day living, not of scholarly perusal of social or economic statistics.
&
When one compares any yardstick of material wealth — the number of cars, the square footage of living space, the number of consumer appurtenances — Americans are the wealthiest people in the history of civilization. Why so? Others have more iron ore, as much farmland, greater populations, and far more oil reserves. But uniquely in America there remains a system of merit, under which we prosper or fail to a greater extent on the basis of talent, not tribal affiliations, petty bribes, or institutionalized insider help. More importantly still, we are impressed by those who advance rather than envious of their success. The lobster-barrel mentality is a human trait, but in the United States uniquely there is a culture of emulation rather than of resentment, which explains why neither Marxism nor aristocratic pretension ever became fully entrenched in America.
Our system of government remains the most stable and free. Consider the constitutional crises in Europe where national plebiscites continue to reject the European constitution that grows increasingly anti-democratic in order to force its vision of heaven-on-earth on its citizenry. There is no need to mention the politics of China, India, and Russia whose increasing affluence ensures a rendezvous with unionism, class concerns, suburban blues, minority rights, environmentalism — all long known and dealt with by the United States. Elsewhere the remedy for tribal and sectarian chaos in Africa or the Middle East is usually authoritarianism.
The current challenge of America is not starvation or loss of political rights — we have been far poorer and more unfree in our past, but the complacence that comes with continued success, to such a degree that we think of our bounty as a birthright rather than a rare gift that must be hourly maintained through commitment to the values that made us initially successful: high productivity, risk-taking, transparency, small government, personal freedom, concern for the public welfare, and a certain tragic rather than therapeutic view of the human experience.
In that regard, most of our present pathologies are self-created. In fits of utopianism we felt we could be perfect environmentalists, no longer develop our ample oil, coal, and nuclear resources, maintain our envied lifestyle, mouth platitudes about “alternative energies,” and yet be immune from classical laws of supply and demand. In truth, with a little national will, within a decade we could both be using new sources of energy and producing our entire (and decreasing) appetite for oil without importation at all of foreign supplies. When our petroleum runs out, we will find other sources of energy; when a Saudi Arabia’s or Venezuela’s fail, so goes their entire national wealth as well.
Our budgetary laxity is a bipartisan stand-off in which free-spending pork-barrel Republicans mouth platitudes about reductions in spending while Democrats continue to vote for increased government programs, assured that either military cuts or tax increases will pay the tab. We still await some gifted statesman who will convince us that we can increase revenues and cut spending without loss of essential governmental services or oppressive taxes
Iraq is expensive, but draws on a fraction of a $12 trillion economy; for all the acrimony over the war, Iraq is stabilizing, al-Qaeda has been discredited, and the notion of constitutional government in the heart of the ancient caliphate is not longer caricatured as a neocon pipedream — an accomplishment beyond the military of any other country.
Slumping house prices are a concern, but we forget that nearly 95 percent of homeowners meet their monthly mortgage payments, that housing prices are merely returning to their 2002 levels — to the relief of first-time potential buyers — that many of the problems were caused by housing speculators who wished to flip properties for instant profits, by overzealous lenders who warped the rules, and by misplaced liberalism that sought to put everyone in his own home, despite the historical fact that between 30 percent and 40 percent of the population either should not, or does not wish to, own their homes.
9/11 third tower mystery 'solved'
By Mike Rudin
BBC, Conspiracy Files
One of the Twin Towers collapses
One of the twin towers collapses
The final mystery of 9/11 will soon be solved, according to US experts investigating the collapse of the third tower at the World Trade Center.
The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.
Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse.
Conspiracy theorists have argued that the third tower was brought down in a controlled demolition.
Unlike the twin towers, Tower Seven was not hit by a plane.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, based near Washington DC, is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse.
That would make it the first and only steel skyscraper in the world to collapse because of fire.
See World Trade Center 7's location and structure
The National Institute of Standards and Technology's lead investigator, Dr Shyam Sunder, spoke to BBC Two's "The Conspiracy Files":
"Our working hypothesis now actually suggests that it was normal building fires that were growing and spreading throughout the multiple floors that may have caused the ultimate collapse of the buildings."
'Smoking gun'
However, a group of architects, engineers and scientists say the official explanation that fires caused the collapse is impossible. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth argue there must have been a controlled demolition.
FIND OUT MORE...
The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 - The Third Tower is on BBC Two on Sunday 6 July at 2100 BST
Visit The Conspiracy Files website or catch up using the iPlayer
Q&A: The collapse of Tower 7
Timeline: WTC 7
The BBC and the 'missing' tape
The founder of the group, Richard Gage, says the collapse of the third tower is an obvious example of a controlled demolition using explosives.
"Building Seven is the smoking gun of 9/11… A sixth grader can look at this building falling at virtually freefall speed, symmetrically and smoothly, and see that it is not a natural process.
"Buildings that fall in natural processes fall to the path of least resistance", says Gage, "they don't go straight down through themselves."
Conspiracy theories
There are a number of facts that have encouraged conspiracy theories about Tower Seven.
* Although its collapse potentially made architectural history, all of the thousands of tonnes of steel from the skyscraper were taken away to be melted down.
* The third tower was occupied by the Secret Service, the CIA, the Department of Defence and the Office of Emergency Management, which would co-ordinate any response to a disaster or a terrorist attack.
* The destruction of the third tower was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report. The first official inquiry into Tower Seven by the Federal Emergency Management Agency was unable to be definitive about what caused its collapse.
* In May 2002 FEMA concluded that the building collapsed because intense fires had burned for hours, fed by thousands of gallons of diesel stored in the building. But it said this had "only a low probability of occurrence" and more work was needed.
But now nearly seven years after 9/11 the definitive official explanation of what happened to Tower Seven is finally about to be published in America.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has spent more than two years investigating Tower Seven but lead investigator Dr Shyam Sunder rejects criticism that it has been slow.
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The collapse of Tower 7
"We've been at this for a little over two years and doing a two or two and a half year investigation is not at all unusual. That's the same kind of time frame that takes place when we do aeroplane crash investigations, it takes a few years."
With no steel from Tower 7 to study, investigators have instead made four extremely complex computer models worked out to the finest detail. They're confident their approach can now provide the answers. Dr Sunder says the investigation is moving as fast as possible.
"It's a very complex problem. It requires a level of fidelity in the modelling and rigour in the analysis that has never been done before."
Other skyscrapers haven't fully collapsed before because of fire. But NIST argues that what happened on 9/11 was unique.
Steel structure weakened
It says Tower Seven had an unusual design, built over an electricity substation and a subway; there were many fires that burnt for hours; and crucially, fire fighters could not fight the fires in Tower 7, because they didn't have enough water and focused on saving lives.
Investigators have focused on the east side where the long floor spans were under most stress.
They think fires burnt long enough to weaken and break many of the connections that held the steel structure together.
Most susceptible were the thinner floor beams which required less fireproofing, and the connections between the beams and the columns. As they heated up the connections failed and the beams sagged and failed, investigators say.
The collapse of the first of the Twin Towers does not seem to have caused any serious damage to Tower Seven, but the second collapse of the 1,368ft (417m) North Tower threw debris at Tower Seven, just 350ft (106m) away.
Tower Seven came down at 5.21pm. Until now most of the photographs have been of the three sides of the building that did not show much obvious physical damage. Now new photos of the south side of the building, which crucially faced the North Tower, show that whole side damaged and engulfed in smoke.
Lfeeds
New and Not Improved
Published: July 4, 2008
Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics.
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The Board Blog
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Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.
Even his own chief money collector, Penny Pritzker, suggests that the magic of $20 donations from the Web was less a matter of principle than of scheduling. “We have not been able to have much of the senator’s time during the primaries, so we have had to rely more on the Internet,” she explained as she and her team busily scheduled more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person.
The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11.
In January, when he was battling for Super Tuesday votes, Mr. Obama said that the 1978 law requiring warrants for wiretapping, and the special court it created, worked. “We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend,” he declared.
Now, he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates “vigorous oversight” and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever.
The Barack Obama of the primary season used to brag that he would stand before interest groups and tell them tough truths. The new Mr. Obama tells evangelical Christians that he wants to expand President Bush’s policy of funneling public money for social spending to religious-based organizations — a policy that violates the separation of church and state and turns a government function into a charitable donation.
He says he would not allow those groups to discriminate in employment, as Mr. Bush did, which is nice. But the Constitution exists to protect democracy, no matter who is president and how good his intentions may be.
On top of these perplexing shifts in position, we find ourselves disagreeing powerfully with Mr. Obama on two other issues: the death penalty and gun control.
Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.”
What could be more reasonable than a city restricting handguns, or requiring that firearms be stored in ways that do not present a mortal threat to children?
We were equally distressed by Mr. Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s barring the death penalty for crimes that do not involve murder.
We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.
There are still vital differences between Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain on issues like the war in Iraq, taxes, health care and Supreme Court nominations. We don’t want any “redefining” on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.
Obama: I’m willing to “refine my policies” on Iraq
posted at 4:09 pm on July 3, 2008 by Allahpundit
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At long last, the ultimate flip-flop is at hand.
“I’ve always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed,” he said. “And when I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies.”…
“My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything that I’ve said, was always premised on making sure that our troops were safe,” he said. “I said that based on the information that we had received from our commanders that one to two brigades a month could be pulled out safely, from a logistical perspective. My guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.”
He added, “I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.”
I’m not going to rub his face in it. The important thing is to make the right decision and he’s nearer to that now than he’s ever been. Yeah, it’s almost certainly for cynical political reasons, but so long as the progress continues and public opinion improves, those cynical political reasons will continue to steer him right. It’s true, too, what Axelrod said earlier about Obama having consistently left himself some wiggle room on Iraq: As far back as last July he was using the line about being as careful getting out as we were careless getting in, and even his awful proposal from January 2007 to have all combat troops out by March 31, 2008 called for temporarily suspending the withdrawal if the Iraqi government met all 13 of Bush’s benchmarks. None of which is to say that he wasn’t completely wrong about the surge or that he’s not light years less confidence-inspiring than McCain is on this issue, but I don’t want to punish good behavior, especially when so few of the people on his side are even willing to entertain the notion of rethinking our commitment in light of the security gains.
The one truly new and startling element of what he said here is the boldfaced part about Iraqi stability, which I can’t remember ever factoring heavily into his rhetoric. Neither can Michael Crowley of TNR, who’s evidently been researching Obama’s Iraq plan in some detail for an upcoming article. The importance of stability did pop up in last year’s speech on Iraq in Iowa, but mainly in the context of negotiations with Iran and other other countries around it. The strongest language I can find in the speech about using troops to maintain stability comes in an aside about withdrawing from more secure areas before we withdraw from less secure ones. Exit question: How’s he going to explain this to the nutroots?
LOL, meet the new boss, same as the old boss
The withdrawal will go along at probably the same rate as it would have no matter who is elected
Report: Iran will halt enrichment if West removes sanctions
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Iran expressed readiness to freeze its uranium enrichment program in return for lifting the international sanctions imposed on it, Channel 2 analyst Ehud Ya'ari revealed Thursday evening.
Iranian President Mahmoud...
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gestures to the media during a press conference in Teheran.
Photo: AP
Slideshow: Pictures of the week
He cited unnamed Western officials as the source of the new development.
Iran has staunchly resisted repeated incentive packages offered by the West in return for halting it enrichment program and has also intermittently limited access of IAEA officials to its nuclear sites.
The West, spearheaded by the US and Israel, rejects Iran's claim that its nuclear program is geared towards peaceful purposes only.
Recently a set of sanctions was imposed on Teheran by the European Union, after the UN has already imposed three rounds of sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
The recent EU sanctions include a ban on trading with Bank Melli, Iran's main state-sponsored bank.
The unconfirmed report Thursday comes after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed scorn at the West's sanctions and said Iran will push on with its nuclear program despite them.
Reportedly, talks on Iran freezing its enrichment program were being held between the Islamic Republic and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the US, Russia, Britain, France and china - and also Germany and the EU.
The incentives offered include rebuilding Iran's fleet of aircraft and aiding the country with civilian nuclear technology.
The package has been given a timeframe of six weeks; the Iranians announced they preferred the deal to go forth immediately.
Well, it seems as if the Israeli training exercise combined with the sanctions and US saber rattling has worked. You need the carrot and the stick
OR, they were really really frightened by big bad Barry talking them to death
Just presenting facts to you blind supporters of Barry
Not whining at all, in fact the repubs are probably hoping that Barry and his friends stay with this line of attack as it's sure to backfire
It'll be as effective as Billary's race baiting
Another Day, Another Smear
...this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law...
By streiff Posted in 2008 | John McCain | smears — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
There is a full-fledged assault underway on John McCain's reputation and it is more than a little uncertain that the McCain campaign has the ability to either recognize the assault or, if they do recognize it, respond to it in a timely and aggressive manner.
We're all familiar with the recent attack on John McCain's military record. We learn from Wesley Clark than all he did was ride airplanes and retired admiral egregious asshat Professor Mark Kleiman informs us that the Navy had found McCain's leadership wanting and declined to promote him to admiral, contra the statements of the Secretary of the Navy at the time.
Why the attack on McCain's years as a fighter pilot is anyone's guess. From the outside this certainly looks like a high-risk, low payoff strategy from Obama. There is another attack brewing that really matters. It is the attack on McCain's deserved reputation as a good government advocate.
Read on.
Probably the single act that made McCain's run for the presidency real was the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act. From my view there is little to like about the act but there is no denying that McCain 1) believed in the bill, 2) burned a lot of bridges to force this bill through Congress, and 3) won a boatload of good will from the press in bargain.
One of the first shots appeared in, naturally, The Nation, a magazine which still denies the guilt of Alger Hiss, the veracity of the Venona files, and most of the other evidence that the American Left was a wholly owned subsidiary of the USSR (the significance of this will be readily apparent in a short while). The focal point for their attack is McCain's relationship to ::drum roll:: The Reform Institute and his connections to... lobbyists.
The rather dense, in every sense of the word, article is an inartful rehash of research by the NY Post's Ryan Sager, Ed Morrissey, and our own Brad Smith.
In their purest form the allegations flow from the obvious to the refuted to the existential.
The obvious claims are that 1) McCain was instrumental in founding the Reform Institute (True), 2) a lot of former McCain staffers and associates work at the Reform Institute (Yes), 3) a lot of those staffers also have worked as lobbyists (Guilty), 4) the Reform Institute solicits contributions (Whoddathunkit), and 5) the Reform Institute likes McCain (You bet).
The Nation tries to insinuate that by putting money into the Reform Institute worked much like the turnstile at the Clinton White House. That but giving a gift to the Reform Institute one was able to gain a favorable outcome before the committees chaired by John McCain.
As the two-time chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain enjoyed unprecedented access to the telecommunications industry. And Davis the lobbyist was the perfect conduit: between 2002 and 2005, for example, Verizon paid Davis Manafort $640,000 in lobbying fees. The contract began after McCain took over the committee and ended when he gave up chairmanship. At the same time Davis aggressively sought telecom donations for the Reform Institute. On two occasions he solicited $100,000 from Cablevision after CEO James Dolan testified before McCain's committee and McCain wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Cablevision's behalf. The donations invited scrutiny from the press: McCain Allies Want Reform (And Money), the New York Times said in March 2005. That July McCain formally resigned from the board, citing "negative publicity," and Davis stepped down as president.
Yet unscrupulous donations from industries McCain was supposed to be monitoring were only part of the reason the Reform Institute became controversial. Even before the dubious fundraising came to light (the institute also twice failed to disclose the names of major donors on its tax returns, a potential violation of IRS law), McCain and Davis's my-way-or-the-highway approach to campaign-finance-reform legislation rubbed many in the reform community the wrong way.
This particular allegation has been examined to death since it was first floated by the AP in 2005. The story was a smear then as it is now. Even the AP had to acknowledge:
Help from McCain, who argues for ridding politics of big money, included giving the CEO of Cablevision Systems Corp. the opportunity to testify before his Senate committee, writing a letter of support to the Federal Communication Commission and asking other cable companies to support so-called a la carte pricing.
McCain had expressed interest in exploring the a la carte option for years before Cablevision advocated it but did not take a formal position with regulators until after the company's first donation came in. Cablevision is the eighth largest cable provider, serving about 3 million customers in the New York area.
Perhaps the most detailed examination of this nothingburger is here. Getting a contribution from someone who agrees with you on a postion and for voting for that position, which you had supported for years previously, doesn't strike most of us as corruption. And a quick look at the Reform Institute website will show they've never addressed this issue. Did McCain's committee chairmanship make Cablevision more likely to give to his pet think tank? Who knows. Even were this the case it would hardly be a head turner much less a scathing indictment.
But if you go back to Ed Morrissey's blog you'll find that the Reform Institute received contributions from groups in favor of abortion as well as from charities affiliated with Teresa Heinz Kerry and George Soros. There is no evidence that McCain voted in their favor after receiving contributions. From all indications it seems like the Reform Institute was the recipient of funds from a wide variety of sources, some of which were McCain allies and some of which were not. Hardly a scandal.
The last allegation may or may not be true and if it is it, in my view, rates a big so what. That claim is that the Reform Institute also served as a mechanism to keep McCain's campaign staff in paying jobs. That it served as a "campaign in exile." Even if true this strikes me as bordering on the silly. If there were a law against this it is difficult to see how a lot of think tanks would survive. The fact is that The Nation doesn't allege it is a violation of the law, or of ethics for that matter, but simply words it in a way that leaves the reader with that impression.
In reading this dog's breakfast I was reminded of the apocrypyhal story from George Smathers's victory over Claude Pepper in the 1950 Senate race in Florida:
Smathers was capable of going to any length in campaigning, but he indignantly denied that he had gone as far as a story printed in northern newspapers. The story wouldn't die, nonetheless, and it deserved not to. According to the yarn, Smathers had a little speech for cracker voters, who were presumed not to know what the words meant except that they must be something bad. The speech went like this: "Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy."
This sums up the story. McCain's sister is a thespian and he's a shameless extrovert. This story also points to why The Nation's shameless and mendacious record in dealing with the Heironymous Bosch landscape that was the Worker's Paradise is important here. Or rather why it isn't. If guilt by association were a valid concept then Katrina vanden Heuvel and her bad case of **** hair would be in Florence, Colorado. The fact is that people who are active on campaigns have to earn a living in the off years and in DC they usually end up in lobbying firms. If you're offended by the notion then perhaps a Trappist monastery would be a good place to go.
We'll be seeing more of this and similar stories in the future. The Obama camp is well aware of the incredible lightness of their candidate and they know that eventually he will have to answer some hard questions not only on his two-and-a-half-gainer quality of his flip flops but on his relationship to know terrorists and convicted felons. They have to rough up McCain in a major way before this happens. On the experience front they want to denigrate McCain's decades in the public square by loudly and falsely claiming that his foreign policy expertise is based on his years in a PW camp. On the issue of corruption they want to say tu quoque and move on.
I can't feign outrage over Barack Obama using his position as a new U.S. Senator to help secure a lower rate on a loan for The Home That Resko Built Helped Cut a Deal On.
Obama had no prior relationship with the lender, was taking out a $1.32 million loan below market rates, without paying the customary fees. So what?
This is politics folks, and this a typical example of why people go into a line of work that exposes them to constant ridicule and scorn. It's about amassing power and prestige for the payoff of parlaying that influence into personal gains, be they monetary, or the advancement of philosophical beliefs.
Barack Obama did precisely what every other politician does, and nothing more.
The only reason this story merits any attention is that Obama's campaign has created a mythology around him that casts him as a reformer.
It is an excellent marketing gimmick, and he'll ride it as long as it is effective and helps the brand he is creating, but make no mistake; like all other politicians operating at this level, Barack Obama holds one conviction, and one conviction only: I'm going to get mine.
And he did.