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No, in this case I do have knowledge
I was born in the North, but byu choice live in the South now
I've also lived in Portland where newsun lives and witnessed more overt racism there than any place I've ever lived- they had a huge skin head population
Will be interesting to see how Barry tires to nuance his position on immediate withdrawal
Yep, I was really in favor of the surge and was sure it would succeed, I just spoke " inartfully"
What an empty suit
Add the South to the long list of things you don't know f*ck about but continue to comment on
How to Lower Oil Prices Now and in the Future
By Patrick J. Casey
Last week, Barack Obama and his ideological fellowship mocked John McCain after the Senator stated that opening up domestic oil exploration would have an immediate negative impact on oil prices, primarily because of psychological reasons, long before the first barrel is pumped (Obama Assails Remarks by McCain on Offshore Oil Drilling). Unfortunately for Obama and his minions, such attacks go a long way in proving that none of them have even an elemental understanding of how markets, including the oil markets, work.
Ultimately, markets are driven by supply and demand. But economists and scientists have known for years (centuries, even) that severe market swings, both upwards and downwards, have a life somewhat independent of supply and demand. At their core, human beings, their emotions, and their subconscious behavior patterns primarily drive those severe swings. Call it "panic", refer to it as "jumping on the bandwagon" -- it exists, it is a component of today's oil prices, and it can be addressed.
For evidence of this "psychological component" of the markets we can look way back to books like "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay published in 1841, or to more mid 20th Century works such as this article from 1962 in Time Magazine, Emotions & the Market. More recently, we have "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" from 2005, written by Charles P. Kindleberger. Kindleberger does a wonderful job of describing the various stages surrounding a financial crisis, boom, or bust - stages which inevitably lead to first mania, then panic.
But as much as we can easily refute Obama's infantile attacks on McCain by using those works and many more like them, today we're dealing with the question of oil. Namely, would the mere opening of new domestic oil exploration create an immediate downward pressure on oil prices?
For that we turn to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Martin Feldstein, We Can Lower Oil Prices Now. Mr. Feldstein was the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ronald Reagan, is currently a professor at Harvard, and is also the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
In his editorial, Mr. Feldstein quickly dismisses the idea, proffered by Democrats, that pure financial speculation explains the current dramatic rise in energy and food prices worldwide. He first discusses perishable agricultural commodities (specifically corn), noting that demand has greatly increased from China, India, other third world countries, and also from the need for ethanol as a fuel additive. This increase in demand all happened rather quickly, and the supply sector has yet to catch up. But since corn is a food staple for billions of people, supply will catch up (people will plant more) and prices will stabilize.
Feldstein then tackles oil, a more complicated subject because of the politics involved. He offers a simple and concise explanation on how oil suppliers choose to increase supply (and therefore reduce price). It's based on several factors, not the least of which is the expected future demand and supply from the countries that control their own oil production. Unlike corn, with oil we're caught in a political struggle that limits production within the United States. The rules of supply and demand still hold, but one particular political party intentionally and artificially limits domestic supply. That takes control of prices literally out of our hands, and when that is coupled with future predictions of demand outpacing supply worldwide, we have what we see today in escalating oil prices. The obvious solution to counter the rising prices -- do something domestically ourselves, and now. We might not see a drop of new oil for a year, three years, or five years -- but we will again control our energy future, and the price of oil and gasoline. From Feldstein's piece:
The relationship between future and current oil prices implies that an expected change in the future price of oil will have an immediate impact on the current price of oil.
...Once this relation is understood, it is easy to see how news stories, rumors and industry reports can cause substantial fluctuations in current prices - all without anything happening to current demand or supply.
By actively letting the world markets know that we are resolved to take care of our own future energy needs, we are directly combating the rise in oil prices. Such a message isn't (and shouldn't be) limited to just pumping more oil. To be most effective, the message should include the fact that we are actively developing methods to reduce our consumption of oil, while at the same time increasing our domestic supply of oil. More from Feldstein:
Now here is the good news. Any policy that causes the expected future oil price to fall can cause the current price to fall, or to rise less than it would otherwise do. In other words, it is possible to bring down today's price of oil with policies that will have their physical impact on oil demand or supply only in the future.
For example, increases in government subsidies to develop technology that will make future cars more efficient, or tighter standards that gradually improve the gas mileage of the stock of cars, would lower the future demand for oil and therefore the price of oil today.
Similarly, increasing the expected future supply of oil would also reduce today's price. That fall in the current price would induce an immediate rise in oil consumption that would be matched by an increase in supply from the OPEC producers and others with some current excess capacity or available inventories.
Obviously, working on more efficient cars for the future does nothing for the oil and gasoline currently used by the 247,421,120 cars estimated to be in use today within the United States. The increased price of gasoline will probably cause many people, especially the poor, to drive a little bit less. But most people don't have the means to go out and immediately buy a more efficient automobile (again, especially the poor), so it's safe to assume that our demand for gasoline over the next few years, if not decades, is not going to recede much, if at all.
That means that the only option we have to negatively affect the price of gasoline immediately is to open up more of our own oil fields for exploration and drilling. I'm not referring to the Democrats plan' to force oil companies to drill dry holes in presently leased lands that revert back to the government in a few years, but allowing those companies to drill in new areas where there is oil - offshore, in the Midwest, and in ANWR.
Are we going to see $2.00 a gallon gasoline again? Probably not. But it seems as if reaching the $4.00 a gallon price triggered some primal emotion in American consumers. They want answers and help, now.
Only one party has a credible solution to today's energy crisis, and that's the Republicans. Open up more areas for domestic oil production, demand that Congress fast track the approval process for nuclear power plants, and invest money in renewable energy technology that might be an affordable replacement for other significant energy sources in couple of decades. Those are two solutions that give us more affordable energy immediately, and one solution that might give us affordable energy in the future.
The Democrats? Regardless of how many people they try to blame for high energy prices, that's all they have in their quiver -- the blame arrow. Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are happy with the higher energy prices and they don't intend to do anything about it. Obama is on record (see YouTube video here) as saying that the solution to current high energy prices is ending the war in Iraq (of course, that's the key to everything), and investing $60 billion to switch America from a "car culture" to a "mass transit culture"!
Books can be written on what's wrong with Obama's plans. Suffice to say that it doesn't help anyone today, or for the next few decades. And the American public will never go along with it. Add to that the fact that the sole nationwide mass transit system we have now (Amtrak) is both an abject failure and hemorrhaging money (requiring constant taxpayer bailouts). Just one tunnel project in Boston cost $14.8 billion over 10 years starting in the 90s, so Obama's $60 billion figure is a ridiculous figure for transforming our transportation system to heavy reliance on mass transit.
Come to think of it, perhaps the aforementioned Mackay tome from 1841, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", describe Barack Obama and his followers quite well.
Iran suddenly open to nuclear negotiations
Posted by: McQ
Iran wants to make nice -
Iran's senior diplomat said Tuesday that Tehran was seriously considering a new offer from six world powers to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program, and he praised the package as "constructive."
The unusually positive remarks by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to a small group of reporters raised hope that a negotiated solution can be found to defuse the crisis.
That's because the threat against them is considered by them to be real and not rhetoric regardless of the public spin they put out there:
During a 90-minute luncheon at Iran's United Nations mission, Mottaki dismissed the growing speculation that Israel or the United States will strike at Iran's nuclear facilities during President Bush's last six months in office.
He described news reports to that effect as part of a long-running campaign of "psychological warfare."
The chance that Israel will attack Iran "is almost nil," Mottaki said. As for a U.S. strike, he said there was little public support in this country for a new conflict. "The consequences of such an attack cannot be predicted," he said.
But, of course, he and Iran's leadership know it isn't "almost nil" and, in fact, not only is the capability there, but, as Iraq has proven to the Iranians, the will is there.
Of course there is little doubt that Israel will attack those facilities and they recently demonstrated their capability to do so as well.
That threat of the use of force has caused Iran to reconsider its intransigent position.
Yet there are signs of intensified debate within Iran's leadership about its nuclear program. Iran has long said that it has an inalienable right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. But Mottaki declined three opportunities to reiterate that position Tuesday, indicating that Iran is weighing its options.
"We are seriously and carefully examining" the proposal, Mottaki said.
In a rather simple terms this illustrates perfectly why, when in negotiations with an enemy, both carrots and sticks are put on the table and left there. And anyway, with North Korea bowing out and Saddam gone, its getting lonely at the "Axis of Evil" table.
UPDATE: Anthony Lake, an Obama advisor, talks about how Obama would deal with Iran:
On Iran: Reiterates an Obama administration would sit down with negotiators without precondition. "Do you believe that simply sanctioning them can drive them into concessions before you talk..."
No Mr. Lake - apparently you have to blatantly threaten them as well.
Remembering What the Swift Boat Vets Actually Said
I'm not the first to make this point, but it seems the attacks on John McCain's war service stem from prominent Democrats completely misreading what happened with the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. The Democrats' conventional wisdom is that A) everything the group said was a lie and B) they attacked Kerry's wartime service.
Go back and reread what they charged. (Take a walk down memory lane from the Kerry Spot here, here and here and Byron's assessment of the impact here.) A lot of their stories came down to their word against John Kerry's. Some of the points of contention were inconclusive, and some of the reactions their comments triggered, like convention delegates wearing "purple heart band-aids" on the floor of the convention, were crass. But they scored several major points. The first was when they pointed out the impossibility of Kerry's story of "Christmas in Cambodia" that was "seared, seared" into his memory. When one of Kerry's oft-cited war stories had such a glaring impossibility at its heart (Richard Nixon wasn't president, and thus couldn't be denying bombing in Cambodia, on Christmas 1968) it raised doubts about all of his other accounts of the war.
Second, no Kerry supporter could dispute the candidate's postwar "Genghis Khan" testimony before Congress, which many Vietnam veterans saw as a betrayal. When it became clear that Kerry was referring to secondhand accounts, and had not himself seen soldiers cutting off heads and ears, many veterans saw that as reckless at best and most likely slander. I'd argue that this was the Swift Boat Vet argument that really gained traction, and I suspect many voters saw it as a situation that revealed Kerry's character.
Third, there were about 200 members of Swift Boat Vets for Truth. Maybe some of them had faulty memories, or were down-the-line Republicans, or just plain didn't like Kerry. But all of them? Many Americans looked at the sheer volume and detail of their stories of Kerry, and concluded that where there was smoke, there was most likely fire.
If we see hundreds of men who served with McCain come out and denounce him, the American people will reconsider their opinion of him, as well. But I would not hold my breath waiting for that to happen...
The Hersh File
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Once again Seymour Hersh wastes our time with an essay that would have been more suitable for a psychiatrist’s couch, accompanied by the question, “Doctor, why do I keep making up these things?”
The doctor might say, “what things?”
And Hersh would say, “you know, these stories saying that America is preparing to go to war with Iran, that we’re going to bomb them, that secret military units are running all over Iran, that we’re supporting killer fanatics. That sort of thing.”
It’s some sort of wacky compulsion with him. Back in the spring of 2006 Hersh told us that the Bush Administration, a.k.a. the Great Satan, “has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack…teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups…(Hersh’s sources) say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.”
Last summer, he announced again that we were on the verge of war with Iran. “This summer, the White House…requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran…The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere…”
We did not bomb, of course, and those alleged plans have vanished from the latest “revelations.” This time around he tells many of the same stories, except without the bombing. And this time he refers to a secret Presidential “Finding,” approved with bipartisan Congressional support, that makes all these things legal. Now it’s just the alleged support for ethnic minority groups, the collection of information about the Iranian nuclear program, and generally seeking to “destabilize the…leadership.” For extras, he suggests that some of our Special Forces have sneaked into Iran, kidnaped some members of the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, and dragged them across the border into Iraq for interrogation. But he just can’t help himself. In the midst of discussing these alleged operations, he suddenly and inexplicably erupts in yet another of his “we’re going to bomb them!” seizures.
A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates…warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preemptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America…” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization)…
In other words, Gates denies the senator’s account. Hersh can’t quite bring himself to say that, so he sticks it between parentheses. You have to parse Hersh very carefully, because he carefully uses words that don’t exactly admit that he doesn’t have much of a case, but show it nonetheless. Take his remark at the top of the story, in which he leads the reader to conclude that we’re spending a mountain of money to destabilize Iran. “These operations,” he writes, “for which the President sought up to (my emphasis) four hundred million dollars…” But the question is not what he asked for, but what he actually got. Inquiring minds would like to know the actual budget, but it seems Hersh does not know it. The language he uses covers everything from zero to four hundred million. The “operations” he describes (most of which I doubt) are pretty small potatoes, like providing funds for Iranian dissidents in order to fight back against the brutal repression (missing from Hersh’s account) that Tehran has directed against its own people, with particular savagery against the Ahwaz Arabs and the Balouch, along with religious groups such as the Baha’i. I think even the frolicsome crowd at CIA’s Directorate of Operations would have trouble crafting a four hundred million dollar invoice for such things.
As so often in Hershian lore, you can pretty much forget about solid information or identifiable sources. His favorite source, who provides many of the juiciest quotations, is simply called “a Pentagon consultant.” Those who don’t live in Washington can’t possibly imagine a)how many of these characters work the city’s streets or b)how many of them claim to know absolutely everything of significance. If you take Hersh seriously, this guy is privy to conversations among small handfuls of people in the Oval Office. I suppose there may be such a person, but it’s hard to take it on blind faith, especially when Hersh quotes him as being pretty incoherent. The Consultant shifts tense and substance in a single paragraph:
Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. (ML: an anti-mullah group under American arrest in Iraq) coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts…
So first we hear that the bad guys “may well” get money from the USG, because a new task force “WILL work” with them. Then, one baited breath later, he says that they are already “getting,” and indeed stashing lots of it away in their own bank accounts.
One wonders why Hersh didn’t at least get the tenses consistent. One wonders why The New Yorker editors didn’t insist on it. In fact one wonders if anyone at The New Yorker did any checking of Hersh’s “facts.” As Roger Simon pointedly asks, who are these sources? Does The New Yorker even know?
Hersh even makes sources of on-the-record statements look bad. He fancies that lots of senior military officers in the Pentagon are fighting a desperate war against warmongers like Bush and Cheney, going all-out to stop tomorrow morning’s bombing run against the Iranian nuclear reactors. In this month’s episode, Hersh’s hero is Admiral William Fallon, briefly in charge of our Central Command until he was suddenly terminated. Hersh would have us believe that Fallon was fired because of his opposition to Administration policy. Hersh cites the following statement by Fallon as the sort of thing that got him into trouble in the White House:
…late last year he told the Financial Times that the “real objective” of U.S. policy was to change the Iranians’ behavior, and that “attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice.”
But President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said precisely that, numerous times. Whatever the reasons for the firing, it certainly wasn’t a statement that was totally in sync with announced Administration policy. If Fallon was indeed fired for something he said, it’s more likely this sort of thing, which Hersh admiringly reproduces:
“Too many people believe you have to be either for or against the Iranians,” he told me. “Let’s get serious. Eighty million people live there, and everyone’s an individual. The idea that they’re only one way or another is nonsense.”
Again, one wonders where the editors have gone. Sure, everyone’s an individual; but in a dictatorship of the sort that rules Iran, only a few people matter. If I were the president, and I heard the head of Centcom talking like that, I too would want him out of there.
That leaves us with Hersh’s encouraging claims that we’re striking back at Iranian military forces on both sides of the border, that we’re supporting some minority groups against the regime, and that our Special Forces guys are running around Iran, gathering information on the nuclear program. We should be so lucky.
I would be delighted if American soldiers were (finally) taking steps against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on their own turf. It has been known for some time (although Hersh, not having heard it anonymously from his omniscient consultants, somehow doubts it) that the Iranians have been training terrorists on their own territory, and then sending them into Iraq and Afghanistan to kill as many people as possible, above all, our troops. Until quite recently, our soldiers were not permitted to initiate action against the Iranian officers who sometimes accompanied the terrorists, even in Iraq. But then, roughly about the same time as the change in doctrine that accompanied the surge, we and the Iraqis started to operate against the so-called “Special Groups” that were in cahoots with the Iranians, and the Quds Force officers who supported al Qaeda. It seems logical that these operations should extend to the training camps across the border, and to the Iranians who run them and command the terrorist squads. Otherwise, one tacitly accepts the legitimacy of Iranian attacks across the border, but denies our right to fight back on their terrain.
So far as I can discover, no such operations are taking place. A high-ranking intelligence official in the United States Government, who has proven reliable for many years, told me categorically that we do not capture, kill, or kidnap anyone in Iran, and that our troops have been told they cannot cross the Iranian border, even in “hot pursuit.” So unless Hersh has real evidence, I’m going to doubt it, even though I wish it were true.
Are U.S. Special Forces collecting information about the Iranian nuclear program? I sure hope so, even though Hersh seems to think there’s something wicked about it. In this connection, he seems to me to reveal a great deal about the sources of his information. He praises the linguistic and cultural skills of CIA “agents and assets,” implying that Special Forces don’t have such skills. Nothing could be farther from the truth; Special Forces have excellent linguists. Indeed, many CIA officers do their language training at Monterey, at the celebrated language school run by the military. Hersh thinks CIA is somehow culturally superior, which it isn’t. It’s the kind of idea that is more likely to come from an Agency employee than from someone in uniform, from the sort of guy who thinks our military is composed of untutored lunkheads, while the CIA–with its long record of failure that even Inspector Clouseau would envy–is composed of MENSA members.
I don’t know anything about support for the minority groups (although I do know that a program with one of the major tribes was totally shut down more than a decade ago), but I’m against it. The regime in Tehran is hollow, having lost the support of the vast majority of the Iranian people. The Iranian people are in fact the greatest threat to the regime, and we should support them all, not group by group or tribe by tribe, but as an entire nation. Our support should be almost entirely political, not military. It must start with an open declaration that we wish to see the end of the regime and that we will support a peaceful democratic revolution. Just as in the successful Reagan strategy against the Soviet Empire, the revolutionaries’ most urgent requirements are communications devices, and we should get them cell and satellite phones, laptop computers, servers, and anti-filtering software to beat the filters the mullahs have obtained from the Chinese censors and other friends. And we should turn our own broadcasts, as in VOA, into sources of accurate information about the latest developments inside Iran.
Hersh doesn’t know very much about Iran, judging from the sources he quotes to bash the alleged support for the two tribes and the M.E.K. Iran is a far cry from the description approvingly quoted from Professor Vali Nasr, who holds forth at Tufts and the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic”
Professor Nasr studied with Frank Fukuyama, but apparently never heard that Germany is younger than the United States, by nearly a hundred years. And Iran is ethnically very different from France or Germany, which have long had basically homogeneous populations. Only half of Iranians are Persians; the rest range from Azeris, Kurds and Balouch to Ahwaz Arabs, and many other tribes. But Nasr is quite right (as is Hersh, who uses him as a proxy) to oppose any American policy that supports ethnic separatism. It’s worse than a crime; it’s stupid. When you’ve got most of the population on your side, you want to embrace it as a whole, not divide it into smaller units that might spat with one another.
It’s hard to even raise this kind of consideration while talking about Hersh, because he lives and writes in a world in which you only get half the story at best, and that half consists of sliming the United States. One would never know from reading Hersh that Iran has been waging war against us for nearly thirty years, and we have yet to respond. He seems not to know that there are military documents, photographs, confessions, and captured laptop computers proving that Iranians operate inside Iraq. If he does know, he doesn’t inform his readers. He writes as if anyone who acknowledges the murderous role of Iran in the world, and wants an end to its evil regime, automatically favors armed war against it, even though many of us are unstinting in our criticism of the mullahs, favor regime change, but oppose a military campaign.
And so I imagine his doctor saying to him: “Well, Mr. Hersh, it seems you’re an obsessive/ compulsive neurotic, doesn’t it? You keep writing the same story over and over again, with minor variations, year after year.”
And I hear Hersh saying: “Yes, but it feels so good when I finish writing it, Doctor. Every time. And they even pay me for it.”
Read bullet | (22) Comments bullet
A taxing situation
Posted by: McQ
The Heritage Foundation takes a look at what Obama promises for taxes should he be elected and what that means:
Obama's tax plan has two major components. First, he promises to end the Bush tax cuts, allowing the top two tax rates to return to 36% and 39.6%. Second, he promises to end the Social Security payroll tax cap for incomes above $250,000. Individuals making more than $250,000, therefore, would face a 15.65% tax rate from payroll taxes in addition to a top income tax rate of 39.6% for a combined tax rate over 56%. Individuals living in cities or states with high taxes such as New York City or California would have tax rates approaching 70%, levels not seen since Jimmy Carter was in office.
This from a man who claims to want to ensure that he puts policies in place to help the economy. Instead, higher taxes, especially in the range being talked about here, have three effects.
One - tax avoidance. People effected by high taxes are going to try every legal means, such as tax shelters, to avoid paying taxes on their earnings.
These gimmicks both reduce investment and economic growth in an attempt to avoid punitive taxation. Some individuals will attempt to transfer their compensation from wages to capital gains since capital gains would only be taxed at 25%. Others might try to incorporate so they could pay business taxes instead of income taxes. All of these schemes divert resources away from wealth creation and to lawyers and accountants who implement these schemes.
Two - Income flight. Money and capital will be moved to overseas location where it is taxed at a much lower rate.
Visiting Britain recently, French President Nicols Sarkozy remarked that France's high taxes had driven so many French to London that it had become the seventh-largest French city. Obama-sized tax rates would drive many creative Americans to Canada and London as well.
Or Ireland. Capital is going to seek a friendly tax climate for investment.
Three - Unemployment. When investment slows, the economy slows. And when the economy slows, the fastest way to effect the bottom line is to reduce headcount.
Currently only six of the top 30 industrial nations have combined local and national tax rates above 55%. The average unemployment rate rate for those countries is 7.35%. Under Obama's plan, the top marginal tax rate would exceed 60%, which means only Hungary would have a more punitive tax rate. Hungary's 2006 unemployment rate was 7.5%.
Couple that plan with the Obama plan to impose "windfall taxes" on the oil companies (for which the consumer will pay at the pump), biofuel mandates (for which the consumer will pay higher food prices) and and a carbon tax (for which the consumer will pay as well) and you have all the makings of an economic disaster
Gee, what are the odds that you said the same thing about Kerry when he was running??
I'd say slim to none
I'm amazed at the number of people whining here about the FISA bill when the Echelon program- initiated by CLinton is a more intrusive program that is ALREADY ( and has been doing so for a decade ) monitoring every form of electronic communication constantly
Fool
You're the greater fool
I never said attacking Iran would be a good idea
The joke here is that it is something that is not gonna happen, yet you wingbats read an article by Hersh, giving no real sources and believe it as gospel
Israel will take out Iran's nuclear capability- probably between the election and inauguration
Use what limited brain power you do have. WE don't have troops to commit to an attack of Iran- we barely are manning our various responsibilities now
The South Will Fall Again
By THOMAS F. SCHALLER
Published: July 1, 2008
W
THE interim between the primaries and the parties’ nominating conventions is, according to ancient writ, a fertile period for presidential campaigns to talk about how they plan to expand the political map in the fall. This year is no different. Barack Obama’s strategists are suggesting that the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party can parlay increased turnout among black voters into a string of victories in the South.
Given that roughly half of all African-Americans live in the 11 former Confederate states, the idea seems intuitive enough. It’s also wrong. Prying Southern electoral votes away from the Republicans is not so simple.
Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi.
The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern electorate: In the 11 states of the former Confederacy, African-Americans were 17.9 percent of the age-eligible population and 17.9 percent of actual voters in 2004, analysis of Census Bureau data shows.
And when socioeconomic status is held constant, black voters go to the polls at higher rates than white voters in the South. In other words, a 40-year-old African-American plumber making $60,000 a year is, on average, more likely to vote than a white man of similar background.
The second myth is that Democratic presidential candidates fare better in Southern states that have large numbers of African-Americans. In fact, the reverse is true, because the more blacks there are in a Southern state, the more likely the white voters are to vote Republican.
Mississippi, the state with the nation’s highest percentage of African-Americans in its population, illustrates how difficult Mr. Obama’s task will be in the South. Four years ago, President Bush beat John Kerry there by 20 points. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Mr. Obama could increase black turnout in Mississippi to 39 percent of the statewide electorate, up from 34 percent in 2004, according to exit polls. And let’s assume that Mr. Obama will win 95 percent of those voters, up from the 90 percent who voted for Mr. Kerry four years ago.
If that happened, the black vote would yield Mr. Obama 37 percent of Mississippi’s statewide votes. To get the last 13 percent he needs for a majority, Mr. Obama would need to persuade a mere 21 percent of white voters in Mississippi to support him. Sounds easy, right?
But only 14 percent of white voters in the state supported Mr. Kerry. Mr. Obama would need to increase that number by 7 percentage points — a 50 percent increase. Mr. Obama struggled to attract white Democrats in states like Ohio and South Dakota. It strains credulity to believe that he will attract three white voters in Mississippi for every two that Mr. Kerry did.
Keep in mind that this analysis (and the speculation that Mr. Obama will generate unprecedented black turnout in the South) does not consider the possibility that white voter turnout will rise, too. Passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act led to an upsurge in black voting in the South, but it also caused many white Southerners to register and vote as well — for the Republicans.
Granted, Mr. Obama’s campaign isn’t counting on Mississippi. What about Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, the three states that are routinely cited as new possibilities for the Democratic column this fall?
Mr. Obama can write off Georgia and North Carolina for the same reasons that Mississippi is beyond his reach — although the math in those two states is slightly less daunting. Virginia, however, is the one Southern state that Mr. Obama has a reasonable chance of winning. And it’s precisely because the home of Robert E. Lee, as NBC News’s political director, Chuck Todd, has suggested, is seceding from the Confederacy.
The demographic makeup of the electorate in Virginia is unlike that of any other state in the South. The black population in Virginia is, as a percentage, among the lowest in the region. And during the last two decades, the state has also experienced a huge influx of upscale non-Southerners, who have taken over the Washington suburbs of northern Virginia. (Florida is a perennial target for similar reasons. With a relatively small black population, a big Hispanic voting bloc and a large contingent of relocated retirees from the North, it is the least Southern of the Southern states.)
In the rest of the South, Mr. Obama cannot overcome reality. Even if unprecedented numbers of black voters turn out to vote for him, the white vote will serve as a formidable counterbalance. Mr. Obama should not hope to capture states in the country’s most racially polarized region.
Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, is the author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.”
LOL, why in the world would they even respond and gave him any credibility?
Yep, page of hysteria based on "unconfirmed/unnamed" sources
And the wingbats eat it up
Did he name ANY real sources for his information???
Yep, when the question gets to close to home, feign girlish ignorance
You condemn McCain for his supposed bombing of innocent civilians, when at the same time you were part of the military machine that perpetrated Hiroshima and Nagasaki on innocent Japanese
Using your logic, you are complicit as well
You also use the existence of Israel to justify any heinous crime committed by the Pals. They stole Pal land, so any crime committed by the Pals/Hezbollah is entirely justifiable in your twisted macho queen mind
Using your "logic" A Japanese person would be entirely justified in killing you and your relatives as you have wished on innocent Israelis
Again a telling no comment on the actions of your persecuted Iranis in Lebanon???
How can you justify that????
PS
After reading your tome on the banality of evil and how the people working in the WTC deserved to die because of their role in perpetuating capitalism, let me take a wild guess and assume that you feel you deserve no culpability at all for your role in helping the Armys latrines stay clean during WWII.
I bet o;' Ward felt no guilt at chasing those checks for working at the U of C either
You and all the other lame queens talking revolution and living off the tit of capitalism are pathetic
Just words.
Just words.
By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Just Words | Obamafiles — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Just words.
"For those who have fought under the flag of this nation -- for the young veterans I meet when I visit Walter Reed; for those like John McCain who have endured physical torment in service to our country -- no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary," said Obama. "And let me also add that no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides."
Just words.
Dem Guru: McCain Limited by POW Years
ABC News' Teddy Davis and Molly Hunter Report: While Barack Obama was urging supporters not to devalue the military service of rival John McCain, a top Democratic voice on foreign policy argued Monday that the former POW's isolation during the Vietnam war has hobbled the Arizona senator's capacity as a war-time leader.
Rand Beers, an Obama supporter who served as Sen. John Kerry's, D-Mass., top national security adviser during his 2004 presidential run, said that because McCain was in an unfortunate state of "isolation" during much of the Vietnam War, he missed the domestic turmoil which took place in the United States and his national security experience is "sadly limited" as a result.
Obama fibs and flip-flops on patriotism [Karl]
The AP’s Jennifer Loven covers Barack Obama’s speech on patriotism, in which he said he “will never question the patriotism of others in this campaign” and implictly threw his surrogate Wesley Clark under the campaign bus for questioning John McCain’s war record. [Update: Here's the official squishing sound. -K]
The Hill notes that Obama also implicitly whacked MoveOn for its “General Betray Us” ad last year. Yet Obama refused to vote on a Senate resolution condemning MoveOn’s attack at the time, saying, “By not casting a vote, I registered my protest against these empty politics.” Of course, Obama is now dashing to the center and already has MoveOn’s endorsement, which Obama welcomed.
In today’s speech, Obama also said this:
Of course, precisely because America isn’t perfect, precisely because our ideals constantly demand more from us, patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy.
However, during the flag lapel pin flap, Obama said this:
A party that presided over a war in which our troops did not get the body armor they needed, or were sending troops over who were untrained because of poor planning, or are not fulfilling the veterans’ benefits that these troops need when they come home, or are undermining our Constitution with warrantless wiretaps that are unnecessary?
That is a debate I am very happy to have. We’ll see what the American people think is the true definition of patriotism.
As noted previously, issues of body armor, military training, or veterans’ benefits might actually be debatable among reasonable people, but he was willing to question people’s patriotism over them. Moreover, Obama now supports the terrorist surveillance program, having seen and learned the degree to which it is necessary to help prevent terrorist attacks. So perhaps Old Obama should be questioning New Obama’s patriotism.
Incidentally, since Obama gave today’s speech in Independence, MO, I cannot help but note that much of Obama’s flag lapel pin flap played out in — Independence, IA. Must be a thing with him.
(h/t Memeorandum.)
According to your metrics, you yourself were a part ( no matter how insignificant and demeaning a role you played ) of the organization that killed thousands of innocent civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
According to your ethics, Japanese people would be entirely within their rights to track you down and kill you and all your relatives in any grotesque fashion they chose
Obama misleads on oil leases: WSJ
posted at 10:45 am on June 30, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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The Wall Street Journal lambastes Barack Obama for disseminating falsehoods on oil exploration, either through malice or ignorance. The Journal can’t identify the root cause, but in the end it matters little. His misleading allegations regarding oil leases, joined by most of the Democrats in Congress, will lead to foolish and self-defeating policies, as anyone who has studied the process of oil production knows:
To deflect the GOP effort to relax the offshore-drilling ban – and thus boost supply while demand will remain strong – Democrats also say that most of the current leases are “nonproducing.” The idea comes from a “special report” prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Resources Committee, chaired by Mr. Rahall. “If we extrapolate from today’s production rates on federal lands and waters,” the authors write, the oil companies could “nearly double total U.S. oil production” (their emphasis).
In other words, these whiz kids assume that every acre of every lease holds the same amount of oil and gas. Yet the existence of a lease does not guarantee that the geology holds recoverable resources. Brian Kennedy of the Institute for Energy Research quips that, using the same extrapolation, the 9.4 billion acres of the currently nonproducing moon should yield 654 million barrels of oil per day.
Nonetheless, the House still went through with a gesture called the “use it or lose it” bill, which passed on Thursday 223-195. It would be pointless even if it had a chance of becoming law. Oil companies acquire leases in the expectation that some of them contain sufficient oil and gas to cover the total costs. Yet it takes years to move through federal permitting, exploration and development. The U.S. Minerals Management Service notes that only one of three wells results in a discovery of oil that can be recovered economically. In deeper water, it’s one of five. All this involves huge risks, capital investment – and time.
If anything, the Democrats ought to be dancing in the streets about “idle” leases. It means fewer rigs. The days of hit-or-miss wildcatting have been relegated to the past by new, more efficient technologies, such as seismic imaging, directional drilling (wells that are “steered” underground) and multilateral drilling (multiple underground offshoots from a single wellbore).
Last week in Las Vegas, Obama offered the same criticism — that oil companies haven’t drilled on the leases they already have. That’s poppycock, as the Journal explains. Not all leases get drilled because not all leases have oil. The producers spend millions of dollars on geological surveys to limit bad investments and put resources where the oil can be accessed. Right now, the best prospects for finding new fields are in the OCS, as Brazil has shown in two finds this year alone. In 2006, we found a huge deep-sea reservoir in the Gulf: Wilcox, which may have as much as 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
Can we find more Wilcoxes? Not as long as Congress refuses to lift their moratorium on exploration of the OCS. Demanding drilling first on all extant leases is an absurd position to take when they don’t have any indication of accessible oil from the preliminary studies. It amounts to drilling dry holes at a cost of tens of millions of dollars each just to demonstrate the futility. Who do you think will pay that cost? Hint: it won’t be Barack Obama or Congress, but the people who drive up to the pumps every day.
Republicans have to hammer home this point every day between now and the election. Democrats offer disinformation on drilling rather than work for solutions to a supply crisis in energy which has all of the indications of a long-term problem. One can either ascribe that to ignorance or malice on an individual or group basis, but then voters have to ask themselves this: does it really matter which cause is in play? If Democrats are merely ignorant on energy production — after all of the years we have spent in crisis, and after months of being in control of Congress — that should be more than enough to show that we need a change, and not a President who is just as ignorant as Congressional leadership.
Blowback
The question is not to lay blame, its what to do now and gong forward
Barry think raising taxes and cutting back will solve things Gross is saying he's wrong
Talking about experience, Gross is way ahead of Barry here
He's right
Barry's plan to raise taxes and the subsequent reduction in economic activity would be a disaster
Yep and I assume that while protecting the Waves from toxic shock during the "Great War" our troops never killed innocent civilians
I'm guessing here that somehow that moral ambiguity is outside your calculations here
Hackworth is entitled to his opinion- waht he FEELS about McCains valor doesn't amtter squat to the issue at question
Whatever, I hope the Dems go full force with this line of attack. For most Americans- outside of you moonbats, it will backfire
I also notice you didn't comment on your poor persecuted buddies, the Iranians , and their role in Lebanon
Please explain how it's really all the fault of the joos and the Great Satan
The Secret American Army
June 29, 2008: The United States now has thousands of spies inside Iraq. This didn't happen overnight. For the last five years, the U.S. has been building an informant network there. This sort of thing takes time, and knowledge of how Arab culture works, and how to work it. The U.S. Army Special Forces, the CIA, reservist cops and Israel were key components. The results (mostly classified) have been impressive. For example, last year, tips from Iraqis led to the discovery of 6,963 weapons caches, plus similar information on safe houses and terrorists themselves. During the first half of 2009, tips led to finding nearly 5,000 weapons caches.
Back in 2003, the Special Forces and CIA already knew about the tradecraft of developing local informants. The Special Forces were always practicing this, but were now so damn busy chasing terrorists and taking care of so many special jobs no one else could handle, that spy networks were not something they could concentrate on. The CIA also had a shortage of people with practical experience in setting up informant networks. That's mainly because media and Congressional pressure in the late 1970s caused the CIA to largely get out of the spy business. Too dangerous because of the nasty people you have to deal with while recruiting quality informants. Thus the reservist cops and Israel became two of the major sources of expertise in this area.
In the United States, it's quite common for police to join the reserves. They don't always end up doing police work, but they have their experience with them always. In Iraq, reservists who were detectives and police commanders quickly saw the need for databases and developing informant networks. That led to the Israeli connection. Israel had been at war with Palestinian terrorists since 2000, and had cranked up their already extensive informant network in the Palestinian territories, and throughout the Arab world. Israeli advise turned out to be critical. But one bit of Israeli wisdom was decidedly unwelcome. Setting up a reliable informant network in Iraq would take time, and there was no way to rush it.
The "surge offensive" of last year was largely possible because the informant network had grown to the point where commanders were confident that many Sunni Arab tribes were ready to switch sides. They knew this because the Special Forces had taught so many officers how to "drink tea" (sit down and talk with local Iraqi big shots). Israeli intel experts advised on how to work an Iraqi neighborhood to find people willing to talk, and how to persuade them to do it even in the face of terrorist threats.
U.S. intel troops, mainly U.S. Army, persevered, and now that's paying off. You can tell by the confident pronouncements from U.S. generals about success in Iraq. It's career suicide to make such statements, unless you are very confident with your resources, especially your intelligence capabilities. Naturally, no one will talk openly about this stuff. Can't risk giving the enemy anything. But in a decade or so, if not sooner, lots of details will come out. It's quite an epic adventure.
Seed
How stupid is Wesley Clark?
posted at 8:31 am on June 30, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:
Because in the matters of national security policy making, it’s a matter of understanding risk, it’s a matter of gauging your opponents and it’s a matter of being held accountable. John McCain’s never done any of that in his official positions. I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the armed forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t seen what it’s like when diplomats come in and say, `I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to get this point through or not. Do you want to take the risk? What about your reputation? How do we handle it publicly?
At which point, Schieffer — after a stunned moment — pointed this out to Clark:
SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean…
Let’s point out a few things about Barack Obama:
* In “the matter of national security policy making.” Barack Obama hasn’t ever done anything.
* In the matter of gauging your “opponents”, Obama wants to meet with them without preconditions despite having no national-security, military, or diplomatic experience.
* Barack Obama hasn’t been on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
* Barack Obama hasn’t had any executive experience.
* Barack Obama hasn’t commanded anything, in wartime or not.
* Barack Obama hasn’t dealt with diplomats in any capacity at all.
* Barack Obama hasn’t ordered the bombs to fall, although to be fair, he has associated himself with someone who has — William Ayers.
Not only can every argument Clark made get applied more to Obama than to McCain, he has now made it clear that the Obama strategy is to demean and belittle McCain’s military service — and by extension, military service in general. This will undoubtedly play very well among Obama’s nutcase fringe supporters as well as idiotic fired commanders of NATO, but that’s a mighty thin list of voters. The rest of the nation will hear these attacks and stand aghast at the dishonorable and outrageously stupid disparagement of a lifetime of service to this nation and understand with crystal clarity the radical nature of Barack Obama and his team.
Nor is this the first such attack on McCain’s service. Democrats have belittled it on several occasions now. In May, it was Bill Gillespie, another Obama backer in Georgia and a candidate for the House. In the same month, Senator Tom Harkin questioned McCain’s mental state for having willingly served in the military. In April, Jay Rockefeller accused McCain of being more or less a coward for being a military pilot, and again in May the New York Times quoted unnamed Senate colleagues of McCain suggesting that he didn’t understand the Vietnam War because he didn’t fight on the ground and spent most of it lounging around Hanoi in a POW camp.
John McCain put his life on the line for his country. Barack Obama has not. While I have never thought that military service was a prerequisite to public office, it certainly gives one a lot more experience and is an asset for the presidency. And as a bottom line, a candidate whose campaign denigrates military service shows himself as unfit for the role of Commander in Chief.
Wes Clark has done Barack Obama no favors, and as the record shows, it’s not just Wes Clark. The Democrats plan on attacking the military throughout this campaign. Obama cannot expect anyone to buy his claims of “a new kind of politics”, unless
Yeah, and in your pathetic bizarro world any heinous crime committed by the Pals is heroic and Iran is a persecuted and misunderstood bastion of peace and hope for the world
I wonder what you think of the role they're playing is supporting Hezbollah in destabilizing Lebanon?? aren't they involving themselves in another country - something that would seem to go against your "principles"
Yeah, McCain never deserved his medals while you did for as a subject for tampon research during your stint in the Army
Geopolitical Diary: A U.S.-Iranian Dance of Diplomacy
The United States has raised the possibility of opening a diplomatic interests section in Iran. To avoid giving the impression that the idea was an unqualified U.S. position, State Department officials carefully leaked word of an ongoing debate about the plan to the press. But the news was not met with immediate denial by U.S. officials. In fact, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to rule the idea out — instead Rice said she preferred not to comment on internal U.S. deliberations.
Hours after her statement, the official Iranian news agency said Iran was prepared, in principle, to consider the request if it is officially made by the United States. So, a week after word was leaked to The New York Times of Israeli maneuvers in preparation for a possible air strike on Iran, the Administration has opened a diplomatic door.
Currently, American affairs in Iran are handled by the Swiss Embassy, without U.S. diplomats present. Under full diplomatic relations, which this new deal still would not be, the United States would have an embassy and ambassador in Tehran, and the Iranians would have one in Washington. This is a step short of diplomatic recognition. U.S. diplomats would be present in Tehran — and Iranians in Washington — but likely working under the auspices of the Swiss and Pakistani Embassies, which house their respective interest sections presently. The United States has this sort of arrangement with Cuba. It allows diplomatic presence and representation without full recognition.
Cuba is hardly a model of international warmth for the United States, but the question is trajectory. At the moment, there is no formal diplomatic presence in Iran. There would be if this were to happen. And that would obviously represent a major psychological shift in U.S.-Iranian relations. It is not that the Americans and Iranians don’t talk. Apart from direct meetings in Baghdad, the Iranians have high-level diplomats in New York. There have also been meetings, varying in degrees of formality, in Switzerland and other venues. In fact, the Americans and Iranians talk all the time, directly, indirectly and sometimes it appears in Haiku poetry. The idea that the United States and Iran don’t talk just isn’t true.
The importance of this offer is not what it would yield, but that it was made. The United States took the first step, even if it did not take it irrevocably and no formal offer was made. The administration is being cautious. The Americans still recall how in 2003 they were embarrassed by the Iranians who rebuffed an offer by the United States to send help and a visit by a high-level U.S. delegation, including the elder George Bush, to the earthquake-ravaged city of Bam.
Today the United States is not offering diplomatic exchanges. While it said it might offer them, the United States emphasized its division on the subject. U.S. diplomatic translation: “We’d like to exchange diplomats but if you say no, we never asked.” The Iranians quickly replied that if asked, they might agree. Iranian diplomatic translation: “Ask and we’ll say yes.” The speed of the Iranian response is telling. They were not surprised by the request. Their answer was ready. Which means, as one would expect, they were sounded out before.
So on Friday it appeared that the world was on the verge of war between Israel and Iran, with the United States supporting Israel. By late Monday, the United States was proposing raising the level of diplomatic relations and the Iranians were indicating that they were open to it. In our mind this reinforces the idea that the careful leaking of putative Israeli war games was part of a “bad cop, somewhat better cop” routine, designed to work the Iranians psychologically. They were offered the choice between Israeli air strikes or improving diplomatic relations. The second offer sounded much better than the first.
Setting aside the purple rhetoric on all sides, we have long believed that the Americans and Iranians were talking and actually working together in Iraq. The massive decline in casualties in Iraq is not simply due to U.S. military operations. The decision by the Iranians to rein in Shiite Iraqi militias had a significant impact on it. Indeed, in our view, the Iraq issue has always been more important to both countries than the nuclear weapon issue, and in Iraq, there has been progress.
Both governments are urgently concerned with face. Neither wants to appear to be conceding anything to the other. When the Great Satan meets the Axis of Evil, no public compromise is possible. So all compromising is done privately. And that’s what makes this important. The tentative offer is very public and comes from the highest levels of government. It has been acknowledged officially. Now, this is the United States and Iran so anything public can collapse quickly. But the offer itself, no matter how it was couched, is extremely significant as is the response. In many ways we regard this as more significant than the Israeli exercises.
Imagine that, the US has actually been talking to the Iranis
Well, there were legitimate questions about his service. HE got a purple heart for a wound that required a band aid only
Not to dredge up the whole swift boat affair, but there is really no comparison between the bravery shown by the two
Talk about blind faith. HE changed his mind because he was collecting tons of money and couldn't let principle of his word get in the way
The largest 527 is MoveOn,org- there have been no significant right wing 527's
I don't think him taking campaign money had anything to do with 527's anyway
The bottom line is that his claim to being a " different type of pol" is a cruel joke on those still naive enough to believe that crap
PS, I believe that the new law does grant immunity to the telcoms= another lie you blindly choose to believe
Wesley Clark demeans McCain’s military service
Posted by: McQ
Of all the "ex-generals" floating around out there, perhaps the most odious is Wesley Clark. Today he decided it was his place to demean John McCain's military service on Face the Nation:
Gen. Wesley Clark, acting as a surrogate for Barack Obama's campaign, invoked John McCain's military service against him in one of the more personal attacks on the Republican presidential nominee this election cycle.
Clark said that McCain lacked the executive experience necessary to be president, calling him "untested and untried" on CBS' "Face the Nation." And in saying so, he took a few swipes at McCain's military service.
"He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded - that wasn't a wartime squadron," Clark said.
That's just foolishness. A squadron command doesn't become "executive experience" only if the squadron is in a combat situation. It is either an executive experience or it's not executive experience whether at war or during peace.
Does commanding NATO not count as executive experience if NATO isn't at war? And btw, does getting fired from his NATO command negate Clark's claim to executive experience?
And then this:
"I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president."
Clark's attempt at denigrating and minimizing McCain's service aside, McCain's service is a qualification among many. Say what you will about McCain otherwise, but his service to the country was exemplary.
But here's a question: if the willingness to fight for your country, put your life on the line and suffer the brutality McCain suffered as a POW doesn't make the cut as far as qualifications go, how far below that does a "community organizer" show up on the list of non-qualifications?
This seems like a horrible idea for Barry. HE's had no experience and here he's trying to discredit McCains brave service. No matter what you think of MCCain, what he did while a captive deserves nothing but respect.
Looks like Barry is also backing away from all those foreign policy debates he promised- too bad McCain would have embarrassed him
The Iraqification of Lebanon
Michael J. Totten - 06.28.2008 - 3:37 PM
Hezbollah is alarming its Lebanese opponents by expanding its territory through the purchase of property outside Shia areas in Lebanon. Former civil war-era President Amin Gemayel went on television Thursday and said what many Lebanese have feared for months now while this has unfolded.
“There is some sort of military preparation starting from Niha in Jezzine all the way across the entire Western mountain range with military surveillance posts set up from Jezzine to Sannine all the way up to Laqlouq,” he said.
If he weren’t talking about an army that really does build massive and sophisticated military infrastructure – including deep tunnels and a high-tech surveillance system in Beirut’s international airport, of all places – I might suspect he was paranoid or exaggerating.
Amin’s Phalange Party is a vehicle for mostly parochial and sectarian Christians, and it has a dark past, as do most parties in Lebanon. His concerns, however, are echoed at the more broad-based and mainstream online magazine NOW Lebanon. “These are preparations for war,” says an editorial earlier this week, “or rather preparations to ensure that if there is a war, Hezbollah’s adversaries won’t be able to fight one. The party knows better than to enter Christian, Druze or Sunni areas. So it has opted for control of the high ground – high ground overlooking the territories of its foes but also controlling lines of communication between mainly Shia areas in the northern Bekaa Valley, the southern Bekaa, South Lebanon, and Beirut’s southern suburbs . . . [W]hat is taking place today has so transgressed the red lines of all communities that what we will almost certainly see in the near future is a dangerous logic of communal self-defense taking over.”
Even if these moves by Hezbollah are being misinterpreted by the overly anxious, NOW Lebanon is correct to point out the danger for the simple reason that they are perceived as threatening. Everyone in Lebanon knows all too well why the “logic of communal self-defense” is an ominous development.
Communal self-defense means sectarian self-defense, and sectarian self-defense means exactly the same thing in Lebanon that it means in Iraq: militias. If the police and the army cannot or will not disarm Hezbollah – and they cannot and will not – then the only self-defense options remaining are personal and communal. Robert Heinlein famously wrote that an armed society is a polite society, but he didn’t know the Middle East very well.
Critics of Lebanon’s Future Movement, the relatively liberal and overwhelmingly dominant Sunni party led by Saad Hariri and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, love to suggest that Hariri has his own militia, as if that draws some sort of moral equivalence between him and Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah who heads up the private army of a hostile state. The truth is that Hariri’s “militia” consists of little more than a bumbling personal security detail from a company called Secure Plus.
Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party, on the other hand, really does have a militia of sorts – at least one that can be called up when needed – and it successfully repelled an attempted invasion of the Chouf Mountains by Hezbollah last month. I’d be quite frankly shocked if the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces party didn’t have at least a small remnant of their old militia.
In any case, Christians, Sunnis, and Druze have been talking about building up their own private forces for some time now to provide a balance of power in Lebanon because the state is too weak to handle the job. Since Jumblatt proved he can repel Hezbollah with a militia, and Hariri cannot because he doesn’t have a militia, the incentive for communal re-armament is now greater than it has been since the civil war ended. NOW Lebanon says Hezbollah’s current strategy is suicidal, and it is. But it’s the most destructive form of suicide possible, the political equivalent of a suicide bombing.
I have written many times that Hezbollah’s enemies cannot defeat them in battle. It’s still true. What’s also true is that Hezbollah cannot defeat everyone else. A renewed civil war would produce a grinding stalemate with Hezbollah as the strongest and with the highest body count. Nasrallah would lose nearly every advantage he has as the leader of the only seriously armed faction, and the rest of the country would circle the drain along with him.
Call it the Iraqification of Lebanon, which is ironic since the civil war and insurgency in Iraq could just as easily have been described as Lebanonization. It may be farce when history repeats itself, but it’s still tragic
well if you listen to Obama he will not spend money unless they can find a funding source
Listening to what he- or any politician says regarding spending restraint- is sheer folly
IF you actually believe that, you're dumber than I thought
Again, what besides blind faith makes you think that Obama is different than any other pol?
Now that he's got the nomination, he's trying to move back to the center, disowning what he said about NAFTA, gun control, etc
He's just as sleazy as the rest
Straight Outta Gitmo
Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:20:32 pm PDT
A former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Abdullah Salih al Ajmi has been identified as the Al Qaeda operative who conducted a suicide truck bombing in Mosul: Released Guantanamo detainee behind March suicide truck bombing at Combat Outpost Inman in Mosul.
A former Kuwaiti Guantanamo Bay detainee conducts a suicide attack in Mosul
Two Kuwaiti al Qaeda operatives who conducted suicide attacks were featured at the end of the video. Abu Omar al Kuwaiti, also known as Badr Mishel Gama’an al Harbi, and Abu Juheiman al Kuwaiti, also known as Abdullah Salih al Ajmi, are both shown on the video, along with their attacks in Mosul, said Kazimi.
Harbi, who claimed to be a “veteran of the jihad in Afghanistan,” conducted a suicide car bomb attack on a police station in Mosul on April 26, 2008.
Ajmi was released from Guantanamo Bay and was searching for “a way to reconnect with the jihad.” He claimed he was tortured while at Guantanamo Bay.
Ajmi “is seemingly responsible for an earlier truck bombing at the Iraqi Army HQ in the Harmat neighborhood of Mosul on March 23, 2008,” said Kazimi. The attack occurred at Combat Outpost Inman, an Iraqi Army base that served as the headquarters for the 1st Battalion, 3rd Brigade of the 2nd Iraqi Army Division.
27
Obama's Real Record: Public Housing
Obama helps rich friends but hurts communities
By Kevin Holtsberry Posted in 2008 | 2008 Presidential Campaign | Barack Obama | Obamafiles — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Need proof that Obama's Hope and Change rhetoric is all symbolism and no substance? Look no farther than this devastating Boston Globe investigation:
As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.
But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies - including several hundred in Obama's former district - deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.
Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama's close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama's constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
Shockingly it all comes back to friends and money. Read on.
Guess who benefited from this scam:
Among those tied to Obama politically, personally, or professionally are:
Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.
Allison Davis, a major fund-raiser for Obama's US Senate campaign and a former lead partner at Obama's former law firm. Davis, a developer, was involved in the creation of Grove Parc and has used government subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,500 units in Chicago, including a North Side building cited by city inspectors last year after chronic plumbing failures resulted in raw sewage spilling into several apartments.
Antoin "Tony" Rezko, perhaps the most important fund-raiser for Obama's early political campaigns and a friend who helped the Obamas buy a home in 2005. Rezko's company used subsidies to rehabilitate more than 1,000 apartments, mostly in and around Obama's district, then refused to manage the units, leaving the buildings to decay to the point where many no longer were habitable.
Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama's campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama's own accounting.
One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.
[. . .]
And although he has distanced himself from Rezko, Obama has remained close to others in the development community. Jarrett participates in the campaign's senior staff meetings. And Obama chose another close friend, Martin Nesbitt, as his campaign treasurer. Nesbitt is chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, one of the key overseers of the shift toward private management and development.
Read the whole article. It is damning. Close friends, critical campaign fundraisers, and important supporters make a bunch of money off of government subsidized housing projects while the projects themselves fall into disrepair and the tenants suffer. Obama claims to know nothing about all this money being wasted and his friends bilking the system.
Instead of development and growth it is just another story of Chicago politics where the powerful and connected make money and poor people are left to suffer; where the government pours more and more money into projects with the same results. This is hope and change? This is Obama's home turf. This is supposedly one of his passions.
And yet look what the people working on this issue are left to say:
Jamie Kalven, a longtime Chicago housing activist, put it this way: "I hope there is not much predictive value in his history and in his involvement with that community."
They are left to hope that Obama's rhetoric has more meaning than his actual actions and history. This is a recipe for disappointment and disaster.
Ignore his words and look at his record. That is the only way we can avoid a repeat at the national level where the stakes are even h
The Saving Grace in McCain’s Energy Policy
The $300 million battery prize and the flex-fuel requirement could save the nation.
June 27, 2008 - by Robert Zubrin
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In a speech given June 24, presumptive GOP presidential candidate John McCain unveiled his energy policy. The McCain program contained numerous elements, but the one that made headlines was his promise to offer a $300 million prize for the development of a battery that would “allow the leapfrogging of the current generation” of electric and plug-in hybrid cars.
Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to win a prize, and other similar prizes helped to drive the development of aviation technology in the 1920s and 1930s. Going back further in time, the development of a workable longitude-determination technique was also successfully incentivized by the offer of a prize to the inventor.
Prizes have thus proven their worth as a method to motivate inventive effort in frontier areas. But batteries are a widely-used technology, and there have been huge amounts of private money invested every year for decades in ongoing programs to develop better ones. So the question must be asked; why offer a government prize to try to incite further such investment, when the much greater rewards offered by the commercial market for a better battery are so apparent?
More to the point, why focus on battery development at all as a major element of energy policy? With or without revolutionary batteries, there is no realistic prospect at all of electric or hybrid cars gaining a sufficient share of the American market — let alone worldwide car sales — on a time scale fast enough to do anything significant to stop the crushing of the United States by the Islamist-led oil cartel.
Let’s stop fooling around. This year the United States will import 5 billion barrels of oil. At $130/barrel, the bill for that will come to $650 billion, or more than five times the cost of the Iraq war. Add to that $400 billion the Americans will pay for domestic oil, and our total fuel bill this year will come to over a trillion dollars, and the world as a whole will pay $4 trillion. These petroleum costs are up a factor of twelve from what they were in 1999, and represent a huge highly-regressive tax on the world economy. For Americans, the $1000 billion oil levy is equivalent to a 40% increase in income taxes across the board - with sixty percent the sum being paid over in tribute to foreign governments.
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Averaged over the US population of 300 million people, the $1000 billion OPEC tax levies a tribute amounting to $3300 per head — for every man, woman, and child in the country, or $13,300 for a family of four. The average American worker makes about $45,000 per year, or $35,000 after taxes paid to Uncle Sam. In 1999, such a worker supporting a family of four had to pay 3% of his disposable income for oil. Now Uncle Saud and Uncle Hugo are taxing him for over 38% of his take-home pay. Is it any wonder that such people are not buying houses? Such a massive drain of cash from the pockets of consumers must perforce collapse the real estate market — as well as that for many other kinds of consumer goods.
So, as a result of this massive tax increase — by far the largest in American history — the United States is being driven into a recession. Subjected to the same tax, Europe and Japan will follow, while poor third world countries who can afford high oil prices even less will be pushed towards starvation. And as the misery spreads, the Saudis and other OPEC potentates are putting together huge Sovereign Wealth Funds to execute takeovers of the western corporations their extortion forces into insolvency. Indeed, OPEC will clear $1.5 trillion in net export profits this year. The entire worth of the US Fortune 500 is $18 trillion. So at their current rate of looting, OPEC will accumulate enough cash to buy majority control of the entire Fortune 500 within 6 years.
This is a 5-alarm emergency. The oil crisis is not a matter of high fill-up prices, or even the loss of economic prosperity. Our independence is at stake. Under such circumstances, McCain’s proposals for battery prizes, enforcing CAFE standards, encouraging “zero-emission vehicles,” and even opening the east and west coast continental shelves to oil exploration, range from silly to, at best, marginally relevant.
Fortunately, however, there was one proposal that McCain put forward that could really make a difference. This was his call to require that all new cars sold in the USA be flex fueled.
Flex fuel cars can run on any combination of alcohol (including methanol and ethanol) or gasoline. The technology is readily available and it only costs about $100 per vehicle.
Making America a flex-fuel vehicle market would effectively make flex-fuel the international standard, as all significant foreign car makers would be impelled to convert their lines over as well. Within three years of such a mandate, there would be 50 million cars on the road in the USA capable of running on alternate fuels, and hundreds of millions more worldwide. Around the globe, gasoline would be forced to compete at the pump against alcohol fuels made from any number of sources, including not only current commercial crops like corn and sugar, but cellulosic ethanol made from crop residues and weeds, as well as methanol, which can be made from any kind of biomass without exception, as well as coal, natural gas, and recycled urban trash. Creating such an open-source fuel market would enormously expand and diversify humanity’s fuel resource base, protecting all nations from continued blackmail, robbery, and in some cases, starvation, induced by the oil cartel.
Methanol is selling today, without any subsidy, for $1.50/gallon on the spot market, equivalent in energy terms to gasoline at $2.80/gallon. Make cars that can choose between methanol and gasoline, and the power of OPEC to set high prices will be broken for good — everywhere in the world.
So break out the champagne. Amidst a pile of campaign nonsense, John McCain just set forth one policy that could save the nation.
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The real Obama
Running in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama staked his campaign on the proposition that he was the Ivory Soap candidate on the issue of Iraq. His opposition to the war was purer than the rest of the Democratic field's. Having been an Illinois state legislator at the time the roll was called in the United States Senate, he had not cast a vote to authorize it. Free of the encumbrance of responsibility at the time of the Senate vote, he was able to present himself to Democrats as the candidate who was a visionary opponent of a misguided war.
Believing that she had something like a lock on the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton pivoted to the general election before the Iowa caucus. She refused to apologize for her vote on the war. Moveover, only last fall she took a responsible position on the Kyl-Lieberman resolution urging the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. When she did so, Obama hammered her for it.
Obama didn't vote on the Kyl-Lieberman resolution any more than he had on the authorization for the use of miliatary force on Iraq. (He was out campaigning.) Indeed, he didn't even announce his opposition to the bill until after Clinton had voted in favor of it. Nevertheless, he found Clinton's vote a useful tool to use against her and he used it with fervor.
The day after securing the Democratic nomination, however, Obama appeared at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington and called for "boycotting firms associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, whose Quds force has rightly been labeled a terrorist organization." I provided the details on Obama's naked cynicism regarding this issue in "Opportunism knocks, part 3." Obama was pivoting to the general election.
Today Charles Krauthammer documents Obama's steps away from his position at the far left of the Democratic Party toward the center of the electorate for the general election. Even better than the instances Krauthammer cites, however, are the accompanying observations:
Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.
Krauthammer likens the media worship of Obama to Communists following the party line: "[H]is media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction."
Vote for your enemy, Garry Wills cynically advised college audiences in the fall of 1972, he has nobody to sell out to but you. Writing in the same spirit, Krauthammer concludes:
The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.
The real Obama is the guy who wants to be president so badly that he has suppressed the sense of embarrassment or shame experienced by normal people under similar circumstances. But the real Obama is also the man of the left who doesn't know much about anything in particular except how to win friends and influence people.
UPDATE: Coinciding with Krauthammer's observation on Obama's media swooners, today's New York Times shows how to toe the line: "For Obama, a pragmatist's shift toward the center." I think that makes the Times the Democratic Party's Daily Worker.
Cheer up. We're winning this War on Terror
Al-Qaeda and the Taleban are in retreat, the surge has worked in Iraq and Islamism is discredited. Not a bad haul
Gerard Baker
"My centre is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack!”
If only our political leaders and opinion-formers displayed even a hint of the defiant resilience that carried Marshal Foch to victory at the Battle of the Marne. But these days timorous defeatism is on the march. In Britain setbacks in the Afghan war are greeted as harbingers of inevitable defeat. In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.
And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier's dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!”
Since it is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it's worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years.
Background
* The hallmark of the Iraq debate is its unreality
* Iraq: Has America lost the will to win?
* Iraq surge fears after al-Qaeda's deadly return
* Petraeus rewarded after ‘surge’ success
Afghanistan has been a signal success. There has been much focus on the latest counter-offensive by the Taleban in the southeast of the country and it would be churlish to minimise the ferocity with which the terrorists are fighting, but it would be much more foolish to understate the scale of the continuing Nato achievement. Establishing a stable government for the whole nation is painstaking work, years in the making. It might never be completed. But that was not the principal objective of the war there.
Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism. Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan's status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda.
In the past three years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been killed. It's true that Osama bin Laden's forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them.
Next time you hear someone say that the war in Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?)
The second great advance in the War on Terror has been in Iraq. There's no need to recapitulate the disasters of the US-led war from the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 to his execution at the end of 2006. We may never fully make up for three and a half lost years of hubris and incompetence but in the last 18 months the change has been startling.
The “surge”, despite all the doubts and derision at the time, has been a triumph of US military planning and execution. Political progress was slower in coming but is now evident too. The Iraqi leadership has shown great courage and dispatch in extirpating extremists and a growing willingness even to turn on Shia militias. Basra is more peaceful and safer than it has been since before the British moved in. Despite setbacks such as yesterday's bombings, the streets of Iraq's cities are calmer and safer than they have been in years. Seventy companies have bid for oil contracts from the Iraqi Government. There are signs of a real political reconciliation that may reach fruition in the election later this year.
The third and perhaps most significant advance of all in the War on Terror is the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal.
This was first of all evident in Iraq, where the head-hacking frenzy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates so alienated the majority of Muslims that it gave rise to the so-called Sunni Awakening that enabled the surge to be so effective.
But it has spread way beyond Iraq. As Lawrence Wright described in an important piece in The New Yorker last month, there is growing disgust not just among moderate Muslims but even among other jihadists at the extremism of the terrorists.
Deeply encouraging has been the widespread revulsion in Muslim communities in Europe - especially in Britain after the 7/7 attacks of three years ago. Some of the biggest intelligence breakthroughs in the past few years have been achieved from former al-Qaeda supporters who have turned against the movement.
There ought to be no surprise here. It's only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.
This is why we fight. Primarily, of course, to protect ourselves from the immediate threat of terrorist carnage, but also because we know that extending the embrace of a civilisation that liberates everyone makes us all safer.
Every death is an unspeakable tragedy. It's right that each time a soldier is killed in action we ask why. Was it really worth it?
The right response to the loss of brave souls such as Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British woman to die in Afghanistan, is not an immediate call for retreat. It is, first of all, pride; a great, deep conviction that it is on such sacrifice that our own freedoms have always rested. Then, defiance. How foolish is the enemy that it might think our grief is really some prelude to their victory? Finally, confidence. We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere: in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.
I Have A Dream
Or Rather, I Think I'm Having a Dream Right Now
By absentee Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | NPR | Shocked and Awed | What?! — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
In a move that is sure to have you asking yourself "Did I actually wake up this morning?", NPR took Senator Obama to task this weekend. That's what I said: NPR.
Scott Simon, heard here in a podcast well worth the listen, wants to know if it just might be possible to question Obama as a candidate without being branded a bigot.
For choice quotes, you can hardly beat this one:
"To my knowledge, Senator McCain has never mentioned Senator Obama's race, much less in the tone Senator Obama implied. What has John McCain ever done or said to merit the charge that he's going to make Senator Obama's race an issue?"
The clean campaign has its rewards. The issue, of course, is Senator Obama's charge last week that the Republicans would, during the election, try and make people afraid of him. Here is the quote:
"We know what kind of campaign they're going to run," said the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. "They're going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. 'He's young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?'"
Read On ...
That's not his only comment along those lines. Mark notes this comment from a Chicago fundraiser only a week earlier:
"But that accurately captures, I think, the strategy. They're [Republicans] going to try to make me into a scary guy. They're even trying to make Michelle into a scary person. Right?" Obama said. "And so that drumbeat – 'we're not sure if he's patriotic or not; we're not sure if he is too black.'"
Good thing he's so post-racial. The Obama camp wants people to be afraid to criticize him. They want those who do dare to criticize to be, at the very least, questionable in the bigot department. Such tactics have worked well in the past. After all, who wants to be the catalyst for Kanye West making Mike Myers squirm again? (Come to think of it, who wants to listen to Kanye West talking at all?)
So far, Senator Obama has been handled with kid gloves. So much so that even joking about him might have you held responsible for the Iraq War. Yet, as his mask comes off, it would seem, so do the gloves. At least some of them.
I know. I pinched myself again too.
Sure, if that "thing" is a lightweight, no experience, say or do anything to get elected typical pol
Seriouly, what behind blind faith makes you think he's a different type of pol or that he actually has ethics?
Obama Heller Reaction Completely Contradicts Previous Stands, Actions
Obama's statement:
“I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view, and while it ruled that the D.C. gun ban went too far, Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe. Today’s ruling, the first clear statement on this issue in 127 years, will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.
“As President, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Today's decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe.”
I'm sorry, how can you claim "I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms" when you steered $15 million to the self-described "most aggressive group in the gun control movement" that published a book entitled, Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns ?
The RNC is calling attention to this comment from before the Potomac Primary, when moderator Leon Harris said, "you support the D.C. handgun ban, and you’ve said that it’s constitutional," and Obama didn't dispute the characterization that he believes the ban is constitutional. If he really disagreed, you figure "I don't think it is constitutional" would have appeared somewhere in his 204-word answer.
06/26 01:12 PM
The good news is Bush finally realized Clinton’s approach represented progress
Sheesh, talk about revisionist history.
It was Clinton ( and Ablrights ) ridiculous concessions to North Korea that actually enabled their nuclear weapons program.
The moral is not that the Clinton way is better, but that he got schooled and the N Koreans took advantage of his naivete. Look at Obama even more stupid policy stances on foreign policy and you can see the future with him at the helm would be even more dicey.
The dullard that wrote the piece thinks that Bush just had a change of heart last week and the treaty just appeared magically.
The bargaining has been going on constantly for years. A big part of our leverage was sanctions and the implied use of force
Typical labial hypocrisy. They say all Bush knows is war mongering and sabre rattling and when he actually resolves a situation w/o force they give him no credit. Worse yet, they give credit to Clinton who started the mess in the first place
Too funny