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They didn't nail them down- they used super glue, because they didn't end up in the story
There was no "proof" of any relationship between McCain and Iseman
There was no " proof " of any illegal actions by McCain in regard to her clients
IF they had the proof, why didn't they put it in the article
Again, I would post the article, but we know you're not programmed to read pasted articles
Google it- Bennet out out a 1500 page article explaining all the dealings
The Times somehow forgot to post all the incidences where he voted against her clients
Interesting that when I posted clear conflicts of interests in Billary's earmarks for certain companies followed by campaign contributions, you never expressed any concern at all
Liberal hypocrisy perhaps?
As would anyone with even half a clue
Think about it, you're sqaying that the NYT has proof, but for some reason decided not to print it???
Why in the world would they do that?
John Weaver Calls BS (Update: Lobbyists The Sources?)
John Weaver has issued a statement that exposes the New York Times story on John McCain as a hack job. Part of their supposed corroboration of the gossip about an allegedly budding romance between McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman was his alleged intervention to stop it. Weaver, who no longer works for the campaign, says he told the Times that his intervention had nothing to do with an affair:
"The New York Times asked for a formal interview and I said no and asked for written questions. The Times knew of my meeting with Ms. Iseman, from sources they didn't identify to me, and asked me about that meeting. I did not inform Senator McCain that I asked for a meeting with Ms. Iseman.
Her comments, which had gotten back to some of us, that she had strong ties to the Commerce Committee and his staff were wrong and harmful and I so informed her and asked her to stop with these comments and to not be involved in the campaign. Nothing more and nothing less.["]
Iseman had bragged about her connections to the committee in order to expand her client list. Weaver heard about it and told her to knock it off, or she'd get frozen out. Lobbyists collect clients by making themselves appear influential, and apparently Iseman got a little too hyperbolic about her connections.
That's the extent of the supposed "intervention" -- and the Times knew it.
Let's talk about the other supposed intervention -- the one claimed by the two staffers who won't go on the record. John Weaver and Mark Salter have been McCain's two top men for ages, and were during this period of time. The Times needs to explain how two lower-level staffers could have gotten access to John McCain during a presidential primary race to stage an intervention over his personal life and his ethics without either Weaver or Salter of them being involved -- and both of them categorically deny it ever happened. Wouldn't it have been Weaver and/or Salter that would have had the access to do that kind of intervention, and not two mid- or low-level staffers?
The Times either needs to produce the staffers or retract the story. It's appalling.
UPDATE: Cleaned up some pronouns and clarified my point in the penultimate paragraph.
UPDATE II: Jonathan Martin at Politico gets an on-the-record denial from former McCain press secretary Howard Opinsky, who describes how Jim Rutenberg was "fishing around" for dirt on Iseman, of whom Opinksy had never heard. Martin asked where the story may have originated, and Opinsky thinks it could have been from disgruntled lobbyists:
Opinksy also said that the Times use of the phrase "associates" to describe their McCain sources suggests that the leak may not have come from his campaign staffers at the time.
"There was only a handful of us [working on the campaign in 1999]," Opinksy said. "We never had a staff meeting to address any of this."
Asked who was behind the story, Opinksy said: "Lobbyists tell a lot of tall tales.
"What's behind this is money. There were a bunch of lobbyists in town who knew that if John McCain became president they were going to have a hard time."
Did the Times use gossip from Iseman's competitors to publish this smear?
LMAO
Well maybe if they had the proof, they should have published it, duhhhhh???
See, it's " All the news that's fit to print", not we print some baseless allegations and you fill in the blanks for the rest
Printing sleazy allegations with no facts to back them up makes them no better than the National enquirer
McCain has said that meeting and warning never happened.
Unless the Times has evidence, this story never should have been printed
They described themselves as disgruntled, w/o explanation. I serioulsy doubt it was over this issue though
The Times conveniently forgot to list all the times that McCain voted against the interests of Iseman's clients
The only thing sullied by this story is the pretense that the Times has any remaining credibility
Look Who’s Talking
Noah Pollak - 02.21.2008 - 14:45
Michael Ledeen offers a rejoinder to one of the sillier promises Barack Obama makes about his approach to Iran and Syria:
We have been talking to Iran virtually non-stop for nearly 30 years. This most definitely includes the Bush administration, which has used open and back channels, including dispatching former Spanish President Felipe Gonzales to Tehran on our behalf. You can judge the results for yourself.
Let’s try it again: We have been talking to Iran. We are talking to Iran right now. The proposal that we talk to Iran is neither new nor does it represent any change in American policy. There is apparently a great desire to deny the facts in this matter.
It is also true that we have been talking to Syria. Well, maybe if we talked more earnestly? And at a higher level of representation? That’s exactly what has distinguished our engagement with Syria from that with Iran. And it hasn’t mattered.
The big push started immediately following the first Gulf War, with James Baker in Damascus promising Hafez Assad the return of the Golan plus an American security guarantee of the border if he would only submit himself to the peace process. Assad, after a great deal of drawn-out, exasperating back-and-forth, finally told Baker to take a hike. Clinton went even further, holding, among other parleys, an eight-day summit in Shepardstown, West Virginia, with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a Syrian delegation headed by the Foreign Minister, and later a one-on-one meeting in Geneva at which Assad brazenly betrayed the terms of a deal to which he had previously agreed.
The Syrian modus operandi both for Hafez and Bashar has been the same: talk and bargain, but give nothing and in the end agree to nothing. This has been the pattern whether the subject of the talks has been Hezbollah, Lebanon, Syrian support for the insurgency in Iraq, or peace with Israel. The latest western leader to get suckered is Nicolas Sarkozy, who this December grew so frustrated trying to negotiate an end to the Lebanese presidential impasse that he declared to the press, “I have reached the end of the road with Assad.”
Obama appears to either not know these details, or thinks that nobody will notice the utter falsity of his claim that we haven’t been “talking to our enemies.” There is thus a Grand Canyon-sized opening for McCain to pummel Obama on the foolishness of this particular trope — an attack that would perfectly complement the wider charge that Obama seems proudly intent on sending the United States wandering naively into the Middle Eastern bazaar.
LMAO
yet were unwilling to believe WJC when he also said...I did nothing improper.
Maybe because Wilie is a compulsive liar and womanizer??
You mean when we didn't believe him when he said " I never had sexual relations with that woman "
The absurd thing here si that there's not even any charges here that anything actually happened and Bennet supplied evidence to contradict the conflict of interest charges
This is a guy who doesn't do any earmarks.
YOu could come up with a long laundry list of Hillary's sleazy contribution/earmark deals done solely for greed
The McCain Counter-Offensive [Byron York]
John McCain's lawyer Bob Bennett was on Today this morning and said that the New York Times left significant information out of its story on McCain's dealings with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. "We provided the New York Times with approximately twelve instances…where Sen. McCain took positions adverse to this lobbyist's clients and her firm's clients," Bennett said. Bennett said "approximately" because, he told Today, he didn't have a precise number. He didn't name any of the instances.
Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has released other information it says it provided to the Times explaining the various actions McCain took on issues of concern to Iseman's clients. Here is McCain's case on those:
The New York Times article states, “A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Iseman’s clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.”
Local Marketing Agreements (Glencairn)
No representative of Glencairn or Alcalde and Fay, met with Senator McCain in 1998 to discuss the issue of local marketing agreements (LMAs). On July 20, 1999, Senator McCain met with Eddie Edwards, the head of Glencairn, regarding LMAs and minority media ownership issues. This meeting was several months after Senator McCain had weighed in at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regarding its expected December 1998 decision on media ownership rules. There were no other meetings in 1999 between any representative of Alcalde and Fay and Senator McCain regarding the issue of LMAs.
Senator McCain’s Commerce Committee staff recalls meeting at least once with representatives of Alcalde and Fay concerning the issue of LMAs. The staff also recalls meeting with many other representatives of media companies, as well as groups advocating for consumer and public interests, regarding the issue of LMAs during the time the FCC was considering the issue.
As to the December 1998 letters and the February 1999 letter, those letters were not written in support of any one party or in favor of a particular interest. Those letters were simply written by Senator McCain as the Chairman of the committee that oversees the FCC to express his opinion that the agency should not act in a manner contradictory to Congressional intent. In both his December 1, 1998 letter and his December 7, 1998 letter, Senator McCain makes clear that Section 202(h) of the 1996 Telecommunications Act unambiguously directs the FCC to review its media ownership rules every two years with an “eye to lessening them, not increasing them.” Additionally, the letters quote from the 1996 Telecommunications Act and its report language, as well as language from the 1997 Budget Reconciliation Act. The letters do not express an opinion on the merits of LMAs, but strongly encourages the FCC to recognize the “clear language” in the statute.
Hundreds of other interested individuals commented on the LMA proceeding, including over a dozen members of Congress from both parties during December 1998 who were also concerned that the FCC would circumvent Congress’ intent. In addition to Senator McCain, Chairman Tauzin of the House Energy and Commerce Committee also stated that the Commission’s failure to act in a manner consistent with the statutory language set forth in the Act would likely result in a review by Congress of the FCC’s function and structure.
Tax Certificates To Encourage Minority Ownership In Broadcasting
When Commissioner Michael Powell was appointed to the FCC in 1998, he spoke with Senator McCain, then Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, about establishing a program that would encourage minority ownership for communications companies, but prevent the rampant abuse that was found in a previous program that the Congress voted to terminate in 1995. McCain and Powell began working in 1999 with the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, the Minority Media and Telecommunication Council, and other minority groups.
That fall, Senator McCain introduced the “Telecommunications Ownership Diversification Act” and Commissioner Powell voiced his support. As the Senator explained in his introductory floor statement on October 8, 1999, he introduced this bill due to his concern that small businesses face “significant barriers in trying to enter the telecommunications industry … These barriers are even more formidable when the entrepreneur happens to be a woman or a member of a minority group, due to their historically more difficult job of obtaining needed financing.” The legislation was referred to the Senate Finance Committee because the bill amended the tax code.
The bill was supported by many broadcasters, and for this reason a group of over 30 companies formed a coalition to lobby on behalf of the bill, which included several of Alcalde and Fay’s clients. The coalition included the major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC, as well as the National Associations of Broadcasters. Other members included the Minority Media and Telecommunication Council, National Asian American Telecommunications Association, National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations, National Council of Churches, National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National Indian Telecommunications Institute and National Urban League.
Senator McCain reintroduced the bill in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congressional sessions, but it has never been considered by the Finance Committee. It should also be noted that Senator McCain along with Senator Gordon Smith have been working to reintroduce this legislation during the 110th Congressional session, as Senator Smith announced during a Senate Commerce hearing.
Additionally, Senator McCain has continued to introduce a bill to promote more small community radio broadcasters, some of which may be minorities. Senator McCain has introduced some form of the legislation promoting the expansion of low power FM radio stations in the 106th, 107th, 108th, 109th and 110th Congressional sessions to show his continued support of media ownership diversity.
Facts With Respect To Letters To The FCC (November 17 And December 10, 1999)
No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay discussed with Senator McCain the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proceeding regarding the transfer of Pittsburgh public television station (WQED) to Cornerstone Broadcasting and Cornerstone Broadcasting’s television station (WPCB) to Paxson. No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding.
Senator McCain was actively engaged in a presidential campaign in 1999-2000, and according his calendar, the last day he conducted business in the Senate was November 8, 1999, and was frequently absent from the Senate prior to that date. He returned to the Senate the night of November 19, 1999 for one hour to participate in a budget vote, and the Senate adjourned shortly thereafter on November 22, 1999. Between November 22, 1999 and Christmas, the Senator did not return to the Senate for any substantive meetings as he was involved in a national book tour and a presidential campaign.
Senator McCain’s Commerce Committee staff recalls meeting with representatives of Alcalde and Fay concerning the FCC’s failure to act on the transfer application. Staff also met with public broadcasting activists from the Pittsburgh area about the transfer application. While the two parties differed in their desired outcome from the FCC, both parties expressed to staff members their frustration that the proceeding had been before the FCC for over two years. Both parties asked the staff to contact the FCC regarding the proceeding. Senator McCain’s personal staff did not meet with any parties regarding this transfer.
While neither the Senator nor his Staff agreed to take, nor did they ever take, a position on the proposed transfer, Committee Staff did agree to draft a letter from Senator McCain to FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, dated November 17, 1999 that began, “I write today to express my concern about the Commission’s continuing failure to act on the pending applications for assignment of the licenses of WQEX(TV) and WPCB(TV), Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.” The letter did not call for the Commission to resolve the matter in favor of either party, and specifically stated, “This letter is not written to secure a favorable resolution for any party on any substantive issue pending before the Commission. Please treat this letter in full compliance with all applicable, legal, ethical, and procedural rules.” Clearly, the purpose of the letter was to request action on the transfer application, not to promote a resolution favorable to a particular applicant.
When the Senator received no response from Chairman Kennard, the Senator’s Committee Staff drafted and sent a letter on December 10, 1999 to the other four members of the Commission and attached the original letter Senator McCain sent to Chairman Kennard. Senator McCain explained to the four Commissioners that he had received no response from Kennard’s office and therefore he was bringing the matter to the attention of the remaining four Commissioners. The letter stated, “The sole purpose of this request is to secure final action on a matter that has now been pending for over two years. I emphasize that my purpose is not to suggest in any way how you should vote – merely that you vote.” (Italics used in original letter.)
During this time, the average time for the FCC to decide a broadcast license transfer was 418 days. Senator McCain wrote the Commission after the parties had waited over 800 days for a decision and again, did not request the FCC to decide the transfer in favor of Paxson or any party. Several other legislators were interested in this proceeding, especially Congressmen Oxley, Stearns, Pickering and Largent who also wrote the FCC regarding the proceeding. Additionally, the FCC’s Memorandum Opinion and Order (FCC 99-393) for this proceeding states that some Congressmen had threatened to offer legislation regarding the transfer application.
Very odd that you point out the conflict of interest here, but when Murtha's pork is brought up, you defend it as " doing the best for his constituents "
I guess you see no conflict there, huh?
So, 2 self described disgruntled employees say that nothing actually happened??
And this is a big deal??
Florida's Darwinian Interlude
By Ben Stein
Published 2/20/2008 12:08:44 AM
Just a few tiny, insignificant little questions.
* How did the universe start?
* Where did matter come from?
* Where did energy come from?
* Where did the laws of motion, thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, come from?
* Where did gravity come from?
* How did inorganic matter, that is, lifeless matter such as dirt and rocks, become living beings?
* Has anyone ever observed beyond doubt the evolution of a new mammalian or aviary species, as opposed to changes within a species?
These teeny weeny little questions are just some of the issues as to which Darwin and Darwinism have absolutely no verifiable answers. Hypotheses.
Yes. Guesses. Yes. Proof? None.
To my little pea brain, these are some pretty big issues about evolution, the origins of life, and genetics that Darwinism cannot answer. Now, to be fair, does anyone else have verifiable answers either? Not as far as I know.
But if there are no answers that can be reproduced in the laboratory, isn't any theory about them a hypothesis or a guess? Isn't any hypothesis worth thinking about? And aren't these immense questions?
Yet the state of Florida, the glorious Sunshine State, was (I am told), until recently, considering legislation that would make it illegal to allow teachers or students in public schools to discuss any hypothesis about origins of life or the universe except that it all happened by accident without any prime mover or first cause or designer -- allowing only, again, the hypothesis, which is considered Darwinian, that it all started by, well, by, something that Darwin never even mentioned.
That is, the state of Florida was considering mandating that only Darwinian-type suppositions can be allowed about scientific subjects that Darwin never studied. (This is not to mention that we know now that Darwin was wildly wrong about some subjects such as genetics, and, again, although he wrote about the evolution of species, never observed an entirely new species evolve.)
This was beyond Stalinism. Stalinism decreed that only Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin knew all the answers, but it did not say that subjects they never mentioned could only be studied if the student guessed at what they might have said. The proposed law in the state of Florida was an anti-knowledge, anti-freedom of inquiry law on a scale such as has rarely been encountered. Maybe in Pol Pot's Kampuchea there were such laws, but they have been unknown in the USA until now.
By an incredible miracle of good sense, at the last minute, the state of Florida changed the proposed regulations. They backed off powerfully saying that only Darwinism could possibly make sense and said they would allow discussion of differing theories about the origins of life. That's the current proposal as I write this on the afternoon of the 19th of February.
I suspect the now omitted proposals would have been unconstitutional in any event (although this always depends on the court you ask). Freedom of inquiry is part of freedom of speech. That is basic. That is what America is all about. Whatever the proposed -- now discarded -- regulations were, they have nothing to do with freedom, very little to do with science, and not even much to do with Darwin, who had a lot more respect for freedom of thought than his henchmen in Florida apparently do.
Reinforcing Failure
February 19, 2008: The presence of NATO troops (with their smart bombs and UAVs) makes the traditional Afghan combat methods (a couple hundred guys with guns) impractical. So the al Qaeda bomb tactics have been adopted more frequently. Apparently the Taliban missed the part where al Qaeda got run out of Iraq, by Iraqis, because of the large number of civilians killed by terrorist bombs. The same cycle is playing out in Afghanistan. There were 140 bomb attacks in Afghanistan last year, and the Taliban are apparently trying to up that number this year. The Afghan police are arresting a lot of the terrorists. Many of the most skilled terrorists (who can build bombs and deploy them) are foreigners, and easy to spot. The skill level of Afghan suicide bomb teams is still low, with bomb makers still getting killed by their own creations, and most attacks killing nothing but bombers and civilians. This years "Spring Offensive" will apparently feature more suicide bombs, and attempts to manipulate the Western media (to pressure Western governments to withdraw troops from Afghanistan).
February 18, 2008: A suicide car bomb, attempting to attack Canadian troops, missed and killed about 40 civilians in a crowded Kandahar marketplace, and wounding four Canadian troops.
February 17, 2008: In the southern city of Kandahar, a truck bomb went off at a sporting event, killing nearly a hundred people. The target was an anti-Taliban tribal commander, who was apparently the main target.
February 15, 2008: The cold weather in western Afghanistan has abated. The snow and low temperatures were the worst in decades. Over 300,000 cattle died, along with over a thousand people. In addition, several thousand suffered cold related injuries (particularly lost limbs from frost bite). The cold has also shut down the usual Taliban activities, which have largely shifted across the border to Pakistan, where the Taliban is fighting for its very survival against an enraged government and population.
Big News from Baghdad
Peter Wehner - 02.19.2008 - 16:56
ABC News’ Clarissa Ward reports that:
If you’re looking for one measure of the impact of last year’s troop surge in Iraq, look at Gen. David Petraeus as he walks through a Baghdad neighborhood, with no body armor, and no helmet. It’s been one year since the beginning of what’s known here as Operation Fardh Al Qadnoon. According to the U.S. military, violence is down 60 percent. One key to the success is reconciliation.
“A big part of the effort, over the last year, has been to determine who is reconcilable, who, literally, is willing to put down his rifle and talk, who is willing to shout, instead of shoot.” Petraeus said. I spent the day with Petraeus, touring Jihad, a predominantly Shiite area in western Baghdad. This place was formerly ravaged by sectarian violence, and militiamen wreaked havoc on the streets. In the last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops moved into the neighborhood, set up joint security stations, earned the trust of local people, and found those men willing to put down their guns and work with them. The results of the last year can be seen on the streets. A soccer team practices on the local pitch. The stalls in the market buzz with customers. I stop to talk to local residents, and ask if they feel a difference. Overwhelmingly, the answer is a resounding yes. “The situation in Jihad is certainly better than before,” a mechanic named Ali said. “Work is constant, shops are reopening, and people are coming back to their homes.” Notwithstanding significant progress, much work clearly remains. The Iraqi government has yet to capitalize on the relative peace and improve the local infrastructure. Sewage and trash fester in the streets. “We have very little electricity,” Ali said. The hope is, that with the passing of a budget this week, that will change. “That unlocks a substantial amount of money for the ministries of Iraq, so that they can start going about the jobs that are so essential, like patching roads that we bounced down today; over long term, improving electricity, fixing water systems, sewer systems,” Petraeus said. Normally very guarded in his assessments of the surge, Petraeus now expresses cautious optimism.
“I have to tell you that, having been here for a number of years, this is very encouraging, actually. I mean, this is, this is potentially a big moment.” he said.
A potentially big moment indeed. We are now seeing extraordinary security gains from the last year translate into both political reconciliation and legislative progress. Within the last week the Iraqi parliament passed key laws having to do with provincial elections (the law devolves power to the local level in a decentralization system that is groundbreaking for the region), the distribution of resources, and amnesty. And those laws follow ones passed in recent months having to do with pensions, investment, and de-Ba’athification.
American Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard that “the whole motivating factor” beyond the legislation was “reconciliation, not retribution.” This is “remarkably different” from six months ago, according to the widely respected, straight-talking Crocker.
Progress in Iraq means life is getting progressively more difficult for Democrats and their two presidential front-runners, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Having strongly opposed the surge, Obama and Clinton have been forced by events to concede that security progress has been made. But until now they have insisted that the surge is a failure because we’re not seeing political progress. That claim is now being shattered.
Soon Obama and Clinton will have no argument left to justify their position on Iraq. It will become increasingly clear that they are committed to leaving Iraq simply because they are committed to leaving Iraq, regardless of the awful consequences that would follow. It is an amazing thing to witness: two leading presidential candidates who are committed to engineering an American retreat, which would lead to an American defeat, despite the progress we are making on every conceivable front.
At the end of the day, this position will hurt Democrats badly, because their position will hurt America badly.
ABC News Political Director "Stumps the Clinton Campaign" [Greg Pollowitz]
Hilarious. Clinton's advisers have spent so much time trying to dig up dirt on Obama, they never bothered to figure out how the Texas primary actually works:
On the Clinton campaign conference call yesterday, a telling (non) answer from Clinton communications staffers Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer.
When ABC News Political Director David Chalian asked them asked about the Texas contest and how they would assess victory in that complicated caucus/primary contest, the answer was tellingly confused.
The reason this is significant (beyond the Clinton campaign's seeming unpreparedness for the Texas contest — more on that HERE) is the possibility that Clinton could win Texas overall but lose the delegate allocation in Texas.
David Chalian: On Texas and Ohio, you guys have obviously pointed to the importance of these states for quite a while, does a Texas victory only get considered a victory if you win both the primary there and the final delegate count due to the complex system there?
Howard Wolfson: Look, I think all of you will be looking at a lot of different data points to determine who wins the night. I think obviously, the delegate counts in this state is one of them, but I'm not going to presume to tell ABC News how to determine the outcome from a rhetorical standpoint. But I think we're going to do very very well.
David Chalian: But, I'm asking would you consider it a victory if you don't win the delegate allocation in Texas that night?
Howard Wolfson: Ummm, you know, I'd have to think about that. I don't know the answer to that.
David Chalian: Okay, thank you.
Howard Wolfson: That is a, ah, less than unequivocal, but I don't know, Phil, do you have a thought on that?
Phil Singer: Umm, no.
Howard Wolfson: You've stumped us. The last question has stumped us.
02/19 08:36 AM
How oily can you get?
Posted by: McQ
Hillary Clinton didn't think she needed Texas way back in January when she thought all of this would be over by Super Tuesday and she'd be the presumptive nominee:
I'll tell you what. In my inaugural speech, I'm going to serve notice on the oil companies and on the oil producing countries: that we are not going to be taken advantage of any longer, that we are going to once again be in charge of our future.
And I can tell you what'll happen.
You know, the oil producing countries and the oil companies will have a conversation. They have a cartel in case you haven't noticed.
And they'll drop the price of oil because they figure they've done it before, they'll do it again. They'll take the political heat off. Everybody will say "Oh, great, did you see how much the gas price has fallen? Oh, we don't have to worry about this anymore."
It's like the old story about how to boil a frog. You drop a frog in boiling water, it jumps right out. You drop it in cold water, you turn the heat up - you've got a boiled frog before too long. We have been the boiled frog in this story, for decades.
Well, not on my watch. We are going to get out of that pan and we're going to be back in charge. And we're going to show the world what we can do when we put our minds to it.
Well that was then and this is now, and, as you might have noticed, Texas is crucial to Clinton's chances of regaining the lead in the Democratic primary. So suddenly, that old oil business isn't so bad:
Clinton said her White House agenda would include environmentally friendly policies that would create millions of jobs. But she said the plan "also recognizes the continuing vital role of the oil and gas industry," another huge Houston-area employer.
She said she voted for legislation to expand oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico because she backs such projects that have local support and are environmentally sound. Obama voted against, she added.
"I think on that issue alone, I should be able to make a strong case to the energy community" for support, the New York senator said.
The Clintons: Making 180s and pandering an artform since 1992.
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QandO
Sometimes a little duct tape is in order
Posted by: McQ
Or better yet, sometimes it's just better to have no opinion about a subject:
A co-chairman of Hillary's Michigan campaign and has a line that's sure to drive a whole bunch of red state governors up the wall:
"Superdelegates are not second-class delegates," says Joel Ferguson, who will be a superdelegate if Michigan is seated. "The real second-class delegates are the delegates that are picked in red-state caucuses that are never going to vote Democratic."
So all you red state delegates (and voters for that matter) - you are indeed second-class in the opinion of blue state Democrats (in the, you know, classless Democratic party?), well, at least as this nimrod sees it.
Heh ... you have to laugh. Someone sticks a microphone in front of some folks and they have to say something, don't they? I have to wonder if there may just be a single chairman of Hillary's Michigan campaign after that little jewel.
exactly- the more hillary tries to maki it a big deal- the more desperate she looks
Is This Really Plagiarism? No
The New York Times makes a big deal about some similarities between elements in Barack Obama's speech and similar constructs in speeches given earlier by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in 2006. While the wording appears too close for coincidence, one has to wonder how much anyone could vary the constructs in similar themes (via Memeorandum):
Senator Barack Obama adapted one of his signature arguments — that his oratory amounts to more than inspiring words — from speeches given by Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts during his 2006 campaign.
At a Democratic Party dinner Saturday in Wisconsin, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, responded to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who has criticized him for delivering smooth speeches but says they do not amount to solutions to the nation’s problems, by ticking through a string of historic references.
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter,” Mr. Obama said, to applause. “ ‘I have a dream’ — just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? Just speeches?”
Mr. Patrick employed similar language during his 2006 governor’s race when his Republican rival, Kerry Healey, criticized him as offering lofty rhetoric over specifics. Mr. Patrick has endorsed Mr. Obama, and the two men are close friends.
“ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? Just words?” Mr. Patrick said one month before his election. “ ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Just words? ‘I have a dream’ — just words?”
After six paragraphs of drawing lines between the speeches, Jeff Zeleny then undermines the entire argument by reporting on how Obama got the theme in the first place. Patrick has counseled Obama on how to counter the experience argument, as Patrick had to face it in his race in 2006. Patrick put his speechwriters in touch with Obama's team to develop the same themes in his stump speeches after consultations last week.
That's a lot different than plagiarism. In fact, to quote Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, it "ain't the same [expletive] ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same [expletive] sport." When Joe Biden lifted entire passages of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock's speeches and passed them off as his own -- and as James Joyner notes, even including Kinnock's personal anecdotes -- that's plagiarism. Biden was unethical and dishonest, while Patrick wanted Obama to make use of his constructs. Perhaps Obama could have referenced Patrick in the speech, but he wasn't quoting Patrick, and how many other ways could he have said the same thing?
Clearly, someone wants to rub a little of the gloss off of Obama's perceived honor and straightforward mien. And who might that be? Howard Wolfson -- one of Hillary Clinton's top aides:
Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign's communications director, today accused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of committing “plagiarism” in a speech in Milwaukee on Saturday night.
Wolfson made the explosive charge in an interview with Politico after suggesting as much in a conference call with reporters.
On the call, Wolfson said: “Sen. Obama is running on the strength of his rhetoric and the strength of his promises and, as we have seen in the last couple of days, he’s breaking his promises and his rhetoric isn’t his own.”
"When an author plagiarizes from another author there is damage done to two different parties. One is to the person he plagiarized from. The other is to the reader," said Wolfson.
Put simply, it's nonsense. It is, however, an indication of how desperate Hillary has become to derail Obama. The supposed victim, Patrick, has already issued a statement hotly criticizing Hillary's campaign for this attack. That should answer the question rather neatly, and call into question why Team Hillary would have launched this attack without securing the support of Patrick for the faux outrage.
Watch the backfire that comes out from this.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 18, 2008 12:17 PM
You're using one person opinion to justify our position
I read their book- it's full of facts that haven't been disproved
They go through extensive analysis to prove that certain statements made couldn't be true ( fog of war and all )
Did you read their book??
Didn't think so, yet you feel qualified to discredit them
What a surprise
No Progress? Withdraw. Progress? Withdraw.
The Los Angeles Times editorial board not only contradicts its previous editorials on Iraq, today's editorial contradicts itself. After pushing for withdrawal from Iraq on the basis that the US and Iraqis had made no real political progress, today they argue that we should withdraw because political progress has undeniably begun. And in conclusion, they wind up arguing for exactly the opposite:
It has taken nine bloody and difficult months, but the deployment of 30,000 additional U.S. troops appears at last to have brought not just a lull in the sectarian fighting in Iraq, but the first tangible steps toward genuine political reconciliation.
Last week, the parliament passed a crucial package of legislation that reflects real compromise among the many factions on three of the thorniest issues that have bedeviled Iraq. First, a law requires that provincial elections be held by Oct. 1, and requires that a law spelling out the details on conducting the election be passed within 90 days.
Despite this progress, we still "must" leave, the LAT exhorts us. However, they recognize that the success may make withdrawal more "difficult", because political and military leaders won't want to surrender the gains already made and put at risk future progress. Does this come as a surprise to the LAT? Apparently, they haven't had much cause to study war and politics, where surrendering gains and future progress are usually seen as, well, stupid.
In their concluding paragraph, they make the counterargument to their own editorial:
If the momentum of Iraq's political surge is sustained, it's conceivable that the United States, having torn the country apart in an ill-conceived invasion and a disastrous occupation, could help glue the biggest pieces together on its way out the door. But building a decent government will probably prove even harder than curbing the violence. And even under the rosiest scenario, it will be our moral duty to provide large-scale political, military and humanitarian aid, including support for the refugees who are beginning to trickle back home, for many years to come.
Well, in fact, that's a great argument for staying engaged in Iraq. As John McCain notes, if the American presence in Iraq provides stability, promotes reconciliation, and strengthens democracy not just in Iraq but in the region without costing American lives, why would we leave? We did the same thing in Korea, Japan, and Europe, and in fact we're still in Korea, Japan, and Europe, accomplishing all of those tasks and pressuring other regimes to change their ways.
This is just the latest volley from the retreat-and-defeat crowd. Instead of declaring the war lost, as Harry Reid did from the Senate floor, they've decided to call the war won -- and demand the same retreat. It's the same policy of retreat with a prettier, more electable message. We won! It's over! It's V-I Day, and now the troops and the US can just leave!
No, we can't. The progress is real, and has been for months, even while people like Hillary Clinton called American commanders liars for saying so. It needs to continue and we have to push al-Qaeda in Iraq out of the country entirely. We have to continue stabilizing Iraq and supporting their national reconciliation. Our role will evolve as the Iraqis become more able to provide for their own security, but we need to ensure that Iraq doesn't collapse.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 18, 2008 8:29 A
Where's the Outrage? [Byron York]
I'm sure you've noticed stories like this one, in which some areas in New York City appear to have grossly undercounted votes for Barack Obama on Super Tuesday primary night. The New York Times reported finding 80 election districts in the city, some in Harlem, in which "Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district." Recounts revealed that Obama had, in fact, received lots of votes.
So where are the cries of disenfranchisement, or at least attempted disenfranchisement? Where are the conspiracy theories? The outrage? And for that matter, where are the cries of outrage that many Democratic party officials appear determined to deny the states of Florida and Michigan representation at the Democratic National Convention? One-point-seven million people voted in Florida's Democratic primary and 595,000 voted in Michigan's Democratic contest. As things stand now, they will have no representation at the convention. (And while those voters are silent, each state's superdelegates will be able to vote however they choose.)
This is a party that went bonkers over the supposed – never proven or even convincingly alleged – disenfranchisement of a relatively tiny number of voters in Florida in 2000. This is a party in which some imagined conspiracies in Ohio in 2004 in which Karl Rove somehow personally hacked voting machines to assure George W. Bush's victory. And now black votes are ignored in New York, at least initially, and more than two million votes are ignored in Florida and Michigan, and are we hearing outraged accusations of malignant forces at work? If so, it's a pretty quiet outrage.
02/18 07:13 AM[/i[
Why Torts Trumped Terrorism
By Robert D. Novak
Monday, February 18, 2008; Page A17
A closed-door caucus of House Democrats last Wednesday took a risky political course. By 4 to 1, they instructed Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call President Bush's bluff on extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to continue eavesdropping on suspected foreign terrorists. Rather than passing the bill with a minority of the House's Democratic majority, Pelosi obeyed her caucus and left town for a week-long recess without renewing the government's eroding intelligence capability.
Pelosi could have exercised leadership prerogatives and called up the FISA bill to pass with unanimous Republican support. Instead, she refused to bring to the floor a bill approved overwhelmingly by the Senate. House Democratic opposition included left-wing members typified by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, but they were only a small faction of those opposed. The true reason for blocking the bill was Senate-passed retroactive immunity to protect from lawsuits private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation's torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity.
The recess by House Democrats amounts to a judgment that losing the generous support of trial lawyers, the Democratic Party's most important financial base, would be more dangerous than losing the anti-terrorist issue to Republicans. Dozens of lawsuits have been filed against the phone companies for giving individuals' personal information to intelligence agencies without a warrant. Mike McConnell, the nonpartisan director of national intelligence, says delay in congressional action deters cooperation in detecting terrorism.
Big money is involved. Amanda Carpenter, a Townhall.com columnist, has prepared a spreadsheet showing that 66 trial lawyers representing plaintiffs in the telecommunications suits have contributed $1.5 million to Democratic senators and causes. Of the 29 Democratic senators who voted against the FISA bill last Tuesday, 24 took money from the trial lawyers (as did two absent senators, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). Eric A. Isaacson of San Diego, one of the telecommunications plaintiffs' lawyers, contributed to the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Sen. Chris Dodd, who led the Senate fight against the bill containing immunity.
The bill passed the Senate 68 to 29, with 19 Democrats voting aye. They included intelligence committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller and three senators who defeated Republican incumbents in the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress: Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jim Webb of Virginia and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
That opened the door for Pelosi to pass the bill with minority Democratic support. A Jan. 28 letter to the speaker signed by 21 House Blue Dogs (moderate Democrats) urged passage of Rockefeller's bill containing immunity. Democrats supporting it could exceed 40 in a House vote, easily enough for passage.
Instead, the Democratic leadership Wednesday brought up another bill simply extending FISA authority, this time for 21 days. Republicans refused to go along because it did not provide phone companies with the necessary immunity. It still could have passed with support from Democrats alone, and the leadership surely thought that would happen when it was brought to the floor Wednesday. But it failed, 229 to 191, with 34 Democrats voting no despite pleas for support from their leaders. The opponents included three congressmen who signed the letter to Pelosi advocating immunity from lawsuits, but most were Kucinich Democrats who intuitively oppose any anti-terrorist proposal.
Clearly, opposition to the Rockefeller bill shown in the subsequent House Democratic caucus derived less from Kucinich's phobia about tough anti-terror countermeasures than obeisance to generous trial lawyers. Pelosi had to decide whether to pass the bill with a minority of her party, which can be dangerous for any leader of a House majority. In October 1998, Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich passed the Clinton administration's budget with 30 percent Republican support, less than a month before GOP losses in midterm elections forced his resignation from Congress.
Nothing will be done until the House formally returns Feb. 25, and the adjournment resolution was constructed so that Bush cannot summon Congress back into session. Last Friday morning, debating two backbench Republicans on a nearly deserted House floor, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said there was no danger in letting the FISA legislation lapse temporarily. Democrats hope that will be the reaction of voters, as Republicans attack what happened last week.
¿ 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Climate change: China - Victim, US - Culprit
Posted by: McQ
This is an example of how absurd the argument about climate change has become and illustrates why there will be no world wide agreement to cut carbon dioxide emissions unless the US and Europe capitulate to the 'victims':
Negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations are not treated as "culprits" and developing countries as "victims," China's top climate envoy says.
The whole world must take action to confront climate change, but developed countries have a "historical responsibility" to do much more because their unrestrained emissions in the past century are responsible for global warming, Ambassador Yu Qingtai said on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly debate on climate change last week.
"The United States and the developed states as a whole are the countries that created the problem, caused the problem of climate change in the first place. In my view, that's what a culprit means," he said.
The United States and China are the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
Washington has argued it should not have to cut its emissions to a level that would hurt the U.S. economy as long as countries like China and India are not required to make similar cuts.
In December, delegations from nearly 190 countries agreed at a conference in Bali, Indonesia, to adopt a blueprint for controlling global warming gases before the end of next year.
Yu said that agreement reiterated a principle of different responsibilities for rich and poor nations.
If it is abandoned, he warned, "people will just disperse and go their own ways and do their own things."
Now, you don't even have to be particularly bright to figure that one out. China, perhaps the biggest net polluter on the planet, is a victim because its repressive regime and Maoist politics hindered economic growth while other economies were streaking ahead of it. Now that it has gotten its head out of its collective posterier as it concerns its economy, it wants the advantage of a free pass while the "culprits" are punished for having relatively free economies and developing them.
This isn't about CO2. It's about political and economic advantage. And I have no confidence that our political leaders, at least those on the left, won't willingly trade it away in the name of "saving the planet".
Is an October Surrender in the Making?
By James Lewis
Get this: Right in the middle of the hottest presidential primary in decades, both Obama and Hillary are sending their foreign policy honchos to Damascus. These advisors are people who have a chance of running US foreign policy in the next administration.
They aren't shy. They are taking over our foreign affairs right now, because they are entitled to. They know better than our elected officials.
What are they doing in Damascus? Not having a Christian conversion experience, for sure. Damascus is a world sanctuary for Islamic terrorists. One of them, Imad Mughniyeh, was just assassinated there. He ran Hezbollah's secret operations from Damascus.
Damascus has also been the transit point for thousands of jihadis going to Iraq to commit suicide-murders against Americans and Iraqis. If you want to talk to Al Qaida and the gang, Damascus is your place. Syria's President Assad is also Iran's best buddy in the Arab world. (Iran is the State Department's biggest terror-sponsoring state.) So Assad is the go-to guy for all the terror sponsors.
The New York Sun writes:
"The same week that a terrorist mastermind harbored by the Baathist regime in Damascus was assassinated by a car bomb, both one of Mr. Obama's foreign policy counselors, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a long-time critic of Israel, and one of Mrs. Clinton's national finance chairs, Hassan Nemazee, were meeting with President Assad."
If you're too young to remember the name Zbigniew Brzezinski, he is Jimmy Carter foreign policy genius, on whose watch the Iranian mullahs got into thirty years of power -- with a nuke coming right up. Brzezinski still thinks today that he and Jimmy were right to bring in old mass-murdering Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. These people are never wrong. Would you trust this guy to represent the United States against Islamofascist terror types?
It's obvious that Hillabama desperately need to send a can't-wait message to the people who attacked us on 9/11. So urgent that they can't even wait for the Democrats to declare a presidential candidate, or to defeat John McCain. This must be a message Hillary and Obama are coordinating with each other, since they are sending both of their foreign policy advisors at the same time to the same place.
Question: What message would that be?
Here's a fair guess. They are telling Terror Central to hold any plans to attack us during the presidential election. Why? Because another 9/11 attack before the election would give the presidency to John McCain, who looks like a hard-ball guy militarily.
It's the reverse of the October Surprise Theory: Call it the October Surrender Theory. The Terror Masters have huge leverage with the Democrats, because they can keep Obama or Hillary out of the White House. You can bet that they know it. They are using that leverage today.
To get the terrorists to cooperate, the Dems would have to be making promises. What are they? That's easy. The Democrats have been telling us in the Op-Ed pages for years.
First. Give up US cooperation with Israel. (See Jimmy Carter's latest book.) The aim is a US-imposed "peace treaty" -- which would be very fine if Hamas and the gang could be trusted to follow a peace treaty. But as Yasser Arafat made so clear when Israel offered him 90% of the West Bank, a peace with Israel is not what they want. Arafat told Bill Clinton at Camp David that he would be assassinated if he signed a peace treaty with Israel. If anything, Palestinian politics today is even more radical today than it was then.
Remember, this is the fantasy life of the Left. Facts don't count.
A leading Israeli Leftist just told Secretary of State Condi Rice recently that "Israel needs to be raped." But when push comes to shove, chances are that most Israelis will decide, no thanks, we'll fight. So this version of "peace in our time" is very likely to mean "war in our time." Israel is not so dependent upon us that it will choose another Holocaust.
Second. The Democrats have been pounding the table for four years that the US should get out of Iraq as quickly as possible. We can only take them at their word. Notice that our ambassador in Iraq just warned against a hasty withdrawal from Baghdad -- even though diplomats are never supposed to say such things in public. The timing is significant. He can read the signs.
Remember that the Democrats think the US defeat in Vietnam and the fall of Saigon was a foreign policy success. The United States needs a bloody nose, they think, to teach us some humility forever. So they want to see those US helicopters taking the last refugees off Baghdad high rise buildings. They don't mind a massive refugee flight like the Vietnamese Boat People and a new Killing Fields in Iraq. It's just breaking some more eggs to make another bloody omelet.
After all, they didn't mind it with the Vietnam War, did they? These are the people who shrugged and rationalized genocide whenever it was committed by the Left ever since Lenin took over Russia -- for a total of 100 million dead in the 20th century alone. They haven't changed one bit.
Third. The Dems want to negotiate a retreat from the Persian Gulf. It might look like an agreement between the Arab Gulf States and Iran. In fact, as soon as the US Navy leaves the Gulf, it means a surrender to the Iranian theocracy. The Democrats would make sure we can never come back, no matter what the Iranians do.
The benefit to the United States? Peace in our time. The benefit to the Democrats? Another Carter-Clinton Presidency, but a really successful one this time, because this time our enemies will be nice.
And if you believe that, vote Hillabama!
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
I didn't think you'd be able to find an instance where the information the swift boat vets provided was false
TIA
Please lits all the fact that the "Swift Boaters" brought up that were proved incorrect.
TIA
And please don't quote any article, just use your own words
TIATIATIA
I rarely read cut 'n paste posts.
I can't imagine how anyone interested in politics would limit themselves to what the posters on this board post
Do you not read articles in magazines/papers/on the web for information? See, this is the same thing, but you don't even have to find the article itself
I'm not saying anything, the facts in the article speak for themselves
You have long whined that the surge was a failure because no political progress has been made
The passage by the parliament of the law listed in the article is a huge step in that direction
Before the meme was " well the surge has failed militarily" followed by grudging admittal that " well, the surge has worked militarily, but there has been no political progress ", now that this bill has passed and other progress has been made, what will the deniers say??
TIA
Any comments Peggy?
Whatever happened to those benchmarks?
The Iraqi Parliament has passed some new and potentially significant laws.
This particular event should have been the lead article on the front page of every newspaper. It should have been the big subject of all the talk shows. It ought to have been acknowledged by every critic of the surge—you know, the ones who initially said the surge wouldn’t work before it even began. The ones who then said Petraeus was lying about the drop in casualties. The ones who then said that it didn’t mean anything anyway because after all, the Iraqi legislature hadn’t met the proper benchmarks that would indicate political progress and reconciliation.
However, here’s how it played on the network news programs. Only ABC’s Charles Gibson saw fit to cover it, repeating an ABC pattern of being more favorable to favorable news from Iraq. And even Gibson alloted it only twenty seconds (although they were positive seconds), the sort of skim-the-surface coverage for which network TV news is notorious:
Overseas, in Iraq, a breakthrough for the country’s government that has been so often criticized. Iraq’s parliament approved three contentious, but crucial, new laws long sought by Washington. The laws set a budget for 2008, grant amnesty to thousands of detainees and define the relationship between the central government and the provinces.
Much better, though, than rivals NBC and CBS. For them, no mention of the Iraqi developments, but:
The CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News on Wednesday night both found time to report on how Secretary of Defense Robert Gates broke his arm in a fall on ice and how, for the first time, a Beagle (named “Uno”) won “Best in Show” at the Westminster Dog Show.
I’m full of compassion for Gates, and I’m fond enough of beagles, but really.
Print journalists did better. Even the AP said this represents one of those much-ballyhooed benchmarks:
The new law…is one of the most sweeping reforms pushed by the Bush administration and signals that Iraq’s politicians finally, if grudgingly, may be ready for small steps toward reconciliation.
Passage of benchmark reforms on healing the country’s sectarian and ethnic rifts — along with a reduction in violence — were the primary goals of the 30,000-strong U.S. troop increase that President Bush ordered early last year.
Violence has dropped significantly, but political progress languished until the logjam broke Wednesday by the narrowest of margins. Before the vote, the only significant measure to emerge from parliament had been a law that allows reinstatement to government jobs of some low-level members of Saddam Hussein’s former Baath party.
The outcome of the October elections is likely to reshape Iraq’s political map.
No, of course it doesn’t mean we’re home free in that country. That would be an absurd assertion to make. But it does mean events are continuing in a very positive direction there. As Richard Fernandez points out:
The more reason to inform the American public of the logic behind electoral reform and why it is so vital. Iraqi and American lives have taken the country back from the brink of civil war and on the approaches to normalcy. But the last steps are the most important. This is where it all pays off.
But all the more reason to be coy or underwhelmed about what’s happening there, because it presents such an embarrassing dilemma to those who said it couldn’t be done. And those are legion, including the vast majority of Democrats, most of our MSM, and certainly the present Democratic candidates.
To its credit, the New York Times covered the story. But how it did so is also very instructive (I don’t know what the story’s placement was, since I’m only reading online and don’t have a hard copy of the paper).
First we have a headline unlikely to garner interest in reading further. Vague and generalized, it fails to describe what’s happening or why it might be important or how it ties into the surge and the benchmarks: “Ending impasse, Iraqi Parliament passes measures.”
Yawn. Still with us? Thought not.
And note the leading phrase of the headline, focusing not on the positive but on the negative, the previous stalling. The article continues in that vein:
Iraq’s parliamentary leaders on Wednesday pushed through three far-reaching measures that had been delayed for weeks by bitter political maneuvering that became so acrimonious that some lawmakers threatened to try to dissolve the legislative body.
The next paragraph is indeed positive. It mentions that the legislation has the potential to spur reconciliation and lead to representative government. But it fails to tie this into the surge and those all-important benchmarks that we’ve heard so much about—when they were unmet, that is.
The article continues to emphasize the contention around passage of the bills, and emphasizes the fairly obvious fact that Iraq is not out of the woods and that these laws may not accomplish their goals. And it’s only in the seventh paragraph that there’s any tie-in to benchmarks—and even then, for some reason, they are referred to as “so-called” benchmarks.
What about Hillary and Obama? Have they chimed in on any of this? I’ve searched and searched and found nothing.
To be fair, I haven’t found anything from McCain, either, so perhaps it’s Google (or my search techniques) that’s at fault. If any of you can find their pronouncements (or those of Reid or Pelosi, for that matter) on the subject, I’d be most interested in reading them.
But I won’t sit on a hot stove till I do.
LMAO- that was hysterical
LOL, yeah he looks like the kind of guy you'd find at an "upscale lounge"
Bill Clinton Says Obama Not Part of 1990s
James Joyner | Saturday, February 16, 2008
Bill Clinton Says Obama Not Part of 1990sBill Clinton is attacking a strawman again.
ABC News’ Sarah Amos reports that former President Bill Clinton — despite myriad promises he would stop assailing his wife’s opponent given how it has backfired on her — upped his harsh attacks today in Tyler, Texas.
“There are two competing moods in America today,” Clinton said. “People who want something fresh and new — and they find it inspiring that we might elect a president who literally was not part of any of the good things that happened or any of the bad things that were stopped before. The explicit argument of the campaign against Hillary is that ‘No one who was involved in the 1990s or this decade can possibly be an effective president because they had fights. We’re not going to have any of those anymore.’ Well, if you believe that, I got some land I wanna sell you.”
[…]
Obama campaign spox Bill Burton tells ABC News in response, “It appears that the man who once told us ‘Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow’ has changed his tune and is now singing ‘Yesterday’ everywhere he goes.”
A pretty good line.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama Chummy Photo And Clinton’s attack here is nonsensical. Obama’s line against Hillary Clinton is that she’s divisive and has consistently supported failed policies whereas he’s a consensus builder with a new strategy.
Amusingly, Bruce Tamaso of the Dallas Morning News filed a report — also datelined from Tyler — under the headline “ Bill Clinton avoids attacks on Obama in East Texas.” He and Sarah Amos apparently attended different speeches.
Photo credits: NYT and Garling Gauge
Hillary talks about her 35 years of service, but after law school, she spent most of her time at the Rose law firm- representing big corporations.
She was on the board of walmart
Her big initiative- health care reform- was a total failure
Just being around power doesn't make her capable of wielding it effectively
What difference would it make- you'll never get it anyway.
The point is putting the UN ( who has shown that they are corrupt time after time ) in charge of how we spend our money?
It a;so includes funding the Kyoto protocol and other addle brained ideas
You're the one who's always complaining about how the deficit is exploding and you're so concerned about the Chinese funding the debt ( in an idiotic stance as our debt has been financed in a very big part by foreign governments for decades )
Who would think it's a good idea to channel aid through a totally corrupt organization?
Obama's Global Tax
Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 8:24:31 am PST
Don’t look now, but Barack Obama has sponsored a bill that’s on the fast track to becoming law, that would impose an enormous global tax on the United States under the control of the United Nations: Barack Obama’s Global Tax Proposal Up for Senate Vote.
A nice-sounding bill called the “Global Poverty Act,” sponsored by Democratic presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama, is up for a Senate vote on Thursday and could result in the imposition of a global tax on the United States. The bill, which has the support of many liberal religious groups, makes levels of U.S. foreign aid spending subservient to the dictates of the United Nations.
Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has not endorsed either Senator Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. But on Thursday, February 14, he is trying to rush Obama’s “Global Poverty Act” (S.2433) through his committee. The legislation would commit the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of gross national product on foreign aid, which amounts to a phenomenal 13-year total of $845 billion over and above what the U.S. already spends. ...
The bill defines the term “Millennium Development Goals” as the goals set out in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, General Assembly Resolution 55/2 (2000).
The U.N. says that “The commitment to provide 0.7% of gross national product (GNP) as official development assistance was first made 35 years ago in a General Assembly resolution, but it has been reaffirmed repeatedly over the years, including at the 2002 global Financing for Development conference in Monterrey, Mexico. However, in 2004, total aid from the industrialized countries totaled just $78.6 billion—or about 0.25% of their collective GNP.”
In addition to seeking to eradicate poverty, that declaration commits nations to banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying a series of treaties, including the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming treaty), the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
About That Experience...
Hillary Clinton has tried to sell herself as the candidate ready on Day One to assume the responsibilities of the Presidency, at least among Democrats. She has claimed the Bill Clinton administration as her own experience, and yet she has no record of running anything during that time except the disastrous Health Care Task Force -- the records of which the Clintons have kept under wraps. Now she wants to distance herself from her supposed experience by claiming that she opposed NAFTA, one of the key pieces of legislation pushed by the Clinton administration (via Memeorandum):
As the 2008 campaign shifts to economically hard-hit states like Ohio, so too do the topics of political debate. This week, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has attacked Sen. Hillary Clinton on trade, arguing that she was once a supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement that contributed to the loss hundreds of thousands of American jobs.
"A little more than a year ago," an Obama mailer reads, "Hillary Clinton thought NAFTA was a 'boon' to the economy." The piece goes on to argue that the New York Senator is "changing her tune" now that she's campaigning in the Buckeye State.
The attack is, most observers say, misleading. The "boon" line, a paraphrase lifted from a September 2006 Newsday article, has yet to be confirmed as an authentic quote. But, more importantly, the mailer misrepresents what former Clinton administration officials and biographers say was Hillary Clinton's long-held opposition to the legislation.
Hillary now claims that she argued against NAFTA from the beginning, but that she couldn't speak publicly about it at the time. Sam Stein writes that she had no "freedom of speech", and that her husband enforced message discipline on everyone, including her. Her warnings that NAFTA was a "Republican economics" effort went unheeded, and the bill passed.
However, many consider NAFTA to have been part of the economic success we enjoyed in the 1990s. It eliminated trade barriers, and it solidified our partnerships with Canada and Mexico. That economic success is what Hillary has used to explain her own candidacy in 2008. Now she wants to argue for the success but against at least one of the major policies that produced it?
So what exactly in the Clinton administration does Hillary want to own? She won't release the records of the HCTF, and now she wants to argue that she wouldn't have signed off on NAFTA had she been in charge. Would she have acted to reform welfare, or is that another part of her platform of experience that she now repudiates? Is she running on the Clinton Administration record, or is she turning into John Edwards without the spa treatments and 28,000-square-foot mansions to dog her newfound populist rhetoric?
Posted by Ed Morrissey on February 15, 2008 7:39 AM
Not Serious
About national security, that is. Over the last 36 hours, Congressional Democrats have again demonstrated a casual, even frivolous attitude toward their Constitutional duty to assist in keeping Americans safe from attack.
First, the Senate joined the House, on a near-party line 51-45 vote, in restricting the use of harsh interrogation techniques under any circumstances. The vote has often been described as a prohibition of waterboarding, but it is much worse than that: the Democrat-sponsored legislation would limit all American interrogators to the techniques approved in the Army's Field Manual. This makes no sense, as Gen. Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, patiently explained to the Congressional Dems:
[T]here is a universe out there of lawful interrogation techniques that we should feel, as a nation, that we have a right to use against our enemies. … The Army Field Manual describes a subset of that universe.
[T]he Army Field Manual does exactly what … it needs to do for the United States Army. But on the face of it, it would make no … sense to apply the Army's field manual to CIA.
[T]he population of who's doing it is different than the population that would be working for me inside the CIA interrogation program. It meets the needs of America's Army in terms of who's going to do it, which in the case of the Army Field Manual would be a relatively large population of relatively young men and women who've received good training but not exhaustive training in all potential situations.
The population of who they do it to would also be different. In the life of the CIA detention program we have held fewer than a hundred people. And … actually, fewer than a third of those people have had any techniques used against them – enhanced techniques – in the CIA program. America's Army literally today is holding over 20,000 detainees in Iraq alone.
[T]here's a difference in terms of … the circumstances under which you're doing the interrogation. And I know there can be circumstances in military custody that are as protected and isolated and controlled as in our detention facilities, but in many instances that is not the case. These are interrogations against enemy soldiers, who almost always will be lawful combatants, in tactical situations, from whom you expect to get information of transient and tactical value. None of that applies to the detainees we hold, to the interrogators we have, or the information we are attempting to seek.
If it is the judgment of the American political process that the Army Field Manual and the processes of the FBI are adequate to the defense of the republic in all conditions of threat, in all periods in the future, that's what we will do. My view is that would substantially increase the danger to America and that my agency should be allowed to continue the use of techniques which have been judged lawful by the attorney general and briefed to this committee.
Gen. Hayden's comments are obviously sensible, so it's no surprise that the Democrats rejected them. Michelle Malkin has the roll call. The Democrats may have hoped that John McCain would give them political cover by voting with them, but he didn't. President Bush will veto the legislation, so the Democrats' vote was a futile gesture, evidently intended to reassure their base that national security is not a priority for them.
In the House today, the Democratic leadership refused to take up the FISA reform bill, preferring instead to allow the Protect America Act to expire. The Senate has passed a version of the act that includes immunity from lawsuits for telecom companies that have cooperated with the government in intercepting international terrorist communications. It appears that the main sticking point with Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues is that they want telecoms to be sued for helping the government to identify terrorists. John Cornyn speculates as to the House Democrats' motivation in refusing to follow the Senate's lead on immunity:
[O]ne important part of the Senate legislation was to provide protection for the telecommunications carriers who may have cooperated with the United States government shortly after September 11, 2001, in providing the means to listen in to al Qaeda and other terrorists, foreign terrorists who are plotting and planning attacks against the United States of America and its citizens. It is a terrible message for the House of Representatives to say that they're not going to act in a way that provides protection for those citizens -- whether they be individual citizens or whether they be corporate citizens -- who were asked by their country to come to the aid of the American people and provide the means to protect them from terrorist attacks….What kind of message does that send that we are going to basically leave them out twisting slowly in the wind and being left to the litigation, some 40 different lawsuits that have been filed against the telecommunications industry that may have cooperated with the federal government in protecting the American people.
I would say finally…there are substantial news reports that indicate a group of trial lawyers who stand to make considerable amounts of money in terms of legal fees off this litigation are substantial contributors to members of Congress. I hope the evidence does not develop that there are decisions being made in the House of Representatives on the basis of the interests of special interest groups like trial lawyers who stand to gain financially from continuing to block this litigation.
That speculation is reasonable, since the Democrats have been shameless in promoting the interests of the plaintiffs' bar, their biggest source of revenue. Today was a day of infamy in the House of Representatives, one of many since Nancy Pelosi and her accomplices took control of that body.
It is deeply ironic that instead of debating legislation that would protect the physical security of Americans, Pelosi and the Democratic leadership spent their time today voting to approve contempt citations against Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten for failing to cooperate with their absurd "investigation" into whether the Bush administration's appointment of U.S. Attorneys was "politically motivated."
Hmm, let's see: the post of U.S. Attorney is, by definition, a political appointment. U.S. Attorneys are always, or virtually always, members of the President's party. No one has suggested that the U.S. Attorneys appointed by the Bush administration were not fully competent. Some "investigation"!
Now, here is an investigation that would actually be worth pursuing: why did Nancy Pelosi and her House leadership refuse to take up the FISA reform bill? Did they deliberately sacrifice the security of Americans to placate their far-left base? Or was there a corrupt bargain with major Democratic Party contributors, who hope to make millions by suing telecoms? Did Nancy Pelosi politicize our national security by subordinating the security interests of all Americans to the financial interests of the Democratic Party's biggest contributors?
Circumstantially, the answer to the last question would appear to be "Yes." Perhaps that explains why Pelosi and her confederates are so eager to focus newspaper headlines on ridiculous "investigations" of the Bush administration.
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I wonder why the 60 year old white bitch war enabler didn't vote?
Not serious about energy policy either
In a post below, John shows once again that congressional Democrats are not serious about national security. They would rather pander to their radical base and, it would appear, to their trial lawyer financiers than authorize measures through which the government can obtain the intelligence needed to fight terrorism.
As Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation demonstrates, the Democrats aren’t serious about energy policy either. Both gasoline prices and oil company profits are high. Thus, House Democrats propose to raise taxes on oil companies. But, according to Lieberman, oil companies already pay their fair share of taxes. In fact, their effective tax rate of 37 percent is slightly higher than that of large corporations in general.
More importantly, the proposed tax hike would tend to produce even higher gasoline prices. It would do so in part by discouraging investment in new domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, thereby tending to decrease supply as demand continues to grow. In addition, any new tax on gasoline, whether at the pump or at the producer level, will raise the cost of this product to consumers. Furthermore, says Lieberman, the Democrats’ proposal would undermine our energy security by providing a competitive advantage to OPEC and other non-U.S. suppliers whose imports are not subject to most of the bill’s provisions.
The Democrats should understand this. As Lieberman reminds us, they tried something very similar in 1980. during the Carter administration, when they imposed a “windfall profit tax” on oil companies. According to the Congressional Research Service, this tax “reduced domestic oil production from 3 to 6 percent, and increased oil imports from between 8 and 16 percent.”
To make matters worse, the Dems would use the new revenue generated from the tax increase to subsidize alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power. Lieberman notes that, even after decades of tax breaks, alternative energy provides only a small fraction of America’s energy needs. Solar energy, for example, provides only 3 percent of our electricity due to its high cost and unreliability. And the Department of Energy estimates that the overall percentage of electricity attributable to renewable sources is not likely to increase even by 2030. In short, the forms of energy the Democrats want to subsidize are the sources of the future, and likely always will be.
The federal government has a dismal record of picking winners and losers among energy sources. Yet the Democrats persist in seeking to raise taxes on what works and subsidizing what doesn’t. They simply aren’t serious.
Realism' in Syria
New York Sun Editorial
February 15, 2008
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
A D V E R T I S E M E N T
What in the world are advisers to both Senators Obama and Clinton doing in Syria in the middle of a presidential campaign — and why are the two campaigns so unforthcoming about the details of the visits? The same week that a terrorist mastermind harbored by the Baathist regime in Damascus was assassinated by a car bomb, both one of Mr. Obama's foreign policy counselors, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a long-time critic of Israel, and one of Mrs. Clinton's national finance chairs, Hassan Nemazee, were meeting with President Assad.
Mr. Brzezinski himself issued a statement to the Baathist controlled press in Damascus, where he was quoted by the official Sana News Agency as saying that the "talks dealt with recent regional developments, affirming that both sides have a common desire to achieve stability in the region, which would benefit both its people and the United States." There was no indication in respect of whether Mr. Brzezinski queried the Syrian regime, officially listed by our own State Department as a terrorist-sponsoring state, about the assassination of Hezbollah's Imadh Mugniyah, who was slain by a car-bomb as, according to the Lebanese Broadcasting Channel, he was leaving a ceremony at an Iranian school in Damascus.
When our Eli Lake, telephoned the Obama campaign to see what it had to say about its adviser's doings in Syria, a spokesman said it was the first they had heard about it. Mr. Nemazee's office would not say anything about the trip, nor would Mrs. Clinton's campaign. When Mr. Lake rang the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, he was informed that Mr. Nemazee had left with the delegation yesterday.
Where is the sense of reality about who President Assad is and what his regime is all about? To suggest, as the Syrians report Mr. Brzezinski said, that they share some kind of common interest in respect of "stability" is disingenuous. Mugniyah, whom the Syrians had been harboring, has been among the FBI's most-wanted terrorists since 1983, when he authorized the attack on the American Marine barracks in Beirut. Mr. Assad runs a police state. Dictatorships can only thrive if the population is in constant terror and convinced the state itself is all knowing.
This has lead some to speculate that the Syrian regime itself might have been complicit in the killing of Mugniyah. We wouldn't gainsay the possibility entirely. Terrorists like drug dealers and mafiosos fight over turf all the time. What we would gainsay is that a benign construction could be put onto the role of the Assad family's Baathist regime in Syria. If the assassination of Mugniyah is a sign of anything, it is most likely that the Baathist regime is itself losing its grip on power. After all Mugniyah was a valuable asset for Mr. Assad, who relied on his capabilities to continue to threaten the prospect of a stable Lebanon.
* * *
So where's the "realism" on the part of Mr. Brzezinski and other so-called foreign policy "realists," who have accused President Bush of foreign policy malpractice for downgrading relations with Syria after the Syrians threw in with the Iranians to sabotage Iraq? Why are advisers to Senators Clinton and Obama in the Syrian capital at a time like this? Are they pressing for a separate peace with the regime? It is something on which Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton will be challenged in the coming campaign, we have little doubt. Where do they stand in respect of Syria — and why can't they bring themselves to explain what their advisers are doing in the capital of one of the countries most hostile to America and Israel?
Who really likes the 60 year old white bitch war enabler?
There is talk that the superdelegsates might be looking for payback for past Billary devious dealings