Obama's Amateur Hour Presidency

February 29, 2008
The danger of Obama's amateur diplomacy
Thomas Lifson American Thinker

After suggesting that he would invade our ally Pakistan and talk to our enemy Iran, Barack Obama has moved on to potentially damage our relations with Canada, our friendly neighbor and number one foreign oil supplier.

Under the terms of NAFTA, Canada is prohibited from cutting off oil exports to the US if there is a worldwide shortage or supply disruption unless supplies are also rationed to Canadian consumers by the same amount.

After the Hillary/Obama debate, Canada's trade minister pointed out that if NAFTA is re-opened, Canada might want to opt out of this clause, which would then leave Canada free to sell its oil to any other country for whatever price it could get.

Both Clinton and Obama have made a big issue out President Bush's alleged insensitivies to other countries. And now these two geniuses are blithely talking about canceling a trade agreement with our two neighbors on which both their economies now depend.


The Financial Times reports:

Beijing has signaled its interest in Canada's growing oil sector. Two of China's biggest energy groups, China National Offshore Oil Co and Sinopec, have invested in small Calgary-based companies with ambitions to extract heavy crude oil from oil sands in Canada.

So the Obama campaign has been caught in a lie and is potentially opening a door for China (among others) to become involved in our most secure source for foreign oil, where the oil sands contain deposits equal to those of Saudi Arabia, while alienating our best friends in foreign countries.

Do we really want to let this man into the Oval Office?

30 Second news over Tokyo

"I do know that al-Qaida is in Iraq and that's why I have said we should continue to strike al-Qaida targets, but I have some news for John McCain, There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."

"As commander in chief, I will always reserve the right to make sure that we are looking out for American interests. And if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad." Potential Commander-in-Chief, Barack Hussein Obama.

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Well, Prince Harry got to do 10 weeks in country, going for as many as four days without a shower and taking fire while on patrol with the Ghurkas.

"It's very nice to be a sort of a normal person for once. This is about as normal as I'm ever going to get."

Now, thanks to a leak from the foreign media, he's leaving Afghanistan. That's too bad, now he must go back to the surreal world.

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Heard: Karzai government controls about 30% of the country; Nato: 60%; Taleban: 10%.

CIA: Follow the law, even if it's 'political' and to the country's detriment.

They will protect us.

CIA memo: U.S. will be lawful, vulnerable
By John McCaslin Washington Times
February 28, 2008

Inside the Beltway has obtained a memo written by CIA Director Mike Hayden to agency employees to "make very clear my position and that of the Central Intelligence Agency" when it comes to interrogative techniques used on terror suspects.

Bottom line: Always follow the law, even if it's "political" and to the country's detriment.

Dated this month, the memo comes on the heels of Congress passing a broad intelligence authorization bill, a major provision of which prohibits interrogation methods not authorized or condoned by the U.S. Army Field Manual.

While Mr. Hayden makes it clear to his staff that the CIA will adhere to U.S. law, he does not hesitate to say that the new ban, which the White House says President Bush will veto, spells danger for the security of the United States.

"If the Intelligence Authorization Bill becomes law, these procedures will be taken off the board for American interrogators [...] and they will be off the board," Mr. Hayden stresses. "CIA works within the legal and policy boundaries created by the American political process so there will be no conditions of threat or danger that would cause us to make an exception."

But he also says a prohibition on what the administration refers to as "enhanced interrogation" methods "is an important national decision and it will have a direct impact on our ability to gather intelligence and to detect and prevent future attacks."

In the memo, Mr. Hayden reiterates "with regard to waterboarding (as I testified before Congress), this technique is not part of CIA's current program, has been used in the past on only three detainees, has not been used for nearly five years, and the threat and operational circumstances under which it was previously used have changed dramatically."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said earlier that he doesn't buy such assurances and warned that if Mr. Bush "vetoes intelligence authorization, he will be voting in favor of waterboarding."

But Mr. Hayden counters in his memo that if the bill becomes law it "would confine CIA interrogators to only those techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual. This manual, crafted in response to the abuses at Abu Ghraib [prison in Iraq], was designed for a different population of detainees, a different group of interrogators, and for different intelligence needs than in the CIA program.

"The manual meets the needs of the American military and is sufficient for their purposes but no one can claim that it exhausts the universe of lawful techniques available to the Republic to defend itself — techniques not useful or not suited to the Army's circumstances but fully consistent with the Geneva Convention and with current U.S. law.

"These are the techniques in the CIA interrogation program. Although they remain classified (as were some techniques in previous editions of the Army Field Manual), they have been fully briefed to the intelligence oversight committees and their lawfulness confirmed by the Department of Justice," he says.

Is a Googled World Anathema to the Fourth Amendment?

FOURTH AMENDMENT U.S. Constitution -

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.'

Why should your non-public business become part of a universal and perpetual record on the internet? If one does not want to borrow money, what right does someone have to keep, maintain and sell a dossier of your financial affairs? Why should someone be able to type in your address and get a satellite photo of your entire property? That used to be call a spy photo.

There is no right of privacy, but there should be, and a person should be able to opt out of an intrusive system that is only possible with the technology created in one generation. It is past time to to stop the continued erosion of a basic human need. We admonish a child not to stare so why should our private business be available to worldwide scrutiny?

We must allow a person to keep private affairs private. It is not a question of having something to hide. A person that wants privacy should not have the burden of giving their reasons for privacy. After all, that is private too.

Buckley on the Panama Canal

Buckley v Gore Vidal, Part 1

Buckley v Gore Vidal, Part 2

William F. Buckley v Noam Chomsky - Part One

Crops for Drought Areas

I will defer to Bobal for further comment on the potential significance to this exciting scientific breakthrough.

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Scientists advance 'drought crop'
By Matt McGrath
BBC News science reporter

Scientists say they have made a key breakthrough in understanding the genes of plants that could lead to crops that can survive in a drought.

Researchers in Finland and the United States say they have discovered a gene that controls the amount of carbon dioxide a plant absorbs.

It also controls the amount of water vapour it releases into the atmosphere.

This information could be important for food production and in regulating climate change.

Water control

Plants play a crucial role in the regulation of the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. They absorb the gas through tiny pores on their leaves called stomata and these pores also release water vapour as the plant grows.

In extremely dry weather, a plant can lose 95% of its water in this way.

Scientists have been trying to find the gene that controls the response of the stomata for decades.

Now teams in Finland and California are reporting in the journal Nature that they have found a crucial genetic pathway that controls the opening and closing of these pores.

The researchers say that this understanding could allow them to modify plants so that they continue to absorb carbon dioxide but reduce the amount of water released into the atmosphere, enabling them to thrive in very dry conditions.

On the way

Professor Jakko Kangasjarvi from the University of Helsinki says this work is the first step on that road

"It opens the avenue, it is still several years away but before this publication, there was no single component which would have so many different effects... there was no target to modify, now we know the target," he said.

While the experiments have been done in a variety of cress, the scientists say that the underlying genetic mechanisms are the same in many food plants, including rice.

It is believed that this new genetic understanding of how to control the amount of water that plants use could be commercialised within the next 20 years.

Obama and His Syrian Born Friend, "Tony" Rezko

Geez, I thought he was Italian

Antoin "Tony" Rezko and Barack Obama are deeply linked throughout his political career and have been friends since 1990. In 13 years in politics, Obama has recieved at least $168,000 in campaign donations from Rezko, his family and his business associates. One connection is Allison S. Davis, of Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, the firm Obama joined in 1993 straight out of Harvard, which specialized in helping to develop low-income housing. Davis is a friend of Tony Rezko, who was one of the firm's top clients. Davis was and is a member of the Chicago Plan Commission, appointed by Mayor Daley.

Allison S. Davis was appointed by Gov. Blagojevich to the Illinois State Board of Investment, which controls state pension funds. The firm of Davis Miner helped Rezko's firm Rezmar get more than $43 million in government funding to rehabilitate half of their 30 buildings for the poor. How is that for government investing?

Did I mention that when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate, Rezko held a cocktail party at Rezko's home, picking up the tab for the reported lavish event. Obama's campaign staff has said it has no records to show who attended that party, or how much it cost. It happened on June 27, 2003.

In October 2006, Rezko was indicted for extortion of businesses seeking to do business with the Illinois Teachers Retirement System Board and the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. In addition, he has been charged with wire fraud for staging false transactions of his pizza stores in order to secure $10 million in loans from GE Capital. The case is being prosecuted by Patrick Fitzgerald who prosecuted the case against Scooter Libby arising from the CIA leak scandal.

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February 26, 2008
The Obama-Rezko plot thickens (updated)
Thomas Lifson American Thinker

The UK Times reports that Barack Obama's involvement with Chicago slum landlord Tony Rezko, currently under indictment, may involve money originating from a British-Iraqi Middle East wheeler-dealer, Nadhmi Auchi, a convicted criminal.

Rezko, an Obama fundraiser, helped facilitate Obama's purchase of a $1.65 million mansion in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood for $300,000 below the asking price. The owner wished to sell both the house and an adjoining lot. Mrs. Rezko paid the full asking price of $625,000 on the same day that the Obamas purchased their luxury home. At a substantial discount. The seller denies that there was any connection between the two transactions. Later, a small portion of the land was sold to the Obamas so that they could expand their garden.

Senator Obama calls this arrangement a "mistake."

Now it develops that Mr. and Mrs. Rezko apparently lacked the money to make the purchase of the plot of land.

In a sworn statement a year later, Mrs Rezko said she got by on a salary of $37,000 and had $35,000 assets. Mr Rezko told a court he had "no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets, no unencumbered assets [and] is significantly in arrears on many of his obligations."

Just weeks before the Hyde Park transactions, Auchi loaned $3.5 million to Rezko.

A company related to Mr Auchi, who has a conviction for corruption in France, registered the loan to Mr Obama's bagman Antoin "Tony" Rezko on May 23 2005. Mr Auchi says the loan, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA, was for $3.5 million.

There is much yet to be learned about the web of transactions involved, but it now appears that money originating from a convicted Middle Eastern wheeler-dealer found its way to indicted Chicago wheeler-dealer Tony Rezko, and then weeks later provided the means for a nearly simultaneous land transaction that enabled the Obamas to buy their home for substantially below asking price.

It certainly doesn't look like change we can believe in, when it comes to Chicago politics.

Update: much, much more from Chicagoan Rick Moran, writing at Rightwing Nuthouse:

The Obama-Rezko relationship must be understood in the context of the influence peddling, the casual corruption, the cronysm, the favoritism shown in less than open bidding – all part of a city and state political culture where the politician, the businessman, and the crook frequently rub elbows and sometimes wear each other’s hats. Obama hiring the daughter of a Rezko associate to work in his office (after Rezko had helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for his campaign) is no big deal. But this kind of “favor” done for Rezko is a different story:


The Chicago Tribune: “On June 13, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that as a state senator, Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting Rezko’s successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens. The Sun-Times said the deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama’s former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama’s state Senate district.
Obama now regrets his association with Rezko and has given $150,000 to charity in order to atone for his sins.

Sorry Barry but it don’t work that way.

Wheat and Chaff

This may not be news to the EB regulars but I couldn't let it pass without a post.

• China is experiencing its coldest winter in 100 years.
  
• The coldest winter in recent memory has killed over 900 people in Afghanistan.
• The coldest winter in 50 years has forced Tajikistan to appeal to the United Nations for aid.
• There is a third more ice in Antarctica than is usual for this time of year.
  
• The Northern Hemisphere has endured its coldest weather in decades and snow blankets more areas than at any time since 1966.
• Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman, and northern Saudi Arabia report the heaviest snow falls in years and below-zero temperatures.

But the BBC was trumpeting the news that a glacier the size of Texas is rapidly advancing toward the ocean. More evidence, they claim of global warming even as some warn that we should prepare for cooler weather.

Ice pack belies global warming
Weather will be ‘normal’ in Northwest, scientist predicts

By Terence Day
For the Capital Press

SPOKANE - Atmospheric scientist Art Douglas says the world could be experiencing global warming or sliding into the next ice age. But in either case, Pacific Northwest weather will be near normal over the next few years.

Speaking Feb. 5 at the Pacific Northwest Farm Forum, the long-range weather consultant and professor emeritus at Creighton University said the region's weather may be about 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer in March, April and May, with precipitation above normal and gradual drying going into harvest.

The region should experience normal weather next fall and winter, he said.

However, weather in the region is likely to turn dry in 2009. Douglas said the Northwest is in a weather pattern similar to the pattern experienced in 1949-1963.

Douglas expects Montana and the Dakotas to be dry throughout 2008, and Canada and northern China will continue very cold with heavy snows into mid-spring, followed by a summer that is hot and dry.

"China will bake May to August," Douglas predicted, with temperatures about 3 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in northern China. Crops will experience drought, and the Olympics will experience dense smog.

Douglas reported Australia's weather is improving for grain production, but South America's wheat-producing regions face continued dry weather. South African growing conditions should be good in 2008.

Whatever the weather, Douglas said, it's not being caused by global warming. If anything, the climate may be starting into a cooling period.

Many were greatly alarmed at melting sea ice near the North Pole with about one-third of the normal ice pack melted by 2007. But Douglas said between November 2007 and January 2008 the entire Arctic Ocean froze over, with the ice pack forming farther south than normal. Ice is forming in places in Korea and Alaska where it normally doesn't, and Siberia's January snow cover was extensive.

"We've really never seen anything like this for many, many years," he said. And the impact has been enormous, with China importing coal "because of a super-cold winter."

The amount of sea ice is the largest ever seen in the Southern Hemisphere, and it has even snowed in Buenos Aires, Douglas said. "Within four or five months, it appears that a warming trend can go very rapidly in the other direction."

Douglas said the climate can quickly correct itself, restoring lower average temperatures in as little as two years.

He said he doubts global warming. He said if greenhouse gases were responsible for global warming, both the Arctic and Antarctic would be experiencing warming, but they aren't.

Douglas said he believes the weather patterns the world is now experiencing are regional phenomena and not a global pattern. He also noted that the warmest year on record was 1998, but questioned why, if we're in a warming trend, it hasn't gotten any warmer than it was that year.

Douglas said warming trends put more moisture in the atmosphere, resulting in more snow, which leads to cooling.

Americans don't understand, he said, that what Europeans fear is that we may be heading into a period of global cooling, which could push ice lower than Europe has experienced in modern times, creating problems for ports there.

After his speech, Douglas told a group of farmers who questioned him that alarm over global warming is analogous to alarm a few decades ago that the Great Salt Lake had shrunk so much that it could never recover. In only three years - in the 1980s - the lake was flooding farmland and endangering highways, industries and subdivisions, which prompted the state to build pumping stations to draw water into the desert to evaporate.

The System Shunt that Shut off U-Tube

Pakistan knocks out YouTube, for all

PETER SVENSSON

Associated Press

February 25, 2008

NEW YORK — Most of the world's Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan's government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet's vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

An Internet expert likened the cause of the outage to “identity theft” by a Pakistani telecommunications company, which accidentally started advertising itself as the fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

The greatest effect was in Asia, were the outage lasted for up to two hours, Renesys said.

YouTube confirmed the outage on Monday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan.

“We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again,” YouTube said in an e-mailed statement.

A YouTube spokeswoman did not immediately respond to an e-mailed question on whether the clips that offended Pakistan's government had been removed. Several clips with interviews of Wilders were still up on the site Monday afternoon.

Two apparent errors allowed the outage to propagate beyond Pakistan, according to Todd Underwood, vice president and general manager of Internet community services at Renesys.

Pakistan Telecom established a route that directed requests for YouTube videos from local Internet subscribers to a “black hole,” where the data was discarded, according to Renesys. Pakistan Telecom's mistake was that it then published that route to its international data carrier, PCCW Ltd. of Hong Kong, Underwood said.

The second mistake was that PCCW accepted that route, Underwood said. It started directing requests from its customers for YouTube data to Pakistan. And since PCCW is one of the world's 20 largest data carriers, its routing table was passed along to other large carriers without any attempt at verification.

“Once a pretty big network gets an error like that, it propagates to most or all of the Internet very quickly,” Underwood said. As he put it, Pakistan Telecom was impersonating YouTube to much of the world.

Pakistan Telecom and the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority were unavailable for comment on Monday night local time. Rex Stover, vice president of sales for PCCW Global in Herndon, Va., said the company is still trying to figure out what happened and why.

John Palfrey, executive director for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said that while all the facts in the case are not yet known, it appeared that the repercussions were due to Pakistan taking a relatively heavy-handed approach in trying to censor YouTube.

“It points in many respects to the difficulty, if not the folly, in Internet filtering at the state level,” he said.

Misrouting occurs every year or so among the world's Internet carriers, usually as a result of typos or other errors, Underwood said. In a more severe example, a Turkish telecom provider in 2004 started advertising that it was the best route to all of the Internet, causing widespread outages for many Web sites over several hours.

“Nobody ran any viruses or worms or malicious code. This is just the way the Internet works. And it's not very secure or reliable,” Underwood said, adding that there is no real solution to the problem on the table.

While most route hijacking is unintentional, some Yahoo networks were apparently taken over a few years ago to distribute spam.

“To be honest, there's not a single thing preventing this from happening to E-Trade, or Bank of America, or the FBI, or the White House, or the Clinton campaign,” Underwood said. “I think it's a useful moment for people to decide just how important it is that we fix problems like this.”

A Guest Post From Barack Obama

Barack Obama was unfairly accused of illegal and indecent behavior by a fraud. His accuser, Larry Sinclair is a blackguard. I gave the story a lot of coverage.

Barack Obama will receive a lot more tough coverage here at the EB. I will do my best to make it fair.

Barack Obama makes some reasoned arguments for his economic views.

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February 24, 2008
Obama's Economic Remarks in Lorain, Ohio Real Clear Politics
Barack Obama

LORAIN, OH - Our economy has been struggling for some time now. And as I've traveled across Ohio, I've seen the face of this economy - a mother who told me she can't afford health care for her sick child; a father who's worried he won't be able to send his children to college; and seniors who've seen their pensions disappear because the companies they gave their lives to went bankrupt.

I don't have to tell you about this. Folks around here have been directly impacted by the changes in our economy - whether it was the loss of steel jobs over the past few decades, or the closing of the Ford plant that was here for so long. And folks in this area are still worried about whether they're going to lose their jobs and how they're going to make ends meet if that happens.

Now, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that we can't stop globalization in its tracks and that some of these jobs aren't coming back. But what I refuse to accept is that we have to stand idly by while workers watch their jobs get shipped overseas. We need a president who's working as hard for you as you're working for your families. And that's the kind of President I intend to be.

I've proposed a job-creation agenda that starts with making sure trade works for American workers. We can't keep passing unfair trade deals like NAFTA that put special interests over workers' interests.

Now, Senator Clinton has been going to great lengths on the campaign trail to distance herself from NAFTA. Yesterday, she said NAFTA was "negotiated" by the first President Bush, not by her husband. But let's be clear: it was her husband who got NAFTA passed. In her own book, Senator Clinton called NAFTA one of "Bill's successes" and "legislative victories."

And yesterday, Senator Clinton also said I'm wrong to point out that she once supported NAFTA. But the fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for President. A couple years after it passed, she said NAFTA was a "free and fair trade agreement" and that it was "proving its worth." And in 2004, she said, "I think, on balance, NAFTA has been good for New York and America." One million jobs have been lost because of NAFTA, including nearly 50,000 jobs here in Ohio. And yet, ten years after NAFTA passed, Senator Clinton said it was good for America. Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America - and I never have.

I didn't just start criticizing unfair trade deals like NAFTA because I started running for office - I'm doing it because I've seen what happens to a community when the factory closes down and the jobs move overseas. I began my career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, fighting joblessness and poverty in neighborhoods that were devastated when the local steel plant closed.

And it's because of this longstanding commitment to working families that I will not sign any trade agreement as President that does not have protections for our environment and protections for American workers. And I'll pass the Patriot Employer Act that I've been fighting for ever since I ran for the Senate so we can end tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas, and give those breaks to companies that create good jobs with decent wages here in America.

It's also time to let our unions do what they do best - organize our workers. If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby, and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I've been fighting for it in the Senate, and that's why I'll make it the law of the land when I'm President of the United States.

We can also invest in American jobs by investing in America, and rebuilding our roads and bridges. I've proposed a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years. This will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs - many of them in the construction industry that's been hard hit by the housing crisis we're facing.

In addition, we've also got to do more to create the green jobs that are jobs of the future. My energy plan will put $150 billion over ten years into establishing a green energy sector that will create up to 5 million new jobs over the next two decades - including jobs right here in Ohio that pay well and can't be outsourced. We'll also provide funding to help manufacturers convert to green technology and help workers learn the skills they need for these jobs.

We know that all of this must be done in a responsible way, without adding to the already obscene debt that has grown by four trillion dollars under George Bush. We cannot build our future on a credit card issued by the bank of China. And that is why I'll pay for every part of this job-creation agenda - by ending this war in Iraq that's costing us billions, closing tax loopholes for corporations, putting a price on carbon pollution, and ending George Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

But in the end, enacting this agenda won't just require an investment. It will require a new spirit of cooperation, innovation, and shared sacrifice. We'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children. That's the kind of vision I have for this country, and that's the kind of vision I hope to make real as President of the United States.

Wars and Rumors of War

Israel is getting ready to invade Gaza
Lorna Fitzsimons
Wednesday, 20th February 2008

Lorna Fitzsimons talks to senior sources and concludes that, with heavy hearts, the Israelis are set to mount a military takeover of Gaza — a step that will leave the talks nowhere

This is not the way things were meant to happen. When Ariel Sharon ordered the removal of all Israelis from the Gaza Strip in 2005, leaders from around the world applauded. It was a clear message that Israel was willing to do almost everything it could to resolve the decades-long conflict with the Palestinians — including returning land without any assurances of peace and security. However, the initial optimism was quickly curbed by the grim reality on the ground: Hamas’s election victory in January 2006 and the sharp rise of rockets fired at communities inside Israel showed that unilateral withdrawal would not provide a better future for Israelis and Palestinians.

Today the number of rocket attacks on Israel is soaring. Senior Israeli diplomatic and military sources have indicated that there will soon be a large military ground invasion, reluctantly mounted by the Israelis, and a possible reoccupation of some of Gaza. If there is an invasion, Israel will have tacitly admitted that the experiment of unilateral disengagement has failed, leaving it at square one in its quest for peace with the Palestinians in Gaza.

It is hard to imagine how any sovereign state could tolerate the situation that Israel finds herself in today. Approximately 190,000 Israelis — the population of Brighton — living in southern Israel have been under attack for seven years. The 23,000 residents in the Israeli town of Sderot have been going through hell on earth: 30 per cent of them now suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, 90 per cent have experienced a Qassam rocket falling on their street; and over the past 18 months more than 1,600 cases of trauma have been recorded. An alarm system gives residents 15 seconds to seek shelter. Sometimes there are 20 attacks a day. Those who can afford to are moving further inside Israel, leaving the poor and elderly to remain. In a country of just six million people, the impact of all this is the equivalent of Newcastle, Preston or Derby being attacked daily.

And the attacks have intensified. In 2005, 401 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip; in 2006, there were 1,722. The belief that territorial concessions alone would provide greater security has collapsed as the rockets keep on coming. In the two and a half years that followed Israel’s total withdrawal, more than 3,700 rockets were fired at Israel — and that figure will be reached this year alone if rockets continue to be fired at the same rate as they have been in the first weeks of 2008. Since 2001, 24 Israelis have been killed and 620 wounded in rocket attacks launched from Gaza. The equivalent attacks on the UK in the same period would have seen 240 people killed and 6,200.

The situation is now even more precarious for Israel following the breach of the Sinai/Gaza border last month. From conversations I’ve had with intelligence sources, we know that Gazan terror organisations used the breach to upgrade their military capacity, bringing in arms and ammunition — and even operatives. Hamas and other groups now have rockets that are able to reach further inside Israel, placing even more people under the threat of attack.

A growing number of government sources now say privately that under the current conditions a major ground operation in Gaza is only a matter of time. Dr Zvi Shtauber, director of the Institute for National Security Studies, believes it is no longer a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ such an operation will take place. Dr Mark Heller, Israeli-Palestinian policy analyst, agrees, calling it ‘almost a statistical certainty’ that Israel will be ‘compelled to re-enter Gaza’. Last week defence minister Ehud Barak called for ‘a calm and calculated management’ of the ongoing crisis, but revealed that he had ‘instructed the IDF to complete preparations for the possibility of a ground invasion in Gaza’. Chief of Staff Lt-Gen Gabi Ashkenazi went further declaring the IDF were ‘ready to deepen and widen any offensive in the Gaza Strip’.

It is clear that any military action in Gaza is likely to be ugly, dangerous and costly in terms of lives on both sides. Rockets manufactured locally using improvised materials and crudely launched from highly populated areas are one of the hardest threats to remove. There is no single or specific group of targets whose elimination would bring about a cessation of rocket fire. This makes military action highly complicated and Israel may well find itself embroiled in a long and bloody campaign taking over large parts of the Gaza Strip.

Experts such as Dr Rory Miller, senior lecturer at King’s College London, warn that if Israel does re-enter Gaza it must do so for specific militarily achievable objectives rather than as a response to domestic public opinion in Israel. He warns that the latter would be ‘disastrous’.

The atmosphere in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plane en route to Germany last week, however, reflected just how little enthusiasm there is to send in any troops at all into the Strip. ‘Anger is not an operational plan,’ Olmert said, indicating that the lessons of the 2006 war with Hezbollah have been learnt — you don’t take troops in unless all other options have been exhausted. But the alternative to invasion and stopping the rocket attacks is much worse; as an ex-parliamentarian I know that the first responsibility of any government around the world is to protect her citizens.

Last month I took a group of senior British editors to meet Amos Gilead, the irrepressible chief of the Israeli Defence Ministry’s political military-bureau. We met him just as the IDF announced its plans to limit the amount of fuel going into Gaza. The general argued emphatically that there was only one effective solution — invasion of Gaza. But, he argued, Israel was, in effect, deliberately fighting terror with one hand tied behind its back, choosing blockades and targeted assassinations specifically because there was widespread reluctance to reoccupy the land she had left voluntarily. He told the journalists, ‘We have one clear option open to us — to invade. We do not want to do this and so we’re trying everything, exhausting all other options to see if there is a chance this is avoidable.’

And that’s what makes Israelis so depressed about the situation today: the vast majority of Israelis do not want to have any presence in Gaza. They don’t want to rule over the 1.5 million people there. They thought they had fulfilled their part of the bargain over two years ago when Israel pulled out, forcibly removing Jewish settlers from their homes and leaving the communities they had built there. A large majority of Israelis supported that action with only 34 per cent opposing. In a country where everyone has a son or a brother serving in the army, there is little appetite for any large military operation that is likely to result in large numbers of soldier fatalities.

Israelis also know that there are likely to be significant negative knock-on effects on the negotiations with Palestinian President Abu Mazen if they do go into Gaza. The round of talks relaunched in Annapolis — where Prime Minister Olmert pointedly acknowledged the role Israel plays in causing Palestinian suffering — may well stall after an invasion. It will be almost impossible for any Palestinian to negotiate while there are tanks, soldiers and civilian deaths in Gaza. Olmert, who has staked his political future on successful negotiations — even instructing his foreign minister to meet her Palestinian counterpart on the day of last week’s suicide bombing — knows this more than anyone.

Hamas, as an Islamist, expansionist organisation that angrily rejects the status quo and Israel’s right to exist, has deliberately created this new reality. Never before has Hamas looked as irrelevant and as isolated as in Annapolis in November last year when almost every Arab state pledged their support to bringing Palestinian independence through negotiation and compromise. It is no coincidence that, threatened by Israel and the PA’s public commitments to negotiations and concerned that its popularity in the Palestinian street could dwindle, Hamas cynically whipped up a crisis in Gaza and on its borders. It has tried to create an alternative vision for the Palestinians: violent resistance and independence through war and bloodshed, and unfortunately it is succeeding.

More worryingly, military action in Gaza could have a detrimental effect far beyond the immediate borders of Israel and Palestine. In a conversation last week, a leading Egyptian moderate, Tarek Heggy, told me, ‘If Israel went into Gaza tomorrow and those pictures were broadcast throughout the Arab world, the implications for the rest of the region will be gigantic. They would create a lot of pressure on the moderate leaders.’

The recent breaching of the border with Egypt underscores Hamas’s decision to prevent any containment of the conflict to the strict limits of the Gaza Strip. Hamas is strategically pushing for an escalation that places its confrontation with Israel on a wider geo-political level — as just another front on what it wants to portray as the West’s ‘assault’ on Islam. A ‘spillage effect’, in which the clash between Israel and Hamas destabilises moderate players in the region is possible. And if it empowers Iran, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas will have succeeded. Israeli leaders fully understand this, but just cannot see another way of stopping the daily barrage of attacks coming into Israel. As one Israeli security analyst summed it up, ‘We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.’

Israelis have learnt never to say never when dealing with Middle East politics, and some Israeli analysts are now arguing that military action in Gaza may actually be a boost for the peace process. Israel has always been prepared to cede territory gained on the battlefield for acceptance and peace with its neighbours. If Hamas rejects that formula then perhaps Israel’s anticipated action may make room for a more moderate Palestinian leadership that accepts the Jewish state and sees compromise as the only path to an independent Palestine. However, I worry that this is no more than wishful thinking, given the rise in Palestine and the wider region of political Islam and the decline of secular nationalism.

It is of course far from clear how events in Gaza will play out. What is plain is that the past seven years of attacks — and the dramatic increase in the past few months — have been unbearable for so many Israelis. Israel has acted with a commendable level of restraint that in all probability no other country in the world would have shown when under attack. Israel may well have to re-occupy large parts of Gaza, essentially admitting that its 2005 experiment of unilateral withdrawal failed — it wasn’t able to bring security to the region by giving back Gaza without a clear partner for peace on the other side. And where will all this leave Israel? Back at square one, pondering her next step in the search for a land-for-peace deal.

Where Does Prophet Obama Stand on International Criminal Court?

From left to right: Ms. Fatou Bensouda, ICC Deputy Prosecutor, Mr. Kofi Annan,  former  UN Secretary-General, Judge Philippe Kirsch, President of the ICC.

I was hoping for a short cut to get rid of Obama. Larry Sinclair would have been fine by me. As usual it will have to be done the old fashion way and that is the right way and best way. Let the man rise or fall on his beliefs and ideas. It is time to get some specifics from the prophet Obama. Let's start with the ICC.

The International Criminal Court isn't discussed much in the presidential campaign, but few issues are more revealing of a candidate's perspective on the United States' legal and political relations with the rest of the world.

The court was established in 2002 to deal with cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Headquartered in the Dutch city of The Hague, it was conceived as a permanent successor to the Nuremberg tribunals formed to try Nazi leaders after World War II. It now has 105 members, including virtually all current U.S. allies, but not the United States itself.

President Bush has attacked the court relentlessly, saying it could subject Americans to politically motivated prosecutions abroad. He has renounced the 1998 treaty that created the court, pressed other nations to disregard it, and signed legislation - nicknamed the "Hague Invasion Act" by critics - authorizing military action to free any citizen of the United States or an allied nation held for trial by the court.

Republican presidential candidates generally share Bush's view, while Democratic candidates largely reject it."

San Francisco Chronicle

_____________________

Europeans Hopeful US Democrats Will Rescue Trans-Atlantic Ties

DW

Europeans think the next US president will be better. They hope a Democrat in the White House will reinvigorate trans-Atlantic ties. But the candidates aren't necessarily much more in tune with Europe.

Europeans' interest in the US primaries and caucuses is immense: leading German newsmagazine Der Spiegel even devoted its title story to Democrat Barack Obama last week, and the Internet is alive with young Europeans commenting on the campaigns in innumerable blogs and forums.

Many Europeans connect the election of a new US president with the hope for a new beginning in trans-Atlantic relations, which suffered setbacks due to numerous controversies, from George W. Bush's uncompromising approach to climate change to his foray into the Iraqi desert. To many Europeans, everything will get better once there's a new president. And if he or she is a Democrat, they believe, it's guaranteed.

Regardless of how passionately Europeans follow the duel between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Europe plays a negligible role in the top Democratic contenders' campaigns. Aside from a few sentences in speeches and essays, the two have hardly said a word about Europe.

And according to some, European hopes will likely be dashed.

"A fundamental new evaluation of the trans-Atlantic relationship will not take place," said Esther Brimmer, research director at the Center for Transatlantic Relations (CTR) at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.

But the tone will change.

"Obama and Clinton will make themselves out to be more cooperative, more international. And for every American president, Europe remains the most important partner," Brimmer said.

US won't allow Europe to dictate

On points of contention between the US and Europe, such as climate change or human rights, the Europeans could expect significantly more cooperation than in the past, she added.

But whether under a President Obama or a President Clinton, the US would demand the leadership role in fighting climate change. It would also refuse to let the Europeans dictate what should be done, Brimmer said. And it's inconceivable that a new president would ratify the statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC), an issue that looms large for Europeans.

"With so much military personnel all over the world, the US doesn't want to be subjected to politically motivated accusations from other states at the ICC," Brimmer said.

But a new president wouldn't try to actively thwart the ICC, as the Bush administration did at the start.

And when it comes to Iraq and Iran's nuclear ambitions, a President Obama or Clinton would discuss the issues more closely with the Europeans, Brimmer reckoned.

Obama attracted attention last year by suggesting he would try to engage in direct talks with Iran. Clinton called the suggestion naive.

Grown apart

Brimmer said the biggest difference between the two Democrats in regard to Europe was that Obama wanted to set the course for where the US would be in 30 or 40 years, particularly in terms of climate change and international dialogue. Clinton, on the other hand, was focused on improving America's standing in the world in the near term.

This different approach "naturally influences the role Europe plays for the US in the mid-term," Brimmer said.

Though Bush's foreign policy may have caused a storm over the Atlantic, actually there had been a fundamental, structural change in the trans-Atlantic relationship, said Karen Donfried, vice president of the German Marshall Funds of the United States.

"The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, hit the US at a time when the Europeans -- after the end of the Cold War -- felt safer than ever," she said. The US and Europe had not only developed different interests, but were also no longer united by a common enemy.

Polls reinforce that view: While Americans identify terrorism as the number one threat, Europeans say climate change is the biggest problem.

Finding a common cause

The rise of new 'super powers,' such as China and India could, however, bring Americans and Europeans closer together again, according to Donfried.

"The EU and the US must work together to integrate countries that come from outside this tradition into the global political system they have so clearly molded," she said.

In that sense, Obama and Clinton would certainly view Europeans as effective partners. But the "Europeans would have to finally get their house in order," Donfried said.

"In haggling over a new European constitution and the Lisbon reform treaty, the Europeans were so occupied with themselves that they were neither united enough nor did they have the necessary view of the outside world to be this effective partner," she said.

Larry Sinclair Lied. Fails Lie Detector Test.

Deception Indicated in Both of Larry Sinclair's Polygraph Tests by First Polygraph Expert Whitehouse.com
2/24/2008 2:15 PM

Dr. Ed Gelb, Former President of the American Polygraph Association was the Polygraph expert selected by Whitehouse.com. He has done over 30,000 polygraph examinations over his long career. There were two polygraph tests administered by Dr. Gelb on Friday. the first polygraph asked Mr. Sinclair on his sex claims. The second polygraph test asked Mr. Sinclair on the drug use claims. There was deception indicated in both tests.
As mentioned yesterday Mr. Sinclair did pass his drug screen so there were no drugs in his system which could have interfered with the test. We have asked Mr. Sinclair on several occasions to put us in contact with the Limousine driver that he named for other news organizations earlier and for us on Friday that was supposed to corroborate his story. As of today he has still not put us in contact with the limousine driver whom he told us he stays in constant contact with.

It was our intention to get to the truth in this serious matter rather than have these allegations that were made almost a month ago drag on to election day. Due to the seriousness of this issue we made the results public today rather than waiting until Monday when we would have received the second expert's conclusions. When we receive the second expert's conclusions we will post those results as well.

We will have all of the written results posted on the site in the next week including video taken of the Polygraph testing so there will be full disclosure and transparency on our part and eliminate any suspicion of any wrongdoing or manipulations of the testing or the results by Whitehouse.com or the polygraph experts. Later this afternoon we will post the actual report by Dr. Gelb.

Barack Obama, Gay Sex, Crack, Larry Sinclair, Lie Detector Test.

The White House site has not yet posted the promised report, but YouTube is not responding. People are reporting from all parts of the US that YouTube is down. The results of the Larry Sinclair lie detector test were supposed to be up an hour or so ago.

These are some of the reports coming in off the Whitehouse.com site:

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:56 PM
youtube down in New Jersey

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:54 PM
Message to Obama SPAMMERS: Are you scared?

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:47 PM
this is a joke we should all leave, so they cannot make tatla jerks
of us

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:46 PM
youtube down in tn

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:46 PM
Youtube down here in VA.

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:43 PM
LAIRY actually kinda looks like LARRY from "PERFECT STRANGER"...OMG!

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:40 PM
Que theme from JEOPARDY

Posted by on 2/24/2008 2:05:35 PM
no you tube in portland, oregon.. I wonder if they are broadcasting
this on you tube?

Tolerance

What will it take for Mexico to get the attention that other world hot spots receive from the media? Apparently drug wars are tolerated and ignored or perhaps it is a no-no to highlight the destabilization and threat on our southern border. Slowly we are learning that certain levels of narco-traffic and illegal immigration are considered just another cost of doing business with our southern neighbor.

Is Mexico's Drug War Escalating?

By IOAN GRILLO/MEXICO CITY Thu Feb 21, 1:45 PM ET

German tourist Jurgen Kohl was window shopping in Mexico's trendy Zona Rosa district last Friday afternoon when he saw a flash of brilliant light followed by a thundering bang and the sound of shattering glass. Minutes later, ambulances and police rushed into the street to find three blood-soaked people crying for help and the remains of a crude plastic explosives device. One of the injured died on the way to hospital. "Being in Mexico, I first thought it was an earthquake or something," Kohl said, visibly shaken from the blast. "I had no idea that bombs went off here."

No group has claimed responsibility for the bombing, which sent shock waves through the heart of the Mexican capital. But officials on the case have said they are investigating whether it could be the work of drug cartels reeling from a crackdown by President Felipe Calderon. Leftist guerrilla groups also have a history of bombing in Mexico, but they have normally hit political or commercial buildings at night without leaving casualties.

If drug gangs are proven to be behind the blast, it would show a worrying escalation in the battle between organized crime and the government. Since Jan. 1, drug cartel gunmen armed with huge arsenals of automatic rifles and grenade launchers have slain more than 30 police, soldiers and judges in ambushes and assassinations. The attacks come as Calderon has made record drug busts, sent 25,000 police and soldiers against the gangs, and extradited alleged kingpins to the United States.

While the Mexican crime families do not have a history of using bombs, explosive devices used to be a favored tactic of their associates in Colombia. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Medellin cartel responded to a government crackdown with bombs on street corners, cars and even one passenger jet, killing hundreds. Colombian gangsters have long been selling cocaine to the Mexican cartels, who smuggle it into the United States. "The cartels could be turning to this Colombian tactic of using terror to pressure the government to back off," said Mexican drug expert Jorge Chabat. "They may be trying to raise the political cost for Calderon of carrying out his campaign."

Police say the man killed in the blast was probably himself carrying the bomb because the device went off about a three feet from the ground, blowing out surrounding car windows but not causing a crater. "The man completely lost his hand. He surely did this when he was handling the explosive device," Mexico City Police Chief Joel Ortega told reporters.

If this is the case, the bomb may have gone off before it was planned, the detectives say. It exploded two blocks from Mexico City's police headquarters. A woman who received burns from the blast was being questioned by detectives in her hospital bed Monday while under police guard. Identified as Tania Vazquez, 22, the woman lives in the rough market neighborhood of Tepito, known as a center of drug dealing. Police raided her home on Sunday and took about $2,500 in cash and lists of phone numbers, officials said. No charges have been leveled against her at this time.

Living several blocks away from Vasquez was an alleged drug trafficker working for the powerful Sinaloa cartel named Rogelio Mena. Police had arrested Mena two days before the blast, along with six other men and an arsenal of weaponry including a Barrett anti-aircraft gun. He is being held for 90 days on suspicion of racketeering and weapons offenses. The Sinaloa cartel has been blamed for carrying out many of the attacks on police and soldiers this year. Federal agents say they also foiled an attempt by the gang to assassinate Federal Prosecutor Jose Luis Santiago, who oversees the extradition of high-level criminals to the United States.

The last bombings in the country were carried out by a leftist guerrilla group called the People's Revolutionary Army, which blew up sections of two pipelines of state oil monopoly Pemex in September. That group previously targeted other oil installations, banks and political buildings and has always claimed responsibility for its attacks.

The still unlearned lesson is that when one compromises with evil eventually one might be forced to submit to that evil. Columbia is a prime example. The cocaine cartels very nearly destroyed that country but the world's Human Rights NGOs seem to have forgotten the near anarchy which inevitably led to the bloodshed on both sides.

The situation is bad and getting worse with Chavez assuming the revolutionary mantle of Castro.

Larry Sinclair Update on Gay Sex and Drug Charges

From Whitehouse.com:

Larry Sinclair's drug test came back earlier than expected. He was tested for any and all chemical substances including illegal drugs that could cause an inaccurate polygraph test result. There were no traces of any such substances found.

We are awaiting for the second polygraph expert to verify the original results and should have an answer by Monday. Video of the polygraph exam will be posted shortly."

I am going out on a limb here, but come to think about it, we don't have any advertisers to lose. It certainly seems as if these guys are painting a picture that will show positive results on this test. Maybe not. Will post the video as soon as it is out.

Arguments against Bio-Fuels

Bio-Foolish Behavior

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Environment: In 2005, America used 15% of its corn crop to replace just 2% of its gasoline. Two new studies say use of biofuels will leave the world a warmer and hungrier place.

The law of unintended consequences has reared its ugly head once again, with a study published in the Feb. 7 issue of the journal Science.

According to University of Minnesota ecologist and study co-author David Tilman, converting the grasslands of the U.S. to corn for ethanol releases excess CO2 emissions of 134 metric tons per hectare (equal to 2.47 acres).

The reason is that plants, from grasses to trees, store carbon dioxide in their roots, shoots and leaves.

"I know that when I look at a tree that half the dry weight is carbon," says Tilman. "That's going to end up as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when you cut it down."

"Any biofuel that causes land clearing is likely to increase global warming," says Nature Conservancy ecologist Joseph Fargione, the lead author of a second study also published in Science.

Fargione notes that ethanol demand in the U.S. has caused farmers to plant more corn and less soy. This has driven up soy prices and caused farmers in Brazil to clear more acres of rain forest to plant the increasingly valuable soy.

Tim Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University and lead author of the first study, says, "There is a huge imbalance between the carbon (released) by plowing up a hectare of forest or grassland from the benefit you get from biofuels."

According to Searchinger, "Corn-based ethanol, instead of producing 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse gas emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years."

So it's not surprising that 10 prominent scientists have written a letter to President Bush and other government leaders urging them to "shape policies to assure that government incentives for biofuels do not increase global warming."

Marcel Silvius, a climate expert at Wetlands International in the Netherlands, recently led a team that weighed the benefits of palm oil against the ecological harm from clearing virgin Asian rain forests for new plantations. He concluded that as a fuel, palm oil is more like snake oil, noting: "As a biofuel, it's a failure."

A team from Wetlands, Delft Hydraulics and the Alterra Research Center of Wageningen University produced a four-year study that detailed the environmental harm caused by the use of palm oil as an alternative energy source. The team zeroed in on Indonesia and Malaysia, where 85% of commercial palm oil is grown.

The study found that 1.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide go up in smoke every year from rain forest fires set to clear new land for biofuel plantations. An additional 600 million tons seep into the air from drained peat swamps. Those 2 billion tons of CO2 constitute 8% of the earth's fossil fuel emissions.

As we have noted, our increased use of corn for ethanol has driven up U.S. food prices across the board.

This process, Tilman notes, is "equivalent to saying we will try to reduce greenhouse gases by reducing food consumption. Unfortunately, a lot of that comes from the world's poorest people. We are converting their food into our fuel."

"We are witnessing the beginnings of one of the great tragedies of history," Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, said in a written statement. "The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before."

To avoid drilling in ANWR, we are increasing emissions of the greenhouse gases previously absorbed by plants and encouraging that process around the world. Meanwhile, a world of hungry people watches us stick ears of corn into our gas tanks.

Paul Pots. Try and Keep a Dry Eye.

Larry Sinclair Completed 4 Hour Polygraph on Gay Sex and Crack Use With Obama.

This should be interesting. I am not sure that I believe it or just want to. Probably both.

____________________

BREAKING NEWS - Larry Sinclair Completed 4 Hour Polygraph Test Today
2/22/2008 8:45 PM Whitehouse.com

Due to security concerns, we had to move the Larry Sinclair Polygraph up a few days. We conducted it in secret today and the picture to the left is from one of the two arduous polygraphs Sinclair underwent today.

The process took four grueling hours, testing Sinclair's claims of sex and drug use separately and also including a drug screening to ensure that Sinclair didn't enlist any chemical assistance.

The results are being confirmed by a second expert and we'll have conclusive word, along with video of the whole thing, Monday or Tuesday. Check back then for more, including video the tests and, of course, the results.

T. Boone Pickens* on Oil Imports

*Nobody can come up with better names than they do in the American South.

You have to love this quote: "Pickens originally backed Rudy Giuliani for president. Asked what happened to his campaign, Pickens said: "My guy rode up in front of the grandstand and fell off his horse. I've never seen anything come and go as fast as Rudy's campaign."

_____________________

Pickens: U.S. Faces Disaster over Oil Wealth Exodus Money News

Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008

One of America's most influential businessmen, legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens, says the nation's wealth is being plundered by oil exporters and the U.S. faces a potential financial disaster if our energy policy is not reformed.
Pickens, who correctly predicted that oil would top $100 a barrel, also says he expects oil prices to drop sharply in the near term.

Appearing on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Thursday morning, Pickens pointed out that the U.S. is currently sending half a trillion dollars out of the country each year to buy oil, in some cases from people who "are our enemies."

Said Pickens, "You take 10 years and you've got $5 trillion ... That's more than $1 billion a day.

"We can't stand that. Wealth is moving out of the country...

"Not one presidential candidate has addressed this … The candidates have to get up to speed on what energy cost is doing to our country." Pickens even turned on his own industry, oil, and called for an increase in alternative energy sources.

"If we do not get on the alternative energy bandwagon and if we don't have a global recession, we could be sitting on $150 oil in two years," he told CNBC.

Pickens touched on a number of other points:

• Although he was originally against ethanol, Pickens now favors an increase in ethanol production, saying, "I'd rather have ethanol, and recirculate the money in the country, than to have it go out the back door on us."

• "I think oil is going to back off," he said. "The weakest quarter is the second quarter. We'll drop $10 or $15 a barrel in the second quarter. I think we'll be back above $100 in the second half of the year."

• Natural gas prices are too high and they can be expected to drop, according to Pickens, who is shorting both oil and gas.

• Natural gas will become a "serious transportation fuel," Pickens predicted, adding: "We've got to get coal cleaned up and we've got to get natural gas into the transportation mix."

• The U.S. should increase its use of solar and wind to meet the expected rise in electricity demand, locating those alternative energy sources in the Great Plains and "middle of the country," Pickens urged.

• Barack Obama says the U.S. "should do bio diesel," said Pickens, "but that won't solve any problems."

• He also said about Obama: "He talks about change. I haven't seen yet what he's going to change."

• A windfall profit tax on U.S. oil companies would be "ridiculous," Pickens charged, saying: "You've got to keep the money in the industry."

• Pickens originally backed Rudy Giuliani for president. Asked what happened to his campaign, Pickens said: "My guy rode up in front of the grandstand and fell off his horse. I've never seen anything come and go as fast as Rudy's campaign.

Pickens told CNBC he now backs John McCain for president. Asked if the Republicans can win the White House this year, he said simply: "Sure."

© NewsMax 2008. All rights reserved.

US Shoot Down of Satellite Is a Warning to Iran

And you can add others to the warning. The technological achievement is staggering and the diplomacy and security advantage should be obvious. The US has demonstrated that a first strike attempt by an enemy could come to naught, and the follow-up US retaliation would be nation ending. The system needs to be continually advanced and a new generation of unmanned fighter and bomber warplanes would insure US dominance for another generation. The consequences in not committing the resources are extremely dangerous. Some of you may want to think about that when contemplating a vote for Obama.

_____________________

February 22, 2008
Satellite shoot-down is a clear warning to Iran
James Lewis American Thinker

Wednesday night's SM-3 shoot-down of a US spy satellite tumbling out of its orbit was a magnificent success for anti-missile defense. It meant hitting a bullet with a bullet, with only a ten-second time window for the shot. The hit was kinetic, meaning that there was no conventional warhead to explode, and the SM-3 hit the fuel tank of the bus-sized spy satellite right in the sweet spot in order to disperse the toxic propellant. The small pieces left over will now burn up in the atmosphere.

The SM-3 was traveling at 17,000 miles per hour when it hit the spy sat. The target was "cold," so that heat-seeking sensors designed to locate hot missiles were not even used. This was a last-minute modification of an anti-missile system for a special job, an extraordinary technical achievement, and one that is now sending ripple effects all around the world. The Chinese People's Army and the Russkis are all upset, poor babies. But this fast, off-the-shelf demonstration of US technical prowess was really a direct shot across the bows of Iran -- and also North Korea.

Why? Because the Russians and Chinese have had ICBMs for decades and never used them. They respond to the balance of terror in a rational way. But Iran and North Korea are constantly threatening us, unpredictable, and often crazy-sounding.

Just this week we heard official statements like this:

"The cancerous growth Israel will soon disappear... I am convinced that with every passing day Hizbullah's might is increasing and in the near future, we will witness the disappearance of this cancerous growth Israel by means of the Hizbullah fighters' radiation [therapy]."

Well, "Hizbullah" means "party of Allah," and that refers to the whole Khomeini cult, not just its Lebanese lapdog. So "radiation therapy" from the Party of Allah has a pretty clear meaning. Tehran's head guru, Ayatollah Khamenei, also explained that Allah hates any Iranians who don't support the nuke program. Exactly where he found that in the Koran wasn't explained.

Meanwhile, North Korea is in the middle of a succession struggle, always the trickiest time in family despotisms. The Syrians, too, have been getting NoKo help on nuclear power, according to Israeli sources.

The Iranian opposition group that keeps leaking the mullah's nuke secrets has just presented evidence that they really do have a working factory to make nuclear warheads, at a town called Khojir, built in cooperation with the North Koreans. Since fabricating ing a nuclear warhead is not difficult once you have the uranium or plutonium, this sounds believable. That news knocks the last leg out from under the rickety fantasy world of the last US National Intelligence Estimate.

So this is a crucial time to demonstrate to the rogues that the West can defend itself. That is why the administration chose this time to show off our anti-missile defense capability.

The brilliance of our anti-missile systems is that they can move and fast and stealthily from place to place. Aegis cruisers like the one that just shot down the spy satellite can be sent to any navigable sea in the world, very close to North Korea, Iran, and Syria. If Chavez ever buys missiles from his friends in Tehran, or if Castro's successor does, the US Navy can be in range the next day. Once we get laser weapons mounted on aircraft, we will have even faster and more flexible defenses. That technology is not far away.

So this is an historic moment for the good guys. For the first time since Stalin exploded an atom bomb in 1949 there is a working defense against nuke-bearing missiles and planes. Real civilizations -- large cities surrounded by farms to feed them -- have always depended upon walls, moats, and natural defenses. That is the only reason why we have the prosperity and culture that began with Sumer 6,000 years ago. But defense and aggression are always in a race -- the liberal fantasy that arms races are somehow abnormal in history is just ignorant.

What's different about the last half century is that city-killing weapons have put the aggressor at a major advantage, so that a High Noon standoff was the only answer. That horrific period is now passing as missile defenses come into their own. We are coming back to a more normal balance. That is a very good thing.

So when you vote in the Fall, don't forget who made missile defenses possible.

(Hint: It wasn't the Democrats).

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

Turkey Television Claims 10,000 Troops Assault Iraq

"Come over for some tea why don't you and oh by the way we assaulted
your northern borders today."

There does not seem to be much of a fuss about this in the media. It certainly is not a "Gulf of Tonkin" moment. AFP reports that Turkish President Abdullah Gul invited his Iraqi counterpart Jalal Talabani to Turkey in a telephone call Thursday night as he informed him of Ankara's ground operation in northern Iraq, Gul's office said Friday.

"During the call, our president conveyed information on the objective of the ground operation which began Thursday night," the statement said.

Gul also underlined Turkey's intention to boost bilateral ties with Iraq in all fields and invited Talabani to Turkey, it added.

_____________________

Thousands of Turkish troops cross border into Iraq Times on Line

Turkish troops escalated their conflict with Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq today when thousands launched the country's first cross-border ground invasion since the 2003 American-led campaign.

The operation to hunt down guerrillas from the separatist PKK was announced by the Turkish military this morning, and came hours after Turkish warplanes and artillery bombed suspected rebel targets.

Turkey's private NTV television station said that 10,000 troops were taking part in the offensive and had penetrated six miles into Iraq, although these reports were unconfirmed by the military. Turkish troops have been massing on the northern Iraqi border for months.

The country's Dogan News Agency reported that the Habur border crossing, a major conduit for trade between Iraq and Turkey, had been closed.

Analysts believe that today's campaign is the biggest launched by Turkey against the Kurds since the 1990s, when a number of cross-border raids were carried out.

"The Turkish Armed Forces, which values Iraq’s territorial integrity and its stability, will return as soon as planned goals are achieved," the Turkish military said, announcing this morning's operation on its website.

"The executed operation will prevent the region from being a permanent and safe base for the terrorists and will contribute to Iraq’s stability and internal peace."

The military said its target was the PKK and that it would take care not to harm civilians. It warned that other militias in the area should "not act in enmity against the Turkish Armed Forces".

It is the first time the Turkish military have carried out a threat to launch a cross-border ground invasion following the decision of the Turkish Parliament to authorise the military to strike rebels in October.

International observers have expressed huge concern that any major confrontation between Turkey and the Kurds could lead to spiralling instability in Iraq, which has already been locked in sectarian violence since the 2003 invasion.

"Turkish ground forces have entered into northern Iraq for what we understand is an operation of limited duration to specifically target PKK terrorists in that region," Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, a US military spokesman, said, giving what appeared to be lukewarm American approval for the campaign.

"Turkey has given its assurances it will do everything possible to avoid collateral damage to innocent civilians or Kurdish infrastructure."

Turkey has conducted air raids against the guerrillas since December with the help of US intelligence, but it has only scarcely carried out so-called "hot pursuits" in which small units sometimes spend only a few hours inside Iraq.

It has been locked in a bitter battle with Kurdish separatists since the PKK began fighting for a Kurdish homeland in south-eastern Turkey in 1984. More than 30,000 people have been killed in Kurdish terrorist attacks and Turkish military operations since then.

Serbs Do Us a Favor and Burn Our Embassy

Quite simply, we never should have been involved with Kosovo for any reason. Kosovo is part of Serbia as New Mexico is to the US. No American President to date would tolerate a European country getting involved in a Mexican led move to encourage New Mexico to declare freedom and secede from The United States. It was a stupid decision by the Clinton Administration to have bombed Serbia over Kosovo.

If the Serbian government cannot find the police or troops to protect the US Embassy, leave it closed. What loss is there to the US if Serbs or Kosovars have a more difficult time coming to the United States?

I have felt for some time that the next Muslim attack on the US would come from white European Muslims and the region of former Yugoslavia is loaded with Islamic militants. There are also Serbian nationalists who despise the US and could be another source of terror. The entire region is a problem that we do not need. It is a good place to start a review on where true US interests are. Not there.

_________________________

Serb Protesters Storm Vacant U.S. Embassy
NPR

Serbian nationalists opposed to Kosovo's independence storm the United States embassy in Belgrade, after a massive rally in the Serbian capital. Several hundred young men dressed in hooded sports tops and scarfs had broken into the premises on the main boulevard of Kneza Milosa. The embassy was not staffed at the time of the attack.

Angry demonstrators broke into an empty U.S. embassy in Belgrade on Thursday, setting fire to its facade and tossing documents out of windows to protest Washington's apparent support for Kosovo's independence.

Serbian police stood by as black smoke billowed from the embassy compound, which had been boarded up after rioters threw stones at the structure earlier in the week. Papers and chairs were thrown out of the windows, with doors wedged into burning window frames.

Protesters were later seen removing the embassy's American flag.

The attack follows a day in which an estimated 150,000 demonstrators protested against Kosovo's weekend declaration of independence from Serbia. Protesters waved Serbian flags and carried signs reading "Stop USA terror".

The subject of Kosovo's independence is extremely sensitive for Serbs, who consider the breakaway region the cradle of their medieval nationhood.

New York Times Hit Job on McCain

I am not going to link the story because when I read it, I found nothing. No names and scant details. The babe looks like a woman McCain would like. To me it is a big so what. I put this up before McCain talks to the press. Why would anyone want to be President?

Star Wars Begin? Not Necessarily.

Sometimes it is just time to go

Comment by James A. Lewis, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Satellite Shootdown Comments

People are looking for ulterior motives for the shootdown because the official explanation – preventing a thousand pounds of hydrazine falling from the sky – seems a bit thin.

Hydrazine is highly dangerous stuff. It’s unstable, corrosive and explodes easily. That means that the fuel tanks for hydrazine are made extra tough. Unfortunately, the strength that lets the fuel tank carry hydrazine safely into space also means that the tank is tough enough to survive catastrophic reentry. When the shuttle broke apart on reentry a few years ago, the hydrazine tank was one of the few items to survive the fall unscathed. In that case, however, the tank contained only a few pounds of hydrazine. In this case, the tank is full. The risk is that the equivalent of a 1000-pound bomb could end up crashing down into a populated area.

Lots of debris falls from space every year – the boosters that carry satellite up come down pretty quickly. Elderly satellites are deorbited without much notice. The difference is that these are usually controlled reentries, where the impact point is planned (usually in water) and there is a degree of control as to the timing. This is an uncontrolled reentry. It’s possible to predict where impact will occur with some accuracy, but a number of factors can through the prediction off. Presumably, the U.S. predicts it will fall near or close to a populated area. Usually these things fall into water – it covers ¾ of the planet’s surface – or an unpopulated area. I know of only one reported case where someone was hit by a piece of a falling satellite, when a 20 pound chunk of aluminum from a Chinese CBERS satellite hit a boy in Shaanxi province – the press reported that he suffered a “fractured toe.”

The hydrazine explanation seems far-fetched, but the alternative explanations make even less sense. The U.S. doesn’t need to do this to impress the Chinese. They were already impressed by earlier successful tests, including the last one where an SM-3 missile launched from an Aegis cruiser hit a warhead 87 miles above the Pacific Ocean. This didn’t get a lot of public attention, but the Chinese military was sure to have followed it closely, if only because the U.S. has a cooperative missile defense program using Aegis with Japan, which the Chinese think could be used to defend Taiwan.

This test and China’s ASAT test really aren’t comparable. This is a ballistic missile defense test rather than an anti-satellite test. An anti-satellite test would have attacked the target while it was in orbit. A BMD test attacks when the target is in reentry. Hitting the target at a lower altitude reduces the risk of debris. One of the problems with the China ASAT test (aside from not telling anyone in advance) is that it left a large debris cloud orbiting the earth. The debris from this Aegis test will be at a lower altitude and be more quickly drawn into the earth's atmosphere, where they will burn up.

Success is likely in this effort, but not assured. Of the ten Aegis tests, eight resulted in hits. There is also the possibility that the satellite will behave erratically as it hits the atmosphere, making it a more difficult target. Variants of the SM-3 missile can be used against aircraft or ships, but these variants carry explosive warheads with proximity fuses (meaning the warhead only as to get near the target, not actually hit it). The missile defense variant uses a ‘kinetic’ warhead, basically a large lump of metal that crashed into the target. It will be moderately embarrassing if it misses.

The notion that secret high tech gizmos would fall into the wrong hands has some merit, but not enough to justify a shoot-down. There are always pieces of wreckage when a satellite falls to the ground. When they fall in the Canadian Arctic, the U.S. and Canada collect the pieces. When a nuclear powered satellite built by the Soviet Union crashed in Canada in the 1970s, the Soviets said they didn’t want the pieces back. When a Chinese rocket carrying a Western-owned communications satellite blew up shortly after launch, the Chinese carefully collected all the pieces and tried to examine them before turning them back, but the most sensitive items were charred and cracked beyond recognition. The probability of gaining useful information from the crash is low, as the best technology would have to survive reentry and the debris would have to fall in an opponent-controlled area. The probability of surviving reentry and landing in a hostile controlled area are too low to explain the decision to shoot down.

The one scenario that doesn’t get as much attention is planetary defence, possibly because it sounds silly. The notion that the U.S. should add intercepting meteorites or asteroids before they strike the earth to its defense missions seems pretty far-fetched. These events are so rare as to be improbable. On the other hand, supporters say, an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs, drastically changed the environment, created a year-long winter and so on. It still sounds far-fetched. On the other hand, a 200-foot wide meteorite that struck Tunguska Siberia in 1908 had the effect of a nuclear explosion (without the radiation aftereffects). If there was warning that a similar event was about to occur over a populated area, it would be nice to have the ability to stop it. It's not worth spending much time worrying about being hit by asteroids, however, or even by satellites, but having spent all that money on missile defense, it’s nice that it finally has some practical use.

We're Broke, Buds!

hattip: Cutler

Notice: New Elephant Bar Policy - No Tabs!

Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Barack Obama

Obama is going to knock out Hillary. That is clear. It will not take much longer. The Clintons will not follow Huckabee’s Arkansas Waltz to certain defeat. Hillary will drop for the good of the party and return to the Senate with a bruised ego. The Democrats however, will discover what they bought.

Like zealots pumped up at an Amway demonstration, the Democrats will work to sell the Barack froth. The new and improved political detergent of the Left, doubly concentrated, guaranteed to please and amaze, will be open for scrutiny by more skeptical and sober souls. Six or seven months of accumulated campaigning will show that the all-purpose Barack soap leaves a spot here and a spot there. The multi-culture marketing scheme will break as they all do by failing in degrees to please. In the end enough sensible people will realize it is just soap in a cardboard box.

The Surge. the Ceasefire and the Election

Basra, Badr and Barack

The surge is over come July.

Sadr's ceasefire may end sooner.
(Like this weekend.)

________________________

Al-Sadr threatens to lift cease-fire

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA,

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has threatened to lift by the end of the week a six-month cease-fire widely credited with helping reduce violence in Iraq, officials said Wednesday.

Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, a spokesman for al-Sadr in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, said that if the cleric failed to issue a statement by Saturday saying that the cease-fire was extended "then that means the freeze is over."

The cease fire was declared in August and due to expire at this month's end.

Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is among the most powerful militias in Iraq. The crux of the message being sent by the organization was that al-Sadr followers would be free to resume their activities if no message was sent by the cleric on Feb. 23.

According to al-Obeidi, this "has been conveyed to all Mahdi Army members nationwide."

The threat was confirmed by another al-Sadr official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The U.S. military has welcomed the cease-fire, saying it is a major factor in the estimated 60 percent decline in violence in the country in the second half of 2007.

But the military has insisted on continuing to stage raids against what it calls Iranian-backed breakaway factions of the Mahdi Army militia, and anger among the cleric's followers has been building.

Influential members of al-Sadr's movement said recently that they had urged the anti-U.S. cleric to call off the cease-fire when it expires.

Al-Sadr's followers claim the U.S.-Iraqi raids, particularly in the southern Shiite cities of Diwaniyah, Basra and Karbala, are a pretext to crack down on the wider movement.

The maverick cleric announced earlier this month that he would not renew the order unless the Iraqi government purges "criminal gangs" operating within security forces he claims are targeting his followers.

That was a reference to rival Shiite militiamen from the Badr Brigade who have infiltrated security forces participating in the ongoing crackdown. The Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army also are involved in a violent power struggle for control of the oil-rich south.

______________________

The Iranians may decide to seek to influence the US Presidential election. Turning the Badr Brigades loose to destabilize the country and kill US service men could bolster Obama's position going into the general election so the Shia militias and foreign jihadists will attempt to make all hell to break loose in the coming months. I am not sure that John McCain will be able to make the case for staying in Iraq.

Change is coming. In Pakistan, in Iraq and in America. Be ready.

Terrorist Sons - "They blow up so fast"

Beware the Ides of March.

Israel kills terror chief with headrest bomb
Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv, Hala Jaber in Beirut and Jon Swain

NOTHING seemed very remarkable about the short, bearded man who mingled with other guests on Tuesday evening at a reception in Damascus, the Syrian capital, to mark the 29th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution.

Yet before the night was over he was dead in the twisted wreckage of his car and the inevitable assumption was that Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, had killed him with an ingeniously planted bomb.

The news spread rapidly that the dead man was Imad Mughniyeh, an elusive figure known as “the Fox” who had been one of the world’s most feared terrorist masterminds.

Robert Baer, a former CIA agent who spent years on his trail, said Mughniyeh was “probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across”.

As the Israelis rejoiced, Iran and Hezbollah, the militant Shi’ite group, which together had harnessed Mugniyeh’s expertise, mourned his death at a huge funeral in Beirut, where he established his terrorist network.

Mughniyeh’s mother, Um Imad, sat amid a sea of black chadors, a lonely, sombre figure as mourners held their hero’s picture aloft.

“If only I had more boys to carry on in his footsteps,” she sighed, confessing that she did not have any pictures of him, even from his childhood, as he had taken them away. He was the third of her sons to die in a car bombing.

With a price of $25m (£12.7m) on his head, he was always vigilant. Some say he had had plastic surgery to alter his face in an effort to elude the Americans and Israelis who blamed him for plane hijackings and other bloody attacks which killed hundreds of their citizens in the Middle East and as far away as South America.

He had grown accustomed to living dangerously and there was no reason he should have feared for his safety last Tuesday as he sipped fruit juice at the party at the Iranian cultural centre. Mughniyeh was on fairly good terms with everybody present – almost all the leaders of the Damascus-based militant groups were represented.

At 10.35pm he decided to go home. Having exchanged customary kisses with his host, Hojatoleslam Ahmad Musavi, the newly appointed Iranian ambassador, Mughniyeh stepped into the night.

Minutes later he was seated in his silver Mitsubishi Pajero in a nearby street when a deafening blast ripped the car apart and killed him instantly.

According to Israeli intelligence sources, someone had replaced the headrest of the driver’s seat with another containing a small high-explosive charge. Israel welcomed his death but the prime minister’s office denied responsibility. Hezbollah accused the “Zionist Israelis” of killing its “brother commander” but believed the explosive had been detonated in another car by satellite.

One witness said: “I held his head in my hands, kissed him farewell. His face was burnt but intact and he had received serious injuries to his abdomen.”

Whatever the truth about the bomb, Mughniyeh, 45, died as he had lived – violently. He was a product of the Lebanese civil war that transfixed western governments 25 years ago.

Born in a south Lebanon village, the son of a vegetable seller, Mughniyeh joined Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s personal bodyguard, when scarcely out of his teens. After the Palestine Liberation Organisation was forced to leave Lebanon in 1982, he stayed behind and joined Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’ite Islamic group that emerged in 1985 as a militant force resisting Israeli occupation.

He came to the attention of Sheikh Mohammed Fadlallah, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, and rose quickly up the ranks. He was shaped into a remarkably effective terrorist as, under the auspices of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the organisation grew into one of the deadliest forces fighting Israel and America.

Western terrorism experts say he was the dynamo behind some of Hezbollah’s most lethal operations. These included the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people and the attacks on the US marine and French paratrooper barracks that left more than 200 dead. It was Mughniyeh’s decision to kidnap Terry Waite, the Church of England envoy, as he tried to broker the release of other captives.

Another notorious act attributed to him was the hijacking of a TWA flight when an American passenger, a US navy diver, was shot and his body thrown onto the runway.

In the 1990s Israel made him a priority target for his involvement in two attacks in Buenos Aires – the 1992 Israeli embassy bombing, which killed 29, and a 1994 suicide bomb attack on a Jewish community centre, in which 85 died. Then he went to ground. The FBI placed him on its most-wanted list but had to use a 20-year-old photograph for its reward posters.

Despite these difficulties, the CIA came close to capturing him. The Israelis were also hot on his trail. “We tried to knock him down several times in the late 1980s,” revealed David Barkay, a former major in unit 504 of Israeli military intelligence who was in charge of Mughniyeh’s file.

“We accumulated intelligence on him, but the closer we got, the less information we gleaned – no weak points, no women, money, drugs – nothing.”

Mughniyeh lost two brothers, Jihad and Fuad, in car bomb explosions in Beirut. In 2000 he was targeted by an Israeli sniper in southern Lebanon. But in Meir Dagan, who became head of Mossad in 2002, he faced a committed opponent under whose leadership the organisation built a strong record in assassinating Israel’s enemies.

Israel fought a bitter 34-day war against Hezbollah in 2006 to eradicate it in southern Lebanon. It believes that Mughniyeh was instrumental in rebuilding the group after the war, rearming it with Iranian-made Fateh 110 rockets which are capable of hitting Tel Aviv and which it fears could be equipped with chemical weapons.

Informed Israeli sources said that at the time of his death Mughniyeh was working for the Syrians on a terrorist attack against Israeli targets. This was to avenge Israel’s airstrike on what was believed to be a secret nuclear site in Syria last year.

Since Mughniyeh’s death, Israeli embassies and Jewish institutions around the world have been on high alert. “I’ve no doubt the Syrians and Iranians will retaliate,” said Barkay.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s general secretary, warned in a fiery oration at Mughniyeh’s funeral that Israel had committed a “major stupid mistake”. It was now “open war”, he said.

In Lebanon, a close friend of Mughniyeh was certain that he would be avenged by Hezbollah in an attack that, ironically, he had prepared himself before his death. “Most likely the retaliation when it comes will be one that had been planned and masterminded by Imad himself,” said Anis Al-Nackash, a Lebanese expert on Hezbollah.

He said Mughniyeh had prepared a variety of “spectacular” attacks to be executed by Hezbollah if one of its top leaders was assassinated. These were now being dusted off and updated.

On the day Mughniyeh was buried, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, summoned Dagan from his cottage in Galilee to Jerusalem.

“It was a one-on-one meeting,” said a source. But it is believed that Dagan was complimented by his boss and told that he would stay as head of Mossad until the end of 2009.

Time will tell whether, as Israel fervently hopes, Mughniyeh’s death has gravely weakened his organisation or if the effect has merely been to harden Hezbollah’s resolve.

Taken out

The Israeli security service, Mossad, is thought to have killed six other militants abroad since Meir Dagan became director in August 2002:

December 2002 Ramzi Nahara, Israeli agent who defected to Hezbollah and planned attacks against Israel. Dagan knew him personally. Killed in Lebanon by car bomb

March 2003 Abu Mohammed Al-Masri, Al-Qaeda member building cell to target Israeli border with Lebanon. Killed by car bomb in Lebanon

August 2003 Ali Hussein Saleh, Hezbollah explosives expert. Killed by car bomb in Beirut

July 2004 Ghaleb Awali, Hezbollah official with links to activists in Gaza Strip. Killed by car bomb in Beirut

September 2004 Izz el-Deen al-Sheikh Khalil, Hamas official liaising between headquarters in Syria and members in Gaza and West Bank. Killed by car bomb in Damascus

May 2006 Mahmoud Majzoub, Islamic Jihad official liaising with Hezbollah. Killed by car bomb blast in Lebanon

_____________________

This is a fascinating story. Although most money seems to be on the Israelis, even the Iranians have been credited with the assassination of Mugniyeh. Some say Mugniyeh was planning a major attack, others say that Iran "offed him" because he could implicate them in 9/11. Some day we may find out who did it, for now though, we'll have to be satisfied that it was done.

Stratfor says that due to logistics, we can expect "spectacular" retribution no earlier than mid-March. They point to the two 1992 and 1994 Buenos Aires bombings as well as two "less impressive" 1994 bombings in London. Stratfor says Hezbollah will most likely pull some plans "off-the-shelf", are most likely surveilling several targets right now and will most likely strike softer targets in Asia, Latin America or Africa.

Hezbollah's standard MO has been to claim "...its attacks using pseudonyms, such as Islamic Jihad Organization or Organization for the Oppressed of the Earth." It will be interesting to see how accurate Stratfor's advice and information is.

Sabotage Being Considered in Middle East Cable Cutting

AFP

Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday.

"We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago," the UN agency's head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP.

Five undersea cables were damaged in late January and early February leading to disruption to Internet and telephone services in parts of the Middle East and south Asia.

There has been speculation that the sheer number of cables being cut over such a short period was too much of a coincidence and that sabotage must have been involved.

India's Flag telecom revealed on February 7 that the cut to the Falcon cable between the United Arab Emirates and Oman was caused by a ship's anchor. But mystery shrouds what caused another four reported cuts.

"Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships," Murshed said on the sidelines of a conference on cyber-crime held in Gulf state of Qatar.

The Falcon cable has since been repaired, along with the Flag Europe Asia (FEA) cable which was damaged off Egypt's Mediterranean coast. The status of the remaining cable is still unclear.

Nine in 10 officers said the war had stretched the military “dangerously thin”.

US army ‘stretched thin’ by Iraq war
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington FT

Published: February 18 2008 22:09 | Last updated: February 18 2008 22:09

The Iraq war has strained the US military to the extent that America could not fight another large-scale war today, according to a new survey of military officers.

Nine in 10 officers said the war had stretched the military “dangerously thin”. However, 56 per cent disagreed with the suggestion that the conflict had “broken” the armed services, while 64 per cent said morale was high.

More than 3,400 current and retired officers, including more than 200 generals and admirals, participated in the survey by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for a New American Security, a centrist think-tank.

The results underscore the concerns of officers about the strain that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have placed on the military. Of respondents, 60 per cent said the military was weaker today than five years ago.


The results of the independent survey come as the Pentagon debates whether to pause the reduction of forces in Iraq, or whether to make further cuts to ease the stress on the military. The Pentagon is unwinding the “surge” by reducing the number of combat brigades to the pre-surge level of 15, which would leave about 130,000 troops in Iraq by the summer.

General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, wants to pause the reduction to assess the impact of removing the surge, which commanders credit with dramatically reducing violence in Iraq. But General George Casey, his predecessor in Iraq and now the army chief of staff, advocates further reductions.

Gen Casey has warned that the military was deploying at unsustainable rates, and was in danger of crossing a “red line” beyond which it would take a generation to rebuild.

Retired Lieutenant General Greg Newbold, a survey respondent who also participated in the generals’ revolt – a string of calls from senior military figures in 2006 for the resignation of then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld – said the survey showed that the Pentagon could not afford to be complacent.

“If the question had been ‘Are we in danger of straining the military in ways that may take a generation to recover?’, the answer might have been different,” said Lt Gen Newbold.

“We ought to be very careful that we don’t overplay the degree of selfless sacrifice and patriotism that we are relying on from a number of people in the military, the mid-grade officers and mid-grade non-commissioned officers that are really the backbone of the services.”

The extended and repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to concerns about the US military’s ability to respond to other potential threats, including Iran, North Korea or a conflict with China over Taiwan.

According to the survey, 80 per cent of respondents believed it would be “unreasonable” to ask the US military to wage another large war today; 37 per cent also said Iran had gained the greatest strategic advantage from the Iraq war, compared with 19 per cent who saw the US as having gained the most.

In a worrisome result for the Pentagon, which has attempted to repair the damage done to its image by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, 44 per cent of respondents disagreed with the statement that “torture is never acceptable”; 43 per cent also disagreed that waterboarding – an interrogation practice that simulates drowning – was torture, in spite of the fact that it is banned by the army field manual.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Has McCain Outsmarted Obama?

"A fox is a wolf who sends flowers."

                                      -Ruth Brown

February 17, 2008
Obama's No-Win On Financing
By Reid Wilson
Real Clear Politics

A year ago, at the beginning of his bid to secure the clean-up-Washington mantle, Barack Obama made a pact with John McCain that, if the two were to be their party's nominees, each would accept public financing for the general election. That agreement sounded far-fetched: At the time, McCain was in the middle of his high-profile free-fall in the polls, while Obama trailed Hillary Clinton by wide margins in virtually every poll.

Now, McCain is virtually the nominee-in-waiting. By his campaign's count, he has already surpassed the necessary threshold of delegates needed to win the GOP convention in St. Paul. Obama, too, is close to winning his side. He has Clinton against a wall; she needs wins in key states of Ohio and Texas in order to keep her campaign afloat. The scenario that the two candidates who most talk about reforming Washington will actually face each other in November looks more than possible, it looks probable.

Obama's own success has forced him to make a choice that opens him to attack either way. Both of his opponents, smelling potential weakness, are already hammering him, pushing him to make the choice that would give McCain a much better position from which to win the presidency.

After raising $32 million in January and about $100 million in 2007, Obama proved he can build a campaign warchest unlike any the American electorate has seen before. If he continued to raise the amount he achieved in January, Obama would have raised an additional $300 million this year, more than $100 million above John Kerry's spending in 2004. There is reason to assume that, once Obama clinches the nomination, his pace would actually pick up.

McCain, on the other hand, has never been seen as a strong fundraiser. He fell far short of his $100 million goal for 2007, raising just $40 million and ending the year with $1.5 million more in debt than he had in the bank. While his fundraising, as the nominee, will ramp up, it is reasonable to assume that, both because of McCain's slow pace and Obama's success, the Democratic candidate would have a giant financing edge over the Republican.

So McCain has something fairly significant vested in making sure both candidates stick to public financing. If they don't, Obama would be able to outspend him by leaps and bounds. If they do, McCain has a level playing field. In fact, given that the Republican National Committee has consistently outraised the Democratic National Committee, McCain would even be at something of an advantage, as the RNC could outspend its Democratic counterparts to better define the young senator.

McCain has spent much of the last several days lambasting Obama's waffling on the promise. As Democrats have done to him in recent weeks, so McCain has begun targeting Obama with verbal shots, offering a preview of the general election to come, should they face off. "I expect Senator Obama to keep his word to the American people as well. This is all about a commitment that we made to the American people," McCain said in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on Friday, according to the Associated Press.

Clinton, on the other hand, made no such financing promise. Instead, she has based much of her campaign on the notion that she is the more electable candidate, and were she to face McCain, she would revel in her ability to outpace the Republican in fundraising. Her argument against Obama on public financing will likely be two-fold, and the first stage is already well underway.

"Last year, Senator Obama pledged to take public financing in the general election if the Republican nominee agreed to do so as well," Clinton communications ace Howard Wolfson said in a statement today, ahead of a conference call focused on the same issue. "Unfortunately, he broke that pledge this week. It now appears that Senator Obama made a promise to the American people that he is not keeping."

But the call for Obama to keep his word is a thinly-veiled trap. Should he do so, Clinton's electability argument will take on a new sense of purpose. If Obama is the nominee, she should argue, he will offer Republicans an opportunity to win. If she is the nominee, she can make the case to primary voters, she will show Republicans no mercy, making her the more electable candidate.

Obama faces two choices: First, he can take public financing, save some face now and open himself to new, stronger attacks on his electability from Clinton while providing McCain an even playing field. Second, he can back out and take a few weeks of assault from McCain and Clinton for going back on his word.

While financing a campaign is an issue few voters care about, choosing the second scenario could potentially cost him votes in a primary election. Choosing the first could risk the general election itself by giving McCain a chance Obama doesn't have to provide. The question cynics in his campaign have to answer: Do they really want to change the way politics works, or do they really want to win? The answer to that question will determine their choice on public financing.

Then again, if they decide they would rather change politics and increase their chances of losing in November, some Democrats, in February, March and April, could decide they would really rather just win.

We Are Not Alone

Milky Way over Utah (Click the Photo to enlarge)

'Hundreds of worlds' in Milky Way
By Helen Briggs
Science reporter, BBC News, Boston

Scientists say there may be many more worlds in our solar system
Rocky planets, possibly with conditions suitable for life, may be more common than previously thought in our galaxy, a study has found.

New evidence suggests more than half the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way could have similar planetary systems.

There may also be hundreds of undiscovered worlds in outer parts of our Solar System, astronomers believe.

Future studies of such worlds will radically alter our understanding of how planets are formed, they say.

New findings about planets were presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.

Nasa telescope

Michael Meyer, an astronomer from the University of Arizona, said he believes Earth-like planets are probably very common around Sun-like stars.

"Our observations suggest that between 20% and 60% of Sun-like stars have evidence for the formation of rocky planets not unlike the processes we think led to planet Earth," he said.

"That is very exciting."

Mr Meyer's team used the US space agency's Spitzer space telescope to look at groups of stars with masses similar to the Sun.

They detected discs of cosmic dust around stars in some of the youngest groups surveyed.

The dust is believed to be a by-product of rocky debris colliding and merging to form planets.

Nasa's Kepler mission to search for Earth-sized and smaller planets, due to be launched next year, is expected to reveal more clues about these distant undiscovered worlds.

Frozen worlds

Some astronomers believe there may be hundreds of small rocky bodies in the outer edges of our own Solar System, and perhaps even a handful of frozen Earth-sized worlds.

Speaking at the AAAS, Nasa's Alan Stern said he believes we have found only the tip of the iceberg in terms of planets within our own Solar System.

More than a thousand objects had already been discovered in the Kuiper belt alone, he said, many rivalling the planet Pluto in size.

"Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System," he told BBC News.

He believes many of these planets will be icy, some will be rocky, and there may even be objects the same mass as Earth.

"It could be that there are objects of Earth mass in the oort cloud (a cloud surrounding our planetary system) but they would be frozen at these distances," Mr Stern added.

"They would look like a frozen Earth."

Goldilocks zone

Excitement about finding other Earth-like planets is driven by the idea that some might contain life or perhaps, centuries from now, allow human colonies to be set up on them.

The key to this search, said Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University, California, was the Goldilocks zone.

This refers to an area of space in which a planet is just the right distance from its parent star so that its surface is not-too-hot or not-too-cold to support liquid water.

"To my mind there are two things we have to go after; we have to find the right mass planet and it has to be at the right distance from the star," she said.

The AAAS meeting concludes on Monday.

Obama Smoking Crack and Getting a Blow-Job: The interview with Larry Sinclair.

Carack Obama getting a crack enhanced hummer: listen here for the Larry Sinclair Audio

Kosovo Declares Independence. Russia Unhappy.

It could happen here. Do not think it could not.

Think about some Southwestern US counties declaring independence from the US. The majority population, because of years of illegal immigration, brought the illegals into the majority. Further assume the majority were Islamic and in ongoingl conflict with native Christians. Assume Russia supported the illegals and the secession (think Vicente Fox). Add into the mix that Russia and Warsaw pact countries bombed Washington DC to stop the US from forcing the illegals back across the border. 

That is Kosovo. 

How did we ever get involved in Kosovo? 

Where is our interest in that mess?

____________________

Russia denounces Kosovo independence bid
39 minutes ago
MOSCOW -AP-

Russia denounced Kosovo's declaration of independence from its ally Serbia on Sunday and called for an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

Kosovo's parliament approved a declaration of independence from Serbia, backed by the U.S. and European allies but bitterly contested by Serbia and Russia.

The Foreign Ministry said Russia supports Serbia's "just demands to restore the country's territorial integrity" and wants the Security Council to renew efforts to reach a settlement on the issue of Kosovo's status.

Kosovo's independence declaration violates Serbia's sovereignty and the U.N. Charter and threatens "the escalation of tension and ethnic violence in the region, a new conflict in the Balkans," the ministry said in a statement. It warned other nations against "supporting separatism" by recognizing Kosovo.

Kosovo has formally remained a part of Serbia even though it has been administered by the U.N. and NATO since 1999, when NATO airstrikes ended former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic's crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists.

Russia has stressed its opposition to any decision on Kosovo's status that is not accepted by Serbia. It has warned that recognition of Kosovo by the United States and other nations would encourage separatists in the former Soviet Union, across Europe and around the world.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov echoed the ministry statement in comments on state-run Vesti-24 television. He called Kosovo's declaration an "illegitimate act" and said Russia supports what he called Serbia's pledges to struggle in a constructive way to keep its borders intact.

"All possible international mechanisms, first of all the United Nations and its Security Council" would be called upon to address the issue," Peskov said.

He said Russia would closely monitor the response of other countries to the declaration

Inconvenient Ice Thickening

This was big news back in September of 2007:

..."Record melting of the Arctic polar ice cap this summer has seen it shrink to an area one million square miles more than normal, scientists claim.
Arctic sea ice - which melts and re-forms depending on the season - reduced by an area the size of 10 Britains during the warmer months, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

And the astonishing shrinkage - plummeting to a total ice cap area of 1.59 million square miles - has shattered the the previous 2005 record by 460,000 square miles.

Arctic sea ice 10 times the size of Britain has melted during the summer, setting a new record

The centre believes the sea ice has reached its minimum area for 2007, measured over a five-day average, and ice is now beginning to re-form for the winter.

At its lowest point during the summer melting season, which stretches from around March to September, sea ice coverage in the Arctic plummeted to 1.59 million square miles, compared with the previous low of 2.05 million square miles in 2005, and 2.60 million square miles for the long-term average between 1979 and 2000.

The ice shrank so much this year that the fabled Northwest Passage route around the top of North America between the Atlantic and Pacific opened up and became fully navigable for around five weeks.

The Northeast Passage, over the top of Siberia, remains closed by just a narrow band of ice, the scientists said.

A combination of higher temperatures, clear skies, warm winds from Siberia and thinner ice have all contributed to the record-breaking sea ice melt this year.

Earlier this month scientists at the NSIDC warned that at current rates, the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer by 2030 and pointed the finger at climate change for the record melting."



Now:

Recent cold snap helping Arctic sea ice, scientists find
Last Updated: Friday, February 15, 2008 | 10:17 AM ET
CBC News

There's an upside to the extreme cold temperatures northern Canadians have endured in the last few weeks: scientists say it's been helping winter sea ice grow across the Arctic, where the ice shrank to record-low levels last year.

Temperatures have stayed well in the -30s C and -40s C range since late January throughout the North, with the mercury dipping past -50 C in some areas.

Satellite images are showing that the cold spell is helping the sea ice expand in coverage by about 2 million square kilometres, compared to the average winter coverage in the previous three years.

"It's nice to know that the ice is recovering," Josefino Comiso, a senior research scientist with the Cryospheric Sciences Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, told CBC News on Thursday.

"That means that maybe the perennial ice would not go down as low as last year."

Canadian scientists are also noticing growing ice coverage in most areas of the Arctic, including the southern Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.

"Clearly, we're seeing the ice coverage rebound back to more near normal coverage for this time of year," said Gilles Langis, a senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa.

Winter sea ice could keep expanding

The cold is also making the ice thicker in some areas, compared to recorded thicknesses last year, Lagnis added.

"The ice is about 10 to 20 centimetres thicker than last year, so that's a significant increase," he said.

If temperatures remain cold this winter, Langis said winter sea ice coverage will continue to expand.

But he added that it's too soon to say what impact this winter will have on the Arctic summer sea ice, which reached its lowest coverage ever recorded in the summer of 2007.

That was because the thick multi-year ice pack that survives a summer melt has been decreasing in recent years, as well as moving further south. Langis said the ice pack is currently located about 130 kilometres from the Mackenzie Delta, about half the distance from where it was last year.

The polar regions are a concern to climate specialists studying global warming, since those regions are expected to feel the impact of climate change sooner and to a greater extent than other areas.

Sea ice in the Arctic helps keep those regions cool by reflecting sunlight that might otherwise be absorbed by darker ocean or land surfaces.

Not Since Solomon

The Queen of Sheba at Solomon's Temple
_______________________________

"Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair."
Barack Obama

---

Barack Obama is a phenomenon.
Not since King Solomon has a man been so wise.
What would the world be like if we had only listened to him?

Taking our cue from the latest NIE, we can say with a high degree of confidence that Barack Obama may be the next Commander-in-Chief. With that in mind, let us look back so that we may look ahead. Here's what he said about the invasion and the subsequent prosecution of the war:

October 2002

"I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances. The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.

I don't oppose all wars. My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil.

I don't oppose all wars. After September 11, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.... The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors...and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, through effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure that...we vigorously enforce a nonproliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair."

November 20, 2006

This kind of realism has been missing since the very conception of this war, and it is what led me to publicly oppose it in 2002. The notion that Iraq would quickly and easily become a bulwark of flourishing democracy in the Middle East was not a plan for victory, but an ideological fantasy. I said then and believe now that Saddam Hussein was a ruthless dictator who craved weapons of mass destruction but posed no imminent threat to the United States; that a war in Iraq would harm, not help, our efforts to defeat al Qaeda and finish the job in Afghanistan; and that an invasion would require an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

Jan 30, 2007

Mr. President, today in Iraq, we sadly find ourselves at the very point I feared most when I opposed giving the President the open-ended authority to wage this war in 2002 - an occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences in the midst of a country torn by civil war.

The American people have waited and the American people have been patient. We have given chance after chance for a resolution that has not come, and, more importantly, watched with horror and grief the tragic loss of thousands of brave young American soldiers.

The time for waiting in Iraq is over. The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close. And the need to bring this war to an end is here.

That is why today, I'm introducing the Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007.

This plan would not only place a cap on the number of troops in Iraq and stop the escalation, more importantly, it would begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces with the goal of removing of all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by March 31st, 2008 - consistent with the expectations of the bipartisan Iraq study group that the President has so assiduously ignored.

The redeployment of troops to the United States, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the region would begin no later than May 1st of this year, toward the end of the timeframe I first proposed in a speech more than two months ago. In a civil war where no military solution exists, this redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve the political settlement between its warring factions that can slow the bloodshed and promote stability.

March 21, 2007

There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers – not 10,000 more, not 20,000 more, not the almost 30,000 more that we now know we are sending– can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. Our troops cannot serve as their diplomats, and we can no longer referee their civil war. We must begin a phased withdrawal of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008.

Feb 11, 2008

"I strongly disagree with the administration's plans to 'pause' the long overdue removal of our combat brigades from Iraq," Obama said in a statement.

"We cannot wage war without end in Iraq while ignoring mounting costs to our troops and their families, our security and our economy.

"While the administration puts our drawdown on permanent pause, (Osama) bin Laden is on the loose, Afghanistan is sliding toward chaos, and we're spending billions of dollars a week in Baghdad instead of helping Americans who are struggling here at home."

_____________________

---

When the World Trade Center Twin Towers were still smoking, when Saddam Hussein was corrupting the world with the now hardly mentioned "Oil for Food" program, when the post Gulf War containment stategy was failing, and when most of the world's intelligence agencies were sure that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to use them, Barack Hussein Obama "knew that Hussein posed no immediate threat." He also "knew " that General Petraeus would fail. Obama has said that unlike George W. Bush, he is a man that admits his errors but it seems that Senator Obama can only see the errors of others.

In hindsight, Obama and his supporters claim that he was right about deposing Saddam, but have they considered what effects a free Saddam might have had on Afghanistan? They do not address Hussein's corruption of the United Nations and refuse to acknowledge that the "containment" was breaking down. They do not, in any meaningful way, address Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Salafist ideology or the concept of good and evil. They do not ask hard questions about Islam. They are unwilling to project kinetic military power and the question should be raised as to whether a President Obama would have invaded Afghanistan or under what circumstances he would resort to military force in the future.

Peace keeping and multi-lateral diplomacy; that is their way and there is some doubt whether Obama and his supporters would go beyond the use of soft power. Will President Obama roll back the calendar to a pre-9/11 mentality? We can say with a moderate degree of confidence that he will. We are less confident about the consequences of doing so.

Kosovo is a European Problem.

Kosovo is 92% Albanian and predominately Muslim. There may be other reasons to get involved with Albania, but Kosovo is not one of them.

There is no possible US interest in Kosovo. There never was. There should be no European interest in Kosovo. You can find twenty other parts of Europe where similar local interests conflict with national interest. Start with Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even Cornwall.

We have enough problems. Kosovo is not one of them.

If the Europeans wish to make it a problem, stand aside and let them.

_____________________

February 16, 2008
Kosovo to declare Independence Sunday
Rick Moran American Thinker

In a move guaranteed to open an international hornet's nest of trouble, Kosovo will declare its independence from Serbia on Sunday:

"Tomorrow will be a day of calm, of understanding, and of state engagements for the implementation of the will of the citizens of Kosovo," said Thaci after meeting religious leaders from the predominantly ethnic Albanian province.

Expectations that independence would be declared on Sunday have been running high but Thaci's comments marked the first top-level confirmation that the long-awaited break with Serbia would take place this weekend.

Thaci appealed for celebrations to unfold with "dignity ... on the day of the declaration of independence, on the big day, on the historic day ... a day of thanksgiving for a sovereign and independent Kosovo".

Kosovo inched closer to its historic declaration of independence with a growing sense of excitement among its people and the European Union launching a police and judicial mission to smoothen the birth of the world's newest state.

Serbia, backed by Russia, has said that the split -- supported by the United States and most major European powers, nine years after Kosovo was put under interim UN administration -- would be illegal.
After 9 long years and an open ended committment by NATO troops to keep the peace between ethnic Albanians and Serbs and an ineffectual UN administration that did virtually nothing in that time to resolve the issues between Kosovo and Serbia, Kosovo is taking a step formally that most international observers say has been a def facto situation since the war; independence from Serbia.

This move couldn't have come at a worse time. With the US, NATO, and the EU all supporting Kosovo independence, the Russians and the Serbian allies are presented with a humiliating fait accompli. It will not sit well in Moscow or Belgrade and could lead to a variety of sanctions by Russia against Europe. And it won't help the frosty relations between Washington and Moscow either.

For the Serbs, this is a devastating blow. Kosovo is considered the center of Serbian culture and religion. The majority Albanian population has dominated the province for hundreds of years, however, and many see the move for independence as long overdue.

Satellite Killer. Here's Hoping We Hit It.

We are shooting down the satellite to prove  we can.

There are many good reasons for doing so. The Chinese are making remarkable progress in the military use of space. They are also developing technology to neutralize US space based communications and combat control.

Surface to surface missile technology is becoming more lethal, less expensive and more widely available. GPS is no longer an American monopoly.

All this makes US carrier fleets more vulnerable than at any time since the Battle of Midway. Surface ships are vulnerable to anti-ship missiles, torpedoes, unmanned aircraft systems and unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Russians, Chinese, and the Indians all have the technology that can sink our carriers.

Putin is becoming more and more paranoid about US intentions towards Russia. India and China are merchants to the world and it is only a matter of time before countries such as Iran will get carrier killing weapons systems. All of these systems are satellite dependent.

The US deterrence of exchanging a carrier for an enemies' satellite system is exchanging a queen for a king.

Good shooting.



USA to shoot down rogue satellite

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15
Statesman

In a scenario reminiscent of Hollywood science fiction, the Pentagon says it will try to shoot down a dying, bus-size U.S. spy satellite loaded with toxic fuel on a collision course with Earth.

The military hopes to smash the satellite as early as next week, just before it enters Earth's atmosphere, with a single missile fired from a Navy cruiser in the northern Pacific Ocean.

The dramatic manoeuvre may well trigger international concerns, and U.S. officials have begun notifying other countries of the plan. They are stressing that it does not signal the start of a new American anti-satellite weapons programme.

Military and administration officials said the satellite is carrying fuel called hydrazine that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it hits the ground. That reason alone, they said, persuaded President George W. Bush to order the shoot-down.

An official predicted a chance as high as 80 per cent that the satellite will be hit by a shot fired when the satellite is about 240 kilometres above the ground. The window of opportunity for taking the satellite down, he said, opens in three or four days and lasts for about seven or eight days. Left alone, the satellite would be expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. About half the 2,270-kilogram spacecraft would be expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would scatter debris over several hundred miles.

A Navy missile known as Standard Missile 3 would be fired at the spy satellite in an attempt to intercept it just before it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. It would be “next to impossible” to hit the satellite after that because of atmospheric disturbances, the official said.

Unregulated Chinese Ingredient in US Blood Thinners

"At Baxter, we focus on assisting people with some of the most complex conditions - for example, hemophilia, cancer, immune disorders and kidney disease. We do this by applying our expertise in medical devices, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology to make a meaningful difference in patients' lives."

It seems to me that if we are going to practice free trade, there needs to be parity in regulations governing like products. If safety regulations are necessary (and in many cases they are) for US products, those companies wishing to export to the US should be required to follow the same standards. Conversely, if the US does not enforce the standards and allows the importation to the US, those standards imposed on US companies should be terminated.

__________________________

China Didn’t Check Drug Supplier, Files Show

By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER New York Times
Published: February 16, 2008

A Chinese factory that supplies much of the active ingredient for a brand of a blood thinner that has been linked to four deaths in the United States is not certified by China’s drug regulators to make pharmaceutical products, according to records and interviews.

Because the plant, Changzhou SPL, has no drug certification, China’s drug agency did not inspect it. The United States Food and Drug Administration said this week that it had not inspected the plant either — a violation of its own policy — before allowing the company to become a major supplier of the blood thinner, heparin, to Baxter International in the United States.

Baxter announced Monday that it was suspending sales of its multidose vials of heparin after 4 patients died and 350 suffered complications. Why the heparin caused these problems — and whether the active ingredient in the drug, derived from pig intestines, was responsible — has not been determined.

The plant in Changzhou, west of Shanghai, appears to fall into the type of regulatory void that American and Chinese health officials are trying to close — in which chemical companies export pharmaceutical ingredients without a Chinese drug license.

China provides a growing proportion of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used in drugs sold in the United States. And Chinese drug regulators have said that all producers of those ingredients are required to obtain certification by the State Food and Drug Administration. However, some of the active ingredients that China exports are made by chemical companies, which do not fall under the Chinese drug agency’s jurisdiction.

In December, American and Chinese regulators signed an agreement under which China promised to begin registering at least some of the thousands of chemical companies that sell drug ingredients. Some of these companies are the source of counterfeit or diluted drugs, including those used to treat malaria.

Discussions that led to the accord began after an unlicensed chemical plant in China made a tainted drug ingredient that poisoned more than 170 people in Panama, killing at least 115.

The heparin plant in China has not been accused of providing a harmful product. The American majority owner of that plant, Scientific Protein Laboratories, also owns a plant in Wisconsin that produces the active ingredient in heparin for Baxter.

In response to questions, Scientific Protein issued a statement confirming that its Chinese plant had no license from the Chinese agency, but said that its raw ingredients come from a licensed supplier.

The statement added that an “independent private U.S. validation company” had found the plant to be in compliance with good manufacturing practices. And a spokeswoman for Baxter, which buys heparin’s active ingredient from Scientific Protein, said it had inspected the China plant less than six months ago.

A spokesman for China’s State Food and Drug Administration, Shen Chen, said Friday that “as far as we know, it is not a drug manufacturer — it is a producer of chemical ingredients.”

Eric S. Langer, managing partner of BioPlan Associates, which prepares and publishes reports on the biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, said he found it hard to believe that a company exporting the heparin ingredient would not be licensed by Chinese drug regulators.

“Being able to produce a pharmaceutical or a biologic in the U.S. or anywhere without having regulatory oversight really doesn’t happen,” Mr. Langer said, adding, “I find it surprising from a regulatory perspective, and I find it surprising from a business perspective.”

Karen Riley, a spokeswoman for the United States Food and Drug Administration, said inspectors from that agency would be visiting the Changzhou plant soon. Ms. Riley said she could not be more specific. Earlier in the week she described her agency’s failure to inspect the plant as a “glitch.”

Congress has criticized the oversight by the Food and Drug Administration of bulk pharmaceutical ingredients made by foreign manufacturers and sold in the United States. A growing number of those ingredients now come from China. Of the 700 approved Chinese drug plants, the United States agency has inspected only 10 to 20 each year.

Baxter makes roughly half of the United States supply of heparin, which is used widely for surgical and dialysis patients. Problems with Baxter’s heparin were first noticed late last year when four children undergoing dialysis in Missouri had severe allergic reactions minutes after being injected with the drug.

The F.D.A. then allowed Baxter to deliver heparin that it was in the midst of shipping, for fear that a total recall would lead to a shortage of the drug, but cautioned doctors to use as little of it as possible and to administer it very slowly.

The agency also suggested that doctors give steroids or antihistamines with the Baxter heparin to help prevent allergic reactions.

Erin Gardiner, a spokeswoman for Baxter, defended Scientific Protein, saying it had been making the heparin ingredient for more than 30 years. “They have been a good supplier,” she said.

Although the cause of the adverse reactions has yet to be determined, she said tests performed by her company had detected unspecified differences between some lots of the ingredient. She did not say whether the lots had come from China or from the Wisconsin plant, which Scientific Protein also owns.

Those differences had not turned up in routine testing that the company does on active ingredients, Ms. Gardiner said, but she said Baxter had used “advanced testing techniques” to find the differences. She added that it was unclear whether the finding was significant.

Two Congressional committees have asked the Food and Drug Administration for more information about inspections of plants making the active ingredient of heparin.

Andrew W. Lehren contributed reporting.

Playing that Funky Music.

Oh, and when is that attack on Iran I've read was going to be the hallmark of the Bush Administration going to launch?

Elephant Bar
Desert Rat

Thu Feb 14, 09:12:00 PM EST

Mr Bush, who, it was promised by many, would not leave it to the "next" Administration, is running out of time. The drums are not even beating, now. Who supposes that they will pick up the tempo, in the coming months, with the Election cycle already in full swing?

Are those Chinese built Panamax tankers underway, are those refineries under construction in China ready for Hugos' crude?

Bet that if not, they almost are.

While the US dithers about with windmills and tide surges. With out the distillery capacity under construction to replace Hugo's crude. So we'll be sending more dollars to Arabia. The Wahabbists will come out a head, again.

The hallmark of Team-43, the ascendancy of the Wahabbists in Arabia. Thankfully the lessons of 9-11-01 were fully learned, and the secular Arabs were defeated, leaving the Wahabbists free rein in the region.

After almost six years of Coalition Occupation, Sharia Rules in Basra! That emblem of Coalition success. While the 1920 Brigades, renamed as Concerned Local Citizens, rule in Anbar.

And the streets of Anbar are safe, as they could have been on 28 Jun 2003 if the US had allowed local elections to go forward, instead of establishing a military occupation.

An occupation that has failed to achieve the desired Goals, the restructuring of Iraqi society, the removal of the Tribes as local power players.

Five years wasted and a trillion USD, with little to show for it but a military that is worn out and now ill equipped. Along with $90 dollar oil and Wahabbists rolling in dough.

Why not unify with Mexico, expand the empire at home, it's a lot less costly. If done above board and not covertly. An ongoing operation that makes Charlie Wilson's War look like childs' play.

It was the Wahabbists that were supposed to be the threat, they were in the light, while American unification was the real play.

Now the Wahabbists have won in the MidEast and American unification is moving forward, with the GOP leading the way.

Success brothers, Team43 completed its' mission. The border is still open, the migrants are flowing north. Wal-Marts' consumer banks in Mexico are gaining clients, daily.

WHAT COSTS MORE PER YEAR THAN THE IRAQ WAR???

From an email:

Subject: WHAT COSTS MORE PER YEAR THAN THE IRAQ WAR???
Be sure to read the 14 reasons at the bottom.


Social Security Change For 2008

The United States Senate voted to extend Social Security Benefits to Illegal Aliens beginning in 2008. The following are the senators who voted to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits. They are grouped by home state. If a state is not listed, there was no voting representative.
Alaska : Stevens (R)
Arizona : McCain (R)
Arkansas : Lincoln (D) Pryor (D)
California : Boxer (D) Feinstein (D)
Colorado : Salazar (D)
Connecticut : Dodd (D) Lieberman (D)
Delaware : Biden (D) Carper (D)
Florida : Martinez (R)
Hawaii : Akaka (D) Inouye (D)
Illinois : Durbin (D) Obama (D)
Indiana : Bayh (D) Lugar (R)
Iowa : Harkin (D)
Kansas : Brownback (R)
Louisiana : Landrieu (D)
Maryland : Mikulski (D) Sarbanes (D)
Massachusetts : Kennedy (D) Kerry (D)
Montana : Baucus (D)
Nebraska : Hagel (R)
Nevada : Reid (D)
New Jersey : Lautenberg (D) Menendez (D)
New Mexico : Bingaman (D)
New York : Clinton (D) Schumer (D)
North Dakota : Dorgan (D)
Ohio : DeWine (R) Voinovich(R)
Oregon : Wyden (D)
Pennsylvania : Specter (R)
Rhode Island : Chafee (R) Reed (D)
South Carolina : Graham (R)
South Dakota : Johnson (D)
Vermont : Jeffords (I) Leahy (D)
Washington : Cantwell (D) Murray (D)
West Virginia : Rockefeller (D), by Not Voting
Wisconsin : Feingold (D) Kohl (D)

http://rense.com/general79/seniors.htm
I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of the following facts:

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year. http://tinyurl.com/zob77
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens. http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English! http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html
5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare and Social Services by the American taxpayers. http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html
9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two-and-a-half times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html
11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border. Homeland Security Report. http://tinyurl.com/t9sht
12. The National Policy Institute, "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period." http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin. http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm
14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States ". http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml
    

Total cost is a whooping... $338.3 BILLION A YEAR!!!

Snopes is provided for doubters:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/immigration/bankofamerica.asp

Is it any wonder she's going down the tubes?

Define Obama. Burst the Bubble.

Bobal posted below a more compelling list than my original. I moved his post from below to here:

bobal said

1. He has no sense of the real world. He doesn't have a clue how rough it is out there. He thinks dialogue by itself would bring results. He wants to go on some apology tour. Why? For what?
2. He wants to pull the troops out of Iraq, damn the consequences, right at the time things are turning better.
3. He doesn't preach any personal responsibility. He preaches collective responsibility.
4. He belongs to a church that is racist and antiAmerican.
5. He is sympathetic to muslims. His muslim past is a big worry.
6. His program is tax and spend, tax and spend.
7. He didn't experiment with drugs. He used with regularity. He is a felon.
8. He will absolutely swamp the country with immigrants, with zero understanding of the consequences for the country. His nonchalant attitude to law breaking as evidenced by his drug use carries over to law breaking of people just walking into the country.
9. He has no economic experience.
10. He'll trash the constitution. He'll trash the second amendment.
11. He pumps up peoples expectations in a fraudulent and irresponsible manner.
12. His undefined cry for change is a mask for a coming imposed socialism.
13. He thinks pouring more money into social programs will lead somewhere when we have been at the point of diminishing returns for decades.
14. He jumps on a bandwagon of global warming when the science is still undetermined and throws out wildly impractical and impossible 'solutions'.
15. He's more power hungry than even Hillary.
16. He is the most left wing person in the senate, and rather than bring people together he will lead us into a simmering class war. Added all up it equals to one magical charismatic charlatan, which may flourish for a season only.

Get Ready

Get ready for the onslaught of lies and propaganda. We will hear one activist and lawyer after another claim that these people were tortured and denied their due process. No trial short of jury trials in civil courts will satisfy them. We will be tortured by the lies and propaganda.

____________

Executions may be carried out at Gitmo

By MICHAEL MELIA and ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press Writers

If six suspected terrorists are sentenced to death at Guantanamo Bay for the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. Army regulations that were quietly amended two years ago open the possibility of execution by lethal injection at the military base in Cuba, experts said Tuesday.

Any executions would probably add to international outrage over Guantanamo, since capital punishment is banned in 130 countries, including the 27-nation European Union.

Conducting the executions on U.S. soil could open the way for the detainees' lawyers to go to U.S. courts to fight the death sentences. But the updated regulations make it possible for the executions to be carried out at Guantanamo.

David Sheldon, an attorney and former member of the Navy's legal corps, said an execution chamber at Guantanamo would be largely beyond the reach of U.S. courts.

"I think that's the administration's idea, to try to use Guantanamo as a base to not be under the umbrella of the federal district courts," he said. "If one is detained in North Carolina or South Carolina in a Navy brig, one could conceivably file a petition of habeus corpus and because of where they're located, invoke the jurisdiction of a federal court."

"We are a long way from determining the details of the death penalty, and when that time comes ... we will follow the law at that time and the procedures that are in place," Hartmann said.

Eugene Fidell, a Washington defense attorney and expert on military law, said Guantanamo Bay could be an execution site, but added that the U.S. would face an international outcry.

"It would be highly controversial because a lot of the world simply doesn't believe in the death penalty any more," Fidell said.

The Bush administration has instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to defend its decision to seek the death penalty for the six men by recalling the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War II.

A four-page cable sent to U.S. embassies and obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press says that execution as punishment for extreme violations of the laws of war is internationally accepted.

The cable points to the 1945-46 Nuremberg war crimes trials in Germany. Twelve of Adolf Hitler's senior aides were sentenced to death at the trials, though not all were executed in the end.

No death chamber is known to exist at Guantanamo, but Scott Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer and who is now a Duke University professor, said the military may decide to build one there. The 2006 Army regulations also call for a viewing room to the death chamber, where at least two news media representatives would be witnesses.

The trial for the six detainees is still months away. And given the slow pace of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, verdicts are unlikely before President Bush leaves office next January.

The accused include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of Sept. 11; Mohammed al-Qahtani, whom officials have labeled the 20th hijacker; and Waleed bin Attash, who investigators say selected and trained some of the 19 hijackers.

Many support the use of the death penalty for men blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks.

"If these guys are found guilty, I can't think of any other case more appropriate for the death penalty," said Charles "Cully" Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "An overwhelming majority of Americans support the death penalty."

Michael Khambatta of the International Committee of the Red Cross said his organization would approve the death penalty only when there are "procedural and judicial guarantees that meet international standards."

Khambatta, who is the deputy head of the ICRC's Washington delegation, declined to comment publicly on whether the ICRC considers the U.S. war-crimes trials fair.

___________

On the Net:

U.S. Army execution procedures: http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/r190_55.pdf

__________________

This will make for some interesting campaign debates. McCain, Obama and Clinton have all called for Guantanamo Bay to be closed down. Obama and Clinton will most likely call for "civil trial" procedings. McCain says he will move the detainees to Fort Leavenworth and give them military tribunals. He has also said that confessions obtained under duress of torture, i.e., waterboarding, will be inadmissible. Does anyone else see a circus coming to town?

McCain and Obama.

He ain't pretty but he can fight.

The talking point of the day from the Clinton camp is that the fire wall in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania will hold. That sounds familiar to many of us. It is the Giuliani strategy that utterly failed.

Nothing spreads fear faster than the moment when a critical mass realizes the game is over. It becomes fight or flight and when the fight is clearly being lost, it takes an unusually talented leader to rally support and turn a sure loss into a victory. Hillary is not that leader.

Hillary is going to take the fall. The only one that can stop that is Hillary and she does not have what it takes to do so. Hillary is a wonk and a Bureaucrat. She has no street skills. Obama is killing her. She is up against a showman and there is not enough time for her to develop the talent that she needs to defeat Obama. McCain is another story.

Seven weeks ago, his campaign hardly had a pulse. Where others like Joe Biden capitulated, McCain had the grit and the survival skills to hang in there, fight and win. It will be McCain and Obama.

Obama has not chosen to define who he is. McCain will force that on him. McCain has plenty of time to put Obama on the defensive and force him to get specific. He needs to draw blood and start showing Obama to be who he really is and not who people want him to be. There is plenty of time for McCain to win this contest.

Don't bet he cannot do it.

Clinton Getting Screwed by the Blacks.

It is all about color

White liberals always have a problem in intellectual honesty. Facts get in the way of evidence, observation and common sense. In this article from the NYT and many others the MSM freely talk about how white men are voting and analyze how single mothers and Hispanics vote, but they can't state the obvious; in this election blacks are acting as racist as any other group, except more so.

You will hear smug surprise that white men are actually voting for Obama or Obama is not doing well in a state where there are large groups of Hispanics, but nothing about the implications that blacks, en-masse, are voting against whites for a black candidate.

There is no other explanation for the almost complete support for Barack Obama from Afro-Americans, after all, Obama is no product of slavery. He is a product of privilege. He has the only requirement needed by Afro-American voters and that in skin tone.

Despite near perfect support for black causes by the Clintons over many years and impeccable liberal credentials, black American voters have thrown Clinton not to the back of the bus, but under the bus. It is a disgrace and no amount of liberal white washing will erase the stain of the obvious.

It should come as no surprise that years of tolerance of such overtly racial black exceptionalism in such things as a “black caucus" has fostered the license for Afro-Americans to practice what would be called racist if done by any other group.

__________________________

February 12, 2008
For Clinton, Bid Hinges on Texas and Ohio

By PATRICK HEALY

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her advisers increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said on Monday.

Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; several said afterward that she had sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas.

They also said that they had not been especially soothed, and that they believed she might be on a losing streak that could jeopardize her competitiveness in those states.

“She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” said one superdelegate who has endorsed Mrs. Clinton, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment. “The campaign is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers, also speaking privately in order to speak plainly, confirmed this view.

Several Clinton superdelegates, whose votes could help decide the nomination, said Monday that they were wavering in the face of Mr. Obama’s momentum after victories in Washington State, Nebraska, Louisiana and Maine last weekend.

Some said that they, like the hundreds of uncommitted superdelegates still at stake, might ultimately “go with the flow,” in the words of one, and support the candidate who appears to show the most strength in the primaries to come.

The Clinton team moved on Monday to shift the spotlight off the candidate’s short-term challenges and focus instead on “the long run,” in the words of her senior strategist, Mark Penn.

“She has consistently shown an electoral resiliency in difficult situations that have made her a winner,” Mr. Penn said. “Senator Obama has in fact never had a serious Republican challenger.”

Clinton advisers have said that superdelegates should support the candidate who they believe would be the best nominee and the best president, while Obama advisers have argued that superdelegates should reflect the will of the voters and also take into account who they believe would be the best nominee. Superdelegates are Democratic party leaders and elected officials, and their votes could decide the nomination if neither candidate wins enough delegates to clinch a victory after the nominating contests end.

With primaries on Tuesday in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, Clinton advisers were pessimistic about her chances, though some held out hope for a surprise performance in Virginia.

And as polls show Mr. Obama gaining strength in Wisconsin and his native state, Hawaii, which vote next Tuesday, advisers, donors and superdelegates said they were resigned to a possible Obama sweep of the rest of February’s contests.

Some donors also expressed concern about a widening money imbalance between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton: Obama fund-raisers say he is taking in roughly $1 million a day, while Clinton fund-raisers say she is taking in about half of that, mostly online. Mrs. Clinton’s aides say that the campaign was virtually broke as of the Feb. 5 primaries, but that finances have stabilized.

Mr. Obama’s financial edge allowed him to begin running television advertisements in Ohio and Texas on Monday, while the Clinton campaign plans to begin advertising on Tuesday. Clinton advisers say that she will have advertisements running statewide in both Ohio and Texas, and that she will have advertisements in English and Spanish in Texas.

“I think that clearly things have not been going as great as they were with her victories on Super Tuesday, and we can’t wait to get to March 4,” said Alan Patricof, one of Mrs. Clinton’s national finance chairmen.

Mrs. Clinton will have “a major ad buy” through the next week in Wisconsin, a senior adviser said Monday, and spend a few days campaigning there. But this adviser and others said the bulk of her time would be devoted to campaigning in Ohio, Texas and a bit in Rhode Island. In a sign of Texas’s importance, she plans to fly there Tuesday, even though Wisconsin votes next week.

While Mrs. Clinton’s advisers and allies emphasize that she has the time and the financial resources to regroup, they say she will have to take more significant steps to shore up her candidacy beyond the staff shakeup she engineered on Sunday, when she replaced her campaign manager and longtime aide, Patti Solis Doyle, with another veteran adviser, Maggie Williams.

Campaign advisers said they expected Ms. Williams to bring new energy to both the campaign team and Mrs. Clinton, after a long year of campaigning, and to encourage her to show more spunk and determination on the campaign trail. They say they do not expect the candidate’s political message to change appreciably; she will increasingly focus on the concerns of working-class voters, a key demographic in Ohio, as well as of Hispanics, a significant population in Texas.

As she seeks to erect a fire wall for her candidacy in Ohio and Texas, Mrs. Clinton will deploy her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to campaign in both states, particularly in Ohio, where her advisers believe his popularity will help her with working-class voters, labor union members and black voters.

In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Mr. Penn, who is also Mrs. Clinton’s pollster, played down some polls that showed strength for Mr. Obama and highlighted Mrs. Clinton’s abilities to beat the leading Republican candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona.

“We believe that Hillary Clinton in the long run is better positioned to take on John McCain,” Mr. Penn said.

Yet some Clinton donors and superdelegates worry that the focus on Mr. McCain is premature, and that other strategic decisions by the campaign — like counting on Michigan and Florida delegates to be seated at the convention even though their status is in limbo — show faulty thinking that suggests the Clinton campaign does not have a short-term game plan against Mr. Obama.

“They are looking way too much at Florida, Michigan and McCain, because all three won’t matter if she doesn’t blow Obama away in Texas and Ohio,” said a Democrat who is both a Clinton superdelegate and major donor, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment of campaign strategy. “Obama has momentum that has to be stopped by March 4.”

Clinton advisers took issue with the notion that Mr. Obama’s momentum was significant, noting that his victory in the Iowa caucuses did not translate into winning the New Hampshire primary five days later, and his South Carolina victory did not prevent Mrs. Clinton from winning the biggest states on Feb. 5.

“There is no evidence that voters are voting based on momentum — in fact the evidence is to the contrary,” said Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s communications director.

Hassan Nemazee, another national finance chairman for Mrs. Clinton, said he was also telling his network of allies not to get caught up in the headlines about Obama

“I’m telling donors and supporters: Don’t be overly concerned about what goes on in the remainder of the month of February because these are not states teed up well for us,” Mr. Nemazee said.

Asked if that message was sinking in, he pointed to the campaign’s announcement that Mrs. Clinton had raised $10 million online so far this month, and was on pace to raise more than $25 million in February.

“I predict for you we will have our best single fund-raising month in February, and that’s significant,” he said.

Chinese Espionage Continues with No US Response.

The industrial and military spying outrage by the Chinese, against the US continues without consequences to the Chinese. The problem worsens yearly. I have a little suggestion:

Value the intellectual and military cost of Chinese espionage and slap a tariff on all Chinese imported goods to recover the cost in one year. It is estimated the cost to the US is in excess of $60 billion per year. That would cost them $165 million a day. That ought to get their attention.

____________________________

WASHINGTON (CNN) --

A Defense Department weapons system analyst and three natives of China have been arrested and charged in two espionage-related cases, prompting a top Justice Department official Monday to declare Chinese espionage is approaching "Cold War levels."

In a case brought by federal prosecutors in Virginia, a civilian analyst for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency stands accused of selling to two Chinese associates classified information detailing U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.

In a separate case, California prosecutors arrested and charged a long-time employee and contractor for Boeing and Rockwell with providing Beijing secrets dealing with the space shuttle and several other sensitive military aircraft and rocket programs.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein, in a news conference announcing the arrests and charges, twice cited congressional testimony that concluded "aggressive" Chinese government espionage programs have reached levels not seen since the Cold War with the former Soviet Union.

"It's a threat to our national security and to our economic position in the world, a threat that is posed by the relentless efforts of foreign intelligence services to penetrate our security systems and steal our most sensitive military technology and information," Wainstein said. Watch authorities describe the case »

Wainstein said the Chinese government is among the most aggressive of foreign powers seeking access to U.S. military and economic secrets.

In the Virginia case officials charge that Gregg Bergersen, 51, of Alexandria, Virginia, sold highly classified information to Tai Shen Kuo, 58, a naturalized citizen who resides in New Orleans, Louisiana. Kuo then allegedly handed the information to Yu Xin Kang, 33, a lawful resident alien also living in New Orleans. Kang in turn allegedly gave the information to a spy for the Chinese government.

Kang, a permanent U.S. resident, will make her initial appearance Monday in a federal court in New Orleans before she is transferred to Virginia to stand trial.

Bergersen and Kuo made initial court appearances in Alexandria, but because they had no lawyers were ordered detained pending a detention hearing Thursday. Bergersen, who was arrested Monday morning, was still wearing a T-shirt and shorts as he appeared before a magistrate judge.

A woman identifying herself as Bergersen's wife told reporters her husband is innocent and the charges had "come out of the blue."

At the Washington news conference, officials declined to comment on how much Bergersen was paid, or whether he knew the destination of the secrets he sold.

Justice Department officials said Kuo cultivated friendships with Bergersen and others at the direction of an unidentified official of the Beijing government. Kuo allegedly "gathered national defense information on behalf of the government" of China from January 2006 to this month.

Meanwhile, in Santa Ana, California, a long-time defense industry employee and contractor was scheduled to appear in court for allegedly providing military secrets to Beijing. Watch where the U.S. says Chinese spies are working »

"A document says he did it out of loyalty to the Motherland," said U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien.

O'Brien said Dongfan "Greg" Chung, 72, of Orange, California, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had worked for Rockwell, Boeing and a Boeing contractor for more than 30 years.

"Chung made multiple trips to the PRC [People's Republic of China] to deliver lectures on technology involving the space shuttle and other programs, and during those trips he met with officials and agents of the PRC government," O'Brien said. Chung also allegedly provided information on the C-17 military transport and the Delta IV rocket.

He is scheduled to appear before a federal magistrate in Santa Ana, California, late Monday, officials said.

Prosecutors say the case is linked to that of another engineer, Chi Mak, who was convicted last year along with several family members of providing information to the Beijing government.

Obama, Messiah, the Prophet with a Vision

"Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic." Pope Benedict XVI


February 11, 2008
Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption
By Kyle-Anne Shiver American Thinker

A messianic fever grips a segment of the American populace and media. A great leader seems to them poised to redeem our collective sins and change nearly everything, bringing about a new era in which permanent solutions are found to age-old conditions.

Whenever I watch Barack Obama, listen to his eloquent but nonspecific oratory, and see the near-swooning young people who invariably follow him wherever he goes, I cannot help but think of the pied piper and wonder toward what destination he is marching our youth. Obama is having this pied-piper effect not only on kids, but also on a large swath of Democrat and not a few independents and Republican voters, too.

Call me skeptical, but this whole Obama phenomenon seems downright eerie.

Over and over again, Obama invokes his double mantra: "It's time for change!" and "Yes, we can!"

Singer Wil.i.am's (Yes, that's right; it's Wil I Am.) YouTube "Yes, we can!" video has already had over 2 million hits, and it has a hypnotic quality reminiscent of eastern religious meditations. I urge every American still capable of thinking for himself to take a serious look at this video.

Then, consider these numbers on recent Google searches using only Obama's name plus one other word:

• Obama + messianic 75,200

• Obama + savior 226,000

• Obama + prophet 312,000

• Obama + Christ 504,000

• Obama + change 4,540,000

A number of internet postings indicate that a great many see Obama in not only political terms, but also wrapped in the untarnished cloak of some vague spiritual-awakening.

It is quite tempting to assume that Barack Obama simply is harvesting the inevitable fruits of 35 years of dumbed-down, political indoctrination in the guise of education in this country. This is dangerous. The problem goes deeper, right into the human soul.

A lust for transformation is a common feature of revolutionaries, and when they succeed in grabbing power, the results usually are brutal. Less than a century ago, massive numbers of people fell for a different political messiah on the European continent, and they were products of an education system and cultural establishment widely regarded as a world leader.

That place was, of course, Germany. And the political messiah promoting "change" was Adolph Hitler.

Hitler's slogan: "Alles muss anders sein!" ("Everything must be different!")

Hitler used each of these phrases to describe his own political program:

"A declaration of war against the order of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word, against the structure of the world which presently exists."

"revolutionary creative will" which had "no fixed aim, no permanency, only eternal change."

"an ethic of self-sacrifice"

"people's community"

"public need before private greed"

"communally-minded social consciousness"


All of these expressions came from Adolph Hitler.

Saul Alinsky, one of Obama's primary political mentors, espoused eerily similar societal admonitions in his book Reveille for Radicals; p. 133 and 105:

"A People's Organization (later changed to "community organization") is dedicated to an eternal war. It is a war against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair, and unhappiness."

and

"A People's Organization is not a philanthropic plaything or a social service's ameliorative gesture. It is a deep, hard-driving force, striking and cutting at the very roots of all the evils which beset the people...it thinks and acts in terms of social surgery and not cosmetic cover-ups."

and

"There is hope, and life is worth living. There may not be a light at the end of the trail but they (the masses) have a light in their hands, a light they made themselves, and they know that not only will they themselves have to work out their own destiny but that they themselves can."*

Obama says, "Yes we can!" change...

Exactly what should change and how is unclear. Everything?

Time for Tough Questions and Straight Answers

More than four months ago, when a reporter noticed that Obama was no longer wearing an American flag lapel pin, and asked if he were making a fashion statement, this was part of Obama's reply:

"Instead," (of wearing the pin) he said, "I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism."
Well, here we are a week after Super Tuesday and it seems we are still waiting for Obama to expound upon the "what" and the "how" of this ethereal "change" mantra, to spell out his commitment to "patriotism."

Little has been made in the mainstream press of the brand of black liberation theology preached by Obama's pastor and spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., who holds a master's degree on world religions with a focus on Islam, and who has traveled to Middle Eastern countries in the company of Louis Farrakhan. Rev. Wright created and presides over the Center for African Biblical studies, whose mission is African-centered Bible studies:

"We are an African people, and we remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization."

Several forms of liberation theology sprouted during the 20th century, all espousing a third way between godless communism and the socialist utopian dream. All are predicated upon an acceptance that sin is not individual, but collective, and that sin cannot be overcome through religious conversion, but only by a people's struggle against all injustice. Congregations of various faiths and denominations have been used as platforms for collective statist approaches to human redemption. The social gospel espoused by religious-left churches in the U.S. is another form of liberation theology, which takes a political route to redemption for man's collective soul.

According to liberation theologies, God does not save men. Man saves himself through a political process of absolute social justice.

Writing in 2004, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict had this to say about liberation theology in his book, Truth and Tolerance (p. 116):

"...this struggle (against all injustice), it was said, would have to be a political struggle, because the structures (of oppression) were strengthened and maintained by politics. Thus redemption became a political process, for which Marxist philosophy offered the essential directions. It became a task that men themselves could -- indeed had to -- take in hand and became, at the same time, the object of quite practical hopes; faith was changed from ‘theory' into practice, into concrete redeeming action in the liberation process." (emphases mine)

Consider these statements from Obama's campaign website, contained in his video invitation for all to "join us in changing the Country."

• "We believe in what this Country can be."

• "In the face of war, we believe there can be peace."

• "In the face of despair, we believe there can be hope."

• "...America can be one people reaching for what's possible."

Obama indeed seems to be offering a people's government solution to all human problems. He is, after all, running for President of the United States, not for a pulpit. Substituting the state for God as provider has been the inherent common thread in all Marxist regimes.

And in this seemingly redemptive offering, Obama may be promising what only God can actually deliver, in the form of yet another, more eloquent, version of the same old utopian dream that started with Rousseau and Marx.

Can man successfully redeem himself through collective transformation and liberation?

Pope Benedict says "No" rather emphatically, in Truth and Tolerance. Writing of the fall of the Soviet Union:

"...where the Marxist ideology of liberation had been consistently applied, a total lack of freedom had developed, whose horrors were now laid bare before the eyes of the entire world. Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic."

Coincidentally, Saul Alinsky began his book Rules for Radicals:

"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer."

Attempting to discern true meaning from Obama's speeches gives one the feeling of having been trapped in a sort of verbal quicksand. Hair-pulling levels of frustration await any effort to find any specific meaning. A sensation of lethargic sinking into an abyss of abstract gibberish awaits the mind looking for specifics..

Obama's public statements, his speeches, even his "present" votes in the Illinois legislature leave one dangerously unsure of his true intentions.

Whatever Obama's concrete plans are, they ought to aligned with his political mentor, Saul Alinsky, and his spiritual mentor and liberation theology specialist, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In the absence of any genuine explanations from candidate Obama himself, the change of which he speaks reasonably may be inferred to be quite antithetical to anything even remotely resembling American patriotism.

And that is a legitimate concern for every American voter.

Obama and Kennedy, Which One?

Sit this one out and meet your new masters, The New Dream Team

Channeling the Wrong Kennedy (hat tip: Trish)

Though he eschews the harsh language of former candidate John Edwards, Obama nonetheless embraces the same class warfare, attacking big business, big oil, big pharma and so on.

JFK reduced the burden of the state on society and unleashed the creative potential of Americans everywhere. At every opportunity in his career, Sen. Ted Kennedy has voted to expand the power, size and scope of government. He sees government as the answer to every problem.

by Michael D. Tanner CATO


This article appeared in the Orange County Register on February 6, 2008.

Perhaps nothing so symbolizes the promise and peril of Barack Obama's presidential campaign as his claim to the mantle of John F. Kennedy.

Obama's recent endorsement by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy's glowing op/ed about him in the New York Times hearken back to the glory days of the 1960s.

Obama has repeatedly compared himself to JFK, and his campaign casts itself as the second coming of Camelot. Obama's supporters see in him the same youthful optimism that made JFK an iconic symbol in the decade.

It was an era when anything seemed possible.

In his appetite for big government, Obama is quite unlike JFK.

But the surviving Kennedys are also symbols of the darker side of 1960s liberalism: The bloated, bureaucratic welfare state. Teddy Kennedy's liberalism gave us welfare as we knew it and spent $11 trillion on federal programs fighting poverty without reducing it. It raised taxes until they discouraged work, investment and innovation. It created an ethic of entitlement and dependence on government. In his policy positions, as opposed to his bipartisan rhetoric, Barack Obama calls to mind this side of 1960s liberalism as well.

Indeed, in his appetite for big government, Obama is quite unlike JFK.

JFK called for cutting taxes. "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low," Jack Kennedy said, long before the advent of Supply Side Economics, "and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now."

The increases in government spending during JFK's term were modest. (It was LBJ, not JFK, who launched the Great Society.) And JFK's fiscal policies spurred substantial economic growth.

In contrast, there is little in Obama's policy pronouncements beyond traditional tax and spend liberalism. According to the respected and nonpartisan National Journal, Obama is actually the most liberal U.S. senator, with a voting record actually to the left of Bernie Sanders, Vermont's self-proclaimed socialist. He has received perfect 100 percent voting records from groups like Americans for Democratic Action, the National Organization for Women and the National Education Association, giving him a slightly more left-wing record than well-known liberals such as Pat Leahy, D-Vt., John Kerry, D-Mass., and . . . Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

One searches in vain for a new idea among Obama's policies. Personal accounts for Social Security? Entitlement reform? School choice? Tax cuts? Obama rejects them all, calling such proposals "Social Darwinism." Instead, Obama offers a traditional laundry list of liberalism: national health insurance, a "living wage" mandate, restrictions on executive pay, taxes on oil companies, more spending on just about everything.

Though he eschews the harsh language of former candidate John Edwards, Obama nonetheless embraces the same class warfare, attacking big business, big oil, big pharma and so on.

JFK reduced the burden of the state on society and unleashed the creative potential of Americans everywhere. At every opportunity in his career, Sen. Ted Kennedy has voted to expand the power, size and scope of government. He sees government as the answer to every problem.

Barack Obama's language is full of Jack, but his policies are pure Teddy.

Michael D. Tanner is director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute.

William the Conqueror, Domesday, Day of Judgment

After William the Conquerer won the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, it took him two more months to consolidate his control of England to become acclaimed King of England and crowned on December 25, 1066, in Westminster Abbey.

A sophisticated medieval form of government was handed over to the Normans and grew even stronger under William. The Normans centralised the autonomous shire system. (Sound familiar?)

The Domesday Book exemplifies the practical codification which enabled Norman assimilation of conquered territories through central control of a census. It was the first kingdom-wide census taken in Europe since the time of the Romans, and enabled more efficient taxation of the Norman's new realm. (Sound more familiar?) The process continues and grows with the internet. The great resource of the period, The Domesday Book, is now an online resource.

________________________

The holy grail of data: it's Domesday, online
William the Conqueror's great census is made available free on the internet

David Smith
The Observer, Sunday February 10 2008

'Not even one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig was left out.' But what William the Conqueror didn't have in the Domesday Book was an easy way of searching its reams of data. It has taken more than 900 years, but at last the internet has provided a solution.

An academic at Hull University has produced the world's first complete, freely available online version.

Professor John Palmer, whose work on the Domesday Book stretches back 25 years, has transformed its handwritten parchment pages into a database with searchable indexes, a detailed commentary and the ability to organise all its statistics in a tabulated format.

The Domesday Book, the oldest and most famous public record, was based on the 1086 great survey of England which investigated 'how the country was occupied, and with what sort of people... how much each had... and how much it was worth'. It covered 13,418 settlements south of the rivers Ribble and Tees.

As with the Last Judgment, all were called to account - hence the name, Domesday, Day of Judgment. There would be nothing like it in England again until the censuses of the 19th century.

But for nearly 1,000 years it has been inaccessible to most people and difficult to understand. There are costly CD-Rom translations, and the National Archives provides online searches, but Palmer set out to create a new format to bring the book into the digital age. Whereas the original has information listed under headings, Palmer has coded and tagged terms so they can be automatically retrieved and analysed. His software makes it possible to isolate certain variables and conduct several searches at once. The results can be displayed as a map, table or translated text, or as a combination of formats.

The three-year project was funded by a £250,000 grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Palmer, who worked on the project with his son, Matt, said: 'My interest in Domesday began in about 1980 as a teaching project. My son was getting interested in computing at the same time. It developed into a research esds.ac.uk/findingdata

The Democrats Worst Nightmare. (Maybe the Republicans)

The one thing the Clinton and Obama camps can agree on is that John McCain, who is popular with independents and moderate Democrats, is their “worst nightmare”.

We have arrived at a time where the US is in a position of needless and preventable vulnerability. Faith and confidence in politics and government has been broken yet the paradoxical popular choice seems to be for more government and more bureaucracy.

Irrationality is rising and a whole new generation is looking for change in all the wrong places. Any change. The left wing purveyors of inspiration are in DEFCON 4. We have yet to get an explanation of what the inspiration will do, but it is a secular faith based something or another and a whole lot of people are buying what they are selling. That brings us to an answer that many of us were unprepared for and that is John McCain.

We do not have another choice and the consequences of an Obama presidency are a risk that we should not take.

Keep this in mind about the current loudspeakers of the party: If they still defend and excuse the obvious mistakes of the past, then why trust their judgment and prognosis for the future? The choice will be between McCain and Barack Hussein Obama. That is the universe we have landed in.

__________________

Hillary Clinton's advisers 'in a state of panic'
By Tim Shipman in Washington and Philip Sherwell in Chicago Telegraph
09/02/2008

Hillary Clinton’s most senior advisers are in a state of “panic” about her presidential prospects and are plotting to enlist Democrat leaders in Congress to thwart her rival Barack Obama’s ambitions.

The Clinton camp is braced for Mr Obama to win a series of primary elections over the next three weeks, which they fear could hand the Illinois senator unstoppable momentum in the race for the White House.

Mr Obama has begun calling those “super delegates” - 795 congressmen and senior party officials who could break a dead heat - who are committed to Mrs Clinton, asking them to change their minds and help him wrap up the nomination.

As of tonight, the two candidates were neck and neck but Mr Obama appeared to be gaining momentum.

“He’s saying: 'Hey, I won your state and I won your congressional district, why are you supporting her?’” a Democrat strategist revealed.

The Clinton camp hopes to stop the Obama bandwagon by winning Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4, after which Mrs Clinton is planning to call on party grandees including Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Harry Reid, the party’s leader in the Senate, to persuade Mr Obama to stand down.

Clinton aides have privately admitted that Mr Obama would only consider such a move if offered the position of vice presidential running mate, something Mrs Clinton has always been reluctant to consider.

A senior Democrat who has discussed Clinton campaign thinking with a member of her inner circle said: “The Clintons are in a state of panic. She has to win both Texas and Ohio.”

But he added that this might prove impossible if Mr Obama maintains his momentum and wins most, or all, of the nine contests which come before that.

Mr Obama was expected to do well in primary elections held in Washington state, Louisiana and Nebraska.

He is also favourite to sweep Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC, which all vote on Tuesday, as well as Wisconsin and Hawaii, where he once lived, on February 19.

Only in Maine is Mrs Clinton confident, though Virginia and Wisconsin may also go her way.

Asked about the upcoming states, Mr Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod told The Sunday Telegraph: “We feel comfortable with them. What was once inevitable is no longer inevitable. The momentum has switched in this race.

"We closed a 20 point gap in the national polls in the last two weeks. The more people are exposed to his message, the better he does.”

But he added: “We are up against the Clinton machine. We are the perpetual underdog and will be throughout this process. We’re ready to go all the way to the convention.”

Clinton aides believe that if Mr Obama does not deliver a knock-out blow before March 4, the advantage will swing back to her and she will argue for a deal in which uncommitted super-delegates unite behind her, to preserve party unity.

But the prospect of a deal behind closed doors, that could brush aside the views of voters in the primaries, is already creating fury in the party.

Donna Brazile, an African American strategist, said last week: “If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party.”

But the Clinton camp fears that a failure to engineer a deal could lead to bitter battles at the Democrat convention in Denver in late August, which could even end with Al Gore, the former vice president, emerging as a compromise candidate.

“There’s a five per cent chance of that happening, but that’s five percent too high,” the Clinton source said.

Mrs Clinton is also under financial pressure.

She claimed that she received $7.5m in donations after admitting lending her campaign $5m last week.

But the source claimed that her campaign is actually in far worse financial trouble than they are letting on.

There will be no proof of how much she raised for three months, when the totals are formally declared to election watchdogs.

The one thing the Clinton and Obama camps can agree on is that John McCain, who is popular with independents and moderate Democrats, is their “worst nightmare”.

They now fear that he could pick Colin Powell or former congressman JC Watts, both of whom are African American, as his running mate.

But Mr McCain still has to shore up his conservative base and is actively looking at the Governors of Minnesota, South Carolina, Indiana, Mississippi, Florida and Texas: Tim Pawlenty, Mark Sandford, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Charlie Crist and Rick Perry.

Allies of President Bush are making the case for Rob Portman, a former White House Budget office director and Ohio congressman.

The Chinese Plan to Sucker Punch The United States Military

Because the American public is “abnormally sensitive” about military casualties, according to an article in China’s Liberation Army Daily, killing U.S. airmen or other personnel would spark a “domestic anti-war cry” on the home front and possibly force early withdrawal of U.S. forces. (“The U.S. experience in Somalia is usually cited in support of this assertion,” according to the Rand report.) Once this hard-and-fast assault on U.S. bases commenced, the Chinese army would “swiftly divert” its forces and “guard vigilantly against enemy retaliation,” according to a Chinese expert.

Hypothetical attack on U.S. outlined by China

By Patrick Winn - Staff writer Air Force Times
Posted : Monday Jan 28, 2008 16:46:24 EST

In a hypothetical future scenario, the U.S. and China are poised to clash — likely over Taiwan.

The democratic Republic of China, commonly called Taiwan — which America backs and the communist People’s Republic of China considers part of its territory — frequently irritates Chinese leaders with calls for greater independence from the mainland. But while the American military mulls its options, Chinese missiles hit runways, fuel lines, barracks and supply depots at U.S. Air Force bases in Japan and South Korea. Long-range warheads destroy American satellites, crippling Air Force surveillance and communication networks. A nuclear fireball erupts high above the Pacific Ocean, ionizing the atmosphere and scrambling radars and radio feeds.

This is China’s anti-U.S. sucker punch strategy.

It’s designed to strike America’s military suddenly, stunning and stalling the Air Force more than any other service. In a script written by Chinese military officers and defense analysts, a bruised U.S. military, beholden to a sheepish American public, puts up a small fight before slinking off to avoid full-on war.

This strategic outlook isn’t hidden in secret Chinese documents. It’s printed in China’s military journals and textbooks. And for much of last year, Mandarin literates and defense experts — working for the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Rand Corp. on an Air Force contract — combed through a range of Chinese military sources.

They emerged with “Entering the Dragon’s Lair,” a lengthy report on how the Chinese People’s Liberation Army would likely confront the U.S. military and how the Air Force in particular can brace itself. In many cases, the theoretical enemy nation China’s officers discuss in these scenarios isn’t explicitly named but is unmistakably the U.S.

“These aren’t war plans,” said report co-author Roger Cliff, a former Defense Department strategist and China military specialist who spoke to Air Force Times from Taiwan. “This is the military talking to itself. It’s not designed for foreigners or even China’s general public to read.”

Element of surprise

When it comes to conflict with the U.S., Chinese military analysts favor age-old schoolyard wisdom: Throw the first punch and hit hard.

“Future conflicts are likely to be short, intense affairs that might consist of a single campaign,” Cliff said. “They’re thinking about ways to get the drop on us. Most of our force is not forward-deployed.”

China’s experts concede its army would lose a head-on fight, with one senior colonel comparing such a scenario to “throwing an egg against a rock.” Instead, the Chinese would attempt what Rand calls an “anti-access” strategy: slowing the deployment of U.S. forces to the Pacific theater, damaging operations within the region and forcing the U.S. to fight from a distance.

“Taking the enemy by surprise,” one Chinese military expert wrote, “would catch it unprepared and cause confusion within and huge psychological pressure on the enemy and help [China] win relatively large victories at relatively small costs.” Another military volume suggests feigning a large-scale military training exercise to conceal the attack’s buildup.

The Dragon’s Lair

Striking U.S. air bases — specifically command-and-control facilities, aircraft hangars and surface-to-air missile launchers — would be China’s first priority if a conflict arose, according to Rand’s report.

U.S. facilities in South Korea and Japan, even far-south Okinawa, sit within what Rand calls the “Dragon’s Lair”: a swath of land and sea along China’s coast. This is an area reachable by cruise missiles, jet-borne precision bombs and local covert operatives. Air Force bases within this area include Osan and Kunsan in South Korea, as well as Misawa, Yokota and Kadena in Japan. And in a conflict over Taiwan, any nation allowing “an intervening superpower” such as the U.S. to operate inside its territory can expect a Chinese attack, according to China’s defense experts.

China is designing ground-launched cruise missiles capable of nailing targets more than 900 miles away — well within striking range of South Korea and much of Japan, according to the report. Cruise missiles able to reach Okinawa — home to Kadena Air Base — are in development.

The Chinese would first launch “concentrated and unexpected” attacks on tarmacs using runway-penetrating missiles and, soon after, would target U.S. aircraft. Saboteurs would play a role in reconnaissance, harassing operations and even “assassinating key personnel,” according to another military expert.

Chinese fighter jets would scramble to intercept aerial refueling tankers and cargo planes sent to shuttle in fuel, munitions, supplies or troops. High-explosive cluster bombs would target pilot quarters and other personnel buildings.

Because the American public is “abnormally sensitive” about military casualties, according to an article in China’s Liberation Army Daily, killing U.S. airmen or other personnel would spark a “domestic anti-war cry” on the home front and possibly force early withdrawal of U.S. forces. (“The U.S. experience in Somalia is usually cited in support of this assertion,” according to the Rand report.) Once this hard-and-fast assault on U.S. bases commenced, the Chinese army would “swiftly divert” its forces and “guard vigilantly against enemy retaliation,” according to a Chinese expert.

Dumb and blind The PLA also would likely use less conventional attacks on the American military’s vital communications network. The goal, as one Chinese expert put it: leaving U.S. combat capabilities “blind,” “deaf” and “paralyzed.”

Losing early-warning systems designed to detect incoming missiles would be, for the Air Force, the most devastating setback — one that could force the service to exit the region altogether, according to Rand.

China could also launch a nuclear “e-bomb,” or electromagnetic explosive, that would fry U.S. communication equipment while ionizing the atmosphere for minutes to hours, according to the report. This would likely jam radio signals in a 900-mile diameter beneath the nuclear fireball.

The PLA could also employ long-range anti-satellite missiles — similar to one successfully tested last January — to destroy one or more American satellites. However, the PLA has a host of less dramatic options: short-range jammers hidden in suitcases or bombs and virus attacks on Air Force computer networks.

U.S. Air Force options

Shielding against a swift Chinese onslaught is, according to Rand, as simple as reinforcing a runway or as complex as cloaking the orbit of military satellites.

In the short term, U.S. air bases inside the Dragon’s Lair should add an extra layer of concrete to their runways and bury fuel tanks underground. All aircraft, the report said, should be parked in hardened shelters, especially fighter jets.

Parking larger aircraft — bombers, tankers and E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control Systems jets — in hard-shell hangars would be expensive and difficult but likely worth the cost, according to the report.

U.S. fighter jets remain the best defense against incoming Chinese missile attacks. But, given China’s taste for sudden attacks, surface-launched missile defense systems must be installed long before a conflict roils. Because the PLA is expected to strike quickly, the report said, waiting for the first tremors of conflict is not an option.

The Air Force also should fortify itself against Chinese hackers by using software encryption, isolating critical computer systems and preparing contingency plans to communicate without a high-bandwidth network. Though China maintains a “no first use” nuclear bomb policy, the U.S., according to Rand, should warn China that nuclear electromagnetic pulse attacks will be considered acts of nuclear aggression and could prompt nuclear retaliation.

Rand insists the Air Force must defend satellites — which support communication, reconnaissance, bomb guidance and more — against China’s proven satellite-killing missiles. This could be accomplished in the Cold War tradition of mutually assured destruction by threatening to retaliate in kind if the PLA blasts U.S. satellites.

“That might be the one restraining factor,” Cliff said. “They might not want to start that space war.”

Or, Rand suggests, the U.S. could invest heavily in satellite protection or evasion techniques, including stealth, blending in with other satellite constellations or perhaps developing and deploying microsatellites capable of swarming to defend larger satellites, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working toward.

Could this really happen? The Chinese first-strike strategy is “more than hypothetical,” according to the report. But in the near term, at least, it’s considered unlikely.

If the most contentious issue is Taiwan, Cliff said, then the likely trigger would be Taiwanese elections, where assertions of complete independence from the mainland can infuriate Chinese leaders. China’s current president, Hu Jintao, has built up China’s military but also its ties with America. In 2012, however, when Taiwan holds an election and mainland China’s leadership is expected to turn over, perhaps for the worse, the risk of conflict could increase.

“It really depends on the circumstances,” Cliff said. “Would Taiwan be the provocateur? If so, it might be hard for the American public to support intervention.”

However, if China moves to capture control of the island, Cliff said he believes the U.S. would face a rocky dilemma.

“Are we really going to let a small, democratic country get snuffed out by a huge authoritarian country — especially when you think about how our own country came into existence?” Cliff said.

As China pours more resources into its evolving and expanding military, it buys the power to more strongly assert itself against America. In November, China denied U.S. Navy minesweepers shelter from a storm and, in another incident that month, turned down an Air Force C-17 flight shuttling supplies to the American consulate in Hong Kong. Experts speculate this was a rebuff to American arms sales to Taiwan, as well as President Bush’s autumn meeting with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of another state China claims, Tibet.

“If this conflict happened today, I’m certain we’d prevail,” Cliff said. “But as time goes on, that’s not a given.”

Lolita, Love Italian Style.

Lolita love affair scandalises Italy
By Malcolm Moore, Rome Correspondent Telegraph
Last Updated: 8:40am GMT 09/02/2008

A 34-year-old Italian man who had sex with a 13-year-old girl has had his sentence cut by a two-thirds because a court decided there was "real love" between the pair.

Antonio de Pascale, a butcher from Vicenza, admitted that he had a four-month long relationship with the girl, who sent him a stream of torrid text messages on his mobile phone.

His lawyers argued, however, that there was a "deep tenderness" between him and the girl and that he had "fallen head over heels in love" after a sexual encounter in his car. They said the girl had consented to every action.

The court in Vicenza accepted their opinion and sentenced de Pascale to only one year and four months in jail out of a possible 12-year term.

Because of a general amnesty for anyone who receives a sentence of less than three years, de Pascale is unlikely to serve any prison time for his Lolita-esque romance.

Antonio Marziale, the president of the Association for the Protection of the Rights of Minors, said the decision was "execrable".

He said: "It is not right to judge whether or not a 13-year-old girl is willing. The law should safeguard young girls who are too immature to make these decisions against adults without scruples."

However, Simonetta Matone, a judge in Rome, said the law must "always look to be reasonable in these cases".

She added: "Every relationship is a relationship and the real maturity, whether physical or psychological, of the minor must be weighed, with the help of experts."

The court decision has unleashed a wave of condemnation in Italy, and even authors of teen novels stepped forward to caution their readers against early sexual encounters.

Federico Moccia, the author of Excuse Me But I Love You, said: "This seems a very strange situation to me. Obviously in a relationship between a child and an adult, the adult has to stop himself. A girl has to be able to value the situation, and a girl this young is certainly not capable. My appeal to 13-year-olds is to wait for your time."

The Hard Road

In Jihad, Islamism and the United Nations, Jeffrey Imm sums up the difficulties and challenges faced by a multicultural, post-modern world in regard to Sharia Law and Islamist ideology.

He itemizes the timid, half-measures taken by the United Nations which are often thwarted by its more fundamentalist Muslim members. Mr. Imm also prescribes the steps which must be taken by the UN in order to institutionalize the human rights in conflict with Sharia law and Islamist ideology.

Here's a very interesting and surprising BBC interview with Martin Amis which highlights the problem with a politically correct west and Jihadism. Amis, described as a "white, middle-aged British atheist" rationally (of course) lays out a case against Islamism and Jihad while the interviewer poses the usual politically correct, multicultural head in-the-sand whirled peas arguments against confronting the evil.

There is a hard road ahead.

The Philadelphia Story. Top 150 Most Wanted Criminals.

Philadelphia 150 Most Wanted

The United States Press and mainstream media will never show you the truth behind violent crime statistics in the major US cities. This report is not from a right wing media source. It is from a major metropolitan police force in Philadelphia and a tough police chief, who by the way just so happens to be black.

McCain, Hillary or Obama?

Watch this video and ask yourself: Who do you think these people will be voting for?

McCain and Romney

McCain needs Romney not Huckabee
Posted: February 08, 2008, 12:10 PM by Diane Francis
U.S. Politics National Post

John McCain’s best running mate would be Mitt Romney (or a Romney endorsed candidate) and a closer analysis of the primary results below show why. Romney, not Huckabee, shores up McCain’s two vulnerabilities: his admitted lack of knowledge about economics and business as well as his age, a concern to many.

On Thursday, Romney nobly stepped aside and established Iraq as the centerpiece issue for the fall Presidential election. To further this, he asked anti-McCain Republicans and conservatives to join him in unity behind front-runner John McCain. It was a non-endorsement endorsement because McCain’s name was not invoked. Then President Bush did the exact same thing and called yesterday for unity to preserve “peace and prosperity”.

This is very very smart, especially in the face of what is developing as a nasty, non-uniting scrap between Obama and the Clintonites. (Hillary’s biggest mistake before Super Tuesday was to try and raise the “swiftboat” issue and that Obama would not be able to stand the Republicans’ withering attacks should he become candidate. This merely raised the issue that there is more dirt against the Clintons to come, witness Obama’s call yesterday for them to release their tax returns and a statement of their income sources.)

Bill the impediment again

Slick Willy has been freelancing all over the place since leaving the Presidency, both socially and financially. So stay tuned. The Republicans will have a feeding frenzy if the Clintons are on the ticket, even as vice president.

Meanwhile, Romney’s withdrawal accomplished four objectives:

• Romney finessed his fierce combativeness and attacks against McCain in the past few months by talking about the greater good fo fighting "evil" terrorists. Candidates have supporters who develop very strong dislikes for opponents and by saying that the cause trumps their dislike for McCain, he helps keep his people on his side for future purposes.

• He saved face by presenting himself as a "sacrifice"

• He has begun the uniting efforts for the party behind McCain.

• He trumps Huckabee as a potential running-mate.

McCain gets it

Yesterday, McCain hinted at this by saying he was “looking forward to meeting with Governor Romney” shortly. Romney may not have personal appeal but he would strengthen a ticket because he is a hugely successful businessman who understands more of the nuances of the economy and business. McCain admits this is a slight shortcoming and that his strength is military and foreign policy.

Romney also looks and acts the part plus is young enough to put to rest concerns about McCain's age in office. At 71 with some health concerns in the past, McCain may be a one-termer which makes the vice presidential position more enticing than is usually the case.

An analysis of results also shows Romney’s value, or a Romney-endorsed running mate, for McCain:

• Romney beat McCain in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Alaska, Utah and Massachusetts. Republicans need help in Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts, which voted Democrat in the past two contests.

• Meanwhile, Huckabee won Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia and West Virginia, but these always vote Republican and except for Arkansas (Huckabee’s state) the combined McCain-Romney vote added up to more than Huckabee’s percentages.

Simply stated, instead of buying oil from scum, we can make oil from scum.

Algae: the perfect biofuel

BY THIJS WESTERBEEK VAN EERTEN*RNL

07-02-2008

Maritime biologist Professor Hein de Baar of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research says that algae are ideal as biofuel. Algae yield ten times as much biofuel compared to for instance corn or rapeseed, are easy to grow, are not a human food source and can be produced CO2 neutral. Professor De Baar hopes that within a few years there will be cars running on algae oil.

Algae are the most common plants on earth. What is more: the planet's biomass is for the most part made up of algae. If biofuel could be produced from algae especially grown for this purpose, CO2 emissions could be reduced substantially. Professor De Baar explains how:
"Algae need CO2 to grow, you could call it 'algae food'. So an intensive algae nursery would require large quantities of CO2. So you need to keep adding CO2, which would be no problem at all if you were to hook up your nursery to a power plant.
Just imagine, the plant's smoke stack emits CO2, which is captured and injected into large containers with algae situated next to the plant. The algae, which will start to grow very fast, can then serve as fuel for the power plant, thus creating a closed circle without any emission of CO2."

Controversial

Biofuels have a bad reputation because some of them also serve as food for humans. In
Latin America prices of corn have gone up because the crop is being used for fuel production. There is no such problem with algae, even though some species are used as animal fodder, but that's at most a by-product.

Food production and algae nurseries are not incompatible. Professor de Baar describes what a future algae nursery may look like:
"Big containers, which would have to be transparent to allow sunlight to enter. It could be a vertical container of several metres high, which would be aerated with air rich in CO2. Another option is to have a mixture of algae and water flow through a series of horizontal pipes.
At first the water would be quite clear, with some nutrients added, but it would end as a kind of pea soup, which can be pumped straight into a factory. The algae would be filtered out so they could be processed as fuel."

Cost-effectiveness

Algae are such a logical choice when considering options for biofuel production, that the question arises why it wasn't taken up ages ago, but Hein de Baar says it's a matter of simple economics. When crude oil was still selling for only 20 US dollars a barrel, serious research into the potential of algae as biofuel held little appeal. However, with the price of a barrel of light sweet crude now hovering around the 100-dollar mark, it has become cost-effective.

The University of Groningen in the Netherlands has set up a consortium with the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Dutch businesses, which in a few years is to result in the large-scale growing of algae for biofuel. Professor de Baar is fully confident that the enterprise will be a success.

Dr Rowan Williams, Off With His Head.

hat tip: bobal and doug

It is hard to overstate the contempt I have for liberals that have had their survival genes stripped from their DNA, and then had it pasturized, homogenized and emulsified into a clarified sclerotic plaque, but Dr. Rowan, The Archbishop of Eyebrows, takes the muffin. He is the poster child for low cultural esteem. You have to pity the Anglicans who seem to be having a discourse and angst over whether they believe they are more deserving of anal penetration or to spend eternity in the purgation of performing Islamic fellatio, under the guidance of the good archbishop. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

__________________

BROWN SLAPS DOWN ARCHBISHOP'S CALL FOR ISLAMIC SHARIA LAW TO OPERATE IN BRITAIN

The Archbishop of Canterbury caused consternation yesterday by calling for Islamic law to be recognised in Britain.

He declared that sharia and Parliamentary law should be given equal legal status so the people could choose which governs their lives.

This raised the prospect of Islamic courts in Britain with full legal powers to approve polygamous marriages, grant easy divorce for men and prevent finance firms from charging interest.

His comments in a BBC interview and a lecture to lawyers were condemned at a time when government ministers are striving to encourage integration and stop the nation from "sleepwalking to segregation".

The Prime Minister rapidly distanced himself from Dr Williams's view. Gordon Brown's spokesman said: "Our general position is that sharia law cannot be used as a justification for committing breaches of English law, nor should the principles of sharia law be included in a civil court for resolving contractual disputes.

"The Prime Minister believes British law should apply in this country, based on British values."
Dr Williams's words opened a chasm over Islam between senior leaders of the Church of England, who are already trying to deal with an Anglican war over gay rights which broke out after he was appointed archbishop.

The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, is facing death threats following his warning last month about Muslim "no-go areas" in Britain.

And the Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu, who has been fiercely critical of Muslim extremists, said last year that "the imposition of sharia law, Britain as a Muslim society - that will never happen".

In his lecture, 57-year-old Dr Williams said that "we have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities". More if you can stand it.

"Our time has come. Our movement is real, and change is coming to America."- Barack Obama

Start thinking about who the "Our" is in "Our time has come." You better start thinking about the politics of redistribution, entitlements and affirmative action. You better start thinking about a twenty year rule of activist Supreme Court justices and the affect that will have on the permanent take-over of the power structure in this country. The Democrats were handed this once in a lifetime opportunity by the single worst President since Lyndon Johnson. The Democrats will capitalize on the wreckage left behind by George W. Bush. They will complete the "Great Society" started by LBJ and that society will be by those "whose time has come."

The Obama speech started to sound very close to the rhetoric of the urban street, so much so that you can mark my prediction, and expect riots if and when he loses. That is the first entitlement that happens when the clarion calls "Our time has come." It is a reckless call from an unqualified man that many divine to have powers and a mystique that is not there.

WTF is This?

Germany to Deploy 200 Combat Troops to Non-Combat Zone in Afghanistan

The fighting is in the south of Afghanistan. Germany is doing it's NATO duty and sending 200 combat troops to the quiet north. Maybe we overdid it when we neutered Germany after WWII, but what on earth is the point to two hundred troops in the wrong zone?

In Europe, there are 116,000 US military personnel including 75,603 who are stationed in Germany. Are we that stupid?

If the 26 nations that comprise NATO can’t sustain a coalition against the Taliban, which is the largest supplier of heroin to Europe and an ongoing terror training ground, what good is NATO to the United States?

_____________________

Germany Agrees to Expanded Military Role in Afghanistan DW

Germany will deploy around 200 combat soldiers in northern Afghanistan, but will not move its troops to the country's more violent south, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung said on Wednesday, Feb. 6.

German troops will be sent to replace the Norwegian contingent scheduled to leave Afghanistan this summer. German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung confirmed the deployment at a press conference, saying that it was important to maintain the quick response force.

"NATO has made the request," Jung told a news conference. "We have decided after consultation with the military that we cannot allow a gap to develop."

Under current mandates, Germany can station up to 3,500 troops in northern Afghanistan as part of the 40,000-strong NATO International Security Assistance Force.

Venturing outside the "safe zone"

The Quick Reaction Force will be the first combat unit Germany sends to Afghanistan. Most of the 3,200 Bundeswehr soldiers serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) are involved in reconstruction work in the relatively peaceful northern part of the country and near the capital of Kabul.

The new mission might take troops out of this relative safe zone. In the two years that the Norwegians were responsible for the Quick Reaction Force, their troops were deployed only once outside of the regional northern command.

Jung said that the German Quick Reaction Force would do the same.

"If our friends are in an emergency situation, we will help them," Jung said.

US, Britain want more


NATO defense ministers meet on Thursday and Friday in Lithuania to discuss the Afghanistan mission. The US and Britain want other NATO members to share more responsibility for stationing troops in the south of the country, where most of the fighting against al Qaeda is taking place.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in London on Wednesday, said very few NATO countries had troops in Afghanistan's most dangerous regions.

"We believe very strongly that there ought to be a sharing of that burden throughout the (NATO) alliance," Rice said.

Britain announced it would maintain its current level of 7,800 troops in Afghanistan. The US has 29,000 military personnel in Afghanistan, about half of them attached to the NATO mission.

Stretched to the limit

Berlin has consistently rejected those calls. Germany's military capacity is stretched to the limit and the country wants to finish the work it started in northern Afghanistan, the government says.

"We see our responsibility as being in northern Afghanistan," deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters in Berlin. "That's where we aim to be successful, and that's how it will remain."

Germany does not expect the issue of troop deployments to add tension to its ties to the United States other NATO members, according to Steg.

"This is not a bilateral question directed at German-US ties," he said, adding that a request for more troops from US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was sent to several European NATO members.

A call for more development aid

The German public remains largely opposed to increasing the Bundeswehr's commitments in Afghanistan. A Forsa survey on Wednesday showed that 85 percent of those polled were against sending troops to the south.

Politicians are divided over whether Germany should play a bigger role in southern Afghanistan.

Oskar Lafontaine of the Left Party said the Quick Reaction Force is a way for the government to further entangle Germany in an unjust war. The deployment "opens the door for a combat mission in all of Afghanistan," Lafointaine said.

The Executive Director of Medico International, an aid group working on human rights and health, also criticized the decision.

"Everyone knows that the problems in Afghanistan cannot be solved with combat operations," Thomas Gebauer said.

Past experience has shown that military escalation worsens the security situation, according to Medico. If the violence is to end, Afghanistan needs peace, rebuilding and development. Germany spends 530 million euros ($785 million) on military operations but only 100 million euros on reconstruction, Gebauer said.

Afghans say foreign troops improve safety

Afghans say foreign troops have helped make the region significantly safer, according to results of a survey released on Wednesday.

Two out of three Afghans in the northeastern part of the country said that they feel "much safer" than they did two years ago. A full 99 percent said they felt safer.

"The improvement is largely attributed to the presence of foreign troops," according to the poll conducted in February 2007 by researchers from Berlin's Free University.

The study found that four of every five of the 2,000 Afghan households surveyed felt foreign troops have had a positive impact on their physical security. The Afghans had an equally positive view of their national government.

Hewitt tells Rush Limbaugh to Shut-Up, sort of.

Hugh Hewitt, not Jennifer Love Hewitt, but this is better to look at.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Seven Reasons To Support The GOP's Nominee
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 10:10 AM

As of this morning, McCain has earned 615 delegates and 4,220,296 votes; Romney 268 delegates and 3,497,341 votes, and Huckabee 169 delegates and 2,232,530 votes.

(If we were using West Virginia rules, we'd get the Huck folks to revote right now and get one of the GOP candidates to 50%.)

Senator McCain has a clear path to the nomination, Romney a very uphill battle, and Huck is fighting for 2012 at this point and for a win in a major vote outside of the south. Certainly they should all stay in through the primaries ahead because it isn't over and because our side needs the excitement of a campaign in such key falls states as Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania to keep the MSM from turning 100% of its attention on to growing the Obama phenomenon. They ought to be scheduling three man debates in every state, making their points and taking every opportunity to look ahead to the fall.

At the same time, Romney and Huckabee ought to begin to note Senator McCain's lead and urge their followers to recognize that if they cannot come back they and their followers will have to come in and join the party's eventual nominee. Senator McCain would do well to make a similar statement though his lead is significant and his collapse unlikely. Putting Humpty Dumpty together again cannot wait for St. Paul. Each of the three need to strike some common chords again and again, beginning with why the GOP needs to retain the White House, regardless of who its nominee is.

There are seven reasons for anyone to support the eventual nominee no matter who it is: The war and six Supreme Court justices over the age of 68.

Folks who want to take their ball and go home have to realize that even three SCOTUS appointments could revolutionize the way elections are handled in this country in a stroke, mandating the submission of redistricting lines to court scrutiny for "fairness."

"It is undeniable that political sophisticates understand such fairness and how to go about destroying it," Justice Souter announced in his diseent in Veith v. Jubilerer, the Pennsylvania redistricting case in which the Court declined by a vote of 5 to 4 to immerse itself in the details of the partisan redistricting of Pennsylvania.

If Democrats control the White House and gain even one of the five seats held by the center-right majority of current justices, this and many other crucial issues are up for legal grabs. When activist judges are more than willing to rewrite rules of long-standing, periods of exile should never be self-imposed "for the good of the party." Exiles can go on a very long time indeed. Ask the Whigs.

They can go on indefinitely when enforced by courts.

The GOP as well is the party committed to victory in Iraq and the wider war. A four year time-out would be a disaster, a period of time in which al Qaeda and its jihadist off-shoots would regroup in some places and continue to spread in others. Iran, even if punished in the months before November, would certainly continue and accelerate its plans under the soft pleadings of a President Obama or Clinton 2.0.

These aren't the years to wish a pox on your primary opponents' heads beyond June.

I don't expect the principals to let up on each other in the two months ahead, and I am especially looking forward to the Ohio and Texas votes.

But it is very possible to play full contact politics without the threat of going home if your team loses. The stakes in the fall are far too high for that

Obama, Crack Cocaine and Gay Sex. What do you think?

Here is the God Squad radio interview with Larry Sinclair

Good Morning, Earth!

The news this morning:

A Dutch study lays the groundwork for more generational warfare.

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.

Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.

The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.

The results counter the common perception that preventing obesity will save health systems worldwide millions of dollars.

Fat people and smokers are off the hook; the evil eye is turned towards the old.

*****************

American Soap Opera.

Brittany Spears Father Appointed as Conservator

LOS ANGELES — Britney Spears' father was granted control of her finances until Valentine's Day by a judge who also barred the troubled pop star from contacting her friend and sometime manager, Sam Lutfi.

Superior Court Commissioner Reva Goetz also appointed a physician Monday to evaluate whether Spears, who is in a psychiatric ward, is competent to make decisions.

Her father, James Spears, and an attorney were granted conservatorship last week after the 26-year-old was hospitalized for the second time in two months following increasingly bizarre behavior.

The commissioner extended that conservatorship until Feb. 14. It allows Spears' father, and attorney Andrew Wallet, to make decisions involving the singer's assets and even who enters her home.

The commissioner also tried to further distance Spears from Lutfi, who sometimes spoke on her behalf and had been seen escorting her about town.

Spears was ordered to have no contact with him by phone, texting, or any other means.

Meanwhile a lawyer appeared out of the mist claiming that Brittany hired him to represent her. I say, just let the family take care of things for a couple of weeks until the idiot gets out. Obviously, these other people; the agents, the lawyers, the posse couldn't keep the girl out trouble. Let them "chill out" for a while.

America at its finest.

*****************

"Phftt, phfttt. I spit on this budget. My wipe my ...with this paper."

Democrats, some in GOP look askance at Bush's budget priorities

WASHINGTON — Democrats, already looking ahead to the next White House occupant, quickly relegated President Bush's final budget to the ash bin of history, saying his proposals to rein in spending on programs are untenable and won't happen.

Even the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, invoked a note of reality. "Let's face it. This budget is done with the understanding that nobody's going to be taking a long, hard look at it."

It's hilarious. Democrats as fiscal conservatives!? Give me a break! Of course, to be fair, the article noted that this is a bipartisan disdain for the lame duck.

What really concerns me is the idea held by too many people that we can have more and more health insurance, health care, retirement benefits, welfare benefits, arts, culture, welfare, childcare, etc, etc etc. I mean, sure, we can have those wonderful benefits, but someone has to pay for them. Remember. "Gas, grass or ass. Nobody Rides For Free"? There is no free ride. Someone is going to pay.

*****************

This ain't no party, this aint no disco, this ain't no foolin' around!

All this business about crying for Republican Unity even before Super Tuesday strikes as a bit premature. Hey! It's the Republican Primary. I say let's have it all out in the open. The Bush wing of the Party want to boil the campaign down to a single issue; the woah. They insist that McCain is the man most capable of defending America, after all, in case you didn't know, he was a Vietnam war hero. That, in itself should be reason enough but do not forget that he supported the surge.

The anti-McCain wing of the party say that McCain As a Reagan "foot soldier" sucks. He's been everything but conservative and they aren't above making a scene in public. It's a bit like watching your family having a big time meltdown right in the middle of dinner at Maggianos or in Hannity's case, Ruth's Cris Steak House. You just want to crawl under the table.

I know its ugly, but we should let the internecine party war play out, after all, these are primary elections for the Presdential nominee. And more than that, a struggle for the soul of the party. Conservatives are making a stand at the Alamo to prevent the party apparachiks from moving the party towards the left. If Republicans want to compromise their conservative principles for power, so be it, the country will move away from the two party system and the Dems will also fracture. I wouldn't bet on any of this happening but no one has a crystal ball.

Vote for Romney, Reconcile with McCain

Like it or not, the Democrats will likely own Washington when this is all over. A life long super liberal or an inexperienced socialist will rule. A Republican president and inept leadership in Congress have squandered the permanent Republican majority. Eight years on a Democratic presidency will totally change the Supreme Court. New rights and entitlements will be found and old ones expanded.

Current government spending is unsustainable without tax increases and class envy will ensure that the revenues will be increased to feed the requirements of the expanding welfare state. The only possible scenario to temper that would be a Republican president.

At best, it will be a presidency of compromise, exactly in the fashion as Romney governed in Massachusetts. The problem is Romney will not be the candidate. If he is, he will not win. Like it or not McCain is the last man standing. You can judge for yourself who is responsible for that, but it is not the Democrats. I am about as enthused about John McCain, as I would be wearing a pair of tight wet boots, but look around and show me another choice. Forget what should have been. Vote for Romney, reconcile yourself to McCain, or lace them up.

___________________

The 3.6 Percent Republicans
The GOP needs McCain Democrats to win.
Weekly Standard
by John J. DiIulio Jr.
02/11/2008, Volume 013, Issue 21

Most leading conservative writers, radio hosts, and activists would probably concur that their liberal counterparts have never really connected with average Americans. Personalities on the right sell more books and get higher radio and television ratings. And until recently, conservatives seemed to be on an electoral politics roll begun in 1994 when the GOP retook the House. Within Republican ranks, for all the talk about crack-ups and implosions, the Reagan legacy still bridges divides between libertarians, social and religious conservatives, and national security conservatives.

By comparison, the left often draws flies. Win, lose, or draw, Democrats are prone to eat their own. Post-FDR, the last time that staunch liberals saw their favorite candidate elected president was never. In fact, the only time Democrats actually nominated a candidate who toed the liberal intelli-gentsia's line was 1972. George McGovern, who recently called for President Bush's impeachment (cue applause in Cambridge, Mass.), got 38 percent of the national vote.

But what is true for the liberal goose is true for the conservative gander. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to quip, people are entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. John McCain is more conservative on more issues than average Americans are. By every standard measure (voting record and ratings, positions on major issues), McCain is conservative. Unlike his critics on the right, however, he is no ideological purist; he is conservative, but he is not what the pollsters call "very conservative." That is one obvious reason why he has such wide appeal. For even in our decidedly right-leaning mass electorate, few Americans, including few Republicans, answer to "very conservative."

Take a glance at Gallup Organization surveys. In 2007, self-identified Republicans were about 28 percent of the mass electorate, self-identified Democrats were about 32 percent, and self-identified independents were about 39 percent. Fifty-five percent of Republicans self-identified as "conservative," 26 percent as "moderate," and 13 percent as "very conservative."

Now, do the simple math. "Very conservative" Republicans are only about 3.6 percent--28 percent times 13 percent--of the mass electorate. If that just seems too low, consult the American National Election Studies (ANES) and add the 12 percent of independents who lean Republican to the 12 percent who are self-described "weak Republicans" and the 16 percent who are self-described "strong Republicans." This sums to 40 percent of the mass electorate. But that still means just 5.2 percent of all voters (40 percent times 13 percent) qualify as "very conservative" Republicans.

To get the figure into double-digits, the "very conservative" faithful would have to be at least a quarter of the party's people, and the party's identifiers would need to be 40 percent of the mass electorate (25 percent times 40 percent just equals 10 percent). But that would be a data-free stretch.

In a country of some 300 million souls, a lively and like-minded 4 or 5 percent of the voting-age population can keep myriad media personalities in the money and favored candidates in office. But the conservative party cannot win the presidency without more than a little help from weakly conservative and moderate voters including Democrats and independents.

Independents matter most. Based on ANES data, Emory University's Alan Abramowitz has calculated that in the 10 elections from 1952 to 1988, the Democrat, on average, won about 40 percent of the total two-party vote cast by independents. In the last four presidential elections, however, the Democrat, on average, won 55 percent of the total two-party vote cast by independents. The independents in 2004 cast one in three ballots.

In 2000, Bush won independents 47 percent to 45 percent over Gore. In 2004, Bush lost independents, getting 48 percent to Kerry's 49 percent. The winning difference in 2004, an election in which both parties exceeded their early turnout projections, was the several million evangelical voters who favored Bush but had not turned out in 2000.

But evangelical Christians, though predominantly conservative, are trending slowly toward the center. The trend is most evident among 18-to 29-year-old white evangelicals, only 40 percent of whom self-identify as Republican. And while about a tenth of all Americans today self-identify as "religious right," about 7 percent self-identify as "religious left."

Even given another candidate as popular with evangelicals as Bush, there is simply not much more electoral juice left to be squeezed from the evangelical orange. The exception would be the fast-growing evangelical Latino population represented by groups like Esperanza USA, and encompassing Latino churches and fraternal organizations by the thousands. President Bush made measurable electoral inroads with that population, but those gains have evaporated for Republicans. The GOP's hard-line rhetoric on immigration, and its failure to deliver big on federal aid for faith-based initiatives, has alienated even religiously conservative Latino leaders.

None other than John McCain keeps asserting that Republicans lost in 2006 because they stopped strictly adhering to conservative orthodoxy by succumbing to Washington's overspending ways. This claim may warm some very conservative hearts, but total yearly federal spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has averaged in the low twenties since Reagan was president, and the annual nondefense discretionary spending that conservatives especially love to hate rose only from 3.2 percent of GDP in 1999 to 3.8 percent of GDP in 2006. Surveys indicate that most Republicans who voted for Democrats or simply stayed home in 2006 were not focused on overspending or overtaxing. Nor were they particularly upset with the GOP over social issues or support for traditional values.

Rather, as the ANES and other surveys showed, most voters, including many Republicans, were disenchanted with Bush's Iraq policies and generally worried that the country was moving in the wrong direction. Plus, the Democrats finally woke up and ran some less decidedly liberal candidates, including a few pro-life Democrats, in key races. In December 2007, Gallup surveys found voters giving Democrats the edge on four out of five issues that mattered most to them: health, taxes, the economy, and Iraq. The only issue on which voters favored Republicans was terrorism.

McCain is probably the only Republican who can win as Reagan did. In 1980, in a three-man race, Reagan won 26 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of independents. In 1984, in a two-man race, he won 26 percent of Democrats again, plus 63 percent of independents. Nor did Reagan by any means always govern from the right. He often wisely bent his sincerely held conservative principles in order to get a legislative half-loaf, a partial regulatory rollback, and so on.

I was not a Reagan Democrat, but every one of my six closest lifelong friends--each, like me, born a working-class Catholic and raised as a Democrat in the 1960s and 1970s in Philadelphia--was. I have the "liberal egghead" teasing scars to prove it. But, reflecting national trends, half voted for Kerry in 2004, and all but one voted Democratic in 2006.

So, finally, an unscientific survey: All my ex-Reagan Democrat buddies like McCain best because he is a war hero, because he seems strong on national defense, and because he looks the part. They all say that they will vote for him if he is the Republican nominee.

The 2008 presidential election may turn on whether the GOP can win back independents, and on whether my friends and millions more like them become McCain Democrats. Many other general election scenarios remain possible. But in this exceptionally weird election year, witnessing the not-so-vast right-wing conspiracy McCain-bash its way to a third Clinton term would win the prize for irony.

John J. DiIulio Jr. is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Republicans Destroying Republicans

Team 43 Leaving the Field

George Bush, Republican, proposed a $3.1 trillion budget today that will come with $400 billion deficits. When he leaves office, the financial condition of the United States will be as follows:

• As of January 30, 2008, the total U.S. federal debt held by the public was roughly $5.1 trillion. This does not include the money owed by states, corporations, or individuals, nor does it include the money owed, for example debt held for Social Security.
• If intra-government debt obligations are included, the debt figure rises to roughly $9.2 trillion.
  
• If, in addition, unfunded Medicaid, Social Security, etc. promises are added, this figure rises to a total of $59.1 trillion.
• In 2005 the public debt was 64.5 percent of GDP according to the CIA World Factbook, making the U.S. public debt the 35th largest in the world by percentage of GDP. For 2007, this figure rose to 66.5 percent.

My point is simple, the Republicans, and George Bush dropped the ball on their one strong suit, government spending. That was Republican self-destruction and by a large measure is responsible for the mess the party is in.

However, by all indications it appears that Barack Obama has a good chance of upsetting Hillary and will be the Democratic choice. He is an unknown quantity and once the excitement dies down, which it will, his record and talents other than those of an orator will be thoroughly examined. I doubt that he will pass the test. A Republican can still win this if the Republicans do not destroy the last man standing.

_________________

February 04, 2008
Time for Republicans to Get a Grip
By Kyle-Anne Shiver American Thinker

It's one thing when your political adversaries denounce your Party and hold a gleeful funeral procession with your ashes on public display. We expect our adversaries to behave this way.

It's another thing altogether when your own luminaries dance to the opponent's fight song and give woeful credence to the wishful thinking of your adversaries.

The leftists are having a field day dancing around the near-dead carcass of the Republican Party, and we seem to be joining them at every turn.

Well, enough is enough, I say. It's time for Republicans to get a grip.

Instead of wildly picking at the bark of a single tree here or there, we need to take a step back and look at the forest. Getting bogged down in a single issue, or even three or four, is not Reaganesque.

Polarizing the President Is Paying Big Dividends

The left got its fire lit by two events: (1) the impeachment of their standard bearer; and (2) the contested electoral victory of George W. Bush. That fire might have extinguished itself, however, if not for the huge infusion of cash from leftist billionaire, George Soros, and his wealthy friends.

Put all that money together with a growing network of leftist political action committees. Spin the same message a hundred different ways, amplify it through the mass media and aim all the ammunition at one target: George W. Bush.

The left has effectively polarized President Bush, even to the extent that his own Party believes much of the propaganda. Peggy Noonan wrote just last week that "George W. Bush has destroyed the Republican Party."

Polarization, the tactic espoused by Saul Alinksy, guru to both Obama and Rodham Clinton, is paying big dividends for Soros and his vast left wing coterie of financiers. George Bush, whose college grades at Yale were better than Al Gore's at Harvard, is stupid; the Iraq War is a dismal failure to be ended, despite the victory being won by our troops; the economy, still growing, albeit at a slower pace than before, is in a recession. People in mass numbers believe these lies.

For one thing, the propaganda blitzkrieg has most likely persuaded many ardent conservative politicians to spare themselves and their families the same treatment, thereby keeping them out of the race altogether.

For another, this polarization has resulted in moving the electoral middle slightly left. This, in turn, allows the Democrats to run two of the most far-left, socialist candidates in history and make it seem as though they are America-loving moderates.

I cannot tell you how many genuine, upstanding American citizens I've heard lately say that even they would vote for a Democrat next election just to stop the constant hate-mongering barrage from the left.

This is much like the attitude of the beleaguered parent who gives in to every childish demand just to stop the tantrum and get a little peace. Americans are wanting a president who cannot be so easily polarized, and they are looking toward the middle.

Moving the middle to the left is forcing the Republicans to run centrist candidates, all of whom have veered off Reagan's path on one or more big issues. That's the big-picture reality, and no amount of protest to the contrary is going to change the picture by this time next week.

But does any of this spell death for the Republican Party?

Only if we let it.

So, what would Ronald Reagan do?

Nobody knows, of course, since he isn't here to tell us. I suspect, however, that the very last thing he would do is start blaming his own. He wouldn't go off half-cocked for all the world to see how his political adversaries had gotten the better of him. And he wouldn't be raising any white flags just because the realities of the political landscape demanded new, slightly different strategies.

Ronald Reagan has been transformed from a living, breathing, human president into a political icon, and I think he would positively hate this.

He would be the first among us, I believe, to demand an end to holding every candidate up to the false picture of conservative perfection we ourselves have created. The problem with making icons is that it is necessary to discount every negative and embellish every positive. When this process is applied to human beings, nothing can result but a false picture that sets its admirers up for failure and disappointment in the long term.

Would Ronald Reagan encourage this childish fantasy? I think not.

And it wouldn't take him five minutes to list the vast differences between one of the Republican centrist candidates and either a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama. Both stand for centralized government solutions to every individual problem. Both stand for expansion of government control on everything from regulating the environment and our health care to an even tighter, iron grip on our education system. Both are internationalists who see America as more of a problem to the world than the source of emulation and better solutions.

When I heard Ann Coulter last week on Hannity and Colmes say that if John McCain is the Republican nominee for President, she would go out and campaign for Hillary Clinton because there isn't a shred of difference between them, I gasped in disbelief. Honestly, I thought the poor dear has completely lost it.

Ronald Reagan was no quitter and he was no fuzzy-brained idealist either. He was a pragmatist all the way, seizing the best opportunity since WWII to bring the Country back rightward. That opportunity had a name: James Earl Carter. There was no vast right wing conspiracy to bring Carter down; he did it all by himself. Reagan dove in and picked up the Country's pieces, and ended the cold war in one preesidency.

But Reagan, of all people would have the good common sense he derived from God to know that 2008 is not 1980. The political landscape has changed, and no amount of fretting, whining, fuming or swearing is going to change that one iota.

Time to get a real grip Republicans. Face reality. And elect a true America-loving centrist who can stop the bleeding. The whole electorate is crying out for an end to the polarizing politics and a man who can truly unite the Country.

We need to do this one for the Gipper.

Chávez and Drug Smuggling

Revealed: Chávez role in cocaine trail to Europe


The guerrilla group Farc has long been suspected of running the Colombian cocaine industry. But how does it move the drug so readily out of the country? In a special investigation, John Carlin in Venezuela reports on the remarkable collusion between Colombia's rebels and its neighbour's armed forces

Sunday February 3, 2008
The Observer

Some fighters desert from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) because they feel betrayed by the leadership, demoralised by a sense that the socialist ideals that first informed the guerrilla group have been replaced by the savage capitalism of drug trafficking. Others leave to be with their families. Still others leave because they begin to think that, if they do not, they will die. Such is the case of Rafael, who deserted last September after 18 months operating in a Farc base inside Venezuela, with which Colombia shares a long border.

The logic of Rafael's decision seems, at first, perverse. He is back in Colombia today where, as a guerrilla deserter, he will live for the rest of his days under permanent threat of assassination by his former comrades. Venezuela, on the other hand, ought to have been a safe place to be a Farc guerrilla. President Hugo Chávez has publicly given Farc his political support and the Colombian army seems unlikely to succumb to the temptation to cross the border in violation of international law.
'All this is true,' says Rafael. 'The Colombian army doesn't cross the border and the guerrillas have a non-aggression pact with the Venezuelan military. The Venezuelan government lets Farc operate freely because they share the same left-wing, Bolivarian ideals, and because Farc bribes their people.'

Then what did he run away from? 'From a greater risk than the one I run now: from the daily battles with other guerrilla groups to see who controls the cocaine-trafficking routes. There is a lot of money at stake in control of the border where the drugs come in from Colombia. The safest route to transport cocaine to Europe is via Venezuela.'

Rafael is one of 2,400 guerrillas who deserted Farc last year. He is one of four I spoke to, all of whom had grown despondent about a purportedly left-wing revolutionary movement whose power and influence rests less on its political legitimacy and more on the benefits of having become the world's biggest kidnapping organisation and the world's leading traffickers in cocaine. The rest here

Man Charges Obama With Drug Use and Homosexual Acts

The Inane and McCain

Things that drive me up a wall:

1. When I hear someone say that they who will vote for a candidate based on racial identity.
2. When I hear someone say that they will vote for a candidate based on religious identity.
3. When I hear that someone will vote for the best-looking candidate.
4. John McCain is a "war hero" and therefore deserves to be President.
   

Most regulars of the EB are well informed about John McCain but there seems to be a groundswell against him and maybe the message will reach a broader audience. Here, a wise man, Thomas Sowell rips McCain a new one:

_________________

McCain’s Crooked Talk
He lies about Romney’s record.

By Thomas Sowell

We have been hearing for years that Senator John McCain gives “straight talk” and his bus has been endlessly referred to as the “Straight Talk Express.” But endless repetition does not make something true.

The fact that McCain makes short, blunt statements does not make him a straight-talker.

There are short, blunt lies — and he told a big one on the eve of the Florida primary, when he claimed that Mitt Romney had advocated a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

Even the Washington Post, which supports McCain, said that the senator “has distorted the meaning” of what Governor Romney said, that Romney “has never proposed setting ‘a date for withdrawal.’ ”

During Mitt Romney’s ABC News interview that Senator McCain twisted, Governor Romney was asked by the interviewer whether he agreed with President Bush’s veto of congressional legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal, and whether Romney as President would veto similar legislation.

“Of course,” was Romney’s reply. There was no ambiguity.

Confronted with his lie on Wednesday night’s debate, McCain blustered and filibustered in a manner reminiscent of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, when he was caught in a lie during a navy inquiry.

When confronted with any of his misdeeds, Senator McCain tends to fall back on his record as a war hero in Vietnam.

Let’s talk sense. Benedict Arnold was a war hero but that did not exempt him from condemnation for his later betrayal.

Being a war hero is not a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card. And becoming president of the United States is not a matter of rewarding an individual for past services.

The presidency is a heavy responsibility for the future of the nation, including generations yet unborn. Character and integrity are major qualifications.

The passing years and a friendly media have allowed Senator McCain’s shortcomings in the character and integrity department to fade into the background.

McCain was one of “the Keating Five” — senators who used their influence to try to protect a failing savings & loan company, which also became the subject of a corruption investigation.

During the 2000 primaries, the Associated Press reported Senator McCain’s joking about people with Alzheimer’s.

This went beyond bad taste because (1) it was known at the time that Ronald Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s and (2) the media to whom McCain was pandering hated Ronald Reagan.

It is especially ironic now to see McCain wrapping himself in the mantle of President Reagan.

With the momentum of his Florida primary win behind him, going into the “Super Tuesday” primaries, John McCain has now been restored to the position of front runner that the media gave him at the outset.

Other Republicans are jumping on his bandwagon. This may have less to do with McCain’s own qualities than with the prospect of getting Cabinet posts or Supreme Court appointments as rewards for their political support.

It may all look like a done deal. But the McCain-Kennedy bill giving amnesty to illegal aliens looked like a done deal two years ago — until the public realized the truth behind the spin and brought that sell-out to a screeching halt.

Super Tuesday may be the voters’ last chance to bring the so-called “straight talk express” to a screeching halt.

It should be called the “sell-out express” because McCain has sold out not only with amnesty for illegal aliens but also sold out the First Amendment with the McCain-Feingold “campaign finance reform” bill that was supposed to take big money out of political campaigns, but blatantly has not.

McCain also sold out on judicial nominations by making his own side deal with the Democrats, undercutting Republican attempts to stop Democrats from filibustering judicial nominees instead of voting them up or down.

This is quite a record for someone running as a straight talker.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

500% Increase in US Military Suicide Attempts

It has been obvious for some time that the burden placed on the US military over the past five years has been inordinately and unfairly proportioned. In a nation of three hundred million, very few are affected. The burden is exasperated by multiple tours not experienced by Viet Nam era troops. If this story is accurate, then we are seeing some of the consequences to our active military.


WASHINGTON (CNN) --

Every day, five U.S. soldiers try to kill themselves. Before the Iraq war began, that figure was less than one suicide attempt a day.

The dramatic increase is revealed in new U.S. Army figures, which show 2,100 soldiers tried to commit suicide in 2007.

"Suicide attempts are rising and have risen over the last five years," said Col. Elspeth Cameron-Ritchie, an Army psychiatrist.

Concern over the rate of suicide attempts prompted Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, to introduce legislation Thursday to improve the military's suicide-prevention programs.

"Our troops and their families are under unprecedented levels of stress due to the pace and frequency of more than five years of deployments," Webb said in a written statement. Watch CNN Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre on the reasons for the increase in suicides »

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, took to the Senate floor Thursday, urging more help for military members, especially for those returning from war.

"Our brave service members who face deployment after deployment without the rest, recovery and treatment they need are at the breaking point," Murray said.

She said Congress has given "hundreds of millions of dollars" to the military to improve its ability to provide mental health treatment, but said it will take more than money to resolve the problem.

"It takes leadership and it takes a change in the culture of war," she said. She said some soldiers had reported receiving nothing more than an 800 number to call for help.

"Many soldiers need a real person to talk to," she said. "And they need psychiatrists and they need psychologists."

According to Army statistics, the incidence of U.S. Army soldiers attempting suicide or inflicting injuries on themselves has skyrocketed in the nearly five years since the start of the Iraq war.

Last year's 2,100 attempted suicides -- an average of more than 5 per day -- compares with about 350 suicide attempts in 2002, the year before the war in Iraq began, according to the Army.

The figures also show the number of suicides by active-duty troops in 2007 may reach an all-time high when the statistics are finalized in March, Army officials said.

The Army lists 89 soldier deaths in 2007 as suicides and is investigating 32 more as possible suicides. Suicide rates already were up in 2006 with 102 deaths, compared with 87 in 2005.

Cameron-Ritchie, the Army psychiatrist, said suicide attempts are usually related to problems with intimate relationships, but they are also related to problems with work, finances and the law.

"The really tough area here is stigma. We know that soldiers don't want to go seek care. They're tough, they're strong, they don't want to go see a behavioral health-care provider," Cameron-Ritchie said.

Multiple deployments and long deployments appear to exact a toll on relationships, thereby boosting the number of suicide attempts, she said.

Traditionally, the suicide rate among military members has been lower than age- and gender-matched civilians. But in recent years the rate has crept up from 12 per 100,000 among the military to 17.5 per 100,000 in 2006, she said. That's still less than the civilian figure of about 20 per 100,000, she said.

The "typical" soldier who commits suicide is a member of an infantry unit who uses a firearm to carry out the act, according to the Army.

Post-traumatic stress disorder also may be a factor in suicide attempts, Cameron-Ritchie said, because it can result in broken relationships and often leads to drug and alcohol abuse.

"The real central issue is relationships. Relationships, relationships, relationships," said U.S. Army Chaplain Lt. Col. Ran Dolinger. "People look at PTSD, they look at length of deployments ... but it's that broken relationship that really makes the difference."

To reduce suicides, the Army said it is targeting soldiers who are or have been in Iraq for long periods and teaching them to notice signs that can lead to suicide.

That training came too late for Army Specialist Tim Bowman. The 23-year-old killed himself in 2005 after returning from Iraq.

"As my family was preparing for a 2005 Thanksgiving meal, our son Timothy was lying on the floor, slowly bleeding to death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound," said his father, Mike Bowman, in testimony to a House Veterans' Affairs committee hearing in December. "His war was now over."

He said veterans return home to find an "understaffed, under-funded, under-equipped" Veterans Affairs mental health system.

Where Did You Get Those Blue Eyes?

"It is not known why blue eyes spread among the population of northern Europe and southern Russia. Explanations include the suggestions that the blue eye colour either offered some advantage in the long hours of daylight in the summer, or short hours of daylight in winter, or that the trait was deemed attractive and therefore advantageous in terms of sexual selection."


How one ancestor helped turn our brown eyes blue

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Independent
Thursday, 31 January 2008

Everyone with blue eyes alive today – from Angelina Jolie to Wayne Rooney – can trace their ancestry back to one person who probably lived about 10,000 years ago in the Black Sea region, a study has found.

Scientists studying the genetics of eye colour have discovered that more than 99.5 per cent of blue-eyed people who volunteered to have their DNA analysed have the same tiny mutation in the gene that determines the colour of the iris.

This indicates that the mutation originated in just one person who became the ancestor of all subsequent people in the world with blue eyes, according to a study by Professor Hans Eiberg and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen.

The scientists are not sure when the mutation occurred but other evidence suggested it probably arose about 10,000 years ago when there was a rapid expansion of the human population in Europe as a result of the spread of agriculture from the Middle East.

"The mutations responsible for blue eye colour most likely originate from the north-west part of the Black Sea region, where the great agricultural migration of the northern part of Europe took place in the Neolithic periods about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago," the researchers report in the journal Human Genetics.

Professor Eiberg said that brown is the "default" colour for human eyes which results from a build-up of the dark skin pigment, melanin. However, in northern Europe a mutation arose in a gene known as OCA2 that disrupted melanin production in the iris and caused the eye colour to become blue.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Professor Eiberg. "But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch' which literally turned off the ability to produce brown eyes."

Variations in the colour of people's eyes can be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes, he said.

"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor. They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA," said Professor Eiberg.

Men and women with blue eyes have almost exactly the same genetic sequence in the part of the DNA responsible for eye colour. However, brown-eyed people, by contrast, have a considerable amount of individual variation in that area of DNA.

Professor Eiberg said he has analysed the DNA of about 800 people with blue eyes, ranging from fair-skinned, blond-haired Scandinavians to dark-skinned, blue-eyed people living in Turkey and Jordan.

"All of them, apart from possibly one exception, had exactly the same DNA sequence in the region of the OCA2 gene. This to me indicates very strongly that there must have been a single, common ancestor of all these people," he said.

It is not known why blue eyes spread among the population of northern Europe and southern Russia. Explanations include the suggestions that the blue eye colour either offered some advantage in the long hours of daylight in the summer, or short hours of daylight in winter, or that the trait was deemed attractive and therefore advantageous in terms of sexual selection.

Ann Coulter is a Tedious Embarassment

"The Democrats have no actual policy proposals of their own unless constant carping counts as a policy."- Ann Coulter in one of her inane yabbers.

I do not find much appealing in listening to Ann Coulter. She is the smug political Paris Hilton of the Republican Party. Any day I expect her to do a Huffington flip to sell her Transpaarent brand of Coulter. Ann Coulter, conservative, said that if Sen. John McCain wins the Republican Party's presidential nomination, she will campaign for Sen. Hillary Clinton. If that is the case she is no conservative and never was.

Anna Loginova, Model, Guard and Dead in Moscow

BEIJING, Jan. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- Anna Loginova, Russia's most famous and glamorous female bodyguard, has been killed in Moscow while trying to defend her Porsche Cayenne from a hijacker, media reported.

Loginova, also a former model and the head of a private security firm, on Sunday tried to fight off the carjacker and clung to the door handle. She was killed after being dragged along the street at high speed as the car screeched away.

"She suffered serious injuries and died at the scene," said a police spokesman.

Loginova was a famous Russian model before venturing into the security business and had shot advertising campaigns for BMW, Chanel and other world-known brands.

She took lessons of Jiu-Jitsu martial art and mastered the sword handling. Afterwards, she opened her own security firm for women.

In a recent magazine interview, she insisted that she and her team of glamorous bodyguards gave better protection than the more traditional beefy male security men.

"I do think that a girl should be a girl, not a Terminator," she said. She posed semi-naked for a Moscow men's magazine to make it clear that she was feminine as well as good with a gun.

Heath Ledger and Drugs