Every time I hear a leftist whine they support the troops too, then turn around and proudly state that the Iraq war is not winnable I feel a little queasy. Here is a letter to the troops penned by General David Petraeus (the man dubbed “General Betray us” by those same leftists). The Weekly Standard has named him Man of the Year. I’d have to agree. General Petraeus has had to fight two wars simultaneously - the one in Iraq and the one against his own countrymen hell-bent on losing the Iraq war to score political points in a disgusting game of “I told you so!”
Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, and Civilians of Multi-National Force-Iraq:
As 2007 draws to a close, you should look back with pride on what you, your fellow troopers, our Iraqi partners, and Iraqi Coalition civilians have achieved in 2007. A year ago, Iraq was racked by horrific violence and on the brink of civil war. Now, levels of violence and civilians and military casualties are significantly reduced and hope has been rekindled in many Iraqi communities. To be sure, the progress is reversible and there is much more to be done. Nonetheless, the hard-fought accomplishments of 2007 have been substantial, and I want to thank each of you for the contributions you made to them.
In response to the challenges that faced Iraq a year ago, we and our Iraqi partners adopted a new approach. We increased our focus on securing the Iraqi people and, in some cases, delayed transition of tasks to Iraqi forces. Additional U.S. and Georgian forces were deployed to theater, the tours of U.S. unites were extended, and Iraqi forces conducted a surge of their own, generating well over 100,000 more Iraqi police and soldiers during the year so that they, too, had additional forces to execute the new approach. In places like Ramadi, Baqubah, Arab Jabour, and Baghdad, you and our Iraqi brothers fought–often house by house, block by block, and neighborhood by neighborhood–to wrest sanctuaries away from Al Qaeda-Iraq, to disrupt extremist militia elements, and to rid the streets of mafia-like criminals. Having cleared areas, you worked with Iraqis to retain them–establishing outposts in the areas we were securing, developing Iraqi Security Forces, and empowering locals to help our efforts. This approach has not been easy. It has required steadfastness in the conduct of tough offensive operations, creative solutions to the myriad problems on the ground, and persistence over the course of many months and during countless trying situations. Through it all, you have proven equal to every task, continually demonstrating an impressive ability to conduct combat and stability operations in an exceedingly complex environment.
Whether it’s due to unfair negative campaigning or people actually looking closer at his record it seems that Mike Huckabee’s momentum in Iowa has hit a snag in the late going. It now looks like press reports might be right for once - Iowa is still undecided, a current toss-up between Romney and Huckabee.
According to RealClearPolitics, polls taken in the last five days average our to a virtual dead heat:
ReutersC-Span/Zogby: Huck 29%, Romney 27%
Am. Resarch Group: Romney 32%, Huck 23%
Mason-Dixon: Romney 27%, Huck 23%
Strategic Vision: Huck 29%, Romney 27%
Quad City Times: Huck 34%, Romney 27%
The back-and-forth of these polls suggests people are really vacillating or the polling in Iowa is crappy.
The most recent (post-Christmas) polling might be bothersome for Huckabee supporters: the Real Clear Politics charts show that, in 15 polls between the end of November and Christmas, Huckabee led in 14 (though they fluctuated considerably, from showing him eight points ahead to three behind).
The good news for Huckabee is that the latest polls - Zogby’s - shows him trending up the last few days, for a 1 to 2-point lead.
By week’s end, we’ll at least have actual votes recorded for the candidates. And Iowa gets to go first.
It’s New Years Eve? Crap where did the year go?
Click the Pic For larger Version
Paul Cyr Maine Photo Album
Weekend Open Comments just did not seem right with a “political” picture attached.
The Dallas Morning News has named their Texan of the Year:
The Illegal Immigrant
He is at the heart of a great culture war in Texas – and the nation, credited with bringing us prosperity and blamed for abusing our resources. How should we deal with this stranger among us?
Not just any illegal alien but THE illegal alien. I wonder why, given the Elvira saga and the millions of illegal alien females, the DMN decided that the Texan of the Year was a male? Interesting.
Historians say that the distinctly American democratic and middle-class ideals grew out of a specific cultural tradition – the Anglo-Protestant. Changed slowly over time by immigrants from the world over, it’s now challenged by a strong competing culture.
If critics are correct, we could be seeing the advent of the kind of fractiousness that bedevils public life in Canada and other nations where peoples who speak different languages, and come from different cultural backgrounds, live together only with mutual suspicion and unease.
On the other hand, perhaps the alarmists are wrong. Maybe these ambitious, hard-working immigrants, whatever their documentation, will write the next great chapter of a story that’s still deeply American, though with a different accent. If the optimists are right, much work remains to be done to incorporate all immigrants fully into new cultural traditions.
The alarmists are not wrong. We are already seeing the type of fractious society described above. It is only going to get worse if we do not continue to enforce current laws, enact new employer sanctions such as those in Arizona and put boots on the border.
The article is actually fairly indepth and a good read, although it never identifies who THE illegal alien is. I’m not certain, but I think THE illegal alien is in this picture:
With all of the negative attacks and focus on minutiae in the current 2008 Presidential primaries, issues of actual importance to everyday Americans are forced to the back of the bus. Perhaps it’s time to return to them.
The right to keep and bear arms is essential to a free society. Which is, of course, why our founding fathers put it into our Constitution.
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms..disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed one.” - Thomas Jefferson quoting Cesare Beccaria, Criminologist in 1764.
On the Republican side, there is only one top-tier candidate that truly understands this, both in his issue statements and in his record. Mike Huckabee. If you happen to consider Ron Paul as top-tier, then there are two.
Surprising, isn’t it? That is, the notion that top-tier candidates for the President of the United States would so easily dismiss a fundamental right spelled out clearly in our constitution. Don’t believe me, check it out for yourself: Fred Thompson, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney.
What, you say? ‘Ol Fred is a solid supporter of the second amendment, right? Wrong. While he might look tough holding a gun in a movie, look at his actual voting record. Gun Owners of America tracked 33 votes while he was in the Senate. He voted pro-gun 61% of the time. How could a guy that supports the second amendment less than 2/3’s of the time be considered pro-gun? Spin, of course. Deception. Obfuscation.
It’s especially enlightening to contrast the differences in the reactions to crises between Huckabee and Thompson. Recall that in 1999, the shooting at Columbine created an atmosphere of gun hysteria in which seemingly “everyone” wanted to institute new controls on guns. Thompson, a sitting senator at the time, fell for it.
Huckabee had his own crisis in Arkansas the year before Fred capitulated. A shooting at a Jonesboro high school had brought out the big guns demanding restrictions on gun ownership. Bill Clinton, so often compared to Huckabee by opponents, lead the charge. But Huckabee refused to cave, recognizing the wisdom of the founding fathers.
Katie Couric: Governor Huckabee, this is the third deadly shooting to take place in the South in the last five months. And some criminal experts have ventured a guess that southern society, which has a more permissive attitude towards guns and hunting, and perhaps in some circles even glamorizes those things, that that might have been a factor in some — in this recent spade of shootings. What’s your view of that?
Gov. Huckabee: I take strong exception to that kind of view. Southerners may have a very positive view toward the ownership of firearms and even hunting, but we don’t have a positive view about murder, and we certainly don’t have a positive view toward murder in a schoolyard.
He also resisted the type of lawsuits that Rudy Giuliani pressed against gun manufacturers:
“Gun manufacturers make the Second Amendment a viable right rather than some theoretical proposition. I will not abuse my authority as governor to pursue their demise or dictate their business practices through coercion,” he wrote.
“I will not seek the capitulation of firearm manufacturers through the use of asinine lawsuits or the doling out of taxpayer-funded government contracts. I regret that you feel either of these tactics to be worthwhile endeavors.”
Governor Huckabee also signed a law prohibiting frivolous lawsuits against gun makers and eased restrictions on concealed carry permit holders in Arkansas.
Who’s a friend of gun owners in this race? Don’t believe the spin, the hype, the negative attacks or the outright slander. Only Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are true friends of gun owners.
Who, exactly, are Mike Huckabee’s foreign policy advisers? Well, as Slick Willie might say, that depends on what your definition of advisers is.
Huckabee claims John Bolton has agreed to work with him on foreign policy. There’s a slight problem with that - Bolton says it’s not true.
At a Thursday evening press conference, Huckabee said, “I’ve corresponded with John Bolton, who’s agreed to work with us on developing foreign policy.”
Bolton, however, has a different view. “I’d be happy to speak with Huckabee, but I haven’t spoken with him yet,” said Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
“I’m not an official or unofficial adviser to anyone,” said Bolton, who mentioned he’d had conversations with other Republican candidates but refused to name any names.
When caught in this fib, the Huckster’s spinmeisters did some fancy footwork, saying what they really meant was that Huckabee had e-mailed Bolton. They did not explain the discrepancy between Huckabee’s claim Bolton was working with the campaign and Bolton’s denial.
Huckabee is trying to answer questions about who is advising him on foreign policy, but can’t seem to get his story straight. He dropped several names, including that of the President of the Council on Foreign Relations Richard Haass. That also didn’t quite turn out to be the relationship Huckabee implied.
Council on Foreign Relations spokeswoman Lisa Shields said Haass has “briefed Huckabee on foreign policy issues as well as [briefing] many other candidates” in both parties. Shields stressed that the relationship was not exclusive and that Haass was not affiliated with the campaign.
And this is just a week after Condi Rice took Huck to the woodshed for his uninformed and “ludicrous” foreign policy statements.
Now Huckabee seems to be carefully parsing his words to create impressions that might just be a tad off the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
We all know politicians engage daily in double-speak. But there must be a special school somewhere to teach that craft to Arkansas governors.
Something very, very strange has happened this last week of the year of our Lord 2007 - a major university decided that football coaches’ contracts should mean something:
CHARLESTON , W.Va. (AP) — West Virginia University’s Board of Governors has sued former football coach Rich Rodriguez Thursday to collect a $4 million buyout of his contract with the school.
. . .
The buyout clause requires Rodriguez to pay $4 million to WVU over a two-year period, with one-third of the total due 30 days after his employment’s termination. His resignation was effective Dec. 19.
Normally, these buyouts are handled as part of the deal with the coach’s new employer, in this case the University of Michigan. But it doesn’t appear at this point that the multi-million dollar buyout provision has been addressed. That might be a big oooops for Rodriguez who, even though a rich coach, probably doesnt have 4 mil lying round the house.
West Virginia officials decided to ask a court to enforce the contract after supporters of Rodriguez questioned its validity and the coach did not disavow those statements, said Alex Macia, vice president of legal affairs and legal counsel for the university.
“There are very clear statements and factually incorrect statements by people who purportedly speak for the coach,” Macia said.
“There comes a time when you have to have a court pronounce as a matter of law what happened,” he said.
This only highlights a growing problem in NCAA football circles. Coaches, who are rewarded with big raises and long-term contracts after good seasons - all intended to keep them from bolting for other schools - make a mockery of their contractual obligations, not to mention their honor, as soon as better spots in the limelight are dangled before them.
In this case, just over a year ago, West Virginia agreed to extend Rodriguez’s contract through the 2013 season, in order to keep him from taking the job at Alabama. The school also raised his salary to $1.8 million per year. (In all, Rodriguez’s salary increased 70 percent in his seven years at WVU.) Afterwards, Rodriguez said he was committed to the University for a “very, very long time.”
Yet, a year later, Rodriguez ignores both the contract and the University’s largesse for a sexier role in a more storied program. (And now it seems Rodriguez is about to argue that he was “fraudulently induced to sign a contract with false promises.” I guess he’s referring to the obscene guaranteed salary and job security most Americans could only dream about.)
This is not to say that most any coach wouldn’t covet the Michigan job. It is to say, however, that fewer and fewer of them are proving to be men of their word.
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The Republican Presidential field is so unsatisfactory - make that just plain lousy - that I have come up with an emergency plan to wrest the White House from Hillary’s hands next year.
However, we must act fast. Like within a week. Like pronto, PDQ, lightning-quick, Superman speed, faster than a Janet Jackson boob-flash.
Somebody has to recruit that disgraced South Korean scientist with the phony clone research. He, I think, is still claiming he’s not a fraud, which means, probably, he is a victim of the Commercial Scientific Community (ie, the drug companies), who wanted to squelch his findings so they could have it all to themselves - much like the oil companies who killed that guy and deep-sixed his perpetual motion machine (or so I’m told at “the meetings”).
Anyway, we get that South Korean guy to bring his DNA kit over here, extract samples from the various GOP candidates (at least from those who show a pulse), plop them into his centrifuge (or whatever it is that phony cloning scientists use), and deliver to us the perfect Presidential candidate.
Here’s the recipe I suggest:
One part Huckabee on abortion.
One part Romney on business/the economy.
One part McCain on being a tough sonofabi—.
One part Hunter on immigration/crime.
One part Rudy on leadership.
One half part each, Rudy and McCain, on the war on terror.
I suddenly realized, even with this list, we are woefully lacking. Whose DNA do we use for taxes? Where do we find the Ronald Reagan amiable humor gene? (No, Huckabee, quips in response to serious policy questions don’t count.)
My God, this field is even worse than I thought!!!
(Feel free to add your own ingredients, if you can find them in this group of empty suits.)
Squawk added:
The perfect candidate?
Bhutto assassinated
by LST Group Post · 12/27/2007 9:05 amPakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said.
The death of the 54-year-old charismatic former prime minister threw the campaign for the Jan. 8 parliamentary elections into chaos and created fears of mass protests and violence across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.
The attacker struck just minutes after Bhutto addressed thousands of supporters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, 8 miles south of Islamabad. She was shot in the neck and chest by the attacker, who then blew himself up, said Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s security adviser.
At least 20 others were killed in the attack.
What happens next?
More information is coming in by the second. None of it 100% reliable at this moment.
I think all we can say at this point is that this is “bad” as in possibly, “disaster” bad.
The Daily Mail in the UK has some pictures of Bhutto right before she was killed. They also have pictures of the scene right after. Be careful, some are graphic.
For more information may I suggest:
- Pajamas Media has a big round-up of blog reaction
- Michelle Malkin
TimesOnline (UK) had a blogger round-up. Richard Dows this to say:
Pakistan is doomed to become a battleground for muslim crazies believing in the cult of death.
Depending on what happens in the near future, he may be right.
Hamous adds:
Predictably, the Rockwellians and Paulestinians blame it on the US:
The horrific assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a massive blow to the empire, since she was the handpicked US replacement for the hated Pervez Musharraf. The US had installed Musharraf as military dictator after kicking out his elected predecessor, Nawaz Sharif (ah yes, global democracy), who was considered insufficiently obedient. The US has spent many billions on Musharraf and his military, but it has only earned the contempt of Pakistanis who don’t like being a US colony (and no, one does not have to be pro-terrorist to be opposed to foreign control).
…
There is only way out: cut spending, cut taxes, stop inflating, end the police state, bring the troops home. Peace and freedom: libertarianism, in other words. How blessed we are, at the very moment of crisis, to have Ron Paul.
Ah yes, the savior shall rescue us from the fascist neo-cons.
suicide bomber my ass, this was ordered assasination
now do you believe there is a threat against RP?
…
I can’t help but wonder what our foreign policy had to do with this.
…
The US neocons in govt still love Musharref… they didn’t like or want Bhutto ruining his iron fist rule over there….
Don’t kid yourself.. the US coddles and nourishes tyrants and dictators the world over, in up to 75 instances just since 1945!!!!
Read William Blums masterpiece, KILLING HOPE… he chronicles US/CIA overthrows, assassinations, coups, financial sabatoge, etc…US is so pure and great… NOT.
…
Ron Paul is so right on all this foreign policy. We are tossing billions into Pakistan. We have an ally, Musharraf who took over in a military coup. And now his opposition has returned and was assassinated. What do we do if its proven that ‘our strong man’ in Pakistan did it?These webs we are weaving are falling apart.
Elect Ron Paul and save us.
BigJolly adds:
Since her last spell in power, Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation. “Everyone’s an expert on Pakistan, a faraway country of which we know everything,” I wrote last month. “It seems to me a certain humility is appropriate.” The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They’d arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a “united” “democratic” “movement” and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That’s what diplomats do: They find guys in suits and get ‘em round a table. But none of those representatives represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan. Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir’s, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that “the whole of the western world” was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime’ll get you a cup of coffee.
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