John Kerry: Beautiful

John Kerry: Beautiful

Not beautiful in the same way as Michelle Malkin, but this bit from the Drudgereport about Kerry's wife and her refusal to dislose her tax returns is at least worthy of being called "classic."

TERESA FIGHTS TO KEEP HER TAX RETURNS PRIVATE

Besides a blurring of Heinz-Kerry assets, the campaign is also wresting with past quotes made by Kerry himself.

In his 1990 Senate race, Kerry asked his challenger to "clear the air" by releasing tax returns.

"I think people want to know whether someone they possibly might send to Washington to represent them in the Senate is someone who pays their fair share of taxes,'" Kerry said. "Why is James Rappaport hiding his tax returns?" Kerry asked. "Why is it some people can live up to that standard and he can't? It seems to me that he ought to be able to release those returns and clear the air...

"Why doesn't he just release them? What is he hiding?"

And at the height of last year's primary race, Kerry vowed that "openness" would be the "hallmark" of his administration.

"As president, openness will be the hallmark of my administration, not some talking point... The highest office in the land requires the highest level of openness for the American people."

Music in the OR

Music in the OR

What's the big deal? They've been doing this since before I worked in an OR back in '92-'94. I seem to remember that the the liver transplant team had a penchant for AC/DC.

How'd you like to here "Highway to Hell" or "Hell's Bells" as you're going under? ;-)

Surgical Tunes: Music Strikes a Chord in the OR

"Screw Her"

"Screw Her"

This girl needs to be punished now.

Too bad they'll most likely let her off with a handslap and a "strong talkin' to."

Coed Hoaxer to Try For Plea Bargain

"She obviously is dealing with a lot of trauma related to this, she's going through a very difficult time. She's having both some emotional and some physical problems to deal with as you might expect somebody who's gone through something like this," Hopper said after appearing in court.

Yep, the old "I did this to myself but you should forget it and let me skate since I am so pitiful" technique. Sorta like the "I murdered my parents; have mercy on me because I'm an orphan" strategery.

To misquote Kos, "Screw her."

Asked about the possibility of a plea bargain, Blanchard said his office always tries to reach an agreement "if that can be done in the interest of justice and reaching a fair result. ... We'll see if that's possible with this case."

Sure it is . . . toss her in jail for a while. That's be fair.

Hundreds of people from Madison and Seiler's hometown searched for her after she disappeared, and her claim about an armed man touched off a major manhunt that authorities said cost the police about $96,000.

In addition, she should have to pay back the city its costs and pay each of the searchers minimum wage for each hour they searched. Maybe she should pay the businesses that lost man-hours to the search for their lost productivity, too.

Coulter on Commissions and Air Travel

Coulter on Commissions and Air Travel

Ann Coulter tones it down, mostly, in this latest piece.

She skewers 9-11 commission member Jamie Gorelick for "building a wall" between intelligence and law enforcement in 1995 and CURRENT anti-discrimination laws thaty disallow ssearching more than two Arabs on any particular flight.

Thank you for choosing United, Mr. bin Laden

Last week, 9-11 commissioner John Lehman revealed that "it was the policy (before 9-11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." Hmmm ... Is 19 more than two? Why, yes, I believe it is. So if two Jordanian cab drivers are searched before boarding a flight out of Newark, Osama bin Laden could then board that plane without being questioned. I'm no security expert, but I'm pretty sure this gives terrorists an opening for an attack. . . .

I have news for liberals: Bin Laden is still determined to attack inside the United States! Could they please tell us when and where the next attack will be? Because unless we know that, it's going to be difficult to stop it if we can't search Arabs.

ARPNOW.ORG

ARPNOW.ORG

Kack Kemp, Dick Armey, and the unfortunately named Dorcas Hardy have set up an organization based on promoting Social Security privitization.

Jack Kemp: The FICA slush fund

I, along with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and former Social Security Commissioner Dorcas Hardy, have created the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity (www.arpnow.org). We want to make it possible for today's workers to move half of their payroll taxes into personal accounts that would be there for their retirement. For a single worker earning $30,000 a year and a two-earner married couple earning $30,000 and $40,000 that would mean annual savings of $2,000 and $4,500, respectively.

Most importantly, large personal retirement accounts would be a real source of prosperity and ownership and bring to fruition our vision of democratizing the American dream - making every American worker a shareholder and investor in our capitalistic system.

Michelle Malkin - Beautiful

Michelle Malkin - Beautiful

Yeah, she's pretty . . . she's also a hell of a columnist.

She absolutely nails it in this retrospective on the attitudes of the NYT.

The liberals who cried 'didn't do enough!

That's right. The same editorial board that has barbecued the Bush Justice Department after the Sept. 11 attacks for fingerprinting young male temporary visa holders traveling from terror-sponsoring and terror-friendly nations (editorial, June 6, 2002); temporarily detaining asylum seekers from high-risk countries for background screening (editorial, Dec. 28, 2002); and sending undercover agents to investigate mosques suspected of supporting terrorism (editorial, May 31, 2002) now expects us to believe it would have applauded Bush for his vigilance if he had swiftly ordered airport security officials to stop thousands of young Middle Eastern men at airports during the summer of 2001 on the basis of an ill-defined threat.

Pre- v. Post- 9-11 Dems

Pre- v. Post- 9-11 Dems

Retroactive hard-liners

• The pre-9/11 Democrats, as portrayed by their reaction to the work of the 9/11 Commission, are not plagued by niggling civil-liberty concerns. . . .
• The pre-9/11 Democrats don't care about planning or diplomacy. . . .
• The pre-9/11 Democrats are ethnically insensitive. . . .
• Finally, the pre-9/11 Democrats are perfectly willing to act on sketchy intelligence. . . .

Ashcroft Bombs Gorelick

Ashcroft Bombs Gorelick

Ashcroft laid this devastating comment and the feet of 9-11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick yesterday during his testimony.

Gorelick's conflict

Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the 9-11 Commission on Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 Guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail."

But Ashcroft's bombshell wasn't his description of the Clinton Administration's policies, which have been discussed by previous witnesses. "Somebody built this wall," Ashcroft told the commissioners, and then went on to accuse one of the commission's own.

"The basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained in a classified memorandum entitled 'Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,'" said Ashcroft. "Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this Commission." Ashcroft was referring to Jamie Gorelick, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration.

Bush's Press Conference Highlight

Bush's Press Conference Highlight

A great response to a fair question.

Sounds like Bush has been listening to the pundits/bloggers out there who have been critiquing those who are Post-Emptive now but wish we'd been Pre-Emptive then.

Washington Post: Text of Bush's Press Conference

QUESTION: You have been accused of letting the 9-11 threat mature too far, but not letting the Iraq threat mature far enough. First, could you respond to that general criticism?

And, secondly, in the wake of these two conflicts, what is the appropriate threat level to justify action in perhaps other situations going forward?

BUSH: Yes. I guess there have been some that said, well, we should've taken pre-emptive action in Afghanistan, and then turned around and said we shouldn't have taken pre-emptive action in Iraq.

And my answer to that question is, is that, again I repeat what I said earlier, prior to 9-11, the country really wasn't on a war footing. And the, frankly, mood of the world would have been astounded had the United States acted unilaterally in trying to deal with al-Qaida in that part of the world.

It would have been awfully hard to do, as well, by the way. We would have had -- we hadn't got our relationship right with Pakistan yet. The Caucus area would have been very difficult from which to base. It just seemed an impractical strategy at the time. And, frankly, I didn't contemplate it.

Clarke's Big Adventure

Clarke's Big Adventure

A fun satire of what the movie of Richard Clarke's new book may look like . . .

Ben Shapiro : Richard Clarke's new movie

BUSH (begins to suck his thumb, petulantly)

Well, fine, if you say so. But try to find out how Saddam's involved. Do I at least get to bomb somebody? Somebody Muslim? I hate those [Arabs]. They don't believe in my favorite philosopher, Jesus.

(proudly)

That's what Pat and Jerry told me.

Vice President Cheney enters the room.

CHENEY (soothingly)

I'll take it from here, George. You go back to playing with your blocks. And, yes, we get to bomb somebody.

Cheney puts his arm around Bush and smiles evilly.

NOTE: I object to the term used to describe Arabs in this piece so I edited it out.

Prager on Racism

Prager on Racism

A fairly weak column by the normally fantastic Dennis Prager.

He did make on great point though . . .

Dennis Prager: Bob Kerrey clarifies the liberal view of blacks and women

It is probable that belief in black inferiority, or at least in black differentness, also helps to explain white liberal support for the lowering of standards for blacks, i.e., affirmative action and quotas. Conservatives believe that no changing of standards is necessary in order for blacks to succeed.

Two from the Sowell

Two from the Sowell

Thomas Sowell's reactions to the 9-11 panel's activities.

Titanic irresponsibility

All this political grandstanding is taking place in the shadow of the greatest danger our nation has ever faced. North Korea is not only rebuilding its nuclear capacity, it is a threat to sell nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations, including those who planned the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Titanic irresponsibility: Part II

Most of us at the time would probably not have believed that we could have gone this long without another and perhaps more catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States. Do you remember how every symbolic occasion -- the World Series, Christmas, New Year's Eve, the Super Bowl -- brought widespread fears that this could be when the terrorists would strike us again?

Yet our respite from terrorist attack has seldom brought even a grudging acknowledgement that perhaps the government's anti-terrorism policies and activities might deserve some credit, instead of the constant barrage of media and political criticism and carping.

Make no mistake, a new and more terrible terrorist attack could happen here at any time -- especially now that Spain has shown how easy it is to panic politicians. But the fact that our enemies see our politics as the weakest link in the chain of American national security means that we need to recognize that as well.

Economy Issues

Economy Issues

USA TODAY: Dazzled by data, economists see blue skies ahead

WASHINGTON — Some economists are raising their forecasts for growth in the first quarter of 2004, based on surging consumer spending, rising factory orders and glimmers of a turnaround in the job market. . . .

"Off the top of my head, I would say that we just moved from 4% gross-domestic-product growth in (the first quarter of 2004) to something like 5%." . . . [says Steve Stanley]

Brian Wesbury . . . predicted the government could report a 6% growth rate in the GDP . . . .

The . . . Labor Department reported April 2 that the economy created more than 300,000 jobs in March - a sign the "jobless recovery" may be easing. . . .

A survey of 1,200 businesses . . . found that 88% of business owners were optimistic about the next six months, with 21% planning to add full-time employees.

9-11 Widows Talk too Much*

9-11 Widows Talk too Much*

A great column on those ubiquitous 9-11 widows - the "Jersey Girls."

Here are some choice comments from this excellent article.

DOROTHY RABINOWITZ'S MEDIA LOG: The 9/11 Widows - Americans are beginning to tire of them.

Debra Burlingame--lifelong Democrat, sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, did manage to land an interview after Ms. Rice's appearance. When she had finished airing her views critical of the accusatory tone and tactics of the Jersey Girls, her interviewer, ABC congressional reporter Linda Douglass marveled, "This is the first time I've heard this point of view." . . .

. . . TV and newspaper editors were [interested in telling] a different story--that of four intrepid New Jersey housewives who had, as one news report had it, brought an administration "to its knees"--and that was, as far as they were concerned, the only story. . . .

The venerable status accorded this group of widows comes as no surprise given our times, an age quick to confer both celebrity and authority on those who have suffered. [Ed. note - what a profound statement this is.] . . . All that the widows have had to say . . . has been received by most of the media and members of Congress with utmost wonder and admiration. They had become prosecutors and investigators, unearthing clues and connections related to 9/11, with, we're regularly informed, unrivalled dedication and skill. . . .

. . . with every passing month, their list of government agencies and agents guilty of dereliction of duty grew apace. So did their assurance that it had been given to them, as victims, to determine the proper standards of taste and respectfulness to be applied in everything related to Sept. 11, including, it turned out, the images of the destroyed World Trade Center in George Bush's first campaign ad . . . .

. . . Ms. Breitweiser's analyses . . . of the ways the Sept. 11 attack might have been foiled. If the Federal Aviation Administration had properly alerted passengers to the dangers they faced, she asked, how many victims might have thought twice before boarding an aircraft? And "how many victims would have taken notice of these Middle Eastern men while they were boarding their plane? Could these men have been stopped?"

A good question. One can only imagine how a broadcast of the warning, "Watch out for Middle Eastern men in line near you, as you board your flight," would have gone down in those quarters of the culture daily worried to death about the alleged threat to civil rights posed by profiling and similar steps designed to weed out terrorists. Consider . . . what the response would have been if John Ashcroft had issued a statement calling for such a precaution, prior to Sept. 11. [Emphasis added.]

*"Kate! Time out, Kate! You've had three times now. That's enough for you. Women talk too much!" -- Mark Shields to Kate O'Bierne on "The Capital Gang," CNN, April 10

RNC Has a Sense of Humor

RNC Has a Sense of Humor

This is great!

Kerry made up his own Misery Index . . . so so did the RNC . . . but theirs is funnier!

U.S. Newswire - RNC Announces Index De Le Miserables

Kerry Repudiates St. Petersburg Dems

Kerry Repudiates St. Petersburg Dems

FINALLY!

I am enheartened to hear that a major Dem has actively denounced someone from their party who made a statement which, if it had been uttered by a conservative, would have been both considered hate speech AND immediately decried by conservatives around the nation.

Keep it up conservatives! (Denouncing "our own" when they do something wrong, that is.) The Dems just may be learning something by osmosis!

USATODAY.com - St. Petersburg Democratic club ad says 'pull trigger' on Rumsfeld

MIAMI (AP) — Florida Republicans are crying foul after a St. Petersburg Democratic club placed a full-page ad in a weekly newspaper, saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should be "put up against a wall" and someone should "pull the trigger."

The ad, appearing in last Thursday's edition of the Gabber, a weekly paper covering the Pinellas County community of Gulfport, included a lengthy criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq and then singled out Rumsfeld.

"And then there's Rumsfeld who said of Iraq 'We have our good days and our bad days.' We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger," the ad read under a banner "St. Petersburg Democratic Club." . . .

Mark Kornblau, a Kerry campaign spokesman, said the club was not working for their campaign "in any official capacity" and called for an apology.

"It is outrageous and does not in any way reflect the position of our campaign. We hope that those responsible will retract the statement, apologize for it and move on to more productive pursuits," Kornblau said.

Maddox said in a statement that the ad was "reprehensible and in poor taste" and urged its immediate removal and a formal apology.

State party spokeswoman Allie Merzer said the group is a social club chartered by the state Democratic party but does not receive funds from the state party and did not consult party before the ad was placed. She said the state party was reviewing the club's charter membership.

Bush Pre-Emptively Attacks Afghanistan . . . 2001

Bush Pre-Emptively Attacks Afghanistan . . . 2001

Nice satire of the current situation and outcry v. what would have happened had Bush done what today's detractors are saying they wished he'd have done.

The New Republic Online: Easterbrook

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY: Washington, April 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner. . . .

5.19.2002

5.19.2002

5.19.2002.

That's

2002

just in case you did not notice.

Aug. Memo Focused On Attacks in U.S. (washingtonpost.com)

The top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush on Aug. 6 carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," and was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to attack and infiltrate the United States, senior administration officials said.

The document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, underscored that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to "bring the fight to America," in part as retaliation for U.S. missile strikes on al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, according to knowledgeable sources.

This memo has been known for a while now.

Thanks to James Taranto at OpinionJournal for the head's up in his Best of the Web Today.

Kerry Loves Misery

Kerry Loves Misery

Rush et al. have this one right: if it's bad news for America, it's good news for Kerry and the Dems.

Here's a story about Kerry's trumped up "Misery Index" - the 2004 version.

FOXNews.com - You Decide 2004 - Kerry Economic Plan Relies on Safe Numbers

WASHINGTON - Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (search) unveiled his own version of the 'misery index' on Monday, claiming Americans are miserable because President Bush has done such a bad job with the U.S. economy.

And now a word from Factcheck.org:

FactCheck.org: Kerry's "Misery Index" Accentuates the Negative

The original ‘misery index’ is simply the jobless rate added to the inflation rate. The term was coined by economist Arthur Okun, an economic adviser in Lyndon Johnson’s administration. It was widely used during the "stagflation" of the '70s and '80s when stagnant economic growth kept unemployment high and inflation reduced the buying power of wages.

By that classic misery measure the country is faring better than average under Bush: the unemployment rate for March was 5.7% -- which is just 0.1% above the average for all months since 1948. And the inflation rate remains historically low – the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index rose only 1.7% in the 12 months ending in February, the most recent month on record. So the classic “misery index” number is currently 7.4.

That's lower than it's been in all but 20 of the previous 56 years on record. It never got this low during any of the years under Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or Bush's father.

And the classic "misery index" was higher in every one of Clinton's first four years than it has been in any of Bush's years. It was not until Clinton's second term that the long economic boom of the 1990's pulled the index down to below its current level. . . .

So it's not surprising that the Kerry campaign has come up with another way of looking at the economy. On April 12 Kerry issued a news release saying "Middle-Class Misery Hits Record Under George Bush," based on a new index put together by former Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling and former Al Gore adviser Jason Furman.

The Kerry index is, to put it mildly, selective.

Rather than use all consumer prices, the Kerry index cherry-picks three items that have gone up faster than the overall rate of inflation: college tuition (at public four-year universities only), gasoline, and health care.

And rather than use the overall unemployment rate -- which was 5.5% at this point in Clinton's first term, only two-tenths of one percent lower than now -- Kerry has used the number of jobs, which produces a more negative picture.

Other statistical indicators chosen by Kerry are median family income and bankruptcies, which have both worsened under Bush, and home ownership -- the only one of the seven indicators in the Kerry index to show improvement. . . .

Contributing the most to the gloomy picture presented by Kerry's index is college tuition. Kerry aides used only the figure for four-year public colleges and universities, which has shot up 13% under Bush, even after adjusting for inflation. But they excluded tuition for private colleges and universities, which went up only 5%. (Both figures are from the College Board's annual survey of college costs.)

When it came to measuring the change in employment, however, the Kerry aides focused on the loss of private sector jobs only, not total employment. That ignored gains in hiring of local, state and federal workers. The economy has lost 2.6 million private-sector jobs since Bush took office, but government hiring has kept the total job loss to just 1.8 million. The Kerry index uses the larger figure, making their index look worse.

This from the semi-neutral Factcheck.org.

Of course, the story about Kerry fumbling the numbers just wasn't enough. Here's their final paragraph:

Kerry isn't the only one spinning economic figures, of course. We pointed out earlier a Republican attempt to claim that after-tax income was up when the Census Bureau reported it was down. Our advice: be wary of all politicians spouting economic statistics.

They just couldn't resist.

Canadian Fair Play

Canadian Fair Play

Free speech is all fine a dandy unless it is something the gov't disagrees with.

Remember folks, this article is abOOt FREE SPEECH, not homosexual rights. I hate to break it to you on the Left (and the Right for that matter) but you DO NOT have a RIGHT to silence people who disagree with you. Deal with it.

When two people disagree with what each other is saying, say one is a pro-choice activist and the other a pro-life activist, who would get to stifle the other? According to the principle above, EITHER one could claim that the other was saying something they did not like and which, they felt, oppressed them. So who would win? The first guy to the courthouse?

It's happening here as well, folks.

Stomping on free speech

'Canada is a pleasantly authoritarian country," Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, said a few years ago. An example of what he means is Bill C-250, a repressive, anti-free-speech measure that is on the brink of becoming law in Canada. It would add "sexual orientation" to the Canadian hate propaganda law, thus making public criticism of homosexuality a crime. It is sometimes called the "Bible as Hate Literature" bill. . . . It could ban publicly expressed opposition to gay marriage or any other political goal of gay groups. The bill has a loophole for religious opposition to homosexuality, but few scholars think it will offer protection, given the strength of the gay lobby and the trend toward censorship in Canada. Law Prof. David Bernstein, in his new book "You Can't Say That!" wrote that "it has apparently become illegal in Canada to advocate traditional Christian opposition to homosexual sex." Or traditional Jewish or Muslim opposition, too.

Since Canada has no First Amendment, anti-bias laws generally trump free speech and freedom of religion. A recent flurry of cases has mostly gone against free expression. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission ruled that a newspaper ad listing biblical passages that oppose homosexuality was a human-rights offense. . . . a British Columbia court upheld the one-month suspension, without pay, of a high school teacher who wrote letters to a local paper arguing that homosexuality is not a fixed orientation but a condition that can and should be treated. The teacher, Chris Kempling, was not accused of discrimination, merely of expressing thoughts that the state defines as improper.

That anti-free-speech principle, social conservatives argue, will become explicit national policy under C-250, with criminal penalties attached. Religious groups say it would become risky for them to teach certain biblical passages. . . . And since C-250 does not mention homosexuality but focuses broadly on "sexual orientation," Canada's freewheeling judiciary may explicitly extend protection to many "sexual minorities." Pedophilia and sadism are among the conditions listed by the American Psychiatric Association under "sexual orientation."

Jacoby: No One Did it Right

Jacoby: No One Did it Right

Jeff Jacoby points out the fantastic Monday Morning Quarterbacking of the current MEDIA circus.

The point: NO ONE was worrying too much about Islamist terrorists before 9/11. Not the President and his administration. Not the Dems. Not the Senate Intelligence Committee. NO ONE.

Jeff Jacoby: Everyone got it wrong before 9/11

We'll get to last week's big Washington story -- Condoleezza's Rice's testimony before the Sept. 11 Commission -- in a moment. But first, a short quiz:

1. Identify the following list of topics:

"The World Bank's mission creep"
"Getting debt relief right"
"Russia's unformed foreign policy"
"Japan, the reluctant reformer"
"With a friend like Fox"
"Caspian energy at the crossroads."

No clue? Don't feel bad. You would have to be suffering from acute foreign-policy wonkishness to recognize the table of contents from the September/ October 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, the flagship publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Like the curious incident of the dog in the night-time -- in the famous Sherlock Holmes tale, the "curious incident" was that the dog didn't bark -- the significance of these headlines is not in what they say but in what they don't say: The nation's leading journal of international relations was paying no attention to the threat from Islamist terror even as Islamist terrorists were planning the deadliest attack ever committed by foreign enemies on US soil.

2. Which US senator admitted on Sept. 11, 2001, "We have always known this could happen. . . . I regret to say -- I served on the Intelligence Committee up until last year. I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it -- but not really doing the hard work of responding.''

That was John Kerry on "Larry King Live," ruing his and his colleagues' pre-9/11 failure to give the threat from international terrorism the urgent attention and "hard work of responding" it should have had.

3. President Clinton's final national security policy paper, submitted to Congress in December 2000, was 45,000 words long. Yet it never once mentioned which international menace?

Al Qaeda. The document referred to Osama bin Laden just four times, and its discussion of terrorism spoke not of wiping out the killers in their nests but of extraditing "fugitives" to make them "answer for their crimes."

Economic Reality

Economic Reality

The doom and gloom crowd will dislike this column.

All about number which show the economy is upward bound . . . and has been.

OpinionJournal.comThe Dangerfield Economy

By nearly every objective measure, the U.S. economy is strong and getting stronger. Just look at the Misery Index, the measure created by the late economist Arthur Okun adding the rates of unemployment and inflation. This may not be the most sophisticated of metrics, but it does capture the two greatest threats to household wealth and security. And it's indicating that, comparisons to the 1990s' bubble years excepted, the U.S. economy is doing very well.

Today's unemployment rate of 5.7% is close to the level Bill Clinton boasted about as he sought re-election in 1996. Meanwhile, inflation has fallen by a full percentage point over the past eight years. As the nearby table shows, the economy compares favorably by re-election standards and President Bush's policies should be enjoying at least a modicum of respect.

Blair: Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

Blair: Never Give Up, Never Surrender!

An incredible piece from Tony Blair.

Anyone anti-Iraq should be required to read this piece.

Tony Blair: Why we must never abandon this historic struggle in Iraq

We are locked in a historic struggle in Iraq. On its outcome hangs more than the fate of the Iraqi people. Were we to fail, which we will not, it is more than 'the power of America' that would be defeated. The hope of freedom and religious tolerance in Iraq would be snuffed out. Dictators would rejoice; fanatics and terrorists would be triumphant. Every nascent strand of moderate Arab opinion, knowing full well that the future should not belong to fundamentalist religion, would be set back in bitter disappointment.
If we succeed - if Iraq becomes a sovereign state, governed democratically by the Iraqi people; the wealth of that potentially rich country, their wealth; the oil, their oil; the police state replaced by the rule of law and respect for human rights - imagine the blow dealt to the poisonous propaganda of the extremists. Imagine the propulsion toward change it would inaugurate all over the Middle East. . . .

They know it is a historic struggle. They know their victory would do far more than defeat America or Britain. It would defeat civilisation and democracy everywhere. They know it, but do we? The truth is, faced with this struggle, on which our own fate hangs, a significant part of Western opinion is sitting back, if not half-hoping we fail, certainly replete with schadenfreude at the difficulty we find.

So what exactly is the nature of the battle inside Iraq itself? This is not a 'civil war', though the purpose of the terrorism is undoubtedly to try to provoke one. The current upsurge in violence has not spread throughout Iraq. Much of Iraq is unaffected and most Iraqis reject it. The insurgents are former Saddam sympathisers, angry that their status as 'boss' has been removed, terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda and, most recently, followers of the Shia cleric, Muqtada-al-Sadr.

The latter is not in any shape or form representative of majority Shia opinion. He is a fundamentalist, an extremist, an advocate of violence. He is wanted in connection with the murder of the moderate and much more senior cleric, Ayatollah al Khoei last year. The prosecutor, an Iraqi judge, who issued a warrant for his arrest, is the personification of how appallingly one-sided some of the Western reporting has become. Dismissed as an American stooge, he has braved assassination attempts and extraordinary intimidation in order to follow proper judicial process and has insisted on issuing the warrant despite direct threats to his life in doing so.

There you have it. On the one side, outside terrorists, an extremist who has created his own militia, and remnants of a brutal dictatorship which murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people and enslaved the rest. On the other side, people of immense courage and humanity who dare to believe that basic human rights and liberty are not alien to Arab and Middle Eastern culture, but are their salvation. . . .

By 1 June, electricity will be 6,000MW, 50 per cent more than prewar, but short of the 7,500MW they now need because of the massive opening up of the economy, set to grow by 60 per cent this year and 25 per cent the next.

The first private banks are being opened. A new currency is in circulation. Those in work have seen their salaries trebled or quadrupled and unemployment is falling. One million cars have been imported. Thirty per cent now have satellite TV, once banned, where they can watch al-Jazeera, the radical Arab TV station, telling them how awful the Americans are.

The internet is no longer forbidden. Shrines are no longer shut. Groups of women and lawyers meet to discuss how they can make sure the new constitution genuinely promotes equality. The universities eagerly visit Western counterparts to see how a modern, higher-education system, free to study as it pleases, would help the new Iraq.

People in the West ask: why don't they speak up, these standard-bearers of the new Iraq? Why don't the Shia clerics denounce al-Sadr more strongly? I understand why the question is asked. But the answer is simple: they are worried. They remember 1991, when the West left them to their fate. They know their own street, unused to democratic debate, rife with every rumour, and know its volatility. They read the Western papers and hear its media. And they ask, as the terrorists do: have we the stomach to see it through? . . .

But our greatest threat, apart from the immediate one of terrorism, is our complacency. When some ascribe, as they do, the upsurge in Islamic extremism to Iraq, do they really forget who killed whom on 11 September 2001? When they call on us to bring the troops home, do they seriously think that this would slake the thirst of these extremists, to say nothing of what it would do to the Iraqis?

Or if we scorned our American allies and told them to go and fight on their own, that somehow we would be spared? If we withdraw from Iraq, they will tell us to withdraw from Afghanistan and, after that, to withdraw from the Middle East completely and, after that, who knows? But one thing is for sure: they have faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism. And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.

It is not easy to persuade people of all this; to say that terrorism and unstable states with WMD are just two sides of the same coin; to tell people what they don't want to hear; that, in a world in which we in the West enjoy all the pleasures, profound and trivial, of modern existence, we are in grave danger.

There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win and it is happening now in Iraq.

Ad Hominem Challenge

Ad Hominem Challenge

To date, not a single person on the Left has taken up my challenge. Mostly because they know that they cannot meet it's requirements. But I still want the point to be made: the Dems and the Left are often engaged in the odious practice of directly attacking the person rather than his or her record. They call people names, float incredulous trheories without any proof, and generally demonstrate all that is the worst in American politics. And I mean MAJOR, HIGH PROFILE, Dems and Lefties, not just the far-left folks at democraticunderground.com.

Reps do not do so. While they are not perfect, you cannot find a SINGLE incidence of a HIGH_RANKING, OFFICIAL REP representative who has done the same. That's my challenge.

Here's a re-issue of that challenge:

Ad Hominem Challenge Update

Last week I posted a challenge to my liberal friends to supply me with a single cite of Rep attacks. Here's what I said:

A challenge to the Left: find me ONE, just ONE, instance of Bush or another Senior Administration Official calling Kerry names. I don't mean saying that he did such and such as a Senator. I mean calling him "crooked" or a liar or some other ad hominem attack. Just ONE pure ad hominem attack.

I am extending that challenge and offering an incentive:

Find me one high-ranking Rep OFFICIAL (equivalent on the Rep side as Gore, Kerry, Dean, etc. are to the Dems) who has called Kerry and compatriots names and engaged in outright ad hominem attacks.

Find me one verifiable cite, WITH SOURCE MATERIAL FOR CHECKING IT OUT, and I will put a link to your site at the top of my blogroll and encourage everyone who visits this page to go a read your site daily.

Are you up to it Media Revolution or Rickfman or any of my other liberal (oh, sorry, I mean "progressive," isn't that the current euphemism?) readers?

Digital TV on Its Way To a Set Near You

Digital TV on Its Way To a Set Near You

Why in the hell is THIS a law?

What bureaucratic nincompoop decided that ALL US TV STATIONS need to broadcast only in digital by 2006?

What possible purpose could this rule serve?

Will programming get better? I doubt it.
Will advertisers get a better return on their money spent? I doubt it?
Will this "help the children"? Uh-uh.
Will it help TV makers sell more expensive HDTV sets? Yep.

I am a decided capitalist folks, as regular readers know. But this is GOV'T forcing the issue.

If the market, if PEOPLE, decide that they need HDTV and prefer digital signals . . . then it would happen. Why do we need a GOV'T RULE requiring such a transition?

Will it help national security? The economy? Whiskey tango . . . ?

FOXNews.com - Foxlife - TV Gets Up Close and Personal

Foul Ball from Left Field

Foul Ball from Left Field

Here's is James P. Pinkerton's assessment of Dr. Rice's testimony and the subsequent release of the PDB.

It is an excellent source for an all-in-one-place recount of how the Left will approach these event.

He willfully twists all of it into to sounding as though Bush got a memo saying, "Bin Laden, 9-11-01, early morning, Twin Towers, Pentagon, Capital, 4 planes."

He also likes making Dr. Rice sounds as though she was a schoolgirl out of her depth at the hearings.

If that's how the Left wants to see it, fine. I think that the average American who read the text of the memo, and hears the comments of Mr. Ben-Veniste's fellow panel members, will understand that this was a warning from 3 YEARS earlier.

When someone comes up to you and tells you that, three years ago, someone threatened the last guy who held the job you now hold, but who hasn't been heard from about it since, would you jump up and do something? Or would you, like most people, think that that was interesting but not enough to act on just yet since there WERE reports of other things happening that WERE recent and immediate?

All of this is the Left imploding. They cannot stand Bush and will purposely make it sound as though Bin Laden called up and said he was a-comin'.

He didn't . Get over it.

Newsday.com: Pre-9/11 doings are coming to light