Traveling

I am flying to KC today and will return late Wed. Don't know how much, if any blogging will get done.

Read the Captain, Michelle, Power Line, Polipundit, Cox and Forkum, et al for the good stuff.

Later.

More Incompetence from Commission and CIA

Did you know that an Iranian intelligence agent went to the CIA on July 26, 2001 and told the CIA that 6 trained pilots were going to attack targets in the US on September 11, 2001?

Didn't know that? Hmmmm. Wonder why the 9/11 Commission forgot to tell us.

Or that Iran was neck deep in the planning and support of the 9/11 attacks?

Does this mean that Cindy Sheehan and the left-wing wack jobs are going to demand that we attack Iran and remove their WMD capability?

Read it all from the Captain.

Or wait for the MSM to tell you.

Able Danger update

From the Captain. I agree with his conclusion:

The more we find out about Able Danger, the more questions about almost everything we have been told about 9/11 it produces. Clearly this failure ran much deeper than we have been told, and the dismissal of Able Danger from the Commission's narrative looks more and more suspect.

In the end, it really doesn't matter if the identification of Atta was correct or not. The Able Danger story is is critically important because we need to expose the corrupt conflicts of interest on the 9/11 Commission and toss out all their work. And most importantly, we need to fully expose and discredit the mindset and worldview of liberals like Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton which made 9/11 possible.

The biggest threat to our country in 2005 and the future is due to the fact that their worldview is still widely accepted in the Democratic Party.

How the PC Left endangers us all

Michelle Malkin covers the Seattle soldier beatings and connects the dots to the PC attitudes of Seattle's left-wing media and politics. The account of the beating death of Kristopher Kime while cops watched because the mayor didn't want to offend blacks is part of the post.

Scott Ott answers Cindy Sheehan

I didn't notice this earlier this week. I wish I had.

Hitchens utterly destroys the childish brats of the left

Read it all. And then go back and read it again. And again. Until you have committed it to memory.

Hitchens, in "A War to Be Proud of", constructs an airtight case against the frauds and fools who worship Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore as they fervently hope for victory for the Islamo-fascist terrorists. Hitchens is no fan of Bush. The hero in his account is the anonymous American public. He writes:

The second bit of luck is a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans. Faced with a constant drizzle of bad news and purposely demoralizing commentary, millions of people stick out their jaws and hang tight. I am no fan of populism, but I surmise that these citizens are clear on the main point: It is out of the question--plainly and absolutely out of the question--that we should surrender the keystone state of the Middle East to a rotten, murderous alliance between Baathists and bin Ladenists. When they hear the fatuous insinuation that this alliance has only been created by the resistance to it, voters know in their intestines that those who say so are soft on crime and soft on fascism.

Having thus fortified yourself with fact and logic, join with renewed vigor the fight against the dishonest nihilists of the left and their disgraceful effort to defeat America. Our children are depending on us to win this one. Defeat is not an option.

George Will has a must-read

Will has a really good column here. He makes a great point that the MSM actually subtract from the public's understanding with their silly coverage of oil prices. Of course, that is true of many other topics they cover.

I also loved this little gem:

Over the last 40 years productivity growth has averaged 2.1 percent. Since 2001 it has averaged 3.9 percent. One reason for this surge? A 1998 prediction by Paul Krugman, now a New York Times columnist, was spectacularly wrong: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's."

Krugman is so popular with left-wing wack jobs precisely because he is always spectacularly wrong. The left has an extraordinary record of being wrong. It is a prerequisite to left-wing "success".

Wash Post caught mischaracterizing the facts

Cori Dauber, a communications prof, makes several good points.

Cindy turning to cinders

Mike Rosen lays out the case. Sometimes, simply stating the facts is all one needs to win it. What kind of fool would hitch his star to this woman?

Almost makes you wonder if she isn't really a Karl Rove plant designed to help guide the lemmings off the cliff.

I wonder why

Perhaps this will help Jay Rosen understand why the White House doesn't trust the press corps.

Memo to MSM journalists -- Smug, biased and incompetent is no way to go through life.

Kaus is half right about Hillary's coming train wreck

Kaus is always worth the read, even though I often disagree with his conclusions. Two gems here:

WaPo's David Ignatius laments the Democratic Party's lack of a strong spokesman who can fulfill "the role of an opposition party" in Bush's time of troubles. I'm not sure it's a big dilemma for Democrats (as opposed to for Hillary) if the party remains championless. After all, there already is an effective anti-Bush opposition party in America. It's called the media. We don't need two of them! Alert kf reader G.S. suggests leaderless Democrats take another look at that Amazing Dr. Pollkatz Polling Graphic. The only time Bush's steady polling decline stopped was in 2004, when he actually had some identifiable Democratic champions (Dean, then Kerry) to be set off against. G.S.'s upshot is

Midterm political advice for the Dems: Keep the party face-less through the 2006 races.

It's good to be kingless!

It's nice to see that there is at least one liberal who will admit the blatantly obvious MSM propaganda effort against W.

BTW -- my problem with the post is that he seems to believe the MSM's portrayal of Iraq as a nightmare. He knows it is propaganda, but he believes it anyway!

Admiring the vicious dictator

I have long wondered why David Halberstam isn't considered a left-wing hack. In the last year or so, he was on C-Span with Ben Bradlee doing a community event in a DC hotel which looked (what I saw of it) like a lefty wack-fest on Iraq and Bush. Recently, I was trying to research a post about Robert McNamara and the planned obsolescence which ruined Ford before JFK gave him the Defense Dept to ruin so I went googling for Halberstam and his book about it. My recollection was that Halberstam was so appalled by the idiocy of McNamara and his Vietnam strategies that he then researched and wrote about the "whiz kid" lunacy that did so much damage to Ford. Remember that he used the title "The Best and the Brightest" as irony.

Anyway, I came across an interview that Halberstam gave in the late 80s where he describes Vietnam as simply a war where the Vietnamese people were fighting against American efforts to keep it as a colony. This is the kind of stuff one might have expected during the war from an American journalist who admitted he was close friends with a Vietnamese journalist for Time who turned out to be a communist spy. But not after we had all the history which followed the war. It was as if he had turned off his brain when he left Vietnam and refused to let any new facts in.


Geitner Simmons has a post which I found enlightening. It has this exerpt from Michael Lind's book which may explain a lot:

Similar undisguised admiration for the communists pervades David Halberstam's Ho (1971). Halberstam's book is perhaps the most sympathetic portrait of a Stalinist dictator ever penned by a reputable American journalist identified with the liberal rather than the radical left.

In Ho, Halberstam omits any mention of the repression or atrocities of Ho Chi Minh's regime. For example, Halberstam writes that in August 1945, "the Vietminh had in one quick stroke taken over the nationalism of the country, that Ho had achieved the legitimacy of power."

From reading Halberstam, one would never guess that in 1945-46 Ho's deputy Giap carried out a reign of terror in which thousands of the leading noncommunist nationalists in territory controlled by Ho's regime were assassinated, executed, imprisoned, or exiled.

Halberstam condemns the repression carried out by the Saigon regime ... Of the far more severe repression in North Vietnam, there is not a word in Halberstam's book.

The Maoist-inspired terror of collectivization in the mid-fifties, in which at least ten-thousand North Vietnamese were summarily executed because they belonged to the wrong "class," is not mentioned. Nor is the anticommunist peasant rebellion that followed; nor the deployment of the North Vietnamese military to crush the peasants; nor the succeeding purge of North Vietnamese intellectuals; nor the fact that almost ten times as many Vietnamese, during the brief period of resettlement, fled from communist rule as left South Vietnam for the North.

The equivalent of Halberstam's book would be a flattering biography of Stalin that praised his leadership during World War II while omitting any mention of the gulag, the purges, and the Ukrainian famine ...

More grist for Robert Conquest's mill. There are none so blind ...

Unhinged from reality

It is ironic that the lefties today choose to refer to themselves as "reality-based" given so many decades of their willful refusal to acknowledge the reality of the horrors of the Soviet Union. Robert Conquest has written about this adamant refusal by academics even AFTER the fall of the USSR gave us access to all the records.

[But suppose they simply are trying to break a world record -- most consecutive years of being wrong about everything.]

No there there

Here.

Of course, the same could be said of Presbyterians and others (and has).

The media's job is to influence not inform

Brandon Crocker reminds us that those who feel that the 2004 election of George Bush represented a failure of the media to do its job are still broadcasting the "news." After pointing out the many differences between Iraq and Vietnam, Crocker does point out the one thing that is identical:

This is the one big similarity to Vietnam. The "mainstream" media sees its job not as reporting the news, but as trying to defeat U.S. foreign policy.

They are the enemy. For the good of the country, they need to be defeated.

Wretchard's take on Yon

I suppose everyone reading this blog is up to date on the incredible reporting being done by Michael Yon. I wanted to point out this take from the Belmont Club on his work because Wretchard takes us back to bin Laden's assessment of America's fighting spirit.

AP biased ?! Forfend the very thought!

Betsy pointed us to this.

[I am shocked, shocked to find gambling in this establishment.]

Sheehan's Professional PR Machine

Via Glenn, we find out that the typical moonbat lefties at move.on, etc. are orchestrating the show. Glenn's ending observation is right on:

I can't say I'm surprised: the "grassroots" antiwar movement keeps turning out to be MoveOn/A.N.S.W.E.R. astroturf. But I bet that if a GOP group were to send servicemen's families to picket Democrats it would be getting more play. And more negative play.

Beyond Sick

These lefties are lower than whale s**t. And they have been doing this since March!!?? Where was the MSM on this? Assholes.

This looks like a good idea

Hugh Hewitt has a post on signing up for Soldiers Angels.

Italy aids terrorists

Captain Ed has more.

AP reports fiction

via Michelle Malkin.

NY Times sinks even lower ...

assuming that's possible.

Mark Tapscott has this.

An intelligent argument

Wouldn't it be great if there were a liberal somewhere in America who could articulate an argument like this? Cohen crafts an extremely persuasive case for teaching a theory that he personally does not believe to be true.

Or this.

I'm not sure where I come out on all this, but I sure have more respect for these kinds of arguments than I do for the gibberish arrayed against them.

18,006 reasons why the MSM is full of it

John at Power Line has an interesting fact -- from 1983 to 1996 out military suffered accidental deaths at a rate which is almost double the rate of combat deaths in Iraq.

Wash Post -- how to choose stories to report

Captain Ed has an interesting juxtaposition to examine. It offers insight into the story selection process at the Post.

Inner City Vote Fraud

Selwyn Duke at American Thinker has a good article on one significant method of vote fraud in the inner city.

Taranto on liberal yearning for defeat

Best of the Web makes a good point -- Sheehan's foolishness has exposed the idiot left in two ways:

For one, it reveals that very few people on the antiwar left have any compunction at all about making common cause with someone who espouses virulent anti-American and anti-Semitic views. For another, it showed something we've long suspected: that some on the left--and not just the America-hating fringe--want America to lose this war. Here's an editorial for today's Seattle Times:

America's purpose in Iraq is over. The soldiers should be brought home. It can be done, as has been proven in Vietnam, Somalia and other places.

Vietnam, a humiliating defeat that left America bitterly divided for a generation, and Somalia, which emboldened Osama bin Laden, are, according to the Seattle Times, the models for the conduct of a war.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Maureen Dowd -- opportunistic media thug

I think Robert Musil gets it exactly right on the Cindy Sheehan embarassment. He writes, in part:

I pray that if what befell Mrs. Sheehan's son should ever befall mine, at least I not be goaded to further grief-drenched flailings by a crowd of smirking, cannibalistic politicians such as John Conyers and Maxine Waters, and opportunistic media thugs including Maureen Dowd, who have done such disservice to Cindy Sheehan.

Paul Krugman -- blatant liar

Dr. Sanity and John Podhoretz are all over it. As she writes:

I used to get irritated by people like Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd. OK, let me be honest. People who have absolutely no regard for the truth make me very, very angry.

So, I basically stopped reading their columns long ago.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that Krugman has blatantly lied yet again (is the sky blue?) and John Podhoretz at the The Corner noticed.

After the 2000 election, two media panels found that Bush would have won, even if the Courts had allowed Gore to count ballots the way he wanted in the four heavily Democratic counties in Florida. Krugman wrote the opposite.

She quotes Podhoretz:

Merely by pulling up the New York Times's own electronic morgue at his desk, Krugman could have avoided making the mistake of claiming that Gore was ruled the winner in two independent media counts. If he didn't, he's lazy. If he he did, he's spectacularly dishonest. And he doesn't strike me as lazy.

More on Jamie Gorelick

Captains Quarters has a refutation of the excuse made by Gorelick supporters that the wall she put up at Justice didn't pertain to the Pentagon (and thus didn't stop Able Danger from being shared with the FBI).

Newspaper editors wonder how to do basic journalism

Lawrence Henry has a great wrap-up of the clueless response of editors such as the Tampa Tribune's Rosemary Goudreau to the assertion from readers that there might be good news in Iraq. It never occurred to them to try some reporting.

Goudreau herself has to ask her own boss "if there was any way to check these assertions" (in the e-mail). Pick up the phone, Ms. Goudreau! Turn to your own back files of "returning soldiers" profiles and -- what? The Tampa Tribune hasn't done any profiles of returning soldiers? Well, call the local VFW posts and churches and start finding some. Then arrange for interviews and ask questions. Assign your reporters to dig at the topic. If your reporters find out something, print it.

If you're out in the world, it falls right in your lap. At our church a few weeks back, one of our service men, home on leave, stood up to say that we shouldn't believe what we saw on TV or in the newspapers, that it was nothing like what was going on in Iraq. After church, he told me, "You don't know anything if you're not reading the blogs."

No one in the Seelye story gets the point, not Goudreau, not Silverman, not Dardarian, and certainly not Seelye herself. They've turned news into a product, like toothpaste. But it's worse. A real toothpaste manufacturer, faced with customer complaints, would find out what's wrong with the toothpaste. The AP-ers never even consider there might be something wrong with their reporting. At best, they are willing only to work on how their readers "perceive" their reporting.

Ponder this, editors. There is something wrong with your product, and your readers have stopped buying it.

Libs getting that familiar sinking feeling

As it becomes increasingly clear that Cindy Sheehan is joining Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson, Dan Rather and the rest of the liberal heros who have been exposed as liars, liberals are having that feeling again. Patrick Hynes has more.

NY Times discriminates against the poor

Don Luskin posts on the Times' new headquarters building. The land was seized by the government under eminent domain ("for a public use"). The land deal makes clear that the "public" is not welcome. No riff-raff allowed in the building. Read about it.

Liberals don't get the joke

Judge Roberts made a lawyer joke over 20 years ago and the crazed nutjobs on the left miss the point. Stuart Buck has more. Were they always this stupid or has their bias made them so?

Why Bin Laden got away from Clinton

His administration was more concerned that Bin Laden be comfortable than in custody. See details from a CIA counter-terrorism chief here.

Purposeful Ignorance or Willful Treason

D J Drummond posts on a whacked out liberal commenter to his blog who compared the terrorists in Iraq to our special forces. After dispensing with such foolishness, he writes:

I no longer feel any responsibility to respect the arguments from anyone opposing the War in Iraq. The evidence, the clear success, and the need for sustained support for the President and our troops makes any opposition to the war at this point either the hallmark of chosen ignorance, or willful treason.

There are none so blind ...

Via Lori Byrd this description from Ace of Spades on Saddam's links to terror:

“No connection between Iraq and terrorism, so long as you exclude the proven connections between Iraq and terrorism.”

If you close your eyes and refuse to see, it simply doesn't exist.

Tapscott on Clinton Intelligence Failures

Mark ties together several of the strands of this story which are emerging. He highlights the importance of the FOIA in getting the revelation of the State Dept warnings to Bill Clinton.

Military Service is a social problem

Stefan Sharkansky writes:

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: military service a "social problem"

In today's P-I, an article about children raised by relatives other than parents:

This so-called "kinship care" is the largely unseen fallout from a confluence of social problems -- parental drug addiction, incarceration, mental illness and, more recently, military service -- that have left about 2.3 million children in the United States raised by their relatives, mainly grandparents.

Military service is a "social problem"?

According to this part of the MSM it is, right up there with drug addiction and mental illness.

Lileks on Presbyterian disgrace

As a Presbyterian all my life, I was ashamed at the decision the PCUSA made against Israel. Lileks is far too gentle, but he's still worth the read.

Read Ben Stein -- right now

Ben Stein lays out some simple truths. Evil exists in the world. We can't fight it, if we won't recognize it. W does. How extraordinarily lucky for us. And for US.

One account of W with a family of a fallen soldier

Michael Smerconish has a version you don't hear from the MSM.

Note -- someone on the web today had a picture of the President kissing Cindy Sheehan when she met with him. Anyone remember whose site?

Lileks on Sheehan and the Dimocrats

As he usually does, Lileks nails it with Cindy Sheehan. Of course, the interesting part of the story is not her incoherent, moronic ramblings or even her virulent anti-semitism. No, the interesting part is how the Democratic Party embraces such idiocy. As he writes:

The hard left in America needs to realize a bald, cruel fact: Anyone who sees no moral distinction between Israel and the mullahs of Iran, or sees the U.S. attempt to set up a constitutional republic in Iraq as equivalent to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, suffers from incurable moral cretinism. The more the fervent anti-war base embraces these ideas, the more they ensure that no one will trust the left with national security. Ever.

Will they learn the lesson? Even money says Sheehan will be sitting in the Michael Moore seat next to Jimmy Carter at the '08 Democratic convention.

Thinking is hard ...

which is why so few politicians try it. Don Luskin has a great example:

WHAT MORE CAN WE SAY?

Could you ask for a single sentence that better captures the quintessence of what's wrong with government trying to spend and invest our money for us? Leading off a story from American City Business Journals, the first half of the sentence:

Members of Congress want to establish a new government-backed venture capital program...

And now the second half:

...to replace one that's being phased out because of sizable losses.

Two important revelations today

Bouncing around the web, it is easy to get focused on Mary White's memo which blistered Jamie Gorelick's wall and predicted that it would get people killed (which it did). But there is also the story of how the State Dept warned Clinton about Bin Laden in 1996 and was ignored.

Ultimately, the 9/11 Commission will be remembered as the ass-covering lapdog for commission member Jamie Gorelick -- the omission commission. (Sorry, I don't know which blogger first coined the term.)

Gotta go. Will provide links later, but I think everyone who checks the Captain, JKS, Power Line et al will get the info.

Religion = Terror (according to ACLU)

See here.

Latest on Able Danger

from the Captain.

Newspaper editor -- "we can't give you the news"

Betsy has a story which points out why so many of us are letting subscriptions to local papers lapse. The paper in Raleigh can't/won't cover the news unless the AP or the NY Times allows it (i.e. provides the story).

Mark Steyn on the 9/11 Commission

Here. As he says, they were so political that we may need a 9/11 commission to investigate the 9/11 commission.

Wash Post covers up the story

John Rosenberg gives us the quotes from left-wing Democrats that the Wash Post forgot to include in a story on the march in Atlanta. I guess the Post readers don't need to know how extreme some liberal leaders really are.

AP gets it all wrong -- again

Power Line has the story.

Serious liberal sickness

Megan McArdle posting at instapundit, has a good post on Kevin Drum's ridiculous assertions about the NARAL ad. Something she didn't address caught my attention. Drum's post included this:

on the overall scale of outrageousness, I have to say that this ad ranks pretty low compared to conservative benchmarks like Willie Horton and the Swift Boat lunatics.

This is why liberalism has gone completely beserk.

The Willie Horton ad was completely truthful. So were the Swift Vets. The NARAL ad was a total falsehood. Compare the Horton ad to what Al Gore said about Horton on the political stump. Compare the Swift Vet ads to what John Kerry said about Vietnam vets. There is nothing even remotely close to the NARAL ad to use as a comparison.

Remember, Drum is supposedly considered to be a rational liberal. I guess that is only because the sick wackos further on the left have abandoned all pretense of logic.

CNN Praises Saddam's treatment of women

NRO's media blog has this. CNN is pathetic.

More liberals screwing the poor

John Stossel explains how liberals and labor unions team up to keep poor people poor.

And they think conservatives are evil.

Barone asks -- NARAL: stupid or cynical liars?

Barone gets to the essential question.

Single Women are Better at Detecting when Men Lie

Quote from a study

... single women seemed to be better at detecting men who were faking good than those who were in a committed relationship. "Women have a kind of radar for deception in men, which they switch on or off, depending on the context."

From Marginal Revolutiion.

Debating the REALLY important stuff

heh.

Burying the memo

The Captain has a good post on how the 9/11 Commission buried the memo that accurately predicted what would happen. US Attorney Mary White predicted that the wall instituted by Jamie Gorelick and Janet Reno would cost lives. It did. So Gorelick and her friends on the Commission buried the memo so the public wouldn't see it.

Cox and Forkum skewer 'em

The ACLU.

Margaret Carlson confirms she's brain dead

Here.

It is better to have thought and forgotten than never to have thought at all.

Lying to your face

Patterico has a long post on how the Cindy Sheehan travesty is covered in the LA Times. He has the quotes Sheehan gave right after her meeting with the President including, “That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together.” Of course, none of that is in the Times. At the conclusion of laying out how badly they covered this story, he writes:

These people are either hopelessly uninformed, or they are lying to you — right to your face. There is no third explanation. And I find it almost impossible to believe that they are that uninformed.

Read it all.

Who was that idiot?

Via The Anchoress I found this excellent round-up on Able Danger revelations by Rusty Shackleford. He makes some good points:

the so-called Able Danger revelations do raise some interesting issues.

The first is the most obvious, and that is the silliness of ever erecting a barrier between law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. In hindsight this was stupid. Some things are so stupid, though, that to need hindsight to see their stupidity one must first find a group of morons, take out the brightest of the bunch, and then find the dullest bulb in the pack. That it was enacted by Democratic Congress intent on reeling in the perceived excesses of the CIA is no excuse for this piece of legislation. Just. Plain. Dumb.

But it also raises another important question: Who was it that refused to turn over the Able Danger documents to the FBI?

I do not personally blame the individual who refused to turn over Atta and his al Qaeda co-conspirators to the FBI. That is, it's not their fault for being a brainless bureaucrat. They were just following policy. But policy or no, there was an individual who had to look at the documents and make a decision not to share this intelligence with those that could do something about it. Who was this person who made the decision to follow policy?

Wal-Mart -- tremendous benefit to the poor

South End Grounds has an op-ed which ran in the NY Times. The authors, a Harvard business prof and a business consultant, point out that the retail giant saves its customers a great deal of money. Who are those customers?

Wal-Mart's customers tend to be the Americans who need the most help. Our research shows that Wal-Mart operates two-and-a-half times as much selling space per inhabitant in the poorest third of states as in the richest third. And within that poorest third of states, 80 percent of Wal-Mart's square footage is in the 25 percent of ZIP codes with the greatest number of poor households. Without the much-maligned Wal-Mart, the rural poor, in particular, would pay several percentage points more for the food and other merchandise that after housing is their largest household expense.

The fight against Wal-Mart is really a conflict between these poor customers and labor unions and their liberal supporters.

Is GOP getting serious about vote fraud?

I just got this e-mail from GOP.com entitled Voter Fraud Alert:

I wrote to you in May about the lengths to which Democrats went in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2004 elections, specifically, the Washington State Governor's race. Our Republican candidate, Dino Rossi, actually won the election, and then the recount, before then Democrat-controlled King County "found" 566 new votes just in time for a second recount, enough to overturn the results of Election Day and the first recount. The judge who presided over the court case that followed, actually said "this election may not be set aside simply because the number of fraudulent votes exceeds the margin of victory" when he issued his ruling against the Republican challenge.

Now, The American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund (ACVR Legislative Fund), a non-partisan, non-profit organization has released a new report documenting how thousands of Americans were disenfranchised during the 2004 elections because paid Democrat operatives were heavily involved in voter intimidation and suppression.

A few of examples include:

Coordinated efforts by certain "non-partisan" organizations to disrupt the election process in at least 12 states through voter registration fraud


Democrat operatives convicted for tire-slashing on GOP election day vans in Milwaukee


An Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling Republican voters telling them the wrong date for the election, and location for polling places
The report also indicated that the following were the top 5 "hot spots" in the nation for voter fraud:

1. Philadelphia, PA
2. Milwaukee, WI
3. Seattle, WA
4. St. Louis, MO/East St. Louis, IL
5. Cleveland, OH

We encourage you to view the ACVR report in it's entirety at www.ac4vr.com and forward this to your friends and family.

Fight back today by calling talk radio and writing letters to the editor describing the Democrats' efforts to undermine American's voting system.

Sincerely,

Michael DuHaime
RNC Political Director

There's nothing new here. What I want to know is whether this is just an effort to fire up the base or a signal that the party is going to take this to the public and insist on measures to clean up the fraud.

Atomic Bombs on Japan didn't end WWII

According to Donald Sensing. Or at least not in the way we have been led to believe. Very interesting piece containing a lot of stuff I didn't know.

Clarke, Wilson and Sheehan

What do they have in common? All three are favorites of liberals because they criticize W. And all three have been shown to be liars in the essential charge they make against the President. And despite being proven liars, they are still heros in the eyes of the left.

What kind of people make heros out of slanderers?

How "reality-based" is that?

The Grieving Activist

Selwyn Duke has a good piece on Cindy Sheehan. He writes:

Being the kind of prop leftist media and activist groups prize – a sympathetic and malleable character whose victim credentials are beyond reproach – such entities have seized upon her story and made her the poster-girl for hate-anything-remotely-conservative-no-matter-what activism. Thus, she has become the latest of a new breed of political animal: the Grieving Activist.

And this:

let’s get something straight: if you want to grieve, grieve. If you want to play politics, play politics.

But my sympathy for the grieving ends where their use of their grief as a political battering ram begins.

I say this unabashedly, without apology or concession. In fact, those who use the Cindy Sheehans of the world for political advantage owe the rest of us an apology. And “use” is the operative word, because this is the most shameful sort of exploitation.

Abortion Profits

Manuel Miranda at Opinion Journal has an interesting quote about the abortion lobby from Senator Hatch in 2002:

In September 2002, when Democrats first blocked Justice Priscilla Owen from a circuit court nomination over a Texas Supreme Court ruling that upheld a parental notice law, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah put it this way:


I fear the opposition to Justice Owen from the abortion lobby is not at all about abortion rights, because abortion rights are not affected by a mere notice statute. The opposition to Justice Owen is not really about abortion rights, it is about abortion profits. Simply put, the abortion industry is opposed to parental notice laws because parental notice laws place a hurdle between them and the profits from the abortion clients--not the girls who come to them but the adult men who pay for these abortions. These adult men, whose average age rises the younger the girl is, are eager not to be disclosed to parents, sometimes living down the street. . . . At nearly one million abortions per year, the abortion industry is as big as any corporate interest that lobbies in Washington. They not only ignore the rights of parents, they also protect sexual offenders and statutory rapists.

Miranda then writes:

You've never heard this? Surely that is no surprise. Mr. Hatch's statement was reported in only one news story, by Newsday's Tom Brune. He noted that there was an audible gasp among the abortion lobbyists in the back of the Judiciary Committee room. I remember that gasp.
What Mr. Brune did not record is that no Democratic senator responded to Hatch's charge. Something very unusual. Not even Dianne Feinstein of California, who, as she always notes, ran for the U.S. Senate to protect abortion rights. Or was it abortion profits?

Jimmy Carter -- incompetent, miserable old liar

The captain has a good post on this George Will column debunking the lies which Jimmy Carter continues to tell.

Update: Will debunks the tale that Carter has told many times -- that he was the one who delivered Carter's debate briefing book to the Reagan camp before the debate. Stephen Hayward adds more:

George Will delivers a well-deserved smackdown to the perpetually truth-challenged Jimmy Carter in today’s Washington Post. Will leaves out one telling detail about that episode. Carter’s debate briefing book was nearly 1,000 pages long, as befits Carter’s control-freak personality (its very length, to paraphrase a Churchill quip, defended it from the risk of being useful to the Reagan campaign). Reagan’s debate briefing book, by contrast, was only 72 pages. There he went again. . .

Gorelick and Able Danger

Michelle Malkin and The Captain discuss why the 9/11 Commission somehow failed to mention that the Army had identified the terror ringleader, Atta, and advised he be arrested before the attacks.

Botton Line -- the wall of separation put up by the Clinton Administration kept the army from sharing the info with the FBI. The wall of separation is now a critical piece of the puzzle of what went wrong. Jamie Gorelick put the wall in place. And Jamie Gorelick was one of the commissioners on the 9/11 Commission.

It is absolutely critical that the public know the truth. And the Democrats and the liberal MSM will always uphold that right to know. Unless, it means explaining how Democrats are responsible for something going wrong. Then -- no more right to know.

More on Berger and Able Danger

from Dr. Sanity.

Legal Quackery

Bruce Bartlett reviews the disaster that is Sarbanes-Oxley. It does nothing positive for business performance or investor value. It has costs which are astronomical. These costs include:

- $15 billion in compliance costs

- $1 Trillion in market capitalization

- increasing difficulty in attracting people willing to serve as directors

- foreign companies delisting from stock exchanges and domestic companies going private or deciding not to go forward with plans to go public.

Bottom Line -- zero benefit for anyone (except CPAs) and enormous costs to shareholders, workers and everyone who wants a good economy.

The last time Congress was this stupid was when the Dems pushed through the "luxury tax" which devastated the boat building industry, forced half its workers to lose their jobs and caused a substantial loss to the treasury (small tax collections more than offset by lost income taxes from workers and businesses and increased unemployment benefits).

Quantifying Progress in Iraq

Econopundit points out something I didn't know -- Brookings puts out a report with stats on the war:

the numbers show continuingly diminishing attacks on (a) US troops and (b) Iraqi infrastructure (both relatively hard targets), accompanied by (c) continuingly increasing attacks on Iraqi civilians (soft targets).

Racist Paternalism

The WSJ had a great column on this today. The American Spectator had this one yesterday. The NCAA has decided that the Seminole Indian tribe, which unanimously voted to approve FSU's use of the nickname Seminoles to honor them, is too stupid to know what is best for itself. So the NCAA has stepped in to bar the use of the name and any similar mascots from NCAA play.

The ruling comes from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Update -- Here is the WSJ link in Opinion Journal.

Garbage in, Garbage Out

Via Vodkapundit, this post from Protein Wisdom on the fools who think the media is accurately portraying the war in Iraq is worth a read.

Barone on blatant media bias in Wash Post

Barone skewers the Post (and Kerry voters).

The Morality of Capitalism

Dr. Sanity also addresses one of my biggest pet peeves with her vigorous defense of the morality of capitalism. Her post, Capitalism is good for the soul, is excellent.

What Sandy Berger was up to (?)

Dr. Sanity wonders if Sandy Berger was hiding references to Able Danger. Clearly some 9/11 Commission staffers hid info from the commission. Was Berger trying to do the same thing?

Read the whole thing.

Tilting at Windmills

Paul Mirengoff has a good post on Richard Cohen's "imaginary spectacle". Cohen's is just one more in the daily war that much of the left fights against the imaginary enemy. In the fever which grips liberals today, their hallucinations have them fighting against a foe who is vicious, hate-filled, mean-spirited, racist, sexist, etc., etc. Of course, that is one of the main reasons liberals keep losing more and more elections. Tilting against windmills rarely produces positive returns.

All this has been obvious for some time. What is interesting is the question of why no one on the left seems able to overcome the fever. By now, we should expect that someone among the Dems, somewhere, somehow, should have become re-oriented with reality long enough to grasp the truth. One could argue that Democrats such as Zell Miller and the hundreds of politicians who have switched parties have grasped that truth. I guess my point is that, to date, everyone like Miller has been automatically excommunicated. Will someone sufficiently high in the liberal church ever grasp the truth? How long will the tilting go on?

MSM bias is most effective in non-election years

I think Michael Barone is great. I don't expect to criticize him often. However, I think he fails to make a critical distinction in this post which looks at why President Bush is not getting any credit for the robust economy. [I noticed that Fox TV had a poll result a couple days ago that only 41% thought he was doing a good job on the economy.]

Barone writes that MSM bias is only a partial explanation:

Biased partisan media coverage. The Media Research Center has shown that mainstream media coverage of the Bush economy 2003-04 was much more negative than coverage of the Clinton economy of 1995-96, though the economic news was in fact similar. This should be no surprise. No serious person expects fair coverage from the New York Times.

But the result of the 2004 election showed us that there are limits to how far the mainstream media can lead the electorate around by the nose. Mainstream media coverage may explain some of the negative response to the economy, but not all of it.

I think that media coverage IS the whole story here. Why? Because we are over a year away from the next election and (as I wrote before) the biased MSM always has far more influence in non-election years.

The result of the 2004 election was due to Bush, the GOP and their supporters being able to blunt the biased message of the MSM with campaign activity. But there isn't any campaign activity on Bush's behalf now. The only megaphone out there right now takes its cue from the editors of the NY Times.

You can't compare the apples of a competitive campaign with the oranges of news coverage in a non-election year.

Belmont Club on the decline and bankruptcy of the Left

As always, Wretchard is worth a read.

Dems cash in on 9/11

Michelle Malkin has a post on how the NJ Dems used homeland security funding as partisan pork. It seems that 93% of the funds went to districts controlled by Dems.

PETA -- clueless

Michelle Malkin points to this. Apparently some blacks in New Haven got upset about being compared to a "freaking cow"!

Not just wrong -- ridiculously silly

Mark Steyn has another funny column which skewers the joke that the Democratic Party has become. I want to stress that the the importance of columns such as these is not that he disagrees with liberals over a policy choice. He is pointing out that the Dems are worse than the bunch that couldn't shoot straight. They are the bunch that shoots themselves.

The DNC's Bush-is-the-reason-your-kid-is-fat press release is a convenient precis of the party's problem: While he runs rings around them, the Dems lounge about getting flabbier by the week and telling themselves it's all his fault they can barely move except to complain about Bush's Supreme Court nominee's kid being overly cute. What's the betting for 2006? The Dems will have a few more "nearly the biggest political upsets," while the Republicans will have the actual political upsets -- a couple more Senate seats? Including Robert C. Byrd's venerable perch in West Virginia?

Republicans may see the increasingly arthritic, corpulent, wheezing, flatulent Democratic Party as a boon for them, but I don't. Two-party systems need two parties, not just for the health of the loser but for that of the winner, too. Intellectually, philosophically, legislatively, it's hard to maintain the discipline to keep yourself in shape when the other guy just lies around the house all day.

The "increasingly arthritic, corpulent, wheezing, flatulent Democratic Party" -- and he was being kind.

Outstanding article to consider

The American Spectator has this. I loved this quote:

Among certain sectors of the media, for example, it's an article of faith that those who believe in God, or advocate principles supporting that belief, are just a mob of Bible-thumping, knuckle-dragging, Scripture-spouting, hellfire and brimstone-preaching, rightwing, gun-toting, bigoted, homophobic, moralistic, paternalistic, polyester-wearing, mascara-smeared, false-eyelashed, SUV-driving, Wal-Mart shopping, big hair, big gut, fat butt, holy-rolling, snake-handling, Limbaugh-listening, Bambi-shooting, trailer-park-dwelling, uneducated, ignorant, backwater, hayseed, hick, inbred, pinhead rubes -- mostly from the South, or places no better than the South -- who voted for Bush.

Everything is moral when the fight is against evil

I have written before that one cannot really make sense of American politics over the last 3 decades without appreciating Charles Krauthammer's observation that liberals believe that conservatives are evil. John at Power Line has a post that just has to be read. NARAL has put out an ad which is so slanderous that it leaves me almost speechless. How can liberals lie so blatantly? Have they no morals at all?

They think they are fighting against evil. Anything goes.

News blackouts impact us all, even Michael Barone

Michael Barone has a very good post on his new blog in which he shows how silly it is for the Wash Post to try to argue that Bush going to Crawford somehow means that he isn't paying attention to his duties. However, in an effort to appear even-handed, he tries to chide conservatives for criticizing Bill Clinton:

Or think hard, my conservative readers, about what it would have been like to be Bill Clinton in the eight years he was president. Many conservatives see Clinton as a sociopath, a man totally uncaring about the consequences of his actions. I choose to see him differently. We have evidence that Clinton was often pressing for action against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, understanding that they were a threat. That's evidence that he felt a responsibility to save Americans' lives.

I would be willing to bet that Michael Barone has never seen this book by Buzz Patterson, the Air Force Lt. Colonel entrusted with the nuclear football as an aide to Clinton in the White House. Patterson relates how Clinton was too busy partying to take a phone call from Sandy Berger and give the final OK for a massive air strike against Saddam. And how Clinton whiffed on the chance to take out bin Laden with missiles.

I don't think Barone would have written what he did, if he were familiar with the facts that Patterson has laid out in his book. He's clearly one of the best informed political commentators we have and he obviously understands the profound bias of the news media today. But not everything gets through the media blackouts.

LA Times as cheerleader

Patterico points out that the LA Times has another front page story on Hillary as a centrist only two weeks since the last one. He notes that the Times' standard for centrist is anything which is less left-wing than nationalized health care.

WSJ has a great Op-Ed page today

The dead tree version of the paper has an op-ed page which is a must-read. Every single article deserves to be read.

Knee jerk causes black eye

Bernard Goldberg was on C-Span's Book Events this afternoon talking about his book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. The event was in Miami and a fair share of the audience was made up of liberals. I started reading the book this weekend, so I tuned in.

His talk was not political. He focused on the increased vulgarity of our modern life. Specifically, he focused on the increasingly common use of the "f***" word. One example was Chevy Chase's reference to President Bush as a "dumb f***" while performing at Lincoln Center at a black tie gala.

During the question period, one woman upbraided Goldberg saying (as well as I can remember it), "Instead of criticizing people for dropping f-bombs, maybe you should be asking what is causing them to use them. Like not being able to find a job ..."

At this point, the crowd basically drowned her out and hooted her down, so I didn't catch the details of her litany of all the supposed problems which afflict America with Bush as president.

Unbelievable. [Who knew that Chevy Chase couldn't get a job?]

There were several other knee-jerk liberal moments that were so stereotypical that you almost had to wonder if conservatives weren't making fun of them by pretending to impersonate them. (I said almost.)

If they show it again, it is worth watching just to see how mindless some of the liberal Kool-aid drinkers can be.

NY Times digs for dirt on children

Hugh Hewitt has a lot of links on the despicable Times. I predict that some blogger will find an editorial where the Times demanded that Chelsea Clinton be off-limits from news coverage. I'll also bet that the various episodes where Al Gore's son endangered the public were ignored by the paper.

Why Hillary Can't Win

Jacob Weisberg has a silly column in Slate on Hillary's problems. He conveniently forgets to mention her extensive record of dishonesty, corruption and criminality. I guess it just slipped his mind. What a bozo!

Michael Barone has a blog!

Via Power Line, I see that Michael Barone has a blog! That should be worth checking out regularly.

The joy of multicultural indoctrination

Via Betsy, a teacher explaining the benefits of his Multiculturalism class.

NY Times -- living in another world

Don Luskin has a post on a NY Times editorial which ignores reality and refers to "facts" which only exist in their fevered brains.

Did you know the stock market was bad? The Russell 2000 and S&P midcap indexes have recently hit all-time highs. The S&P 500 hit its highest level in 4 years.

The Times' editorial board is so desperate in wanting a bad economy that they have come to believe their own hallucinations.

No more do-overs

I just noticed this by Stephen Green at Vodkapundit where he discusses the fact that everything we write can now be found on the web. A lot of folks find that disconcerting.

I remember the first time I took a deposition as a new lawyer. Knowing that the court reporter was sitting right across the conference table recording every sound that came from my mouth was really mind blowing. Having read depos replete with "uh, umm, you know" etc., I was so conscious of every word for a while. Eventually, we all get over it, but it can really have an impact.

Providing Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

Brent Bozell on how the news media is working to defeat the US military.

Democratic vote fraud

Washington Times' Inside Politics has this:

Election fraud
A nonpartisan group yesterday released a report that said paid Democratic operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression activities than were their Republican counterparts during the 2004 presidential election.

Even the blatantly obvious truth should be reported.

Check out this new blogger

Bernard (disclosure -- he is a friend of mine. Angie and I introduced him to his wife.) has started a blog with a different twist which I thought was really great -- he offers classic quotes from the past which can be related to current events. Check it out here.

Note -- interesting personal story on Bernard -- We met him in March 1994, shortly after he had gotten out of the Army. He had served as a Ranger in Somalia. We introduced him to his wife, Meredith, who is a good friend of my wife. When they got married, Angie, as a bridesmaid, marched down the aisle next to a groomsman who was wearing the formal full dress uniform of the army. His name was Matt Eversmann. Matt and Bernard had met in college at Hampden-Sydney. A few years later in 2001, we went with Bernard, Meredith and some others to see the movie, Black Hawk Down. Those of you familiar with the movie may remember that Josh Hartnett stars in the movie which documents what happened during a raid in Somalia. Hartnett plays Sgt. Matt Eversmann. Anyone who has seen the movie will agree that it is incredibly intense. Imagine watching it knowing that the central character is reprising a combat reality that one of your best friends actually experienced.

The cost of the filibuster

Opinion Journal has a piece by Manuel Miranda on the extent to which filibustering judicial nominees has already hurt Democrats in Senate elections in 2002 and 2004.

In some ways I almost hope that they decide to try to bork Judge Roberts.

It's all our fault

John Leo summarizes the foolishness of liberals who can't be trusted to understand how to deal with terrorists because they don't understand what is going on.

I want to point out that this same kind of thinking permeates our society, especially the legal system. I have belonged to a very nice fitness center for the last 15 years or so which is almost as long as it has been open (it has indoor and outdoor pools, indoor and outdoor tennis, basketball court, running track, racqetball, exercise classes, all kinds of cardio machines, weight machines and free weights). The locker room has a sauna, steam room and whirlpool on the way to the showers.

Earlier this summer, the president of a local labor union was arrested for trying to perform a sex act on a young teenage boy in the steam room. Now there are signs up in the locker room which notify everyone that swim suits must be worn in the whirlpool, towels worn while walking to the showers, etc. In essence, the corporate owner (a hospital holding company) seems to wish that we could change clothes, use the bathroom and shower without ever being naked. Apparently, sexual assault is not the fault of the pervert, it is the fault of those people who are naked in the locker room.

What a ridiculous irritant.

Long hot Sunday at the swim meet

Spent all day at the finals of the City Meet watching my son, Madison, swim. He made the finals in all four of his events and improved on his best time in each stroke. Although it is tough competing against the older, larger 12 year-olds as an 11 year-old in the 11-12 age group, he demonstrated that he is one of the best 11s in the area.