Grace

Dems cave - Hot Air

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There was a time, not so long ago, that we assumed a Democratic majority would cause enormous problems in getting funding for the war efforts in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Afghanistan. If one wanted to see how well the surge has really worked, all the proof can be found in the quiet, mostly bipartisan manner in which the latest supplemental funding bill passed through Congress this month. Instead of crowing over the demolition of Democratic opposition it represents, President Bush took the gracious path of acknowledging the bipartisanship: ...

Despite the conciliatory tones of all the administration officials in today’s announcement, the Democrats are privately annoyed at having lost yet another battle to George Bush during his supposed lame-duck year.

Who We're Up Against

Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post

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Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.

Gitmo Resident Returns to Jihad

The Long War Journal is instrumental in following the War on Terror.

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Ajmi was released from Guantanamo Bay and was searching for "a way to reconnect with the jihad." He claimed he was tortured while at Guantanamo Bay.

Ajmi "is seemingly responsible for an earlier truck bombing at the Iraqi Army HQ in the Harmat neighborhood of Mosul on March 23, 2008," said Kazimi. ...

Thirteen Iraqi soldiers were killed and 42 were wounded after Ajmi drove an armored truck packed an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives through the gate of the outpost and detonated in a spot between the three main buildings of the compound.

Progress 5

Now this looks like progress. See photo at link (Strategy Page)

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U.S. Marine 1st Lt. Kathryne B. Schilling coaches a woman as she prepares to shoot a pistol during her training to become a Sister of Ferris, June 4, 2008, Ferris, Iraq. The Sisters of Ferris will inspect women for weapons, suicide vests, large amounts of cash and contraband at entry control points.

Non-partisan Issue - Gas

Like illegal immigration, it looks like the cost of gas cuts strongly across party lines. See, we can come together when it matters, like after 9/11 and on immigration.

Hot Air

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... Fox gets to that precise question we should start drilling immediately “in the United States” — 76% say yes, including 71% of Democrats — and whether we should be drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, to which 77% say yes.

Example #13

Evidence that we are not in hard economic times even though the media likes to tell us we are. People feel they can afford to send money to politicians. Other examples include our purchasing of HDTVs, SUVs, ever increasing movie prices/sales (no "price gouging" here, no...).

Vis: Hot Air

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Mr. Obama’s power to excite average donations of less than $100 also is admirable...

Drill

Charles Krauthammer

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Gas is $4 a gallon. Oil is $135 a barrel and rising. We import two-thirds of our oil, sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the likes of Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. And yet we voluntarily prohibit ourselves from even exploring huge domestic reserves of petroleum and natural gas.

At a time when U.S. crude oil production has fallen 40 percent in the past 25 years, 75 billion barrels of oil have been declared off-limits, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. ...

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

...forbidding drilling there does not prevent despoliation. It merely exports it. The crude oil we're not getting from the Arctic we import instead from places like the Niger Delta, where millions live and where the resulting pollution and oil spillages poison the lives of many of the world's most wretchedly poor.

Our environmental imperialism does not just redistribute pollution to people who can least afford it. It generally increases the total overall damage because oil extraction in the wealthier and more technologically advanced United States is far more environmentally sensitive.

Still better than the alternative

Not in this area, but in others.

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He says what he means and he means what he says, even when it’s really stupid.

Liberal Unemployment

Jerry Bowyer - Townhall.com

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Ask yourself a few questions: Why did unemployment surge ...?
... This huge jump in the size of the unemployed comes from new entrants to the economy – hundreds of thousands of them. ...who starts looking for work at the end of Spring? That’s right – students. Hundreds of thousands of students are looking for work right now, and they’re not finding it.

Congress is to blame. Last year Congressional Democrats (along with some Stockholm-Syndromed Republicans) passed the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, which started a phased hike of the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25. Free market economists warned them that this would increase unemployment – that rapid increases in unemployment compensation hit teens and minorities the hardest. ...

Now, we see the perfectly logical outcome of wage controls – rising unemployment among the most economically vulnerable.

Why McCain

Thomas Sowell

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Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home.
This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world-- Iran-- is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb.

The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran's nuclear bomb will be the terrorists' nuclear bomb...

One of these candidates will determine what we are going to do to stop Iran from going nuclear-- or whether we are going to do anything other than talk, as Western leaders talked in the 1930s.

At a time like this, we do not have the luxury of waiting for our ideal candidate or of indulging our emotions by voting for some third party candidate to show our displeasure-- at the cost of putting someone in the White House who is not up to the job.

Revisionist WWII

Here's a piece by Victor Davis Hanson criticizing Pat Buchanan's new book on Churchill and "The Unnecessary War"

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Buchanan and others, for example, fault the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I as too harsh on a defeated Germany...

The mistake instead was not occupying all of imperial Germany after the first war in 1918-19. ... The Allies later did occupy Germany after World War II -- and 60 years without war have followed.

The Point

From Hot Air:

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History made — and was that the point?

In watching and reading some of the reaction, many reveled in Obama’s nomination for the same reason. They want to feel good about America rather than have an experienced nominee. In fact, they not only want to feel good about America, they want to feel good about themselves. They wanted to be part of that historical moment, and that was their first priority — and that’s not limited to Obama supporters, either. The lament one hears most about Hillary’s collapsehas nothing to do with policy, experience, or expertise, but that she didn’t get to be the one who makes history.

Progress in Afghanistan

via Hot Air

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The defeatist rhetoric on Iraq has just about been discredited, and its cousin — that we’re losing in Afghanistan — may be just as endangered. The Telegraph reports that the aggressive counterinsurgency tactics adopted by NATO have “decapitated” Taliban leadership, and that cross-border attacks have taken the fight out of the rebels.
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In the winter of 2007, American commanders decided on a much more aggressive policy, using NATO’s advantage in close air support. The military no longer just defended against Taliban attacks, but used air power to chase down and destroy Taliban forces once they withdrew. NATO also significantly increased the attacks across the border in Pakistan, and has increased them more in 2008.

We Will Remember

A mother's quote at her son's Medal of Honor ceremony (via. Hot Air)

“I guess about the only thing you’re really going to remember about my son is that he did the right thing at the right time.”