June 24th 2009
Y
eah, yeah, we get the whole “Fair and Balanced” thing and all … but check out the party affiliation in the banner below Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford. No such luck - although another Southern politician with a similar fondness for Argentine women, Wilbur Mills, did have a legit “D” after his name.
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January 25th 2009
I
‘ve been doing a bit of Facebook “wallfare” over Guantamo with liberal blogger Dan Chmielewski. He knee-jerks on the subject, seeing Gitmo as a blight on America’s honor, without giving much more thought to the consequences of closing it other than disputing the recent report that 61 detainees released from Gitmo have been identified to be back at work trying to advance jihadism. Dan probably wouldn’t agree with this assessment of Gitmo, from a post on Civilian Irregular:
Our Nation is at war, and JTF-Guantanamo serves as an integral component of OPERATION Enduring Freedom. We are the model organization for safe and humane enemy combatant detention operations, and for the collection and dissemination of strategic intelligence supporting the Global War on Terror. We operate under the watchful gaze of the Nation and the world. We are a strategic asset operated by a highly trained and patriotic team of military and civilian professionals, dedicated to supporting our Nation’s interests in the Global War on Terror.
The post goes on to describe two reasons for keeping detainees at Gitmo. The first is gaining intelligence, which we all can understand and which has been written about ad nauseum from all sides of the political spectrum. The other is lawism, a new term for me.
If it weren’t for lawfare we could execute them when their intelligence value has been exhausted. Lawfare, according to Colonel Charles Dunlap,
describes a method of warfare where law is used as a means of realizing a military objective. There are many dimensions to lawfare, but the one ever more frequently embraced by U.S. opponents is a cynical manipulation of the rule of law and the humanitarian values it represents. Rather than seeking battlefield victories, per se, challengers try to destroy the will to fight by undermining the public support that is indispensable when democracies like the U.S. conduct military interventions.”
We are struggling to find a way to combat lawfare without either providing terrorists with information they should not have, or stepping on the rights of American citizens. We don’t have the solution, and we shouldn’t be forced to close Gitmo because of political deadlines until we have a viable lawfare strategy - and a strategy to keep ourselves safe from the damage these vicious animals can foist on us.
Continue reading “Sunday Scan - January 25, ‘09″
October 20th 2008
B
arrack Obama and Joe Biden are both lawyers, as are Hillary and Bill Clinton. Oh, and Michelle Obama is a lawyer, too. That takes care of the top of the Dem party.
Moving on, John Edwards, the disgusting former Dem candidate for president, is a lawyer, and so is his poor suffering wife, Elizabeth, who ought to sue him. In fact, an email I received recently revealed that every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate).
Every Democrat vice-presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school, as did Harry Reid. The email said both Congressional Dem leaders are lawyers, but I don’t find evidence that Nancy Pelosi is. What law school would accept her? What the heck; it’s an almost perfect sweep for the Dems.
Not so for the GOP. President Bush and Vice President Cheney are not lawyers, but businessmen. John McCain was career military and Sarah Palin’s degree is in journalism.
Mitt Romney has a Juris Doctor, but he’s also got an MBA. Mike Huckabee put his religion degree to work as a pastor. I’m not sure how Ron Paul’s BA degree in biology has played out for him, but he does seem to be surrounded by a lot of smarmy stuff. He went on to become an OB/Gyn, delivering oodles of babies (as commenter Rich pointed out; thanks.) The other three primary contenders, none of whom won much approval from GOP voters, were all lawyers - or played one on TV: Rudy Giuliani, Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson.
The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and, Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.
Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination when he ran in 1976 against Ronald Reagan, who was most decidedly not a lawyer.
In short, the leadership of the Democratic party is made up overwhelmingly of people who’s business is writing and applying laws and regulations. The GOP’s leadership is made up overwhelmingly of people who have tried to make a living despite all those laws and regulations.
Who do you trust more to fix the economy? The party of lawyers, or the party of business people?
The Obama administration told us that not only would they be very good at spending unfathomable sums of money, but they’d also be maestros at turning that cash into jobs for a job-hungry America. Like so many White House words, the Big Job Promise is turning out to be nothing more than hype-fuel for the big-government machine.
Take the $3.3 billion grant program to upgrade the nation’s electricity network. Please. When it was announced in April by Joe “Oh, It’s Just A Little Lie” Biden, he had a pretty simple - if grammatically challenged - explanation for the grant’s intent: “This is jobs - jobs.”
ABC’s Rick Klein did some digging and found:
[T]he Obama administration is now saying it will not take the potential for job creation into account in “rating” proposed projects for possible funding — after initially saying that would be a primary consideration.
In April, when the Energy Department first announced regulations for companies that wish to apply for “Smart Grid Investment Grants,” “job creation and retention” was among the explicit criteria. …
But late last month, the department quietly modified the criteria to take the job piece out. As the department explained in a June 26 set of Frequently Asked Questions:
“These criteria differ significantly from those presented within the [Notice of Intent]. First, DOE removed the criterion on the extent of jobs creation ….”
Good governance mandates that return on investment should be the criteria for selecting these projects, not jobs, so I’m not disappointed in DOE’s new direction. But I am just a wee bit disappointed that the White House has become such a den of hyperbole and deceit.
With Obama winning the presidency by seven percent, we can't blame the media. Their laudatory coverage and refusal to extensively probe into Obama's background and [lack of] experience was at best responsible for five percent of his vote, the pundits tell us. Here is a compilation of over 100 significant instances of pro-Obama/anti-McCain bias during the 2008 campaign.
"Thank you for the Voice of the Victims films. The students really liked it, and it means so much to them to hear real stories and not watch a cheesy drama like so many other videos."
— a high school teacher.
The most powerful film about drugs of choice and choices about drugs.
