This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Politics

  • White House; Carter “increasingly irrelevant” (Updated)

    Former worst US President in my memory, Jimmy Carter, feeling left out of limelight lately, took time to bash the President on BBC last week, while taking a glancing blow at Tony Blair, according to the Washington Post;

    The former president also lashed out at British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Asked by BBC Radio how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, Carter said: “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient. And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.”

    Of course, this a foreign policy critique from the guy who not only aided the mullahs’ rise to power in Iran by abandoning our tradition ally the Shah, but he also facilitated the creation of the Taliban in Afghanistan by being such a spastic creampuff that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan during his Presidency without fear of retribution (except that we boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics – that must’ve really stung, huh?).

    Well, according to the Post (Reuters Wire service story), the White House fired back at Carter yesterday;

    White House spokesman Tony Fratto had declined to react on Saturday but on Sunday fired back.

    “I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless personal criticism is out there,” Fratto told reporters. “I think it’s unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.”

    Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday’s sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.

    Yeah, well Reuters forgets that former Presidents have traditionally kept their stupid mouths shut on policy, too. Especially when they’re talking to the foreign press. Carter has been a non-stop, yammering goofball since Clinton left office and the new administration has ignored him.

    Of course, Clinton sent Carter to negotiate with the Haitian Generals and North Korea (look how well those worked out for us) and he went to insure that Hugo Chavez won his re-election in Venezuela. I’m surprised he had nothing to do with his favorite Commie’s election in Nicaragua (Daniel Ortega, by the way).

    Carter, during his interview, went on to blather;

    In his interview with the [Arkansas] Democrat-Gazette, Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having “zero peace talks” in Israel. Carter also said the administration “abandoned or directly refuted” every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts, by other presidents.

    Look how well all of Carter’s negotiations have worked out for us – yet he thinks that there is something negotiate over in the Middle East. Hey, dipstick, Arabs don’t want to negotiate – they want to kill us all. Especially YOU.

    Carter went on to ignore history;

    “We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,” Carter said.

    I guess Carter forgot that every other nation on Earth has waged pre-emptive war on us in the last century. Remember the Zimmerman Telegram? The sinking of the Lusitania? How about Pearl Harbor? And ya know what – the Carter Doctrine was a pre-emptive, unilateral move by your administration to protect the free flow of oil in the Persian Gulf.

    Don’t you think it’s time we stopped sitting still like ducks on a pond during opening day? Or would you prefer that we just sit by and wait for terrible things to happen like the embassy seizure in Iran?

    No, of course you don’t think we should get ahead of our enemies – that’s why you got to be the last President who could walk the mile down Pennsylvania Avenue on your inauguration day. By the end of your administration, you’d made the world so dangerous that every President since has had to ride in a bullet-proof limo.

    The RNC wasn’t so gentle with Carter as the White House;

    “Apparently, Sunday mornings in Plains for former President Carter includes hurling reckless accusations at your fellow man,” said Amber Wilkerson, Republican National Committee spokeswoman. She said that it was hard to take Carter seriously because he also “challenged Ronald Reagan’s strategy for the Cold War.”

    Carter’s been wrong about every one of his foreign policy criticisms and attempts over the last 35 years. Why should anyone think he has something substantial to add now?

    UPDATE: Fox News Channel (with an AP contribution) reports that Carter claims he was misunderstood;

    “My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted but I wasn’t comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking about anyone personally,” Carter said in an interview Monday when asked to explain.

    The comments “were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between [President Richard] Nixon and this administration, and I think that this administration’s foreign policy compared to Nixon’s was much worse. … I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations throughout history but just with President Nixon’s,” he told NBC’s “The Today Show.”

    What a doofus. In his quote above, he used the word “worst” which means he was comparing this administration with at least two other administrations, otherwise he would have used the word “worse” which would be used in comparing two administrations (Nixon versus Bush). Language means stuff.

    Oh, and he admits that he’s irrelevant;

    Carter…said he doesn’t “claim to have any relevancy” on the Iraq issue, though he has sent reports for the president and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his personal activities monitoring elections around the world.

    Well, he finally got something right. The old coot needs to go back to Plains, sit on the porch of his mansion and rock himself further into obscurity.

    Editor’s Note: I know I’ve said much of this before, but I feel it bears repeating. This a form of self-flagellation over the guilt that my first vote in a Presidential election went to Jimmy Carter. I regretted it within days after his inauguration when his first official act was to give amnesty to draft dodgers. And the main reason I’d voted for him was because he’d promised, during the campaign, to not surrender the Panama Canal (where I was stationed at the time) – we all know how that turned out.

    Later, I spent weeks on Green Ramp in Fort Bragg waiting for the signal to run a Soviet combat brigade out of our Hemisphere – that of course never came to fruition, to our great shame – but our equipment at the time had been manufactured during the Vietnam war and there were no parts available and mostly failed to work – none of us were surprised when Desert One ended because of maintenance failures.

    There was no fuel or money to train; we practiced jumping from the tailgate of moving duece-and-a-half trucks to simulate assembling on the drop zone. When I got promoted to Sergeant from Corporal, my raise was an whopping $22/month.

    So yeah, my beef with Carter is personal and will last until one of us dies. Expect one of these posts everytime he opens his stupid yap.

  • More Edwards hypocrisy

    The Wall Street Journal editorial board takes on John Edwards today in their Review and Outlook piece entitled “Pride of the Caymans”;

    Let us say right up front that it’s terrific that John Edwards lives in a country where he can lose an election and still land a $480,000 part-time job as a consultant to an investment firm that keeps its hedge funds in the Cayman Islands as a tax shelter for its clients. This truly is the land of opportunity.

    We’re also encouraged to hear that, according to the former Senator’s spokesman, “John Edwards is running for President to give every American the opportunities that he’s had.” While there may not be enough half-a-million-dollar-a-year part-time consulting gigs to go around just yet, the hedge fund industry is growing. And there’s always private equity if you find yourself, as Mr. Edwards described his 2005 circumstance, making $40,000 a year at an antipoverty think tank and wanting to learn something about “capital markets.” Thus did he turn, in his time of need, to Fortress Investment Group LLC, pride of the Caymans.

    So the editorial goes on tell us how the pretty pony railed against US investments being sheltered overseas in the 2004 campaign and today. How the Breck Girl told AP that he took the job to learn about the relationship between capital markets and poverty.

    How refreshing it would have been, then, for Mr. Edwards to have emerged from his toil in the crucible of high finance to explain that all is not moral darkness in the upper reaches of the investing class; that people who invest in businesses help alleviate poverty and make the economy strong; and that it is risk-taking that offers Americans their best — indeed, their only — chance to have “the opportunities he’s had.”

    It was not to be, alas. Mr. Edwards said instead that if he’s elected President he’ll still try to abolish offshore tax shelters. At least he’ll have already made his money.

    Well, on top of this bald-faced lie that he took the consulting job as a learning opportunity (how many companies take on consultants who are there to learn), the man who has never had a bit of soil beneath his nails is telling us how we should spend our Memorial Day this year “supporting” the troops by demanding that they surrender (from Crotchety Old Bastard).

    This is the Democrats’ Great Hair Hope?  Actually, I guess he’s no worse than their other choices.

  • Illegal Immigration

    I have difficulty formulating a stand on illegal immigration. I’m pretty wishy-washy on it, actually and only because  there are no easy answers that will satisfy everyone involved. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were legal immigrants from Sweden in 1899, my wife is a legal immigrant, my step-daughter and her daughter are both legal immigrants. But, that’s legal immigration.

    My wife is pretty upset at illegals because of the nutroll we engaged in to get her here and keep her here that they’ve avoided. Back in the early days, we had paperwork to file every January to report her address and employment status.

    Once, when she went home for 18 months while I was deployed elsewhere in the world, she lost her resident alien status and she had to file all over again. When her alien card was stolen, we had to replace it, which took years.

    Of course, when you’re an illegal immigrant, none of that stuff bothers you, I suppose.

    We know hundreds of illegals here. Montgomery County, MD is full of them and since we gravitate toward Latin cultural events and restuarants, it’s hard to avoid them. Do I want them “sent back where they come from”? Not really. Generally, they work hard and contribute to the community here.

    Since the welfare state and popular culture has created a lot of work that Americans won’t do (I know it sounds cliche – but it’s true), like fast food restuarants, landscaping and picking up behind the filthy pigs who were born here, they serve a real purpose. I recognize that is a pretty insensitive and racist thing to say (and the Leftists that say it are being racist without realizing it), but, again, it’s true.

    Now, according to the Washington Post today;

    Democratic leaders were leery of three pivotal concessions to the conservatives. The first would make illegal immigrants’ access to long-term visas and the new guest-worker program contingent upon the implementation of the border crackdown. Before those immigrant-rights measures could go into effect, the government must deploy 18,000 new Border Patrol agents and four unmanned aerial vehicles; build 200 miles of vehicle barriers, 370 miles of fencing, and 70 ground-based radar and camera towers; provide funds for the detention of 27,500 illegal immigrants a day; and complete new identification tools to help employers screen out illegal job applicants.

    That’s probably the most important point of the whole bill – stop further illegal immigration. In fact, they ought to take about 50,000 immigrant laborers to the border tonight and build the wall and towers in one night, so illegal immgration ends right now. Just discussing the new legislation is probably influencing a couple thousand more to make the dash.

    I think the immigration should be stopped because it’s draining poor, undeveloped country of it’s most energetic citizens. I love Latin America for it’s culture, climate and food and I hate to see it destroyed because the most valuable inhabitants leave.

    The Wall Street Journal reports that this is no free ride for those here, though;

    The proposed legislation would step up security along the U.S.-Mexican border, but also allow almost all of those immigrants now in the U.S. illegally to remain as long as they were willing to report to authorities and pay a $5,000 fine. One of its most sweeping innovations would be a guest-worker program that eventually would allow 400,000 temporary workers to come to the U.S. each year to fill low-skilled jobs in the booming service sector.

    Although, it is close to a free ride. $5k isn’t a very big penalty considering the benefit that being here has brought the illegals all these years – and in the years to come. It’ll barely cover the costs of filing all of the paperwork and doing the necessary background investigations.

    From the Washington Times;

    Those convicted of serious crimes would not be eligible for the path to citizenship, though negotiators said they expect most illegal aliens to qualify. Final legalization wouldn’t take place until the security “triggers” are met.
        Under the plan, all workers, including U.S. citizens, will have to be verified as legal workers by their employers. For noncitizens, that means using a tamper-proof ID. For U.S. citizens, it means a driver’s license, passport or other government-issued ID. 

    I know the xenophobic Right and the lenient Left (including the peckerwoods that want California to seceed and become a Mexican State) aren’t happy about any of this, but then, that’s what compromise is, isn’t it? A way to insure that no one is happy?

    It’s a difficult problem that has no easy, workable answers. This is probably the best we could get under the circumstances. I probably fall in line with Lindsey Graham (shudder);

    “This is the last, best chance to pass immigration reform on our terms as a nation,” Graham said. “If this somehow collapsed it will be years before you could recreate this.”

    I think the media and the Democrats are making hundreds of missteps when they make a show of meeting with Hispanic “leaders” as Nancy Pelosi is doing;

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met today with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and said the Senate measure is a good starting point that may need to be improved through amendments. Pelosi, a California Democrat, said the House intends to complete work on its own bill before recessing in August.

    If the Democrats act like the Latin Community are the only people with anything important to contribute to the discussion, they make the mistake of alienating the entire rest of the country – you know…the people who have a real and legitimate stake in the lawmaking aspect of this. But, then Democrats only see us as homogenous groups of people who think like the other people who are our same color, or have the same accent. 

    But, I agree with Crotchety Old Bastard that illegal immigrants should just sit down and shut up and play the hand we deal them – it’s an incredibly generous plan and too much niggling over the details is going to have the same effect as Arafat’s holding out for more at the Wye Plantation.  

    I love Michele Malkin, but I think she’s overreacting this time. If there’s no compromise on this, it’ll only get worse – but my proviso to my admittedly wishy-washy opinion is that ENFORCEMENT MUST START NOW! Probably last night.

    UPDATE: Apparently Uncle Jimbo at BlackFive agrees with me, somewhat.

  • What John Edwards learned about poverty

    The Democrats’ “Breck Girl”, John Edwards sacrificed a portion of his life to advise a hedge fund so that he could learn about poverty. In an interview with Nedra Pickler of Associated Press, Edwards explained his thought process;

    Democrat John Edwards said Tuesday that he worked for a hedge fund between presidential campaigns to learn about financial markets and their relationship to poverty – and to make money too.

    Asked if he had to join a hedge fund to learn about financial markets, Edwards replied, “How else would I have done it?”

    That question probably explains how clueless Edwards is when it comes to dealing with the middleclass and lower class workers. I can think of thousands of ways to learn about poverty that wouldn’t involve getting paid lawyer fees. Working in a soup kitchen, spend a night in a box in an alley, probably just about anything except working for a hedgefund.

    Now, here’s the rest of the story from Chris Cooper of the Wall Street Journal;

    Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards earned a $479,000 salary in 2006 working for Fortress Investment Group LLC, a New York-based hedge fund, according to financial disclosure forms released yesterday.

    The former North Carolina senator, whose campaign is rooted in an appeal to working-class voters, has faced questions about his time spent at the high-paying fund catering to wealthy investors before formally launching his campaign.

    On top of the salary he drew as a senior adviser, Mr. Edwards and his wife also hold investments in several Fortress fund pools, the largest of which is valued at between $1 million and $5 million, according to the forms that were filed to meet a May 15 deadline.

    So I guess he learned that he’s never gonna be poor as long as he pretends to be a presidential candidate.

    Even the Washington Post detects something a little fishy in Edwards’ explanation;

    Edwards has faced questions about the hedge fund — where he said he worked only a few days a month — because Fortress owned offshore funds that served as tax havens for investors and because the firm’s portfolio included subprime lenders, which provide high-risk loans that often target minorities. As a candidate, Edwards has railed against both practices. 

    So, Edwards doesn’t mind taking a half-mil from people who he claims are sucking the middleclass dry. (I don’t exactly agree with the Post’s assertion that a high-risk loan can target minorities. it’s not like someone on the street hustled some passers-by – someone had to sign something along the line, but I guess this isn’t about loans, is it?)

    Edwards is a rich boy, silver spoon, elitist playing at being a common-man type, but half-million dollar part time jobs and $400 haircuts tell a different story.

  • Senate rejects withdrawal proposal

    The Senate Democrats and the anti-war freakazoids got handed their collective ass today, according to the Wall Street Journal;

    The Senate overwhelmingly rejected calls for an early withdrawal from Iraq as Democrats struggled to find a path to end weeks of confrontation with President Bush over emergency war funding through Sept. 30.

    The 67-29 defeat was even more decisive than a 255-171 House vote last week in which similar withdrawal language split Democrats and was rejected. But the gap between the White House and the new Democratic majority over Iraq appears to be only widening as the administration takes a hard line against even setting a target date for redeployment, subject to the president’s approval.

    Such a compromise had been crafted by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, but the Michigan Democrat abruptly withdrew the proposal this morning after White House officials said it would still provoke a presidential veto.

    Levin has just realized what I’ve been saying for weeks; if the Democrats keep sending pre-vetoed legislation to the President, they’re gonna be the one’s held responsible by the voters next year. And since the troops or national security are not the Democrats’ minds, maybe they’ll settle down and get some work done now. I don’t think they could get their lunch order through Congress these days. 

    And, if you’re wondering what the bill was that Levin was proposing, I found it at Flopping Aces and it was a doozy;

    Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., have offered an amendment to the Water Resources Development Act to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by October 1, 2007, if certain commitments are not met by the Iraqi government.

    The withdrawal would have to be completed within six months, the same terms that drew a presidential veto when they were made part of the 2007 supplemental war spending bill.

    Yeah, you read that right – it was included in a water resources bill. Of all the underhanded, slimy crap, they tried to slip an anti-war measure into a conservation bill for a double-whammy on the administration.

    I’m fairly certain that if the war ended tomorrow, though, the Democrats would put it in our loss column and find something else to complain about by tomorrow tonight.

    Dafydd at Big Lizards discusses the impact this will have on the Democrat Presidential candidates.

  • Bye, Lanny

    Lanny Davis, the only Democrat on the president’s privacy board, resigned yesterday. The Wall Street Journal reports;

    The lone Democrat on a White House privacy board has abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the Bush administration over the board’s role in protecting civil liberties.

    Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer and former Clinton White House counsel, said this week he no longer believed the five-member board was sufficiently independent to provide robust oversight of controversial government surveillance programs.

    Leaders of the Sept. 11 commission pointedly criticized the board last week for not doing its job and questioned many of the findings in the board’s 49-page annual report to Congress.

    His chief complaint, according to the Washington Post was revisons the White House made to the commission’s report;

    The Bush administration made more than 200 revisions to the first report of a civilian board that oversees government protection of personal privacy, including the deletion of a passage on anti-terrorism programs that intelligence officials deemed “potentially problematic” intrusions on civil liberties, according to a draft of the report obtained by The Washington Post.

    One of the panel’s five members, Democrat Lanny J. Davis, resigned in protest Monday over deletions ordered by White House lawyers and aides. The changes came after the congressionally created Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board had unanimously approved the final draft of its first report to lawmakers, renewing an internal debate over the board’s independence and investigative power.

    Some of the changes sought by the administration ultimately were reversed, and some members of the panel said they were not opposed to the others.

    I wonder where Mr. Davis came down on the heavily-edited 9/11 Commission’s report. I wonder how upset he was over Jamie Gorelick‘s membership on that Commission. I wonder if Mr. Davis railed against the Able Danger group not being allowed to testify to the 9/11 Commission.

    This is just another attempt to discredit the Administration. The American public has been misled by Democrats since the PATRIOT Act was enacted on every measure that has worked successfully to protect us from another terrorist attack and now Lanny Davis has thrown himself on another grenade for Leftism.

  • John Doe Protection Act

    As you’ve probably read on other blogs, Congressman Steve Pearce (R-NM) has introduced what is being called the John Doe Protection Act across the internet. Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times has been a real tiger on this whole issue since the Flying Imams started this whole thing last November;

    Muslim religious leaders removed from a Minneapolis flight last week exhibited behavior associated with a security probe by terrorists and were not merely engaged in prayers, according to witnesses, police reports and aviation security officials.
        Witnesses said three of the imams were praying loudly in the concourse and repeatedly shouted “Allah” when passengers were called for boarding US Airways Flight 300 to Phoenix.
        “I was suspicious by the way they were praying very loud,” the gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department.
        Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks — two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin.
        “That would alarm me,” said a federal air marshal who asked to remain anonymous. “They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane.”
        A pilot from another airline said: “That behavior has been identified as a terrorist probe in the airline industry.”

    Audrey also warned us last month about the threat to the “John Does” who reported their suspicious behavior;

    A group of imams suing US Airways for discrimination amended their lawsuit this week to target only the “John Doe” passengers who they say are racist and falsely accused them of behaving suspiciously.
        The six imams were removed from a flight in Minneapolis in November for disruptive behavior reported by passengers and members of the flight crew.
        The lawsuit filed earlier this month targeted “passengers who contacted US Airways to report the alleged ‘suspicious’ behavior of plaintiffs performing their prayer at the airport terminal.”
        The amended lawsuit identifies possible John Does as individuals who “may have made false reports against plaintiffs solely with the intent to discriminate against them on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity and national origin.”  

    Today she’s writing about the legislation introduced by Joe Lieberman in the Senate and Congressman Pearce in the House;

    A bipartisan coalition in the House and Senate is pushing legislation to protect Americans from being sued for reporting to authorities suspicious activity that may lead to a terrorist attack.
        “If you see something, you should say something, and not have to worry about being sued,” said Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican.
        The measure was introduced in the Senate late Friday and is sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, along with Mr. Kyl and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the panel’s ranking Republican.

         A House version introduced yesterday is sponsored by Rep. Steve Pearce, New Mexico Republican; Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee; and Rep. Bill Shuster, Pennsylvania Republican.
        “In a post-9/11 reality, passenger vigilance is essential to security. If we fail to protect passengers that report suspicious behavior, it would be a huge victory for terrorists,” Mr. King said.

    The House legislation is HR 2291 and HR 1640 (this link takes you to thomas.loc.gov, just type in the HR# in the search box to read the bills – they don’t have permanent links). I’ve got a call in to Lieberman’s office to find out the Senate designation that hasn’t been returned yet. The House Resolution 1640 reads;

      (a) In General- An individual shall not be liable for any injury or damages relating to such individual’s qualified disclosure of suspicious behavior. A civil action for damages related to such disclosure may not be brought in any State or Federal court.
      (b) Qualified Disclosure of Suspicious Behavior- For purposes of this section, the term `qualified disclosure of suspicious behavior’ means any disclosure of the allegedly suspicious behavior of another individual or individuals to a Federal, State, or local law enforcement agency or other security personnel that is made in good faith and with the reasonable belief that such behavior is suspicious.

    HR 2991 reads;

      Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. IMMUNITY FOR REPORTING SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR.

      (a) In General- Any person who, in good faith, makes, or causes to be made, a voluntary disclosure of any suspicious transaction, activity, or occurrence indicating that an individual may be engaging, or preparing to engage, in an action described in section 3 to any employee or agent of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation, or the Department of Justice, any Federal, State, or local law enforcement officer, any transportation security officer, or any employee or agent of a transportation system shall be immune from civil liability to any person for such disclosure under any Federal, State, or local law.

    (b) False Disclosures- Subsection (a) shall not apply to any statement or disclosure that the person making the statement or disclosure knows to be false at the time it is made.

     SEC. 2. IMMUNITY FOR MITIGATION OF THREATS

      Any person in receipt of a report described in section 1 who takes reasonable action to mitigate a suspicious action described in section 3 shall be immune from civil liability to any person for such action under any Federal, State, or local law.

     SEC. 3. COVERED DISCLOSURES.

      The actions described in this section are possible or attempted violations of law relating to–

    (1) a threat to a transportation system or the safety or security of its passengers; or

    (2) an act of terrorism (as defined in section 3077 of title 18, United States Code) that involves, or is directed against, a transportation system or its passengers.

     SEC. 4. ATTORNEY FEES AND COSTS.

      Any person who is named as a defendant in a civil lawsuit for making a voluntary disclosure described in section 1 or for taking an action described in section 2, and is found to be immune from civil liability under this Act, shall be entitled to recover from the plaintiff all reasonable costs and attorney fees allowed by the court in which the lawsuit was decided.

     SEC. 5. EFFECTIVE DATE.

      This Act shall take effect on November 20, 2006, and shall apply to all activities and claims occurring on or after such date.

     

    But the Democrats are hot to strip the language from last month’s Transportion bill as reported by Crotchety Old Bastard  and Little Green Footballs. Michele Malkin has more on the bill.

    I expect everyone to call, write, fax, and email your Congressmembers to support these bills.

  • Anti-counter-terrorism Democrats

    Who could be surprised by the Democrats’ behavior towards one of our strongest allies in the Southern Hemisphere, as reported in the Washington Times’ editorial today;

    Consider the record of Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia, since his election in 2002. A deal with paramilitary forces has resulted in more than 31,000 fighters surrendering their weapons. By boosting the size and strength of security forces and going after the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Mr. Uribe was able to reduce the guerilla’s presence in central Colombia. The country is safer — the annual murder count, on a steady increase before Mr. Uribe took office, has declined by more than one-third — and Colombia is more prosperous. The rate of increase in gross domestic product has gone up. Throughout his tenure, moreover, Mr. Uribe has been a strong U.S. ally in a region without many.
        With these positive steps, it’s little surprise that Mr. Uribe enjoys solid approval ratings at home. In Washington earlier this month, however, Mr. Uribe found that neither his success nor his support of the United States could win him so much as a cordial reception on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, under pressure from interest groups, initially rebuffed requests to meet with Mr. Uribe. She did meet with him, but later issued a press release that did not even mention the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement that Democrats have held up and that Mr. Uribe had traveled to Washington to advance.
        Instead, the speaker used the meeting as another opportunity to hit at revelations that members of Mr. Uribe’s government had been involved with paramilitary groups. Sen. Patrick Leahy cited the same as reason for blocking some $55 million in military aid to Colombia last month.

    Democrats complain about how other countries perceive us and our foreign policy – who could blame the rest of the world with fickle, irresponsible terrorist-hugging jackasses running the Congress like a pack of elementary school nerds.

    And the Washington Post today, gets to hammering on Uribe claiming that legislators in Columbia have been arrested for participating in para-military groups and that they’re political allies of Uribe’s. If you scroll down towards the end of the Post article, you see Uribe has been instrumental in dismantling the organizations;

    Uribe ordered the commanders jailed in Itagui prison in northern Antioquia state until they confessed their crimes and provided details about the land and other property they had stolen during a long and bloody dirty war. But the disclosures by Semana, coupled with the fact that the commanders have so far revealed little about their crimes, have cast doubt on the government’s effort to dismantle the paramilitary groups and bring justice to victims.

    Just because the dismantling isn’t going as fast as the Democrats and the Post would like, this is certainly no reason to withold funding from one the few leaders in Latin America committed to fighting terrorism in the region. I’d like to see them get this exercised about Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran dismantling their organizations and plans.