Political Football

This post was put up on 11/30 and today 12/03 I have an update.

Mike Huckabee’s campaign is being aided by an independent group run by a former top aide at the NRSC and funded in part by a group of retired Procter & Gamble executives in Ohio.

“Trust Huckabee,” whose website went live last week, was responsible for flooding Iowa with automated calls last night praising the former Arkansas governor and criticizing his GOP opponents.

Read more by taking the link below.

Link here

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wow, I got “push polled” by a group that is REALLY AFRAID of a Rudy Presidency.

Most push polls are longer in duration; it was stated as a 60 second poll, which it pretty much was.

It started out asking if I was going to the Iowa Caucus (did not ask D or R) and continued to ask me to specify which candidate I was supporting by saying a name then asking me to say YES or NO. This was also a ROBO poll (no human intervention), no keying by me, so a ton of calls can be made in a short amount of time).

After I said yes for Rudy it went through two rather nastily worded issues that were apparently supposed to change my mind on Rudy’s candidacy. One of the questions used “homosexual” rather than the more commonly used term “gay” to pose the question – I can only assume that was to make me cringe? Didn’t work.

Rudy’s stance on gay rights is no different that most of the first tier of Republican candidates. He does NOT support Gay marriage, as some have indicated, he does support civil unions as many candidates do. I guess the real crime is that he has some gay friends and that makes some people uncomfortable.

The second question was a nastily phrased question about Rudy’s integrity based on legal trouble Bernard Kerick (police chief during part of Rudy’s time as Mayor) is in. Rudy acknowledges Kerick is facing legal trouble on some tax issues and more but also says:

“Bernie Kerik worked for me while I was mayor of New York City. There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City?

The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime, a correction program that went from being one of the worst in the country to one that was on ‘60 Minutes’ as one of the best in the country, 90 percent reduction of violence in the jails.”

Take the full measure of the person for which you’re casting a vote.

Push Polling is a very ugly part of politics – I have urged my Rudy friends to answer differently from me in the call if they get it and see if they bash that candidate. If we can get enough calls documented, the culprit will be exposed.

Posting all the negatives about a man who has served in the Public sector for most of his life, will not change the results he’s achieved or could acheive as President. This is a sign of desparation.

Let’s put one more negative out there and put more context to it…

About the paying the Mayor’s security detail from 10 years ago you’ve been seeing in the news?

Posted by the Politico last night in response to Giuliani’s appearance on Katie Couric, New York City Comptoller William Thompson was quoted as saying that his auditors were “stonewalled” when they tried to look into the matter of Giuliani’s security expenses.

However, not until the 13th paragraph does the story note that Thompson is a Democrat. Left out of the story completely is the fact that Thompson has designs on running for mayor in 2009, and has been raising money for over a year. Does that automatically invalidate everything he says? No. But it’s certainly a relevant detail to consider and falls under the category of full disclosure.

Rudy continues to say there was nothing irregular done on his part.

The police department paid for all of these expenses. But since the police department would sometimes be slow in payment. City Hall would pay it first, then the police department would reimburse every single penny of it. And now we’ve been able to confirm that. So this was really, I know what this was. This story is five years old. It came out two hours before a debate. It’s a typical political hit job with only half the story told … not that second part told … that every single penny was reimbursed … that all of this was public. All of this was discoverable. It was not done in a way that nobody could see it.

Politics is indeed an ugly business. -pf

The 11/28 “youtube” debate was promoted as Republicans sending in questions.  So much for that…  at least 4 of the more pointed questions were sumbitted by clearly Democrat citizens - it would have taken almost NO research time to uncover that information – follow the links below to read the details.  

1) Gay question linked to Clinton 

Link to documentation of summary above 

2) Abortion questioner is declared Edwards supporter

3) Log Cabin Republican questioner is declared Obama supporter

4) Lead toy questioner is a prominent union activist for the Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers

click on this line to read another article about the debate

And so the revolutionary facade of the great YouTube Experiment has fallen in spectacular fashion: Many of these questioners weren’t the ordinary Americans as advertised by CNN at all. Many in fact were activists, partisans and ideologues, who unsurprisingly gamed CNN, when they weren’t making total fools of themselves.

to read the entire article, click here 

Oh yeah, and Clinton the male was in town a few days ago and stirred up some dust of his own.

Link to article below

Bill Clinton stumbles on stump for wife

By Jill Lawrence
USA TODAY 

WASHINGTON — It was a partial clause in a sentence uttered in Muscatine, Iowa. But Bill Clinton’s assertion Monday that he’d opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning” triggered outbursts across the political spectrum.From the left, the right and the media establishment, the judgment was the former president had committed a gaffe that could hurt his wife’s presidential bid.“Bill Clinton Rewrites History on Iraq?” wondered ABC News’ Political Radar blog. “A political blunder of monumental proportions,” Dan Spencer wrote at the conservative Redstate.com. At liberal DailyKos .com, the headline was “Bill Clinton’s ‘truthiness’ problem.”Clinton’s comment, reported by the Associated Press, came in a discussion of tax cuts for wealthy Americans during wartime. “Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” he said.New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign posted quotes Tuesday from Bill Clinton in which he highlighted his reservations about using force. Before the war started in 2003, he said that “we don’t invade everybody whose regime we want to change” and that if Saddam Hussein disarms, the United States should seek regime change by helping his rivals.“As he said before the war and many times since, President Clinton disagreed with taking the country to war without allowing the weapons inspectors to finish their jobs,” said campaign spokesman Jay Carson.Clinton was more oblique in Little Rock and Iowa City less than a week after the invasion. “Whatever our politics” and “whatever your views,” he said, it was time to support President Bush and the troops.Bloggers, however, posted quotes that underscored Clinton’s support for Bush and concern about Saddam. For instance:•In April 2003 in New York, Clinton said “Saddam is gone and good riddance” and Bush shouldn’t be criticized “for trying to act” on the belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

•In May 2003 at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., he said that “I supported the president when he asked the Congress for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

The hubbub comes as polls show Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama neck and neck in the race to win Iowa’s leadoff nomination contest. They were tied at 29% in a Strategic Vision poll of Iowa Democrats released today.

University of Iowa political scientist Peverill Squire said Clinton’s remark may revive concern about his wife’s vote to authorize war. “It’s undoubtedly a distraction,” he said.

Obama gave a strong anti-war speech in late 2002, while he was a state legislator. Asked Tuesday about Clinton saying he opposed the war from the start, Obama laughed and said: “If he did, I don’t think most of us heard about it.”

For the last week rumors have been swirling between Ann Arbor and Iowa City that Kirk Frentz is going to be the next University of Michigan Football Head Coach.

Apparently that was only a well established rumor that developed so many “legs” that it took on the look of an urban legend.

And there it died.

Today the University of Iowa AD announced that neither he or Kirk had any contact with the Michigan AD.

Kirk is a good coach, and Iowa is lucky to have him.  Even with the disppointing record over the last three years, he’s the consensus guy for the job and I’m happy the rumor was just that.

I doubt two things -

1) that Iowa will be bowling this year (sigh…)
2) there will be any more talk about it until after the BCS bowls are over -

There seems to be an understanding that Les Miles (LSU coach) is in the running as is Cincinnati’s Coach and a few others.  We’ll see.

In Kirk We Trust

Link
Christopher Booker’s Notebook
By Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 1:48am GMT 25/11/2007
We are set on a course of ‘planet saving’ madness

The scare over global warming, and our politicians’ response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level – not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his “first major speech on climate change”, airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 – which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign trying to commit Winston Churchill’s government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.

Mr Brown’s only concrete proposal for reaching this absurd target seems to be his plan to ban plastic bags, whatever they have to do with global warming (while his government also plans a near-doubling of flights out of Heathrow).

But of course he is no longer his own master in such fantasy exercises. Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the “planet-saving” measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.

By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from “renewables”. At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill).

As Whitehall officials privately briefed ministers in August, there is no way Britain can begin to meet such a fanciful target (even if the Government manages to ram through another 30,000 largely useless wind turbines).

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from “biofuels” by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage).

Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs.

This compulsory switch to low-energy bulbs, apart from condemning us to live in uglier homes under eye-straining light, is in practice completely out of the question, because, according to our Government’s own figures, more than half Britain’s domestic light fittings cannot take them.

This year will be remembered for two things.

First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that – yet another vastly inflated scare.

Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon “Plastic Bags” Brown, wholly out of their wits.

Billions of MoD spending is off target

The great row over under-funding of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, led in the Lords by five former Chiefs of the Defence Staff, has so far missed a hugely important part of the story, although it was hinted at by General Sir Mike Jackson when he was interviewed on the Today programme.

Alas, John Humphrys failed to pick up the significance of Jackson’s observation that “we may not have enough to do the things which we do now and the things which we may have to do in the future”.

The problem with our defence spending in recent years is not that the Ministry of Defence has been starved of cash. On the contrary, it has been earmarking colossal sums for projects designed to equip us to fight imaginary wars in the future, as part of the European Rapid Reaction Force to which Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon committed us around 2000: £20 billion on the Navy’s two giant carriers (with planes and infrastructure); £16 billion on FRES, a new family of vehicles for the Army; not to mention the £20 billion already committed to Eurofighters for the RAF.

It was the diversion of resources into planning for that imaginary future that took the eyes of the MoD and the then-Chief of the Defence Staff off the need to equip our forces adequately for the totally different type of insurgency war they have actually been having to fight.

The MoD is belatedly trying to make amends for this disastrous blunder, for instance equipping our troops with properly mine-protected Mastiffs, instead of the unprotected Snatch Land Rovers that have caused so many deaths. It may also help that enthusiasm for the EU’s fantasy armed forces of the future has been on the wane.

But no one at the time shared that enthusiasm more obviously (or was happier to send those hopelessly inadequate Land Rovers to Iraq) than the officer who was then Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Mike Jackson.

Schools minister neglects homework

Desmond Swayne, MP for New Forest West, tells me of a fearful problem affecting Hampshire schools, which have been told by the county education officer, Ian Beacham, that under new rules teachers must no longer drive pupils in mini-buses unless they have a full “passenger vehicle licence” – “a huge and expensive undertaking which entitles them to drive a coach or bus”.

Threatening many extra-curricular activities, such as away sporting fixtures, this is causing such grief that Mr Swayne has asked in Parliament whether it is right that teachers should be forbidden to drive children in this way.

Schools minister Jim Knight didn’t know the answer but said he would look into it. Harriet Harman, Leader of the House, suggested that Mr Swayne should move for a debate on the issue.

Had those ministers or Hampshire’s education officer learned to use Google, they might have found in seconds that this is all a fuss about nothing. The two relevant EU directives on driving licences, 91/439 and 2003/59, make clear that teachers are exempted from the licensing requirements, as does a leaflet available at the click of a mouse on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency website.

But does it not say something about the way we now allow our laws to be made in Brussels that neither ministers nor a council official responsible for enforcing them appear to know what those laws say?

On October 19, 1999 I reported here a remarkable “personal message” sent out to Britain’s small businesses over the signature of Nick Montagu, then head of the Inland Revenue Board. He told them how “exciting and important” it was for him and his staff to be “at the forefront of implementing the new Labour Government’s policy agenda”.

How apt, in light of the mega-grief they are currently causing the Government, that eight years later our incompetent tax-gatherers appear to be playing such a significant part in New Labour’s impending downfall.

Link to article @ Townhall.com

Lessons in Holiday Dining With Liberals
By Larry Elder
Thursday, November 22, 2007

Just before the holidays, I had my annual dinner with longtime friends — all political liberals.

My friends’ son, now in college, asked me a health care question as I munched on a delicious dish of short ribs. “If you’re against government health care insurance, what should poor people do? What, just screw ‘em?”

Having known him since birth, I was taken aback by not just the question. I knew that, like Custer, I sat surrounded by liberals. But the harshness of the question surprised me.

Because Republicans, like me, reject the John Kerry-esque argument that “health care is a right not a privilege,” liberals believe we see a bipolar world — those with the money have health care, and to hell with those who don’t.

So I said, “This is a somewhat complicated question, but the short answer is free enterprise.”

“Free enterprise?”

“The reason health care isn’t accessible to so many people is because of government interference. For example, a medic in Iraq who attends to fallen soldiers — but is not an M.D. — could not return stateside and open a practice. My aunt worked for over 30 years in a maternity ward. She told me that many times the new interns would say, ‘Nurse Maggie, what drug should I use, and what kind of dosage?’ Yet laws would prevent my aunt from opening up a pharmacy.”

“Do you think something like this will happen?”

“It already is,” I replied. “Several pharmacies like Walgreens now open up many clinics and provide cheap health care for low-income people.”

At this point, his father jumped in and said, “Really? I never heard of that.”

“You never heard,” I said, “that drug stores like Walgreens now have in-house, walk-in medical clinics so that people can get care for medical problems, the kind of treatment that most people need — noncomplicated, nonsurgical procedures?”

“No, I never heard of that.”

And so it went. But for the record, big drug store chains like CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens, along with the largest U.S. retailer, Wal-Mart, are expanding walk-in clinics in their stores. Hundreds will be opened this year, and thousands over the next decade. Staffed by nurse practitioners who can examine patients, administer vaccines, and prescribe medications for minor illnesses, these clinics charge much less than a traditional doctor’s office visit. Besides increasing access to health care and reducing costs, such clinics reduce the burden on overflowing, ridiculously expensive, we-have-to-treat-you-even-if-you-can’t-pay hospital emergency rooms. Available, convenient, affordable walk-in care also catches some illnesses before they become serious and costly. And doctors will have more time available for complex cases.

Despite a growing and aging population, no new for-profit medical school has been constructed in the United States since the early 1900s. In 1980, the Department of Health and Human Services survey predicted a huge surplus of doctors by 2000. State governments stopped building new medical schools, and almost all 126 medical colleges cut back enrollment, and medical graduates declined. The American Medical Association just reported an increase in first-year medical school enrollees for 2006 — the first increase in decades . The U.S. still has only 126 M.D.-granting medical schools, but some experts predict we need at least 90 more to meet the doctor shortage predicted for 2020.

How many people also don’t know that laws prohibit interstate health insurance sales, preventing people in state A from getting medical insurance from a company in state B? According to The Wall Street Journal in 2005, “eHealthInsurance compared the cost of a standard family insurance policy ($2,000 deductible with a 20 percent co-insurance) across that nation. (A) non-employer-based family policy for four in Kansas City, Missouri, costs about $170 per month, while similar coverage in Boston tops more than $750 a month.” Why? Most states mandate the type of services that must be covered — podiatrists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, etc. — whether the patient wants it included or not.

Some states force insurers to sell to all applicants at the same price, regardless of their age or health. The result? “Faced with higher premiums for insurance they seldom use, the young and healthy drop their coverage, leaving an insurance pool of older, sicker people — and even higher premiums. After a decade of such political meddling, the average monthly cost of a family policy in New Jersey bests the monthly lease of a Ferrari.”

“Finally,” I said to my friends’ son, “people with little money still manage to afford cars. And people with little money can, if government set the market free, afford health care coverage. It won’t be the type a resident in Beverly Hills gets, but there would be some bare-bones type of coverage if only government got out of the way.

“Now,” I said, “can I have another glass of orange juice?”

Larry Elder is host of the Larry Elder Show on talk radio and author of Showdown : Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests That Divide America .

LINK to article – Priceless

Hicks Nix Peacenik Pix:

Movies That No One Wants To See

November 13, 2007 1:00 AM

Post-9/11 and Iraq war movies keep tanking at the box office but Hollywood just keeps on making them. Pajamas CEO and screenwriter Roger L. Simon’s explanation isn’t going to get him invited to many Hollywood parties.

By Roger L. Simon

Okay, that’s nowhere near as good a ‘hed’ as the Variety classic –
Sticks Nix Hicks Pix – made famous by Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy”. Perhaps readers can come up with a better one, but you get the point. The public isn’t going to Hollywood’s antiwar movies – and it’s not just the hicks if you look at the amazingly-consistent comments on Breitbart.com beneath the article: “Hollywood is casualty of war as movie-goers shun Iraq films.” It’s everybody and his brother from Tacoma to Tallahassee, not to mention a large number from abroad. As of last Saturday night, the Agence France Presse report had over 500 comments and counting.

The article itself, not surprisingly anonymously written, is filled with the usual shopworn explanations for the audience’s disinterest. For Lew Harris of Movies.com, it’s the canard that movies are escapism only. Serious films are just too heavy for the great unwashed. For Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com, it’s that audiences don’t want to pay for what they already see for free on television (Iraq). Veteran television producer Steve Bocho says it’s hard to gain audience interest in a “hugely unpopular war.”

The audience members themselves – that is the Breitbart commenters – are having none of this nonsense. The third one down, “Extremely Bored,” puts it this way: “Let me correct this point – I am not weary of war news at all. I am shunning these movies – and many others- because I am tired of Hollywood’s anti-American stance on absolutely everything. However we got into the war, and whatever mistakes were made up to this point, we are one country. We need to win and we need to remain tough against terrorism. It doesn’t benefit anyone to do otherwise. I will go see a movie that reflects that point.”

He is echoed almost immediately by commenter “Lee”: “The real answer – the obvious one that liberals can’t bring themselves to accept – is that most Americans are tired of liberal spinmeisters trashing their country, our soldiers, and our way of life. The Redfords of the world sit in their ivory towers and try to tell us how to think and react based on their own prejudices …”

And so it goes down the page… hundreds, soon thousands.

Now, admittedly, this is Breitbart.com and many readers come via Drudge – hence some bias – but the box office figures do not lie. These people represent a fair percentage of the (absent) audience. For years Hollywood insiders would joke about the cluelessness of the “flyover people” between the two coasts. But reading these comments, the flyover people, whether foreign or domestic, seem so much more intelligent than the Hollywood wags quoted in the article, it borders on the pathetic.

In fact, the box office debacle should be no surprise to anyone who had been paying the slightest attention, so the question is: Why was and is Hollywood so clueless? (Speaking of “is,” how about Writers Guild President Patrick Verrone being photographed arm-in-arm in front of Paramount Studios with Jesse Jackson, of all people, in order to generate support for the current writers’ strike? The African-American community long has seen through Jackson as the self-promoting jerk he is, but not the WGA.)

Since there’s a strike on and I can’t get work anyway, I will let ‘er rip:

The truth is Hollywood people are massively uninformed. They live in a bubble and, outside what they read in the New York Times and hear on NPR, they know almost nothing about what is really going on in the Middle East. And very few of them are curious to find out, because they assume what they already know is true and they have no impetus to investigate further.

But there is deeper reason for this than mere convenience and received conventional wisdom. These are not curious people because they are highly self-protective. They live a hugely privileged lifestyle, often based to a great degree on luck (and they know it), and this existence could only be threatened by contradictory information. Who wants that – particularly when it would alienate your colleagues, hurt your reputation and cause work problems?

Better to produce movies that validate the orthodoxy, even if they are economic disasters. Your colleagues will be impressed and you might win a prize (De Palma did – at Venice). Most of them are low budget anyway – a piffle. And the distribution system is rigged anyway. The antiwar swill won’t lose that much money because, boring as the films may be, they will be force-fed into the global entertainment machine, grouped in packages with other movies and sold to foreign television distributors to re-emerge as late-night reruns in Albania or wherever on into 2027 and beyond. A minor loss, if any.

And there is another benefit. (Here is where I am really going to make enemies.) Making movies like these or making extreme liberal public pronouncements make you seem like a good guy to yourself, when in your private life you are a miserable, self-serving bastard.

In order to understand how important that is you must never forget that Hollywood is a brutal place. It is just as vicious and competitive as dramatized in TV shows like Entourage, only nowhere near as entertaining. Only the most ambitious and determined survive and, to do that, the chances are you will not come out of the process a nice person. You will step on the backs of your colleagues, mistreat your staff and have generally erratic personal relationships based much more on status and connections than love or genuine affection.

Of course I am overstating to make a point, but I have noticed, in the years I have worked in Hollywood, that, with rare exceptions, the more successful people are, the more wretched they are to others. And those with the most obvious public liberal credentials are often the ones who are the most despicable in their private behavior. You could almost graph it.

Much of this public liberalism of the excessive knee-jerk variety stems from a form of self-loathing. These same people do not want to be bastards – life just put them in that position. But, at the same time, they do not want anyone to take away what they have – the vast acclaim and fortune – even if deep down they wonder if they are worthy. What to do? What to do?

The solution is to create another self, a kind of mini-me, who goes out and loudly proclaims what a fine liberal humanistic person he or she is- a public projection to obfuscate the private self. Sometimes this results in actual good works, but usually it is basically blather (see Streisand’s website) or dopey showing off like Sean Penn putting in an appearance with Hugo Chavez.

Other times, distorted work emerges like the current group of films no one wants to see.

Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist and blogger, and the CEO of Pajamas Media. 

 Link to article @ Human Events.com

Rudy’s Defining Moment
by Dan Proft

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for Rudy Giuliani’s political courage and straight talk as to what must be done to do right by millions of poor kids who deserve options in this land of opportunity to which a quality education is the price of admission.

This was written by a friend of mine who lives in California, another Rudy supporter who considers himself a conservative Christian.  I have been struggling to find the words to say this - but he says it much better.

The More Important Thing

I have a picture in my prayer binder of a solitary Special Forces soldier, flanked on his left and on his right by two fighters of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. It’s a photo I scanned from the cover of the book The Hunt for Bin Laden by Robin Moore, about the toppling of the Taliban in 2001.

Under the picture I placed a quote from the governor of a province in Afghanistan that was under Northern Alliance control. He said, in a question to a US Special Forces soldier sent to his area by the Defense Department, “Where are all your men? You have come alone? How can you help us defeat our enemy with only one man? The Russians sent tens of thousands…Bush sends us one…What kind of men are these Green Berets that will come alone?”…and then a note, in parentheses: “Fewer than 100 American soldiers were on the ground when Kabul fell.”

To repeat the comment of General O’Neill, Patton’s chaplain, “The spiritually alert…carry the burdens and bring the victories.” We’re finding this to be true whether the battlefield is in Iraq, or in America, or in our home community, or in the personal lives of the people we know. This is why we’re not panicked at the thought of someone who is personally pro-choice becoming President, and we are not blinded to other issues of importance in the upcoming election. The spiritually alert – not a party, not a President – carry the burdens and bring the victories. It’s long past time that this became the dominant perspective of Christian voters.

Mark Steyn: World should give thanks for America

MARK STEYN

Syndicated columnist

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays.

Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: In Continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from Dec. 22 to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world.

But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness, which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod?

And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.

Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius! But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.

We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together.

Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union.

If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced ‘n’ diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish, in effect, the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it.

I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era.

In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations.

But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.

Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.

If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:

“We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!”

Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either.

Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.

Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

Link

Thank You

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, November 09, 2007 4:20

Veterans Day: From Valley Forge to Gettysburg, from Pointe du Hoc to the Pusan Perimeter, and from Khe Sanh to Fallujah, we salute and give thanks to those who gave their last full measure of devotion.

Approximately 5,000 Americans died in combat in the Revolutionary War, equivalent in terms of today’s population to half a million. Some 2,000 died in a place called Valley Forge in the bitter winter of 1776. They were the first veterans of the new nation, but they would not be the last.

Less than a century later, this nation would be involved in a great Civil War in which more Americans would die in a single day than in four years of combat in Iraq. On Sept. 17, 1862, 3,650 soldiers on both sides died at Antietam, with 22,700 wounded or missing. In the end, 620,000 would be killed in a nation of just 31 million.

If casualties and uncertain prospects for success are the benchmark for giving up the struggle for democracy and freedom, Lincoln might have given up after Antietam. Washington might have given up after Valley Forge. But America does not give up, does not cut and run, and neither does its military.

We forget in the trivia of modern-day politics that the existence of this nation at various points in its history was, as the British are prone to say, a “very near thing.” Lincoln remembered this at Gettysburg, in honoring those who sacrificed so that this nation would not perish from the Earth. We should remember too. Every day.

Fortunately, we had a secret weapon — the American soldier. Ronald Reagan made that observation on a cliff in Normandy on June 6, 1984, some 40 years after U.S. Army Rangers scaled it under withering German fire to ensure the success of D-Day. “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” Reagan would say. “These are the men who would take the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end the war.”

As Reagan noted, they “knew some things were worth dying for. One’s country was worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.” Some unfortunately have forgotten that.

Six months after D-Day, the troops of the 101st Airborne would find themselves surrounded by German panzer divisions in the Belgian town of Bastogne. It was an offensive that could have delayed or even changed the outcome of the war. They shouldn’t have been able to hold out, but they did.

On Dec. 22, 1944, Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe answered a Nazi surrender demand with the famous one word response that would be America’s answer to tyrants who threaten us ever since: “Nuts!”

There would be more sacrifices. The month-long assault on Iwo Jima resulted in more than 28,000 American casualties, including 6,821 dead. Casualties at Okinawa totaled more than 38,000 Americans wounded and 12,000 killed or missing.

Sometimes the results are inconclusive, and sometimes defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory by timid politicians back home. But that does not diminish the valor and the sacrifice of the brave soldiers who held out against great odds at places like Pusan in Korea and Khe Sanh in Vietnam.

The nature of the war that began on 9/11 is different, but the goal of the enemy is the same. It wants to wipe freedom from the face of the Earth. But those who embrace fanatical and nihilistic ideologies, from Nazism to Islamofascism, are up against an enemy they can never understand or defeat — the American soldier.

We remember Pat Tillman, the former Arizona Cardinals safety killed while serving with the Army Rangers in Afghanistan. Tillman could have stayed in the National Football League earning millions of dollars, but he was willing to put his life on the line for his country. That he was killed by friendly fire is irrelevant to his sacrifice. As columnist Michael Reagan has said, when you’re in a war zone and you’re killed, you’re a hero. In our book as well.

On April 30, 2005, Cpl. Jeffrey Starr, of Snohomish, Wash., was killed in a gunbattle in Ramadi on his third tour of duty. After his death, Starr’s family found the letter on his laptop computer written to his girlfriend, Emmylyn Anonical.

In the letter, Starr said: “I kind of predicted this; this is why I’m writing this . . . A third time just seemed like I’m pushing my chances.” Emmylyn decided to make the letter public, explaining, “The reason I chose to share that letter was the part about why he was doing this, not the part about him expecting to die.”

Wrote Starr: “I don’t regret going, everybody dies, but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it’s not to me. I’m here helping these people, so that they can live the way we live. Not have to worry about tyrants or vicious dictators. To do what they want with their lives. To me that is why I died. Others have died for my freedom. Now this is my mark.”

Long before the “Anbar Awakening” and the success of Gen. David Petraeus’ surge, men like Marine Sgt. Rafael Peralta went nose-to-nose with al-Qaida in Iraq. In the November 2004 battle for Fallujah, Sgt. Peralta was shot in the head and chest at close range as his team went house-to-house clearing the town of jihadists.

As he lay on the floor of a terrorist hideout, Peralta saw a yellow, foreign-made grenade that would have wiped out his entire squad. To save his fellow Marines, he reached out, grabbed the grenade and tucked it into his abdomen, where it exploded.

Maybe Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise can make movies about real heroes like Peralta, Starr and the boys of Pointe du Hoc, who gave them the opportunity to produce anti-war drivel like “Lions for Lambs,” set for release this Veterans Day.

At the end of the 1954 film “The Bridges at Toko-Ri,” based on the Korean War novel by James Michener, the crusty old captain of an American aircraft carrier, watching his pilots take off for another mission from which not all would return, asks rhetorically, “Where do we get such men?”

Where indeed? Thank you all.

Link - from Powerlineblog.com

Senator Lieberman reflects on the Democratic Party

Watching the Democratic presidential candidates’ forum on MSNBC last week, I was most struck by the candidates’ apparent belief that the Bush administration is the principal threat to the United States. According to a speech he gave yesterday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, Senator Lieberman has observed by the same phenomenon among his Senate Democratic colleagues. Eli Lake reports in today’s New York Sun:

“Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.”Those words were part of a speech that traced Mr. Lieberman’s own position on the war in the tradition of not only the great Democratic presidents of the 20th century, but also the interventionism of President Clinton and his vice president, Albert Gore, a man who has played to the net roots base that tried and failed to unseat Mr. Lieberman in 2006.

Mr. Lieberman was particularly critical of his 22 Democratic colleagues in the Senate who voted against the senator’s resolution to label Iran’s revolutionary guard corps and elite Quds Force a foreign terrorist entity. He accused liberal Web logs of peddling a “conspiracy theory,” namely that the legislation was a back door authorization for war. Also, without naming names, he said some of his colleagues who had voted against it said they agreed with its substance, but told the senator, “We don’t trust Bush. He’ll use this resolution as an excuse for war against Iran.”

Mr. Lieberman concluded, “There is something profoundly wrong-something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.” He added, “There is likewise something profoundly wrong when we see candidates who are willing to pander to this politically paranoid, hyper-partisan sentiment in the Democratic base — even if it sends a message of weakness and division to the Iranian regime.”

These observations from respectable players and observers such as Senator Lieberman cannot be repreated often enough, as only public shaming holds the prospect of inducing responsibility. Senator Lieberman has posted the full text of his speech under the title “The politics of national security.” It deserves wide circulation and serious discussion. Thinking along the same lines, the Sun has published a companion editorial on Senator Lieberman’s speech.

Checking today’s New York Times, however, it appears that Senator Lieberman’s speech is not among the news fit to print.

Thanks and Praise: I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome.

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Infantry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

visit Michael Yon’s Blog here.  Read more about Michael Yon:

Telling soldiers’ stories from the frontlines is dangerous work that few do as well as Michael Yon. Risking combat injury, intense heat, sand and dust storms, and jarring explosions: the cost is crushing. Most major news organizations can’t afford to keep a footprint here, yet Michael Yon does it without corporate sponsors or advertisers. He receives no funding or financial support from Fox News, or any movie, book or television deal. He is entirely reader supported.

Michael says: “Interest in the war is waning back home, I’m told, which may explain the thinning ranks of reporters over here. Ironically, with fewer reporters here every day, it’s even more critical to keep the few sources of news on the ground working. Please continue to spread the word about my work and please support this site by clicking here.”

here is another good article on “staged hate crimes” (really…) by Clarence Page

Staged on ABC
November 7, 2007 12:00 AM
Staged on ABC
News writer fill-in for the Hollywood strikers.
By Michelle Malkin

My readers offered their own news sting ideas:

“I wonder if they would consider sending a professor wearing an ‘I Love W’ button and an American flag pin into the faculty lounge at Harvard or some other liberal ivory tower with a hidden camera. I would love to see that experiment.”

“Perhaps when I get back from deployment, you can follow me around Seattle and see how I get treated wearing my Navy uniform . . . “

“Wear a pro-life T-shirt to a Women’s Studies class.” Or a “Marriage Is Between One Man, One Woman” T-shirt to the New York Times newsroom.

The story…

You don’t have to be a Harvard University researcher to figure out that the media is infected with liberal bias — or to realize that some left-wing journalists will use any means necessary to create ideological narratives that fit their worldview. The Rathergate debacle at CBS News involving faked National Guard memos to smear President Bush was an extreme example. But if you look closely, you’ll find everyday examples of Serious Journalists manufacturing the news and concocting social crises.

Amazingly, they always manage to make conservatives look racist, intolerant, and evil. Funny how that works.

On Monday, the local Fox affiliate in Birmingham, Ala., blew the whistle on an ABC News sting operation intended to elicit bigoted responses from local residents. The national ABC News program Primetime Live hired actors to pose as same-sex couples and engage in public displays of affection on a park bench. Birmingham police department sources told the Fox affiliate about the social experiment; a local merchant spotted an RV where the ABC crew was stationed. The merchant was told “ABC was working on a week-long project to see how people would react . . . A FOX6 news reporter approached the RV and talked with an ‘actor’ who said, ‘Yes, we are working for ABC News.’”

Welcome to Media Theatrics 101. Instead of simply interviewing folks in the South or staking out real gay couples, ABC News thinks it’s fair and objective to stage-manage social experiments and call it journalism. Next thing you know, they’ll hire celebrity prankster Ashton Kutcher to jump out and yell, “You just got Punk’d!” as passers-by get ensnared and — ABC News hopes — exhibit the signs of prejudice they are so sure exist in southerners.

Does this politically correct set-up sound familiar? It should. Last spring, I exposed a similar news media production engineered by NBC’s Dateline, which recruited Muslim males to be sent to sports events and NASCAR races in the South and across the heartland to expose fans as anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bigots. Yes, the same program and network that were humiliated for faking GM pick-up truck explosions attempted to manufacture another crisis to give Dateline’s talking heads yet another opportunity to furrow their brows, shake their heads, and win more Emmy awards.

For many left-wing do-gooders in the media, the ideological end — exposing America as an irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic, elitist nation — justifies these manufactured means. That destructive philosophy has manifested itself on countless college campuses, where professors and students alike have been caught cooking up fake hate crimes to show how racist our society is.

On Monday, in a separate but rather related incident, a student journalist/College Democrat at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., admitted that she had drawn swastikas on her own dorm-room door. Sarah Marshak signed a confession, according to campus officials, after security cameras caught her in the act. Her campus publication, The Hatchet, said she told the staff that she “only drew the final three of six swastikas on her door in an attempt to highlight what she characterized as GW’s inaction.”

It’s a short leap from hoax crimes to hoax news. Marshak could get expelled, but there may yet be an opening for her at the stage production unit of ABC News, NBC News, or CBS News.

The de facto dinosaur network-news motto, after all, is “All the news that’s fit to stage.”

Doing Rudy Justice – Judging qualifications.

By Theodore B. Olson
11/7/2007
NRO

To some extent, America knows Rudy Giuliani. They know him as “America’s Mayor,” the man who engineered the greatest urban Renaissance of my lifetime and who stood as a pillar of strength when our nation needed him most. But there is more to Rudy — much more to the man I have had the privilege to know since we first worked together in the Reagan Justice Department.

Rudy’s time as associate attorney general — the number-three position at Justice — does not get the type of coverage that some of his later endeavors do. But much of my conviction that Rudy is the man best equipped to lead America forward these next four years stems from what I learned both from and about him back then. So allow me to share.

It’s tough to overstate the level of responsibility that Rudy was tasked with at Justice. The Justice Department is a massive undertaking, and few, if any, positions entail the breadth of oversight responsibilities as associate attorney general. The FBI, DEA, the Bureau of Prisons, every single U.S. attorney and U.S. marshal — this is just a sampling of the divisions that fell to Rudy to oversee. And he did. Rudy earned a reputation as one of the most visionary, effective, charismatic and inspirational leaders we had.

Candidates for president talk about the ways in which their experience uniquely qualifies them to lead us in the future. But we would do well to remember that the presidency is an executive office. Rudy Giuliani, whose time as mayor is among the preeminent illustrations of executive excellence our nation has ever seen, has been developing the necessary skills for almost 30 years — beginning with his time as a key player in the Reagan administration.

We also hear much these days about the type of judges a president would appoint — rightly so, as few things a president does have as lasting an effect as appointments to the federal courts. There is not a candidate, Republican or Democrat, who has close to the experience of Rudy Giuliani in this arena.

As part of the senior leadership at Justice, I met with Rudy and a small group of others every morning of every working day, a group that worked together on various different projects at various different times. One of the most important responsibilities discharged by Justice Department leadership was to recommend outstanding lawyers to President Reagan for appointment to judicial positions, including the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeal, and the federal district courts. That process included a concentration on the character and integrity of those we wanted to appoint — people who would respect the Constitution, the laws passed by Congress, and the limited role of judges. I know Rudy Giuliani will appoint judges who share this judicial philosophy — not just because we’ve had conversations about it, although we have, but because I’ve seen him actually address those issues and approach that task in person, with outstanding results.

The ability of our next president to keep the American people safe and secure is at the top of every list of presidential qualifications. Rudy Giuliani was a key figure in the Reagan administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. Responsible for supervision of the DOJ’s involvement in an interdepartmental group on terrorism, Rudy perceived that our laws, some seriously out-of-date, did not adequately equip us to deal with the threat of terrorism and he devised and advocated changes in those laws to modernize our legal resources and capabilities. He also played a central role in shaping the criminal policy of the Reagan administration, in charge of the U.S. attorney’s offices, the Drug Enforcement administration, the DOJ’s Criminal Division, and the U.S. marshals. The breadth of Rudy Giuliani’s experience in the arenas of justice and security is simply unmatched by any presidential candidate running today.

Rudy has been an inspirational leader since the first day I’ve known him. His intelligence, energy, creativity, and vision enabled him successfully to manage the massive responsibilities that come with being associate attorney general. Those are the qualities that defined his time in the Reagan Justice Department. They defined his time as U.S. attorney. They defined his time as mayor of New York. They will define his time in the White House. And that’s precisely why I support him for president of the United States.

— Theodore B. Olson, former solicitor general of the United States, is the Chairman of Rudy Giuliani’s Justice Advisory Committee.

Dawn.Pettengill@legis.state.ia.us
Representative Jeff Kaufmann (R – District 79) held his bi-annual fund-raiser in Muscatine County last week and invited Dawn Pettengill to appear and speak to the group.

As I’ve said before; if you want to see how a government can run into disrepair when one party “owns” the house, senate and governorship – you need look no further than Iowa. If we don’t elect a Republican President in 2008 the same chaos will happen nationally.

Dawn spoke for 30 minutes about the last session in the Iowa House as the Democrats attempted to pass the “Fair Share” bill. I have no direct quotes, this is from my memory of what she said in a heartfelt and humble manner.

you can read some history about Dawn’s fight here and here…

For further background – the Fair Share bill in its last form would have forced any government worker who was working in a union job to pay union dues. Today, in Iowa they are not forced to pay union dues. This law would take it out of their check. In its initial form, the law was designed to also affect non-government workers. I have three problems with this:

1) I have a  little exposure to Economic Development in Iowa. This law would change the business climate in Iowa significantly. Businesses (jobs) like to locate in “Right to Work” states. This law would effectively remove that status from Iowa. If you read my earlier posts you read where a representative of IPSCO, a large steel mill that just located a plant in Muscatine County a few years ago, said they would not have located in Iowa if this law was in effect when they moved here.

2) I believe unions served a good purpose when they were first founded almost 100 years ago, but they rarely do any more. A respected former boss of mine (and a democrat) told us that if our site was unionized, it was because we (the company) did not treat employees fairly. I believe most union workers are responsible workers, but union leaders for the most part are more interested in growing their power base than doing good things for their workers.

3) Far too large a percentage of union dues goes to political activity. 90% + of that political activity supports Democrats – it is patently UN “Fair” to take $500 or more annual dues and spend a good portion of it on support of political parties that the union worker does not support. Union workers work actively for Democrat candidates across the United States. There must be a balance between workers rights and a business’s right to exist.

Dawn’s talk was enlightening, although I had been monitoring the activities through the press and the ABI (The Iowa Association of Business and Industry).

Dawn indicated that the requirement to pass this law came from Washington DC, not from Iowa. As the law went through committees there were as many as 20 or more democrats that had problems with it. “could people lose jobs if they didn’t sign on with the union…”

There has been documentation to indicate Union political coffers would be increased by over 100 million dollars annually in Iowa if this bill was passed.

After the intimidation of being pulled into the Speaker’s office and the Governor’s office with threats of this or that perk being stripped from the legislators, and being told she HAD to obey because her vote was “bought” (not sure the reference – I inferred it was donations to her campaign) – it came down to three Democrats who felt FAIR SHARE was unfair. Brian, Dawn and Delores.

Dawn had indicated earlier that the majority of her financial support was from unions in the past; and she had stopped attending regular caucus meetings because it was just getting too ugly.

The day for the floor debate was announced. That day Brian was scheduled to be a keynote speaker in a convention out of state. He protested to no affect. Delores, at 79 was feeling the stress of the situation – and at one point everyone was called to attend a caucus – Delores was too ill to attend and begged off. Before she left the capitol building one of the Democrat leaders yelled at her that she must attend. She left anyway.

That left Dawn alone to face her caucus. The leader announced they were staying in that room until there was 51 votes. There were 50 votes without Dawn. They were in the caucus room for 4 hours.

One by one, the people she had considered friends and colleagues took turns telling her what a bad person she was, some calling her a snake – and worse. She was devastated. Before she broke down, she decided to leave and stood up. The two men sitting beside her grabbed her arms keeping her from moving. That was it.

She shook herself free, left the caucus to find Delores and ponder her fate.

Please consider sending Dawn (and Jeff!) a campaign contribution.

Dawn is a Great American, and I’m proud to call her an Iowa Republican.

Leaving the Democrat Party after 35 years on April 30,2007, she was welcomed into the Republican Caucus in the Iowa House. She is planning on running for re-election in 2008.

http://www.dawnpettengill.com/getinvolved.asp

- bye bye Right to Work laws, and US corporations (the USA already has the 2nd highest corporate tax rate in the world – not exactly a business stimulation guys…)

- Hello Socialized Medicine and EVERYTHING manufactured out of the USA. Pretty soon only the only employer in the US will be the US GOVERNMENT!

don’t say you weren’t warned…  most important presidential election in MY lifetime.

You can NOT be a friend of the “worker” and be the enemy of the “corporation” that employs them.

Link 

U.S. unions ready to push new laws if Dems win big
Sun Nov 4, 2007 12:52pm EST
By Nick Carey

CHICAGO (Reuters) – If the Democrats hold both houses of the U.S. Congress and take the White House in the 2008 elections, America’s struggling unions plan to trade their political support for a raft of labor-friendly bills. “It’s early to say but if the Democrats were to take the presidency,” as well as Congress, said Bill Samuel, legislation director of the AFL-CIO labor federation, “this could be an opportunity for historic change.”

Analysts say Big Labor will push for legislation to make forming unions easier, restrict free-trade pacts, raise corporate taxes and reform the creaking health-care system.

“There is a real threat the Democrats may take the White House and extend their majorities in the House and Senate with the support of the unions,” said Brian Darling, a congressional analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “In return, the Democrats would push measures like another minimum wage hike or no new free trade agreements that would be bad for the U.S. economy,” Darling said.

Link

Article published Nov 5, 2007
Giuliani may boost GOP in Northeast races

November 5, 2007 By S.A. Miller – House Republicans see a 2008 ticket topped by former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani making congressional races in Democratic strongholds of the Northeast more competitive, improving the party’s odds for picking up the 16 seats to win back the majority.

The popularity of the former mayor — polls in the region show Mr. Giuliani neck and neck with Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York — promises to put in play congressional races in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania — districts that typically vote Democrat.

“He would make it possible to knock off [Democratic] first-term members of Congress,” said Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican, who has endorsed Mr. Giuliani. “He would bring out a lot of Republican voters and get a large number of conservative Democrats and independents.”

The outlook was shared throughout the ranks of House Republicans, but most declined to be identified in deference to the other candidates for the nomination.

New Jersey Republican State Committee Chairman Tom Wilson said Mr. Giuliani is “as close to a favorite son as there is” in the Garden State, and Pennsylvania Republican Party Chairman Robert A. Gleason Jr. called a Giuliani ticket the “best-case scenario.”

“With Giuliani at the top of the ticket, [Democrats] might lose control of the House,” Mr. Gleason said. “We believe we [in Pennsylvania] could win back the four seats we lost [in 2006] and possibly pick up another one.”

Proponents of a “Giuliani bounce” at blue-state polls say it could propel challenges to Democrats including Reps. Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hall in New York, Christopher Carney and Paul E. Kanjorski in Pennsylvania, Steven R. Rothman in New Jersey and Christopher S. Murphy in Connecticut.

Democrats dismissed the potential coattails of a Giuliani nomination.

“There is no one the Republican Party can nominate that will dampen the strength of our candidates down the ballot,” New York Democratic Party spokesman Jonathan Rosen said. “We are confident New York is trending more Democratic.”

A Rasmussen Reports poll released last week showed Mr. Giuliani leading the Republican field with 24 percent of the vote ahead of former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee’s 15 percent and Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, both with 14 percent.

Mr. Giuliani’s rivals for the nomination each offer an edge in other regions. For example, Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor whose father was Michigan governor in the 1960s, could help Republicans down the ballot in the Midwest and New England.

“Giuliani brings strength to a different region,” said a Republican Party political strategist, who did not want to be identified. “Right now on paper he looks the best for putting these [Northeast] areas into play, but is he going to play well in Georgia?”

The party is hoping for a polarizing election to drive heavy turnout and help win back House seats lost in Republican-leaning districts in 2006, the strategist said.

Republican David Cappiello, who is challenging Mr. Murphy in Connecticut’s 5th District, said he doesn’t necessarily think in political “coattails” but he is convinced Mr. Giuliani would break Democrats’ lock on his state.

“With Giuliani on the ballot, Connecticut would be a state both parties would have to pay attention to,” Mr. Cappiello said. “He puts the state in play.”

Link 

David Gratzer
Malignant Rumor
On cancer survival rates, Rudy’s right and his critics are wrong.
31 October 2007

This week, Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign released a radio ad in which the candidate praised American health care for curing him of prostate cancer and wondered what might have happened to him under the socialized medicine practiced in the United Kingdom, where survival rates for that condition are far lower. In the ad, now running in New Hampshire, Giuliani says: “I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chance of surviving prostate cancer, and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States, 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England, only 44 percent under socialized medicine.” He drew those statistics from an article that I wrote for the Summer 2007 issue of City Journal.

The ad has already aroused intense criticism, most of it claiming that survival rates in Britain aren’t nearly so low. ABC News’s Rick Klein, in a blog entry entitled “Rudy’s Fuzzy Healthcare Math,” writes: “To hear Rudy Giuliani describe it in his new radio ad, the British medical system is a scary place. . . . But the data Giuliani cites comes from a single study published eight years ago by a not-for-profit group, and is contradicted by official data from the British government.” Kevin Drum, blogging at CBS News, declares simply: “Giuliani is full of shit.” Ezra Klein of American Prospect agrees on his blog: “It’s—no pun intended—crap. England and America have vritually [sic] the same mortality rates from prostate cancer.”

Let me be very clear about why the Giuliani campaign is correct: the percentage of people diagnosed with prostate cancer who die from it is much higher in Britain than in the United States. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports on both the incidence of prostate cancer in member nations and the number of resultant deaths. According to OECD data published in 2000, 49 Britons per 100,000 were diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 28 per 100,000 died of it. This means that 57 percent of Britons diagnosed with prostate cancer died of it; and, consequently, that just 43 percent survived. Economist John Goodman, in Lives at Risk, arrives at precisely the same conclusion: “In the United States, slightly less than one in five people diagnosed with prostate cancer dies of the disease. In the United Kingdom, 57 percent die.” None of this is surprising: in the UK, only about 40 percent of cancer patients see an oncologist, and historically, the government has been reluctant to fund new (and often better) cancer drugs.

So why do the critics think that Britain’s survival rates are as high as America’s? The main reason is that they are citing overall mortality rates, which are indeed, as Ezra Klein writes, similar across various countries. That is, the percentage of all Americans who die from prostate cancer is similar to the percentage of all Britons who do. But this misses the point, since a much higher percentage of Americans than Britons are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the first place. If you are a patient already diagnosed with prostate cancer, like Rudy Giuliani, your chances of survival—as Giuliani correctly said—are far higher in the United States.

Likewise, though Rick Klein is right that official UK data differ from mine, those data look at five-year survival rates—that is, they track cancer patients for five years and report on their survival. Their approach is different from mine. They don’t examine what we might call a “snapshot,” as my data do: that is, examining how many people with a particular disease die during a given interval of time—say, a year.

True, the OECD data are seven years old, as Rick Klein also points out. However, newer studies show a similar trend: Americans do better when diagnosed with cancer than their European counterparts do. Since the publication of my City Journal essay, the prestigious journal Lancet Oncology has released a landmark study on cancer survival rates. Its findings:

• The American five-year survival rate for prostate cancer is 99 percent, the European average is 78 percent, and the Scottish and Welsh rate is close to 71 percent. (English data were incomplete.)
• For the 16 different types of cancer examined in the study, American men have a five-year survival rate of 66 percent, compared with only 47 percent for European men. Among European countries, only Sweden has an overall survival rate for men of more than 60 percent.
• American women have a 63 percent chance of living at least five years after a cancer diagnosis, compared with 56 percent for European women. For women, only five European countries have an overall survival rate of more than 60 percent.

These data, recently released, are now the best available. They too confirm Giuliani’s point: he was fortunate to be treated here.

I’m not denying that American health care has its problems. On the contrary, I’ve just written a book advocating reform. And the Giuliani campaign isn’t denying it, either—the mayor has advocated reforms of his own. But as Americans consider how to improve our health care system, we should understand what we do well and what other countries do poorly. Failing to do so would be the public policy equivalent of malpractice.

Dr. David Gratzer, a physician, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care. He advises the Giuliani campaign.