From a campiagn press release

 “Meet, talk, and hope may be a sound approach in a state legislature, but it is dangerously naive in international diplomacy where the oppressed look to America for hope and adversaries wish us ill.”  

While the NYT has been busy with their hit and run against Sen. McCain all the Dem strategists come talking heads have been touting a similar phrase, “where there is smoke, there’s fire”.  If that’s the case, then Obama’s house is burning down because Rezko and his dirty dollars bought it. From today’s Wall Street Journal 

While the Chicago trial doesn’t involve Sen. Obama, it puts the candidate’s ties to Mr. Rezko back in the spotlight. Mr. Rezko is under indictment for extortion, and prosecutors will try to prove he used connections with state politicians and appointees to orchestrate kickback schemes. The 52-year-old real-estate developer, a key player in the Illinois political establishment, has pleaded not guilty. When asked if the timing of the trial could be problematic for the Obama campaign, spokesman Bill Burton said, “By now it is well-established that Sen. Obama is not involved in the matters at issue in the trial.” Sen. Clinton laid into her rival in a debate last month over his ties to Mr. Rezko, whom she labeled a “slum landlord,” and her campaign has suggested that Mr. Rezko played a bigger role in Sen. Obama’s professional and personal life than the candidate has acknowledged.  

Obama gets his own record wrong!

OBAMA’S STATEMENT

KING: Tonight, Senator Obama, you’ve talked about more transparency. You also at one point criticized earmarks. And yet, a recent report came out that identified you — lower on the list in terms how much money senators seek and sneak into the budget for these pork barrel spending projects, but it still said you were responsible for $91 million in earmarks. And you have refused to say where the money went, what it’s for. Why?

OBAMA: No, that’s not true. We’ve actually disclosed, John, all our earmarks. And so, you know, we’ll be happy to provide you with that information, because I believe very strongly in transparency.

THE TRUTH

Obama Has Refused To Disclose His Earmark Requests For 2005 And 2006. “Since last year, he has publicly released the letters he submits to the Appropriations Committee seeking support for the spending items, but has not released those submitted to the committee in 2005 and 2006.” (Paul Kane, “Candidates’ Earmarks Worth Millions,” The Washington Post, 2/14/08, page A1, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021303635.html)

Nancy Pelosi has developed quite an amazing ability to stick her foot in her mouth right when it will be the most noticeable. While Nancy Pelosi is saying things like this,

“There haven’t been gains, Wolf,” the speaker replied. “The gains have not produced the desired effect, which is the reconciliation of Iraq. This is a failure. This is a failure. The troops have succeeded, God bless them. We owe them the greatest debt of gratitude for their sacrifice, their patriotism, and for their courage and to their families as well.” [Emphasis mine]

Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda is signing a different tune. In recently released copies of letters intercepted between the leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorists in charge sound the alarm that everything around them is falling apart.

 “This created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight. The morale of the fighters went down . . . There was a total collapse in the security structure of the organisation.”

and this:

“There were almost 600 fighters in our sector before the tribes changed course 360 degrees . . . Many of our fighters quit and some of them joined the deserters . . . As a result of that the number of fighters dropped down to 20 or less.”

and this:

“The Islamic State of Iraq [al-Qaeda] is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar province. Al-Qaeda’s expulsion from Anbar created weakness and psychological defeat. This also created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight.

Of course, Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats have never been to keen on things like facts. They tend to get in the way of their agenda…

The first standing ovation of the night come from the Republican side cheering President Bush’s steadfast commitment to make tax relief permanent. Funny that the Dems didn’t stand for that…could one say they are anti-tax relief? Would that really be a surprise?

During the last Dem debate, I wrote a post about the potential long-term harm their vicious primary might have on the their prospects in coming elections.

Now, it seems that Stuart Rothenberg agrees:

 Could Democrats, who are unified in their dissatisfaction with George W. Bush and have been pleased with their presidential field, really become so divided that they give a surprising opening to the eventual Republican nominee? Yes.

The whole article is very interesting and details how the destructive politics of the Clinton Duo could impose some irreparable damage on the Democratic Party.

So I posted a few days back, while watching the Democratic debate, that I wonder if the Dems will have some lingering hard feelings after all of these vicious attacks. Well, apparently some Dems are worried about the same thing:

A few prominent Democrats, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), have spoken to the former president about the force of his Obama critiques. There is some fear within the party that if Obama becomes the nominee, he could emerge personally battered and politically compromised. And there is concern that a Clinton victory could come at a cost — particularly a loss of black voters, who could blame her for Obama’s defeat and stay home in November.

The Washington Post article talks to some other prominent Democrats that are getting a little nervous about the potential repercussions of the thrown-down fight between Clinton and Obama.

“This is harmful to the party, it’s harmful to the state. And I understand they want to win, but this is about — should be about — a competition of ideas, not who can pull the hammer harder,” he said.

Read the whole article here.

Many people would consider it to be good news abortions in our country have fallen to the lowest levels in decades.

However, then I realize that the level to which they have fallen is the still the unacceptably high number of 1.2 MILLION abortions per year.

It’s hard to call this a glass half full…

It is encouraging that, for whatever reason, abortions are falling in America. I would like to think it’s because the movement to protect innocent life is making headway through the education of men and women that human life is at stake.

In a shocking (although sadly not so) article in Sunday’s New York Times, two reporters, Deborah Sontag and Lizatte Alvarez, launched into typical talking points about bloodthirsty soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan as maniacal killers.

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The NYT patched together 121 of these stories to paint the picture of rabid young men returning to America as crazed murderers - following the leftist portrait of American soldiers who are either psychopaths to begin with or are made so by the military.

The problem here is that 121 veteran-murderers, although sad, is a tremendously small amount as Ralph Peters explains in a counter-article in the NY Post:

Had the Times’ “journalists” and editors bothered to put those figures in context - which they carefully avoided doing - they would’ve found that the murder rate that leaves them so aghast means that our vets are five times less likely to commit a murder than their demographic peers.
The Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, should crunch the numbers. I’m even willing to spot the Times a few percentage points (either way). But the hard statistics from the Justice Department tell a far different tale from the Times’ anti-military propaganda.
A very conservative estimate of how many different service members have passed through Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait since 2003 is 350,000 (and no, that’s not double-counting those with repeated tours of duty).
Now consider the Justice Department’s numbers for murders committed by all Americans aged 18 to 34 - the key group for our men and women in uniform. To match the homicide rate of their peers, our troops would’ve had to come home and commit about 150 murders a year, for a total of 700 to 750 murders between 2003 and the end of 2007.
In other words, the Times unwittingly makes the case that military service reduces the likelihood of a young man or woman committing a murder by 80 percent.

I don’t know whether to assume the reporters are simply bad at their jobs because they are lazy and incompetent, or because they ignore basic journalistic standards and impose their leftist propaganda upon their audience, but either way they owe our veterans a very serious apology.

Please tell the NYT editors how you feel by here!

Click here to view an interview I did with TCW regarding the GOP primary field thus far.