Friday, December 30, 2005

2006 Predictions:  First Three Months

I am going to be lame and do the predictions game. I know that news turns on a dime, so I will only make predictions regarding the top 5 news stories for the first four months (1/3 of the year) in 2006.

1. President Bush's SOTU address will be described by the MSM as the speech that will determine if he has become a lame duck president. There will be over-analysis and much punditry. Bush will deliver a speech less grand than last year, but it will be just as powerful. Look for less concessions to the liberals. He will discuss these things the most: winning in Iraq, renewing the Patriot Act (tied to domestic eavesdropping), improving the economy by making tax cuts permanent, making our energy secure through ANWR, child sex predators (no steroids this time), New Orleans, and finally...the border (and he will not mention his guest worker program).

2. The hearings on Judge Sam Alito, Jr. to the SCOTUS. Democrats will try to filibuster his nomination, but when the democrats realize that the republicans have enough votes to invoke the "constitutional/nuclear option," they will back down--but only after they have called Judge Alito a racists, sexist, anti-abortion, right-wing extremist bent on "turning back the clock" on civil rights. Ultimately, he will be confirmed with only 5-10 democratic senators voting in his favor and 2-3 republican senators voting against.

3. The investigation into the NSA leaks regarding eavesdropping on people within the US in contact with suspected terrorists overseas. Arlen Spector will hold hearings that will resemble the 9/11 commission hearings (5-network coverage) that will ultimately backfire against liberal republicans (no effect to democrats); liberal republicans will overreach wanting to pose and preen for the camera but ultimately look like fools. One conservative senator will have enough sense to subpoena Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, Judith Miller and Michael Cooper to ask if the NSA leaker should be pursued as vigourously as the person that leaked the identity of Ms. Plame.

4. The Republican Study Committee will push the issue of immigration so far that even the Bush administration will sign an enforcement only bill (but with a promise to revisit the guest worker program in 6 months). President Bush will utilize this issue with the most embattled senators (Kyle and Santorum) and it will help only one of these senators. Tom Tancredo and JD Hayworth, as well as other congressional members on southern border states, will become more vocal in 2006. Immigration will become a national plank for each party with the democrats accusing republicans of racism (trumpeted by the international community after Vincente Fox files a petition at the UN where the US will be compared to Zionist occupiers). Ultimately, republicans will punk out in the Senate and there will be no bill for Bush to sign.

5. The democrats will still play the same yarn about no plan and demand timetables. This will not fly with the American people. The democrats will see many of their Iraq war vets they are recruiting to guilt-trip the public begin to stumble or find greater opposition than they thought by the incumbents. The mood in April of 2006 will be that the Dems have a chance to win the senate and the house, but that will be the same mood of early 2004 with Abu Ghraib and will be forgotten later in the year.

That's my take, and I might be totally wrong, but I win many hands of poker so I might pull this off

I hope everyone has the safest, healthiest and most prosperous new year in 2006 than they've ever had. God bless you, God bless our soldiers, God bless our president and God bless America.

John Kerry Meet Baby Noor

More American soldiers terrorizing Iraqi women and children:

When troops from the Georgia National Guard raided a Baghdad home in early December, they had no idea that their mission in Iraq would take a different turn.

As the young parents of an infant girl nervously watched the soldiers search their modest home, the baby's unflinching grandmother thrust the little girl at the Americans, showing them the purple pouch protruding from her back.

Little Noor, barely three months old, was born with spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spinal column fails to completely close. Iraqi doctors had told her parents she would live only 45 days.

But she was tenaciously clinging to life, and the soldiers in the home--many of them fathers themselves--were moved.

"Well, I saw this child as the firstborn child of the young mother and father and really, all I could think of was my five children back at home and my young daughter," Lt. Jeff Morgan told CNN from Baghdad. . . . So Morgan and his fellow soldiers began working to get Noor the help she needs.

Fox News reports that Baby Noor is headed the United States and will receive treatment free of charge. I hope, when this baby is older, that she will seek out and meet with John Kerry.

Major Security Flaw in Microsoft Windows

Please take the time to read this article about safeguarding your computer from a very serious flaw reported by Microsoft/Secunia.

Microsoft Corp. has issued a security advisory for what Secunia is deeming an "extremely critical flaw" in Windows Metafile Format (.wmf) that is now being exploited on fully patched systems by malicious attackers.

Websense Security Labs is tracking thousands of sites distributing the exploit code from a site called iFrameCASH BUSINESS.

That site and numerous others are distributing spyware and other unwanted software, replacing users' desktop backgrounds with a message that warns of spyware infection and which prompts the user to enter credit card information to pay for a "spyware cleaning" application to remove the detected spyware.

Vulnerable operating systems include a slew of Windows Server 2003 editions: Datacenter Edition, Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition and Web Edition.

Also at risk are Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional, making both home users and businesses open to attack.

The article includes instructions for a partial work around, but it will disable the autostart of your Windows Picture and Fax Viewer.

WaPo Creates News; Undermines War Effort

You know what you're in for when you read a Dana Priest article/editorial that lies in the lead: Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor: Anti-terror program authorized by Bush after 9/11 has expanded in size and ambition, despite a growing outcry over its clandestine tactics. - Dana Milbank

What growing outcry? Am I missing something? Last time I checked, 64% of adults are fine with wire-tapping people in the US talking to terrorists outside the US.

The "New Furor" or "growing outcry" is what Priest finds in the newsroom--not in America. So the WaPo is attempting to create outcry. And in so doing they are jeapordizing our national security.

In the article, Priest describes a secret CIA program called GST (the full name is not known). So the WaPo has now identified our undercover airplanes, our undercover prisons, piggy-backed the NYTimes piece on the NSA program, now it reveals the GST program. Why don't they just print the instructions to build a nuclear device?

Thank God we have a president that is decisive and will stick to his guns no matter what dirt is thrown at him. I am catching up on season 4 of 24, and to compare the utter incompetence of VP Charles Logan as he refuses to allow CTU rough up a terrorist to find a nuclear warhead, then botches a raid where the terrorist is because he orders secret service to arrest Jack Bauer because Bauer roughed up the terrorist anyway? Then realizes his decision helped the terrorist escape...then he almost cries about it and just a disgusting vision of "what if" someone like John Kerry assumed the presidency.

We will win this war in spite of the MSM's aiding the enemy.

Funniest NRO predictions for 2006

In Manhattan, the New York Times will do a fashion item on the faux Western sheep-cowboy look and "Why can't I quit you?" will be discussed at Columbia as a serious philosophical question and distributed as a Podcast. - Denis Boyles

Chelsea Clinton gets engaged. Howard Dean gets enraged. Cindy Sheehan fades. - Kellyanne Conway


Hillary Clinton is seen reading Kate O'Beirne's best-selling Women Who Make the World Worse. While reading, a lamp is thrown. - K-Lo

The feminists will hold another "Equal Pay Day" event to complain about the so-called "wage gap" on April 25, 2006 and no one will care. - Carrie Lukas

Brokeback Mountain becomes the first winner of a new Academy Award category, "Gayest Movie." Winners note that it's fabulous just to be nominated, girlfriend.

George and Laura Bush file their 2005 income-tax returns, listing Cindy Sheehan as a dependent. - Ned Rice

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Surely, Andrew Sullivan Fainted after Reading that Torture Works

UPDATE: after reading comments to this post, I agree that the column/article conjectures that warterboarding MIGHT be what broke KSM. I read it too quickly and I apologize.

I don't know if I would consider "waterboarding" outright torture. I typically think of things like the rack and the Iron Maiden when someone says "torture."

But here we have evidence that waterboarding works waterboarding might work.

Moral and legal aspects aside, conventional wisdom is that torture simply isn't practical: that someone who is being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop, and that information gleaned through torture is therefore not reliable.

Some former military and intelligence officers say, however, that physically aggressive interrogation techniques that some human rights groups consider torture can be effective in the short term. When asked for specifics, the technique they cite is "waterboarding," in which water is poured over a subject's face to create the sensation of drowning.

Consider Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 39-year-old former al-Qaida operative who was the Sept. 11 mastermind and bearer of many al-Qaida secrets.

...He ultimately had so much to say that more than 100 footnoted references to the CIA's interrogations of KSM are contained in the final report of the commission that investigated Sept. 11.

A Tale of Two Leaks

Columnist Linda Chavez poses an interesting question:

Within days of the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity, Sen. Chuck Schumer was demanding a full-scale investigation into the incident, and others soon followed suit. So where are Sen. Schumer and his fellow Democrats in demanding a similar investigation and prosecution of a far more egregious leak of classified material involving the National Security Agency? Instead of demanding to know who leaked information that could jeopardize both sources and methods for intelligence gathering that will protect American lives, Democrats -- and some Republicans -- are busy accusing the president of wrongdoing. Response to the two leaks reveals a stark double standard.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Well That’s Just Great

The NYTimes demonstrates precisely why they are seditious and dangerous:


Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.

The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say.

Isn't it bad enough that the DNC is providing its tactics to the "disinfranchised" in Iraq and to Saddam's legal defense team?

Gun Violence in Canada is U.S.’s Fault

Blaming your own problems on the U.S. has become a popular pastime in other countries. Now Canada has come up with a doozy:

TORONTO, Ontario (AP) -- Canadian officials, seeking to make sense of another fatal shooting in what has been a record year for gun-related deaths, said Tuesday that along with a host of social ills, part of the problem stemmed from what they said was the United States exporting its violence.

...

"It's a sign that the lack of gun laws in the U.S. is allowing guns to flood across the border that are literally being used to kill people in the streets of Toronto," [Toronto Mayor David] Miller said.

Miller said Toronto, a city of nearly three million, is still very safe compared to most American cities, but the illegal flow of weapons from the United States is causing the noticeable rise in gun violence.

"The U.S. is exporting its problem of violence to the streets of Toronto," he said.

Lack of gun laws? We have gun laws. Unfortunately, there are criminals who flaunt our laws. Illegal flow of weapons from the U.S.? If Canadian criminals didn't want them, our criminals wouldn't be able to sell them.

Fortunately, there is a voice of reason from the Great White North:


John Thompson, a security analyst with the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute, says the number of guns smuggled from the United States is a problem, but that Canada has a gang problem -- not a gun problem -- and that Canada should stop pointing the finger at the United States.

"It's a cop out. It's an easy way of looking at one symptom rather than addressing a whole disease," Thompson said.

Yep. It's a whole lot easier to blame the big, bad United States than to look at the real reason for the problem. Let's get one thing straight: I am not advocating the flow of illegal arms across our borders, no matter what the direction. What I dislike is one, the knee-jerk finger pointing at the U.S. and two, the fact that politicos seem to forget that for a gun to kill someone, another person has to be pulling the trigger.

In other words, it's a people problem, not a gun problem. Obviously there are criminals in Canada who have decided that they'll use guns. If they didn't get them from their criminal pals to the south, they'd find another way to get them.

Blaming us for your issues isn't going to solve them, Paul Martin and David Miller. Once you figure that out, you might have a chance of actually finding a way to combat these thugs.

tagged: toronto canada guns paul martin canada

Crossposted to Blogmeister USA

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Fake But Accurate, still

It never ceases to amaze me about how liberals just don't care about facts:

"The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for 'The Little Red Book' by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story," reports the Standard-Times of New Bedford, Mass.:

The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.

Among those who fell for the story, as we noted Friday, was Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, who cited it in a Boston Globe op-ed piece (though he claimed the book in question was "the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto"). According to a Globe news story on the hoax, the Globe interviewed the shifty student--whose request for anonymity both papers have respected even though he lied to them--"but decided not to write a story about his assertion, because of doubts about its veracity."

Kennedy, meanwhile, apologized for slandering America's dedicated law-enforcement agents by portraying them as totalitarian thugs.

Ha ha, we fooled you! Here's the actual Kennedy response as reported by the Globe:

Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, said last night that the senator cited ''public reports" in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy's broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.

This follows the non-apologies from Al Shaprton, Jesse Jackson, Kerry F. Dunn, and Paul Mirecki.

Liberal Judges Play Games, Bush Gives them the Finger

I wonder what this means:

U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Heart newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.

The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.

I want to know who these judges are and who appointed them and why they feel the need to give Bush a harder time while we are at war than during previous adminstrations.

Legislative Successes for GOP in 2005

Jayson at Polipundit has a nice round-up of GOP successes in 2005 that is not frequently mentioned in the MSM.

Why I Don’t Celebrate or Support Kwanzaa

I don't celebrate Kwanzaa for several reasons:

1. It is not an African Harvest celebration that is what many black American's believe.

2. The holiday is completely made up (it's not even 40 years old) and is used to instruct people in collective Marxism.

3. It is designed to further segregate black Americans from American culture.

4. It is simply an excuse for a bunch of haughty blacks to don African costumes and parade around being "African."

5. It's lame.