US PRESIDENCY AS ACCUMULATIVE ERROR

David Swanson, author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union has written a chilling piece of commentary on the state of the American presidency.

Below is an excerpt:

SECOND, I LOOKED AT THE POWER OF WAR. Our Constitution wisely placed it in Congress. It is now in the White House and growing ever stronger. President Obama has demanded and received a larger military budget than Bush ever had, plus a larger war budget on top of that, not to mention the secret budget for some of the spy agencies that engage in war. President Obama continues to insist on funding the wars off the books with so-called emergency supplementals. He's put bases into more nations. He's put more troops in the field. He's expanded the use of mercenaries and contractors. He's dramatically expanded the illegal use of drones to bomb Pakistan and other nations, resulting—among other forms of blowback—a man trying to set off a bomb in Times Square, a man whose father's job used to be guarding nuclear weapons. Obama's Pentagon is pushing hard to use drones in U.S. skies as well. Meanwhile, Obama has—in another badder than Bush innovation—formally authorized secret military action in dozens of nations. He's formally done away with habeas corpus and established the power to imprison people at Bagram and other sites completely outside any legal process. He's kept our death camp at Guantanamo open. President Obama has continued to assert the power to torture, and torture has continued. He's also continued to assert the power to kidnap or "rendition" people and send them to nations that torture. But, most disturbingly, Obama has largely replaced torture with murder. People we would have sought to capture two years ago, we now seek to murder instead. And Obama has claimed the power to assassinate anyone, including American citizens. And, needless to say, the warrantless spying programs and other violations of civil liberties roll on unquestioned, and Miranda rights may be at risk now too. And one reason to think things may be even worse than we know is that Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors.

Read it all at Corrente: Obama Was Created By Our Failure to Impeach Bush

THE CULT OF DISAPPOINTMENT

THOSE WHO VOTED FOR POTUS Obama have not walked away from him. Those who voted against him were never in the room. Those who voted against George Bush and Hank Paulson and the cranky, weary, predictably puckish John McCain are newly persuaded that there was no credible choice in 2008. The rookie or the train-wreck?

Fourteen months later, it is more clear that the Obamanation crowd chose their idea of the UnBush, and instead what they got was an UnAware. POTUS does not register how much polling trouble his party is in.

Those voters have now turned not into a big-hearted pumpkin awaiting their shining prince to carry them off into the Brave New World where no adults are allowed but into a steady drift of dead-eyed wanderers, perfectly ripened pickings for the ever so embracing cult of disappointment.

The red ink in the 2011 fiscal budget has ended all the dreams for Obamanation as well as the last-ditch McCainiacs. What remains is receivership, or something like it, reorganized Federal spending and paying off the debts without taking on new ones. The debts are the end of disappointment. Time to clean out the two-car garage called Congress.

Read it all.

THE TALKING SANDWICH

POLICY RIPS ASIDE, THE SUSPICIOUS PR STRATEGY that put this Robert Gibbs buffoon in the White House Press Secretary slot simply to play the inept front man designed as an administrative contrast and counterweight to the messianic fluency of the eternal candidate named Barack Hussein Obama (except when his teleprompter chokes), seems apparent to all but the most dedicated of partisan players.

And I suspect the pick of Joe Biden as VP was for the same reason. Make the highly brokered showmanship of Barry the Obama look good via the manipulation of exaggerated comparison.

Wasn't Joe Biden sold to the voting public as a strong foreign policy wonk? But what's he been kept doing? The President himself has laughingly informed the public that he's anointed Joltin' Joe as watchdog for the domestic stimulus money, while BHO himself calls the foreign policy shots from the shadows, afraid to confront, or even face those foreign counterparts he is stiffing or the military leadership he commands yet ignores.

Remember how half the country railed against the supposed grammatical ineptitude of George Bush?

Opinions still rage. By playing his media games at the G-20 summit, Obama has managed to insult what's left of our allies, insuring the world is an even more dangerous place.

His dramatic disclosure of Iran's "secret" nuclear facility that he has known about since last November, the same one that some of our allies have known about for several years, has made him the laughing stock of the world. Perchance, to all those free of blinders, one can't help but notice that this president has confirmed to the world that he just might be the Clown-In-The-White-House, a title dubbed to him by certain number of fallen Democrats who saw him up close during the primaries.

Because Mr. Obama deliberately embarrassed them at the G-20 meeting, China, France, Great Britain, and Russia will now move to extract a high price for cooperating with the US on the Iran issue, and it should come as little surprise should the nations actually work to embarrass the president and the United States.

Under George Bush some of our allies didn't like the US, but they respected our status and our resolve. Under apologetic and weak Obama, they no longer respect the US, and seek ways to exploit our weaknesses with even more diligence than in ordinary times. They see, according to sources close to French President Nicolas Sarkozy that Obama is nothing more than what he appears to be—an egotistical, bumbling showman in an empty suit, despite all his dedicated followers on the US Left and in the media who try to paint this man, tied to his teleprompter except when giggling late nights with David Letterman, as the greatest statesman and intellectual America has ever seen, and I mean ev-aaaaah!

Too much skin in the game to admit they were duped, or perhaps they just love cashing those George Soros-funded checks they get in the mail? Who knows? But we remain, indeed, a nation divided. A quick spin around the media turf and channel wars is enough to tell us everything we wanted to know but were afraid to ask about where our country is now headed and even why we somehow intuit that the gear-grinding propaganda machines on both sides are only now just warming up.

BUYING AMERICA BACK TO PROSPERTITY

An excerpt from Patrick Buchanan's riveting piece about the "Buy American" movement, and the legislative push we need to pull this country back from the disaterous free trade deficits it has accumulated under the misguided tutelage of our last three presidents. We need this on so many levels. Let's just begin with financial solvency and homeland security.

WE MAY BE AT AS TURNING POINT in history. For we are about to choose whether to fully and finally cast our lot with globalism, or to become again a nation and people who put Americans first.

We are about to decide, perhaps for all time, whether we believe in a deepening interdependence leading to one world government, or we restore the independence won for us by the men on Mount Rushmore: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

All four were economic nationalists. All would today be decried as protectionists. For all believed that the nation's independence and prosperity hung upon its ability to stand alone in the world, and that foreign goods should never enjoy as privileged access to America's markets as American goods made in the U.S.A.

All four put America first. And it was they who created out of 13 rural colonies the greatest manufacturing power in history. Is not their record superior to what Bush-Clinton-Bush left us: a hollowed-out industrial nation dependent on foreigners for the needs of our national life and for the loans to pay for them?

Even John Maynard Keynes came around in 1933 to believe in "national self-sufficiency."

Those who prattle about the perils of protectionism need to be asked: What has free trade produced, but a bankrupt America that must go hat-in-hand to Beijing to borrow the money to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure? Are we also to use Chinese iron, steel and cement because they, with their Third World wages, will work for less than our fellow Americans?

As for Europe's threat of a trade war, bring it on!

We would eat their lunch. As analyst Charles McMillion writes, in eight years of Bush, Canada ran up $500 billion in trade surpluses at our expense, Japan ran up $600 billion, the European Union $800 billion.

These three trading partners, often by imposing value-added taxes on U.S. imports, and rebating those taxes on goods sold here, racked up $1.9 trillion in trade surpluses, sucking jobs, factories and technology out of the United States. These trade deficits, and the even larger ones with China, says Paul Volcker, are behind our present crisis.

America is bust. It is shameful to have to go to China and Japan to borrow the money to rebuild America. But to go to China and Japan and borrow billions, and not spend the money here, makes zero sense.

We have indulged in free trade for a quarter century. And look where it has gotten us.

Read it all. And don't neglect to read the comments including this opposing viewpoint:

Pat is making a common logical fallacy of assuming that because x failed then y would have worked. In reality there is no proof that we would be better off had we practiced protectionism for the last quarter century. The science of economics shows that we would actually be far worse.

One hundred years ago 98% of the population worked in food production, now 2% are getting the same job done, and little of it has to do with imports. Technological advances drastically reduced the needed manpower. The 96% who lost their jobs weren't happy, I'm sure, and yet 96% of the US population today isn't unemployed. The menial jobs of food production were passed down to machines while the humans moved on to higher skill jobs.

Today we are seeing a similar shift. The third world is taking over the lower skilled jobs, forcing Americans to improve and evolve.

Pat, for example, by saying "Canada ran up $500 billion in trade surpluses at our expense" is making it seems like we just wrote Canada a check in that amount when it reality we have received $500 billion worth of goods and services in return. Goods and services that would cost more to American consumers had they been produced domestically.

Which brings me to my next point, where is Pat discussing the higher level of living enjoyed by Americans thanks to lower priced goods and services? During Communism, Russians had lots of cash, but nothing to buy. Even with the latest economic earthquake, us American still enjoy a higher standard of living than other countries—why isn't their trade surplus saving them?

Ultimately, Pat is ignoring the most fundamental part of free trade—FREEDOM. Who is Pat or anyone to tell another American who he can or can not buy from? Its my money and I want to have the freedom to buy from whomever I want to--including non Americans. And for our government to have a policy to only buy American forces each of us to pay more for the same. And looking at how well we fared in the War on Drugs, do we really think we can prevent illegal imports into this country?

Ultimately Pat's problem is that he is clueless about economics. Rather than carefully studying it he lets his emotions dictate whats right and whats wrong. Economics is a science. You can't force its laws to change anymore than you can force the law of gravity to change.

Free trade works. It us Americans, who have gotten lazy and complacent, who are the problem. Flipping houses is not a day job. We need to improve ourselves. We need a smaller government that doesn't regulate and tax us to death. And we need to leave free trade alone.

The fact is that we live in a world that is constantly trying to destroy the USA since we are at the TOP, so when academics use the theories based upon the artifical world of FREE TRADE we get HAMMERED. FAIR TRADE IS A TWO WAY STREET!

THIS PROFANE SPLITTING OF HAIRS

HERE'S WHAT FORMER PRESIDENT George "The Rifleman" Bush has said about Osama bin Laden at various points in time, depending on how he was trying to spin the news of the day:

"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him."
- G.W. Bush, 9/13/01

"I want justice...There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive,'"
- G.W. Bush, 9/17/01, UPI

"Secondly, he is not escaping us. This is a guy, who, three months ago, was in control of a county [sic]. Now he's maybe in control of a cave. He's on the run. Listen, a while ago I said to the American people, our objective is more than bin Laden. But one of the things for certain is we're going to get him running and keep him running, and bring him to justice. And that's what's happening. He's on the run, if he's running at all. So we don't know whether he's in cave with the door shut, or a cave with the door open—we just don't know...."
- Bush, in remarks in a Press Availablity with the Press Travel Pool, The Prairie Chapel Ranch, Crawford TX, 12/28/01, as reported on official White House site

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."
—G.W. Bush, 3/13/02

"I am truly not that concerned about him."
—G.W. Bush, repsonding to a question about bin Laden's whereabouts, 3/13/02 (The New American, 4/8/02)

Of course, we think that the tall Saudi provocateur has taken his last breath long ago. Why the State Department still authenticates these last few audio tapes that have surfaced filled with generic and ambiguous messages is debatable, but I suppose there's a shadow of doubt lurking somewhere nearby to be blamed.

But before certain readers get the giddies, they should fathom this irony gnawing at our great republic. Our commandos and other elite personnel are waterboarded as part of their training. This new fellow Obama is a naive child, thrust into a world by handlers that he has knows not, and immediately rushes to close Gitmo. He subjects us to one stupidity after another (as the Islamicists continue to behead Westerners), given that he continues on this present course.

So now Pole Piotr Stanczak joins Briton Kenneth Bigley, Italian Enzo Baldoni, Bulgarians Georgi Lazov and Ivailo Kepov, Americans Jack Hensley, Eugene Armstrong, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, and Daniel Pearl as victims of this hideous barbarity. These men were all civilians—engineers, civilian contractors, truck drivers and journalists. Oh, and Russian diplomats, Thai security guards, countless Iraqi "apostates", and three Indonesian schoolgirls. Mighty warriors of Allah? Hardly. War criminals coddled by the Left. Most certainly!

Last year the BBC decided to tackle this disturbing subject on an episode of its show "Bonekickers"—with a storyline that had a *Christian fanatic* inspired by the crusades beheading a moderate Muslim victim.

OBAMA TALKIN' TRASH IS HARDLY NEWS

Well now, NR columnist Kathleen Parker has settled back down if only somewhat into her more familiar conservative roots with a few choice words about the new president. We must remember that Ms. Parker was the "good Republican" woman who tore into Governor Sarah Palin as being "out of her league" in this new role as Republican VP nominee. This was an outrageous attack, given the fact that many of us were and are still cringing note for note the same bristling song about the Chicago ACORN-tainted community organizer named Barack Obama.

Hell, with the long line of political scoundrels cluttering up our persistently revised glorious past and the Blagojovich impreachment guilty verdict just delivered in a unanimous blowout, I wonder if anybody on God's green planet is qualified to cleanly govern a state, much less the whole country anymore.

But life moves along. Elections are held. Winners take power. New drapes are ordered. Personal styles and wayward policies are thrust upon us. But apparently Ms. Parker doesn't like trash talkin' playground antics, and it doesn't matter whether it's the skins or the shirts shucking the jive. Personal exemption excepted. Let's take a look:

TWO IMPRESSIONS EMERGE from President Barack Obama's first week in office. Partisanship has reached a tipping point when the new president is circling the fire hydrant with a conservative talk-radio personality. And, the new president is sounding an awful lot like the old one. Let's roll the tape.

"I won. I will trump you on that."

That's Barack Obama a few days ago, according to The Associated Press, speaking to Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona during a meeting with congressional leaders about the proposed stimulus package. Kyl had the audacity to question giving tax credits to people who do not owe federal income taxes.

Rewinding to 2004: "I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style."

That's George W. Bush after his re-election, explaining his assumption that the American people approved of his many plans, including Social Security reform and the war on terror.

Obama and Bush each mistakenly assumed that his election was a national mandate for his policies, rather than a rejection of alternatives.

Yes, Ms. Parker seems genuinely upset that boys will be boys, particularly if she's a moose-hunting mother of five from the North Country. Personal empowerment? Perhaps the Lady Parker should have supported the judgment of an honor-crippled US Senator from Arizona instead of harping on the genuine freshness which was overworked into a momentary stumble by Sarah Palin.

If Obama had a mandate at all, it was to heal the divisions that have plagued politics for so long. No more partisan bickering, he promised, though there's only about a smirk's difference between Obama and Bush, stylistically. While one is bring-'em-on confrontational and the other a passive-aggressive Mr. Cool, both reveal a staggering sense of personal empowerment.

If only Kathleen Parker knew what the PUMAs knew she would not have believed those phony words by the Democratic machine, which this go round in particular, included every man, woman, and child on the payroll of the mainstream media. Did I say mention this woman calls herself a conservative? She continues in this vein:

Obama was cool even when, at that same GOP meeting, he urged Republicans to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. No anger, just angst. "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done."

Excuse me, Mr. President, but you've been baited by none other than the Master Fisherman. Limbaugh tossed you a lure and you chomped.

Uh, yes. El Rushbo—radio talk-show personality, master of ceremonies extraordinaire—certainly has a tendency to stretch over the top, embellishing the picturesque until it smacks of the grotesque, but that is beside the point in this theater of the obvious, and she further details some of that testimony, blasting both Limbaugh and Bush for their predilection toward colorful phrasing. Okay. Did I mention this woman claims to be a conservative? But while she takes the Republicans to task for past linguistic and oratory failures, she continues to whisper sweet nothings to Mr. Obama with these noble words:

Trying to assign blame—or amp up rhetoric to satisfy the market's gargantuan appetite for ratings—is counterproductive in the present. If Obama wants to rumble, he's got an eager foe in Limbaugh. But if he really wants to win, he might take a page from his predecessor's playbook: Never dignify your enemies with recognition...

OBAMA TEAM TO REBUILD FAILED STATES

Yikes! And double yikes! Will this "foreign aid to our enemies" money pit that should be more properly known as jizya ever stop?

WASHINGTON—When President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday, it will include two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices—Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary—have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops.Whether they can make the change—one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best—“will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

The adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, cast the issue slightly differently in an interview on Sunday.

“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem,” he said. “During the campaign the then-senator invested a lot of time reaching out to retired military and also younger officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to draw on lessons learned. There wasn’t a meeting that didn’t include a discussion of the need to strengthen and integrate the other tools of national power to succeed against unconventional threats. It is critical to a long-term successful and sustainable national security strategy in the 21st century.” Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work, even though President Bush repeatedly promised such a shift, starting in a series of speeches in late 2005. But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr. Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home.

Mr. Obama’s best political cover may come from Mr. Gates, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and veteran of the cold war, who just months ago said it was “hard to imagine any circumstance” in which he would stay in his post at the Pentagon. Now he will do exactly that.

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers.

He also denounced “the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist and communicate with other parts of the world—the ‘soft power’ which had been so important throughout the cold war.” He blamed both the Clinton and Bush administrations and said later in an interview that “it is almost like we forgot everything we learned in Vietnam.”

Read it all.

Try as we might, there are those of us who flatly refuse to believe that this penchant of American leadership to try to buy friendship around the world is the proper motivation to quell the ire of our declared enemies. This is just more of the same tired Bush policy. More American treasure out the door, while our own nation's industrial sector is gutted and our long neglected infrastructure continues to rot. Obama intends to continue the policies which does nothing but sell America out to the highest bidder, dismantling this country piece by piece at a time when the US economy is already at a critical breaking point. This is NOT a good thing. Our own national security is at stake.

Of course this article does not list which so-called failed states has attracted Obama's attention. Weren't we all led to believe that rebuilding Iraq was a waste of good American treasure and human resources? The continued pig-headedness to send American resources to countries that will never bend to Western jurisprudence because these countries live and die by a so-called noble book that tells them to resist down to the last breath, is simply irresponsible. The cloaked paternalism of the Western mindset just can't seem to peer through it own veil of self-righteousness on the one-hand, or break its cultural addiction to Middle Eastern oil and our own high standard of living which binds us in supplication to our enemies, on the other.

This is a sad state of affairs which must be properly addressed. Might against might. Depending on state-level bribery when our treasury is empty will not ensure our victory, but spell our defeat.

McCAIN REBUTS ARGUMENTS TYING HIM TO BUSH

CAN ANY REPUBLICAN HERE voting for McCain tell me five things that John McCain will do differently than President George W. Bush?

1) 2003: Senator McCain called for a surge in troop levels in Iraq. Bush refused. Adopted in 2007, McCain's surge strategy won the war in 18 months. Had Bush listened to McCain instead of General Colin Powell and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Iraq war would have been over in mid 2005. Obama to this day won't admit that the surge strategy has turned out to be superior to the cut-and-run strategy.

2) 2005: Energy Policy Act of 2005. Bush and VP Cheney proposes an energy plan that gives away billions of dollars in pork to energy special interests. McCain opposed it. Senator Barack Obama and other special interests on both sides of the aisle supported it.

3) 2008: SEC Chairman Cox and Secretary Paulson asks Congress to draft bail-out legislation. Senate and House majority caucusses draft a bill that includes major pork such as a $600 million per year every year slush fund to ACORN (the electoral-fraud, sub-prime mortgage "community organizer" organization). Desperate to get a bill, Bush supported it immediately. Obama came out in support of it as well. McCain opposed it until sufficient modifications were made to the bill to ensure that its funds will go towards the bailout of the economy and not special interests like ACORN. Obama continues to accuse McCain of being "erratic" because he opposed it (when it was loaded with pork for ACORN) before he was for it (after getting tax-payer protection into the bill).

Of course, I can go on and on. But for argument sake, let's look at two more public policy decisions.

4) Neutral with Bush) Senate Bill 190 in the 2005 Congress, McCain co-sponsored legislation to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie's powers-to-be in the United States Congress, in this case Senate Banking Chairman Chris Dodd and House Banking Chairman Barney Frank, among others indebted to Fannie and Freddie on both sides of the aisle, opposed it. Of course, Fannie and Freddie, in conformation with the banking regulation Community Reinvestment Act which made it mandatory that banks make loans to people who can't pay it back for politically correct purposes, which Obama calls a "good idea" because his front group ACORN bullied banks into making them, Fannie and Freddie CEOs Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines made tens of millions of dollars peddling these toxic loans and earned themselves advisorship in the Obama campaign and therefore possibly cabinet positions should there be a Barack Obama ial administration.

5) The Bush Water Resources Development Act of 2007. This act provided money to the construction of roads and levees. However, it was loaded with pork barrel spending. McCain co-sponsored legislation to guarantee road and levee projects got the money first before it went to special interests. Special interests on both sides of the aisle, including Obama of Illinois, prevailed even over a ial veto. Of course, afterwards, an interstate bridge in Minnesota collapsed killing tens of people, and not atypical seasonal flooding in Iowa subsequently overran levees subsequently. Had McCain and Bush had their way, the funds earmarked to road and levee repairs would have actually gone to road and levee repairs, thus saving lives and property, instead of special interests.

Thank you for your open-mindedness. I trust you will research these legislations to find them factually accurate and join this recent Obama-to-McCain convert in spreading the message that on the big issues of the day, whether it was with or against Bush, McCain has been always right, and when Obama agreed with McCain, he was right, but every time Obama disagreed with McCain, Obama was wrong.

Found on an ABC News blog posted by a fellow named James. And let us not forget, both candidates threw in with the Bush FISA extensions, the domestic spy bill, which hardly differentiates between Joe the Plumber from Toledo and Abdullah the suicide bomber newly arrived from Pakistan, also now residing in Toledo.

JOHN MCCAIN IS NOT GEORGE W. BUSH

HERE ARE JUST A FEW reasons why John Sidney McCain is not and will never be the carbon copy of the current Bush by any measure (thanks to WMCB at the Confluence). That shaky train has left, folks. Get over it, and study these few more pressing facts:

In 2001, he was one of only two Republican Senators to vote against Bush’s tax cuts.

In 2003 he voted against Bush’s second round of tax cuts, calling it “unwise in a time of war”.

He stood up to his party on the torture issue, getting his Detainee Amendment into the appropriations bill despite howls of protest and threats of veto by Bush.

The McCain-Feingold bill, considered McCain’s finest legislative achievement, is one of the strongest campaign finance reform bills in US history.

He defended John Kerry’s war record from the floor of the Republican National Convention in 2004. Word is Bush was pissed at that.

He tried to get the Climate Stewardship Act passed in 2003, and while he failed, he was one of the only Republicans pushing to address the issue at all. He has angered many in his party by his openness to listen to the facts rather than toe the party line on climate change.

He defended a fellow Republican Senator Jim Jeffords, when he switched to Independent and threw senate control to the Dems. Jeffords was being eviscerated for it, and McCain testily called them “self-appointed enforcerrs of party loyalty”, defending Jeffords.

He has worked his tail off for practical, comprehensive immigration reform, addressing security concerns while staying far away from the xenophobic posturing of some on the right.

He helped expose and bring down Jack Abramoff.

He angered his party by leading the “Gang of 14″ to reach a compromise on filibusters.

He was considered to be a favorite for John Kerry’s running mate in 2004. Biden said so. Others said so. If he is such a hard-core conservative as the Left is now trying to paint him, why did many Dems want him on the ticket 4 years ago?

Is McCain everything I want in a president? Not by a long shot. But he is NOT the Bush clone that the Democrats are so suddenly trying to claim he is. It’s baloney.

Now while I realize that a McCain vote is probably not a vote for the GPE (Greatest President Ever), it is a vote however that I can stomach. Baloney (balogna) has never been a favorite of mine, but I do happen to know what it and other processed meat (can you say SPAM?) tastes like. It's called growing up poor...

A SPEECH LIKE NONE OTHER

Here's a very funny piece by Wesley Prudon published by the Washington Times.

DAVY CROCKETT IS THE PATRON SAINT of every politician who ever left Washington with a bruised ego and a broken heart. When he was bounced out of Congress in 1830, Davy told the folks on the banks of the Nolichucky River in Tennessee: "I'm going to Texas, and the rest of you can go to hell."

Departing presidents have left town nursing similar sentiments but avoided saying them out loud. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, continuing their endless rassling match today in Indiana and North Carolina, could take Davy Crockett's benediction as a caution. George W. Bush surely feels like Crockett is kin, and there's the fantasy of a speech floating across the Internet that George W. could but never would deliver. But if he had only the self-discipline of his critics, this is what he might say:

"If the polls are right, more than half of you don't regard yourselves as 'my fellow Americans," so I'll cut right to the chase. I'm getting out of Dodge. Before anyone gets in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, let me assure you that no laws were broken, the Constitution is intact. I'm quitting because I'm fed up with you people. You have no interest in what's actually going on in the world. Most of you are too lazy to do your homework and figure it out.

"Let's start local. The politicians and pundits have persuaded you that the economy is in the tank. That's despite record numbers of homeowners, including record numbers of minority homeowners. Minority business ownership is at record levels, too. Our unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton administration. The stock market has rebounded to record levels and more Americans than ever own stocks. But all you can do is whine about gasoline prices, and most of you are too dumb to realize that the price of gasoline is high because the Chinese and the Indians are driving cars now, and because Al Gore and a handful of wacko greenheads are more worried about polar bears and their beachfront property than they are about you.

"I'm tired of this 'blood for oil" crap. If I were trading blood for oil, I would have seized Iraq's oil fields a long time ago. And don't give me this 'Bush lied, people died' crap, either. I could have planted chemical weapons planted all over Iraq to be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty. The rest of the world thought Saddam Hussein had the goods, too, same as me.

"Fools don't understand that we face a unique enemy. The 'soldiers' of our new enemy, unlike our old Soviet enemies, are actually eager to die. That's OK with me, and good riddance, as long as they aren't trying to take as many of you with them as they can. But they want to kill you in the name of what I generously called 'the religion of peace' (not that I ever believed it any more than you do). You all should be grateful that the Islamists haven't killed more of us here in the United States since September 11, but you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that.

"I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight, but most of you think 'a long and difficult fight' amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.' You won't look through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do.

"The facts are easy enough to find. They're all over the Internet, along with a lot of stuff that ain't true. You have to pay attention and sort it out, but most of you would rather watch 'American Idol'. I could say more about your idiotic belief that government, not your own wallet, is where money comes from. But it would sail right over your heads.

Read it all.

GEORGE BUSH FUNDS TERRORISTS

Oh, this is rich, absolutely ludicrous, this news that the United States taxpayer should be sending money TO Saudi Arabia, instead of collecting huge sums of dough FROM those scoundrels. With billions of petrodollars carefully counted and stashed in secret vaults, a workforce of foreigners to do the manual and sophisticated work the Saudis won't and can't accomplish for themselves, of course, for a single reason or many, and a military force made up not of Saudi men and women, but of Kansans, Californians, and New Yorkers, these slick-tongued Saudi imposters continue to milk jizya from our Dhimmi-in-chief, and he of course, is delighted to pay it.

How many 9/11 terrorists originated from Arabia? Who funds radical Wahabbi madrassas and mosques all over the planet, including some 1500 built here in the US in the past 25 years? Who threatens to convert oil dollars into oil euros, if a certain bankrupt nation doesn't toe the line? Who oppressively rules its own country with the strongest of iron hands, while jet setting about partaking in big gulps of every vice it refuses its own people, and who continues to traffic in slavery without a hint of shame? Who refuses to allow a school of young girls to escape a burning building because they aren't wearing the proscribed head garb required by the religious police? Who exhibit zero tolerance for any show of religious faith other than their own particularly vile state-mandated form of Islam?

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Last Friday, President Bush certified Saudi Arabia as a cooperative anti-terrorism ally and released U.S. financial aid to Riyadh. This occurred despite charges leveled against the “Kingdom” by Stuart Levey, the U.S. Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, who one day after the sixth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, declared that Saudi Arabia had failed to prosecute terrorism financiers.

Levey voiced frustration that not a single terrorist supporter identified by Washington had been prosecuted by the Saudis.

“If I could snap my fingers and cut off the funding from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia,” a frustrated Levey told the press. “When the evidence is clear that these individuals have funded terror organizations . . . then that should be prosecuted and treated as real terrorism because it is.”

Levey leads an office which marshals the Treasury Department's policy, enforcement, regulatory and intelligence functions to sever the lines of financial support to international terrorists, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, narcotics traffickers, and other threats to our national security. Yet, the United States blithely ignored the very person with the best information whose job is to help stop terrorism and safeguard our country.

Instead, we are providing U.S. aid to the world’s top oil-producing country which is also coincidentally the main financial and ideological sponsor of Wahhabism or Islamic extremism. This austere form of Islam insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran and spreads the belief that all those who don't practice their form of Islam are heathens and enemies. In effect, we are funding our enemies. Even more outrageous, we are funding wealthy enemies: a resource-rich country that is the largest source of financing for Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists who have murdered hundreds of Americans and Israelis.

The extent of Saudia Arabia’s wealth frequently makes headlines. Recently, Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family, sold a 5% share of the Kingdom Holding Company, one of the largest investment companies in the world, for more than two and a half times its initial public offering valuation. As a member of the Saudi royal family, Al-Walid holds assets estimated at $20.3 billion and is deemed by Forbes Magazine as the 13th wealthiest person in the world. The prince’s major holdings include Citibank, AOL, Apple, Inc., Worldcom, Motorola, News Corp, Planet Hollywood, and numerous other companies. He alone is the largest foreign investor in New York and his extensive real estate holdings including upscale hotel chains and resorts. In July of 2005, Talal donated $20 million to the Louvre in Paris, the largest donation ever received by the museum, for the construction of a wing to house Islamic art.



In recent years, Talal has used his financial clout to influence American foreign policy, shape media portrayals and promote Islamist ideology. Following the 9/11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, Al-Walid offered a $10 million donation to New York City toward relief efforts and suggested that the U.S. should reexamine its allegedly pro-Israel policies in the Middle East as the root cause of the attacks. The donation was turned down.

Prince Talal gave $500,000 to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an un-indicted co-conspirator in the funding of Hamas, for distribution to American public libraries of books that sanitize Islam and terrorist organization activities. One book declares that terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah were placed on the U.S. government’s terrorist list, not because of their well-documented terrorist operations, but because of the pro-Israel bias of American leaders.

During the 2005 Muslim riots in France, Prince Talal, the fifth largest shareholder of the parent company of Fox News, called network chief Rupert Murdoch and demanded that a screen banner identifying the unrest as “Muslim riots” be changed to “civil riots.” The Prince maintained that the U.S. media is too pro-Israel and he encouraged the Arab world and media to do more to counter this tendency.

Further, Prince Talal has tried to influence U.S. Middle East policy by donating $20 million each to Harvard University and Georgetown University, among the largest university donations in history, to finance Islamic studies and create a pro-Islamic environment among future and current policy leaders. From a country that ironically routinely punishes practitioners of Christianity, he declared that his primary reason for bestowing the gifts was the promotion of “Muslim-Christian” understanding.

Of grave concern is another donation by the Prince to the Saudi Committee for the Support of the al-Quds Intifada for $27 million given in 2002. Although committee leadership attempted to portray the gift as assistance for Arab-Palestinian families resisting the “occupation,” documents captured by the Israel Defense Forces indicated that the funds were payoffs for suicide bombings used as enticements to murder by Hamas. A Saudi-government cleric, Sheikh Saad al-Buraik, stated to television audiences viewing the 2002 fundraising telethon, “I am against America until this life ends…She is the root of all evils and wickedness on Earth…” He further urged listeners to pillage the Jews, enslave their women and wage all-out jihad.

The travesty of U.S. funding for a wealthy terrorist-sponsoring nation is further demonstrated by a 2005 study, “Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques” by Freedom House, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that seeks to advance the worldwide expansion of political and economic freedom. Freedom House researchers found that over 80% of U.S. mosques had been radicalized by Saudi-appointed, Wahhabist imams and ideology. These Saudi-trained clerics, the ideological arm of the royal family, advocate the rejection of Christianity and Judaism, the full application of the Sharia or Islamic law in America, hatred of non-believers, renunciation of allegiance to America and the waging of jihad by all Muslims against infidels.

It is indeed troubling that U.S. leaders overlook the role that the Saudi government plays in supporting terrorism worldwide and the spreading of extremist ideology within America. It is the height of irony that while Saudia Arabia bans churches and arrests Christians praying in private homes, it is also freely funding a fifth column inside America in the form of “religious” instruction. For President Bush to praise Saudi Arabia as an “anti-terrorism” ally while Saudi-funded efforts within our borders are undermining and threatening our very existence as a free nation, nullifies American counter-terrorism measures and ignores the warnings of those charged with protecting us. Such a decision dangerously ignores reality and courts our own destruction.

BURNING BUSH CONSPIRACIES

Despite a recent poll that 12% of Americans defy the functions of ordinary intelligence amidst clear evidence to the contrary in suggesting that the Bush administration had an active hand in the September 11 attacks on American soil, we cannot dismiss all the bad news thrown at us by conspiracy theorists aiming to tear America apart at the seams.

The following scenario, while old news, is almost certainly factual, and continues to point up the hard conclusion that Saudi Arabia is no less a declared enemy against the West and the United States than Iran is, and that the US military is little more than a mercenary force controlled by Saudi interests held in place by the kingdom's subtle threats against our nation's economical best interests.

And it is this realization that compels me to advocate with the most avid anti-war protestor that the US needs to vacate Iraq and Afghanistan, cease all overt military actions until we are attacked once more, close our borders to ALL immigration, begin rebuilding our own infrastructure and fortitude, leaving the ME Islamists (Arabs & Chaldeans) to quarrel among themselves for supremacy in the hopes of weakening the Camp of Islam as it pursues its oft-stated desire to reconstitute its beloved Caliphate, And then we should take a hard look at shutting down the Saudi-financed madrassas springing up all over the West since the 1970s, and deporting or charging with treason all hard line Muslims and sympathizers who would call for jihad and sharia law on American soil. War is a nasty business. And it is rarely won with words. Let the saber-rattling masquerade begin!

Given the impossible task of actually earning or owning its own right of return according to Leftists even those among their own people, Israel can and therefore must protect itself. After all, it has vowed to use the Samson option if pushed to the wall, and will not flinch. Never again!

America, unfortunately, is a house divided, and must be healed, or face our own painful reality check. After all, Ahmadinejad has proclaimed that both Israel and America will perish from among the nations of the earth. I have no reason not to take him at his word (no matter how preposterous), if we in the West don't change our ways and learn to name our enemy, and fight this inevitable war with a strategy based on winning not the hearts and minds of our enemies but those hearts and minds of those who support the enemy from within our own borders, those Americans who may hold dear to cherished ideals but for some reason cannot recognize the true enemies of those ideals.

From Greg Palast of the BBC, a fiendishly far-left outfit I usually avoid:

On November 9, 2001, when you could still choke on the dust in the air near Ground Zero, BBC Television received a call in London from a top-level US intelligence agent. He was not happy. Shortly after George W. Bush took office, he told us reluctantly, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI, “were told to back off the Saudis.”

We knew that. In the newsroom, we had a document already in hand, marked, “SECRET” across the top and “199-I” - meaning this was a national security matter.

The secret memo released agents to hunt down two members of the bin Laden family operating a “suspected terrorist organization” in the USA. It was dated September 13, 2001—two days too late for too many. What the memo indicates, corroborated by other sources, was that the agents had long wanted to question these characters … but could not until after the attack. By that time, these bin Laden birds had flown their American nest.

Back to the high-level agent. I pressed him to tell me exactly which investigations were spiked. None of this interview dance was easy, requiring switching to untraceable phones. Ultimately, the insider said, “Khan Labs.” At the time, our intelligence agencies were on the trail of Pakistan’s Dr. Strangelove, A.Q. Khan, who built Pakistan’s bomb and was selling its secrets to the Libyans. But once Bush and Condoleeza Rice’s team took over, the source told us, agents were forced to let a hot trail go cold. Specifically, there were limits on tracing the Saudi money behind this “Islamic bomb.”

Then we made another call, this time to an arms dealer in the Mideast. He confirmed that his partner attended a meeting in 1995 at the 5-star Hotel Royale Monceau in Paris where, allegedly, Saudi billionaires agreed to fund Al Qaeda fanatics. We understood it to be protection money, not really a sign of support for their attacks. Nevertheless, rule number one of investigation is “follow the money” — but the sheiks’ piggy banks were effectively off-limits to the US agents during the Bush years. One of the men in the posh hotel’s meeting of vipers happens to have been a Bush family business associate.

Before you jump to the wrong conclusion, let me tell you that we found no evidence — none, zero, no kidding — that George Bush knew about Al Qaeda’s plan to attack on September 11. Indeed, the grim joke at BBC is that anyone accusing George Bush of knowing anything at all must have solid evidence. This is not a story of what George Bush knew but rather of his very-unfunny ignorance. And it was not stupidity, but policy: no asking Saudis uncomfortable questions about their paying off roving packs of killers, especially when those Saudis are so generous to Bush family businesses.

Yes, Bill Clinton was also a bit too tender toward the oil men of Arabia. But this you should know: In his last year in office, Clinton sent two delegations to the Gulf to suggest that the Royal family crack down on “charitable donations” from their kingdom to the guys who blew up our embassies.

But when a failed Texas oil man took over the White House in January 2001, demands on the Saudis to cut off terror funding simply stopped.

And what about the bin Laden “suspected terrorist organization”? Called the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the group sponsors soccer teams and summer camps in Florida. BBC obtained a video of one camp activity, a speech exhorting kids on the heroism of suicide bombings and hostage takings. While WAMY draws membership with wholesome activities, it has also acted as a cover or front, say the Dutch, Indian and Bosnian governments, for the recruitment of jihadi killers.

Certainly, it was worth asking the bin Laden boys a few questions. But the FBI agents couldn’t, until it was too late.

In November 2001, when BBC ran the report on the spike of investigations of Saudi funding of terror, the Bush defenders whom we’d invited to respond on air dismissed the concerns of lower level FBI agents who’d passed over the WAMY documents. No action was taken on the group headed by the bin Ladens.

Then, in May this year, fifty FBI agents surrounded, invaded and sealed off WAMY’s Virginia office. It was like a bad scene out of the ‘Untouchables.’ The raid took place three years after our report and long after the bin Ladens had waved bye-bye. It is not surprising that the feds seized mostly empty files and a lot of soccer balls.

Why now this belated move on the bin Laden’s former operation? Why not right after the September 11 attack? This year’s FBI raid occurred just days after an Islamist terror assault in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Apparently, messin’ with the oil sheiks gets this Administration’s attention. Falling towers in New York are only for Republican convention photo ops.

The 199-I memo was passed to BBC television by the gumshoes at the National Security News Service in Washington. We authenticated it, added in our own sleuthing, then gave the FBI its say, expecting the usual, “It’s baloney, a fake.” But we didn’t get the usual response. Rather, FBI headquarters said, “There are lots of things the intelligence community knows and other people ought not to know.”

Ought not to know?

What else ought we not to know, Mr. President? And when are we supposed to forget it?

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Greg Palast’s reports for BBC Television Newsnight and The Guardian paper of Britain (with David Pallister) on White House interference in the investigation of terrorism won a 2002 California State University Journalism School ‘Project Censored’ Award.

The BBC television reports, expanded and updated, will be released this month in the USA as a DVD, “Bush Family Fortunes,” produced by BBC’s Meirion Jones.