Al Qaeda Can Run, But Can’t Hide in Northern Iraq, General Says

The tables have turned for al Qaeda in northern Iraq, as a surge of operations there in the new year has put terrorists on the run looking for new places to hide, a commander in the region said today.

“A year ago, we were often reacting to al Qaeda and what they were going to do,” Hertling said. “Now, I think the tables have turned, and they are attempting to react to where we’re going to go next. And that’s a critical difference.”

About 15,000 local people have signed up as concerned local citizens under a program that allows them to assist with the security effort.

“As things begin to develop and we get more and more into the ‘hold’ and the eventual ‘build’ stage, coalition forces will begin to leave,” the general said. “As the Iraqi police stand up more and more capability, the Iraqi army will begin to leave and the police will be left, along with local citizens, in securing the inside of town.”

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48730

Iraqi adviser cannot understand why we discuss leaving Iraq

[snip] -- whom I'll call by his tribal name, al-Dulaimi -- helped me navigate the thickets of local culture and politics when I served in Iraq during the first year of the war. -- Dulaimi told me that he'd watched the Democratic presidential debates while waiting for his flight out west.

"They all talked about leaving Iraq," he said of the candidates. "They're just saying that to get votes, aren't they? They would never do that, would they?"

His plaintive question gave me pause. Of course, Dulaimi wouldn't understand American politics, or the way some Americans would view this war. After all, he had known American soldiers who were selfless and dedicated. The Americans he knew, the ones he had risked his life (and the lives of his family members) to support, would never "cut and run."
--
When I turned to answer Dulaimi's question about the heart of America, I didn't duck the obvious. Yes, we could pull out of Iraq. As bizarre as it sounds to anyone who has given a piece of themselves to this effort, retreat is possible. However, it is unnecessary.
--
I wait to hear a presidential candidate address what is really needed to succeed in Iraq. As Dulaimi has so quickly learned, we are all waiting for our leaders to address the obstacles to the road ahead.

http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Nate+Slate%3a+My+Iraqi+adviser+cannot+understand+why+we+discuss+leaving+Iraq&articleId=20745474-7322-4072-92e3-683b2062fb7b

The Terror Scare?

Influential voices are peddling a dangerous fallacy: that the threat of terror is overblown, another example of scare tactics, like the supposedly nonexistent Communist threat in the 1940s and 1950s. Surprisingly level-headed people are hearing this siren call, at once so attractive and so dangerous.
--
Among many obvious fallacies here one is paramount: the number of victims is only one metric for judging terrorist activity, and possibly the least telling. The number of victims is the factor most open to reduction. A country can't control the number of terrorists, it can't control the number of attacks, it can't control the number of attempts. But it can keep the terrorists, attacks, and attempts from being successful, which is precisely what U.S. antiterrorist policy has concentrated on since 9/11, and to all indications, quite successfully.
--
Our campaign against Al-Queda and its offshoots has been extraordinarily successful. There have been no further attacks despite repeated attempts (another element ignored) But the next successful strike may well come from a completely different direction, from groups now considered harmless, or irrelevant, or that perhaps don't even yet exist...

[and above all else: the convergence of suicidal (non-deterable) martyrs and portable WMD. Long-ish, important, recommended > http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/the_terror_scare.html ]

Sweden, Norway drop out of UN's Darfur mission

Sweden and Norway have dropped plans to send about 400 troops to the UN peacekeeping force in Darfur because of opposition from Sudan's government, a Swedish Foreign Ministry official said Wednesday. The two Scandinavian countries had planned to send a joint engineering unit to the peacekeeping force in the troubled region, but the Swedish and Norwegian foreign ministers said in a joint statement that ''Sudan's opposition makes it impossible to maintain the offer of a Norwegian-Swedish contribution."

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/01/09/darfur-peacekeeping.html

Will Venezuela Be Judenrein

On December 1, 2007, two dozen heavily armed police staged a raid on a Jewish community center in Caracas where hundreds were celebrating a wedding. The police, the Venezuelan equivalent of the FBI, claimed to be seeking weapons and evidence of "subversive activity." They found no weapons

This bit of harassment theater was only the latest in a series of worrying moves by the Chavez government against its Jewish citizens. The same community center had been raided in 2004, in the morning hours when children were being bussed to school. The regime -- which boasts of cozy friendships with Ahmadinejad's Iran -- has also engaged in steady anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda. A little more than a year ago, Chavez declared in a Christmas Eve speech that "the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world."

[our neighbor]

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2008/01/25/will_venezuela_be_judenrein

US Was 'Set Up' to 'Take the Flak' for China, India at Bali Conference

The media loved the melodramatic moment at the Bali global warming conference where a delegate gained YouTube and environmental infamy as the man who pushed America to break the deadlock in Bali when he told the US to “lead” or “get out of the way”on the issue of curbing greenhouse gases.
But what happened was not that simple, Mr. Conrad said recently, in his first in-depth interview since the close of the talks. The American delegation, in a way, was “set up” by other countries to take the blame, he said.

“There was a certain feeling that maybe the U.S. could be the fall guy for this whole thing, that if G-77 couldn’t resolve its own issues, if it just held the line on a position they already knew the U.S. rejected, that the U.S. would be the one that stepped up and had to take the flak for collapsing the whole thing,”

It's easier to blame the United States for all of the world's problems. That way no one else has to take responsibility, and it perpetuates the Evil America storyline.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/lynn-davidson/2008/01/22/us-was-set-take-flak-china-india-bali-conference

'Patients to lose weight before NHS treatment'

Patients could be required to lose weight before they can be treated on the National Health Service, Gordon Brown has suggested. In a New Year message to NHS staff, the Prime Minister indicates people may have to fulfil new "responsibilities" in order to establish their entitlement to care. The new conditions could be set out in a formal NHS "constitution", Mr Brown says. (Snip) Despite the NHS commitment to provide free universal care, it is already common for doctors to set conditions on patients seeking treatment.

[the inevitable evolution of government run health'care']

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=EL3VVI3Y3LYOFQFIQMFSFFOAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/news/2008/01/01/nhealth201.xml

Obama supports driver's licenses for illegals

Washington -- Sen. Barack Obama easily won the African American vote in South Carolina, but to woo California Latinos, where he is running 3-to-1 behind rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, he is taking a giant risk: spotlighting his support for the red-hot issue of granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. It's a huge issue for Latinos, who want them. It's also a huge issue for the general electorate, which most vehemently does not.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/28/MNH1UL57Q.DTL

Recession Skeptics – The Side Unheard in the Media

Recession stories have a lot in common with global warming stories - there are a lot of them and you hear only one side. And like global warming, recession is the subject of a Newsweek cover story, appearing on the front of the magazine's February 4 issue. The story, "The U.S. Economy Faces the Guillotine," written by Daniel Gross, takes a one-sided gloomy approach to reporting on the U.S. economy. It worked on the assumption a recession is inevitable and may have even already started.

"The Great Global Market Freak-Out of 2008 has everyone asking whether the United States - already on the road to recession - is entering into a protracted period of economic trouble where jobs will be slashed, prices will continue to rise and the dollar will keep falling; and if so, whether the declining U.S. economy will pull the rest of the world down with it,"

What Gross completely ignored it the possibility the economy will be fine and stave off a recession. There are prominent economists* who don't believe that the United States is "on the road to recession," - but good luck reading their opinions in Newsweek.

[*Brian Wesbury, an economist for First Trust Advisors, L.P., in the January 28 Wall Street Journal. , for one]

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/jeff-poor/2008/01/29/recession-skeptics-side-unheard-media

Grading Teachers: Kids' Test Scores Must Count

If you want good teachers in the schools, the first step is obvious: Figure out who they are. And not by relying solely on water-cooler chat and subjective judgments but by also looking at rock-hard data on teacher performance. Such common-sense thinking has led Chancellor Joel Klein & Co. to undertake a pilot project to measure and track teachers' results - based on their students' test scores. (Snip) Imagine teachers treated like other professionals - having their performance monitored and quantified, as is routinely done in other fields...

[a 'pilot' program. better late then never I guess]

http://www.nypost.com/seven/01282008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/grading_teachers_560403.htm

Bush to push for trade deals

The White House is planning a major campaign to persuade a reluctant Congress to approve free trade deals with Colombia, South Korea and Panama this year, a senior Commerce Department official said on Wednesday. But the Bush administration is unlikely to accept legislation hiking duties on Chinese imports as a tradeoff for those pacts, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Chris Padilla said in an interview.

[Q: when they 'hike duties' on imported goods, who pays for that?]

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/International__Business/Bush_plans_relentless_push_for_trade_deals/articleshow/2688393.cms

AFP: Same Story, Two Different Towns

Two Ohio towns. Identical story. That's what the AFP presented to us on Sunday and then again yesterday. On Sunday,
we read this:

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.

This is Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland and a town ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, either in search of new jobs after the factories shut down, or in shame after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.

Monday,
we read this:

The streets are empty. Trash rustles down the road past rusted barbecues, abandoned furniture, sagging homes and gardens turned to weed.

This is Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood in southeastern Cleveland ravaged by the subprime mortgage crisis roiling the United States.

Faded "for sale" signs sit in front of deserted houses. The residents are gone, most after being evicted for missing their mortgage payments.

A red, white and blue American flag flies over windows and doors which have been boarded up to keep the drug dealers away.

Keep comparing the two. The wording is verbatim in both yarns.

http://colossus.mu.nu/

Ad Watch: Term limits change tied to effective disaster response

California
--
A new campaign advertisement cites emergency response to last year's devastating Southern California wildfires as a reason to alter lawmakers' terms by approving Proposition 93.
--
ANALYSIS: The ad implies that legislators played a key role in responding to the fatal infernos, but the Assembly and Senate were not in regular session at the time. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued numerous emergency orders to assist victims while firefighters struggled to extinguish the flames, but the governor's actions did not require, or receive, a vote by the Legislature.

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/657810.html