Marine Corps Sgt. Jeremy F. Boutwell, 23, knows a thing or two about honor, courage and commitment.
“Honestly, leaving Iraq was the worst time of my life,” he said. “It was nice being around home for about the first month, because I got to see my family and friends, but then it tore me up inside knowing my buddies were still heavily engaged at the time (in Iraq).”
Boutwell said he never lost his desire to be a Marine during the surgeries and his ensuing recovery, but quickly found himself in another battle: the fight to re-enlist.
“Headquarters tried to retire me from the Corps when I was stuck down in Texas for my surgeries. But I didn’t want to get out, so I fought the decision, and they finally let me re-enlist. You just really got to believe in being a Marine and believe in what you’re doing, and that’ll carry you as far as you want to go.”
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Poll suggests Iraqis optimistic
More than 50% of Iraqis think their lives are good, more than at any time in the last three years, a survey says. The poll for the BBC, ABC, ARD and NHK of more than 2,000 people also suggests that a majority believe that security in their area has improved since 2007...
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Clinton says "we cannot win" Iraq war
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Hillary Clinton charged on Monday the Iraq war may end up costing Americans $1 trillion and further strain the economy, as she made her case for a prompt U.S. troop pullout from a war "we cannot win."
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ABC Finds Optimistic Iraqis and Kids Playing Safely on the Street
Marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, ABC's Wold News on Monday provided a status check on how Iraqis view their lives. Anchor Charles Gibson explained “we have polled inside Iraq and there is some good news.” Specifically, “today, 55 percent of Iraqi say their lives are going well. Last summer that number was 39 percent.”
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CNN Features Iraqi Troops Who Favor Democrats in Election
CNN’s Kyra Phillips, currently in Iraq on assignment, apparently couldn’t any Iraqi troops who support the Republicans for the November election in the U.S. All of those featured in her report on Friday’s "Newsroom" program said glowing things about Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or the Democrats in general...
[what bias?]
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said President Bush's Iraq policy has failed. She spoke in response to comments made last week by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who said that no one in the U.S. and Iraqi governments thinks there has been "sufficient progress by any means" when it comes to Iraqi national reconciliation. [i.e., the politics]
But Michael Rubin, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, called Petraeus a "realist," adding that "the progress toward reconciliation will take time."... "President Bush doesn't have a magic wand," he said. "But there is a huge difference between not following an arbitrary congressional timeline and failing."
"The worst possible option would be to withdraw and create a vacuum," Rubin told Cybercast News Service.
[The critical thing is that Iraq be made to fail in time for the presidential election.
Party before country]
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A new Pentagon report on Iraq and Terrorism has the news media buzzing. An item on the New York Times blog snarks, "Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link." The ABC News story that previews the full report concludes, "Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda."
How, then, to explain this sentence about Iraq and al Qaeda from the report's abstract: "At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust"?
The executive summary says that the evidence did not reveal a "smoking gun (direct connection)" between Iraq and al Qaeda. But, as noted, the report itself offers much evidence that the opposite is true...
... Saddam Hussein "supported" a group that merged with al Qaeda in the late 1990s, run by al Qaeda's #2, and the New York Times thinks this is not a link between Iraq and al Qaeda? How does that work?
Anyone interested in the "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism" -- that language comes from this report, too -- should read the entire thing for themselves, here.
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Although there has been considerable talk in recent months about possible political, constitutional, or economic crises in Russia, only distinguished human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov has drawn attention to a crisis that is already under way: Russia's "shameful moral crisis."
Kovalyov emphasized the "corrupting force" of the lies that Russia's leaders "are incapable of rejecting." He notes that no "remotely literate citizen" believes these lies, including even the staunchest supporters of Putin and the pro-Kremlin Unified Russia party...
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[HT:MD]
Foreign technology collection efforts have "eroded the US military advantage by enabling foreign militaries to acquire sophisticated capabilities that might otherwise have taken years to develop." "Massive" industrial espionage has "undercut the US economy by making it possible for foreign firms to gain a competitive economic edge over US companies."
Dr. Brenner's report goes on to say that foreign intelligence efforts increasingly "rely on cybertools to collect sensitive US technology and economic information." Foreign intelligence agencies do this by "placing collectors in proximity to sensitive technologies or else establishing foreign research" by "forming ventures with US firms." The report specifically identifies China and Russia as the leading culprits...
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Trendy climate-change policies like ethanol and other biofuels are actually worse for the environment than fossil fuels, according to two studies published in Science, a peer-reviewed journal. The first study, by ecologists at Princeton University and the Woods Hole Research Center, break new ground by exposing a kind of mega-accounting error:
Utilities face a serious problem. Electricity demand is projected to increase 40 percent by 2030, according to government estimates. Meanwhile, overzealous regulators make it difficult to expand energy capacity. Unfortunately, instead of loosening regulations to induce capacity expansion, state and federal governments are moving toward rationing electricity.
Proponents make it sound so simple. Just buy a new dishwasher, build a couple of windmills, put some solar cells on the roof and — voila — energy problem solved. Not really. Maryland would have to reduce its electricity consumption by about a fifth of today's use — or the equivalent of a half a million households — to meet Mr. O'Malley's objective. Still, some may say, all this sounds fair enough. What's wrong with some aggressive conservation?
Well, there's a lot wrong when it's unjustifiably forced upon consumers. Think about it. The legitimacy of these draconian efforts is rooted in the notion there is an energy shortage. Conservation, after all, makes sense when there is a shortage of something. But energy is not in short supply. There are fossil fuels, and lots of them, right here in America. Yet America is one of the few nations that chooses to leaves much of its own reserves untapped...
[a component of our insane energy policies is that government bureaucrats are always looking for ways to increase their power - and this energy-is-bad idea plays right into their hands of taxing (and so controlling) all activity]
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Wait lists for medically necessary health care are Canada's shame, says writer Nadeem Esmail. Or, as Beverly McLachlin, Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, says, access to a waiting list is not access to health care.
* In 2007, wait times for access to health care in Canada reached a new historic high: 18.3 weeks averaged across 12 medical specialties.
* Canadians waited a median of 25 weeks for cataract surgery from the time their general practitioner referred them to a specialist to the time they received treatment.
* Canadians waited a median of 42 weeks for joint replacement.
Consider the personal costs a wait line of that magnitude entails in
term of pain and suffering and actually making a condition worse.
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Several members of the state's House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would have the state's health department set the limits on who is obese. These guidelines would be sent to all restaurants, which would then be enjoined from serving customers who fall into the dreaded obese category.
[snip]
It's unlikely that such a law will ever become reality, but the fact that it's been proposed shows how crazy it's getting out there...
[again: political correctness runs amok - with no limits - until actively stopped by the populace. Are we there yet? ]
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The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer and so is his wife Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate.) Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Benson, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.
The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.
Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work.
Lawyers see these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And so we have seen the procession of official enemies in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers - and the Democratic Party is made up of lawyers.
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Three Things to Ponder:
[HT:GC]
C O W S
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.
T H E C O N S T I T U T I O N
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq . Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.
T H E 1 0 C O M M A N D M E N T S
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this:
You cannot post "Thou Shalt Not Steal," "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery," and "Thou Shall Not Lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians...It creates a hostile work environment.
