[this isn't the critique of Bush often implied: those that see the constant encroachment of socialism and loss of personal liberties also respond that the country's headed in the wrong direction...]
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Soldiers Visit to Help Afghan Children Begin School

The soldiers showed their support for the school, teachers and students by providing notebooks, pens, pencils and other school supplies to the students. About 120 students arrived for the first day of classes at the Oshay school in the Shahidi Hasas district of Afghanistan’s Oruzgan province.

“All of the children seemed extremely happy to be there and excited to learn,” a coalition soldier said.

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Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, California University Professor Emeritus, Regarding the Nomination of General David Patraeus to Centcom Commander:

“Petraeus’ recent nomination to Centcom commander suggests that, like the growing influence of Gens. U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman in 1863, or of George Marshall when he reconfigured the Army in 1940, we at last are beginning to get the right officers in the right places at the right time.

“The despairing enemy seems to sense this as well. The more al-Qaida mouthpiece Ayman al-Zawahiri threatens the West, the more he sounds like Hitler's shrill propagandist Joseph Goebbels in his bunker as the Third Reich was crumbling.

“In his latest desperate rant, a suddenly ‘green’ Zawahiri was reduced to appealing to environmentally conscious Muslims to fault the United States for our supposed culpability for global warming! No wonder polls across the Middle East show a sharp decline in support for his boss, Osama bin Laden.”

[the point: time is not on their side, it's on ours - provided we persevere]

The 100 Year Lie

Asked at a New Hampshire campaign stop about possibly staying in Iraq 50 years, John McCain interrupted -- "Make it a hundred" -- then offered a precise analogy to what he envisioned:

"We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea for 50 years or so."

And lest anyone persist in thinking he was talking about war-fighting, he told his questioner:

"It's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world."

There is another analogy to the kind of benign and strategically advantageous "presence" McCain was suggesting for postwar Iraq: Kuwait. The U.S. (with allies) occupied Kuwait in 1991 and has remained there with a major military presence for 17 years. We debate dozens of foreign policy issues in this country.

I've yet to hear any serious person of either party call for a pullout from Kuwait.

Why? Because our presence projects power and provides stability for the entire Gulf and for vulnerable U.S. allies that line its shores.

But a serious argument is not what Democrats are seeking. They want the killer sound bite, the silver bullet to take down McCain. According to Politico, they have found it: "Dems to hammer McCain for '100 years.'"

-- "He (McCain) says that he is willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq" (Barack Obama, Feb. 19).

-- "We are bogged down in a war that John McCain now suggests might go on for another 100 years" (Obama, Feb. 26).

"It's a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage 'endless war' based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea."

The Democrats are undeterred. "It's seldom you get such a clean shot," a senior Obama adviser told Politico.

It's seldom that you see such a dirty lie.

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US found date-stamped Iranian weapons in Iraq: report

The US military says it has found Iranian-made mortars, rockets and explosives in Iraq bearing recent date stamps, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. "You can see the manufacturing dates right on the armaments themselves," a senior commander in Baghdad was quoted as saying. "These are very clearly weapons that were made in the last month or so."

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University 'an agent of extreme Islam'

A judge has likened Griffith University to hardline Islamic ''madrassas'' in Pakistan - notorious for breeding radicals - and accused the Queensland institution of promoting a Muslim ideology espoused by Osama bin Laden. Queensland District Court judge Clive Wall also accused Griffith of becoming an ''agent'' through which the Saudi Arabian embassy was propagating extreme Islam.

[G.W.O.T.]

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Pelosi Kills Colombian Free Trade Agreement

Pelosi's Bad Faith: The Democrats are now an officially protectionist party.

That much was made clear when Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed the rules of the House to avoid being forced to bring the Colombian Free Trade Agreement to a vote:

The fact is, Democrats killed this agreement because they want to roll back free trade agreements across the board. Quite simply, this is madness. For every job they "save" (a dubious proposition), 3 jobs will be lost as a result of reduced exports and imports as nations bump up tarrifs and protectionism becomes the norm.

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Colombian police: FARC responsible for most U.S. cocaine

BOGOTA, -- Most of the cocaine that enters the United States is manufactured by FARC, Alvaro Caro, head of Colombia's drug enforcement police, said Monday. "The southern guerillas send their cocaine via the Pacific and the northern ones via the Atlantic, but all are equally committed to growing illegal crops and harvesting them for export," he said.

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U.N. sees world climate change deal in 2009

The world can reach a significant new climate change pact by the end of 2009 if current talks keep up their momentum, the head of the United Nations climate panel said on Sunday. The United Nations began negotiations on a sweeping new pact in March after governments agreed last year to work out a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol by the end of next year...

[I.e., they're in a rush to inact some kind of binding something before the ruse is up. - Silence will be interpreted as consent...]

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The rise of the new energy world order

A steady migration of power and wealth from energy-deficit to energy-surplus nations: There are few countries - perhaps a dozen altogether - with enough oil, gas, coal and uranium to meet their own energy needs and provide significant surpluses for export. Not surprisingly, such states will be able to extract increasingly beneficial terms from the much wider pool of energy-deficit nations dependent on them for vital supplies of energy. These terms, primarily of a financial nature, will result in growing mountains of petrodollars being accumulated by the leading oil producers, but will also include political and military concessions.

The transfer of wealth alone is already mind-boggling. The oil-exporting countries collected an estimated $970 billion from the importing countries in 2006, and the take for 2007, when finally calculated, is expected to be far higher. A substantial fraction of these dollars, yen and euros have been deposited in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), giant investment accounts owned by the oil states and deployed for the acquisition of valuable assets around the world.

In recent months, the Persian Gulf SWFs have been taking advantage of the financial crisis in the United States to purchase large stakes in strategic sectors of its economy....

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Quote of the Week

Robert Samuelson, Newsweek and Washington Post Contributing Editor, Regarding Congressional Complicity in the Rising Costs of Fuel:

"It may surprise Americans to discover that the United States is the third-largest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We could be producing more, but Congress has put large areas of potential supply off-limits. These include the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and parts of Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. By government estimates, these areas may contain 25-30 billion barrels of oil (against about 30 billion of proven U.S. reserves today) and 80 trillion cubic feet or more of natural gas (compared with about 200 tcf of proven reserves).

"What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity."

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Investment Group Puts Millions in Green Companies Gore Has Stake In

Some more pieces of the "How Al Gore is Going to Become Amazingly Wealthy by Selling Climate Hysteria" puzzle came together Friday when the Silicon Valley venture capital firm he's now a part of announced a $500 million investment in green technologies.

Making matters more delicious, the firm already has investments in many of the same companies Gore admitted in March he has a stake in.

To begin untangling this web, let's first take a gander at what was reported Friday by the San Francisco Chronicle (emphasis added): ...

[that's why I prefer 'scam' to 'hoax' - it's the money...]

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Stop Apologizing for Being an American

A couple of days ago, I had the misfortune of being on a BBC radio show with an American college professor who sounded like he had read one too many Noam Chomsky books.

Let me give you a short impression of the guy: "Blah, blah, blah, racists! Blah, blah, blah, of course Jeremiah Wright was right when he said...blah, blah, blah. No wonder people are angry at America!"

Not to disagree with Professor Crabby McCommiePuss, but there is no nation in the world that has more to be proud of and less to apologize for than the United States of America...

[a little perspective...]

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