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Boy, the spine sure has melted out of those Democrats! Was it really only just last week Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to fight the telecom amnesty element of the new FISA legislation that gave Bush everything he wanted and more to protect America from terrorist attack? When promoting how the House Dems caved on the FISA legislation, Obama made a promise I knew then was as fake as all his positions on key issues of the day: “Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President’s illegal program of warrantless surveillance...

Obama advisers say bin Laden can appeal to U.S. civilian courts Barack Obama has expressed support for the Supreme Court’s decision in favor of civilian prosecution of terrorism suspects, and his advisers said Tuesday that if Osama bin Laden were captured, he too should face civilian prosecution. – AP Bill Sammon, The Examiner 2008-06-18 07:00:00.0 Current rank: # 13 of 6,452 WASHINGTON - Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers said Tuesday that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to U.S. civilian courts, a privilege opposed by John McCain. Responding to questions from The Examiner, Sen....

Buried deep in this AP report, between news of a crackdown on al Qaeda in Mosul and a suicide bombing in Baqouba, is Nancy Pelosi's concession that the surge is succeeding. According to AP, the Speaker, who made a surprise visit to Iraq, "expressed confidence that expected provincial elections will promote national reconciliation." She also "welcomed Iraq's progress in passing a budget as well as oil legislation, and a bill paving the way for the provincial elections in the fall that are expected to more equitably redistribute power among local officials." As Abe Greenwald points out, in February Pelosi said...

Both opponents and supporters of the war in Iraq seem reluctant to raise the issue of what's going on there now as an issue in the presidential race. Opponents, of course, can't deny that things are better than a year ago - and may fear that this could persuade voters that President Bush was right after all. After all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided that the war was "lost" a year ago. And critics have sounded the tocsins about the supposedly coming Iraqi civil war for five years. (Some even suggested at times that Iraq was already in civil...

The battle between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama over whether Mr. Obama belittled voters in small towns appears to have hardened the views of both candidates’ supporters and stirred anxiety among many Democrats about the party’s prospects in the fall. For five days, as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have tangled more ferociously than at almost any point in the last year, interviews with voters in Pennsylvania suggested little new movement toward either side as the primary campaign there entered its final week. A snapshot of public opinion, a poll by Quinnipiac University, showed no change in the...

ANN ARBOR, MI – Military prosecutors are desperately fighting to prevent the testimony of Pennsylvania Congressman John Murtha, Secretary of the Navy Donald Winters and several top Marine Generals, including former Marine Commandant Michael Hagee and the current Commandant James Conway. The requested witnesses will show the dirty hand of unlawful command influence—considered by the courts as the “mortal enemy of military justice.” The hearing on the motion to produce the testimony of these high ranking officials will begin tomorrow morning at Camp Pendleton, California. The Unlawful Command Influence motion (click here to read motion in pdf) was one of...

Sunday, April 13, 2008 Posted By:MAF Blogger DannyPermalinkPatraeus testifies again: Liberals pile on Helen Thomas has written another scathing opinion dripping with contempt for General Petraeus, Ryan Crocker and of course, we can’t forget, the President. Surprisingly even Democratic would-be presidents Obama and Hillary could not escape her livid criticism. In their disappointing comments, the Democratic rivals were as cautious as Petraeus. Clinton said “it’s time to begin an orderly withdrawal of our troops.” Obama told Petraeus that while he wants U.S. troops out of Iraq, he “would not initiate a precipitous withdrawal.” Watching the testimony myself, and looking at...

The last time General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker reported to Congress on the state of the Iraq war, "benchmarks" were all the rage. Congress had established 18 criteria in early 2007 both to pressure the Iraqis and to keep score on their progress. And in September, Congress faulted the Iraqi government for failing to meet many of those measures. Concocting a checklist of laws and actions that would lead to national reconciliation in Iraq was always a fool's errand and misunderstood the complexity of the situation. But having laid down this marker, Congress would want to hear an...

Washington Dispatch: The Iraq general's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee was predictable: progress is real, we must stay the course. But committee Democrats missed an opportunity to undercut the White House story. By David Corn April 8, 2008 As General David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday and pitched a story of success in Iraq, a news update flashed on the television screen: Sadr threatens to end cease-fire. Meaning that civil war between the Shiite-dominated government of Baghdad and the Shiite movement led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr could...

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a Democratic candidate for president, said on Tuesday that the United States should set a timetable to pull its troops out of Iraq to pressure leaders there to establish peace. "Increased pressure in a measured way, in my mind ... includes a timetable for withdrawal. Nobody's asking for a precipitous withdrawal, but I do think that it has to be a measured but increased pressure," Obama told Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

On the heels of the testimony of Gen. Petraeus to Congress this week Senator Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have written a editorial in the Wall Street Journal that is a must read: Al Qaeda in Iraq has been swept from its former strongholds in Anbar province and Baghdad. The liberation of these areas was made possible by the surge, which empowered Iraqi Muslims to reject the Islamist extremists who had previously terrorized them into submission. Any time Muslims take up arms against Osama bin Laden, his agents and sympathizers, the world is a safer place. In recent months, the...

Based on his Senate history, Barack Obama as president would likely push to expand human rights and reduce poverty abroad using cooperation rather than confrontation. If foreign events permit. Aside from his vigorous opposition to the Iraq war, Obama spent more of his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on speeches and inspirational trips than on investigations and aggressive oversight. Obama pushed through legislation that condemned violence by the Zimbabwe government, for example. He helped raise awareness about Darfur and called on the administration to do more to reduce global poverty. ...he's worked across the aisle on critical issues...

Sometime within the next six months or so, al-Qaida or Saddamist terrorists will attempt a Tet offensive. No, Middle Eastern mass murderers don't celebrate the Vietnamese festival of Tet, but trust that America's enemies everywhere do celebrate and systematically seek to emulate the strategic political effects North Vietnam's 1968 attack obtained. This spring marks the 40th anniversary of Hanoi's offensive (yes, 40 years, two generations). It will also mark the umpteenth time American enemies have attempted to win in the psychological and political clash of an American election what they cannot win on the battlefield. In the course of Tet...

President Bush said Congress must act quickly to approve a bill to fund troops in combat before members break for the holidays. “Congress’ first priority should be to provide the funds and flexibility to keep our troops safe and help them protect our nation,” Bush said during his weekly radio address yesterday. The president said he has submitted detailed requests to fund operations in the war on terror beginning in February, and he noted that troops have been waiting on the needed funds for months. “The funds include money to carry out combat operations against the enemy in Afghanistan and...

TAKE THE POLL AT THE LINK: Would you torture a captured terrorist who hid bombs in your child's school? Democrats (and some rinos) are stalling the confirmation of Judge Michael Mukasey as the new Attorney General because they aren't convinced where he stands on "waterboarding". If a terrorist was caught hiding bombs in their child's school, you can bet Hillary, Senator Leahy of Vermont, and even Schumer would line up to rip off fingernails to get the intel. But to satisfy their ultra-left and jihadi-excusing base, they are putting our lives at risk so they can posture as "progressives". Tell...

Jim Webb, the loquacious freshman senator from Virginia, is again proposing an amendment that would mandate a certain amount of time that soldiers must spend at home between deployments. At first glance, supporting this amendment looks like supporting motherhood and apple pie — Webb’s stated aim is to take care of America’s soldiers at war, and who could possibly object to that? The amendment, furthermore, gives the president the right to waive the requirement “if the President certifies to Congress that the deployment…is necessary to meet an operational emergency posing a threat to vital national security interests of the United...

Fifteen months before the 2008 election, the Democrats are odds-on favorites to put one of their own into the White House. A solid majority of the country rejects the Bush administration and the war in Iraq he initiated. But psychologist Drew Westen says Democrats could lose yet again if they don't learn how to stand up for themselves and connect with voters emotionally. Westen is a clinical, personality and political psychologist and a professor in the departments of psychology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta. He's also a political consultant whose bestselling book, "The Political Brain:...

WASHINGTON -- Worsening disapproval scores for the Democrats in Congress have spawned party-wide fears that voter alienation could give Republicans a chance to make a comeback in 2008. The Democrats' tumbling voter-approval numbers haven't drawn much attention on the nightly news shows, but they have stirred warnings in the party's inner circles and raised hopes among GOP strategists for the first time since last year's election rout drove them from power. A string of independent polls in the past two weeks tells the story: -- A nationwide Pew Research Center poll found that barely 33 percent of Americans surveyed "approve...

WASHINGTON - Even some critics of President Bush's Iraq war policies are conceding there is evidence of recent improvements from a military standpoint. But Bush supporters and critics alike agree that these have not been matched by any noticeable progress on the political front. Despite U.S. pressure, Iraq's parliament went on vacation for a month after failing to pass either legislation to share the nation's oil wealth or to reconcile differences among the factions. And nearly all Sunni representatives in the government have quit, undermining the legitimacy of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite. Still, there have been signs of...

Washington, D.C. - There’s good news from Iraq, which has produced almost nothing but bad news since the 2003 invasion. The U.S. military surge, widely denounced as a last-ditch effort by an embattled, lame-duck president fighting an un-winnable civil war, is working. Even as vocal a war critic as Deputy Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has now acknowledged as much, telling CNN that the U.S. military is “making real progress.” Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multi-national force in Iraq and author of the counterinsurgency surge strategy now underway, told Talk Radio host Allen Colmes that during the past...

You know that things are going better in Iraq when even the Democrats begin to acknowledge it. One senator said U.S. troops are routing out al-Qaida in parts of Iraq. Another insisted President Bush's plan to increase troops has caused tactical momentum. One even went so far on Wednesday as to say the argument could be made that U.S. troops are winning. These are not Bush-backing GOP die-hards, but Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Bob Casey and Jack Reed. Even Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, said progress was being made by soldiers. The suggestions by them...

CHICAGO (AP) - Standing before a church congregation that has witnessed inner-city violence firsthand, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Sunday that more must be done to end a social ill that is "sickening the soul of this nation." Obama told churchgoers at the Vernon Park Church of God on Chicago's South Side that too many young lives are being claimed by violence and more must be done to combat the problem. "From South Central L.A. to Newark, New Jersey, there's an epidemic of violence that's sickening the soul of this nation," the Illinois senator told the crowd. "The...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Under mounting political pressure at home, the US military is betting all that a summer-long campaign against Al-Qaeda in Iraq will leave it in a position to begin drawing down US troops by early next year. General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, has only three months to bring about a major change in security conditions, a goal that has eluded all his predecessors. Should he fall short, analysts say, an angry Congress is almost certain to act to take matters into its own hands. "Let's not forget that there is a lot of power in...

In his official written reply when vetoing the democrats surrender bill, President Bush called the bill “UNCONSTITUTIONAL” and wrote the following: …. Finally, this legislation is unconstitutional because it purports to direct the conduct of the operations of the war in a way that infringes upon the powers vested in the Presidency by the Constitution, including as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. For these reasons, I must veto this bill. Amen Mr. President. God bless President Bush and our brave troops. Below is the full text of President Bush written veto: May 1, 2007 TO THE HOUSE OF...

A simple statement made by a national legislative leader in Washington this week indicates that a war is being lost, but it is not the war in Iraq. It is the defeat of the War of Ideas taking place nowadays in the US Congress. One striking example is a declaration by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that "the United States had lost the war in Iraq", a conclusion he said he’d communicated to President Bush at a meeting last Wednesday. "This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday",...

The Democrats will do John Murtha’s bidding. He owns them. It’s over. The House of Representatives will vote to defund the Iraq War, Mitch McConnell will have to fight a battle royal to prevent that sentiment from carrying the senate. There are those who would ask if I’m from Planet Murtha and they may even wonder if I’ve responsibly redeployed my common sense to Okinawa. When the new congress organized, Murtha was elected dog that runs behind Steny Hoyer. He should be the man whose view stays the same every day. This would hold true; except for one small thing....

President Bush has pursued an "erroneous policy" that has fostered violence in the Middle East, said former President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the historic Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. "In my opinion, maybe the worst ally Israel has had in Washington has been the George W. Bush administration, which hasn't worked to bring a permanent peace to Israel," Carter said Friday during a stop in West Michigan. Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, were here as part of a fundraiser for their son, Jack Carter, who is seeking a U.S. Senate seat in Nevada. The $500-a-person event, attended by...

Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans say the President should set a firm deadline for removing all U.S. military forces from Iraq. A Rasmussen Reports survey finds that 41% disagree and oppose such a deadline. Republicans oppose setting a firm deadline for troop withdrawal by a 60% to 31% margin. Democrats favor a deadline by a 61% to 26% margin. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 45% favor a deadline and 35% are opposed.