Congrats Bit And David

It would seem that BitsBlog is included in Right Wing News‘ John Hawkins favorite bloggers of 2007 list. BitsBlog ranked 32nd of the 40 listed.

As Bit and David do most of the heavy lifting, I feel that they deserve the praise. Keep up the good work.

Update I: (Bit)

Wow… I was running a bit behind my “go to work” schedule, this morning, so didn’t see this, until Fers brought it up. My reaction is one of pleasant surprise. That list puts us in some VERY heavy company…  We’re honored, indeed. Many thanks to John for the mention.

Update II:  (David L)

I’d be a hypocrite, if I all of sudden become a big fan of lists.   A list is no more relevant than the criteria used to compile it.   For a good example of a bad example, I recently skewered, for good reason, the Guadian‘s list of the most influencial liberals and coneervatives.

Having said that, John is conservative who shares similar preference as I do.    I am flattered by the company into which John places us.    Have read almost al the blogs John listed,  have bookmarked most and several are daily reads.   It is without exception  good company.

John lists one of the best single person amatuer blogs anywhere, Betsy’s Page.   To be better than Betsy’s Page would be my ultimate dream.

Alan Dershowitz, guesting at the WSJ today:

Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism–the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture in interrogation of suspects or the humiliating misuse of sexual taunting that infamously occurred at Abu Ghraib. I am talking about that rare situation described by former President Clinton in an interview with National Public Radio:

“You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that’s the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or waterboarding him or otherwise working him over.”

He said Congress should draw a narrow statute “which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” The president would have to “take personal responsibility” for authorizing torture in such an extreme situation. Sen. John McCain has also said that as president he would take responsibility for authorizing torture in that “one in a million” situation.

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president–indeed any leader of a democratic nation–would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

There’s a fair amount of meat in this article, and I commend it to your reading.

One point he doesn’t make here, however, that I think needs be made…

Is the relentless pursuit of such matters by the Democats seeking any tool possible to hit Bush over the head with, be more likely to cause some secretive activity on the part of Bush for national security reasons alone, much less simply keeping some sanity in the situation?  How mach security damage was done to us by the extreme measures being taken to expose our interrigations who there were conducted with, and how they were accomplished?  And consider the reasons why such measures were taken… political reasons, all. Was it worth risking our national security over? Is it really worth destroying the country over, so the Democrats can rule over the remains of it?

Yes, to answer the question of a couple overnight e-mails… I voted, yesterday. A local election, for the most part.

The initial tallies seem interesting… Democrats making gains in the metros, Republicans walking way with the prize everywhere else. Polarized, would be the word, I suppose. Such results are not unusual here in the people’s republic of New York. I’ll be looking over the local results from all over, though, today to see if I can find a trend that bears on the national scene. May take until evening.

Very interesting tidbit from World Net Daily with respect to the death of Kathleen Willey’s husband,  Ed: 

At the time of that meeting, Clinton and Willey were unaware that Ed Willey was lying dead of a gunshot wound to his mouth in the woods near his car, parked on a hunting path in rural King and Queen County, Virginia.

It does seems like friends of the Clintons were rather fond of suicide by gunshot the mouth.    The parallels to Vince Foster are eerie.

Hat tip:  Memeorandum.

Yeas and Nays:

On today’s “The Situation Room,” Sen. Hillary Clinton opened up about her widely-discussed performance during last week’s MSNBC debate. (You can watch the video here on Breitbart.tv)

“I wasn’t at my best the other night,” Clinton told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “We have had a bunch of debates, and you know, I wouldn’t rank that up in my very top list.”

Well, yeah. Thanks for admitting what the rest of the world was already saying. Can’t get by that Hillary, huh? So, what wasn’t good about the performance, then? That you were dishonest, evasive and flip-flopped in a fashion that makes landed trout jealous?

Or was it simply that you were exposed as doing so?

Crowley also pressed Clinton about the White House records from her husband’s administration and whether there was anything she could do to expedite their release.

We have tried and, as I said, he has done more than any other president and has never withheld any document that has been processed to be ready to be released.

Here we are, back at parsing the Clintonesque turn of a phrase. Define ‘processed’ for us. Does it include removing them from the public record via the pants leg express, I wonder?

Captain Ed notes, , the Mukasey vote, yesterday:

The Senate Judiciary Panel reported Michael Mukasey’s nomination to the full Senate today, recommending confirmation by an 11-8 vote. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein voted to support , as announced earlier, all but guaranteeing his confirmation on the floor of the Senate later this month. The opposition of the other Democrats transformed what had been a victory for them into another triumph for the White House:

Amid protests outside the Justice Department and opposition by key Democrats, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-8 Tuesday to send the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general to the full chamber for a confirmation vote.Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, two key committee Democrats who said last week they would vote for confirmation, gave him the majority vote needed to advance his nomination. Every panel Republican voted for Mukasey and every other Democrat opposed the nomination.

Feinstein, D-Calif., argued that a leaderless Justice Department is “not in the best interest of the American people or of the department itself. That’s worthy of consideration.”

Saying she believes torture is illegal, Feinstein said Mukasey should not be denied confirmation “for failing to provide an absolute answer on this one subject.”

Schumer, D-N.Y., who suggested Mukasey to the White House in the first place, countered that the nominee’s statements against waterboarding and for purging politics from the Justice Department amount to the best deal Democrats could get from the Bush administration.

And here’s where the Democrats almost literally snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They had pressured the White House to dump Alberto Gonzales, who gave the administration plenty of reasons to succumb. Instead of appointing Ted Olson, the apparent first choice of the White House, Schumer pushed for Mukasey as a “consensus candidate” — and won.

If the Democrats had left it at that, they could have claimed a significant victory over the White House. Instead, they engaged in a fruitless colloquy over whether waterboarding was illegal — when Congress has the power to make it explicitly illegal at any time.

Hmmm.

I certainly agree that The Democrat party handed GWB a victory, here, both with Mukasey’s appointment, and with the waterboarding nonsense. In the end, there’s really nothing else to call it.

But I don’t know as I’d call their position a futile one; Clearly, given they didn’t use their legislative authority to outlaw the procedure outright, the whole thing was for show. All smoke and mirrors for the benefit of the far left.  “Look, we’re standing up to Boooooshhhh”, and all that rot. In this, they can claim that they tried to stop the “torture”. It’s a thin claim, but usually with the far left, the arguments required to sell the left, are not all that convincing to the rest of us.

At the bottom line, however, this IS a victory for Mr. Bush, and yet another defeat for the Democrats, who haven’t been able to get ANYTHING right since they took over a year ago.

Michelle gives us a timeline of this mess.

So does fellow Swamp Stomper Blue Crab Blvd and so too, Sister Toldjah, and Whizbang, and Riehl World View

And Memeorandum, of course

Via Library of Economics and Liberty

Arnold Kling highlights a truism of the left in the Great Health Care Debate: Read the rest of this entry »

Just One Minute quotes the Boston Ledger:

   John Kerry: I’m Now Prepared to Fight Off Swift Boat Veterans
Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, perhaps preparing to get back into the presidential ring one day, claims he’s now armed with materials that will make war record critics from his 2004 presidential campaign go running tail between legs.

The 63-year-old Democratic senator told The Patriot-Ledger on Tuesday that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Navy servicemen who served with Kerry and criticized his record in Vietnam, will be revealed as liars.

“We have put together a documented portfolio that frankly puts their lies in such a total light of absurdity and indecency, that should they ever rear their ugly heads again, we have every single ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted, and I welcome that in a sense,” Kerry said after addressing Boston’s South Shore Chamber of Commerce. “It’s a shame we weren’t able to produce all that at the time.”

Cool – Kerry has finally wrestled his personal history to the canvas.  Did Douglas Brinkley, Tour of Duty author, finally allow Kerry access to Kerry’s “War Notes”?

Yeah, well, it took him this long to make stuff up that fit. And this isn’t the first time this has come up, as JOM indicates:

 Whatever – we spun this oldie back in May 2006, the last time Kerry claimed he was ready to bring it on against the Swifties.  I know everyone who followed the Swifties has a personal favorite, but mine is this – what in the record suggests that the two members of the Band of Brothers who now claim to have been with Kerry when he won his first Purple Heart were actually there?

Kerry had damned little in the way of credibility three years ago, and will certainly have none now…  But I suppose if he keeps his mouth running the Republicans will have a neat little Christmas gift.

What a sad excuse for a human being John Kerry is.

False Confessions They’ve always been the point of torture, and always will be.

In a CIA sub-station close to al Libi’s jail cell, the CIA’s “debriefers,” who had been talking to al Libi for days after his return from Cairo, were typing out a series of operational cables to be sent Feb. 4 and Feb. 5 to the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va. In the view of some insiders, these cables provide the “smoking gun” on the whole rendition program — a convincing account of how the rendition program was, they say, illegally sending prisoners into the hands of torturers.Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. (“I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda,” Powell said. “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”)

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a “foreign government service” (Egypt) that: “the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq…This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then “placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches].” He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to “tell the truth.” When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that “he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back.” Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then “was punched for 15 minutes.” (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war — the al Qaeda/Iraq link — was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

Now I’m really off to drink liberally.

So bloviates Atrios. My guess, however, is he’s been drinking already… he’s missed something fairly crucial about intel gathering… Actually several somethings…

• You seldom, if ever, act based on one source, in the intel game. We had far more than this one source telling us exactly the same scenario.
• There is no argument that tourture has been the source of much intel which has saved many lives… both American, and Iraqi.
• In spite of what inaccuracies he points up here, with (again) this single point source) nobody, including Atrios cannot deny that Saddam WAS in fact connected with al Quieda.

The Central issue, here… what we have here is an American leftist, squeamish about doing what needs to be done to secure victory, from a mortal enemy… an enemy who wouldn’t hesitate to engage in torture far worse than what Atrios complains of here, on far less provocation. Now, were a Democrat in the White House, do you suppose he’d be complaining so loudly? You know he wouldn’t.

And finally, how is it that the CIA is viable as a source, only when it matches the stunted and distored worldview of Atrios?

FIVE TERRORISTS KILLED, 30 SUSPECTS DETAINED DURING COALITION OPERATIONS

Posted: 05 Nov 2007 02:12 PM CST

FIVE TERRORISTS KILLED, 30 SUSPECTS DETAINED DURING COALITION OPERATIONS

Interesting note in the WaPo, today:

All of the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency are committed to a set of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would change the way Americans light their homes, fuel their automobiles and do their jobs, costing billions of dollars in the short term but potentially, the candidates say, saving even more in the decades to follow.

Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), who from the outset has made global warming one of the three pillars of his campaign, explains his ambitious plan to Democratic primary voters in terms of sacrifice.

“I know what presidential candidates are supposed to do; they roll in here every four years and they promise you this, they promise you that. What I’m going to do is tell you the truth,” Edwards says at nearly every campaign stop. “It won’t be easy, but it is time for a president who asks Americans to be patriotic about something other than war.”

The strong medicine Edwards and his fellow candidates are selling — an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gases from 1990s levels by 2050 — tracks with a plan espoused by scientists. But it is a plan that will require a wholesale transformation of the nation’s economy and society.

Not really. More like a wholesale destruction of our economy… which our previous attempts to ‘save the environment’ have gotten about half completed.

Casting this ‘global warming’ nonsense as a moral imperative is already wearing thin on people who have seen previos effotrs only come to economic problems, increase governmental power, increased taxes, higher energy costs  lower productivity, and increased hardship on the American family… the very people they’re supposedly trying to help.

The Democxrats are playing the Global Warming scare, ala Chicken Little, to get into office. They’re playing on fear, plain and simple.

Don’t let them.

Alas poor Tim Russert.   First Linda Hirshman  analogized Russert to Adolf Hiter.  Now,  and maybe even worse,  former president B.J. Clinton compares Russert to  John O’Neill

‘Rat folklore holds that John Kerry would be Presidnet but for the evil of the SWIFT Boat attacks.   Ryan Nakahima reports former President B.J. Clinton has elevated Tim Russet to the level of John O’Neill: : 

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former President Clinton on Monday compared Republican criticism of his wife’s position on driver’s license for illegal immigrants to the ads that helped sink John Kerry’s White House hopes in 2004.

“I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again,” Clinton told some 3,000 members of the American Postal Worker’s Union at a convention 

Nedra Picker, Associcated Press, reports that Barack Obama quesations B.J.’s leap:

WASHINGTON – Barack Obama said Tuesday that former President Clinton is making a leap to compare treatment of his wife in the presidential race to the “swift boat” criticism of John Kerry in 2004.

The former president had encouraged an audience in Nevada Monday not to let “trivial matters” take away the election from the Democrats as they have in the past. He cited the television ads during the 2004 presidential campaign that questioned Kerry’s patriotism and campaign commercials in 2002 suggesting that Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga. was soft on terrorism 

Bruce Kesler, Democracy Project. questions the wisdom of B.J.’s analogy:

 The man of the infamous wagging finger can’t stick it in the hole in the dike holding back the facts about Hillary irrefutable waffling, and only emphasizes it by comparing it to Kerry’s mendaciousness. If there’s to be any repeat of 2004, it’s led by the bald-faced Clintons.

The problem for Kerry with the SWiFT boat ads is that the charges were true.    Kerry was never in Cambodia while Richard Nixon was President.    B.J. suggests that the ”rats simply can’t handle the truth.

Russert’s question could have been answered with either a simple yes or no.    If Mrs. Clinton needs to call in the heavy cavalry every time she faces a simple yes or no question,  it is futher evidence that she is simply not qualified to be President.   David Koresh was not available for comment.

Hat tip:  Memeorandum.

Noted on another blog just now which shall remain nameless, since they had no part of choosing the graphic…

Is it just me or does this ad for NYC Tourism, look amazingly like this old cover for the 1972 WAR LP called “The World Is a Ghetto”?

Forgive me, but it strikes me that if anyone else were to make the connection between the two bits of artwork, it might not be the best image for tourism… Then again, I’ve always been a fan of the group… and so the connection would be more natural for me than for some. Still….

Glenn calls this one correctly, I think:

WHY IS THE WORLD MORE CONCERNED with Musharraf’s coup than with Hugo Chavez’s emerging dicatatorship?  Because enemies of the United States, like Chavez, get a pass.

Past this, I’ve already made a pronouncement, here.

Billy Beck:

News guaranteed to warm McPhillips’ heart:

“AUGUSTA, Maine –A state law encouraging high school seniors to continue their education by completing at least one postsecondary school application took effect last month, but Maine’s top education official is looking to take the approach a step further.

Education Commissioner Susan Gendron proposes a requirement that seniors apply to college before becoming eligible for a diploma. The change in state rules on graduation requirements would require approval by the Legislature.”

Look, why don’t we just cut right to the chase and mandate that everybody be smart?

Well, it’ll keep Erb in Tofu, at least. And eventually, it gives the left a massive advantage, politically. This is exatly why the government needs to be removed from the educational process.