House Democrats Are Divided
The Democrats are finding out now that they are in power it’s not always easy to make decisions. It was easy for them when they were the minority, all they had to do was wait for the prsident to do or say something and oppose it. No matter what it was.
Now they have the majority and they can’t make a decision on the Iraq war. They are trying to play both sides of the fence with their own party, and making neither side happy.
This is from politico.com:
Liberal Democrats Revolt On Iraq Spending Bill
John Bresnahan
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is facing a full-blown revolt from liberal House Democrats over the $98 billion Iraq supplemental bill, according to Democratic insiders. Anywhere between 50 to 75 Democrats are now threatening to vote against the bill because it doesn’t go far enough toward ending the war, including setting a date certain for withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, said the sources. Pelosi and Democratic leaders are expected to postpone markup of the Iraq bill in the House Appropriations Committee by at least a week in order to buy time to resolve the matter.
Liberals are unhappy with the current proposal being discussed by Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and the Democratic leadership, which would prevent President Bush from sending more troops to Iraq unless they are certified as being properly equipped, trained and rested to take on combat missions. After weeks of political attacks from Republicans, Murtha softened his original proposal so that Bush can waive the requirements, although the White House would have to report to Congress why they are issuing such waivers. The Blue Dog Coalition, a group of moderate and conservative Democrats from swing districts, also wanted Murtha to soften his proposal.
But as happens so often in politics, if you move too far in appeasing one group, you then alienate another, which is what’s happening here. Liberals Dems now don’t want to vote for the Iraq supplemental, with many pointing out to Pelosi and party leaders that they never have voted for one before and aren’t about to start doing so now just because Democrats are in the majority. These Democrats also want to offer their own alternative proposal to cut off Iraq funding immediately as an amendment to the supplemental on the House floor, said Democratic leadership aides.
Liberals Democrats like Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), co-chairwoman of the Out of Iraq Caucus, want to end the war now, so they want a date certain for a withdrawal or pullout or “strategic redeployment,” and they want it in the Iraq supplemental or they won’t vote for it. “They figure that we won the election on a promise to end the war, and they want to live up to that promise,” said a senior House Democratic lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a tough place the speaker is in right now, but we’ll work all this out.”
Pelosi has a bit of a problem here. If the Democratic leadership puts a date certain for withdrawal in the bill, there’s a chance that enough Blue Dogs Democrats would defect and vote with Republicans, meaning the bill could down for defeat outright. While that might suit anti-war lawmakers and groups. the political consequences could be disastrous for the party. It would end the Iraq war by default since there would be no more money for combat operations, and Republicans would punish the Democrats for years over it.
But if she leaves out a date-certain withdrawal, Pelosi may lose her left, and that’s her power base, both within the Democratic Caucus and the party at large. She faces a very ticklish task sorting the whole thing out, although the senior Democrat lawmaker isn’t worried. Pelosi “will get everyone on board at the end of the day,” the lawmaker insisted.
The House Democratic Caucus will met at 12 p.m. on Tuesday, and Iraq will be at the top of the agenda, according to Democratic sources.
GOP ‘B-Team’ Takes Jabs at Top Tier Candidates
Some of the lesser known Republican candidates appear to be starting to take shots at the big three candidates in the GOP. One of these men have my vote in the New Hampshire primary, I just haven’t decided which one.
I ask everone out there to look at these candidates also, not to just vote for someone with name recognition.
From cnsnews.com:
By Fred Lucas
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
(CNSNews.com) – Touting his conservative credentials, former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore borrows a phrase from an unlikely source:
“I will represent the Republican wing of the Republican party,” Gilmore said, a variation of a quote first made famous by Howard Dean, now the Democratic National Committee chairman, when he ran for his party’s 2004 presidential nomination. Dean complained that other Democrats in the primary race weren’t liberal enough.
Now, in the early stages of the 2008 presidential contest, the top GOP presidential candidates find themselves increasingly the targets of the “B-team” of candidates, as the lesser known Republicans take aim at the policies of the perceived frontrunners — Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
There’s good reason for the criticism, Gilmore said at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., on Saturday.
He noted that McCain opposed President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and favors an immigration policy that critics view as amnesty; that Romney endorsed then-Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas for president in 1992 and said he didn’t want to return to the economic policies of Ronald Reagan; and that Giuliani supports registration of guns and backed Democratic New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s failed reelection effort in 1994.
“These people who are anointed the frontrunners are fine men and served loyally in their positions — but they are not conservatives,” said Gilmore, also a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Gilmore was one of five “B-team” candidates to criticize the leading trio while speaking at the conservative event.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said Friday that conservatives may be asking themselves, “Dude, where’s my candidate?”
While admitting he lacks the name recognition and financial backing of the big three, Huckabee observed that “if celebrity and money were the most important factors in becoming president of the United States, then Paris Hilton would be president.”
Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas appeared to enjoy the most visible support of the lesser-known GOP candidates, based on the number of people at the conference waving signs with his name on them. In CPAC’s annual straw poll, Brownback came in third place with 15 percent of the vote.
Addressing the conference Friday, Brownback pledged to “rebuild the family and rebuild the culture.” He also promised to replace the current income tax code with flat tax and to end abortion if elected.
“Life begins at conception, biologically,” Brownback said. “With any luck, on the Supreme Court we are just one vote shy of overturning Roe v. Wade.”
Unlike some of the other candidates, Brownback didn’t take as many shots at the big three.
Conference attendees differed in their opinions on the type of candidate the GOP should nominate in 2008.
“Republicans will not win with just the party line,” said Joe Hannan of West Milford, N.J. “We need a moderate candidate like Rudy Giuliani. The people in charge of the Republican party knew we’ll need a more moderate candidate to win.”
But Art Kelly of Manassas, Va., said he hopes that someone other than McCain, Giuliani or Romney emerges.
“I don’t think the field has been narrowed at all,” Kelly said. “None of those three are acceptable to me. I would be hard pressed to say these guys are in the center. They’re liberal. They might be in the center for Massachusetts and New York.”
He conceded that in McCain’s case, he has been “good on spending and has spoken out on earmarks.”
While the top candidates generally have been more measured in their comments, the long shots have less to lose in speaking their minds — and they did so over the weekend.
“If a judge can look at a sonogram and not see a valuable human life, I will not appoint that person to the federal bench,” another “B-team” candidate, Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, told the enthusiastic crowd Friday.
Immigration reform crusader Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado – yet another 2008 aspirant – took the podium to applause from mostly one section of the crowd, but he revved up the broader audience during the speech.
“It’s great to celebrate diversity,” he said. “It’s when we make a state religion out of it that’s a problem,” he said, drawing laughter and applause.
Tancredo also poked fun at the top tier candidates, and their bids to shift to the right despite their questionable conservative records.
“I’m not surprised, with the rush to the right, the conversions that are made,” he said. “But conversions are supposed to happen on the road to Damascus, not the road to Des Moines” — a reference to the 2008 Iowa Caucus.
Closing In On bin Laden?
I hope this is true, but we have heard we are closing in on bin Laden before.
From blogs.abcnews.com:
CIA Rushing Resources to Bin Laden Hunt
Brian Ross Reports
Armed with fresh intelligence, the CIA is moving additional man power and equipment into Pakistan in the effort to find Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahri, U.S. officials tell ABC News.
“Reports that the trail has gone stone cold are not correct,” said one U.S. official. “We are very much increasing our efforts there,” the official said.
People familiar with the CIA operation say undercover officers with paramilitary training have been ordered into Pakistan and the area across the border with Afghanistan as part of the ramp-up.
Although never publicly acknowledged, Pakistan has permitted CIA teams to secretly operate inside Pakistan.
Pakistan officials say they are aware that CIA teams have increased their presence in northern Waziristan since last September when Pakistan withdrew its troops from the area under a much-criticized “peace deal” with tribal leaders.
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell testified last week that current intelligence “to the best of our knowledge” puts both bin Laden and al Zawahri in Pakistan. It was the first time a high-ranking U.S. official publicly identified Pakistan as bin Laden’s hiding place.
Past intelligence has indicated that bin Laden often changed locations in March, traveling to hiding places in the mountains once the snow cover begins to melt.
Can Mike Huckabee Out-Charm The GOP Big Three
From salon.com:
In a race dominated by Giuliani, McCain and Romney, the folksy Arkansas Republican is a long shot. But he’s the one Christian conservative running who might not scare independents.
By Michael Scherer
March 5, 2007 | WAUKEE, Iowa — When he woke up this morning, Mike Evans knew basically nothing about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. But now he sits in a booth at Philly’s Finest, a pizza joint squeezed between a tanning salon and a tax shop in an Iowa mini-mall, waiting for the long-shot 2008 Republican presidential candidate to arrive. He has brought along his five home-schooled children, all younger than 14, who are digging into the free pizza and soda pop. In his hand, he holds Huckabee’s Wikipedia entry, printed out just hours earlier. “I Googled him,” he says. Read more…
Tom Delay Questions Democrats Patriotism
From politico.com:
Other than seeing overweight relatives over the holidays, there’s never a bad time to be honest. If a member of Congress sincerely regrets a decision or a speech or a vote, whether about authorizing the president to use force in Iraq or anything else, the member should feel free to say so.
This is the calculus many Democrats would have us believe they used to come to their current hand-wringing lamentations over their votes on the war. This is all well and good, both morally and politically, except for one thing: Everyone knows it’s nonsense. Read more…
Obama Admits Life Begins At Conception
“We have too many children in poverty in this country and everybody should be ashamed, but don’t tell me it doesn’t have a little to do with the fact that we got too many daddies not acting like daddies. Don’t think that fatherhood ends at conception.”
With that statement above spoken by Barack Obama in a church in Selma Alabama, Obama admits human life begins at conception. This cannot please pro choice voters. If life begins at conception how can he justify his pro choice view on abortion. If he truely believes this he would have to be pro-life. No one who believes life begins at conception would condone destroying human life would they?
I believe he was pandering to the church goers he was speaking to, trying to deceive them into believing he must be pro life, while never having to state his real view on the issue.
It’s either that or he simply mispoke not even realizing he was possibly opening up an aportion debate. I know he was speaking about the responsibility of fathers in the upbringing of their children. Not letting the government take the place of the father. I couldn’t agree more with that thought. But I just found it interesting he said life begins at conception, and yet supports aborting life.
A Call For Seperation Of School And State
WHATEVER ELSE might be said about it, US District Judge Mark Wolf’s decision in Parker v. Hurley is a model of clear English prose.
“The constitutional right of parents to raise their children does not include the right to restrict what a public school may teach their children,” Wolf unambiguously wrote in dismissing a suit by two Lexington couples who objected to lessons the local elementary school was teaching their children. “Under the Constitution public schools are entitled to teach anything that is reasonably related to the goals of preparing students to become engaged and productive citizens in our democracy.”
Entitled to teach anything. That means, the judge ruled, that parents have no authority to veto elements of a public-school curriculum they dislike. They have no right to be notified before those elements are presented in class. And the Constitution does not entitle them to opt their children out of such classes when the subject comes up.
As Wolf’s straightforward language makes plain, it doesn’t much matter what that subject might be. The parents in the Lexington case objected to “diversity” instruction that presented same-sex marriage and homosexual attraction as unobjectionable. That message contradicted the parents’ “sincerely held religious beliefs that homosexuality is immoral and that marriage is necessarily . . . between a man and a woman.”
But suppose instead that the facts had been reversed, with parents who passionately support same-sex marriage filing suit because the school kept emphasizing the traditional definition of wedlock — a definition democratically reaffirmed in many state constitutional amendments and statutes in recent years. As Wolf applied the law, the result would have been the same: The complaint would have been dismissed, and the school would have prevailed. Read again the judge’s words: “The constitutional right of parents to raise their children does not include the right to restrict what a public school may teach their children.”
Similarly, the school would have prevailed if this had been a case about guns, with parents objecting to a curriculum that emphasized the Second Amendment and armed self-defense. Or a case about evolution, with parents outraged because their children were being taught that Darwinism and intelligent design were equally legitimate approaches to an ongoing debate. Or a case about race, with plaintiffs suing because their kids were learning that affirmative action amounts to reverse racism.
Parker v. Hurley, in other words, was not just a victory for gay-marriage advocates or a defeat for Judeo-Christian traditionalists. It was a reminder that on many of the most controversial subjects of the day, public schools do not speak for the whole community.
When school systems deal with issues of sexuality, religion, politics, or the family, there is always an overriding agenda — the agenda of whichever side has greater political clout. Parents who don’t like the values being forced down students’ throats have two options. One is to educate their children privately. The other is to find enough allies to force their own values down students’ throats. In Judge Wolf’s more genteel formulation: “Plaintiffs may attempt to persuade others to join them in electing a Lexington School Committee that will implement a curriculum . . . more compatible with their beliefs.”
Once Americans may have agreed on what children should be taught, but that day is long gone. On any number of fundamental issues, parents today are sharply divided, and there is no way a government-run, one-curriculum-fits-all education system can satisfy all sides. The only way to end the political battles over schooling is to depoliticize the schools. And the only way to do that is to separate school and state.
Parents should have the same freedom in educating their kids that they have in clothing, housing, and feeding them. You wouldn’t let the government decide what time your kids should go to bed, or which doctor should treat their chicken pox, or how they should spend their summer vacation, or which religion they should be instructed in. On matters serious and not so serious, parents are entrusted with their children’s well-being. Why should schooling be an exception?
Get government out of the business of running schools, and a range of alternatives will emerge. Freedom, innovation, and competition will do for education what they do for so much else in American life: increase choices, lower costs, improve performance — and eliminate conflict. So long as education is controlled by the state, the battles and bad blood will continue. With more liberty will come more tolerance — and more resources spent on learning than on litigation.
Jeff Jacoby’s e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
Coulter Versus Maher
From americanthinker.com:
In the uproar over Ann Coulter’s tasteless “joke” at the CPAC Conference, Bill Maher’s much more egregious call for Dick Cheney’s assassination and the applause of his audience have been ignored, as Newsbusters showed.
As for Maher, I conclude that by lamenting that the assassination attempt failed — because he concluded it would “save lives” — Maher is indeed calling for further attempts. But contrarily, if one were inclined to invert Maher’s twisted logic, one could propose that those who are not wholeheartedly in step with the war-effort are showing America’s disunity which only emboldens the Islamic terrorists to commit more car bombings etc.; thus the death of such an American anti-war advocate would “save lives”.
Fortunately, I cannot remember seeing conservatives calling for assassination of America’s liberal politicians.
Do Liberals really want to invite a return of political violence to America? Aren’t the lessons from the assassinations of Lincoln, JFK, MLK, RFK, and attempts on Ford and Reagan yet learned by the Left?
Coulter comment was almost immediately denounced by leading Republicans including most of the presidential candidates. It will be illuminating to see the response if any of Democrats to Maher’s awful comments, beginning with Barney Frank who was on Maher’s show.
The Great Global Warming Swindle
This is a story from lse.co.uk. It’s about a documentary that is going to air that debunks the global warming hoax. Notice how the word controversial is used to describe the documentary and the director. Why is it called controversial? Because it goes against the agenda. It doesn’t fit the template.
Here’s the article:
Accepted theories about man causing global warming are “lies” claims a controversial new TV documentary.‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ – backed by eminent scientists – is set to rock the accepted consensus that climate change is being driven by humans.
The programme, to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday March 8, will see a series of respected scientists attack the “propaganda” that they claim is killing the world’s poor.
Even the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is shown, claiming African countries should be encouraged to burn more CO2. Read more…
Today on Meet The Press John Murtha admitted that the public doesn’t want to defund the war.
When asked why the Democrats haven’t filed a resolution to defund the war he said, “You don’t have the votes to do that in the first place, and when you don’t have the votes you can’t go forward. And the public doesn’t want it.”
Now, I am a bit confused. Haven’t we been hearing from the Democrats that they were elected to end the war? Hasn’t the media and the left been saying there was a madate to end the war? They keep reporting that the American people have rejected Bush’s war. It’s time to support the troops by bringing them home, they say. If this is the case how can Murtha say the public doesn’t want to cut off funding?
The truth is that there is a small percentage of anti-war Democrats who these people are trying to appease. They know that most Americans want to win the war, so it would be political suicide to cut off funding.
Of course the American people want to get out of Iraq. The problem for the Democrats is that we want to win first. As I have said many time before on this blog, a US victory in Iraq will make the president look good, so they are trying to tie America’s hands behind her back so we will lose and make the president look bad. At the same time they won’t cut off funds so that they can be perceived as not have cut and ran.
Below is from politico.com, John Murtha admitting the American people don’t want to cut and run:
News – Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the leader of the anti-war forces in the House, conceded Sunday that he and Democratic leaders do not have the votes to de-fund President Bush’s troop increase in Baghdad or put restrictions on money spent on the overall war effort in Iraq.
Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” why Democrats would not move a resolution to de-fund the war, Murtha said, “You don’t have the votes to do that in the first place, and when you don’t have the votes you can’t go forward. And the public doesn’t want it.”
Over the past week, many Democrats in the House signaled their displeasure with Murtha and suggested they would be reluctant to support the spending blueprint he laid out to a group that opposes the war.
“You’ve got to have the votes to pass the legislation,” Murtha conceded Sunday when host Tim Russert asked whether he got ahead of himself in laying out his plan to restrict money allocated for the war before he built support among his Democratic colleagues.
The Pennsylvania Democrat, who chairs the spending subcommittee on defense, expects party leaders in the House to introduce a new plan Monday, but he would not discuss the details of that legislation.
Meanwhile, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said Democrats in the upper chamber would narrow their resolution limiting Bush’s ability to conduct the war, avoiding a direct revision of the initial 2002 resolution authorizing the war because it could create legal complications.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the few vocal supporters of the president’s escalation of soldiers to Iraq, positioned Murtha’s readiness arguments as a red herring to further his overarching goal to force a troop withdrawal.
Murtha “is using the readiness issue to stop the surge,” Graham said Sunday on “Meet The Press.”
