Confederate Yankee

May 08, 2006

A Stringer of Large-Mouthed Asses



Several of my distant brethren on the far left of blogosphere this morning have gone out of their way to prove that the “reality-based community” is leaking reality at an every increasing rate, as they went postal over a flippant comment President Bush made about—wait for it—fishing.

Yes, while being interviewed for the German magazine Bild, the interviewer asked about his best and worst moments as President.

Bush gave the rather obvious answer that the 9/11/01 terrorist attack was his worst, while his best moment was:


"I would say the best moment was when I caught a 7 1/2-pound largemouth bass on my lake," Bush said, laughing.

Believe it or not, the Party of the Perpetually Peeved found a way to have a complete hissy fit over this, as well.

Firedoglake:


So, let me get this straight. The man has been President for five freaking years. And the thing that he thinks is his best moment in office as President of the US of A is catching a big fish in his lake.

Americablog


Most Americans couldn't name a best moment for Bush either. But he's been President for over five years and his best moment was catching a fish? That says a lot. He really is the WORST PRESIDENT EVER…

And the geniuses over at Hullabaloo, well, they smell conspiracy:


With all the daily opportunities available to do such good for your fellow country-folk, and the world, the only thing Bush specifically mentioned that made him happy is catching a big fish. In his own lake. Which could very well be deliberately stocked with big fish.

Mercy (or as they say mercí).

I'm certain they'll soon be petitioning Russ Feingold to try to impeach Bush, claiming no doubt, that using a Tiny Torpedo without Congressional authorization is an illegal act of war.

As nutty as these folks get over a joke Bush made about fishing, it's no wonder the American voter won't trust them with football.

(h/t : Memeorandum)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:34 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 06, 2006

Praying for a Cinderella Man

So let me see if I understand the defense here.

Patrick Kennedy, son of famed Oldsmobile yachtsman Ted, and grandson of Prohibition bootlegger Joe, used the alibi that it wasn't alcohol that caused him to crash his car at 2:45 AM Thursday morning, it was drugs.

That's a pathetic excuse, even by Kennedy family standards.

But it turns out that even that ignoble defense fell apart, as a D.C-area bar employee reports that she saw him drinking in the bar shortly before the crash, and the Capitol Police listed him as being under the influence of alcohol in their traffic report.

While some disingenuously try to play it off as just an accidental drug interaction issue—oh, he was just sleep-driving, explains away Talk Left—as if that is a normal, everyday occurrence like sneezing—the very real fact is that Kennedy was a threat to others when he is behind the wheel. This was his second suspicious wreck in just two weeks. Kennedy's penmanship in the earlier accident report was so discombobulated that it is very hard to believe that he wasn't under the influence then, as well.

Patrick Kennedy now states will be entering a rehabilitation program at the Mayo Clinic for an addiction to prescription drugs. He states that he has "no recollection" of the events of Late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, and yet, he provided a full explanation of the wreck and a denial that he was drinking, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, and then provides a description of the police's treatment of him.

Now I see via Michelle Malkin that some posters at the Daily Kos want him gone, tossed out of Congress—though not because they care about Kennedy :


Here's the problem folks: most Americans who aren't partisans truly believe the democrats and The Republicans are "all the same" and that the power-elite takes care of its own.

Democrats can talk about Abramoff and Cunningham and the Republicans' toothless ethics bill, but so long as the People see us as just the "other side of the coin", they have little reason to go to the polls to vote for Dems.

Now we've got Congressman William Jefferson who despite allegations of bribery won't resign, and Patrick Kennedy who announces he's "going to vote" and so dodges a Breathalyzer test, and now will go into rehab rather than resign.

This gives all the justification in the world to independents who will say that the Dems are "just as bad" and that "all of them are corrupt."

It isn't Kennedy they care about, but how he might affect upcoming elections. Nice.

My personal feeling on the subject (speaking as someone who drank like Hemingway while in college) was that Kennedy should keep his job while he gets some help... idle hands being the devil's playthings and all that. My thought that was that once he got out of Mayo, he could immerse himself in his work, which could keep him too busy to get bogged down thinking about his addictions.

At least, that is what my position was.

Dan Riehl, recovering himself, had different thoughts on Kennedy's best way back to sobriety, and he's none to happy with the way things are progressing thus far:


Unfortunately, it looks as though the same enablers, including the media, will likely prop him up once again, perhaps long enough to at least survive until some day when he really falls down. Let's hope he doesn't kill someone else in the process. I came too close to doing that myself while behind the wheel of a car more times than I'd care to share.
Certainly, anyone who can take advantage of a good hospital, especially with Kennedy's additional mental illness, should do so. But the notion that he will be anything like fit to perform in government for at least a couple of years is simply a myth.

[snip]

If Rep. Patrick Kennedy gave a damn about addiction recovery as a whole and knew anything about how to bring it about, he'd quit the House, admit what an abject failure he's been, then get some genuine humility and real help and not look back.

That he likely won't do so tells you how ready to simply go on lying and using he is, as opposed to taking a break so he can come back re-invigorated and continue the good fight as regards addiction recovery, or anything else. Hell, Oprah will probably have the still sick man on as cured within 3-6 months. What a pathetic joke and complete insult to addiction recovery that will be.

When looking at it from Dan's perspective (and I do encourage you to read the whole thing), I can see his point as well. It isn't "just an addiction"—as if that wasn't bad enough—but a serious mental illness (bi-polar disorder) and a family history of addiction that are compounding the issue.

I think Dan is right. Patrick Kennedy should make facing down his demons his full-time job for now. He can always return to Congress once he's clean and sober. Americans love an underdog fighting back from adversity, and he'd certainly be a far better Congressman with a clearer head. Let's pray he can get there.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:17 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Feed the Filthy Zionist

It's pledge week at Protein Wisdom.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:20 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 05, 2006

Recalling the Twelfth Imam

Unless you have been under a rock or in New York City public schools, you are probably aware that Iran has engaged in the development of a nuclear program.

Iran has publicly stated that this is so that Iran can create nuclear power plants, a claim viewed with great suspicion by most of the world, as Iran sits upon vast petroleum reserves that will meets the nation's energy needs far into the future. Iran's parallel development of indigenous long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles and purchase of similar systems, as well as their claims of developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) that are used only to deliver nuclear warheads, show that Iran's uranium enrichment program has the ultimate goal of obtaining multiple nuclear weapons.

Why do we care?
Consider that Iran is a major state-sponsor of Islamic terrorism, and successive Iranian leaders have repeatedly threatened to exterminate Israel. Recently, Iranian government officials went far enough to state that they could destroy Israel with nuclear weapons and absorb an expected Israeli nuclear counterstrike.

Tens of millions of people throughout southwest Asia would be likely to die in such an exchange.

No, why do WE care?
Other than being philosophically opposed to genocide and nuclear war on a scale never before imagined?

Try:

  • years of nuclear fallout carried around the world on prevailing winds;
  • a nearly complete an long-term disruption in international oil supplies, resulting in major economic upheaval;
  • increasing the possibility of international conflicts over reduced oil supplies;
  • the dehumanization of all Muslims as a result of this mass genocide, perhaps leading to retaliatory strikes, mass internment, and deportation campaigns to eradicate the religion, particularly in western Europe and China.

There is also the possibility that Iran may even provide nuclear weapons to a terrorist group, such as the Iranian-funded Hezbollah.

Don't they know if they use nukes, they might get nuked back?
"Might" doesn't come into the picture. They will be nuked back if they launch a first strike. Iran's population is concentrated very heavily (60%) in urban areas (Tehran: 7.1 M, Mashad: 2.8M, Tabriz: 1.5 M, Karaj: 1.4 M, Shiraz: 1.3, etc), and even a partial nuclear response by either Israel or the United States would cause Iran to cease to exist.

It would be incredibly stupid for them to launch a nuclear attack, then.
You're thinking like a westerner. In many Islamic countries, there is no separation of church and state. Church is state to varying degrees, with Islamic theology making laws and defining policy, again, to varying degrees. A sub-sect of Shia Islam rules the Islamic Republic of Iran, and this sect's eschatology believes that the near-term messianic return of the 12th Imam can be brought about by an apocalyptic event.

What is more apocalyptic than a nuclear war?

So they think that by getting nuked, they'll go to heaven?
You might call it nuts, and I might agree, but good prosecutor would call it "motive."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:39 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Friendly Fire

While looking for more out-take video to analyze of Musab al-Zarqawi's shooting session for my Blooper Troopers post, I ran across a video report on the new Zarqawi footage by CNN's Jamie McIntyre.

It runs 3:07, and Ian has made it available as either a .WMV or .MP4 at Expose the Left.

As stated in my previous post, Zarqawi is shown to be less than impressive with the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) he is shown firing in this video. He is unfamiliar with the weapon's operation, bracing for heavy recoil before firing, and then...

Pop... pop... pop.

Zarqawi can't get the machine gun to fire as a machine gun, in fully-automatic mode. It then seems to seize completely, and Zarqawi looks befuddled. While the footage is too grainy to tell for certain, it appears that the gun suffers a probable "stovepipe" malfunction, where a cartridge casing fails to eject completely and is caught by the bolt, resulting in a weapon stoppage. An associate happens to be nearby who has at least rudimentary experience with firearms, and he grabs the bolt handle and cycles the action to release the stovepiped round.

And as you watch the terrorist and his henchmen wrestle with the malfunctioning M249, the damnedest thing happens: CNN's Senior Pentagon Correspondent Jamie McIntyre starts making excuses for al-Zarqawi's performance.

From 0:48-1:07 to on the clip:


"This weapon is an American weapon. It's called a SAW, or Squad Automatic Weapon, a very heavy machine gun which has a very heavy trigger; it's not easy to fire, and in fact it might be quite understandable that anyone--even somebody with weapon's experience, wasn't familiar with this particular weapon might have trouble firing off more than a single shot at a time...

It is bad enough that a U.S. journalist is seemingly making excuses for an al Qaeda terrorist, but not only is McIntyre making excuses, he is making demonstrably false excuses.

The M249 is light machine gun, the lightest dedicated machine gun in the U.S. Military. It fires the lightweight 5.56 NATO round, a cartridge developed from the .223 Remington, a cartridge designed to kill woodchucks and other small game. Most states will not allow hunters to use such a lightweight cartridge for medium and large game because it is so underpowered.

Nor is the M249 plausibly a "heavy" machine gun as far as weight goes. The M249 in the configuration shown weighs approximately 15 lbs, with the 200-round box magazine adding another 7 lbs when full. By way of comparison, the M2 .50 Caliber Browning, a real heavy machine gun, weighs 84 lbs without its 44 lbs tripod and ammunition.

McIntyre also claims that Zarqawi was having problems because of the M249's trigger. It would be interesting for Mr. McIntyre to reveal his source for his claim that the M249 "has a very heavy trigger." I have been unable to find so much as a single source that describes the standard trigger pull of the M249 as being "heavy." It is such a minor factor in the weapon's operation that I cannot find it mentioned at all.

Even the fact that the M249 is a fully-automatic weapon doesn't keep McIntyre from trying to float the excuse that some who, "wasn't familiar with this particular weapon might have trouble firing off more than a single shot at a time." Even General Lynch notes at 2:06 that "it's supposed to be automatic fire, he's shooting single shots, one at a time...something's wrong with his machine gun."

But it isn't just that Jamie McIntyre floated one lame excuse for the ineptitude of a terrorist that was so astounding, it is that he did so more than once.

After General Lynch makes his comments on Zarqawi's problems with his machine gun, McIntyre states from 2:50-3:50 into the clip:


...it's not clear at all that it really shows much about Zarqawi's military abilities with the weapon, because as I said, the Squad Automatic Weapon, a very heavy trigger, hard to fire unless you've had specific training on it, and one would imagine he hasn't had a lot of specific training on American weapons."

I can understand that as CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent for well over a decade McIntyre might have developed a certain degree of respect for this nation's enemies, but that doesn't mean he should go out of his way to fabricate excuses for them.

Update: I've now talked to several SAW gunners, including one who was a trainer, and the consensus viewpoint among them is that the terrorists have not cleaned this particular weapon, which caused cycling problems leading to the embarrassing jam. Jason at milblog Countercolumn has a post that compliments this one any goes into further details about the M249.

Sadly,as pathetic as McIntyre's video segment was, that bastion of liberalism, the NY Times is always ready to go that extra mile:


An effort by the American military to discredit the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by showing video outtakes of him fumbling with a machine gun — suggesting that he lacks real fighting skill — was questioned yesterday by retired and active American military officers.

The video clips, released on Thursday to news organizations in Baghdad, show the terrorist leader confused about how to handle an M-249 squad automatic weapon, known as an S.A.W., which is part of the American inventory of infantry weapons.

[snip]

The weapon in question is complicated to master, and American soldiers and marines undergo many days of training to achieve the most basic competence with it. Moreover, the weapon in Mr. Zarqawi's hands was an older variant, which makes its malfunctioning unsurprising. The veterans said Mr. Zarqawi, who had spent his years as a terrorist surrounded by simpler weapons of Soviet design, could hardly have been expected to know how to handle it.

Now, who do you chose to believe?

In one corner, we have the New York Times, who cites two officers and a couple of professors (one of whom is a veteran) in their article, without stating if any of these four men have any knowledge of the M249. They do not profess any specific knowledge of the weapon in question at all, and the Times does not provide one fact in this story. It's all opinion. Also in this corner, CNN's Jamie McIntyre who cites completely erroneous information to make excuses for a terrorist.

In the other corner, you have a couple of bloggers who did what the professionals should have, and "Googled" facts about the M249 and similar weapons. The bloggers were in contact with and verified facts through current and former SAW gunners from two countries (United States and Canada).

One side has facts, the other opinion. You choose who you want to believe.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:05 AM | Comments (36) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 04, 2006

At Least The Car Stayed Dry

Drudge is running a flash that Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), son of Sen. Ted Kennedy, make be part of a suspected drunk-driving crash and cover-up involving the Capital Police:


Police labor union officials asked acting Chief Christopher McGaffin this afternoon to allow a Capitol Police officer to complete his investigation into an early-morning car crash involving Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), son of Sen. Ted Kennedy.

ROLL CALL [note: my link-ed.] reports: According to a letter sent by Officer Greg Baird, acting chairman of the USCP FOP, the wreck took place at approximately 2:45 a.m. Thursday when Kennedy's car, operating with its running lights turned off, narrowly missed colliding with a Capitol Police cruiser and smashed into a security barricade at First and C streets Southeast.

“The driver exited the vehicle and he was observed to be staggering,” Baird's letter states. Officers approached the driver, who “declared to them he was a Congressman and was late to a vote. The House had adjourned nearly three hours before this incident. It was Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy from Rhode Island.”

Baird wrote that Capitol Police Patrol Division units, who are trained in driving under the influence cases, were not allowed to perform basic field sobriety tests on the Congressman. Instead, two sergeants, who also responded to the accident, proceeded to confer with the Capitol Police watch commander on duty and then “ordered all of the Patrol Division Units to leave the scene and that they were taking over.”

A source tells the DRUDGE REPORT: It was apparent that the driver was intoxicated (stumbling) and claimed he was in a hurry to make a vote. When it became apparent who it was instead of processing a normal DWI the watch commander had the Patrol units clear the scene and allowed the other building officials drive Kennedy home.

This morning's incident comes just over two weeks after Kennedy was involved in a car accident in Rhode Island.

Developing...

Unlike some Drudge stories, this might have some meat to it, as MSM sources are corroborating that Kennedy was involved in a 3:00 am wreck, and that the responding officers were not allowed to perform field sobriety tests. WUSA9.com has more details:


9 News has learned U.S. Capitol police officers are concerned about the handling of an accident involving Congressman Patrick Kennedy (D-Rhode Island) about 3 a.m. this morning.

Rep. Kennedy was reportedly behind the wheel of a green Ford Mustang when it crashed into a security barrier at 1st and "C" streets Southeast.

No one was hurt, but there are reports that the car nearly struck a Capitol police cruiser and that it had been swerving, as if trying to make a U-turn.

So far, Kennedy HAS NOT been charged. The congressman released a statement Thursday night saying alcohol was NOT involved.

"I was involved in a traffic accident last night at ... the U.S. Capitol. I consumed no alcohol prior to the incident and I will fully cooperate with Capitol Police in whatever investigation they choose to undertake," he said.

The Capitol Hill Fraternal Order of Police is calling for higher-ups in the department to allow patrol officers to complete their investigation.

The head of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 1, Lou Cannon, told 9 News that he's concerned that Kennedy may have received special treatment and this could be a case where “rank has its privilege.”

Capitol police Officer Greg Baird wrote a letter to acting Chief Christopher McGaffin saying how the investigation was handled calls the department's integrity into question.

According to Rollcall.com, Baird -- acting chairman of the Capitol Police Fraternal Order of Police –- said Kennedy's Mustang had its lights off when it narrowly missed crashing into a police cruiser and smashed into a security barrier at 1st and C streets Southeast about 2:45 a.m.

According to sources, Kennedy told police that he was late for a Congressional vote. But the House had adjourned more than three hours earlier, sources said.

According to Roll Call, Baird wrote in his letter that the driver got out and “was observed to be staggering.” He told officers he was a congressman late for a vote. Baird wrote that patrol officers at the scene were prohibited from performing field sobriety tests. Then two sergeants arrived, conferred with a watch commander and “ordered all of the patrol division units to leave the scene … that they were taking over.”

Congressman Patrick Kennedy is Ted Kennedy's son. He is currently serving his sixth term as the Democratic Congressman from Rhode Island. He sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

First off, and very seriously, I'm glad no one was hurt. A late model (2005) Ford Mustang weighs 3,351 lbs, and traveling through the dark with its lights off in the dark is a recipe for disaster. My second thought was, of course, thankfulness that Kennedy wasn't near the Inlet Bridge over the Tidal Basin, or things could have ended far more tragically.

This case could bode very poorly for the Kennedy clan and the Capital Police as well if there is any evidence at all of a cover-up. Odds are than any questionable involvement by either Patrick Kennedy or his father Ted—if indeed there was any—can and probably would disappear faster than a bottle of Maker's Mark down Ted's fleshy gullet. The Capitol Police watch commander and other senior officers seem somewhat more likely to take any fall here.

Capitol Police Officer Greg Baird seems to be a good cop trying to shine light on a shady situation. He felt strongly enough about the interference in his investigation that he went against his superiors when he felt they were wrong. That takes guts, and integrity.

It will be very interesting to see how—and if—this case proceeds.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 05:47 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Blooper Troopers

It appears the video released of al Qaeda action hero Musab al-Zarqawi left quite a bit on the cutting room floor, including footage edited out from his "Rambo" scene, where Zarqawi is seen in firing long bursts from a 5.56mm light machine gun used by the U.S. military.

What the version of the video posted to the internet does not show says quite a lot. The unedited footage was captured near Youssifiyah, presumably by Task Force 145, shows that al Zarqawi is unable to clear a simple "stovepipe" jam from the M249 squad automatic weapon he uses. He requires the assistance of a follower, who with one deft motion of his hand, racked the bolt to clear the malfunction.

Just seconds after Zarqawi fired dozens of rounds through the gun, he puts one of his men at extreme risk as he sweeps the machine gun's barrel around, momentarily pointing at the terrorist's chest without apparently activating the weapon's safety, or even taking his finger off the trigger. Shortly after that display of stupidity, another terrorist is shown grabbing the machine gun by the still-smoking barrel, burning his hand.

The unintentionally comic elements of this footage does not, of course, minimize the lethal threat Zarqawi and his minions pose to the Iraqi people, but it does humanize him and diffuse a bit of the mythology surrounding him. He is not invincible, and at moments, he is all but helpless.

Update: As I noted in a comment at Hot Air:


If he [Zarqawi] is that unfamiliar with a common weapons malfunction, I wonder just how many combat actions he has actually participated in.

Is Musab al-Zarqawi a paper tiger? We don't have enough data to answer that question, but with this film, we now have enough to bring it up.


Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 01:34 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Howard Dean Screws Gay Outreach Coordinator, Advocate at DNC

Via Drudge:


Democratic Party Chair Howard Dean on May 2 fired the party's gay outreach advisor Donald Hitchcock less than a week after Hitchcock's domestic partner, Paul Yandura, a longtime party activist, accused Dean of failing to take stronger action to defend gays.

Dean immediately hired gay former Democratic Party operative Brian Bond to replace Hitchcock, according to DNC spokesperson Karen Finney, who called Bond a "proven leader."

Bond served from 1996 to 2003 as executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a bipartisan national group that raises money and provides training to help elect openly gay candidates to public office.
"It was not retaliation," Finney said of Hitchcock's dismissal. "It was decided we needed a change. We decided to hire a proven leader."

Hitchcock declined comment Tuesday night except to confirm that Dean informed him May 2 through a surrogate that he had been terminated. He said he was considering consulting an attorney to decide whether to contest the firing.

Regardless of how you feel about gay couples, this stinks to high heaven for the DNC. If a female activist had made charges that Dean wasn't doing enough for rape victims and Dean fired her husband, who was in charge of a related outreach effort, it would almost certainly and immediate be condemned as a retaliatory act that was certainly tasteless, unethical, and depending on the jurisdiction, may be legally actionable as well.

The Democratic Party claims to have big tent, but Howard Dean seems to take a dim view of the rights of those who enter through the back door.

We can only hope that if they do decide to follow with legal action for this apparently retaliatory firing by Screamin' Howard, that Hitchcock and Yandura get justice in the end.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:02 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 03, 2006

Bird Flu Review: Nix this Sick Chick Schtick

Major Chaz is not impressed with what he sees coming from ABC's pending made-for-television bird flu movie:


How many people will now base their knowledge on the Bird Flu from a television movie written by a guy who also wrote the previous TV blockbusters as "Atomic Twister", "Meat Loaf: To Hell and Back", and "Daydream Believers: The Monkees Story".


Hey, it has to be more realistic than Commander in Cheif.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:22 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Savage Realizations

You've got to hand it to the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage; if he doesn't like how the facts are arranged, he's more than willing to arrange them on his own. Such was the case in his article Hearing vowed on Bush's powers.

The main focus of the article was President Bush's decision to use Presidential signing statements to bypass provisions of 750 bills that the President thinks may conflict with the Constitution. According to the definition provided by Savage in his article, signing statements are:


…official documents in which a president lays out his interpretation of a bill for the executive branch, creating guidelines to follow when it implements the law. The statements are filed without fanfare in the federal record, often following ceremonies in which the president made no mention of the objections he was about to raise in the bill, even as he signed it into law.

That's what Charlie wants you to see. How about another perspective?

Walter Dellinger, Assistant Attorney General under President Clinton, wrote to Bernard Nussbaum, Counsel to President Clinton, in 1993, The Legal Significance of Signing Statements:


To begin with, it appears to be an uncontroversial use of signing statements to explain to the public, and more particularly to interested constituencies, what the President understands to be the likely effects of the bill, and how it coheres or fails to cohere with the Administration's views or programs.

A second, and also generally uncontroversial, function of Presidential signing statements is to guide and direct Executive officials in interpreting or administering a statute. The President has the constitutional authority to supervise and control the activity of subordinate officials within the Executive Branch…

[snip]

A third function, more controversial than either of the two considered above, is the use of signing statements to announce the President's view of the constitutionality of the legislation he is signing. This category embraces at least three species: statements that declare that the legislation (or relevant provisions) would be unconstitutional in certain applications; statements that purport to construe the legislation in a manner that would "save" it from unconstitutionality; and statements that state flatly that the legislation is unconstitutional on its face. Each of these species of statement may include a declaration as to how -- or whether -- the legislation will be enforced.

Thus, the President may use a signing statement to announce that, although the legislation is constitutional on its face, it would be unconstitutional in various applications, and that in such applications he will refuse to execute it. Such a Presidential statement could be analogized to a Supreme Court opinion that upheld legislation against a facial constitutional challenge, but warned at the same time that certain applications of the act would be unconstitutional.

[snip]

In each of the last three Administrations, the Department of Justice has advised the President that the Constitution provides him with the authority to decline to enforce a clearly unconstitutional law. This advice is, we believe, consistent with the views of the Framers. Moreover, four sitting Justices of the Supreme Court have joined in the opinion that the President may resist laws that encroach upon his powers by "disregard[ing] them when they are unconstitutional."

(note: footnote numbers stripped for readability)

The four justices? Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy and Souter. One might have reason to believe that Justice Alito and/or Chief Justice Roberts would make a similar judgment, rendering a majority decision of 5-4 or 6-3 in the President's favor on the modern Court, though Savage couldn't be troubled to go through the "extensive research" once could do in several minutes on Google that led to this potentially important information.

In other words, despite Specter's incessant grandstanding, John Dean's whining and Savage's perhaps intentionally leading framing, it appears that while Bush's frequency in using signing statements is unusual, it does have both precedent and the apparent support of the Supreme Court.

Of course, Charlie Savage isn't quite done there. Why stop with a little misdirection, when you can try adding to The Big Lie?

Speaking of the President executive order authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct targeted intercepts of suspected terrorist communications where at least one end was on foreign soil, Savage wrote:


Feingold is an outspoken critic of Bush's assertion that his wartime powers give him the authority to set aside laws. The senator has proposed censuring Bush over his domestic spying program, in which the president secretly authorized the military to wiretap Americans' phones without a warrant, bypassing a 1978 surveillance law.

But Savage's assertion as to the nature of the program is is false, and demonstrably so. Not one single claim has ever been made that shows this was a domestic spying program. In all instances, from the original article written in the NY Times, to specific comments made about the program by former NSA director General Michael V. Hayden, to comments made by the White House itself, it has been emphatically stated that the program is not domestic, but international in nature. International means more than one country, which was a primary criteria for all of these intercepts. My six-year-old can understand that oft-repeated concept, so why is it so difficult for Savage to understand? The intercepts were also not a wiretapping of Americans' phones, another "fact" Mr. Savage conveniently cannot support.

Once you have the real facts and misrepresentations of this Globe article laid out in front of you, it is hardly surprising that a recent Reuters poll found that 69% of Americans don't trust the media. With reporters like Charlie Savage more interested in manufacturing news than reporting it, why should they?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:04 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Moussaoui Gets Life... Or Does He?

Part of me thinks Rusty is probably right: if Zacarias Moussaoui gets life in prison for his part in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, how can we really justify putting to death any other terrorists we may capture? That is a rather disturbing question.

At the same time, life is prison, even in what is likely to be solitary confinement, is perhaps more likely to result in his dying within this next decade. Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibalistic serial killer of 17 men, was sentenced to 15 consecutive life sentences in February of 2002, but was murdered by another inmate in 2004. Child molester John Geoghan was also sentenced to life in 2002 and murdered by another inmate two years later.

It is quite possible that Moussaoui will create enough hatred among the inmate population that his life sentence will end up being a very short stay.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 04:49 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

What Amnesty Brings

Welcome to the new look of illegal immigration.



Source.

Via the L.A. Times:


Mexican President Vicente Fox will sign a bill that would legalize the use of nearly every drug and narcotic sold by the same Mexican cartels he's vowed to fight during his five years in office, a spokesman said Tuesday.

The list of illegal drugs approved for personal consumption by Mexico's Congress last week is enough to make one dizzy — or worse.

Cocaine. Heroin. LSD. Marijuana. PCP. Opium. Synthetic opiates. Mescaline. Peyote. Psilocybin mushrooms. Amphetamines. Methamphetamines.

And the per-person amounts approved for possession by anyone 18 or older could easily turn any college party into an all-nighter: half a gram of coke, a couple of Ecstasy pills, several doses of LSD, a few marijuana joints, a spoonful of heroin, 5 grams of opium and more than 2 pounds of peyote, the hallucinogenic cactus.

The law would be among the most permissive in the world, putting Mexico in the company of the Netherlands. Critics, including U.S. drug policy officials, already are worrying that it will spur a domestic addiction problem and make Mexico a narco-tourism destination.

So not only are we facing an ever-increasing number of illegal aliens leaching funds and services that were created to help America's legal residents, we're now facing the distinct possibility that these illegals will be junkies and addicts desperate for a fix as well.

Remember to "thank" your Republican senators pushing for the amnesty bill by voting them out of office in November.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:16 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

McCain's Missing Merchandise

David Ignatius has a WaPo Op-ed up to day called, A Man who won't Sell his Soul.

Interestingly enough, it is about John McCain, one of the most calculating, cynical, triangulating Senators in office, and one who made the frightening admission just last week that he won't let a little thing like the Constitution get in his way:


"He [Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform... I know that money corrupts... I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government."

McCain sold out the most important part of the First Amendment by heavily infringing on the right to free political speech with McCain-Feingold, and now he appears ready to dump the Amendment altogether. John McCain can't sell his political soul.

You can't sell what you don't possess.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:41 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 02, 2006

Cato the Blunder?

I've just completed the 22.5-page Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush (31-page PDF), authored by Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch of the libertarian CATO Institute.

The executive summary should be compelling to everyone, regardless of political orientation.

It begins:


In recent judicial confirmation battles, President Bush has repeatedly—and correctly—stressed fidelity to the Constitution as the key qualification for service as a judge. It is also the key qualification for service as the nation's chief executive. On January 20, 2005, for the second time, Mr. Bush took the presidential oath of office set out in the Constitution, swearing to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." With five years of the Bush administration behind us, we have more than enough evidence to make an assessment about the president's commitment to our fundamental legal charter
Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes
  • a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
  • a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
  • a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as "enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror— in other words, perhaps forever; and
  • a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.
President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

The CATO authors make the charge that a sitting president is violating his oath of office and the Constitution he has sworn to protect on multiple occasions, and these are charges not to be dismissed lightly. I had to read this document.

After reading it all and taking it in, I sit here with mixed emotions.

The authors make a strong case in each instance, and the way they frame the issues, there seems little practical doubt as to whether or not the President is guilty of some of the things that Healy and Lynch charge. But is little doubt the same as no doubt, and how do we judge?

Example #1 was the infamous McCain-Feingold bill (Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or BCRA).

Bush did sign McCain-Feingold into law after objecting to it on Constitutional grounds. It which seems to be a direct assault upon the most important core principle of the First Amendment, free political speech. But Healy and Lynch then make this comment on page 5 (as the page is numbered, may vary in your PDF viewer):


…when the president abdicates his constitutional responsibility, as President Bush did when he signed a bill he knew to be unconstitutional, there is no guarantee that the courts will act to uphold theirs.

In fact, the Supreme Court did not accept President Bush's invitation to strike down the offending portions of the BCRA. In 2003, in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the court upheld all the major provisions of the BCRA.

To me, this seems perplexing. If the President thinks a congressional bill is unconstitutional and signs it into law thinking it is unconstitutional, should he face impeachment when the Supreme Court upholds all the major provisions of the law?

If he should then be impeached, what of the members of Congress who voted to pass the bill in the first place? Do they not violate their oaths as well? And what do we do with a Supreme Court that upholds what many lay people consider a clear violation of the very essence of the First Amendment? Should we toss them all, executive, legislative, and judicial, and appoint President Antonin Scalia for filing a dissent that upheld the Constitution?

From McCain-Feingold, to "free speech" zones, the so-called "torture memos," and questions about apparently expanding powers to arrest and seize property, Healy and Lynch take aim at the President but find themselves hitting other targets with virtually every shot.

For example:

  • The "free speech" zones are enforced by the Secret Service or local police at Secret Service behest, and the authors cannot even provide evidence that Bush ha any part in these decisions;
  • the "torture memos" debate is carried forward upon opinions put forth by the Justice Department and the Department of Defense, as well as the White House;
  • the "war powers" argument put forth by the authors would seem to implicate almost every president back to Truman (with the apparent exception of Bush 41) for using police actions instead of congressional declarations as their method to go to war, while at the same time noting the current President Bush seized upon Congressional use of force still in effect from the 1991 Persian Gulf war, and got a congressional use of force authorization of his own as well;
  • The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are indicted along with the President under a charge of overly expanded arrest and seizure powers;
  • an alleged expansion of surveillance powers would condemn the NSA as well (note: I think the authors are fundamentally wrong in their assertions made in this section, and they should admit this is blind speculation on their part based upon unsupportable assumptions, which they don't);
  • and on and on…

It would appear at the end of the article that all branches of the federal government, and indeed most individual departments of these branches, must bear at least some responsibility for the current wretched state of affairs the authors state this nation is currently in, or may find itself in at some point in the future.

The often compelling—and occasionally self-defeating—arguments made by Healy and Lynch would seem to indicate an entire federal system that has become corrupted to the point that we as a nation should consider a wholesale scrapping of all three branches of government and start them afresh—OR—it suggest that the authors may over-reaching to support a hypothesis that may have been pre-determined, and in doing so, tarred everyone with the same brush.

I'll be very interested to see other impressions of this document.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:25 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Wind

I don't much care for the over-saturated Plame case and have refused to cover it for the most part, but the latest round of over-the-top assertions are really too much.

Over at Donkelephant, Justin Gardener is in over his head regarding a Raw Story claim that Valerie Plame was working on Iran when she was exposed. Setting aside for now the fact that whoever leaked to MSNBC correspondent David Shuster is also a leaker worth firing and perhaps prosecuting, we catch Gardener hyperventilating:


To all of those who said she wasn't really a covert agent, that she wasn't really doing anything of importance…well, you're wrong.
She was working on Iran. In fact, she was tracking the ins and outs of their attempts to acquire WMDs. And the Bush administration's actions most likely harmed that intelligence gathering.

[snip]

Should Rove go to jail for leaking her name to Novak? Who friggin knows at this point. But should he be ashamed because his brand of dirty politics could have cost us something in the Iran intelligence shell game? You're damn right he should.


Back up a second, Justin.

Plame was a WMD analyst, based out of CIA headquarters since 1997 because her cover was likely exposed in the Adlrich Ames affair. Others sources say her cover was blown as far back as the mid-1990s in separate events by a spy in Russia and diplomatic incompetence in Cuba.

Her exact position was classified, but to argue that anyone who drove through the main gates of the CIA in Langley every day for work is somehow covert is asinine. Joe Wilson himself said she wasn't covert (his exact word was "clandestine") in a July 14, 2005 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN. As her husband, he just might know a bit more about that than does Justin and his compatriots.

As for Rove, it remains to be seen if he will even be charged. Shouldn't we wait to have a trial and then see if he is convicted before he is sent to jail, or is that whole "due process thing" superfluous?

As for what revealing Plame's name did or didn't do to her section in the CIA, I think Gardener and his friends at Raw Story are making assumptions they cannot possibly support without a much higher security clearance than they presently have at CIA HQ (which I think is "none," but feel free to correct me). Plame is hardly the only WMD analyst in the CIA, and is quite likely to be one of many working on Iran. I find it highly unlikely that an intelligence agency infamous for so many layers of bureaucracy would have just one analyst working on a country that most have targeted as one of our main proliferation threats since before President Clinton was in office.

Did the disclosure of Plame's identity have an impact on investigating Iran's WMDs? I'm sure it could have, but to what degree we may not know for some time (if ever), as that information is almost certainly classified. It would stand to reason that anytime you lose a person with experience it decreases the overall knowledge base to a certain degree. But Plame was not the only CIA analyst working on Iranian WMD programs, and I've seen no one able to cite evidence she was even one of the more important analysts in this area.

Her exposure was certainly unfortunate, but I don't think anyone can make the statement that it was highly detrimental to the overall work, and it certainly wasn't terminal to the Agency at large.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:15 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Jeep Jihadi Charged

Mohammed Taheri-Azar, the Iranian-American jihadi wannabe that tried to run down UNC-Chapel Hill students, was charged with nine counts of attempted murder. In addition:


Mohammed Taheri-Azar, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, also was indicted on four counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and five counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury.

Taheri-Azar is accused of driving through the gathering spot, known as the Pit, on March 3, hitting nine people. He has said his actions were in retaliation for the deaths of Muslims throughout the world caused by the United States.

I can only wonder if Chapel Hill (motto: "Left of Center, Right at Home") will raise monies for his defense fund. Some people have already thought about doing just that.

Other Iranian-Americans (or more accurately, Iranian-North Americans) aren't among them.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:44 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 01, 2006

A Day Without A Difference

Today was the much-touted Day Without Immigrants, code for a day where illegal aliens and their supporters across the United States weren't supposed to work, or shop, or do much of anything other than protest. In short, they were supposed to act French.

Even though North Carolina has a substantial Hispanic population (45% of which are illegal. Thank you, Mike Easley), I must confess I didn't notice any significant difference in my daily routine.

Traffic flowed (or didn't) about the same. Taco Bell, staffed by Pakistanis, was still open, and Wendy's, staffed by Mexicans, was as well.

It might have been a Day Without Immigrants in some parts of the country, but here in Raleigh, North Carolina, as I experienced it. this seemed to be just another Monday.

It was a Day Without a Difference.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:36 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

"The Dumbest Man in the U.S. Senate"

When I lived in New York, I used to drive home from my job in Westchester listening to Mark Levin, who often referred to Democratic Senator Joe Biden (Del.) as "the dumbest man in the U.S. Senate."

It appears now that Biden's intelligence was overestimated:


The senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed Monday that Iraq be divided into three separate regions — Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni — with a central government in Baghdad.

In an op-ed essay in Monday's edition of The New York Times, Sen. Joseph Biden D-Del., wrote that the idea "is to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group ... room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests."

The new Iraqi constitution allows for establishment of self-governing regions. But that was one of the reasons the Sunnis opposed the constitution and why they demanded and won an agreement to review it this year.

Biden and co-writer Leslie H. Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledged the opposition, and said the Sunnis "have to be given money to make their oil-poor region viable. The Constitution must be amended to guarantee Sunni areas 20 percent (approximately their proportion of the population) of all revenues."

Biden and Gelb also wrote that President Bush "must direct the military to design a plan for withdrawing and redeploying our troops from Iraq by 2008 (while providing for a small but effective residual force to combat terrorists and keep the neighbors honest)."

How are Biden and Gelb, two reputed political experts, so blatantly incompetent that they don't realize that a divided Iraq would create far more problems than what we see in the current situation?

At the very least, partitioning off the nation along ethnic lines would encourage even more balkanization, and the attendant Sunni vs. Shia fighting would almost certainly intensify instead of abating. This of course would trigger an almost certain exodus of refugees of minority populations from one region into another. Choas is the best result we could hope for in such a fouled design.

In addition, neither Biden nor Gelb touch upon the fact that such a division is likely to inflame an already tense situation between Turkey and the Kurdish-controlled areas in the west, and Iran and the Kurdish region in the east. Both nations fear that a partitioned Kurdish region would be the trigger for Turkish and Iranian Kurds to fight to bring their regions in to a larger Kurdistan based in Iraq. Turkey has already made clear that they view an independent Kurdistan as a threat, and they have already made cross-border attacks, as have the Iranians.

Joseph Biden's idiotic attempt at ethnic segregation would expand Iraq's current sectarian violence into an almost certain regional conflict, encouraging both Turkey and Iran to invade. An invasion by either of these countries would almost certainly create situations where American military forces in the area might be forced into tense situations and possible open combat, either against our NATO ally which s bad enough, or potentially more seriously, a conflict that could easily flash into an ever-expanding, full-on conventional war with Iran.

Such a conflict could see thousands of U.S casualties and perhaps hundreds of U.S dead, but that isn't the worst of it. Coalition forces, with unquestionable air superiority, would send tens of thousands of Iranian conscripts to their graves in such a conflict as well. Through sheer stupidity, Joe Biden would create a situation potentially more deadly than all of the battles of the Iraq and Afghan wars so far, combined.

Is Joe Biden the dumbest man in the United States Senate as Levin contends?

I'd hate to see who could top him.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 03:47 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Day of the Lamprey

In the United States today, organizers are touting what they call a "Day Without Immigrants." I'm sure real Americans such as Squanto, Manteo, Crazy Horse and Geronimo would support such a cause if they alive, but that is not what today is really about. No, this May Day—a communist/socialist holiday—is about something completely different.

This May Day protest is a celebration of the illegal importation of poverty, and an attempt to legitimize the violation of this nation's sovereignty. It is a blight on this nation's long history of accepting immigrants legally from other nations with open arms, by those who seek to latch onto this nation's economy like a lamprey, sucking dry social services meant for this nation's legitimate unfortunates, and artificially lowering wages so that legal Americans on the lower end of the economic scale cannot afford to live on what they bring home from work.

I spoke to a homebuilder yesterday who told me that without illegal labor, his cost per square foot for framing a home would nearly double. In other words, that means that because of an artificial depression of labor costs, legal Americans in this trade are getting far less in wages than they should. Want to take a guess who hurts the most in this arrangement?

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were busy this past weekend protesting the War in Iraq, but where have they been for poor blacks and other minorities that are seeing their wages undercut by illegal labor? For that matter, how many poor blacks and other minorities, including legal immigrants, would stay poor if entry level and trade-skill labor rates were what they should be?

So have a soft spot in your heart if you must for those illegals who overcrowd our schools, close our hospitals and fill our prisons. If you can read this, they are probably just a sympathetic cause you can choose to agree or disagree with without much of an impact to your daily life, and you can hardly blame them for wanting something better than they have in their own countries.

But that is not a legitimate excuse for the poverty they bring to this nation and perpetuate, adding 12 million poor and destitute to an overtaxed social support system, making it impossible for the system to raise up those who are here legitimately.

Chris Muir's Day-by-Day said of the illegals protesting “We demand the American Dream!! Without the American part” and he was mostly right:



What Muir can't address in two panels is what these illegals are doing to the American Dream for hard-working legal residents of this nation. Who cares about their needs and dreams? Apparently, they'll just fall through the cracks in Hell's Kitchen and Davenport and Bethlehem and Princeville, remaining at the bottom, never allowed a leg up, as we allow the poor of other nations to bury them alive.

* * *

I've often heard Republicans using analogy of fishing to describe the difference between them and Democrats.

Democrats, it is said, will give a hungry man a fish. That is great for today, but tomorrow, than man will be hungry again, and no closer to providing a meal for himself. Democrats will give him another fish, courtesy of the government, who took that fish from someone else. It is a vicious, unending cycle.

Republicans, instead, say they want to teach the man to fish, to be self-sufficient so that he can feed himself and his family not just that day, but in days to come.

But something falls apart when the lake or river all these people depend on is overrun with parasites that suck the life out of the fish...



Eventually, everybody starves.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:56 AM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 29, 2006

Show Me How

It's everywhere you turn this evening on the mainstream new sites. Fox. CBS. CNN:


Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters marched Saturday through Manhattan to demand an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq just hours after an American soldier died in a roadside explosion in Baghdad -- the 70th U.S. fighter killed in that country this month.

"End this war, bring the troops home," read one of the many signs lifted by marchers on a sunny afternoon three years after the war in Iraq began. The mother of a Marine killed two years ago in Iraq held a picture of her son, born in 1984 and killed 20 years later.

Cindy Sheehan, a vociferous critic of the war whose 24-year-old soldier son also died in Iraq, joined in the march, as did actress Susan Sarandon and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. One group marched under the banner "Veterans for Peace," while other marchers came from as far off as Maryland and Vermont.

You know what? I want this war over, too.

I want all the fighting to stop, for our troops to come home. I want to never again fear the sound of jet engines carried upon the wind under bright blue skies. I want to never again turn on the news to see that a suicide bomber in an Tel Aviv or Bali or London or Poughkeepsie made widows and widowers and orphans for his bloodthirsty god. I want to be able to do without these concerns.

Show me how.

Show me how to stop bin Laden's planes and Zarqawi's swords with Peace and Love and warm squishy visions of Equality and Justice. Show me how a hug can stop an IED. Explain how constantly apologizing for simply being who I am will stop their lust for killing me for simply wanting to exist.

Please do that. Find a solution. Go beyond your recycled rhetoric and show me how to co-exist with those who will murder the whole world for their thuggish god.

But that would be too hard, and it isn't really your goal, is it? You exist to complain, not resolve. Resolving is so... messy.

You can't bring your cute three year-old daughter to solve the real problems of the world. You can't even acknowledge the world is not a Benneton ad. There are people who want to murder that cute little girl simply because she is an American. Simply because she is a Christian, or a Jew, or a Wiccan. Simply because she wants to go to school, or chose her own fate, or grow up to think for herself, and not bend to their god's rigid dictums of what he says she must do and be and say.

So please, show me how wandering down well-guarded streets on a nice spring day wearing cake make-up, chanting and waving a fan, will keep planes from shattering glass and steel and bodies. Show me how your leisurely stroll stops Next Time from happening. Do that, and I'll be found waving the largest "Bush=Hitler" sign at the very next rally.

But that isn't how the world works is it?

Predator and prey relationships, the most basic of interactions in nature, are something that the followers of the Church of Darwin refuse to acknowledge could apply to themselves.

Show me how to reason with a zealot. In the split-second as his thumb drops on the plunger to detonate the bomb on his belt packed with hundreds of ball bearings, negotiate with him, infidel.

I'm waiting.

Show me how to stop Darwin. Show me how to stop their bloodlust.

Show me that your "peace and justice" aren't empty words muttered by empty heads. Show me how capitulation to their plans for world domination will stop the killing instead of intensify it.

Please.

I'm waiting.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:24 PM | Comments (63) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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