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Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Jonah Goldberg on Hillary Clinton & 2008 on National Review Online: "It was such an awkward moment, much of the commentariat hasn’t figured out exactly what to say about it, starting with Clinton herself. At first she tried to explain that she was thinking of Osama bin Laden and Bush’s inability to capture him. Later, she claimed she was making a joke — just not about her husband.

From my own viewing of the video — you can find it on YouTube and elsewhere — Hillary wasn’t making any joke at all. She was merely the butt of one and laughed along with the crowd — without getting the joke — in an excruciating “I meant to do that” sort of way. "

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

'I REALLY RESENT' By JOHN PODHORETZ - Opedcolumnists - New York Post Online Edition: "There's a lot of talk on the Left these days about how inauthentic Hillary is as a candidate. But there's nothing inauthentic about her expression of resentment against Bush. After all, if he hadn't asked her and other senators to vote for a resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, she wouldn't have had to make a choice that she now regrets.
That original choice was almost certainly inauthentic: Hillary became a hawk, in all likelihood, because she wanted (as her husband once said during another war) 'to maintain my political viability.'
You want the real Hillary? The real Hillary is the Really Resenting one. Enjoy. "

Monday, January 29, 2007

The Corner on National Review Online: "Another way to read Hillary Clinton's demand that the US be out of Iraq by 2009 is that were she President she would not be able to handle it. So she'd rather it just go away. It does not bode well for her ability to cut it with other crises that will undoubtedly face us in the future. If she has nothing substantive to say with respect to Iraq then how can she justify running for President at all, other than as a servant of her own ambition?"

Charles Krauthammer on Energy on National Review Online: "Even worse, the happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear."

Jonah Goldberg on Democrats & War on National Review Online: "One wonders if the untold millions of North Koreans who've starved, bled, and died since then would similarly applaud Eisenhower's courage and wisdom. For more than half a century, North Korea has been a prison-camp society beyond the imagining of George Orwell, where public executions for stealing food are familiar events. "

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Jonah Goldberg on Democrats & Children on National Review Online: "Hillary Clinton’s entire approach to public policy, from her earliest days as a “children’s rights advocate,” has been grounded in the idea that political differences need to be put aside for the sake of The Children. In 1996 she proclaimed, “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child. ... For that reason, we cannot permit discussions of children and families to be subverted by political or ideological debate.” "

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Rich Lowry on Hillary Clinton & 2008 on National Review Online: "But no one likes naked calculation, and Clinton worries Democrats traumatized by the experience of their last few presidential candidates. Because liberalism typically doesn’t sell in American presidential politics, liberal candidates tend to run as culturally conservative centrists — i.e., phonies. It sank both John Kerry, who couldn’t even order a Philly cheesesteak properly, and Al Gore, who adopted three such utterly different personas in three national presidential debates that his performances could be a case study in abnormal-psychology classes."

Monday, January 22, 2007

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Newt Gingrich, Roundtable: "HUME: I think race is an asset to Barack Obama. If Barack Obama was a white guy, he would be kind of an ordinary newcomer to the U.S. Senate. I think people are fascinated by and inspired by his story, and it's one of the things that's propelling him.
And I think most Americans, the overwhelming majority of Americans, deeply want to see African Americans get ahead in this country and they are proud of those that do.
And for Barack Obama, a lot of people would be impelled, I think, to vote for him for president, all other things being equal, in part because he's black. I think it's an asset. "

Facing the Islamist Menace by Christopher Hitchens, City Journal Winter 2007: "Two things, in my experience, disable many liberals at the onset of this conversation. First, they cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.
The second liberal disability concerns numbers. Any emphasis on the relative birthrates of Muslim and non-Muslim populations falls on the liberal ear like an echo of eugenics. It also upsets one of the most valued achievements of the liberal consensus: the right if not indeed the duty to limit family size to (at most) two children."

Saturday, January 20, 2007

New Orleans of Future May Stay Half Its Old Size - New York Times: "The new doubts, surprisingly, are largely not based on the widespread damage caused by the flood. Rather, crippling problems that existed long before Hurricane Katrina are mostly being blamed for the city�s failure to thrive.
In this view, the storm was merely a grim exclamation point to conditions decades in the making. Before the storm, some economists say, New Orleans may have had more people than its economy could support, and the stalled repopulation is merely reflecting that."

Friday, January 19, 2007

Charles Krauthammer on Iraq on National Review Online: "We need to find a redeployment strategy that maintains as much latent American strength as possible, but with minimal exposure. We say to Maliki: you let us down and we dismantle the Green Zone, leave Baghdad, and let you fend for yourself; we keep the airport and certain strategic bases in the area; we redeploy most of our forces to Kurdistan; we maintain a significant presence in Anbar province where we are having success in our one-front war against al Qaeda and the Baathists. Then we watch. You can have your Baghdad civil war without us. We will be around to pick up the pieces as best we can."

Thursday, January 18, 2007

OpinionJournal - Extra: "For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers. "

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Thomas Sowell on Iraq on National Review Online: "President Bush was right to listen to the military as regards the conduct of the war. But perhaps he should have sought the advice of police chiefs as regards maintaining law and order.

For that we did not have enough troops in Iraq and — more important — the troops we did have were under too many politically imposed restrictions. Put bluntly, they needed to tell the many private militias in Iraq to drop their guns or get killed.

Far fewer people would have died if they had. Of course, hand-wringers around the world, beginning with the American media, would have denounced such “brutality” and claimed that “negotiations” could have prevented such bloodshed."

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Sic Semper Tyrannis: "But most importantly, by any measure of fairness, Saddam's fate was singular in the annals of recent murderous dictators. The world seems to forget that usually such killers are either given statues, villas in exile, or, even when tried, rarely convicted and punished. "

RealClearPolitics - Articles - What America Doesn't Know About Iraq: "I wonder when politicians and commentators detail all that the Bush administration did wrong, whether any of it really matters? Would things have turned out differently if we had done everything right? Was Iraq so 'broken'' we never could have fixed it? "

Monday, January 15, 2007

James C. Capretta on Balanced Budgets on National Review Online: "While in the minority, it has been relatively easy for Democrats to attack Bush as a big spender even as they themselves proposed to expand government well beyond the Republican proposals (see, for instance, the 2003 Medicare drug-bill debate). "

Friday, January 12, 2007

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "Despite having taken over Congress, Democrats may find it difficult to obstruct President Bush's plans for Iraq. One reason, as the New York Times notes:
While Democrats control both houses of Congress, their margin in the Senate is so slender that Republican supporters there can fight back, using their chamber's arcane rules to frustrate Democrats on other issues.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, hinted in morning television appearances that any legislation expressing disapproval of the president's plan might be blocked by a filibuster, the stalling move that requires 60 votes to overcome, well short of Democratic strength.
OK, how about a little flashback--to a May 24, 2005 Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg:
In the end, it was the language of the Constitution itself and two old bulls of the Senate--Robert C. Byrd and John W. Warner--that averted a grim showdown over federal judicial nominees that had threatened to wreak lasting damage on Capitol Hill. . . .
The sticking points were always the same, [Sen. Ben] Nelson said. Democrats wanted assurances that they would not lose the right to filibuster judges, particularly a Supreme Court nominee, and that Republicans would not invoke the nuclear option. Republicans wanted assurances that they were not giving up the right to the nuclear option, and that Democrats would use the filibuster only rarely. . . .
Mr. Warner said Mr. Byrd, who is the longest-serving senator, opened every meeting with a reminder: 'Country, institution, and next, us.'
Less than two years ago, preserving the filibuster was a high-minded matter of serving 'country' and 'institution.' Now the filibuster is an 'arcane' 'stalling move.' Disputes about process are seldom really about process."

Charles Krauthammer on Embryonic-Stem-Cell Research on National Review Online: " it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

It will have turned out that Bush’s unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge.

And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another. Who will be holding the line next time, when another Faustus promises medical nirvana if he is permitted to transgress just one moral boundary?"

Thursday, January 11, 2007

The Blog | Greg Gutfeld: PREDICT WHEN AND HOW JOHN SEERY WILL DIE THIS YEAR! | The Huffington Post: "But is it a victory if Seery dies? I think so. I mean, it makes me feel better. And, you know, at least
I'm honest about it. See, assholes like Seery, and the people who agree with him - pretend to feel bad about the death of our troops. But they don't give a fuck. No. They need people to die to make their point. It makes them feel smart, and makes their political enemies feel bad. But by saying troop deaths bother them personally - well, that's just a lie. Seery wants as many troops to die as possible. Because without it, what does he have? Cleary, it's not grace."

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