The new year is only a day away and as always, we wish a Happy New Year to our friends and family. As a military family, we have spent many New Years apart (Christmases, Easters, anniversaries and birthdays as well). As an Army wife, knowing too well the feelings that accompany deployments and separations during such occasions that would otherwise be festive, I cannot help but think of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.

Soldiers live their every day lives in a way that is foreign to the average civilian. Their’s is a life of obedience, submission, physically taxing work, sacrifice and danger. They don’t whine; they leave that to state side partisan debates. They don’t cower; they face their fears head on. They don’t run from responsibility; they run headlong into it. They spend their lives training for war, weathering the elements of cold and heat.

Then they spend their lives living in war, facing the dangers of relentless enemies, both foreign and domestic, who are armed with either guns or a microphone. They understand that the erroneous things being said back home about their mission and their leaders, while hurtful, is democracy in action, and that’s what they’re fighting for both in their own country and around the world.

They are heroes, pure and simple. They suck it up, they lay down their lives, and they wish for their families. So while we’re toasting at 11:59 pm New Year’s Eve, say a blessing and a toast to the valiant soldiers of the United States military who make it possible for the rest of us to remain at home and celebrate in peace.

I have created this slideshow for them in their honor using exclusive 82nd Airborne Division photographs from the expeditionary phase fo the war in March 2003 through February 2004 when my husband, SFC Proctor, was there. (exception: Saddam’s capture was compliments of 4th Infantry Division)

The slideshow is large, 29.4 MBs, and takes about 1 minute to download/open using DSL. I hope you find this tribute as enjoyable to watch as it was to make. WATCH IT HERE

HOOAH & Happy New Year!

Cross-posted at Amy’s Blog

That’s essentially what the Nation’s Jonathan Schell is recommending. Here’s a representative sampling from his hyperventillating article:

The alarming argument is that as Commander in Chief he possesses “inherent” authority to suspend laws in wartime. But if he can suspend FISA at his whim and in secret, then what law can he not suspend? What need is there, for example, to pass or not pass the Patriot Act if any or all of its provisions can be secretly exceeded by the President?

I can’t wait for the day when liberals like Jonathan Schell would actually read the Consstitution and to read whether there’s case law on point on the issue. I also can’t wait until someone asks Mr. Schell whether wartime presidents had authorized warrantless searches prior to FISA’s enactment. If they did, by what power did they do this? Or do liberals like Mr. Schell think that FDR’s Justice Department went into open court to get warrants for intercepts of calls originating in Germany and ending in New Jersey.

My wish for Mr. Schell is that Hugh Hewitt gives him a crash course in ConLaw so he doesn’t sound so oblivious to the Constitution, which supercedes any legislation that Congress passes. It’d be wise for Mr. Schell to learn that legislation must comply with the dictates of the Constitution.

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship. (continue reading post »)

AP reports: “A powerful storm sent rivers and creeks spilling over their banks and into cities and set off mudslides that blocked major highways across Northern California on Saturday. At least a dozen people had to be rescued from the rushing water, and forecasters were warning of another storm on Sunday.”

“California officials urged residents along the Napa and Russian rivers and on hillsides to collect their valuables and get out.

In the city of Napa, near the heart of wine country, the river rose 5 feet over flood stage and water surged into downtown before the water began to recede. Napa officials estimated about 1,000 homes flooded.”

Not like New Orleans, but a terrible nuisance nonetheless.

Here’s to finding the high ground.

UPDATE:
Current Watches, Warnings and Advisories for California
Issued by the National Weather Service
This page contains watches, warnings and advisories that are in effect for California. This file is usually updated about every two minutes.

National Weather Service: Map
Satellite Imaging

RELATED:
Flooding in Napa: SF Chronicle has more
Government Prepares for Next Big Disaster

Now doesn’t that look interesting? I can’t imagine Bill Clinton, being the saint that he’s always been, doing “extralegal” things. Can you?

According to an Agence France Press summary of the Die Zeit interview, Scheuer explained that the Clinton administration “had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.” The top Bin Laden hunter recalled that the extralegal directive came after “President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clarke ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda.”

While I don’t find it difficult to believe that Bill Clinton authorized “extralegal interrogations”, I’m more than a little skeptical of the source of this article. Michael Scheuer isn’t exactly trustworthy, in my opinion.

Scheuer’s revelations contradict a much ballyhooed Nov. 2, 2005 report in the Washington Post, which insisted that “the secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” After mistakenly claiming that renditioning began under President Bush, the Post noted that “considerable concern lingers [within the CIA] about the legality, morality and practicality” of the program.

If Scheuer’s telling the truth, then this would fly in the face of that Washington Post article. I’ll take a wait-and-see attitude on this but I can’t say that I’d be surprised if it turned out to be true. I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything more.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

The polling must be conclusive if Hillary’s finally speaking out on the NSA intercept ‘program’. Then again, it might just be because she’s blasting the Bush administration in a fundraising letter. One thing that’s certain: when she’s silent on a breaking issue, it’s because she’s waiting for the polling to inform her of the best-sounding position to take and nothing else. She should be ashamed of herself but shame isn’t something that a Clinton feels.

After noting the NSA program, Mrs. Clinton vowed to fight for “national security policies that tell the truth and level with the American people.” She also observed that “the values that made America in the 20th century not just the economic leader of the world, but the moral leader of the world are under attack today.”

Hillary’s right that “the values that made America in the 20th century not just the economic leader of the world, but the moral leader of the world are under attack today” but it’s because out-to-lunch lefty Democrats are undermining them. They’re undermining them whenever they tell us to leave Iraq. After all, keeping one’s word is called honesty and that’s a moral value that’s been part of America for a couple of centuries. They’re undermining our moral leadership by telling the world that our President is essentially a criminal solely for political gains.

Not a word about the NSA program, for instance, appears on Mrs. Clinton’s official Senate web site, which covers her positions on everything from “inappropriate” video games to her recent statement on the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2006.

What’s the matter, Mrs. Clinton? You speak out on a wide range of issues on your website but you don’t mention this? Why not? Doesn’t it fit into your carefully crafted centrist image? Or is your official Senate website sheer imagery and the fundraising letter the real you? Inquiring minds demand to know.

As long as she’s speaking out on the NSA intercept program that the Bush administration is doing, why doesn’t she decry the larger-scale and more randomly selected data-mining operations of her husband’s administration? After all, Echelon and Carnivore were alot bigger. Didn’t they intrude on Americans far more than Bush’s narrowly focused spying?

Don’t be shy now, Mrs. Clinton. We demand to know.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

A Prayer Request From Captain Ed at CQ:

Prayers Needed For FM
Got some bad news today on the transplant front. The biopsy came back from the hospital, and the tissue shows a polyoma virus infection of the transplanted kidney, which has led to the lessened kidney function that we have seen the past few weeks. It often comes with the transplant, and normally healthy people don’t have a problem with it as the body suppresses the virus without incident. However, when a patient is on immunosuppressive therapy as transplant patients are for life, this is always a potential threat.
The First Mate will have to go three days each of the next three weeks to the hospital for IV infusions of anti-virals, as well as add in more medication for fighting the infection. At the same time, the doctors have to lessen the immunosuppressive therapy somewhat to allow the body to fight the infection — but which risks the kidney and pancreas that she received over the last year. It’s a tightrope act, and for the next few weeks we’ll have to just keep a close eye on her to make sure she comes through OK.
She has always appreciated your thoughts and prayers, so I thought I’d keep you updated. We could use a few of them now and for the next few weeks.

I strongly encourage all my readers to pray for Ed’s beloved First Mate & to include Ed, their family and the medical personnel that they’ll deal with in those prayers. I’d also strongly encourage people to stop past CQ and drop a little note to Ed in the comments. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

U.S. Forces Focus More on Training Iraqis

U.S. troops in Baghdad will increasingly focus on training the Shiite-dominated special police forces, a top U.S commander in Iraq said Friday, reflecting efforts to quell ongoing friction among the country’s ethnic factions.
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In the coming months, he said, coalition forces “will be stepping back somewhat from the Iraqi army forces and assisting in greater numbers the Iraqi special police in Baghdad.” Webster said the police training will focus in part on handling detainees.
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In other comments, Webster said that while the number of U.S. casualties is about the same as a year ago, there are fewer successful attacks by the insurgency. A year ago, he said, up to 30 percent of the attacks caused injury or damage to coalition forces or Iraqi people, and now just 10 percent are successful.

This is welcome news because it proves that we’re transitioning from a fighting force to a less visible force essentially training the people who will finish off the insurgents. It’s also likely that this news should convince more people that the President’s plan of a multi-track approach is the best plan.

Pace: U.S. to Launch Phased Iraq Pullout

Gen. Peter Pace said the current force of 160,000 would drop to below 138,000 by March, then U.S. commanders on the ground would work with the Iraqi government to determine the pace of future pullbacks in areas that have been secured by local security forces. “The bottom line will be that the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police will gain in competence, that they will be able to take on more and more of the territory, whether or not there are still insurgents in that area,” he said in an interview with a small group of reporters, including the AP, aboard a military plane en route to the United Arab Emirates.

This is an important and logical step in the war in Iraq. This should be seen as proof that more Iraqi security forces are getting trained, no matter what nonsense Slow Joe Biden mutters about. I predict that he’ll claim that this is a PR move that doesn’t truly represent the true facts on the ground.
(continue reading post »)

ACLU Website

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Media@aclu.org

NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union today sharply criticized a Justice Department investigation into the disclosure of an illegal National Security Agency domestic eavesdropping operation approved by President George W. Bush.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as well as two full-page advertisements in the New York Times, the ACLU has called for the appointment of a special counsel to determine whether President Bush violated federal wiretapping laws by authorizing illegal surveillance of domestic targets.

The following statement can be attributed to ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero:

“President Bush broke the law and lied to the American people when he unilaterally authorized secret wiretaps of U.S. citizens. But rather than focus on this constitutional crisis, Attorney General Gonzales is cracking down on critics of his friend and boss. Our nation is strengthened, not weakened, by those whistleblowers who are courageous enough to speak out on violations of the law.”

“To avoid further charges of cronyism, Attorney General Gonzales should call off the investigation. Better yet, Mr. Gonzales ought to fulfill his own oath of office and appoint a special counsel to determine whether federal laws were violated.”

Unbelievable! This shows just how concerned the ACLU is with National Security, absolutely none. Why would the ACLU not want an investigation of sources leaking classified information? What other reason, than hatred of America could it be? What we need is an investigation of the ACLU.

Cross-posted at Stop the ACLU

Ed Rendell is in big trouble and he’s definitely scrambling. Here’s why: The AP’s Marc Levy has written an article about the new legislation that the Pennsylvania Senate passed requiring “Pennsylvania voters to show some form of identification at the polls or be forced to cast a provisional ballot.” The Pennsylvania House had already passed a similar bill. If the House adopts this bill, then it goes to Gov. Rendell, who can then veto it or sign it.

If he signs it, which isn’t at all certain, that means he could lose thousands of votes he’d get from out-of-staters and dead people. If he doesn’t sign it, Lynn Swann and the Pennsylvania GOP will use that veto like a billy club on him from the minute he vetoes it straight to Election Day.

Here’s what Kate Philips, Rendell’s press secretary, is quoted as saying “The governor is concerned that identification requirements may discourage people from voting and eventually disenfranchise people.”

Anyone around here buying that disenfranchisement argument? Here’s how I’d translate that quote: “Gov. Rendell needs all the fraudulent votes he can get. Anything that stands in his way of that is something that he’d have grave concerns about. It shouldn’t matter if the legislation makes sense. Anything that stands in the way of that will be framed in civil rights language, even if the most important factor in it is running clean elections.”

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

Reuters’ Deborah Charles is reporting that the Justice Department is initiating an investigation into who leaked the “highly classified” information about the warrantless wiretapping program. I’m only surprised that it took this long.

A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in the United States without the approval of a special, secret court. Bush secretly gave the NSA authority to intercept communications without such approval.

I’ve had 2 questions gnawing at me that I’m attempting to get answered from a couple contacts I’ve got, namely, did Article II of the Constitution give the president power to surveil communications without warrants? If he did, wouldn’t that trump any restrictions that FISA might attempt to put on those powers? When I find the answers to those questions, I’ll post an update. If there’s an attorney who reads this, I’d welcome your input into this.

It seems to me that everyone’s pointing to FISA as the sole governing principal involved in this issue. My question is: What was the governing principal before FISA was enacted in 1978? Did the President have the power to surveil foreign communications without a warrant before FISA and what authority granted him that power?
(continue reading post »)