I just took another look at Ned Lamont’s website to see what his foreign policy beliefs are, especially about the Middle East. It’s safe to say that I found them just as unsettling this time as I did last time. Here’s part of what I found unsettling:

Let’s be clear that Bush emphasized Iraq at the expense of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, and we are reaping the consequences. Just think what the situation could have been if the United States had invested its power, prestige, and resources in a peace settlement. Instead we chose a failed war and stand virtually alone, paying a heavy price for a profoundly failed set of decisions.

Lamont can think whatever he wants but anyone that thinks that peace in the Middle East is possible is dangerously delusional. Hamas is now running the Palestinian Authority. They’re committed to wiping Israel off the map. They’re funded by Iran, whose biggest goal is wiping Israel off the map. Why does Lamont think that anything remotely resembling peace with Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran is possible? Is he a graduate of the Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton School of Peace that believes that peace is only attainable through worthless treaties? The reality is that signing peace agreements with any of these groups is as productive as the treaties that were signed with Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s.

Here’s another part that I found disturbing:

All Americans want the kidnapped soldiers to be returned and this cycle of violence to end, based on the principles of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 of 2004, which calls for Hezbollah militias to be disbanded and disarmed, with the government of Lebanon taking full control of all of its territory.

Count me out of that type of arrangement, Mr. Lamont. I want nothing of the sort. I’d prefer that “this cycle of violence” ends when the last Hezbo terrorist dies and not a split second sooner. The belief that the U.N. and Lebanon will fully implement UNSCR 1559 is naive and dangerous. You can wish all you want for it but it won’t make peace a reality.

Frankly, the only thing that’s been successful is when Israel uses big guns and powerful tanks, when Israel is as ruthless as their enemies. Anything less than that is simply an exercise in futility. It’s time that Mr. Lamont stopped living in that dream world that Martin Peretz talked about when he said:

“It is a fortunate world that Mr. Lamont lives in, but it is not the real one.”

Mr. Lamont isn’t just naive. He’s dangerous. And we can’t have that in the U.S. Senate.

Technorati: Ned Lamont, Lieberman, Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel

Cross-post at LetFreedomRingBlog

According to this article, Hillary Clinton is stabbing Joe Lieberman in the front while trying to ingratiate herself to the Nutroots gang.

Lieberman is running as an independent in November, and Republicans have attempted to cast his primary loss as a sign that the Democratic Party has been taken over by its extreme left wing.
At Clinton’s Westchester County home, she and Lamont “talked about what Mr. Lamont can expect from the George Bush-Karl Rove attack machine,” Wolfson said. “She told him Republicans were invested in defeating him.” Clinton has contributed $5,000 from her political action committee to Lamont’s campaign and will do “whatever works for the campaign,” Wolfson said. Wolfson, one of Clinton’s senior political strategists, also said he will join the Lamont campaign as an adviser.

Hillary knows that Lamont is a political idiot but she thinks he’s a good vehicle to ‘get herself right’ with the Nutroots crowd. If Lamont had come along 25 years ago, he wouldn’t have gotten 10 percent of the vote. Because the Democratic Party is now dominated by the idiot anti-war faction, he won a primary. I’ve said before that JFK, FRD and Harry Truman wouldn’t recognize this Democratic Party, nor would they want anything to do with it.

The old party bosses would’ve pushed Lamont to the side in a heartbeat. Today’s ‘party bosses’ are nothing more than megalomaniacs who crave power so badly that they can’t think straight. It’s a sad sight, especially when you see them kick one of the most decent men in American politics to the curb. Joe Lieberman deserved far better than he’s getting.

Everyone knows that Hillary will do whatever is the politically expedient thing at the moment. That’s why people don’t trust her. That’s why she’ll never get elected President.

Technorati: Hillary Clinton, Ned Lamont, Joe Lieberman, Election 2006

Cross-post at LetFreedomRingBlog

John Murtha’s categorical declaration that Marines had killed people in Haditha in cold blood took another hit today in this Washington Post article. Let’s look at what they’re reporting:

In a 34-minute interview with two colonels, Laughner described taking pictures of each of the bodies while moving from room to room in three houses, as the Marines described what happened in each circumstance. The Marines told Laughner they had taken fire from the houses and believed they heard people “racking AK-47s”, preparing to fire the automatic weapons. The Marines then “cleared” the rooms using fragmentation grenades and rifle shots. Two other accounts given by lawyers for Marines in the unit are consistent with the version Laughner heard from the Marines involved in the incident on Nov. 19.

It hardly sounds like these Marines went off the deep end. Rather, it sounds like they were defending themselves from imminent danger. It’s a big stretch to say that people defending themselves from imminent attack killed people in cold blood. If you heard someone getting ready to fire automatic weapons at you, what actions would you take? Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate in using everything in my arsenal to defend myself in such a hostile environment.

(continue reading post »)

On page 240 of Pat Buchanan’s stunningly logical new book, “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2006) appear the following words:

“One of the truly major issues with which America must deal [is] the vast tidal wave of human beings coming from the Third World. There is a fragmentation going on in this country. At what point does cultural, racial diversity become a kind of social anarchy? How do you get national cohesion this way?”

But those are not the words of my friend and political sparring partner Pat Buchanan. They are words he quoted from a 1987 interview in The Christian Science Monitor with Eric Sevareid, the CBS correspondent and close associate of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

Only 19 years ago, one of the nation’s most respected public liberals could unself-consciously utter words that today could be a scandalous career ender for a public figure.

And it is around that issue — race, ethnicity, language, culture and immigration — and the problem of talking honestly about it, that Buchanan has constructed his most important book to date.

Folks, it is time to start the real discussion about illegal aliens. To date, the debate has been about whether or not we should enforce our laws, should we open the borders or close them. Then we get into the economic costs of illegal aliens and the fact that this has harmed our children, parents and the morality of a nation.

Pat Buchanan is opening up the BIG question, how does the illegal alien flood across our borders affect the future of our nation and the future of freedom? No longer is this a question of 40,000 illegal aliens in California prisons or do we give them drivers licenses. We need to concentrate on the effect of this violence to our laws, in the long term. Yet, this had been discussed twenty years ago, by certified liberals, who sounded like an early day Buchanan. What has changed in the past twenty years? (continue reading post »)

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last week that the communications intercept program conducted by the National Security Agency is unconstitutional. While many are shocked or feigning shock over her decision, this writer wasn’t shocked or surprised at this judicial ruling.

The moment I read in her decision the term “warrentless wiretaps” I knew Judge Taylor’s decision was more political than constitutional. These were not wiretaps. They were intercepts of communications between suspected terrorists overseas and people residing in the United States.

Diggs, sitting in federal court in Detroit, ruled Thursday that the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program should be halted immediately. She said plaintiffs from the legal, academic and journalism field had proven that the program was harmful to them and violated the US Constitution. One of the major plaintiffs in the case was none other than the American Civil Liberties Union, and they did an excellent job of “judge hunting.”

They found the perfect judge to hear the case: A President Jimmy Carter appointee with a history of activism on the bench. An admitted liberal Democrat, Judge Taylor’s court decisions include the banning of Nativity scenes from municipal property.

She was once blasted by Judge Bernard Friedman for her role in an effort to have a suit challenging the University of Michigan’s use of race in its law school’s admission policies assigned to another judge who was handling a similar case. Taylor’s husband is on the board of regents for that school. Her attempt was politically motivated since Friedman was considered more conservative than the other judges.
(continue reading post »)

Public school advocate, teacher, author and friend Ari Kaufman published this opinion piece today about the shortcomings of California’s teacher credentialing programs.

Like many young teachers, Ari left LAUSD after only a few years in the classroom because of the systemic failures of our state’s most destructive criminal enterprise.

In his column he writes:

… teacher credentialing programs have now fused into this list of revisionist, multicultural historical-social instruction. We all can reasonably speculate what a graduate-level class in journalism, political science or sociology would deduce about modern political events; however, the most fast-moving and fervent anti-establishment indoctrination is coming from the instructors at the teacher credential programs…

As if Ari’s assessment wasn’t disturbing enough, another teacher’s private response to him did the job:

August 22, 2006

Hello Mr. Kaufman,

Your article in the OC Register really hit home. Teaching is an art and it takes certain sorts of personalities to do it. I am a teacher, but I’m not working because of a different set of circumstances. You’re correct; the credentialing process is irrelevant to the actual challenge of teaching children. The classes you discussed are for the most part useless to an aspiring teacher, but very relevant if one wants bureaucratic membership. The real problem for me was not jumping the hoops to become a teacher. My problems began when I began to speak out in the hopes that I could effect change for the better. I was naïve and believed that moral conscience could win.

You obviously realize the problems with our failure in public education are multifaceted. You touched on it in your article when you said that teachers, administrators, and the union have despised your efforts for reform. I went against the administration and almost lost my credential, the very document which I valued because of the enormous work I had to go through in order to prove myself worthy to teach. I had been teaching for over twelve years when this occurred. It’s a rather interesting story and in a small way depicts what has gone wrong in what I thought was a great field for a career. One of my beliefs from my experiences is that the public education establishments don’t want intelligent and creative people to apply. They only want follower types so that they will teach children to be followers as well. Hence, a rigorous and lengthy credentialing process.

(continue reading post »)

Jon Miller of Michigan State University is befuddled. He conducted a survey, as reported in New Scientist Magazine, and it seems Americans are at the bottom of the “I believe in evolution” totem pole. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan shows that “only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.” The percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005.

This has totally frustrated and confused evolutionists. Some of the insulting and arrogant sentiments expressed by Miller and his colleagues:

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US.

“The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicized,” he says. ” Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue.”

Miller’s report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That’s despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. “We don’t seem to be going in the right direction,” Miller says.

There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. “That is a group of people that can be reached,” says Scott.

Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don’t agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

Actually, it’s closer to 95%, but whose counting. Human DNA is also similar to that of the worms, mosquitoes, and chickens. There is a 75% similarity between the DNA of nematode worms and man. The genes of fruit flies belonging to the Drosophila genus and human genes yielded a similarity of 60%. How should people respond to that, Mr. Miller? Common design is not common ancestry. (continue reading post »)

Based on these articles, I’d say that it’s sounding more like the Bush Administration is finally taking border security seriously. Here’s what Reuters is saying:

Elite U.S. Border Patrol units armed with assault rifles and stun grenades may be set to play a more prominent role as authorities gain greater control over the porous border with Mexico, border police say. Little known outside law enforcement circles, the Bortac tactical teams have been deployed to remote reaches of the border to hunt drug and human traffickers using out-of-the way routes since the 1980s.
The Bortac members wear full battle-dress uniforms and carry state-of-the-art night vision and thermal optics. They are armed with weapons including M4 assault rifles and “flash-bang” stun grenades developed for the special forces.

Based on the article, these teams sound like they’re as capable in performing their duties as a Navy SEAL is in performing their job. (continue reading post »)

A Mexican man with two prior convictions for illegally entering the United States was arraigned in federal court in Cleveland on Wednesday for illegal reentry, the result of an investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Jose Barron-Marquez, 35, a citizen of Mexico, was apprehended by the New Philadelphia Police Department after stealing a US flag and setting it on fire following a July 4th Independence Day celebration. Marquez provided the arresting officer a false identity, calling himself “Marco Polo.”

Marquez was taken into ICE custody July 11. Database checks revealed that he had two previous convictions for illegally entering the United States, in September 1994 and October 1999. Marquez was last deported from the US in January 2000 after he was arrested in Texas for sexual assault.

“Anyone who believes they can violate the integrity of our borders with impunity should take notice,” said Brian M. Moskowitz, special agent in charge of the ICE Office of Investigations for Michigan and Ohio.

“Re-entering the U.S. after deportation is a serious offense. ICE will continue to seek prosecution against those who commit such crimes.” (continue reading post »)

While Connecticut Democrats were busy gutting Senator Joe Lieberman for being supportive of the war in Iraq, California Republicans were trying to figure out how to support more moderate candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steve Poizner.

Democrats decided that candidates that don’t march lockstep on the war will be shunned, and defeated if possible. They threw long-time liberal Joe Leiberman under the bus for his views on the war in exchange for the more liberal Ned Lamont. Lamont parrots the Moveon.org, Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan view of America.

Meanwhile, the California Republican Party, over the objections of many grumbling conservatives put some of their single issue views such as abortion on the back burner and endorsed Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor.

Regarding minorities, Democrats point out that their membership numbers are higher. This is true, but minority Democrats are expected to support the politics of dependency. African-Americans like Condoleezza Rice and Bill Cosby who don’t support the victim agenda are called Uncle Toms.

Republicans are looking for ways to include more minorities in the party. The Bush Administration has appointed more minority individuals to high level government and cabinet positions than ever before in US history.

African-American home and business ownership has reached an all time high. School accountability and choice, needed in the inner cities more than elsewhere are Republican agendas, and opposed by the Democrats. Democrats protect the teachers unions who donate millions in campaign contributions at the expense of education reform in poor minority neighborhoods where it is needed the most.

The trend appears to be that Democrats are moving to the extreme left and accept no dissent from their members and candidates, while Republicans are moving to the middle and opening up the tent.

Cross-posted at SactoDan.com

Technorati Tags: Democrat, Republican, Politics