Redstate

Posted at 12:29am on May 16, 2008 Imperialism

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

As if any more evidence was needed to show that Hugo Chavez means to destabilize the region:

High-ranking officials in Venezuela offered to help Colombian guerrillas obtain surface-to-air missiles meant to change the balance of power in their war with the Colombian government, according to internal rebel documents.

Venezuelan officials served as middlemen with Australian arms dealers and agreed to help the rebel commanders travel to the Middle East to receive missile training, according to files on computer hard drives seized by Colombian authorities and shown to The Washington Post. In interviews, Colombian officials said they have no evidence that the guerrillas obtained the antiaircraft missiles but added that Venezuelan authorities appear to have provided light arms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

The disclosures have already started to reverberate in the Bush administration and among Latin America policymakers on Capitol Hill, where a small group of Republicans has proposed classifying Venezuela, a major oil exporter to the United States, as a state sponsor of terrorism. The United States and Europe long ago blacklisted the rebel organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as a terrorist group.

Posted in Foreign Affairs | Hugo Chavez | Venezuela — Comments (1)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 8:46pm on May 15, 2008 And Now a Word for Folks Who Use the Word "McAmnesty" On a Regular Basis.

By Leon H Wolf

You know the guy who's likely to win the Democratic Presidential Nomination? He's planning some action on immigration if he wins the election. You know what he's planning to do? If you guessed "build a really big wall and deport lots of people," you're so, so very close to being correct:

Barack Obama is easily winning the African American vote, but to woo Latinos, where he is running 3-to-1 behind rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, he is taking a giant risk: spotlighting his support for the red-hot issue of granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

It's a huge issue for Latinos, who want them. It's also a huge issue for the general electorate, which most vehemently does not. Obama's stand could come back to haunt him not only in a general election, but with other voters in states such as California, where driver's licenses for illegal immigrants helped undo former Gov. Gray Davis.

* * *

"Barack Obama has not backed down" on driver's licenses for undocumented people, said Federico Peña, a former Clinton administration Cabinet member and Denver mayor now supporting Obama. "I think when the Latino community hears Barack's position on such an important and controversial issue, they'll understand that his heart and his intellect is with Latino community."

You know, I understand that McCain is not acceptable to you on this issue. I get that. But the decision to not vote does not occur in a vacuum - if McCain does not win, someone else will. And he's got plans you're probably not going to like.

Posted in Immigration | McCain | Obamafiles — Comments (24)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:42pm on May 15, 2008 Putting Bush's Words In Context: Barack Obama, Neville Chamberlain, and the Art of Appeasement

By Erick

Posted in 2008 | appeasement | Barack Obama | George Bush | Neville Chamberlain | War — Comments (38)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 7:24pm on May 15, 2008 SENATE TRIES TO SNEAK IMMIGRATION REFORMS THROUGH

By RS Insider

It looks like the Democrats and amnesty-loving Republicans slipped the AG Jobs bill into the Senate emergency supplemental appropriations bill during committee markup today. This bill relates to giving amnesty to illegal aliens who work as migrant workers.

Early intelligence reports that it probably has provisions similar to the last AG Jobs bill that was considered – including amnesty provisions. It was supposedly a Feinstein/ Craig amendment and was accepted with a vote of 17 – 12.

If Harry Reid offers this version of the supplemental as a substitute to the House version, he will block out all other senators from any opportunity to strip this Ag Jobs provision, which will ultimately keep potential amnesty provisions in the war funding bill.

Your Senator's number is (202) 224-3121.

[UPDATE:] A source tells me that the GOP leadership is scrambling to stop this and that this was not done with the GOP leadership's blessing. The House GOP leadership is preparing to fight too.

Posted in Ag Jobs | Amnesty | Immigration — Comments (10)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:52pm on May 15, 2008 Don Young Votes for Tax Increase

By Erick

John Boehner, Roy Blunt, and the House GOP leadership, having failed to deal decisively and boldly to purge the cancer that is Don Young from the House GOP Caucus, got to witness him vote to raise taxes today. He joined 31 other Republicans who have no real leaders to show them the way.

The tax increase is a .5% increase on individuals who make more than $500,000.00 a year. The Democrats, naturally, called it a "Patriot Tax." They should have called it what it is: the "Rape the Entrepreneurial Class Tax Law" or RECTAL.

You know, I think we, all of us here at RedState, should commit to a project: every work day from now until he is crushed in the primary, write some bad about Don Young. Highlight his arrogance, highlight his scandals, highlight his votes, highlight his corruption, highlight his general jackassery -- highlight all the stuff to make sure when people are Googling him, they find out everyone hates Don Young except Don Young and a bunch of people in the federal pen.

By the way, the Club for Growth PAC put out a press release on this. Yes, they *do* get involved in primaries, Don Young.

Posted in 2008 | Culture of Corruption | Democrats | Don Young | tax increase — Comments (53)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 5:17pm on May 15, 2008 Think Progress fails history

By Soren Dayton

ThinkProgress notes a passage from John McCain's speech today in which McCain warns of the dangers of appeasement:

Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain. I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.

Think Progress proceeds to fail history 101:

McCain’s praise of Ronald Reagan is wholly misplaced. To recap, during the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, hostages were not released because of Iran’s fear of Reagan, as McCain suggested. In reality, Iran released them after Reagan administration officials infamously sold arms to the country, which were transfered to Ayatollah Khomeini. As a result, 11 Reagan officials were convicted of crimes.

They are so laughably, ignorantly wrong. The hostages were released on Reagan's inauguration day. Recall that these guys recently accused McCain of plagiarism when someone had actually stolen the lines from him.

Hacks and clowns

Posted in 2008 | John McCain | Ronald Reagan | Smearing And Sliming John McCain | ThinkProgress — Comments (60) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 4:07pm on May 15, 2008 Breaking: No Money For The War, Leave Iraq In 30 Days, Fix The Levees And HelpThe Unemployed

By haystack

The Democrat strategy of sneaking a bill to the floor they had over 450 days to get through Committee and Amendment and debate has succeeded. Obey and the Democrats have given Pelosi her trophy.

Using three votes on H R 2642 (Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Act) this is how things turned out.

On funding 162 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan:

Yeas 141, Nays 149, "Present" 132, Not Voting 12

On troop withdrawal in 30 days:

Yeas 227, Nays 196, Not Voting 11

On spending 21 billion on levees in New Orleans, extending Unemployment Insurance, and Taxing small business:

Yeas 256, Nays 166, Not Voting 12

Decorum...and site posting rules preclude my adding any personal commentary on this news...the title speaks it more cleanly than I can muster within this post.

Posted in Congress | Democrats | Iraq Funding | Surrender to win — Comments (23)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 3:06pm on May 15, 2008 May 15 McCain Blogger Conference Call

McCain Answers, Does Not Eat Waffle

By Dan McLaughlin

Senator McCain just finished a conference call with bloggers. Most of the call was dominated by discussion of Iraq and Iran, specifically Senator Obama's reaction to President Bush's remarks in Israel, Senator McCain's thoughts on negotiating with Iran and Senator McCain's thoughts on his announced goal to win the war in Iraq by 2013. Here are the highlights:

Senator McCain set out his definition of victory in Iraq, including control of the country by the Maliki government, the Iraqi military taking over responsibility and U.S. troops out of harms way and reducing U.S. troop presence, but he stressed that this does not mean we leave Iraq, or that there is not still "sporadic fighting." He again analogized a long-term presence in Iraq to those in Kuwait and Korea.

Senator McCain specifically stated that he looks forward to having with Sen. Obama or Clinton a "debate as to whether we are winning or not" in Iraq. He stressed repeatedly the importance of the "facts on the ground."

He emphasized that he is not announcing a date for withdrawal by setting a 2013 goal. When a questioner characterized his speech as a withdrawal date he was quite firm in telling her that "you either didn't read or didn't understand my speech" and said it "should be fairly apparent" that he picked 2013 because that would be the end of his first term and he's saying what he intends to accomplish.

Turning to Iran, Sen. McCain said he took Pres. Bush at his word that in his remarks on the dangers of appeasement he was not referring to Sen. Obama, but he did note "such a vociferous reaction" by Sen. Obama and characterized as the "highest degree of naivete and inexperience" to negotiate with Iran when the Iranian leadership refers to Israel as "a stinking corpse" and threatens to wipe Israel off the map and supports terrorism and the insurgency in Iraq, emphasizing that such talks would only lend prestige to the Iranian regime.

As Sen. McCain described Sen. Obama's proposal for such talks: "what is it that he wants to talk about?"

Sen. McCain then laid out his conditions for talking with Iran: renounce threats against Israel, renounce nuclear ambitions, stop supplying "lethal explosive devices" to insurgents in Iraq. He noted that he'd be willing to offer incentives to Iran but they would have to make those steps first. He also noted that U.S. Ambassador Crocker, in Iraq, has tried talking with the Iranian Ambassador there (despite the lack of formal diplomatic relations) but has met with nothing but intransigence.

A few more random points:

Posted in 2008 | Bloggers | John McCain — Comments (16)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 1:27pm on May 15, 2008 Touchy

By Pejman Yousefzadeh

Speaking at ceremonies to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel, President Bush made the following statement regarding the fight against terrorism:

. . . "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.

"We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is--the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

This relatively banal statement--banal because it has been repeated in some form or another by Western leaders ever since it became indubitably clear that Neville Chamberlain did not quite have things right at Munich--has caused people to lose their ever-loving minds. Barack Obama is generally even-keeled, but . . . well . . . read the following overreaction:

"It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack," Obama said in the statement his aides distributed. "George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel."

Read on . . .

Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Paranoia Will Destroy Ya — Comments (46)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:13am on May 15, 2008 McCain Looks Back At His First Term

By California Yankee

Senator John McCain gave a terrific speech today in which he took a look back at the accomplishments of his first term as president.

The McCain campaign also released the following ad focusing on what John McCain envisions achieving during his first term in the White House:

In the speech, McCain's vision of accomplishments includes the following:

Read on ...

Posted in 2008 | John McCain — Comments (43)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 11:06am on May 15, 2008 Islam and Free Speech: Canadian version.

By Paul J Cella

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.
— G. K. Chesterton.

Any reader involved in our long-running debate (recapitulated just last week) on Islam and Free Speech, should sit down a read this remarkable statement carefully. It concerns a complaint brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission against Mcleans magazine, which reprinted a portion of Mark Steyn’s book America Alone. The complaint alleged that Mcleans and Steyn violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by unfairly “targeting Muslims.”

Read the statement, and then read on.

Posted in Canada | free speech | Mark Steyn | sedition | the Jihad | War — Comments (11)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:52am on May 15, 2008 Tom Davis: Bush Too Conservative On Spending. Yeah, That's The Problem.

Why Congressional Republicans May Soon Be Added To The Endangered Species List

By Dan McLaughlin

With the latest setback in a House special election, Virginia's Tom Davis - who formerly headed the NRCC - has the long knives out for current head Tom Cole. But his diagnosis of the problem seems more a symptom than a cure:

Rep. Tom Davis stomped on the concrete floor of the Capitol basement when asked by reporters about Republican fortunes at the moment.

"This is the floor," he said, by way of explanation. "We're below the floor."

Inside the meeting, Davis had just presented his colleagues with what he said was a 20-page memo outlining his prescription for a way out of this mess. He did not offer details to the press, yet did not spare the party and the president scathing criticism in his public comments.

"The president swallows the microphone every time he opens his mouth," Davis said.

He believes Bush's staunch opposition to the Democratic housing bill and the SCHIP bill, for example, is hurting rank and file. Look at yesterday's vote on [stopping the purchase of oil for] the SPRO [the federal oil reserve], where Republicans defied the president in droves. Lo and behold, the White House says today that it will not veto the bill.

Today is also the day when the House takes up the farm bill, which the president has promised to veto. It's expected that this will become the second veto of Bush's administration to be overridden -- though the farm bill has more of a parochial dynamic than the national political one.

H/T.

Now, as it turns out, when you go to Davis' actual memo, a copy of which is available through the Weekly Standard, he has a mixed bag of suggestions, some good and some not so good. But the long-time moderate Davis will have a hard time selling skeptical conservatives on his suggestions if the first thing out of his mouth is that the GOP shouldn't be fighting the few battles where it has truly stuck its neck out for fiscal responsibility.

Read On...

Posted in Cleaning House | Republicans | tom davis — Comments (14)/ Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:42am on May 15, 2008 Everytime I get ready to throw the President and the Party to the curb

By Joliphant

Promoted from the diaries...

Something happens that reminds why I voted for them in the first place. Our leaders can and do demonstrate stunning moments of clarity on the big issues that the opposition can't even dream of.

From the Wall Street Journal

The President spoke to the Israeli Knesset yesterday and once again showed, he knows whats important in the world and why.

Read on...

Posted in Archived — Comments (221) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:25am on May 15, 2008 We seem to be missing some data.

Odds and ends absent from the best Democratic Primary EVER.

By Moe Lane

And let me depress our Democratic lurkers a bit by noting that we're only at the halfway point of it. Good times, good times.

Anyway, there are some things missing, and I have to admit, I'm curious where they are:

1). Polls for Montana, South Dakota, and especially Puerto Rico. The default Media assumptions are that Senator Obama is going to win the first two because he won the (caucus) States around them, and that Senator Clinton will win the last one because it's full of people who speak Spanish. On the other hand: Montana and South Dakota are primary contests full of working class white people, which is a demographic group that Obama is busily losing at levels not seen since Walter Mondale; and the media folks reporting on Puerto Rico are generally from mainland USA, which means that they almost certainly don't speak Spanish themselves, thus making it hard for them to check. Some actual, you know, polls would be helpful here, people.

2). About those April 2008 fundraising totals, Hillary, Barack: pretty miserable for you both, huh? No? So what were they? It's May freaking 15th, already; and neither of you could be made to shut up about the billions and billions of money you raked up in December, January, February, March... What? Sorry, no, John's taking public money for the general, and our race is over anyway. You two are still in this one. So come on, already.

3). "A senior Democrat strategist, familiar with discussions at the highest levels of the Obama camp, has revealed that Mr Obama is now confident of the support of around 120 of the remaining 260 undeclared superdelegates." Yeah. How is that going, anyway? I mean, given that 29% of Clinton's supporters currently want her to do a third-party bid if she doesn't get the nomination, I think that "delicacy about hurting her feelings" (HAH!) may need to take a back seat to "stopping the bleeding now." You think that maybe you want to get that list leaked, Senator?

Note that there's always the possibility that I just missed any or all of this. But if the obsessive amateur political junkies can't find something...

Moe Lane

Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton — Comments (8)/ Email this page » / Read More »