Say Anything Blog

Wal-Mart, GOP forsake God, groups say

Some Christian conservative groups say both Wal-Mart and the Republican Party have “forsaken God.” And just as the GOP took a hit in the elections earlier this month, the groups say the retail giant’s lower-than-expected November sales figures are the wages of that sin.

Why are sales below estimates? “It is for the same reason things went south for the Republican Party this past election cycle,” read a statement by the Rev. Flip Benham and Pat McEwan, with Operation Save America and Operation Save Wal-Mart. “Wal-Mart has forsaken God and it has forsaken the people who love Him.”

The groups led protesters on Nov. 24 to picket the “gates of hell” — that is, Wal-Mart stores around the country. They say Wal-Mart, like the GOP, has strayed from its founding principles, set by founder Sam Walton, citing Wal-Mart’s dispensing of “Plan B” contraception and the fact that the retailer is a corporate member of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

Cause all that is worse than profiting off slave labor and funding the Chinese military.  Yeah.

I'll say up front I am not a fan of Sen. Brownback.

Brownback hints at ‘08 presidential bid

Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas strongly hinted yesterday that he would run for president in 2008, saying the Republican field was open for a “full-scale conservative” and that he would make an official announcement soon.

During an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” the Republican outlined what he called a “compassionate conservative” agenda, including a willingness to open diplomatic ties with Iran and Syria.

Sounds good, so far.

“I think there is room, on the Republican side, for somebody that’s a full-scale conservative, that’s an economic and fiscal and social conservative,” Mr. Brownback said. “I think there’s room on our side, and need on our side, to develop some new plays, particularly on the compassionate conservative agenda. So we’ll be making some announcements, soon, about that.”

And stop the train. No more “compassionate conservatives.” Been there, done that.

In other news...Sen. Brownback Investigating Possible Pro-Gay Agenda of Judicial Nominee

In an attempt at compromise with Democratic senators from Michigan, President Bush nominated Janet T. Neff as a judicial candidate for the Federal District Court for the Western District of Michigan in April of this year. Senator Sam Brownback, a conservative Republican from Kansas, is investigating Neff’s views on same-sex ‘marriage’ and her involvement in a 2002 homosexual commitment ceremony in Massachusetts before giving his ‘thumbs up’ to the nomination.

Senator Brownback, nationally known for his opposition to same-sex ‘marriage’, has been careful to explain that Neff’s attendance alone would not disqualify her from the federal bench. However, Brownback does want to investigate Neff’s involvement in the ceremony to ascertain that Massachusetts’ law at the time was not breached.

One compassionate conservative going after another compassionate conservative’s pro-gay nominee.


I've heard him speak in person twice now (NDGOP Convention in April and a small event in Vinton, Iowa). He's way out of his league when it comes to foriegn policy and his religious right-ness borders on the extreme. He is in favor of amnesty and open borders and has rubber stamped Bush's spending increases at every chance.

He's not right for America.

When 2008 gonna be over cause it’s gonna be a long two years.

Embassy denies asking Bush twins to leave Argentina

The U.S. Embassy in Argentina rejected reports that it had told President George W. Bush’s twin daughters to leave the country after a widely publicized purse-snatching incident.

Argentine officials confirmed last week that one of Bush’s daughters had her purse stolen in San Telmo, a neighborhood popular with tourists. The incident led to teasing by Argentine media about the twins’ seemingly ineffective Secret Service bodyguards.

“We have seen a report from news sources stating that embassy officials strongly suggested that President Bush’s daughters curtail their visit in Argentina,” the U.S. Embassy said in a written statement. “This is false.

Good times.

Wonder how much booze was involved.

New Phase

“We’re clearly in a new phase, characterised by this increasing sectarian violence that requires us obviously to adapt to that new phase and these two leaders need to be talking about how to do that,” White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters accompanying Bush to the Estonian capital, Tallinn.
[...]
“He (Maliki) has some strong views on that subject. As you know the Iraqis have been talking to the Syrians. The Iraqis have been talking to the Iranians. Their view is that the future of Iraq, if it is a subject of conversation with Syria and Iran, ought to be a conversation by Iraqis,” he said.
[...]
“We’re not at the point where the president is going to be able to lay out a comprehensive plan,” he said.

Sounds like Maliki is quickly becoming the fallguy.  Not surprising.  However what seems to be surprising is the idea that Syria and Iran should have a role at all.

Hadley also said Bush had telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and discussed the importance of supporting the Lebanese government and of “sending a firm message to Syria that it needs to stop destabilizing that government”.

Many Lebanese blamed Damascus for the assassination last week of Lebanese cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel, the latest in a series of murders of anti-Syrian politicians since Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon last year.

So on one hand Syria is to be involved in Iraq, on the other they need to get out of Lebanon.

If we approve Syria and Iran’s involvement in Iraq we also approve of their involvement everwhere else.

Calls for calm as crowd stones Iraqi PM

Angry fellow Shi’ites stoned Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s motorcade in a Shi’ite stronghold of Baghdad on Sunday in a display of fury over a devastating car bomb that tore through their area.

Maliki was visiting the Sadr City slum to pay respects to some of the 202 victims of last week’s devastating bombing.

“It’s all your fault!” one man shouted as, in unprecedented scenes, a hostile crowd began to surge around the premier and then jeered as his armored convoy edged through the throng away from a mourning ceremony.

Looks like his own Shi’ite people are turning against him.  If that is the case it’s just a matter of time before he is gone because obviously the Sunnis want to get rid of him.

"Those who say we cannot put a price tag on the value of life should not complain about the high price of prescription drugs that keep them alive.”

GOP MOVES RIGHT

A sign that Republican membership in the House has moved right came when the 13 new GOP congressmen elected three of its four class officers who had been backed by the conservative Club for Growth.

They included Bill Sali of Idaho as class president, Adrian Smith of Nebraska as Policy Committee representative and Doug Lamborn of Colorado as representative to the whip. The fourth officer is Kevin McCarthy of California as Steering Committee member.

A footnote: The 13 newcomers constitute the smallest Republican freshman class in many years. The 41 freshman Democrats will pick their officers later.

I don’t know much about the other three, but Adrian Smith is a “Real Deal” Conservative. I had a chance to meet him last fall while I was representing The Leadership Institute in Nebraska and Adrian is also an LI Grad so it is nice to see some fellow LI’ers making it to leadership positions is nice.

So heres the idea, we all have books we have have read just sitting around.  Instead of letting them collect dust, list them and swap them.  (Each side will pay their own shipping just to simplify things.) Honor system is in effect. If you rip anyone off your name will be drug through the mud here on SayAnything.

I will get it started.  Feel free to list what you have with your email address.

(more...)

New York Times

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, corrupt charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

How do you smuggle oil?  More importantly how do you smuggle enough oil to make sizable amounts of cash?

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many of the insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says that $25 million to $100 million of the total comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

Figures.  When you deal with people who are used to corruption, that is all you will ever get.

“If accurate,” the report says, its estimates indicate that these “sources of terrorist and insurgent finance within Iraq — independent of foreign sources — are currently sufficient to sustain the groups’ existence and operation.” To this, it adds what may be its most surprising conclusion: “In fact, if recent revenue and expense estimates are correct, terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq.”

Maybe the Democrats will raise their taxes! 

Even taking the higher figure of $200 million, the group’s estimate of the financing for the insurgency underscores the David and Goliath nature of the war, with American, Iraqi and other coalition forces fighting an array of shadowy Sunni and Shiite groups that can draw on huge armories left over from Mr. Hussein’s days, and the willingness of many insurgents to fight with little or no pay. If the $200 million a year estimate is close to the mark, it amounts to less than what it costs the Pentagon, with an $8 billion monthly budget for Iraq, to sustain the American war effort here for a single day.

So they admit there is really no story here.

With Excerpts from Irving Kristol

WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM?

Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently.

[...]

[O]ne can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.

[...]

Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable.

[...]

Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.

[...]

The older, traditional elements in the Republican party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published.

While the left’s portrayal of Neoconservatism is in a demonizing regard, the attitudes of the persuasion’s founders should not be ignored.

Russia has made their choice as to if they are with us or against us.

Russian rocket deliveries to Iran started

Russia has begun deliveries of the Tor-M1 air defence rocket system to Iran, Russian news agencies quoted military industry sources as saying, in the latest sign of a Russian-US rift over Iran.

“Deliveries of the Tor-M1 have begun. The first systems have already been delivered to Tehran,” ITAR-TASS quoted an unnamed, high-ranking source as saying Friday.

Moscow has consistently defended its weapons trade with Iran. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said the contract for 29 rocket systems, signed in December last year, was legitimate because the Tor-M1 has a purely defensive role.

Most of us know of the Laffer Curve.

Yesterday, Art Laffer was on Rush with Roger Hedgecock and made a statement to the effect of - illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay because all they really lack is a little paperwork.

Dug up an interesting article on Laffer here are some excerpts:

On immigration:

Immigration is the lifeblood of American prosperity. These people are not a problem, they are a solution. When you get this high-quality labor coming in - including illegals - it does not get any better. If we were able to stop illegal immigration, you’d see California fall off the face of the earth.

Controlling our borders and verifying that people who are in this nation is not just a matter of paperwork; it is a matter of the Rule of Law.

If we ignore the laws of our nation, how in the world do we expect people in Iraq to understand those principles?

On the trade deficit:

We’re the only developed country that is a growth country. Do growth companies lend money or borrow money? They borrow money. We are the capital magnet of the planet. Where would you like your money invested? The Middle East? How about Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela? [To generate the dollars needed] to buy U.S.-located assets, [foreigners have] to sell more goods to us, and they’ve got to buy less goods from us. The only way they can generate the dollar cash-flow to invest in the United States, is for them to run a trade surplus with us, and us to have a trade deficit ...

Do not think of our trade deficit as a problem. It is an answer. These people are providing us with the real resources that increase our output, employment, production, productivity.

Why do we want to allow China the surplus to throw US dollars around and drive up the price of oil? Every dollar that China obtains from American commerce can be used to price us out of the world market.

---

Being right on economics does not mean someone automaticly correct on national policy.

FR Adds: If our prosperity is based on illegal immigration, then our prosperity is not legitimate and liable to burst just as the dot com bubble did.

And do we really want to have the prosperity of our nation to be built on the backs of people whose first act in this nation is to disrespect and disobey our laws?

Talk about a slippery slope.

Bush Initiates Iraq Policy Review Separate From Baker Group’s

In a measure of the suddenness and importance of the review, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week postponed a long-planned trip to an Asia-Pacific conference in Vietnam to take part in discussions about Iraq.

Rice has been doing “a lot of thinking” about the issue over the past two months, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said yesterday.

Thinking about what?

“The primary focus is on the State Department’s role in Iraq and are we pursuing the proper policies, are we seeking the right objectives, are we using the right means to achieve those objectives, following the right strategies and right tactics?” he told reporters.

Better late than never I guess. Maybe someone should of thought about this a while ago.

One component of the larger effort is likely to be a military review initiated in mid-September by Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. His assessment of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts, with a core focus on Iraq, includes 16 top commanders meeting daily to brainstorm on questions such as “Where are we going? What are we trying to do? Are we going to get there this way?” according to a joint staff spokesperson.

That's awsome! The leaders of the military are asking eachother “What are we trying to do?” Sounds like a plan for victory!

“Nothing is off the table. They are looking at the whole spectrum of less forces, more forces,” a senior defense official said.

Nothing is off the table? What about defeat and surrender?

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I was taught growing up “if you don’t know what to do, don’t touch anything.” I was also taught “you break it, you buy it.” For some reason, our leaders don’t understand either - it would seem by this story at least.

Extremist Liberals believe that “progress” includes spliting America in two.

I won’t waste space quoting them, but they just do not believe in the United States.

While it can be argued that Regionalism is probably a historical inevitability, the idea that these wackos want to take someone else’s ball and go home is laughable.

Let’s face it, those that are guiding the Democratic Party to the left are of the same ilk that drove the Democratic Party to create the Confederacy to preserve slavery.

If they weren’t so inept and pacifistic they might be considered a threat.

Let’s review today’s news from the front.

Henry Kissinger says that a military victory in Iraq is impossible.

LONDON—Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday.

Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq’s neighbors _ including Iran _ if progress is to be made in the region.

“If you mean by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Apparently now we are debating the definition of “win.”

But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq’s neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict.

“A dramatic collapse of Iraq _ whatever we think about how the situation was created _ would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.

Right, cause the middle-east was such a peaceful place before we showed up.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair is backtracking like there is no tomorrow on his statement that Iraq is a disaster

Downing Street moved swiftly to play down an apparent admission by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the invasion of Iraq had been a “disaster,” labelling his comments a “slip of the tongue.”

In an interview Friday on Al-Jazeera’s new English-language channel, broadcaster Sir David Frost suggested that the 2003 US-led and British-backed invasion had “so far been pretty much of a disaster.”

“It has,” Blair replied, before adding quickly: “But you see, what I say to people is why is it difficult in Iraq? It’s not difficult because of some accident in planning.

“It’s difficult because there’s a deliberate strategy… to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war.”

But during Blair’s trip to Pakistan for talks with President Pervez Musharraf, the prime minister’s official spokesman told reporters: “It was a straightforward slip of the tongue… sometimes he does this when he’s half-listening to the question and wants to get on and respond.”

No, a slip of the toungue is saying sh*t in church.  A four sentence statement is not a slip of the tongue.

Elsewhere, in his bid for the Republican nomination in 2008, John McCain says we need more troops in Iraq.

Sen. John McCain, a front-runner among GOP presidential contenders for said Sunday the U.S. must send an overwhelming number of troops to stabilize Iraq or face the possibility of more attacks in the region and on American soil.

“I believe the consequences of failure are catastrophic. It will spread to the region. You will see Iran more emboldened. Eventually, you could see Iran pose a greater threat to the state of Israel,” said McCain, R-Ariz.

“We left Vietnam. It was over. We just had to heal the wounds of war,” said McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war after his Navy plane was shot down in 1967. “We leave this place, chaos in the region, and they’ll follow us home. So there’s a great deal more at stake here in this conflict, in my view, a lot more.

McCain said he based his judgment partly on the writings of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader in Iraq who was killed in a U.S. air raid, and of Osama bin Laden.

And Charlie Rangel will lead the Democratic effort to reinstate the draft.

WASHINGTON—Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has his way.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars and to bolster U.S. troop levels insufficient to cover potential future action in Iran, North Korea and Iraq.

“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” Rangel said.

Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War who has unsuccessfully sponsored legislation on conscription in the past, said he will propose a measure early next year.

In 2003, he proposed a measure covering people age 18 to 26. This year, he offered a plan to mandate military service for men and women between age 18 and 42; it went nowhere in the Republican-led Congress.

That, that’s just great.

No wonder we are having trouble, we’ve got a bunch of extremists trying to dictate how things will happen.