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Al Qaeda’s Defeat In Iraq

Al Qaeda lost in Iraq partly because American soldiers and Marines outsmarted and outfought them, but also, just as importantly, because the Iraqi people themselves rose up in resistance.

Iraqis aren’t the only ones who have soured on Al Qaeda lately.

Last year the Pew Research Center surveyed Muslims in 16 different countries. Support for suicide bombers has declined in nearly every country that was also surveyed in 2002, and the decline is dramatic almost everywhere. The only Muslim communities surveyed where support for suicide bombers remains at greater than 50 percent are, unsurprisingly, the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

The United States could not have prudently allowed itself to yield the field to Al Qaeda in either Iraq or Afghanistan by being wholly distracted from one or the other. Both fronts were crucial for Al Qaeda, which means both were crucial for the United States. It doesn’t matter if we like the fact that we have been embroiled in a hot war with Al Qaeda in two countries at once. That’s just how it is.

If Al Qaeda hadn’t poured all those resources into Iraq, they likely would have poured them into Afghanistan. And the U.S. very well may have lost the war by this time. Afghanistan, at the very least, would be in much worse shape than it is. And it’s not looking good even now. Independent foreign correspondent Michael Yon, who is hardly known as a pessimistic defeatist, still insists we’re losing the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the U.S. has all but won the war in Iraq even though Iraq was in much worse shape recently and the war there did not last as long. Iraq, as it turned out, was an easier place to fight Al Qaeda and other sundry insurgent and terrorist groups than Afghanistan.

Obama is rightly worried about the safe havens Al Qaeda has created in Pakistan, and it’s to his credit that he refuses to let up about it. But for years he’s been entirely blasé about the safe havens Al Qaeda created in Iraq–in Ramadi, Fallujah, Baqubah, Mosul, and parts of Baghdad. For years he has aggressively promoted a policy of abandoning the fight in that country which quite obviously would have allowed Al Qaeda to preserve those safe havens and possibly even expand them.

He finally admitted the surge worked after wallowing in denial about it for a year and a half while those of us who actually worked in Iraq knew he was wrong. It’s time for him to admit that one of the results of the surge is that Al Qaeda lost its war in Iraq and was not given time to reconstitute.”

Jenny Hatch

Chavez has some advice for President Bush!

“Socialism is the only route to the salvation of the world.”

And on the other side of the Political Spectrum,
Ann Coulter chimes in…

Meanwhile, economists were screaming from the rooftops that the Democrats were forcing mortgage lenders to issue loans that would fail the moment the housing market slowed and deadbeat borrowers couldn’t get out of their loans by selling their houses.

A decade later, the housing bubble burst and, as predicted, food-stamp-backed mortgages collapsed. Democrats set an affirmative action time-bomb and now it’s gone off.

In Bush’s first year in office, the White House chief economist, N. Gregory Mankiw, warned that the government’s “implicit subsidy” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with loans to unqualified borrowers, was creating a huge risk for the entire financial system.

Rep. Barney Frank denounced Mankiw, saying he had no “concern about housing.” How dare you oppose suicidal loans to people who can’t repay them! The New York Times reported that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “under heavy assault by the Republicans,” but these entities still had “important political allies” in the Democrats.

Now, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, middle-class taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.

Political correctness had already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.”

Who is right???
I’ll go with the expert on Free Market Capitalism and the LAW of Supply and Demand.
Jenny Hatch

CNN: Commentary: Bailouts will lead to rough economic ride – Ron Paul
Editor’s note: Ron Paul is a Republican congressman from Texas who ran for his party’s nomination for president this year. He is a doctor who specializes in obstetrics/gynecology and says he has delivered more than 4,000 babies. He served in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was elected again to Congress in 1996. Rep. Paul serves on the House Financial Services Committee.

(CNN) — “Many Americans today are asking themselves how the economy got to be in such a bad spot.

For years they thought the economy was booming, growth was up, job numbers and productivity were increasing. Yet now we find ourselves in what is shaping up to be one of the most severe economic downturns since the Great Depression.

Unfortunately, the government’s preferred solution to the crisis is the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place: government intervention.

Ever since the 1930s, the federal government has involved itself deeply in housing policy and developed numerous programs to encourage homebuilding and homeownership.

Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were able to obtain a monopoly position in the mortgage market, especially the mortgage-backed securities market, because of the advantages bestowed upon them by the federal government.

Laws passed by Congress such as the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to make loans to previously underserved segments of their communities, thus forcing banks to lend to people who normally would be rejected as bad credit risks.

These governmental measures, combined with the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy, led to an unsustainable housing boom. The key measure by which the Fed caused this boom was through the manipulation of interest rates, and the open market operations that accompany this lowering.

When interest rates are lowered to below what the market rate would normally be, as the Federal Reserve has done numerous times throughout this decade, it becomes much cheaper to borrow money. Longer-term and more capital-intensive projects, projects that would be unprofitable at a high interest rate, suddenly become profitable.

Because the boom comes about from an increase in the supply of money and not from demand from consumers, the result is malinvestment, a misallocation of resources into sectors in which there is insufficient demand.

In this case, this manifested itself in overbuilding in real estate. When builders realize they have overbuilt and have too many houses to sell, too many apartments to rent, or too much commercial real estate to lease, they seek to recoup as much of their money as possible, even if it means lowering prices drastically.

This lowering of prices brings the economy back into balance, equalizing supply and demand. This economic adjustment means, however that there are some winners — in this case, those who can again find affordable housing without the need for creative mortgage products, and some losers — builders and other sectors connected to real estate that suffer setbacks.

The government doesn’t like this, however, and undertakes measures to keep prices artificially inflated. This was why the Great Depression was as long and drawn out in this country as it was.

I am afraid that policymakers today have not learned the lesson that prices must adjust to economic reality. The bailout of Fannie and Freddie, the purchase of AIG, and the latest multi-hundred billion dollar Treasury scheme all have one thing in common: They seek to prevent the liquidation of bad debt and worthless assets at market prices, and instead try to prop up those markets and keep those assets trading at prices far in excess of what any buyer would be willing to pay.

Additionally, the government’s actions encourage moral hazard of the worst sort. Now that the precedent has been set, the likelihood of financial institutions to engage in riskier investment schemes is increased, because they now know that an investment position so overextended as to threaten the stability of the financial system will result in a government bailout and purchase of worthless, illiquid assets.

Using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to purchase illusory short-term security, the government is actually ensuring even greater instability in the financial system in the long term.

The solution to the problem is to end government meddling in the market. Government intervention leads to distortions in the market, and government reacts to each distortion by enacting new laws and regulations, which create their own distortions, and so on ad infinitum.

It is time this process is put to an end. But the government cannot just sit back idly and let the bust occur. It must actively roll back stifling laws and regulations that allowed the boom to form in the first place.

The government must divorce itself of the albatross of Fannie and Freddie, balance and drastically decrease the size of the federal budget, and reduce onerous regulations on banks and credit unions that lead to structural rigidity in the financial sector.

Until the big-government apologists realize the error of their ways, and until vocal free-market advocates act in a manner which buttresses their rhetoric, I am afraid we are headed for a rough ride.

Harvard’s propaganda for Obama

“Last week I did a review of Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard and his book, “The Invisible Constitution.” Tribe’s thesis is that the “real” Constitution is not so much in the black-letter text of the actual document, but in the unwritten, “recovered memories,” hidden, “imagined experiences” and penumbral shadows.

Tribe’s legal philosophy is antithetical to the original intent of the Constitution’s framers and, in my opinion, is insufficient as a legitimate theory of constitutional law. At its foundation, Tribe’s ideology is a secular, Marxist, socialist legal philosophy.

Professor Tribe’s fellow colleague at Harvard, Cass Sunstein, a visiting professor of constitutional law from the University of Chicago Law School wrote a piece last week defending Barack Obama for the New Republic titled, “The Empiricist Strikes Back.”

Professor Sunstein’s defense of Obama’s controversial views on domestic and international policy utilized the technique of moderating his policies by placing Obama to the right of his growing legion of leftist critics in the fringe blogosphere who are angry at his recent surge to the center to counter Sarah Palin’s popularity as McCain’s V.P. candidate. I am not convinced.

Sunstein’s arguments would be plausible if this were 1988 – before the advent of conservative intellectuals like Joseph Farah, Dr. Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, FoxNews, the Internet and many others in the so-called “alternative media.”

But it isn’t 1988; it is 2008, and now any rationally minded person can look at Professor Sunstein’s apologetic for Obama and determine almost immediately if it is truth or propaganda.

Unfortunately, these days most of what is coming out of Harvard and all the Ivy-League universities ignores or actively denigrates the original mandate of these prestigious institutions – seminaries to train Christian ministers to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout America and the world.

Over the past 150 years since the apotheosis of Darwinian evolution to the academy, higher education has devolved into socialist and Marxist propaganda factories. Because of Leninist entrenchment conservatism and ideas out of the Judeo-Christian tradition of intellectual thought have been increasingly marginalized.

Let me give you a few examples of this Pravdaesque technique from professor Sunstein’s article:

Throughout the article, Sunstein defines Obama with such words as “empiricist” (acquisition of knowledge through experience), “progressive” (code word for “liberal” or “liberalism” which since President Ronald Reagan, has become an infamous epithet), “independent thinker,” “visionary minimalist” (advocating minimal [small] forms of government). Honestly, Sen. Obama possesses none of these qualities.

Professor Sunstein writes: Obama believes in an individual right to own guns. Not so. Obama changed his view to support the Second Amendment and conventional conservatism because he saw the handwriting on the wall regarding the groundbreaking, pro-Second Amendment case, D.C. v. Heller (2008) where the Supreme Court majority overturned a 33-year handgun ban in Washington, D.C.

Other issues Obama has been forced to move to the right on – thus angering his liberal base – include:

Obama’s backtracking on his strong and early opposition to the Iraq war;

Obama has said the death penalty may be appropriate for child rape;

Obama has voted for wiretapping reform that includes retroactive immunity for telephone companies;

Obama recently said that he does not want to reopen NAFTA negotiations unilaterally.

Sunstein writes: “They think that his recent departures from left-wing orthodoxy are a form of flip-flopping or some kind of betrayal.” No Cass, Obama hasn’t betrayed the radical left fringe, he is part of the leftist fringe whose voting record and radical association like Wright, Ayers, Dohrn, Alinsky, Fleiger brand him as a certified Marxist.

Furthermore, Obama has been increasingly frustrated and strident because he cannot tell America who he really is. Overtime this makes him appear less authentic and less Messiah-like. Since Aug. 29 when McCain picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a quintessential, authentic social conservative as his running mate, Obama has been dropping like a rock in the polls.

Sunstein further comments: “But, by nature, he is also an independent thinker, and he listens to all sides.” However, everyone (except for Professor Sunstein) knows by now that Obama was cited by the National Journal as the most liberal senator in Congress – meaning, out of 535 members, Obama has the most extremist voting record of all his colleagues in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. There is nothing “coming together,” bipartisan or “independent” about Sen. Obama.

As a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, Sunstein should be ashamed of himself for presenting such fawning propaganda as a reasoned critique, as if his only readership were brainwashed cultists. I am not one such person.”

Speak it Ellis!
Here is a funny from the People’s Cube:

Click on the image to get to the thread!
Jenny Hatch

Summary:

“This comprehensive analysis of minor abortion data from nearly all 50 states between 1985 and 1999 demonstrates that state-level parental involvement laws are effective in reducing the incidence of abortion among minors. Overall, the findings indicate that when a state enacts a parental involvement law, the abortion rate falls by an average of approximately 13.6 percent.

This study is the first of its kind to compare different types of parental involvement laws. The findings indicate that more protective parental involvement laws result in even larger abortion declines. Laws that require parental consent instead of parental notification reduce the minor abortion rate by about 19 percent. Furthermore, laws that mandate the involvement of two parents, instead of just one parent, reduce the in-state minor abortion rate by approximately 31 percent.

The overall minor abortion rate in the United States has fallen by close to fifty percent between 1985 and 1999, and this study shows that parental involvement laws are an important causal factor in this decline. Currently about 36 states have a parental involvement law on the books, but some are more effective than others in their ability to reduce the incidence of abortion. The laws that were enacted in Minnesota and Mississippi laws are among the most effective in reducing abortion rates among minors.”

This should be a no brainer, but I get how concerned pro choice advocates are about the girl pregnant by her incestuous father, and the concerns that scenario could raise for the girl seeking the abortion. I would imagine this teen mother is in the minority of those seeking abortions though and still think the parental notification laws are some of the best on the books.
Jenny Hatch

When Mitt Romney stepped out of the presidential ring, I endorsed Ron Paul for a few months while he was still running for president. The main reason why is because of his clarity on monetary issues. This interview is an excellent overview of his understanding of the Free Market.
Ron Paul: This Bailout Won’t Be the Last
September 19, 2008 05:35 PM ET Luke Mullins
I recently chatted with Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) about the gigantic financial bailout that the government is preparing to undertake.
Some excerpts from the interview:
What’s your take on this huge financial bailout?

“It’s more of the same. More debt and more inflation and more pressure on the dollar. Ultimately, although the markets are responding very favorably at the moment, I think it is going to be devastating to the dollar and to our financial situation in this country.”

Continue reading “US News and World Report” →