Check out Michael Yon’s most recent Dispatch from Iraq.
Michael has traveled around the entire country in recent weeks. What he is doing is truly unique and incredibly valuable for all of us here at home who want to know what is happening on the ground. If you, like me, are sick of reporting from Iraq consisting of reports of car bombs and casualties only, we need to step up and support independent journalists like Michael Yon. What he is doing is not just incredibly dangerous, it is incredibly expensive. If you are able to do so, please support his work.
I just returned last night from a wonderful week in Florida with my family. A few observations before regular blogging resumes…
1. There is nothing better than sitting by the pool and reading about record cold and fifty year low temps.
2. I forgot how AWFUL drivers in Florida are. I lived in Miami for three years after college, but my recollection of the driving wasn’t anything close to what I witnessed this week. The vacation included a trip from Ft. Lauderdale area to Orlando, a three hour drive. NASCAR must have something to do with it, why else would so many drivers try get thisclose, virtually drafting behind you? The use of a turn signal, I think I saw one after six days. Red lights? Those mean hurry up before the light at the other side of the intersection turns green. If you actually hit the gas at the first sighting of a green light without looking both ways, you are taking your life in your own hands.
3. Disney’s Magic Kingdom is a wonderful place. Spotless, efficient, family friendly. The park is crowded everyday but the lines for the rides, even when they appear long, move quite quickly. They have a series of repeatable processes there that make that park go.
4. Even with all the recent headaches, Jet Blue is a wonderful airline. Comfortable seats, two flights that departed and arrived on time, friendly staff. Traveling with two young children is a challenge and I can’t imagine doing it on any other airline.
5. I saved the most important for last. Be thankful everyday for the health of your family. My daughter was born seven weeks early but has been completely healthy. We were very lucky, and we know it. Don’t take that for granted. I saw the amazing people from the Make-A-Wish Foundation at Disney and it stopped me right in my tracks. No kid should have to deal with such serious illness.
A terrific article in The Weston (CT ) Forum on an 83-year old blogger named Robert Stein. Written by Patricia Gay, the article does a great job capturing not just the life and times of Mr. Stein, which were interesting on their own, but his motivations for blogging and observations on politics. This was a pleasure to read.
At 83, Mr. Stein is happily retired and could spend his days on the golf links or sunning himself by the babbling brook in his front yard. But no, there is blogging on the computer to be done…
…Mr. Stein explains that when he retired he still felt the need to express himself, so he started writing op-ed pieces and letters to the New York Times. â??Friends kidded me about becoming a prolific letter to the editor writer,â? he said.
Then one day he wrote an op-ed piece about how John F. Kennedy would have been appalled by todayâ??s politicians. The Times decided not to publish it. Thatâ??s when he discovered that the need to express himself was â??backing upâ? on him, as he put it. So Mr. Steinâ??s son, Keith, encouraged him to write a blog.
And here he is, Connecting The Dots at 83 years young, The Blogtogenarian.
Look no further than Patterico’s destruction of Glenn Greenwald today.
Patterico is one of the best bloggers out there, and one of our favorite guests on Pundit Review radio. You can listen to him here and here
I had the honor of having one of my letters to the editor published in today’s Wall St Journal. Here it is. Gotta keep these “Democratic” Senators honest.
Senator Conrad Has No Eyes to See a Booming Economy
In his Feb. 16 Letter to the Editor “The Federal Debt Explosion,” Sen. Kent Conrad states, “The fact is, this administration has the worst fiscal record in history and its new budget does nothing to change that.”I’m sorry, am I missing something here?
Following the Bush 2003 tax cuts on dividends, capital gains and individual income, our economy has expanded for more than 48 months at an average of 3.5 percentage annual growth. The federal deficit has also shrunk 58% over the past three years mostly due to soaring tax payments emanating from the much-maligned “rich” and evil corporations. More than 7.5 million new jobs have been created with unemployment at 4.6%. Inflation remains relatively low, productivity sky high, exports are increasing, and wages have been rising across the board. All of this has occurred in spite of the Clinton recession, corporate scandals, bursting of the dot-com bubble, 9/11 and Katrina — and yes, despite overwhelmingly Democratic opposition to the pro-growth Bush tax cuts by liberal Democrat senators such as Sen. Conrad.
While President Bush and the GOP have failed to hold the line on entitlement spending and were rightfully penalized for it in the 2006 elections, does the Bush administration really have the “worst record in history?” Was Sen. Conrad not around to witness the stagflation and misery index of the Carter years in the 1970s?
As to the senator’s concern over the rising federal debt burden, our federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP is currently at 36.8%, having increased $1.4 trillion from 2003-2006, but which is now falling. As was noted by a Feb. 6 Journal editorial, “Fiscal Revelation,” this amount “is dwarfed by the $14 trillion in new household wealth created over the same period,” yet another empirical fact conveniently ignored by the senator.
Finally, the president’s proposed 2008 budget condemned by Sen. Conrad is at least a step in the right direction in that it reduces federal spending from 20.3% of GDP to 18.3% of GDP, calls for the elimination or reduction of 141 programs for a savings of $12 billion, and eliminates the deficit by 2012 if the president’s tax cuts are extended. Perhaps if Mr. Bush had proposed spending and tax increases, Sen. Conrad would have been less critical. If he is really as “concerned” about the long-term economic picture in our country, perhaps he and his Democrat colleagues will work with the president and congressional Republicans on the many market-based reforms that have been proposed and partially enacted for the two most significant unfunded liabilities facing future generations of Americans — Social Security and Medicare.
They have done nothing in the past besides demagoguing and obstructing such market-based reforms, but who knows, perhaps Democrats will be singing a different tune now that they are in the majority.
Gregg Jackson
Newton Mass.
I think Mitt Romney is probably a nice guy, and probably a talented businessman and devoted family man.
But this does not alter the fact that he was a terrible governor of our state. He is also portraying himself to be a conservative Republican when in fact he is a Republican John Kerry. Why can’t he just level with the voters about what his core beliefs are?
He was pro choice in 1992 when running against Ted Kennedy for Senate, pro-life in 2001 in Utah at the Mormon Tabernacle, pro-choice again in 2002 when running for Governor in Mass, and now in 2006 pro-life again. At least Rudy admits to being for abortion on demand and doesn’t try to deceive the voters with the constant flip flopping.
The same can be said of same sex marriage in Mass. Romney had ample opportunity to stop the total judicial usurpation of the legislative authority to define the marriage laws in Mass by using his executive authority to stop the activist court’s attempt to re-write marriage statutes from the bench imposing same sex marriage on Mass citizens without a proper consitutionally proscribed vote. But he didn’t. In fact he threatened to fire any clerks who failed to issue marriage licneces to same sex couples and never used his executive authority to defend the rule of law that had been egregiously violated by Margarett Marshall & Co. on the MSJC.
Then right before leaving office to run for president, Romney gave one speech at the state house with pro-marriage citizen groups such as Vote on Marriage to portray himself as “pro-traditional marriage.” Total PR stunt so that he would be “on record” as a defender of “traditional family values.”
He also claimed in South Carolina, an important GOP primary state, that he was opposed to gay marriage and civil unions- when in fact he is on record supporting Vermont style “civil unions” which are basically the same thing as marriage.
The guy flip flops more than John Kerry if that is even possible.
Finally, right before leaving office Romeny signs a univeral-healthcare bill that Hillary Clinton would have been proud to call her own.
When then-Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, introduced a universal health-insurance plan in the Bay State early last year, it was widely acclaimed. But less than a year after passage, RomneyCare is in the intensive care unit, soon to be wheeled into hospice.
The first signs of trouble appeared last August. In a filing to support general obligation bonds, officials projected that the new plan would increase state government health-care spending by $276.4 million in 2007. That’s $151 million more than what the public had been told the plan would cost. Meanwhile, the state’s new bureaucracy, busily signing up people for free care, has run into trouble finding affordable plans for those who have to pay. The premiums for subsidized plans would consume up to 6% of a person’s income — prompting calls from activists and echoes from politicians that they should be exempted from the individual mandate. So much for universal coverage.
Reality fully hit in late January of this year, when private insurers submitted bids to the bureaucracy that would administer the new program. The average premium for the unsubsidized plans was not $200 per month — as Mr. Romney promised from the stump — but rather $380. That’s more than 15% of the target audiences’ income — and for a plan with a $2,000 deductible and a total cost sharing of $5,000. People were stunned, outraged. Naturally, “greedy” private insurers were blamed. Politicians called for price controls.
I wonder if Romney will explain to the voters aorund the country how this totolitarian socialist style healthcare plan he bequeathed upon we the people in the Commonwealth is “conservative?” I am also wondering if he can explain as a pro-growth fiscal conservative how such as government run bureacratic nightmare that he left us with in Mass can possibly be good for small businesses that are having a hard enough time operating in the Commonwealth in the first place and are leaving the state in record numbers becuase of things like….you guessed it- rising healthcare costs.
I know the guy is articulate and telegenic. But my God can somebody please explain to me what this guy has done as governor to qualify him to be the president of the United States? His is the type of pedigree one would normally expect from a Democrat, but not a self described conservative “Reagan Republican.”
“I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next.”
In today’s Wall St. Journal, Senator Joe Lieberman makes a compelling case for Democrats to end the politicization of the war-something we at Pundit Review have done along with millions of Americans have been arguing for a long time.
He says in essence that we must unify as a nation behind Gen. Petraeus, his strategy, and the entire mission at this very critical juncture in the war in Iraq.
But the fact is that we are in a different place in Iraq today from even just a month ago–with a new strategy, a new commander, and more troops on the ground. We are now in a stronger position to ensure basic security–and with that, we are in a stronger position to marginalize the extremists and strengthen the moderates; a stronger position to foster the economic activity that will drain the insurgency and militias of public support; and a stronger position to press the Iraqi government to make the tough decisions that everyone acknowledges are necessary for progress.
In regard to the Defeaticrats who can’t wait to declare deffeat in Iraq as they did in Vietnam, Senator Lieberman has this to say,
There is of course a direct and straightforward way that Congress could end the war, consistent with its authority under the Constitution: by cutting off funds. Yet this option is not being proposed. Critics of the war instead are planning to constrain and squeeze the current strategy and troops by a thousand cuts and conditions…
..In fact, halting the current security operation at midpoint, as virtually all of the congressional proposals seek to do, would have devastating consequences. It would put thousands of American troops already deployed in the heart of Baghdad in even greater danger–forced to choose between trying to hold their position without the required reinforcements or, more likely, abandoning them outright. A precipitous pullout would leave a gaping security vacuum in its wake, which terrorists, insurgents, militias and Iran would rush to fill–probably resulting in a spiral of ethnic cleansing and slaughter on a scale as yet unseen in Iraq.
Unlike, his ex-Democrat collegues in the Senate, Lieberman can see beyond “stage one” in that he acknowledges that “startegic redeplyment” (i.e. cutting and running and declaring defeat) would have terrible consequences. He doesn’t say it, but pulling out prior to the completion of our mission in Iraq would almost definately mean “redeployment” of our troops in an even more dangerous situation. But the Donkeys just can’t seem to understand that defeat in Iraq means defeat for the U.S. and our allies around the world. This is why Americans don’t trust them with national security.
Senator Lieberman ends with this:
I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next. Instead of undermining Gen. Petraeus before he has been in Iraq for even a month, let us give him and his troops the time and support they need to succeed…
..We are at a critical moment in Iraq–at the beginning of a key battle, in the midst of a war that is irretrievably bound up in an even bigger, global struggle against the totalitarian ideology of radical Islamism. However tired, however frustrated, however angry we may feel, we must remember that our forces in Iraq carry America’s cause–the cause of freedom–which we abandon at our peril.
Pelosi talked about how the Dems would usher in a new era of bipartisanship. Let’s see just how serious they are- especially at this crucial point in time in Iraq.