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5/16/08 May 17 Socastee library meeting The public is invited to a May 17 1:30 p.m. South Strand Republican Club Socastee Library meeting tomorrow. It will feature an Horry County Council district 4 debate between the primary candidates, Mike Ryan (incumbent) and Gary Loftus. Horry County Treasurer candidates Roddy Dickinson (incumbent) and Benji Allen and Coroner candidates Robert Edge (incumbent) and Dan Bellamy will face off.

 5/15/08 Iraqi forces mount al-Qaida hunt in Mosul "U.S. and Iraqi troops moved against al-Qaida on two separate fronts Thursday, with house-to-house searches in Mosul and an operation in the desert to stanch the flow of insurgents and weapons to that northern city.

  "With the new sweep, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is aiming to put down Sunni extremists after launching two other major offensives elsewhere in as many months targeting Shiite militants. Mosul, a key transport crossroads between Baghdad, Syria and other points, is considered the last major urban base of al-Qaida in Iraq after the group lost strongholds in western Anbar province."

5/15/08 House rejects bill funding Iraq, Afghanistan wars

 5/15/08 Computer Verified, Chavez Implicated "Terrorism: Interpol's authentication of FARC computer data Thursday leaves little doubt about Venezuela's bid to destabilize Colombia. So should the U.S. declare it a terror sponsor and stop buying its oil? Or do nothing?"

5/15/08 Pork Farm "The House (318-106) and Senate (81-15) have passed a new $300 billion farm bill by veto-proof margins this week. The bill is worse than the 2002 farm bill, which at the time was considered the most bloated and wasteful in history. President Bush should not only veto it, he should take his time in doing so. We have a feeling that the more time the public has to get to know this bill, the less they will like it.
  "For starters, the bill extends the direct-payment program at a time when farm incomes have reached record highs. Direct payments are government payments intended to supplement farmers’ incomes. Farmers receive these payments whether they grow anything or not. Rep. Ron Kind, a Democrat from Wisconsin, was absolutely right when he said of this provision, 'It’s not a safety net — it’s an entitlement program.'”

5/15/08 McCain: I will win Iraq, kill bin Laden and start President's Question Time "Washington - John McCain declared yesterday that within four years of being elected president he would have won the Iraq war, killed or captured Osama bin Laden, halted the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea and introduced British-style Prime Minister’s Questions in Congress. The Republican nominee-elect, setting out his stall for a general election campaign against the Democrats, used an ambitious speech to define their differences and look back on his first term from the vantage point of 2013."

5/14/08 Maliki's Victory "When Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered a military offensive against rogue Shiite militias in March, it was widely panned as a failure that was one more reason the U.S. needed to abandon Iraqis to their own 'civil war.' Well, several weeks later the battle for Basra and Baghdad against Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army looks to be both a military and political success."

5/14/08 Remember Those Massive Illegal Immigrant Rallies? "When my father came from Germany as a 19-year old the very first thing he did was to enroll in a class taught at a local public school to learn English. My aunt told me that he became proficient in English in only six weeks. He wanted to be an American and to do so he had to learn the language. Of course, he retained his German heritage.  However, assimilation was important to him, as it was to most immigrants. 

  "For years America has drifted away from assimilation, which has become an unspeakable word among the cultural elite.  Instead, we are told that we must recognize and celebrate the diversity of various groups without demanding any compromise from them.  This has hurt immigrants more than anyone else because many have become isolated in cultural ghettos without a proper command of English, the American political and legal systems or American history and culture.  That said, it also has fractured American society."

5/14/08 Dems and High Oil Prices

5/14/08 Gore Financially Invested in Climate Cause
  "Weeks before announcing a $300-million, three-year advertising campaign to raise awareness about global warming, Al Gore was conducting a slide show for a group of investors in Monterey, Calif., touting companies such as Bloom Energy, Amryis , Mascoma and other firms that are not household names -- yet.
  "These bio-fuel and green technology firms could be poised to take off, Gore told his audience."
 

5/13/08 Bush disappointed with intel before Iraq war  "President Bush said Tuesday he was disappointed in 'flawed intelligence' before the Iraq war and was concerned that if a Democrat wins the presidency in November and withdrew troops prematurely it could 'eventually lead to another attack on the United States.'" . . .

5/13/08 N. Korea to cooperate on verification

  "North Korea has agreed to cooperate fully on verifying its nuclear declaration, a US official said today as he displayed some of the 18,822 documents Pyongyang has given Washington about its plutonium program. Obtaining the documents last week was a victory for the Bush administration, which has struggled to persuade the secretive communist nation to produce a 'complete and correct' declaration of its nuclear programs that was due on December 31. The declaration is part of a broader multilateral deal."

5/13/08 In Defense of ‘Big Oil’ "Where is it written that the cost for a product or service should be frozen in place and in time, never to rise again, or to rise at a pace commensurate with our incomes? People who think this way know little to nothing about supply and demand and less than nothing about the profit motive. . . . According to government estimates, there is enough oil in areas accessible to America — 112 billion barrels — to power more than 60 million cars for 60 years. . . .

5/13/08 Who Will Pay For Promises Of Politicians?

  By WALTER E. WILLIAMS  [Economist] 

  "Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place. Politicians and a large percentage of the public lose sight of the unavoidable fact that for every created benefit, there's also a created cost, or, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman put it, 'There's no free lunch.'"

  "While the person who receives the benefit might not pay or even be aware of the cost, as sure as night follows day, there is a cost borne by someone. Let's look at a couple of congressionally created problems. . . . The Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks and thrifts to make so-called "no doc" and "liar" loans to customers who had no realistic ability to pay them back. Congress, doing the bidding of environmental extremists, created our energy supply problem.

  "Oil and gas exploration in a tiny portion of the coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would, according to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey's estimate, increase our proven domestic oil reserves by approximately 50%. The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and eastern Gulf of Mexico offshore areas have enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. These energy sources of oil have also been placed off-limits by Congress. Because of onerous regulations, it has been 30-plus years since a new refinery has been built. Similar regulations also explain why the U.S. nuclear energy production is a fraction of what it might be. . . .

  "Congress' proposed 'solutions' to the energy and food mess it has created include a windfall profits tax on oil companies, a gasoline tax holiday for the summer, increases in the food stamp program and foreign food aid. These measures will not solve the problem, but will create new problems."

5/13/08 Britain Opens Up Secret UFO Files

5/13/08 The pot holes on the high road "Barack Obama, fortified with 92 percent of the black vote, talks about transcending race to impose 'unity' and 'change.' (He took the precaution yesterday in West Virginia of showing up with a new flag pin, bigger than the one he wouldn't wear last week.) Cindy McCain, who heard it from her pillow, says her husband had rather lose than emphasize the considerable Obama 'negatives.' All this is happy talk for April and May. Mr. Obama must contend with a color problem that won't go away: Voters aren't concerned that he's too black to be president, but that he's too green. Such 'experience' as he has is experience only in 'activism' in shady precincts far out in left field. . . .

  "John McCain, who just the other day completed a tour to convince conservatives that he really and truly is one of them, is regarded by many swing voters as a 'centrist,' far closer to the mainstream than Mr. Obama. Not only that, he's perceived as tough enough and then some to defend the nation's security, and Mr. Obama isn't. The likes of Iran are not likely to intimidate a man who showed his grit hanging by his arms on the wall of a prison cell in Hanoi. The prospect of dealing with the likes of Iran already intimidates Mr. Obama, who says he'll offer supplications to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with or without his demonstration of good faith.

  "More trouble. Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, says his polls find that Mr. Obama's first problem is that he's perceived as a liberal. Indeed, he has the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate. 'He is perceived by many voters as not well-grounded on foreign policy and not tough enough and he has a potential problem, distinct from race, of being an elitist, an intellectual.'" . . .

  "[W]rites Edward N. Luttwak in the New York Times, 'Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as [he] has written, his father said he renounced his religion.' His conversion in Muslim law is a crime worse than murder, and in radical Muslim quarters the punishment is beheading (though certain Muslim moderates say stoning and hanging would suffice). The Secret Service, charged with the senator's safety, has taken due note."

5/12/08 Air Combat by Remote Control

  "The sniper never knew what hit him. The Marines patrolling the street below were taking fire, but did not have a clear shot at the third-story window that the sniper was shooting from. They were pinned down and called for reinforcements.

  "Help came from a Predator drone circling the skies 20 miles away. As the unmanned plane closed in, the infrared camera underneath its nose picked up the muzzle flashes from the window. The sniper was still firing when the Predator's 100-pound Hellfire missile came through the window and eliminated the threat."

5/12/08 Warring History Rethinking the Iraq critics

  "The claim is that “neocons,” including Feith, politicized intelligence to show that Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction. Not so, as the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Silberman-Robb Commission have concluded already. Every intelligence agency believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and the post-invasion Duelfer report concluded that he maintained the capability to produce them on short notice. There was abundant evidence of contacts between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Given Saddam’s hostility to the United States and his stonewalling of the United Nations, American leaders had every reason to believe he posed a grave threat. Removing him removed that threat.
  "Unfortunately — and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush — the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren’t found."