Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

(With a tip of the hat to Matt Margolis at Blogs for Bush.) Hillary Clinton spoke to the Brookings Institution last Thursday in a speech called: ADDRESSING THE NATIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGES OF OUR TIME [pdf link].

Here’s this from an MSNBC piece regarding her speech:

Clinton also saw a likelihood that the new Iraqi government would repress women’s rights which, she said, had been expanded by Saddam Hussein.

“I have been deeply troubled by what I hear coming out of Iraq. When I was there and met with women members of the national governing council and local governing councils in Baghdad and Kirkuk they were starting to express concerns about some of the pullbacks in the rights they were given under Saddam Hussein,” she said.

“He was an equal opportunity oppressor, but on paper, women had rights. They went to school, they participated in the professions, they participated in government and in business; as long as they stayed out of his way, they had considerable freedom of movement.”

On paper, Senator, women had no rights under Saddam Hussein. Men had no rights. In a dictatorship such as that in Iraq, all rights derive from and are bestowed upon the despot. Any rights possessed by anyone else were transitory rights at the whim of the dictator, and thus were not actual rights.

The woman is a dizzbot. Someone should go back and give her a retroactive F in 6th Grade Civics. As I do to some public officials from time-to-time, I call on her to resign her Senate seat immediately. She is unfit to serve.

Founder and editor-at-large of National Review magazine William F. Buckley in his Sunday column suggests that instead of passing a Constitutional Amendment, which he does not ask that President Bush withdraw from consideration, Congress simply limit the Courts from reviewing cases having to do with marriage.

A means of devolving popular authority, to be exercised by individual states, could be obtained by removing jurisdiction from the Supreme Court in matters having to do with marriage. Article III, Section 2 gives Congress the necessary authority to do this.

“…the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

I had heard a similar suggestion regarding the display of the Ten Commandments in public places.

Could you imagine the Court declaring such a restriction of the jurisdiction to be Unconstitutional, prohibiting their established power of judicial review (Marbury v. Madison)? This is strange stuff, but just when we think we have seen everything…

In a story in Monday’s London Daily Telegraph, Alec Russell in Washington (the byline) writes about Sunday’s Dem debate in New York.

He’s very enthusiastic about Kerry’s chances, saying that Kerry will have it wrapped up the Dem nomination after Tuesday: “Any further resistance would be pointless.”

It’s a nifty read, being British and all. One paragraph piqued my interest:

“Give me a living room, a bar, one on one,” he said. “I think I can talk to anyone in the country.”

Name the time and place, Senator.

Through the summer, President Bush’s strategists say, they expect the President to be behind candidate Kerry in the polls or, at best, run even. So the NYTimes says HERE.

The piece is a little look at what to expect. For instance:

Mr. Bush himself, the strategists said, will refine his stump speech so that it is less about his accomplishments so far than about the opportunities he has created for the future, and the stark choices facing the voters in November. Chief among them, Republicans said, would be whether the country wants to entrust its security to a Democratic challenger that the White House is busily portraying as too liberal and lacking in principle.

In response, Kerry will repeat that he served in Vietnam. His four (4) months of service are off-limits, but they can be separated from the candidate.

(Hat tip to RNC Research [link]). At this morning’s Dem debate in New York, candidate Edwards cited a Washpost piece: Kerry’s Spending, Tax Plans Fall Short - Review of Proposals Shows Expenditures Exceeding Savings by $165 Billion.

The relevant lines from the transcript of this morning’s debate:

Edwards: … These are great arguments about what he intends to do going forward. But it’s similar, for example, Senator Kerry has consistently said that he can pay for all the things that he’s proposing and substantially reduce the deficit, I think I’ve heard him say cut it in half, in his first term.

Well, The Washington Post today just analyzed his proposals, and its the same old thing. Here we go again. In fact, in fact, he overspends, in terms of being able to pay for all of his proposals, he overspends by $165 billion in his first term, which means he would drive us deeper and deeper into deficit.

[Dennis then talks but is ignored.]

KERRY: And John has just made some very important statements, and I want to respond to them.

I think John would have learned by now not to believe everything he reads in a newspaper. And he should do his homework, because the fact is that what’s printed in The Washington Post today is inaccurate.

A stimulus is by definition something that you do outside of the budget for one year or two years. The Washington Post included the stimulus when they figured the numbers. The stimulus is what you do to kick the economy into gear so that you can reduce the deficit.

Secondly, they did not include the reduction of the $139 billion of the Medicare bill which I have said I am sending back to Congress because it’s a bad bill. I voted against it, it’s bad.
Now, when you add up my stimulus that’s outside of the budget and the Medicare numbers that they didn’t even include, you do not go over, I do not spend more…

ELIZABETH BUMILLER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES: Senator Kerry, let me…

KERRY: No, no, I insist on being able to finish.

BUMILLER: I want to ask a really important question.

KERRY: This is important.

The point is, Kerry said that the Washpost piece linked above was fiction. Here’s a paragraph from that article:

But a review of his campaign proposals shows that the Democratic front-runner is promising to spend at least $165 billion more on new programs during his first term in office than he could save with his tax plan, a mix of breaks for the middle class and increases for corporations and the most affluent. The $165 billion figure does not include the cost of several proposals Kerry has not fully detailed or backed with estimates.

To borrow a term used by Steven Taylor at PoliBlog, Kerry is toast. He resembles toast, as well.

From this morning’s Dem debate in New York [Reuters link]. Dem candidates John Edwards and John Kerry criticized President Bush in regards to Haiti:

The two top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination — John Kerry and John Edwards — were quick to try to highlight Haiti as an issue ahead of November’s elections, alleging President Bush did too little too late to stabilize the impoverished nation.

Kerry said Bush had “empowered the insurgents” by failing to step in sooner and added, “I never would have allowed it to get out of control the way it did.”

Edwards suggested it fit a pattern of “do nothing, do nothing, and when it gets to crisis stage, then we act.”

Why the United States and not Haiti’s former colonial overlords in France? After all, the French cut and ran from Haiti 200-years-ago, leaving the mess that has existed ever since.

President Bush should have acted prior to Haiti becoming an actual emergency? That, m’friends, would be preemption. As recently as last Thursday, Kerry blasted the President’s “unilateral preemption.”

Where were Haiti’s WMD? Are they a threat an immediate threat to the mainland United States? Why don’t Kerry and Edwards want to try sanctions for a while then seek a National Security Council resolution?

The two situations are comparable, though what the Coalition stopped when it overthrew Saddam Hussein was far darker than what is happening in Haiti today.

When we go to Haiti, we’ll be acting to protect the Haitians from themselves. What will the world think of the candidates’ arrogance?

When this election is over, I hope the Senate leadership remembers everything said and done by candidate Kerry when he tries to become Senator Kerry again.

I think we have the newest, revised John Edwards victory strategy. First, it seems, he plans to get shut out on Tuesday do scored runner-up delegates in Georgia, Minnesota, and Ohio. (Pollster John Zogby last week called for an Edwards victory in Georgia, but I still haven’t seen how he’s playing in Atlanta.)

The next step in Edwards’s lunge towards victory is to sweep Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and March 9, setting up a showdown in Illinois on March 16.

And if you’d like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar…

The Sunday edition of the Rightsided Newsletter, concerning what was said on the Sunday morning talk shows, has been sent to the sundry global Inboxes. If you do not yet subscribe, you can read the online version HERE.

I forgot to include Late Edition host Wolfgang Blitzer’s rhyming couplet:

Jean-Bertrand Aristide is out.

What will follow in Haiti, very much in doubt.

One can find poetry in the most unexpected of places, but it follows that we should be cautious about how hard we look for it.

KEY:
MTP: NBC’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert
FNS: FOX’s Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace
FTN: CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer
TW: ABC’s This Week with former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos
LE: CNN’s Late Edition with Wolfgang Blitzer

And that’s the KEY I use for my Sunday review and analysis of the Sunday Morning Talk Shows, for the free Rightsided Newsletter. If you are interested, please visit our web site or send a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe [AT] tripod.com.

Tim Russert is going to use his Meet the Press show on NBC again to attack the Catholic Church. He will harass Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop of Washington; and Robert Bennett of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. I’ve never covered this, though it has been, with tax cuts, one of Russert’s obsessions.

On FOX’s Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace will talk to an Illinois Appellate Court judge, Anne Burke, and the national chairmen of the two parties: Ed Gillespie on the RNC and Terence McAuliffe of the DNC.

On CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer will talk with Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) and Representative Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) the bill which protects counts the murder of a mother and her unborn child as two murders. It has passed Baldwin’s House, but the Democrats are again blocking it in the Senate.

Scheduled to meet on This Week is a taped George Stephanopoulos interview with recently deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.. He’ll also talk to German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, CFR President Richard Haass, and former Clinton UN Ambassador Dick Holbrooke.

On CNN’s Late Edition, Wolfgang Blitzer talks to Israeli Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Arafat’s Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath, John Edwards and Diane Feinstein, and Representative David Dreier (R-California).

You can still subscribe by visiting the web site.

Backed by two New York losers, candidate John Kerry received a boost in his bid to win New York’s Democrat primary next Tuesday: former NY Governor Mario Cuomo and the fruit of Mario’s loins, former Clinton HUD Secretary Andy Cuomo [CNN link]. (NOTE: I use Clinton’s name not as a descriptive adjective; rather, as a qualifier.)

Mario’s keynote at the ‘84 Dem convention was heralded by journalists at the time as masterful. I watched the thing live, and I thought it to be lousy. Hindsight tells me no different.

Do you recognize this rhetoric?

We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite because surely the Republicans won’t bring this country together. Their policies divide the nation - into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.

It was garbage then, and the only difference now is that it’s been rotting for two additional decades.

Mario was thrown out of office by the New York voters, who chose instead George Pataki. Andy made a run toward Pataki in ‘02, but he did not attend the State Dem convention and lost the nomination to Carl McCall. Word was that Senator Hillary’s boyz didn’t much care for Andy.

Mario even picked a veep for candidate Kerry:

“Although “any number” of Democrats could do a good job as vice president, Mario Cuomo singled out Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, who is running second in delegates to Kerry.

“He’d be a natural favorite, I would think, to a lot of people. But there’s a lot of analysis I’m sure that has to go into it,” said Cuomo.

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!”

The Washpost today reported on Vice President Dick Cheney’s kind words for Representative Roscoe Bartlett (R-Maryland), who is facing a primary challenge from Republican State’s Attorney Scott Rolle.

Cheney praised Bartlett as an ally of the Bush administration in the fight against terrorism and the war in Iraq, and he lauded the veteran lawmaker’s experience and bipartisanship.

“In this time of testing, the president and I have been grateful to have Congressman Bartlett at our side,” Cheney said. He left unmentioned the fact that Bartlett had been among the White House’s Republican critics in the buildup to the war, arguing for more debate and perhaps a formal declaration of war by Congress.

Congressman Bartlett did eventually vote to authorize the war. In 1998 and 2002, Bartlett and Representatives John Duncan (R-Tennessee) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) spoke against the folly of international entanglements. Again, he backed the resolution.

Rolle, however, describes himself as younger and more conservative. Bartlett has a wonderful libertarian streak.

This is not the case in Pennsylvania, where the Administration and the State GOP is endorsing Senator Arlen Specter over his conservative challenger, Representative Pat Toomey. Specter also voted to authorize the war against Saddam Hussein, but he voted against Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court and against the conviction of Bill Clinton on impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. He also resisted the President’s tax cuts in 2001, voting to scale back the initial proposal.

Primary challengers compete with not only the incumbent.

Beginning Monday, the European Union will begin phasing in what will eventually amount of $4-billion in trade sanctions unless the United States Congress raises taxes on U.S. corporations which export goods overseas.

The history of the dispute goes back to 1997 when the E.U. filed a complaint about the Foreign Sales Corporation (FSC) law that benefits many large U.S. exporters like Microsoft. [CNS link]

After years of rulings and appeals, the WTO ruled that the tax breaks add up to illegal subsidies of exports and authorized the sanctions, which the E.U. voted last year to begin by March 1 if the law was not repealed.

Yes, the World Trade Organization (WTO) decided that the tax breaks given by the U.S. Congress to U.S. companies were a violation of global law. And evidently, the U.S. will back down:

A bill to repeal the [tax cut] measure in the Senate could reach the floor next week, and another bill is also being worked on in Congress.

“There is a consensus in Congress and in the administration that the U.S. does need to come into compliance,” said the [U.S. government] official.

What will Congress do when or if the WTO rules that it is not taxing corporations or individuals enough, thus given them an unfair advantage over their European counterparts? I don’t want to live in a miserable, European welfare state. But the WTO has to level the playing field, and how many decades until we’re living Miss Rand’s Anthem?

Sifting through the remains of the Democrat primary season, we pause on Senator Joe Lieberman (D-Connecticut). He told the AP that he want to be neither candidate Kerry’s veep nominee nor, in the unlikely event, in a Kerry cabinet.. He wants to go back to being a Senator from Connecticut, and he said that he seek reelection in 2006.

He said he is friends with both Kerry and Edwards, so he will endorse neither until the race is in someone’s hand.

One of the reasons he gave for his candidacy’s failure: “I’m not a screamer.”
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Dr. Taylor’s Toast-O-Meter is up at PoliBlog, if you want to check that one.

I recently signed-up to become an “editor” for WatchBlog’s conservative column. My first piece dealt with a topic we first discussed two weeks ago: South Dakota’s H.B. 1911, protecting the right to life of an unborn human being.

Here is the WatchBlog piece from Tuesday:

South Dakota v. Roe v. Wade

In a Presidential election year, is it time to test Roe v. Wade from the Right? Republican South Dakota State Representative Matt McCaulley thinks it is, and he was the chief sponsor of the State’s HB 1191 [pdf text], “[a]n Act to establish certain legislative findings, to reinstate the prohibition against certain acts causing the termination of an unborn human life, and to prescribe a penalty therefor.”

Representative McCaulley said that the bill was designed to call challenge the notion in Roe that the Supreme Court did not know when human life begins.

From HB 1191:

The Legislature finds that since neither constitutional law nor Supreme Court decision has resolved the question of the beginning of life, it is within the proper sphere of state legislative enactment to determine the question of fact in light of the best scientific and medical evidence. The Legislature finds that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm.

McCaulley avvered that the time for the measure, which passed the South Dakota State House, 54-15, is now: “We are ready to fight for the right to life, as opposed to waiting for it.” He told me last week:

“The moral issue of abortion is a battle for the legitimacy of our otherwise civilized society — it is our treasured Republic that we are trying to save by returning this issue to the control of the democratic process.”

It is a novel concept: removing from the purview of unelected courts a matter of life and death, and returning it to those who were democratically elected by the people to whom the laws apply. It is contrary to our form of government that such a concept has become so offbeat. Ironically, whether or not this happens will be a matter of judicial opinion.

Richard Thomas of the Thomas Moore Law Center [press release] has noted:

“This is new and unique legislation that has never been considered by the Supreme Court. The Law Center and our Associate Counsel, Harold Cassidy, are pleased we could be of assistance to Matt McCaulley and South Dakota in their efforts to protect the unborn. While we cannot predict the future, we do know that this legislation establishes significant facts that the courts will not be able to ignore.”

South Dakota’s Senate has to pass the legislation first [Lifenews.com story], and the Senate State Affairs Committee, fearing that a court would strike down the law, fashioned an amendment which removed the abortion proscription and changed the bill into one which would require doctors only to notify women seeking abortions of the possible risks involved. (The Senate committee’s version does, however, hold that South Dakota agrees that science has definitely proven that human life begins at conception.)

The Senate, if it chooses, can reject the amendment and pass the bill as it passed the State house, but at least one Senator has said that he will not support a bill that the courts will overturn, choosing instead to pass a bill which will reduce the number of abortions. The choice, then, is between passing a mild bill which accomplishes very little, or passing a bill which could be all or nothing.

The nothing could be important, as well. South Dakota right to life, according to a story from the Associated Press, opposes the measure because it could offer the Supreme Court a chance to further entrench Roe v. Wade at the expense of South Dakota. The problem with this excuse is that the Roe decision as written, with its trimesters derived “emanations of the penumbra” is bad law and has been treated as such by the Court beginning essentially in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, while the general finding of Roe, that abortion is a civil right, is decided and established law.

If one considers abortion to be the ending of a human life, it strikes me as hypocritical to reject a measure which could end the practice in so-moved States in favor of a measure which might or might not save a few lives. Abortion is currently a judicially established federal right almost separate from the terms of the Roe decision itself, so offering the Court an opportunity to throw the decision out or to defend it by different means is worth the hazard. This is not a matter on which a strong advocate of either direction has an opportunity for cowardice.

Representative McCaulley told me last week:

“The first challenge to the law will come from Planned Parenthood who has promised to fight this bill in the courts. The court system is the primary way that a vocal minority imposes their morality on society — a morality the minority could not impose on the rest of us if they were forced to work through the democratic process. The court challenge could come as early as July 1, 2004 when the law (if passed) would go into effect.”

McCaulley has vowed to fight the Senate amendment and have the Senate vote on his original language. South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds is staunchly Pro-Life and is expected to sign it, meaning it could be working its way through the judicial system during the height of the Presidential campaign season. It would be difficult for a “practicing Catholic” like John Kerry to dodge this question. (John Edwards could repeat that there are “two Americas.”)

Candidate John Kerry told a crowd at UCLA’s International Institute: “We cannot win the war on terror through military power alone.”

Although found in a piece from a different news organization (San Francisco Chronicle), Kerry told the same UCLA crowd something different, as well.:

Kerry said that to replenish what he called “our overextended military,” he would add 40,000 active-duty Army troops, “a temporary increase likely to last the remainder of the decade.”

His criticism was that we need to work with our allies in the war on terror, and he stated that the Bush strategy was to attempt militarily to eviscerate the problem. That is reinforcing a previously planted notion that the Administration’s anti-terror plans are unilateralist, when they have involved a global coalition from the start, including such diverse countries as France and the Yemen.

But he wants 40,000 new troops anyway, and I assume that he will introduce conscription. How else is he going to create these new troops? And he will need more than that if the troops follow his Vietnam model and serve four (4) months then are transferred back to the States where they protest the war.

The Kerry condundrum.

Good morning. Candidate John Kerry has come up with a bizarre notion to explain the recent strife in Haiti: President Bush hates Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide.”

‘’This administration has been engaged in very manipulative and wrongful ways,'’ Kerry said. “They have a theological and an ideological hatred for Aristide. They always have. They approached this so the insurgents were empowered by this administration.'’

Since he has no clue, he was obviously projecting. This means that foreign relations in a Kerry Administration will be based on which leader Kerry is advised has the most cooties.

Political campaigns generate some disturbing sentiments.

Just up on the Rightsided Newsletter “Right Columnists” page is the latest from Barbara J. Stock. A registered nurse of 24-years, Ms. Stock offers Nurse Barbara’s Biology 101 for Abortion Advocates.

Life is a miracle.

I found a nifty column by a Michael Ruff in The Flat Hat, the student-run paper of the college of William and Mary. Ruff is a junior at the school, but his practical suggestion sounds like something, regrettably, from another era. (I say “Regrettably,” because more people should be thinking and saying the same thing today.)

He proposes that people who need work take jobs.

You want a job? Have you ever seen, “sorry, there are no jobs available this week,” in the classifieds? I see commercials for joining the military everyday, not to mention I’ve never seen a McDonald’s that isn’t hiring.

For many of the unemployed, it isn’t any job they want — they must have “their” job. Sorry, but the job doesn’t belong to you and, if you really need a job, you might have to take a pay-cut and work harder. The point is: if you really want a job, you can find one.

But, as he points out, some folks would sooner blame the President.

Give the piece a look: HERE.

Last Tuesday, I asked: “Where are Haiti’s WMD?” The question was in response to a righteously indignant editorial from the clowns at the NYTimes demanding U.N. sanctions and inspectors and military action.

Where is France on this? I’m sure you’ve heard:

France, Haiti’s former colonial power, has already proposed a U.N.-backed multinational force to stabilize the politically troubled nation.

French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said in Paris on Thursday that France would like to see a force deployed ‘’within days.'’

‘’The regime (in Haiti) has reached an impasse and has already shaken off constitutional legality,'’ he said.

Although Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide has vowed to stay put, the French have called for his removal. Regime change.

The Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding, though it was promulgated some nineteen years after the French colonialists quit Haiti, the United States ought to invite the French into our hemisphere to keep the peace. Let them keep some peace somewhere, instead of agitating as in the Ivory Coast. (The U.N. had to ask the United States to come in and bail the French out, as explained in this story today from Reuters.)

We’re told that John Edwards will be a wonderful candidate at some point in the future. When they say he will get his next chance in 2008, they’re already calling this year’s election for the President.

What is being said of Edwards?

In what must now be troubling for Edwards fans, then-veep Al Gore said of their candidate in 2000: “His future is so bright you have to look at him through sunglasses.” (I think that was song…)

Of Edwards, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution proclaimed today: “His moment may come, but this is not it.” On Thursday, the New York Times opined: “It’s easy to envision him as the nominee four or eight years down the line.” The Queens Chronicle tells us that “could be the man to lead the Democratic Party in years to come. Just not yet. As a first-term senator, Edwards lacks the foreign policy experience that voters want to see in the man seeking our nation’s highest office during the war on terror.” A Democrat strategist told Reuters recently: “Whether or not he is on the 2004 Democratic ticket, he’s been a force in this race and will have another opportunity.” Columnist Jimmy Epson of the Dayton Daily Citizen remarked last Monday: “If he campaigned well, even in a loss, it could vault him in stature in 2008.” Jeff Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University, told Reuters for the same piece: “Edwards becomes an odds on favorite the next day for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. It will be between him and (New York Sen.) Hillary (Rodham Clinton).”

While Democrats give Hillary high marks as U.S. Senator, party spokesperson, and fundraiser, surveys show they do not want her to be President. What of Howard Dean? The Deaniacs say they want him, but his novelty will probably have work off in four years.

This “in four years” reminds me of a hopelessly naive short story in a book collection called Alternate Kennedys which I read in the early ’90s. In this bit of alternate history, JFK’s son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy had survived his birth and was the anti-politics, clean-up-Washington kind of guy.

The Kennedy clan met to discuss this. Uncle Ted admonished him that this just wasn’t how things were done. Bobby’s son Joe — the former Massachusetts Rep. we called “Little Joe” — had wanted to seek the Presidency, but the whole family agreed that “your time will come.”

When Ronald Reagan missed winning the GOP nomination in ‘76, his supporters were told that his time had gone.

What is Edwards going to do four the next three years (this assumes he can launch his ‘08 campaign in an exploratory phase in the summer of ‘07)? If he tries to settle on the outside but say active as an advisor, he’ll be laughed out of the room. He cannot go back to chasing ambulances. Maybe he can start a political movement of some sort.

Even if he runs as Kerry’s veep nominee, he’ll have to fill the intervening years. Joe Lieberman did this by sitting in the Senate.

If he runs for his party’s nomination in 08, he is going to have to remain relevant. Hillary Clinton will not have that problem even if she loses her reelection in 2006.

Edwards is being very nicely told to get the book. He is getting his pat on the head, though.

After all this talk of President Bush permanently damaging U.S.-German relations, it turns out that such talk was hot air. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visited the White House today and the past is where it blongs.

“We have differences - in the past,” Bush said as he and Schroeder sat side-by-side in the Oval Office, both men relaxed and smiling and frequently leaning in toward each other as they spoke. “But there’s nothing wrong with friends having differences and we have both committed to put the differences behind us and move forward.”

Likewise, Schroeder declared his first White House visit in two years a success. The two had been at odds over the German leader’s fierce opposition to the Iraq war.

“We talked not about the past,” Schroeder said. “We very much agreed that we have to talk about the present and the future now.”

Evidently, the president has forgiven Schroeder for his fierce opposition to the liberation of Iraq, driven as it was by tight German elections in late 2003,

As for France, will Chirac be branded a racist if he doesn’t send troops to the former French colony of Haiti?

Representative Corrine Brown (D-Florida), who is black, told Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega, a Mexican-American, that the President’s Haiti policy was racist and had been drafted by a “bunch of white men.” Secretary Noriega told her that he would pass her remarks on to Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. [link]

He later told her that as a Mexican-American, he resented being called a racist and a white man. Brown shot back that “you all [whites, Hispanics] look alike to me.”

She apologized Thursday:

“I apologize right up front,” Brown, D-Fla., said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “But I am concerned about the crisis that is about to happen in Haiti and about the blood and about the government collapsing and about the people suffering and I just pray that we will intervene before it’s too late.”

She sent she had sent a letter to Noriega, but, as per its policy, the State Department would neither confirm nor deny it.

Representative Henry Bonilla (R-Texas) called on Brown to resign: “Congresswoman Brown’s comments demonstrate a complete lack of ethnic sensitivity. This irresponsible statement represents a step backward for race relations.”

It is intellectually lazy, when one disagrees with a policy which involved people who happen to be of color, to begin charging racism without a thought. But perhaps Representative Brown is a small part of the cabal that redefines that term.

The bi-partisan political news publication National Journal — paid subscription required — reports: “John Kerry is ranked ‘most liberal’” Senator in their 2003 Senate roll call vote rankings.

We’ll pick it up from Drudge:

NATIONAL JOURNAL on Friday claimed Democrat frontrunner John Kerry has the “most liberal” voting record in the Senate.

The results of Senate vote ratings show that Kerry was the most liberal senator in 2003, with a composite liberal score of 96.5 — far ahead of such Democrat stalwarts as Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

NATIONAL JOURNAL’s scores, which have been compiled each year since 1981, are based on lawmakers’ votes in three areas: economic policy, social policy, and foreign policy.

The National Journal ranking system was devised in 1981 by the man who on to become CNN’s senior political analyst, Bill Schneider; according to Drudge, Schneider still “continues to guide the calculation process.”

It is difficult to claim to a moderate if one is to the left of Ted Kennedy, Babs Boxer, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. And if being a liberal is an asset in a Presidential election, Kerry should cruise to victory.
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The RNC is avoiding the “liberal” label for candidate Kerry, saying instead: “LABEL HIM WHAT YOU WANT, KERRY WRONG CHOICE FOR AMERICA.”

They also use a quote from nonpartisan political scientist Larry Sabato:

“‘Look at National Journal ratings – Kerry is way to the left of the American mainstream,’ said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.”

Candidate John Kerry has called on President Bush to name Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida) to be our nation’s envoy to Haiti:

“He knows the situation in Haiti extremely well and knows the cost that widespread violence will cause not only in Haiti, but on our shores.”

And the rebels will engage in mirth as the doddering former Dem Presidential candidate scribbles meaningless catch phrases in his notebook.

As well he should. After all, candidate John Edwards is campaigning like the frontrunner’s best friend. Kerry hasn’t yet made a total fool out of himself, and he seems certain to be the Democrat nominee to run against President Bush this fall.

THIS is from the Washington Times:

“On national security, Americans have the clearest possible choice,” Mr. Bush told 1,000 supporters in a 10-minute speech. “Our opponents say they approve of bold action in the world, but only if no other government disagrees. Yet America must never outsource our national-security decisions to leaders of other governments.”

To President Bush, defending the nation against terror is the primary concern of his Administration. To Kerry, the war on terror is a distraction.

How seriously we should take the threat of terrorism is a legitimate campaign issue.

Does Kerry think that the President has already won the war on terror?

I turned off the Dems shortly after 9:30p, when candidate Edwards started campaigning for candidate Kerry with the Dems, on the topic of the Iraq war. They both voted for the resolution granting the President — as the questioner phrased it — “a blank check.” Edwards was quick to point out that neither he nor Kerry would have conducted the war in the manner in which the President has. By comparing Kerry to himself, he is campaigning for him.

The truth is, both Edwards and Kerry voted to authorize the President to use force against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with no conditions. Neither of them held out, threatening to vote no unless the President gave them a resolution which they now claim they wanted, tying his hands until he received French and German support.

Edwards has said that he voted against funding the troops in Iraq, even though he wanted to fund the troops, because if the funding measure would have failed, the President would have come back and offered a more acceptable measure.

On the measure regarding the invasion, Edwards did not vote no until he had a more acceptable resolution for which he could vote.

On the measure regarding funding the troops, Edwards did vote no hoping to have a more acceptable bill.

Edwards is a good liar. No one caught him.

Not that it matters at this point.

… on CNN

As I said earlier, give this thing ten minutes to see what Edwards is going to do. His mailing of earlier promised: “Tune in and see what promises to be the most interesting debate so far.” His aides have reportedly used the term, “Confrontational.”

The destruction of Kerry could begin tonight, but almost doubtlessly not in time to cost him the eventual Dem nomination. In and of itself, that is of little concern.

Of course, Edwards could be the Edwards we’ve come to know and for whom we’ve learned to feel something akin to sorry.

Retiring House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin (R-Louisiana) has opted not to accept well-paid lobbying position with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. This comes after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had accused Tauzin of talking to the organization about the job while the recent Medicare legislation was being drafted. Tauzin spokesman Ken Johnson commented.

Billy recognized that legitimate perception concerns were raised even though he did nothing wrong legally or ethically,” Johnson said. “He recognized that some eyebrows were rightfully raised about the discussions. It’s a legitimate concern, he can understand that.”

I would have accepted the job.

Deaniacs have no one. Some people, spiritually weakened even by forces some might consider benign, cling to a man who becomes a symbol. Larger than he is.

Clinging, here is a petition:

To: Dean for America, 60 Farrell Street, Burlington, VT 05403

We want our country back. It’s that simple. A choice on the left between Kerry, Edwards, Nader, Sharpton, and Kucinich is an uninspiring choice at best. We also are not convinced that any of these candidates can actually beat Bush head-to-head.

Therefore, we humbly request that you, Gov. Dean, return to the race and save us from this intolerable situation. We will fund you, we will work for you, and we will vote for you.

We need you now more than ever before. Please give us a real choice by returning to the race immediately. Thank you.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

It is to close down soon, and this “Undersigned” is currently 340 people. The screen shows the latest name only, and when I checked just now, that was Hieronymous Bosch, who is mentioned here as a Dutch painter who died in 1516.

Isaiah Z. Sterrett’s latest column is live [link] on the Rightsided Newsletter web site, and this week, he endorses the campaign of former U.S. Treasurer and moderate Republican Rosario Marin for the GOP nomination to take Babs Boxer’s U.S. Senate seat this November. He came to this conclusion after meeting with conservative Republican challenger Howard Kaloogian, whom he found to be “too rough around the edges.”

It is my sincere hope that Golden State Republicans give this lady a chance. Shes smart and energetic and determined and if we conservatives can hold our noses long enough to forget abortion, we can elect her to the United States Senate. Make no mistake: Babs Boxer is terrified of this woman.

This is clearly a two-person race. A few weeks ago it looked like Kaloogian could win, but thats becoming increasingly unlikely. Marin’s only real opponent at this point is Bill Jones, a man who supported the biggest tax increase in California’s history, and who supported John McCain in the 2000 election. (Marin, by contrast, actually worked with President Bush.)

…and there is a Dem debate tonight

True to form, candidate John Edwards is closing the gap between his campaign and that of frontrunner John Kerry in the days leading up to the New York primary. According to a Marist poll released last week, Kerry held a commanding 52-point lead over the North Carolina Senator in the Empire State, 66-percent to 14-percent.

A poll released yesterday (Wednesday), however, show’s Edwards narrowing the gap to a mere 39-points, 60-percent to 21-percent. The margin of error, however, is NOT +/- 40-percent.

Of course, in Wisconsin, Zogby’s 3-day had Edwards far off the lead, and he closed to finish second. But closing to finish second, at this point, is losing.

Now, they debate tonight Los Angeles, and they are joined by Dennis and Al. You will want to watch the first ten minutes of the debate. If Edwards has not begun to chop Kerry into little bits by that point, switch to CSI. That’s the only blood you’ll see.

And Edwards has to cut Kerry into ribbons if he wants to close the gap. Edwards knows how to persuasively argue the evidence, and there is plenty of it against Kerry, but will he do it? If he does not, then it will be very clear that he does not care to win.

Tonight, we might see the first act in the destruction of John Kerry. We probably won’t.

Forensics never lie.

The House of Representatives, today, passed H.R. 1997, the “Unborn Victims of Violence Act.” It’s also been called, “Laci and Connor’s law,” after the murdered Petersons of current note, and RIGHT HERE is a pdf with the text of the bill. It’ll open in your Acrobat Reader.

The vote was 254-163.

The House had earlier rejected a Democrat alternative which would have toughened the penalties for attacking a pregnant woman but treated the death of baby as merely an aggravating circumstance in the attack on the mother. This is liberal hypocrisy.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) said in a floor speech today [speech text]:

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act provides that if an unborn child is injured or killed during the commission of crimes of violence already defined under federal law, prosecutors can bring two charges, one on behalf of the mother, the other on behalf of the unborn victim. Indeed, the House of Representatives, in the 106th Congress, by a unanimous 417 - 0 vote, passed the “Innocent Child Protection Act” – a bill only two sentences long – that banned the federal execution of a woman while she carries a “child in utero.” “Child in utero” is defined in that bill exactly – to the word – as it is in this one, namely as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.” Now, opponents of H.R. 1997 argue that harm to an unborn victim should simply be considered an additional harm to the mother, not an independent harm to another human being. Yet a vote for the Innocent Child Protection Act cannot be defended on the grounds that executing a pregnant woman would cause her to suffer additional harm because there can be no additional harm exceeding the ultimate and final punishment of death.

The bill passed the House in the last Congress (107th), 252-172. The Congress before that one (106th), it passed by a vote of 254-172.

The Senate will probably not put it to a floor vote, but the House has gone on record.

Before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. Senate, on April 23, 1971, John Kerry said of his fellow soldiers: “They told stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires with portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” A few days earlier, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Kerry noted: “There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed.” Specifically, he mentioned “search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages.” Remember, he was in Vietnam, on a boat, for all of four (4) months.

Last Friday, someone named Dan Kennedy published an opinion piece on BostonPhoenix.com which proposed the following undocumented assertion about that:

Trouble is, Kerry was accurately quoting American soldiers who had participated in the Winter Soldier Investigation, a project of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, of which Kerry was a co-founder.”

We get a more credible story from the former head of the Romanian intelligence service, Ion Mihai Pacepa, writing in NRO:

To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and “news reports” about invented American war atrocities.

His piece talks about the KGB’s anti-war activities, and candidate Kerry was their product.

One has to question the judgment of a candidate who was on the wrong side of the Cold War.

The New York Times today endorses candidate John Kerry to win their State’s Dem primary, making a point of brushing off the “Anybody-But-Bush sentiment” and selecting “the person who is most qualified to be president.”

Calling Kerry “one of the Senate’s experts in foreign affairs,” they lament President Bush and the “thinness of his résumé when Sept. 11 occurred.”

Almost everyone who has been watching the Democratic campaign would love to merge Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards into one composite super-candidate, with Mr. Kerry’s depth and Mr. Edwards’s personal touch with the voters. In the television era, likability is extremely important. But this is a serious business, and Mr. Kerry, the more experienced and knowledgeable candidate, gets our endorsement.

All of this translates into: “He is dull as all get out, sure, but he has to know stuff after serving in the Senate for that long.”

B-1 Bob Dornan was something of an icon to conservative C-SPAN junkies — we named our first cat after the man in 1993 — in the ’80s and ’90s. His fiery “special order” speeches, coming after Congress had adjourned for the day, were filled with the colorful terms of his own culture war, until one day he was beaten by Loretta Sanchez in 1996 — by 984 illegal alien votes.

Dornan became a radio talk show host, our cat which bears his name weighs 26-pounds, and that looked to be that. But Bob Dornan is back, this time to challenge his old friend, Representative Dana Rohrbacher in next Tuesday’s CA-46 GOP primary.

Now he’s back, Dornan says, because America needs him to fight the war on terrorism. And he sees his current opponent as part of the problem, citing campaign contributions Rohrabacher has received from several Arab Americans and Arab American organizations.

The quote is from an LATimes piece.

At the crux of this run, it seems, is B-1 Bob’s feeling of abandonment by his colleagues when he tried to take Sanchez down in a 1998 rematch:

In 1998, Dornan angrily criticized Rohrabacher and other Republicans for not helping him enough in his rematch against Sanchez.

“What did the party do? They said, ‘Dornan, you are on your own — we are going to distance ourselves from you,’ ” said Mark Dornan, his son and current campaign manager. “They sacrificed my dad on the altar of political correctness for the sake of outreach in the Latino community.”

That’s quite a charge, but I’m pulling for the guy. C-SPAN has not been the same without him.

Check this out:

Bleached-blond Mohawk? Check. Ripped and faded blue jeans? Check. Silver-studded dog collar? Check. Political science textbook? Check.

Pierced and tattooed rockers are in for a mosh-pit civics lesson this year. Nearly 200 bands are lining up to lambast President Bush and try to register a half-million voters through the Punk Voter coalition.

John Kerry played bass guitar for a cover band when he was in school.

[story with photo]

Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) became, in 1962, the first American to orbit the Earth, at the helm of Friendship 7. Today, a week before Ohio’s Super Tuesday primary, he endorsed candidate John Kerry to be his party’s presidential nominee.

It make sense for him, though. Edwards is not seeking re-election, so Glenn will have to work in the Senate next year with Kerry, not with Edwards.

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NOTE: A gentleman named Michael reminds me that John Glenn is no longer a U.S. Senator (see comments below). As happens: Oops.
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If Glenn were younger, though, he might have made a good veep candidate for Edwards. There slogan could have been: “Two Americas… and Fireflies!” (The reference is worth it. If you don’t get it offhand, make a note to Google: glenn fireflies. Add the search term “urine” if you want an easier answer.)

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan today told the House Budget Committee that “a thorough review of our spending commitments — and at least some adjustment in those commitments — is necessary for prudent policy.” This means spending on Social Security and Medicare, as the system prepares for the first wave of Baby Boomer retirements in four years. [Reuters link].

“In view of this upward ratchet in government programs and the enormous uncertainty about the upper bounds of future demands for medical care, I believe that a thorough review of our spending commitments — and at least some adjustment in these commitments — is necessary for prudent policy,” the Fed chief emphasized.

It will not be taken in an election year. Listen to candidate John Kerry:

“No matter what was said in Washington just this morning, the wrong way to cut the deficit is to cut Social Security benefits,” Kerry said during a speech at the University of Toledo. “If I’m president, we are simply not going to do it.”

Said two congress critters:

Mr. Greenspan has it backwards. He portrays Social Security as the problem. But in reality, the high deficits brought on by Bush Administration fiscal policies are the problem. Those fiscal policies are now threatening Social Security,” said [Democrats] Charles Rangel of New York and Robert Matsui of California.

The all blamed the entitlements’ problems on the President’s tax cuts, which Greenspan said “should be continued, because over the long run, they will benefit the economy.”

President Bush says that he will not cut social security, either.

And no one elected can say that Social Security was a bad idea. When you hear someone say that future generations will have to pay for government’s stupidity, it now looks like we might be a “future generation/”

One of conservatism’s gadfly’s, Patrick Buchanan, has suggested in a column today that, while criticizing the President for not upholding and upholding the Constitution against the liberal judiciary,

Should Daschle, Kennedy and Co. deny Bush a vote on his first Supreme Court nominee, he should not hesitate to make history’s first recess appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

That being said, Roll Call reports today that Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) had threatened to keep the Senate from recessing for any significant period of time. He’s rightfully afraid that the President might use such opportunities to use his Constitutional power to circumvent an obstructionist Senate and appoint federal judges where needed.