Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

that he will not seek to a full term.

[H]e said he did not want to neglect his family responsibilities by adding the roles of candidate and fund-raiser to a list of titles that includes acting governor, State Senate president, father, husband and coach to a youth basketball team in Newark.

“It is way too much for any one person,” he said today, as a roomful of staff members and supporters looked on, some with tears in their eyes.

He was governor for ten weeks, and his problem is that his political ambitions hit a brick wall named billionaire Senator Jon Corzine. In New Jersey, I’ve hard it said, Corzine could have defeated McGreevey when he was straight.

The NJ GOP will need a popular President Bush to help out with this one, and they just might get it. The way the Democrats have set things up, their popularity falls as the President’s rises. It’s a zero sum game right now, for the most part, and it looks promising for the President.

Eric Lindholm has fun with JF Kerry for his tale-told-to-Tim (Russert) about how he met with various Arab prime ministers and presidents who told him, to a one, that they would be in Iraq had President Bush been nice to them.

It was a case of Kerry being Kerry, and I thought nothing of the exchange, but it’s getting some play. Eric covers the credulity factor and he links to others.

This is what Kerry does, and it fit my thesis perfectly. Kerry has no foreign policy; rather, he listens to Joe Biden (who also mentors McCain and Hegel on many issues). Joe Biden constantly relates how he has spoken with such and such world leader who would be more than pleased to help out if the President would stop calling them names in public. It’s comical coming from Joe Biden, but from JF Kerry, it’s self-destructive sycophancy.

Don’t get me wrong, Kerry’s an intelligent guy; his problem is, he is not a thinker, not an intellectual. Joe Biden is. Technically, at this point in our history, I’d have to say that Joe Biden is potentially the most dangerous Senator. (Kennedy, Boxer, Kerry are annoying, but they’re all relatively dumb-as-a-post. Biden’s not.)

The latest column by Judson Cox, Iraqi Democracy Succeeds Despite American Democrats, is now live on the web site of my Rightsided Newsletter. And you can read it on the site: HERE.

The day after the vote. Looking back, Baghdad Dweller told us: “I colored my finger with this great voting color.” The day after, Mohammed at Iraq the Model proclaimed “the purple finger revolution.”

Yes, euphoria inevitably meets reality, but reality is not a Jordanian street punk named Zarqawi.

“And you know it’s gonna be alright.”

As happened to her admirer Fidel Castro last October, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has passed out during a speech.

Hillary had told the crowd that she was feeling weak and had a stomach virus, so it is possible that she was not too far into her pints to be speaking in public.

In Germany, any woman under age 55 who has been unemployed for more than a year must accept available employment. They have legalized prostitution. A 25-year-old out-of-work waitress thus must accept employment at a Berlin brothel or have her benefits removed.

who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse.

This is the welfare state, folks; it converts a population into a collection of government whores. With an abusive pimp.

On the RSN site, columnist Justin Darr takes a look at the reaction of the lefty blogosphere to the Iraq elections in his latest piece, Goodbye Reality! The tough life of a liberal blogger. Check it out on the RSN site: here.

An official United Nations maintains that there has been no genocide perpetrated against non-Arabs in Darfur, the Sudan, although some 70,000 non-Moslems have been slaughtered and 2,000,000 have been forced from their homes. A six member U.N. panel found that what has happened does not fit the U.N. definition of genocide, which would have required deliberate action by the Sudanese government to destroy a religious, racial, or ethnic group in Darfur. The Sudanese government argues that someone else is doing it.

Had the panel decided that the genocide was in fact genocide, the U.N. would have been required to do something to stop it. As the U.N. tends not to do anything other than pass resolutions and issue reports, that is what is being done. Sanctions are not an option, it seems because of disagreements on the Security Council.a

Someone has reminded me of something I wrote in a Rightsided Newsletter “commentary” back on Tuesday, March 25, 2003. I was discussing whether to let Germany, France, and the U.N. in on rebuilding Iraq, after the United States had taken the risks to liberate her. That question has become convoluted, now moot, but I wrote something else:

Going into this, President Bush envisaged a Democratic Middle East with which the United States could deal individually and as a group. Democracy, if it takes hold in Iraq and is nurtured by other democratic nations, could spread. The question then would be: Do we allow France, Russia, Germany, the Kingdom of Belgium, or Nelson Mandela to participate in sustaining the new democracies? It would be an abomination. Only four countries saw the necessity of risking their by far most valuable commodity for the future.

“Going into this, President Bush envisaged a Democratic Middle East…” It’s a wide image, not the narrowly focused WMD about which today’s anti-Bush crowd feebly harps. This entire operation was too grand for their imaginations.

The latest column by Barbara J. Stock, Democrats: “Deja Vu” All Over Again, is now live at the Rightsided Newsletter web site.

You can read it at the site: HERE.

Baghdad Dweller, an Iraqi blogger, managed to acquire a snapshot of Abu Musab Zarqawi attempting to enter a voting center in Iraq.

This is my post regarding today’s elections. I got most of my news from FOX and from the Blogsophere. There were the Sunday shows which I covered this morning, but that was a mixed set of reports. Where Dan Rather was working for cred by reporting the wonder of it all for CBS, ABC’s Peter Jennings…

Well, I usually pick up ABC’s This Week off C-SPAN Radio at 1p. I tuned in this afternoon, but the preempted to carry the President congratulating the Iraqis. As with most of you who want this to work out for Iraq, my spirits were very high, even higher after the President spoke.

After the President, C-SPAN Radio aired This Week from the start. Host Steph cut to

Peter Jennings in Baghdad, explaining that the militants had succeeding in forcing people to say home, no one had voted, the vote was a fraud, everyone had died, and the country was awash in blood. I then remembered that he had spoken those words five hours previously, and it suddenly seemed irrelevant. Then the entire show seemed irrelevant, and I tuned out.

Pejman Yousefzadeh has a great response to JF Kerry at Redstate, where Trevino nails Markos Moulitsas gang at Daily Kos. (I believe both Kerry and Moulitsas to be whimpering simps sans substance, but somebody has to take them on I suppose.)

The vote was a success today. No, it didn’t elect a government ready to join the body of civilized nations, or whatever, but it was a start. What Iraq must do now is get back on her own feed. The country cannot be forever dependent on another, and it has to work its way towards that. Lady’s and gentleman, we have seen a start. And though it is politically and otherwise substantively important, I am convinced that it’s greatest import will be psychological. The chains are off.

I’m happy for the Iraqi people. What a day!

Not quite. But…

Word is that the Emir of Qatar wants better relations with Washington, so is considering putting his cable channel, Al Jazeera, on the sales block. It has a large audience, makes no money.

“We have recently added new members to the Al Jazeera editorial board, and one of their tasks is to explore the best way to sell it,” said the Qatari official, who said he could be more candid about the situation if he was not identified. “We really have a headache, not just from the United States but from advertisers and from other countries as well.” Asked if the sale might dilute Al Jazeera’s content, the official said, “I hope not.”

Talk is about whether a private owner would make the station more or less objective. Who cares? Sell it to Iran.

The Republic of Georgia is sending 550 troops to Iraq, on top of the 300 already in country, to participate in peace-keeping operations. The United States Air Force will airlift them in.

The coalition is willing. Let’s see if Joe Biden can talk Chirac into sending trainers to Iraq. It would be a slap at the President, and I don’t think Chirac wants to do that. If he wants to be a U.S. ally, he has to deal with President Bush for four more years. He has to talk to Biden only when the Delaware Democrat comes to town to pester him.

Here’s a couple Conservative Edge toons from Canadian cartoonist Aidan:

I’ve completed this Sunday’s Rightsided Newsletter, the weekly review of the Sunday morning talk shows, and sent it out via bot to the sundry global Inboxes. If you do not yet subscribe — ‘t is free — you can read it online at the RSN web site: HERE.

My summary and review of ABC’s this week is coming up in this space shortly, and you can visit Redstate to see everything with an interactive capability. That will be up before 2p ET.

Iraq for Iraqis!

From Husayn at Democracy in Iraq:

It will be a day forever remembered. My voting was only a simple act, I went, I identified myself, got my finger stained, filled out a ballot, and dropped it in a box. It is not a complex or grand process to the eye, but it is one that I will forever remember and will recount to my children, and their children. And God willing it will be remembered through the ages.

And don’t forget the Iraq Blogroll, #4 on the column to the right. I have links to quite a few of the top blogs out of Iraq. Omar and Mohammed have posted something exceptional, for instance, at Iraq the Model.

Good morning!

Meet the Press (NBC): Host Tim Russert will talk to JF Kerry. Non-stop. For the entire show. Irrelevancy on the day of the first democratic election in Iraq.

FOX News Sunday: Host Chris Wallace talks with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Russert could have wanted her, but the White House prefers Fox. That’s a possible scenario; the other being that Russert simply preferred to have Kerry. It makes sense, in a perverse way.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer talks to the leadership of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee: Dick Lugar (R-Indiana) and Joe Biden (D-Delaware), who strikes me as ready to run for the Presidency again in 2008.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos talks to another 2008 possibility with a newfound anti-Bush streak: Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. He’ll also talk to Secretary Rice.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolfgang Blitzertalks to Senators John Warner and Carl Levin of Senate Armed Services; Ahmed “The Outlaw” Chalabi and Adnan Pachachi; Kurd leader Jalal Talabani; Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie; several others mostly involved with the election; and Secretary Rice.

I’ll watch and review these for Sunday’s Rightsided Newsletter, to which you can subscribe for free by visiting the web site at http://rightsided.tripod.com, or by sending a blank e-mail to rsn-subscribe [AT] topica.com.

Expect it Sunday after the shows. (Come here for the Review of This Week, though.)

Betsy Newmark highlights a report on an apology from the BBC:

The BBC has apologised for erroneously reporting that U.S.-led and Iraqi forces may be responsible for the deaths of 60 percent of Iraqi civilians killed in conflict over the last six months.

Apologized to whom? Their Prime Minister? President Bush? The British people whom they misled? The Iraqi people, whose cause they undermined? Mistakes of that magnitude, affecting public opinion and review as they do and thus corrupting attempts by the Iraqis to institute a peaceful democracy, are treasonous to humanity.

Oops?

Central Command, a.k.a. Centcom, has forecast the results of tomorrow’s election in Iraq:

The Shiite Unified Iraqi Alliance list – 43.8% = 120 national assembly seats. [Sistani’s boyz]

The Kurdish list – a surprising 36.4% (more than twice their 16-18% proportion of the general population) = 100 seats. [the two Kurd parties]

The Iraqi National Accord – 8.1% = 22 seats. (A formula is being actively sought to retain him as premier even if his showing is low.) [President Ghazi al-Yawar and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi]

The Iraqi Communist party (the best organized) – 1.6% = 5 seats. [everybody has these types]

All the Assyrian, Turkomen and Yazdi minorities together – 4 seats.

All the rest – 5 seats.

This forecast is based on 6 months of U.S. intelligence gathering and opinion surveyes. This will then be a measure of how our intel is doing over there.

[HT, John Lester]

Representative Ike Skelton (D-Missouri) delivered the Dem response to the President’s Weekly Radio Address, Saturday morning. While admitting that the elections were important, “despite a number of serious mistakes by the Bush administration,” what if [cue the music] things… had… been… different:

What if the United States hadn’t disbanded the Iraqi army? What if the administration had listened to commanders like former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki who called for a larger force for post-war stabilization? What if the reconstruction funds appropriated by Congress had been spent more quickly to provide more economic opportunity for the average Iraqi?

The wonderful universe of pointless hypotheticals which have no bearing whatsoever on the matter at hand.

Read on for a little incredulity:
(more…)

Former pop sensation Michael Jackson has a porn collection covered with the finger prints of young boys, or so his prosecution holds. California Judge Rodney Melville, however, has ruled that it is not a porn collection:

Melville also ruled that dozens of adult books, magazines and DVDs seized at Jackson’s Neverland ranch - one with the fingerprints of Jackson and the accuser - can be used as evidence.

However, the judge said the prosecution could not refer to the material as pornography, obscenity or erotic. Instead, the words “adult” or “sexually explicit” can be used, he said.

Are these the evolving standards of decency in an ordered society? And what is the problem with the relatively innocuous term “erotic”? It might be that if something is called erotic, it is intended to arouse, and the prosecution has to prove that this was Jackson’s intent.

“I don’t know what adult magazines are, but I know them when I see them. For instance, Woodworking magazine deals with band saws, plunge drills, and cordless nailers. Don’t want no kids ’round none o’ that.”

Good morning!

I took a few minutes and added something to this site which I have had on the side-burner, if there be such a thing, for a while. I’ve put up and Iraqi Blogroll, with links to (mostly) blogs written inside Iraq. These are people whom, in my lifetime, I never really expected to have points of view. They have them.

The bloggers vary in age and background, and in views of what is happening. There is optimism, pessimism, hope, despair, and that Raed fellow I included only because I think he was first. Someone got ahold of his mind and instructed him that it is trendy to be anti-American. You know, “Berkeley, man!” (That’s not fair. I don’t know the man, but it’s how his stuff reads.)

What I like most is the apprehension as a people prepare to vote for the first time. Or one man’s wife wanted to take food to a friend but ran face-to-fact with an American soldier and had to return home.

These are the realities of war.

Check out the Iraqi Blogroll. It’s at No. 4 on the right.

(Note: I commend to your attention Iraq the Model. That was my Best Blog of the Year last year, for what that’s worth.)

Prominent abortion advocate and Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt has up and quit. She gave no reason.

From an American Life League, STOPP International press release:

Under Gloria Feldt, Planned Parenthood killed more human beings in the last eight years than any terrorist organization. Her departure is good news. During her eight-year reign, Planned Parenthood aborted more than 1,370,000 babies in its own facilities. In contrast, Feldt’s predecessor, Faye Wattleton, was in office 14 years and oversaw a total of 1,320,000 abortions.

It sounds as if she stepped up the killing as she saw the life-allied troops advancing. If you wish to draw a parallel, feel free.

I don’t think her departure is, per se, good news; it depends on what replaces her.

This is from Iraqi blogger Hammorabi:

“It is wrong to assume that the terrorists’ attacks are resistance. The real occupiers of Iraq are the mentally retarded terrorists who tried to impose their dull and tyrant role over every one.”

I should include the caveat that this is one person’s opinion only and is not reflective of the terrorists and their sympathizers on whom many in the media seem to rely for their reports.

The eyes of the global MSM were on what Vice President Cheney wore during the solemn memorial at the Auschwitz camp. The heart patient dressed warmly, and the world grumbled.

The 2000 New York Senate race to replace the retiring (now “late”) Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan started as one between a pre-September 11 Rudy Giuliani and still-first-lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rudy’s divorce and health pushed him to the sidelines, and stand-in Representative Rick Lazio irked the media’s ire by invading personal space. She defeated him soundly.

If the NY GOP has its way, Giuliani will be the man to challenge Hillary in her 2006 reelection bid. The dynamics have chanced drastically since 2000, starting with Rudy’s new media-star power and Hillary’s incumbency.

There is the bit about there party’s nominations in 2008, but I don’t see either winning those prizes. Let’s see what 2006 brings us. Giuliani has to know his chances are very weak for picking up the GOP Presidential nomination in 2008, and I suspect he’s after additional political office, so we might get a treat next year.

[HT, Mark Noonan at GOPbloggers. — cross-posted at Redstate.]

Joel Berg, in the comments to a post below, challenges:

Would anyone here care to have an actual debate over the reality that soup kitchens (most of which are faith-based) DO exist throughout America and their lines are growing ever-longer due to our current, failed policies?

I think that would be worthwhile, Joel. First, how do I establish that the lines in soup kitchens are growing ever-longer? How did you reach this conclusion?

Once we’ve sorted that one out, we can discuss why these lines are or are not longer.

Good morning!

Got this one from Blackfive.

From Iraq, Friends of Democracy is posting “ground-level election news from the people of Iraq.” Blackfive says that it is “for, about, and mostly by the Iraqi people themselves.”

Grassroots correspondents, people situated in various cities and regions of Iraq.

I’ve bookmarked it. Remember, the election is on Sunday U.S. time. It will take two weeks for the votes to be counted. The thusly elected body – they vote for tickets/slates, not individual names – picks another body and a Constitution is drafted, then there is a vote on that in October. Two Sunni provinces can veto the Constitution if it’s too Shi’a/Kurd.

This is not a SNAP and it’s over proposition; rather, it is a SNAP and it’s started process. Once it begins, it will not stop.

The latest column by John T. Plecnik, Senate Democrats Prepare to Block Conservative Judges, is now live at the Rightsided Newsletter web site.

Any political consultants worth their salt will tell you that a four year filibuster is tantamount to political suicide. If Bush is willing to fight, then conservatives can take back the courts.

Read his column on the RSN site: HERE.

Teddy Kennedy had his say earlier, and AP is now running a story about a Congressional fringe which wants to bring the troops home.

A commentary in Virginia’s Roanoke Times reads, in part:

Republican (I emphasize, Republican) Rep. Ron Paul said of them [neocons] in a speech July 10, 2003: “Let there be no doubts, those in the neocon camp had been anxious to go to war against Iraq for a decade. They justified the use of force to accomplish their goals, even if it required pre-emptive war. …”

Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) is not the loyalty-or-death Republican the writer would make him out to be. He was a Libertarian Party candidate for President, and he sticks pretty much to his principles. He ideologically opposes by the United States which remove regimes of another country unless there is immediate provocation. Somehow, he does not believe Saddam Hussein was dangerous enough to warrant removal.

Read Arthur Chrenkoff’s “Good News from the Moslem World, Part 4″ for a look at the world outside the MSM-generated abyss. We’re looking a some potential reform, which is the direction in which the President is trying to encourage the region.

It looks like Teddy Kennedy is trying to get in his his last, best shot at the President’s policy, our troops, and democracy in Iraq before Sunday’s election – and then hope that the enterprise fails so he is proven correct.

The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution,” Kennedy said in remarks prepared for delivery at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

The American troops are part of the problem?

“There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us, but there will be much more violence if we continue our present dangerous and destabilizing course,” said Kennedy. “It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin.”

Kennedy’s makeshift thesis has the violence subsiding and the country stabilizing if we pull our troops out. The President sees pulling our troops out once the violence begins subsiding and the country stabilizes. But the President, unlike Kennedy, does not see our military presence as the cause of the violence and instability.

Zarqawi himself has said that this insurgency was about stopping democracy. He wants a state run by people who claim to understand the will of Allah. If the troops go, that mindset wins Iraq. If the troops go, the anti-war crowd of the early 21st century will have done something very similar to what the anti-war crowd did thirty-five years ago.

Ted Kennedy, in the position of a U.S. Senator, is bad for our democracy. Whether it is conscious on his part is arguable, but he wants us to lose our democracy. I will not draw any comparisons or parallels.

It turns out that the MSM was wrong, that President Bush did not propose in his inauguration speech that the United States run around the world recklessly invading non-democracies.

He had to explain this to them.

Perhaps if he’d have used large type and pictures…

The latest column from Christopher G. Adamo, “Moderates” Could Orchestrate GOP Disaster in ‘08, is now live on the Rightsided Newsletter web site.

Read it: HERE.

Here is a Conservative Edge cartoon from Canadian cartoonist Aidan:

Good morning!