Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

I refer you to two great RedState posts.

The first is streiff’s: Transition to Iraqi Control:

In a little heralded development Multi-National Corps-Iraq announced:

The Iraqi government will officially take control of its major air, sea and land-based military commands beginning early next month by standing up the Iraqi Joint Headquarters, a major step toward putting Iraqis in the lead for securing the country, a senior Coalition spokesman here said Aug. 28.

After more than three years of training and assistance for the Iraqi military, the government of Iraq has created the conditions for the Iraqi military to begin reporting directly to its government for orders, rather than relying on Coalition command structures, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the Multi-National Force – Iraq senior spokesman, said.

He has a great graphic to bear the changing look of the force in Iraq.

The second post is from Mike, dealing with the mysterious hold placed on the earmark reform bill: Byrd Admits, Then Lifts Hold on Obama-Coburn Bill.

I should add - this is very good news, and not just because two lousy Senators met the business end of the blogosphere - but because it shows that Senator Coburn is one savvy fellow, making good tactical moves throughout this story. And just as good, it shows that when Bill Frist is motivated, he can be a helpful and effective partner.

And Bill Scranton seconded the nomination of Governor Reagan in Detroit.

State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack has said that there will be a meeting in Britain of “major powers” to discuss Iran and its little nuke game. Those major powers are: Britain, France, Germany, the PRC, Russia, and the United States.

The meeting will produce nothing. The meeting is a fantasy, as France and Russia are not major world powers. They are both living on past power: Russia’s, almost 20 years ago, Frances, several centuries ago.

Empty threats do not work. Empty threats of sanctions are treated, by the mullahs, as the joke they are.

It’s the shame that no one remembers Ultravox.

The Norwegians, though, have recovered the famous Ed Munch painting, The Scream. It was painted in 1893, Munch died in ‘44, and the painting was stolen two years ago.

The painting portrays the angst that will be embedded in the psyche of American moonbats after this November’s election.

Good morning! Patterico previews the ABC TV movie The Path to 9-11 this morning, set to air this September:

The Clinton administration will likely go ballistic over this film. (Perhaps why ABC isn’t pushing it at as much as they should be??) It does not have a ”partisan” feel to it by any means. The Bush administration comes in for some criticism (Condi Rice in particular comes off rather poorly), but that is nothing compared to the depiction of Sandy Berger and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. I doubt that they will be able to show their faces in public after this (and also helps to explain why Berger was so eager to try and illegally remove classified documents from the archives before his Senate testimony on the 9/11 events). If Bill Clinton’s current purpose in life is solidify a positive ”legacy” for his time in office, this film has the potential to be his biggest hurdle to overcome yet.

The Clinton Administration is no more, and the PR apparatus in its place has nothing left to say. But Patterico points out that the flick is based on the 9-11 Commission’s report, and one wonders what our reviewer would say on a second glance at the film, but anything which comes from the MSM which at least seems not to present wholly view of the aforementioned PR apparatus is a step in the right direction.

The Yankees won this afternoon, the Sox lost, and the Yankees are now 10 up on Boston in the loss column. It really doesn’t matter at this point, and the Yanks derailed in the recent 5-game Boston Massacre and, more important, both Papi and Manny are hurt.

Manny’s a punk, but Ortiz is exciting. By all accounts, he’s a wonderful guy, as well, and he’ll be in the hospital until tomorrow while they chech his heart.

I have some problems over at Rathergate, trolls, and it’s more difficult to deal with than I had previously thought. But I can handle that one. I’ve a last resort thing, but that won’t be much trouble if it comes to it. A little extra work.

Two peas in a pod? The Center Daily Times tells us that Pennsylvania Republican Senators Rick Santorum and Arlen Specter toured Centre County’s Grange Fair together Tuesday, but Howard Mortman of New Media Strategies notices in the piece that Senator Specter is still the same man governed by Scottish Law, and he and Senator Rick are still worlds apart.

Read More…
(more…)

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, hawing a Bush-bashing novel he’s written with the derelict David Corn of The Nation, told the world earlier this week the that anti-war former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the person Joe Wilson was looking to frog-march, the man who had leaked the name of super-secret spy agent Plame, Valerie Plame, to columnist Bob Novak. Wilson had frothed that Karl Rove had leaked Plame’s name to defame him for attacking the President about Niger/Yellowcake/etc. Really, according to Isikoff, it was Armitage dropping the name because that’s the sort of thing he does. Nothing sinister.

But we all knew this. And Isikoff still has the Koran-flushing fiction for which he has never personally apologized, so we can take his word for what it’s worth.

CNN has independently verified Armitage’s culpability from “two sources familiar with Armitage’s role.”

Read More…
(more…)

Well, I watched all the Sunday Morning Talk Shows. I heard plenty of debate on how well we were or were not for the imminent onslaught of Category 5 Hurricane Ernesto on the battered Gulf Coast. It was a sure thing. Was Bush ready this time, a year later, for another killer storm?

From a South African news outlet comes this story, in which a Key Largo bar patron observes of Hurricane Ernesto, which has touched down there: “I’ve seen much worse rainstorms in New York.”

Al Gore. Global warming. Killer Hurricanes. Huh?

Don Rumsfeld spoke to the VFW yesterday and to the American Legion today, and Adademic Elephant, the most solid Rumsfeldian at RedState, has a a brilliant overview.

And, while we’re at it, former Senator Max Cleland (D-Georgia), a Vietnam veteran and military amputee, is being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Why? The war in Iraq. No kidding.

That stunt is very low. It’s slap directly across the faces of his fellow veterans.

Redemption for Bill Clinton, courtesy of his friends at the New York Times. You see, the greatest President since JFK is atoning for the Rwandan “genocide he regrets he didn’t try to stop as president.”

He’s helped to renovate a rural hospital in Rwanda, and he touches “the outstretched hands of children alive because of the AIDS medicines his foundation donated.”

He mouths the words that the “United States just blew it in Rwanda,” during the 1994 Genocide when Clinton did nothing. He has clearly not accepted the personal guilt the paper asserts has has, but at least he knows that his underlings blew it for him.

But on this trip, Mr. Clinton seemed anything but a man tormented by guilt. Rather, he reveled in his role as a private citizen championing people with AIDS.

George Bush has done more to fight AIDS in Africa than any other person in history, but the paper argues that the ” debate over whether Mr. Clinton missed a political opportunity to lead the charge on global AIDS years before Mr. Bush seized it is far from over.” Perhaps the debate is still raging amongst the Times’, but in the real world, it never was a debate. Clinton did nothing, President Bush is treating it like a problem that the United States should help solve.

Clinton, they conclude, is thinking big: a hero, indeed, of our age. I detect pain in their little paean.

ranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — “ding dong” — has challenged President Bush to a debate:

“I suggest holding a live TV debate with Mr. George W. Bush to talk about world affairs and the ways to solve those issues,” he said.

The French would love that one.

We don’t know whether Jefferson Parish, LA, boss Aaron Broussard’s challenge on MTP last year to debate anyone is still open:

If somebody wants me to debate them on national TV, hey, buddy, be my guest. Make my day. Put me at a podium when I got a full night’s sleep and you will not like matching me against anybody that you want. That person is going to be in trouble.

What do you think, the weepy Broussard vrs. the bufoonish Ahmadinejad? It might be fun, put it opposite the new Monday Night Football.

Not much.

Lynn Swann is within 4.9% of Ed Rendell in the latest Zogby.

On another note, the Reverand Jackson met with some exiled Hamas dude, Khaled Meshaal, “is hoping to use respect he has gained in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East to succeed where others have failed.”

It’s unclear at what he is trying to succeed and where others have failed, but he is talking about a prisoner swap. I’m not sure why or what good he thanks that would do, but Jesse Jackson loves the cameras.

TV Guide.com hast published the transcript of their Stephen Battaglio’s interview with FNC’s Shepard Smith on the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

TVGuide.com: Did you think some people took your outrage as a political statement?

Smith: Of course. They always do. There is a certain percentage of the population who always sees the news through their own ideological prism. The more dramatic a story is, the larger degree to which they become angry. I see our role as guardian of the public trust and watchdog of the people. And at times when the people don’t have a voice and only we as messengers can hear a voice, we need to deliver their message. The message was not something quiet where residents come up to you and put a hand on your shoulder and say please tell the following story. They were screaming. They were crying. They needed insulin. They needed baby formula. And they were out of their minds. For me to deliver that story in a way [in which] you would deliver stock quotes would have been wrong. There came a time when the people’s anger had to be told…. The level of trauma is something most people don’t understand.

Guardian of the public trust and watchdog of the people? There was a day, perhaps, but many news people have betrayed that trust and Photoshopped the facts.

If Smith is trying to restore something, great.

Jellyroll Morton should have recorded this song. I’ve got the broadband blues, waiting for the cable to get with it.

AOL dialup is… something else.

Mike “Flush the Korans!” Isikoff of the infotainment mag Newsweek and crackpot David Corn of The Nation, two noted anti-Bushies, have teamed up to pen a book about this and that. Isikoff pens an advertisement for the book at the mag’s web site.

In it, Isikoff reveals that the person who revealed Valerie Plame’s name to reporter Bob Novak, the man whom Joe Wilson supposedly wants to frogmarch, is none other than anti-war former State Department No. 2 Dick Armitage. Ta-da. It’s not Karl Rove, not Scooter Libby, not Dick Cheney. I

t’s Dick Armitage.

We’ve pretty much “known” this for a long time, and so, Isikoff reports, has Patrick Fitzgerald. But why didn’t Colin Powell’s State Department tell the White House of Armitage’s culpability?

No culpability is admitted by Isikoff, and this tale can be believed only as far as we can throw it because it is reported by someone with little care for veracity, but he offers this:

The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

But this, of course, is an accusation: That the Bushies wanted to smear Joe Wilson rather than prove that he was not credible.

Isikoff is going to go down fighting on this one; after all, he has a book to sell.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett has decided Commonwealth candidates for public office need no longer swear not to be “subversives.”

The 1951 law describes as subversive anyone who advocates or takes part in “any act intended to overthrow, destroy (or) alter” the government.

The idea is that they’re allowed no to say that they want to destroy the government if they haven’t yet acted on their whim.

Subversion sounds so nasty.

The day opened with news of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig having gained their freedom. Joe Biden admitted on FNS that Hamas really can’t be half bad after all. He’s a nut. He also wants to divide Iraq like the United States, turning the Sunnis into South Carolina. (Hey, he said it.)

Michelle Malkin, whom I do not mind linking at all, beautifully captures what happened.

I’m done.

The great one, Joe Biden, was Chris Wallace’s guest on FNS this morning, and this interview might become famouse because of Biden’s boast that he could win in the South because Delaware, his home State, was a slave State.

That’s Biden.

Here, below the fold, are my shows notes for more of the uneven lunancy:

(more…)

Sunday, August 27, 2006.

On MTP, Hizzoner Ray Nagin explained that he was just comparing sites which took time to develop. When he said “hole in the ground,” he meant: “an undeveloped site as yet.” FEMA Director David Paulison explained that his agency has no control of money it gives to victims after it has been given; Russert complained that victims were spending targeted relief money on soda pop and condoms.

On TW, Brownie said that it was all Chertoff’s fault and that his disaster consulting business was doing so well because he knows what works and what doesn’t. Mary Landrieu walked around New Orleans and neither cried nor threatened to assault the President of the United States. Gulf Coast Rebuilding coordinator Don Powell said that money had been allocated for Katrina relief, but that they were waiting for the bills.

On FNS, Joe Biden told Wallace that while he was sure that General Abizaid, who said last week that Iraq was “nowhere near” a civil war, had a pretty good idea how things were going in Iraq, Generals Casey and Chiarelli had told him that we’re all going to die. Biden said that he does not want to partition Iraq; rather, he said, he wants the Iraqi provinces to have the same rights and powers as does South Carolina.

On FTN, Bob Schieffer talked to Harry Smith in New Orleans, and Smith said that no one trusted the government and was on their own. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour then explained how, unlike what Harry had opined, it was not a per se economic class issue. Some wealthy homes by the beach were not able to rebuild while less well off neighborhoods a few blocks inlands were rebuilding apace. FEMA director Paulison addressed Smith’s snideness by saying that everyone should be responsible for themselves, but that FEMA was prepared to help.

On LE, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s translator was speaking into a tube, but the prime minister seemed to indicate that the Iraqis should be ready to take care of their own security within the next year.

Also of note, and not mentioned in the show-by-show review below, is that CBS News’ Harry Smith told FTN host Schieffer that a woman in St. Barnard’s Parish in New Orleans cried for 45 minutes about her home which had been damaged by an oil slick. They wouldn’t be able to build. Standing in the parish with George Stephanopoulos last week in a tape show on TW, Senator Mary Landrieu boasted about how St. Bernard’s Parish was the greatest example of the rebuilding effort. She spoke in glowing terms.

Mary Landrieu last year sat that the President was “out of touch.” Go figure. (She says that the Bushies are still out of touch. Gulf Coast Rebuilding coordinator Don Powell displayed that this was a fraudulent supposition on FOX News Sunday this morning. Landrieu’s mind is lost on the Moon, and there is a slight pun there.)

The show-by-show review is up at RedState.com.

I’ve to do the Sunday Morning Talk Shows this AM, and that will be posted at RedState.com in several hours.

I’ll let you know when I’m done.