Even before the 2004 Election, people were asking "What happens to Blogs ForBush after the election?" I've left my intentions unknown to the masses for a long while, but today I'm ready to not only reveal the answer, but I'm ready to show you.

I am pleased to introduce you to Blogs For Victory.

Blogs For Victory will replace Blogs For Bush. Some of the more popular and blog entries have been copied over, should you want to continue the discussion there. Unfortunately, importing all the posts and comments proved to be too cumbersome.

And don't worry, Blogs For Bush won't be closing down. the archives will remain intact, but no future posts will be made here.

We hope you enjoy our new home.

Good job for the King of Spain:

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - The king of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to "shut up" Saturday during a heated exchange at a summit of leaders from Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Chavez, who called President Bush the "devil" on the floor of the United Nations last year, triggered the exchange by repeatedly referring to former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar as a "fascist."

Aznar, a conservative who was an ally of Bush as prime minister, "is a fascist," Chavez said in a speech at the Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. "Fascists are not human. A snake is more human."

Spain's current socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, responded during his own allotted time by urging Chavez to be more diplomatic in his words and respect other leaders despite political differences.

"Former President Aznar was democratically elected by the Spanish people and was a legitimate representative of the Spanish people," he said, eliciting applause from the gathered heads of state.

Chavez repeatedly tried to interrupt, but his microphone was off.

Spanish King Juan Carlos, seated next to Zapatero, angrily turned to Chavez and said, "Why don't you shut up?"

Its good to be the King - you get to tell creepy thugs to shut up.

Looks like Democrats are trying to make waterboarding an issue in the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General. Democrats want him to condemn waterboarding as torture.

But, waterboarding is not torture, and I have no idea why Democrats want terrorists to be coddled, not interrogated.

A friend of mine who served in the U.S. Navy gave me some firsthand information about the experience of waterboarding.

I was waterboarded during SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) Training as a new Naval Aviator prior to reporting to my first squadron. The purpose of this training was to prepare naval aviators for what they may experience if captured during a time of war. This training was based on the experiences of Naval Aviators and others who had been prisoners during the Viet Nam War. Mr. Mukasey is correct in his assertion that stating what types of interrogation techniques we will or will not employ, allows the enemy to prepare for these interrogation during their training.

So, torture or not torture? He explained:

Waterboarding is hardly torture. It does not maim, cause permanent physical damage,or result in death. It merely simulates the sensation of drowning and having no control over your ability to end the encounter for very brief periods of time. Khalid Sheik Mohammed was subjected to this interrogation technique and was able to resist much longer than would have been expected from an individual who had not been trained to resist waterboarding. This is an indication that our enemies are being prepared for the possibility of being captured.

So, not only are Democrats insisting that we no longer use waterboarding as an interrogation technique with captured terrorists, they want Mukasey to spell out what kind of interrogation techniques we would use, which is useful information for terrorists in their training so they are prepared for such techniques in the event they are captured.

Whose side are the Democrats on anyway? They don't want us monitoring terrorist phone calls, they don't want to properly interrogate them, but they do want to inform terrorists of how we listen to them and what kind of interrogation techniques they should prepare for.

The FEC complaint is still working its way through the bureaucracy, but we've got yet another example of the fundamental dishonesty of Hillary Clinton:

The Iowa caucuses are known for their “living-room chats” where ordinary Iowans can meet candidates face-to-face and talk about what interests voters. When candidates have larger events or make major policy speeches, the crowds are bigger, but there is often still an opportunity for questions. But under the pressures of major media coverage, with polls narrowing in Iowa, campaigns can potentially control questions and coverage by planning questions ahead of time.

While no campaigns admit to this practice, at a recent Hillary Clinton campaign event in Newton, Iowa, some of the questions posed to the New York Senator were planned in advance, planting some audience members in the crowd.

I'm sure its happened before, I'm sure it will happen again - but Hillary, especially, is the candidate who is unwilling to get into an unexpected situation. She has a script, and she wants to stick to it. This is different from message discipline necessary to a successful campaign - this is attempting to manipulate the voters into supporting a candidate. She doesn't want to win the White House, she wants to obtain it - as it if were her right to be President.

In the illegal fundraising and in tactics like planting questions, Hillary is clearly showing that there is pretty much nothing she won't do to ensure the White House falls to her. Why? I don't know - but people who want power that badly are the very people who must be kept furthest from it.

None of the Democrat Senators running for President bothered to vote on the Mukasey nomination.

McCain didn't vote, but we can be pretty sure, would have voted for him - Obama, Clinton, Dodd and Biden? Just didn't want to be on record as opposing the man...

Cowards.

With each expansion of the nanny state, comes an equal and proportional contraction of our freedoms:

This latest issue of banning Christ for Christmas arose at the Plant City Living Center in Plant City in--where else--Florida. The system moved in on an 85-year-old identified only as Mrs. Arnold. Mrs. Arnold was told that “federal law now prohibits her from displaying anything that references religion--words, decorations and the like--in the common area of her apartment building, a soulless, politically-correct-strapped HUD “facility”.

According to the center, HUD has issued a directive banning “any religious symbols or religious words associated with Christmas”, which effectively prevents the Mrs. Arnolds of Small Town, America from placing a small Christmas tree outside their humble doors if it contains any religious symbols or words--"even an angel”, as AFA said in a special alert asking for emails.

Why are nameless, well-paid bureaucrats allowed so much latitude designing laws that cannot help but demoralize little people?

The building at the heart of this latest controversy has about 40 one-bedroom apartments for seniors who are at least 62 years old.

If the residents want to have a Christmas party in their community room, they cannot call it a Christmas party. “The Center says HUD directs residents not to use the word ‘Christmas’ but to use the word ‘holiday’,” the AFA advisory said.

Some ‘holiday’ when it’s not cheered by any of your own long-held traditions!

Ladies and gentlemen, the State, when held up as god, is a jealous god, and it shall have no other gods before it.

Not even the Real One.

I find it all the more oxymoronic that people on the left who call themselves Christians, are so willing to sell their religious freedom to embrace the false promises and sour milk that flow from the golden calf that is the government teat.

In the absence of the acceptance of God, man himself attempts to fill the void to become that which he rejects.

With predictably disastrous consequences, I might add.

And unfortunately, those who choose to ignore history are bound and determined to drag the rest of us along on their path toward its insidious repetition.

...of people who think that Joe Lieberman should be the GOP Vice Presidential candidate in 2008:

Peter Weher at NRO's The Corner, following on Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard.

Unless someone can find someone saying this prior to mid-2005, I think I was the first person to suggest that Lieberman is the ideal candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket in 2008 - though it might have to go through a name change on the party ID. In 1864, it was GOP Lincoln and Democrat Johnson, and I believe they called it a "Union" ticket.

The thing needed, right now, is national unity. The divisions in our nation only help our enemies, and we must show the world that the anti-war left is a marginal political ideology. Having a GOP/Democrat national unity ticket in 2008 is the best means of demonstrating that as far as the war goes, America is united in its quest for victory.

Yep:

In the weeks and months after September 11, Democrats and Republicans put aside our partisan divisions and stood united as Americans. As late as October 2002, a Democratic-controlled Senate voted by a wide bipartisan margin to authorize President Bush to use military force against Saddam Hussein.

As the Iraq war became bogged down in a long and costly insurgency, however, and as President Bush’s approval ratings slipped, Democrats moved in a very different direction—first in the presidential campaign of 2004, where antiwar forces played a decisive role in the Democratic primaries. As you may recall, they also prevailed in Connecticut’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary last year.

Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there.

Part of the explanation for this, I think, comes back to ideology. For all of our efforts in the 1990s to rehabilitate a strong Democratic foreign policy tradition, anti-war sentiment remains the dominant galvanizing force among a significant segment of the Democratic base.

But another reason for the Democratic flip-flop on foreign policy over the past few years is less substantive. For many Democrats, the guiding conviction in foreign policy isn’t pacifism or isolationism—it is distrust and disdain of Republicans in general, and President Bush in particular.

Really, that is all there is - no rationality, no convincing alternative policy...just a hatred of a party in general and a man in particular. So ingrained is this hatred that there was actually a proposal to impeach Vice President Cheney this week...which, if you are a lunatic Bush-hater, would be the first step on the path to impeaching President Bush, 'cause you don't want to remove Bush and get stuck with the even more evil Cheney, right?

  Continue reading "Joe Lieberman on the Democrats"

53-40...which means that (a) I'll bet the Donks running for President made themselves scarce and (b) that 40 Senators are so blinded by Bush hatred that they were willing to deny the United States an Attorney General during the middle of a war even though the AG, by nature of the time frame of his appointment, will be no more than a caretaker until the next Administration comes in.

Geesh!

Just welcoming into the world the new blog out of Nevada, Desert Conservative. Check out the new kid on the block.

"So whadda we got? A cuisinart?"

Gas prices are hitting $3.19 per gallon around these parts right now.

The "peak driving season," known for its relationship to high gas prices, is long past.

Yet oil is not only flirting with $100 per barrel prices, it's practically got its hand up her skirt, and its ever-skyrocketing prices will inevitably tank our economy.

China, in its booming economy, is poised to overtake the United States as the world's largest consumer of energy, by 2010, to be exact.

How is China handling its energy needs?

  Continue reading "Dark Helmet can teach us a lot about U.S. energy policy"

It doesn't get any more obvious than this....

The Houes passed a scaled down gay rights bill yesterday - angering some gay rights activists because it fails to take into consideration a person's "gender identity". The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, and a certain Presidential veto if it manages to get out of the Senate, so the particular bill is a moot point. But there may be a Democratic President joined to a Democratic Congress in January of 2009, and so this bill may eventually see the light of day.

This term "gender identity" is ill-defined, but what it appears to be is when a person "feels" they are female, we have to respect it. Whatever the heck all that means - as one person pointed out, its a trial lawyer's dream of a law...

Outside of that, just what really constitutes "homophobia"? The word is tossed around with wild abandon on the left, but is there an actual definition of it? Strictly speaking, the word means "fear of (gay) man". The word, of course, was invented as an excellent means of silencing debate on gay rights - if you don't agree, you are "homophobic", and that sounds really, really bad...especially in brainless, MSM reports. But I think that if we are to work to ban homophobia, then it should be understood just what we are banning.

And therein lies the trouble - the advocates of laws banning homophobia won't tell us what is being banned - thus leaving open the prospect that the principle of an Evangelical school could be fined or jailed for failing to hire a cross-dresser...or a priest indicted because he states that homosexual sex is "inherently disordered", as stated by the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We're in a very tricky business when we seek to ban speech - and if we are in any way to seek restrictions on what people say, then we should have to very carefully say just what it is we're banning - and until the gay rights activists give us exact definitions of what they want stopped, then we'll have to just be in blanket opposition to all their anti-discrimination proposals.

What do you think?

Michael Yon's lastest from Iraq:

A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from “Chosen” Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope.

The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ” Thank you, thank you,” the people were saying. One man said, “Thank you for peace.” Another man, a Muslim, said “All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.” The men and women were holding bells, and for the first time in memory freedom rang over the ravaged land between two rivers.

Always good to keep in mind that the people of Iraq are, well, people...they are not the amoral ciphers our leftists believe when they say we can't bring democracy or that they have been fighting for ages and will never stop. People in Iraq are winning the campaign in Iraq...

From the founder of The Weather Channel:

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create in allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild “scientific” scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens. Only one reporter at ABC has been allowed to counter the Global Warming frenzy with one 15 minutes documentary segment.

Wow. That's harsh.

Thing is, we know that data can be manipulated...wonder what a genuinely independent audit of all this would bring up?

Interesting look at GOP election prospects for next year by Jim Geraghty over at NRO. I'm not about to get that positive about things, but there are some real reasons for the GOP to feel energised going into 2008.

Chronic homelessness has declined.

Productivity is way up.

The President of France has nice things to say about us.

SDI is becoming ever more effective.

A school opens in Iraq where terrorists used to rule.

What a miserable failure of a President.

I was talking to the Mrs yesterday (I do that from time to time, ya know?) and she pointed something out to me - Obama is everywhere on daytime TV. The Mrs watches, when she can, Oprah and Ellen and all of the daytime programming so tailor-made for adult, female viewers. She says you can hardly turn on the TV these days without seeing Obama - and she also points out that Obama seems a very nice man.

This could spell some rather large trouble for Hillary.

Why? Because Hillary's whole campaign is based upon an alleged appeal to women - women will carry her to the nomination, and women will then carry her to the White House (some Democratic pundits are claiming that huge numbers of GOP women will vote for Hillary just for the chance to vote for a woman - a monstrous insult to all women, but Democrats do have a lot of contempt for the special interest groups they claim to serve). Obama's natural constituency, of course, would be black Americans - but there aren't a lot of black Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire. So, if Obama wants to do anything at all, he simply must eat into Hillary's prime constituency - and getting on daytime television and being a nice guy is an excellent way to get started.

Never underestimate the power of just being likable. Hillary's likability fluctuates on the scale between that of a tarantula and a dead cat - Obama's seems to be on the level of a new puppy. Obama may very well be building a reservoir of good will among the very constituency most vital to Hillary and most likely to actually vote in Iowa and New Hampshire (if you've got time to watch Oprah during the day, then you've likely got time to go vote, too). Hillary might find herself thinking of redecorating the White House, and then suddenly find herself barely coming in first in Iowa...and coming in second in New Hampshire. Really, it may all come down to whether or not Obama is also building the ground game necessary to get well-disposed voters to the polls...and he may well end up destroying the myth of Clinton invincibility. After that, it would be anyone's guess what would happen.

Given the hand wringing of some FSO's over the prospect of being required to do their job, an FSO in Iraq offers some advice:

I just finished reading a news article discussing some of my FSO colleagues' vehement and emotional response to the idea that a few of us might have directed assignments in Iraq . To my vexed and overwrought colleagues, I say take a deep breath and calm down. I have been here for a while now, and you may have been misinformed about life at a PRT.

I personally dislike the whole idea of forced assignments, but we do have to do our jobs. We signed up to be worldwide available. All of us volunteered for this kind of work and we have enjoyed a pretty sweet lifestyle most of our careers.

I will not repeat what the Marines say when I bring up this subject. I tell them that most FSOs are not wimps and weenies. I will not share this article with them and I hope they do not see it. How could I explain this wailing and gnashing of teeth? I just tried to explain it to one of my PRT members, a reserve LtCol called up to serve in Iraq . She asked me if all FSOs would get the R&R, extra pay etc. and if it was our job to do things like this. When I answered in the affirmative, she just rolled her eyes.

Calling Iraq a death sentence is just way over the top. I volunteered to come here aware of the risks but confident that I will come safely home, as do the vast majority of soldiers and Marines, who have a lot riskier jobs than we FSOs do.

I wrote a post a couple days ago where I said that perhaps everyone's talents are not best employed in Iraq . That is still true. But I find the sentiments expressed by some at the town hall meeting deeply offensive. What are they implying about me and my choice? And what do they say to our colleagues in the military, who left friends and family to come here and do their jobs? As diplomats, part of our work is to foster peace and understanding. We cannot always be assured that we will serve only in places where peace and understanding are already safely established.

In my view, nothing so clearly illustrates the State Department's institutional opposition to American policy as the refusal of FSO's to serve in Iraq - these are men and women who volunteered for this line of work and their job is to serve at the direction of the President and the Secretary of State. If they don't like it, they are free to pursue other career options.

If we Republicans retain the White House next year, job one will be to clear out of the Executive branch all of those bureaucrats who think they have a say in policy making. Some of these people seem to think that they are other than creatures of the executive power of the Presidency of the United States of America. The President is elected to set executive policy - bureaucrats are hired to carry it out, and if they don't like the policy, resignation is the only honorable course of action.

Now, we need good FSO's, just as we need good people at all levels of government - and good people are people who will speak up when they think something is wrong and who will vigorously advise their elected superiors of their views - but good people are also people who know their place in the grand, constitutional scheme of things and that means that their dissent ends at the office door, unless they are permanently on their way out of it.

John Kerry is claiming that he now has the ammunition to send the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth running "with their tails between their legs" next time he runs for President.

Read about it at The Ice Palace!

The Terrorist News Network, that is...

Violence in Iraq has seen its lowest point since near the start of the war. Stories available on the internet are legion regarding the dramatic decrease in both U.S. and Iraqi civilian deaths in the past two- to three-months. Al Qaeda in Iraq is all but defeated, and locals are turning on them like a pit bull on a burglar that's run out of treats.

So what does CNN lead off with in its top of the hour radio newscast and on its website?

2007 now the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Iraq

Leave it to the good folks at CNN TNN to find a speck of feces in a mountain of roses.

I guess, to them, extremism in the pursuit of an agenda is no vice, extremism in the pursuit of truth, no virtue.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Just wanted to let everyone know, since Leo beat me to the punch, that this one counts as "What Media Bias? Part 106"

Looks like Kucinich's political stunt didn't exactly win the hearts of other Democrats... but now they're stuck wit it.

House Republicans on Tuesday prevented Democratic leaders from blocking a resolution to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney.

The vote to table the privileged resolution, offered by Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinch, began as a largely party-line vote to kill the measure, but Republicans developed a strategy to force Democrats to debate the resolution by supporting Kucinich. GOP leaders felt as though it was in their interest to debate the measure because it would make Democrats look bad.

After more than an hour of waiting for the vote to close, the motion to table the resolution failed by a vote of 162-251 after Democratic leaders failed to convince a group of liberal caucus members to side with them.

Republican lawmakers and aides credited Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) for coming up with the idea.

So, which side is Hillary on again?

So, today as I was reading through this post, I discovered a lengthy anti-Bush comment preceded by the following taunt:

I don't think you have the b***s to allow this post to the blog. Let's see.

Well, guess what? The comment was published... But I've taken it down. Not because of what the comment said -- it wasn't particularly intelligent -- but because comments that imply that we (a) censor comments based on ideology and/or (b) don't have enough confidence in our positions to handle opposing views are immediately nixed regardless of what they say.

Why? Because look around. Read the comment thread in any post. There is an abundance of opposing views present in the comment threads, and I am beyond insulted at any insinuation that comments are screened or censored by ideology. I'm sick of it. And I'm sick of people who pretend like the only way they can get their comments published is with these phony challenges. Further, I'm not going to empower any pompous liberal commenter by giving him/her reason to believe that I've been shamed into letting their comment be published. Not a chance.

I've said it plenty of times before, if you want to guarantee that your comment will not be published or deleted, then go ahead and accuse of censoring and of being too afraid to publish a particular comment. It's only your time that is being wasted. If you want to contribute to the conversation, get off your high horse and give us your opinion, not your ego.

Over the past few years, I've received plenty of complaints from readers who have been fed up with loony liberals who don't contribute to the conversation in the comment threads. I've considered it a source of pride that, unlike liberal blog communities, we allow opposing views in our comment threads. If some unintelligent egotistic liberal wants to pretend that B4B censors, then that person doesn't deserve to have their comments published. Plain and simple.

UPDATE: Looking further, I discover that the same person who made the comment cited above has been posting on B4B since mid October. Every single comment made was published.

Surely an uphill climb:

Abu Dhabi, Nov. 5, 2007 (CWNews.com) - A visit to the Vatican by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah should lead to greater religious freedom for Christians in that country, according to the Catholic vicar for Arabia and Yemen.

"I am not expecting to be able to build a cathedral. But at least (we need) the freedom to worship in security," Bishop Paul Hinder told the Reuters news service.

In an interview on the day before King Abdullah's meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, Bishop Hinder said that he hopes for "more security and freedom" for Christians in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi government currently forbids the public practice of all faiths other than Islam. Christians living there must worship secretly, and are subject to expulsion or imprisonment if religious activities are detected.

Bishop Hinder, a Swiss-born Capuchin, does not live in Saudi Arabia, but works from an office in Abu Dhabi. His sprawling ecclesiastical jurisdiction covers over 1.2 million square miles, populated by nearly 48 million people. But Catholics form only a small minority: about 1.2 million, most of them foreign workers employed by Saudi firms.

I was rather flabbergasted to learn a couple months back that there are Catholics in Mecca - a priest we have visitng who used to say Mass in the Arabian penninsula assured me that there is, indeed, a Christian presence in Mecca. Its not easy, to say the least, but they are there - though they cannot participate in religious services in Mecca; likely because it is just too dangerous. Mostly, the Christians in the area go elsewhere for services - though they keep in touch with the larger Christian world via radio broadcasts. I never got around to asking if any of my Evangelical brothers and sisters have representation in Mecca, but given the determination I see in their missionary work, I wouldn' t be surprised to find some of them there, too.

This good priest also says there is a large and vibrant Christian community outside of the Saudi Arabian part of the Arabian Penninsula. While they don't exactly have complete religious liberty, no real difficulty is placed in the way of holding Christian religious services.

There are, in my view, two keys to winning the War on Terrorism. The first is that at least a plurality of the Arab/Moslems peoples start to live under democratic government - this will provide the hope and prosperity which will undercut the pull of Islamist propaganda. The second is religious liberty - unless and until the Moslem authorities permit the free expression of non-Moslem spirituality in the Moslem world, all attempts at reconciliation and integration of Moslems into the larger world will fail. The Christians of the world are commanded to be patient, but it will be hard to be forever patient if, say, the persecution of Christians continues in Moslem areas (most notably in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia - but, as an aside, let me also put in a word about Hindu persecution of Christians in India; it does happen, it is a growing problem, and it must not be ignored no matter how much we otherwise have in common with the free people of India).

Only time will tell how this will come out, but meetings between Christian and Moslem leaders are the good first step.