Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough has some great advice for congressional Democrats that they’ll naturally prove too… well, Democrat to heed.

According to Mr. Scarborough, the Democrats are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Freelance Journalist Michael Yon, who has gone into harm’s way in Iraq to bring us the real deal rather than the spun, twisted and sanitized left wing, Bush hating, politics-over-truth, shameless Mainstream Media’s version of events, while showing the compassionate humanity of the American soldier that the liberal media blatantly ignores, is one of the finalists for Time Magazine’s Photo of the Year for his emotion-inspiring photo of an American officer, Major Beiger, comforting the fatally wounded little Iraqi girl named Farah after a terrorist blew himself up in a crowd of children.

Read about the voting for photo of the year, view the pics and then vote, from here, at Michael Yon’s Online Magazine.

Mark Steyn has written another of his usual great reads, this one on anti-Israeli Iranian madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the suicidal diplomacy he enjoys from the fucking idiots fine folks at the U.N. and in our own State Department.

“Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces,” Ahmadinejad told Iranian TV viewers. “Although we don’t accept this claim, if we suppose it is true,” he added sportingly, “if European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II, why don’t they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe? Germany and Austria can provide the regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will be resolved. You offer part of Europe, and we will support it.”

Big of you. It’s the perfect solution to the “Middle East peace process”: out of sight, out of mind. And given that Ahmadinejad’s out of his mind, we’re already halfway there.

So let’s see: We have a Holocaust denier who wants to relocate an entire nation to another continent, and he happens to be head of the world’s newest nuclear state. (They’re not 100 percent fully-fledged operational, but happily for them they can drag out the pseudo-negotiations with the European Union until they are. And Washington certainly won’t do anything, because after all if we’re not 100 percent certain they’ve got WMD — which we won’t be until there’s a big smoking crater live on CNN one afternoon — it would be just another Bushitlerburton lie to get us into another war for oil, right?)

Read the entire column here.

If this is true, it could be good news for those of us wishing to buy a house as a home rather than as an investment.

Sales of new homes jumped to an all-time high in October in what could be a final spurt from a housing market that is expected to slow after five record-breaking years.
The Commerce Department report released Tuesday showed sales of new single-family homes climbed to a record annual rate of 1.42 million units last month. The 13 percent increase from September was the largest percentage gain in more than 12 years.

Analysts said the unexpected surge was probably influenced by fence-sitters rushing to buy homes before mortgage rates climb higher.

“The housing market is peaking despite what today’s data suggest,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

He said part of the rise in October could have occurred because worried builders have started cutting prices and offering other incentives to move unsold homes.

Home values are not a tangible phenomenon, nor is there any precise formula that can be applied to them. They are a product of the marketplace and therefore completely reliant on the good old concept of supply and demand.

When there is a strong demand, everybody on the selling end cashes in; Realtors make more money on their average 6% fees, sellers make a bundle in profits based on their initial investments in the properties and on the buyers’ end, banks make the money by raising mortgage rates to take advantage of the demand — in a manner of speaking, they are the pilot fish of the transaction, though their necessary function brings them a much better return than that enjoyed by their cousins whose only satisfaction is that of a job well done in the cleaning of a shark’s teeth.

When the price of a house becomes prohibitive to all but a few and the cost of borrowing the money to buy increases along with it, the “buy as an investment” crowd becomes cautious because they see their potential for earning a substantial “hold on to it while prices go up, then sell it” profit margin begin to dwindle.

That’s pretty much what’s happening now, so,

Economists believe the momentum so far this year will result in a fifth year of record sales for both new and existing homes in 2005, but they forecast sales declines in 2006 as potential buyers react to sustained increases in mortgage rates.

Rates for 30-year mortgages have been above 6 percent for seven consecutive weeks and economists are predicting they will rise even higher in coming months as the Federal Reserve keeps raising rates to combat inflation pressures.

Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight, a private research firm, predicted that sales of both new and existing homes would drop by around 10 percent next year.

“We are not expecting a crash or anything dramatic but a slowdown from the sizzling numbers that we have been seeing,” he said.

On the other hand,

The concern of some economists is that the booming housing market could have a bigger downturn similar to the bursting of the stock market bubble in early 2000.

The worry is that activity in recent years has been pumped up by investors buying homes and condominiums in hopes of quick gains. If they suddenly decide to dump those properties, it could cause a glut on the market that would further depress prices.

What is indicated here, if the “experts” are correct, is that the seller’s market that now dominates the real estate industry in most of the United States is about to become a buyer’s market, which will move home buying out of the short to midterm investor’s court and into that of the “common man.”

It is 4:17 on a partly cloudy, thirty two degree morning here in Charlotte, North Carolina and I have just been assured by the third technical support weenie I’ve talked to in the last 14 hours that my Internet access from the hotel in which I’m presently ensconced is now in good working order.

According to said representative of the outsourced contractor, the problem had something to do with an online “disclaimer” of some sort that is not made available to individual recipients of the service to access and diddle with, and he said he accessed and diddled with it{my terms, not his}, setting it so that I would have no further trouble for the duration of my thirty day stay here at the Staybridge Suites “by Holiday Inn.”

That is, he said, and I quote, “I have set it up so you will have no problems with your Internet access for the next thirty days.”

As I said in my reply in the last thread to a comment by Michael, “Once in a blue moon, you get the 1% of tech support people who hasn’t yet moved on to a job that pays more than coolie wages, and the problem is solved, more often from their end than not.”

I can but hope that the above mentioned master of tech support is indeed in that 1%, and not just another professore of the brush-off as are most of his esteemed colleagues.

The proof, as they say, will be in the proverbial “pudding”.

The hotel I am presently staying at in Charlotte, NC is having a “jump” problem with their ISP, and having just lost a lengthy post as a result, I will be temporarily refraining from blogging while Level 2 technicians at the outsourced(as usual) Internet service company attempt to correct the problem.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, an Op-Ed by U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Robert Kimmitt gives a solid, well defined analysis of the state of the Iraqi economy today with a forecast for the future.

Only a year-and-a-half after regaining its full sovereignty, Iraq is laying the groundwork for a self-sustaining, market-based economy which can serve as an engine of growth for that nation and for the broader Middle East. While the world’s attention has been focused on security and political developments, Iraqi authorities have been working steadily to reverse decades of economic decline — which under Saddam Hussein was marked by triple-digit inflation, crushing debt and rising poverty. And as President Bush made clear Wednesday, we have a strong stake in helping the Iraqi people succeed in achieving their economic potential.

Liberals, ignore it as usual, there’s nothing in there that attacks the Bush Administration. Right thinkers and other open minded readers, read the rest of the article here.

A Manhattan judge ruled that the searching of bags on subways is constitutional.

But of course,

The NYCLU said it will appeal Berman’s 41-page ruling.

“The NYPD’s unprecedented program of searching hundreds of thousands of innocent people using the New York City subway system violates one of our most basic freedoms,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman.

Donna Lieberman and the rest of the ACLU club simply must do their share when it comes to endangering a large number of American lives by making us as vulnerable as possible to terrorist attack — through the aiding and abetting of chaos, they aspire to undermine the faith of the people in our government.

These, along with undermining religion and disarming the people, are the textbook tactics of communist revolutionaries.

Whereas the pinkos people of San Francisco have no use for the same military that ensures their freedom to verbally trash the government express their political opinions freely to the point of disallowing anyone from the U.S. Armed Forces to address students in their high schools, other schools, three thousand miles away, welcome our military.

High School ROTC programs in Maryland are enjoying strong enrollment numbers, according to a Washington Times report, nationwide programs having doubled in the last five years.

SNOW HILL, Md. (AP) — More students at Eastern Shore high schools are joining the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, part of a national rise in popularity that has some high schools reporting up to a fourth are enrolled in the program.
JROTC programs numbered 3,184 last year nationwide, up from 1,493 in 1990. Last year, more than 500,000 students in the United States were JROTC cadets.

From Lt. Col. Ron Harrington, USMC (Ret), at Snow Hill High School on Eastern Shores and Capt. Warren Harris, Army, at Crisfield High School,

Col. Harrington called the JROTC program a positive experience for the students, who are not required to join the military as adults.
“What I like to say is that we don’t teach the Marine Corps, we teach Marine Corps values,”{emphasis mine} he told the Salisbury Daily Times.
On the Eastern Shore, schools from Wicomico High School to Crisfield High School all have programs in place with solid followings.
Capt. Warren Harris, an instructor for Crisfield’s Army JROTC program, said about 70 students usually sign up for classes each year.
“Last year we had about 78 students enrolled, and being a small school, that makes about 20 [percent] to 25 percent of the school’s population,” he said.

This is a good sign, in my opinion, that despite efforts by the left to indoctrinate public school students to despise their country and its military, much of our youth is demonstrating through action that their own feelings are those of patriotic Americans wherein the anti-American dogmas of the liberal are of little or no import.

It’s too bad that the majority of San Francisco parents and teachers choose to raise and indoctrinate the next generation of Murthas, Deans, Kerrys, Durbins, Pelosis, Teddy Ks and other left wing elements to continue their work of undermining the United States and all that America stands for, and to form the next wave of the liberal assault on our country’s ability to defend itself.

One of the things our Bush bashing liberals and U.N. officials seem oblivious to, and I hope that’s the case because if not, their hatred of the President far outweighs their will to survive, is the probability that terrorists will eventually possess, if they do not now, portable weapons of mass destruction{WMDs}, and will attempt to use them here in the United States and in other countries Islamofascism considers their enemy.

According to Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer,

We have to face up to the fact that terrorists are actively endeavouring to try to get access to, in particular, chemical and chemical, biological and radiological weapons, the easiest of which would be radiological weapons. They could create what is sometimes called a “dirty bomb” very easily with conventional explosives around some nuclear material, which wouldn’t create a nuclear explosion but would disperse radioactive material.

And we have to face up to the fact that terrorists are actively trying to obtain these weapon systems. And in South East Asia there may be a real sense of urgency in a country like Indonesia, of course.

But when you get to the United Nations in New York, it has to be said that there are quite a number of members there who don’t see the urgency of addressing these issues, which I believe there should be.

It seems that it’s always the so-called intellectuals of the left who reason that if we “make nice,” and attempt to negotiate peace with terrorists like the ones who shattered our world on 11 September 2001 rather than waging war against them, they would convey their best wishes and leave us alone.

Thank God there are more people around who focus on reality rather than the Utopian pipe dreams of these “elite thinkers.”

If we believe the tragedy that occurred on 9/11 was horrible, imagine how we would view the setting off of a suitcase nuke in midtown Manhattan, the Loop in Chicago, downtown Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. in the middle of a business day. The death toll would make that of the World Trade Center appear picayune by comparison, easily into seven digit figures, laying waste an entire metropolitan area and spreading severe, lethal radiation into the suburbs.

It is speculated that after the break-up of the Soviet Union, a number of so-called “suitcase nukes” went missing.

In late September, Alexander Lebed, Russia’s former chief of national security, repeated his assertion, first made earlier in the month, that Russia may have ‘lost’ up to 100 1-kiloton ’suitcase-sized’ nuclear bombs. Speaking in Tokyo on 22 September, Lebed said that despite unequivocal denials of his claim by the authorities, “the problem still exists.” “Unfortunately,” he added, “some people chose to protect their name or laugh off the issue.” He repeated his view of the gravity of the situation: “These are ideal weapons to conduct nuclear terrorism… We must seriously look for them or else humankind cannot rest in peace.”

In his book Al Qaeda, Brotherhood of Terror, former F.B.I. consultant on international terrorism Paul L. Williams contends that Osama bin Laden purchased as many as twenty suitcase nukes from former KGB agents.

While various former Soviet officials deny that such nukes were ever produced by the U.S.S.R., others point out that such denials are to be expected under the heading of CYA, and still others, like Lebed, give evidence that these compact WMDs were indeed built, for intended use by Spetznaz{Soviet Special Forces} units.

Naturally, our ever optimistic liberal airheads intellectuals will insist that such terrible things as suitcase nukes couldn’t possibly be out there in the hands of terrorists, because after all, only responsible men and women would have had access to them — had they existed at all.

Yet it is fact that on the U.S.S.R.’s dissolution, a number of their military officials absconded with a wide variety of weaponry and sold it on the international black market as a way of generating investment capital, to ensure future personal financial security in an environment turned capitalist.

Would unscrupulous former members of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti have been any different if they had access to these nukes?

A book I would highly recommend to put this issue into perspective is Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe by Graham Allison.

By continuing to prosecute the Global War On Terror as aggressively as we are{and do your reading, there were negotiations between Iraq and Russian nuclear personnel in the years prior to the downfall of Saddam Hussein!}, we reduce the odds that a nuclear catastrophe will occur here in the United States or in other western countries. If an al-Qaeda member has no compunction about detonating himself with conventional explosives to kill a handful of American soldiers or crash an airplane into a building to kill a few thousand, it’s a given that he’ll simply love the idea of sacrificing his life to murder a million of us.

Liberals, wake up!