Yes, we can see that ceding Gaza to the Palestinians is paying some real dividends.

Palestinian terrorists in Gaza have fired an almost daily portion of Kassam rockets towards Israel over the past two weeks, and yesterday’s serving included a rocket that landed in the southern areas of Ashkelon. Defense Minister Sha’ul Mofaz convened a meeting of senior defense establishment figures, and demanded that the army continue to fire artillery at northern Gaza as a deterrence measure.

And now it looks like some Israeli politicians are borrowing a chapter from the American Democratic Party, the chapter titled, “Politics Before Country.”

Mofaz was running for head of the Likud until last week, when he suddenly decided to transfer to Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party, where he is guaranteed a Knesset seat and, most likely, a Cabinet position. In light of what many viewed as his unabashed opportunism, many questions were raised as to his fitness to make life-and-death decisions in the capacity of Defense Minister.

I know I’m going to hate to see where this all ends…

Senator John McCain(R/D Arizona) is getting quite a bit of exercise, standing at center aisle and leaping from foot to foot, left side to right side, doing his almighty best to please both Democrats and Republicans. Boy, he really wants to be elected President.

In the end, of course, he’ll find very few takers on either side.

Sen. John McCain disappointed Democrats on Capitol Hill on Sunday by defending the Bush administration’s decision to use the National Security Agency to monitor a limited number of domestic phone calls in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Here’s the article.

Here’s the latest column from Mark Steyn, right-thinking master wordsmith, titled Iraq Vote Leaves Dems Looking Like Losers.

One day Iraq will be a G7 member hosting the Olympics in the world’s No. 1 luxury vacation resort of Fallujah, and the Defeaticrat Party will still be running around screaming it’s a quagmire. It’s not just that Iraq is going better than expected, but that it’s a huge success that’s being very deftly managed: The timeframe imposed on the democratic process turns out to have worked very well — the transfer of sovereignty, the vote on a constitutional assembly, the ratification of the constitution, the vote for a legislature — and, with the benefit of hindsight, it now looks like an ingeniously constructed way to bring the various parties on board in the right order: first the Kurds, then the Shia, now the Sunni. That doesn’t leave many folks over on the other side except Zarqawi and Dean. What do the two have in common? They’re both foreigners, neither of whom have the slightest interest in the Iraqi people.

LMAO!!!!

According to an article by Sam Dillon in Treason Central the NYT,

The average American college graduate’s literacy in English declined significantly over the past decade, according to results of a nationwide test released yesterday.

The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, given in 2003 by the Department of Education, is the nation’s most important test of how well adult Americans can read.

It seems to me that the literacy levels of young adults have been declining in direct correlation to our advances in technology.

It’s interesting to note that while black and Asian students’ scores have increased, white and hispanic literacy levels have decreased.

Read the rest here.

First We Have John McCain’s “Al-Qaeda Bill Of Rights,” now President Bush has to do this because lawmakers are now seeking to put our nation in danger of sequels to 9/11.

President Bush, at the White House yesterday, calls for renewing the anti-terror act because “we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment.”
President Bush yesterday blasted senators using a filibuster to block renewal of the Patriot Act, calling the move irresponsible and saying it puts American lives at risk.

Are these people nuts?

“In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without this law for a single moment,” Bush said in a rare live version of his weekly radio address.

He demanded full reauthorization of the act, parts of which are set to expire within two weeks.

“The terrorist threat to our country will not expire in two weeks,” Bush said. “The terrorists want to attack America again and inflict even greater damage than they did on September the 11th.”

These suicidal, stupid effin’ anti-Bush vote-chasers U.S. Senators are thinking through organs other than those inside their craniums.

Bush also took aim at leaks that have exposed a secret National Security Agency eavesdropping program that he authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

“Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies and endangers our country,” he said.

A report about the domestic spying appeared in Friday’s New York Times. Bush described the program as narrowly designed and called its use “consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution.”

He added that it had only been used to intercept international communications of people inside the United States determined to have “a clear link” to al Qaeda or related terrorist organizations.

“This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security,” he insisted.

The program is reviewed every 45 days, using fresh threat assessments, legal reviews by the Justice Department, White House counsel and others and information previously obtained under the program, he added.

It’s good to know{NOT!} that these boneheads elected U.S. officials at least have some soul mates(cell mates would be better, I mean treason is still illegal, isn’t it?) over at the New York Times, in terms of irresponsible journalists who’ll publish anything they believe might hurt the administration without first looking thoroughly at the legalities, pretending as though members of al-Qaeda don’t also read the newspapers.

If there really is a quagmire anywhere in the War On Terror, it’s located on Capital Hill.

Raven has more on the New York Times issue.

And there’s this, LOL, the episode of the Rampaging Santas.

First, congratulations to Michael Yon for winning Best Media Blog in the 2005 Weblog Awards.

The latest entry in Michael Yon’s Online Magazine is a great piece of video on Election Day in Iraq.

Jewish Comedian Jackie Mason, speaking for me and for millions of other American Jews, says it best.

We have the right to pornography. Erections are allowed to be mentioned every day!

“But you can’t say, ‘Merry Christmas!’”

Merry Christmas to all my Christian friends, and take a hike to all my fellow Jews who shame us by aligning themselves with the Marxist shmutz of the ACLU.

Thank God this was a non-meltdown kind of accident.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — An explosion ripped through a smelter at a nuclear power plant outside the northern city of St. Petersburg, badly injuring three people, Russia’s nuclear agency said Friday.

Rosenergoatom said radiation levels were not affected as the reactor in that part of the Leningrad nuclear plant was undergoing repairs and not in operation at the time.

This may be considered by some to be in poor taste, but it reminded me of a joke Yakov Smirnoff told when I saw him at Harrah’s Reno about fifteen years ago:

“Here in America, you have all these wonderful medical advances, but we have them in Soviet Union, too.
There, they have invented a way to X-ray whole population at once, is called Chernobel.”

As I wrote in a previous post, I don’t believe there should be a set-in-stone policy regarding treatment of all prisoners we take in Iraq and elsewhere in the course of the War on Terror.

To be a little more specific, there are two general factions we are fighting in Iraq, the Sunnis who are themselves Iraqis and are, therefore, attempting to regain their former status in their own country, and the so-called “foreign fighters,” al-Qaeda members and others whose presence in Iraq is strictly to disrupt the democratization of a country that is not even theirs.

Arguably, then, while the latter group can only be called terrorists, the former might rightly be called insurrectionists. Both groups are the enemies of the overwhelming majority of Iraqis who want their new democracy to flourish, therefore members of both groups must be captured or killed until their respective forces have been broken.

While we may consider rules of conduct for blanket humane treatment to the insurgents we capture, this should not apply to terrorists nor to anyone else who has been involved in the murder of innocent civilians or the beheadings of abductees — al-Qaeda members are mass murderers who deserve no consideration as human beings. Some speak of a moral high ground, that’s all well and good, but when applying such concepts to fighting terrorists, we are doing so at our own peril and that of our troops and of civilians. I don’t believe that a terrorist’s rights, comforts or life should even be a consideration if the life of a single U.S. or Iraqi soldier or citizen might instead be saved.

In today’s Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday abandoned his opposition to expanding a ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of terror suspects, but only after winning legal protections for CIA interrogators.
The agreement was a victory for Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, who for months has pushed for an expansion of the ban in spite of strong opposition from the White House, including threats of a veto.
“It’s a done deal,” Mr. McCain said after meeting with the president at the White House. He said the legislation would protect “all people, no matter how evil or bad they are.”

Well, Senator McCain, that last part definitely disqualified you from my list of possible candidates to vote for in the next Presidential election.

Conservatives were not impressed.
Legal scholar Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation called the McCain proposal “the al Qaeda Bill of Rights.” He predicted it would subject U.S. soldiers to civilian courts.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said the proposal would harm Mr. McCain’s expected run for the White House in 2008, but he acknowledged the Arizona Republican was relentless in pressuring the Bush administration.
“He wasn’t going to back down,” Mr. Limbaugh told his audience. “He’s attached this to the defense appropriations bill, and the president, really, I think was up against a wall because money for the military runs out at the end of the year.”

Read the rest here.