Good News

First of all I hope all of you had a good Hogmanay (Scottish New Years Eve) and will have a bright New Year. There does seem to be more good news that is not being widely reported in the MSM. First, let me point you to an article in Investors Business Daily that says thing are good all over.

The New Year: Despite natural disasters and the casualties of war, Americans say 2005 was better than 2004 — and a huge majority expect things to improve again in 2006. Truth is, things are better the world over...

A new Quinnipiac University poll of about 1,200 registered voters found the hopefulness of Americans as unflappable as ever — with no rose-colored glasses in sight.

Fifty-three percent thought 2005 was better for them personally than 2004; only 33% thought it was worse. Among those ages 18 through 29, 68% thought 2005 was better for them than 2004; only 24% called it worse. With 4.5 million new jobs in the last 2 1/2 years, GDP growth over 4% and a 5% unemployment rate, those numbers shouldn't be a great shock.

As to the future, 79% thought the new year would be better for them personally, with only 10% predicting a worsening. Of 18- to 29-year-olds, the number rose to 93%, with only 3% pessimistic about 2006. For those in their 30s and early 40s, 85% thought the near future would be bright...The world has a great deal to celebrate. Incomes are up worldwide, and they continue to rise. Life spans are up, from an average of under 50 years at the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S. to 77 today — an increase exceeding 50%. Life expectancy was around 40 years in China and India a half-century ago; today it's well above 60

If you read the daily nattering negativity of the Media and the of the Democratic Party and its left wing, some of this might be hard to take, so I suggest that you may need to have your anti-depressants handy. If good news is deemed by you to be bad, this is very, very bad. Next comes one of my favorite authors, Ralph Peters in his op-ed piece in the Post.

IRAQ made impressive progress in 2005. You wouldn't have known it from the daily news coverage or the surrender-now demands of left-wing extremists, but the long-suffering nation marched forward.

Here and abroad, the enemies of freedom insisted that failure was inevitable. Terrorists, insurgents, journalists with agendas, global America-haters and the Democratic Party's national leadership all tried to force our troops out of Iraq, no matter the consequences for the 26 million human beings who'd be left behind.

But the Iraqis refused to fail. Our troops refused to fail. And the Bush administration refused to fail.

Thank God.

Over the last 12 months, the pessimists called every major development wrong. But that won't stop them from doing everything they can again this year to devalue freedom, discredit democracy, drive Iraq toward civil war, encourage the terrorists and, above all, embarrass the Bush administration.

Our critics, foreign and domestic, will continue to ignore the human rights of millions while shrieking over the "mistreatment" of imprisoned terrorists and demanding a "fair" trial for Saddam (in Europe, with no death penalty). But the left's self-righteous bluster sounds more like sour-grape nagging every day.

CONSIDER just a dozen of the many reasons for optimism about Iraq:

Amen and his 12 points should be read as well as the entire short article. Here is one of my favorite graphs.

WE should be encouraged by the progress in Iraq and heartened by the American people's distrust of elitist propaganda. From Hollywood's latest anti-American rant to the decaying New York Times, the stars of the America's Most Arrogant Show have had to learn yet again that we don't take orders from trust-fund snots, campus cowards or actors (when Alfred Hitchcock said, "Actors are cattle," he was being far too kind).

It is about time

It was announced today by the White House that the Justice Department is launching an investigation into who leaked the top secret NSA intellegence gathering program to the media. Earlier the Gray Lady made a big deal out of "Who outed Valerie Plame" thinking that it had to be someone in the White House and cried about the dire consequences to Natioal Security and then the dear old gal herself outed the covert CIA flights and the black ops detention centers for terrorists and then this NSA story without blinking so much as an eye about damaging "National Security". The NY Post had a good editorial about the actions of the "Paper of Record" where it had this to say.

Does The New York Times consider it self a law unto itself — free to subversively undercut basic efforts by any government to protect and defend its citizens?

The Times, it appears, is less concerned with promoting its dubious views on civil liberties than with undercutting the Bush administration. The end result of the paper's flagrant irresponsibility: Lives have been put in danger on the international, national and local levels.

The ability of the nation to perform the most fundamental mission of any government — protection of its citizens — has been pointlessly compromised.

The Jayson Blair and Judith Miller fias coes were high-profile embarrass ments for The Times, but at the end of the day mostly damaged the newspaper alone.

The NSA, CIA and NYPD stories are of a different order of magnitude — they place in unnecessary danger the lives of U.S. citizens.

The New York Times — a once-great and still-powerful institution — is badly in need of adult supervision.

The NYT cited current and former members of the intellegence community as its source. These sources need to be found and prosecuted to the fullest exent of the law. The NYT and the Washington Post have both been shown to care nothing for our security and only for what damage they can do to Bush and Company. The worst thing that can happen to a newspaper is to lose its crediblity and the two mentioned along with the LAT are certainly working on that.
From Ed Morrissey :

In another attempt to find something sinister to hang onto the Bush administration, another secret program constituting a major part of the war on terror has been exposed by another member of the Exempt Media. This time, the Washington Post uses its contacts in the CIA to expose an umbrella program called GST, the code for a loose affiliation of dozens of programs designed to locate and fight terrorists abroad rather than wait for them to show up here. Nothing about the article stands out as a smoking gun, it never alleges anything specifically illegal, but Dana Priest writes the front-pager as a warning that the President has gone out of control in defending the US from attack Reading the lengthy article, it becomes clear that the sources feeding this to the Post come from the CIA. Not only does the article expose Langley programs exclusively, the entire end of the article is dedicated to the whining of CIA personnel over their public image.

If Porter Goss can't clean out this cesspool then Congress should. It seems the only successful black ops this CIA can succeed in, is against our own Government. As I have said before, the CIA and our entire intellegence community seems to have more leaks than an Iraqi sewer. Some super secret bunch of spooks we have entrusted the security of our country to.

The UN and Tsunami Response

This is the UN we have all grown to know, love and respect. From the Heritage Foundation website comes the shocking (not really) information that the UN is still the UN. After the Oil for Food scandal and Kofi's missing Mercedes, you would think that maybe, just maybe there would be some actual reforms going on. Not. It seems that it is business as usual in the "World Body". (this is the same UN that was going to give that Global Test)
The research, done by the Financial Times (subscription required) focuses a spotlight on the tsunami relief effort taken over by the UN.

When the U.N. took over the tsunami relief operation in early 2005, the world body pledged full transparency, in light of its disastrous handling of the Iraq Oil-for-Food Program. The U.N.’s under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, boasted in an opinion editorial that “only the UN has the universal legitimacy, capacity, and credibility to lead in a truly global humanitarian emergency.”[2] Egeland had earlier criticized the U.S. contribution to the tsunami relief effort as “stingy.”[3]

A recent investigation by the Financial Times, however, has raised serious questions regarding the U.N.’s handling of the tsunami relief effort, in particular the way in which it has spent the first $590 million of its $1.1 billion disaster “flash appeal.” The appeal includes nearly $50 million from the United States.[4] The two-month FT inquiry revealed that “as much as a third of the money raised by the UN for its tsunami response was being swallowed up by salaries and administrative overheads.”[5] In contrast, Oxfam, a British-based private charity, spent just 10 percent of the tsunami aid money it raised on administrative costs.[6]

The Financial Times concluded that “a year after the tsunami, pledges of transparency and accountability for the UN’s appeal appear a long way from being realized. This is primarily blamed on dueling UN bureaucracies and accounting methods plus what in many cases appears to be institutional paranoia about disclosure.”[8]

This is an excellent overview and insight into what the UN is all about and should be read in its entirety.

Very Interesting

This will be a short post but with a few interesting reads about the NSA kerfuffle and the "Bush Lied" screed from some unexpected places. The first comes from the NYT op-ed column by David Rivkin and Lee Casey on the law applicable to the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program: "Unwarranted complaints."
The next is from the WSJ by Robert Turner. Both excellent reads, so take your time and absorb the information.
The "Bush Lied" screed is addressed by the Chicago Tribune. I wonder if anyone is listening to this or are they like the monkey with his hands over his ears and doesn't want to hear what he doesn't like.

Also interesting is this new poll from Rassmussen:

December 28, 2005--Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

Sixty-eight percent (68%) of Americans say they are following the NSA story somewhat or very closely.

Just 26% believe President Bush is the first to authorize a program like the one currently in the news. Forty-eight percent (48%) say he is not while 26% are not sure.

My Wish...

for everyone today is for all to have a Merry Christmas and to keep our men and women in harms way and far from home in your thoughts this Holy Day Season. May God bless them, their families and yours. Merry Christmas all.

Gotta love it

From the WSJ "Best of the Web" by Tarantino. 'We Didn't Have English Class'

Last week Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate minority leader, boasted to a Democratic gathering that "we killed the Patriot Act." Perhaps realizing that this was not the most appealing message to send to voters outside the Bush-hating base, Reid took to the Senate floor Monday and offered an apology of sorts (link in PDF):

Mr. President, maybe I didn't have the education of a lot of my friends. I was educated in a little school in Searchlight, NV. We didn't have English class. Maybe my choice of words wasn't perfect. Maybe I should have said we killed the conference report. But the fact is, that is what we had done. People can try to change the words and the meaning of it all they want, but that is what happened. I may not have the ability to express myself like the folks who were educated in all these private schools and fancy schools, but I understand the Senate rules. Everyone knows that cloture was defeated, killed, whatever you want to call it. That means that cloture was defeated and that bill is still before the Senate.

This is the same Harry Reid who, a little over a year ago, called Justice Clarence Thomas "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court" because "I think that his opinions are poorly written." If Reid's literacy is as defective as he himself claims it is, doesn't this make him, by his own standard, an embarrassment to the Senate?

Further, if Reid never even had an English class, what qualifies him to evaluate Justice Thomas's writings? Or was he merely stereotyping Thomas as unintelligent because of his race, in the manner of ignorant men throughout history?

heh.

Still more on the NSA story

From an interview with a noted Constitutional scholar(and by no means is he a consevative one) Cass Sunstein on the Hugh Hewitt Show yesterday. Transcript via The Radioblogger.
Here is an excerpt:

HH: ....First, did the authorization for the use of military force from 2001 authorize the president's action with regards to conducting surveillance on foreign powers, including al Qaeda, in contact with their agents in America, Professor?

CS: Well, probably. If the Congress authorizes the president to use force, a pretty natural incident of that is to engage in surveillance. So if there's on the battlefield some communication between Taliban and al Qaeda, the president can monitor that. If al Qaeda calls the United States, the president can probably monitor that, too, as part of waging against al Qaeda.

HH: Very good. Part two of your analysis...If...whether or not the AUMF does, does the Constitution give the president inherent authority to do what he did?

CS: That's less clear, but there's a very strong argument the president does have that authority. All the lower courts that have investigated the issue have so said. So as part of the president's power as executive, there's a strong argument that he can monitor conversations from overseas, especially if they're al Qaeda communications in the aftermath of 9/11. So what I guess I do is put the two arguments together. It's a little technical, but I think pretty important, which is that since the president has a plausible claim that he has inherent authority to do this, that is to monitor communications from threats outside our borders, we should be pretty willing to interpret a Congressional authorization to use force in a way that conforms to the president's possible Constitutional authority. So that is if you put the Constitutional authority together with the statutory authorization, the president's on pretty good ground.

Read Sunstein's original post on his blog. It seems that there is a concerted effort to not only deflect but obscure the true issues of the NSA intelligence gathering program and convince the public that it is something it is not.
Cass Sunstein seems to think so too.

Read Sunstein's assessment of the poor job that the media has done covering this issue.

HH: Do you consider the quality of the media coverage here to be good, bad, or in between?

CS: Pretty bad, and I think the reason is we're seeing a kind of libertarian panic a little bit, where what seems at first glance...this might be proved wrong...but where what seems at first glance a pretty modest program is being described as a kind of universal wiretapping, and also being described as depending on a wild claim of presidential authority, which the president, to his credit, has not made any such wild claim. The claims are actually fairly modest, and not unconventional. So the problem with what we've seen from the media is treating this as much more peculiar, and much larger than it actually is. As I recall, by the way, I was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, and they did say that in at least one person's view, the authorization to use military force probably was adequate here.

HH: Do you think the media simply does not understand? Or are they being purposefully ill-informed in your view?

CS: You know what I think it is? It's kind of an echo of Watergate. So when the word wiretapping comes out, a lot of people get really nervous and think this is a rerun of Watergate. I also think there are two different ideas going on here. One is skepticism on the part of many members of the media about judgments by President Bush that threaten, in their view, civil liberties. So it's like they see President Bush and civil liberties, and they get a little more reflexively skeptical than maybe the individual issue warrants. So there's that. Plus, there's, I think, a kind of bipartisan...in the American culture, including the media, streak that is very nervous about intruding on telephone calls and e-mails. And that, in many ways, is healthy. But it can create a misunderstanding of a particular situation.

(ht Betsy Newmark)

DOJ Response to NSA questions and more.

Glenn Reynolds points us to this missive from the Dept.of Justice response to the NSA issue. (via The Corner).
More answers and more understanding will tend to lead to more hand wringing and gnashing of teeth on the left. heh.

Speaking of a Quagmire

It seems from all I have been reading that the Democrats have found themselves in a querulous quagmire politically on the NSA position along others that they have taken. From what I can glean from those much more qualified than I am, the warrantless searches being talked about is not only legal but common when talking about international intelligence gathering. John Hinderaker has one of the most extensive posts on it to date. Scroll down on their site and read much more on this issue. The is also an interesting link to Harvard Law Review article by Professors Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith: "Congressional Authorization and the War on Terrorism."

It seems that the Democratic Party leadership and talking points are not being produced "in house", rather they are being written by the NYT etal. First the non story of the flushed Koran, then lately the NSA story followed by the revelation that the FBI was surveillance the ELF/ALF and their support groups (egad, the horror) and that even the NYPD was sending undercover cops into demonstrations in NY. The New York Times has reported leaks about the covert CIA flights, the covert detention facilities and now the NSA legally spying on foreign communications and they seem to be proud of it. Where is the outrage about the leaks and the leakers ala Valerie Plame? Whose side are these people on?
Ed Morrissey writes: "This series of articles show just how much that leftists want to return to a 9/10 world, where the evils of society comprise the government agents that want to protect the US from terrorists instead of the terrorists themselves. New Yorkers, at least those at the Times, appear to have forgotten why a huge gaping hole exists in Lower Manhattan. They either forgot or stopped caring about "connecting the dots", a phrase that they used to castigate these same security forces for not divining the intent of Mohammed Atta and al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 -- but now resolutely oppose and expose the very methodology which would allow them to see the 'dots' in the first place."
I could not agree more.
ht to OBT for the link.

Patriot Act and National Security.

First let me say I am not an attorney or a Constitutional scholar but I am an everyday lay student of the law and its different effects on our life. I try to read as much as I can from the postings and writings of those that are. Being a citizen, I think that is the least that we can do.
As for the Patriot Act under fire now, it is my understanding that it was mainly an extension of what has been used for years against the drug runners and organized crime and was expanded to include the terrorist enemies of our country. The PATRIOT Act is based on fifteen extant statutes, most importantly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was passed by Congress in 1978.

The PATRIOT Act, as described in the Department of JusticeÂ’s website does the following:
· Allows law enforcement investigators to use the tools that were already available to investigate organized crime and drug trafficking.
· Allows laws enforcement to use surveillance against more crimes of terror, including the development of networks and training for violence.
· Allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trained to evade detection, especially by allowing the same “roving wiretaps” long used to track organized gangs and smugglers.
· Allows law enforcement to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists, in much the same manner as they already do against organized crime and drug cases.
· Allows federal agents to request a Court Order to obtain business records in national security terrorism cases, rather than wait for the violence to begin.
· Facilitates information sharing among government agencies, to see trends and planning before they evolve into violence.
· Updates the law to reflect new technologies and threats; most laws before the PATRIOT Act were written before the age of portable computers and roving cell phone towers.
· Allows victims of computer hacking to request law enforcement assistance.
· Increases the penalties for terrorist acts.
· Acts against the creation or support of terrorist networks.

The main concern supposedly about this act is the possible infringement of our civil liberties although an extensive search including the ACLU has found no such examples or complaints. I would think that any examples of such abuse would be shouted from the rooftops. I therefore have to conclude that there has been no such abuse.

Bill Roggio posted these telling quotes from some of todays detractors yet they were yesterdays supporters:

Regarding the need to expand FISA to allow roving wiretaps - “the FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy! What’s good for the mob should be good for terrorists” (Senator Joe Biden, D-DE)(Congressional Record)

Regarding the need for expanded cooperation between intelligence and law enforcement – “We simply cannot prevail in the battle against terrorism if the right hand of our government has no idea what the left hand is doing” (Senator John Edwards, D-NC)(Press Release)

Regarding the need to take legal action against the financial support for terrorist groups and networks – “if one is going to cope with an al Qaeda, with a terrorist entity such as Osama bin Laden, who moves his money into this legitimate marketplace, law enforcement has to have the ability to hold people accountable” (Senator John Kerry, D-Mass)(Congressional Record)

Since no one I could find have had their rights trampled under the jackboots of this legislation in 4 years and untold numbers of terrorists and their networks have been destroyed, this seem too much of a political ploy for gratuitous gain than true interest in National security. What is going through these people mind? Apparently it is okay to use these laws for fighting organized crime and drug trafficking but we need to go out of our way to protect the civil liberies of terrorists and those sworn to destroy us. Go figure.I'm outta time for now but will be back with a follow-up later including my research on the NSA kerfuffle.

I think that the Democratic Party has again jumped the shark on national security and will once again be judged to be on the wrong side of history just like their commitment to defeatism will be judged by the American voters. Who do you trust when it comes to security for America? It seems that the left is more interested in the civil rights of terrorists and enemies than they are about the safety of the people, or perhaps it is just a bigger interest in their political future and the downfall of Bush that is upmost in their minds. Either way, they are again showing the true colors of the left. This is not the Scoop Jackson Democratic Party. I'm not sure what party it is anymore.