I’m on the David Boze show on Monday
David has graciously asked me to be a guest on his show on Monday at 4 PM, 770, KTTH. Hope you get a chance to listen in.
Friday notes
Last night, I attended a meeting of a national group, Americans for Prosperity, wanting to establish a state chapter. Please, everyone, visit their website, www.americansforprosperity.org , and take a look. Join, it costs nothing, and they have much to offer. I plan on joining and helping them as much as I can. This is an important step you can take for your kids, our country and our future. Join, and do what you can to help. More later…
Meeting notice
FYI, I will be the speaker at the January 12 meeting of the Eastside Republican Club meeting. Would love to see a lot of you there and, you should think about joining anyway. Doors open at 6, check the website at www.eastsiderepublicanclub.org, make sure you click the link for first time attendees in the middle of the page if you are such. The charge does include a pizza/pasta dinner. Hope to see a lot of you there.
Wednesday notes
FIRST, THIS MORNING, a big thank you to Pam Hall, long-time listener, and Lt Brett Hatfield, both of the Federal Way Police Department, for inviting me to sit with them yesterday at the memorial service for Pierce County Sheriff’s Deputy Kent Mundell. It was an honor to be there, and even more so to sit with the Federal Way PD.
The service was incredible and very moving, respectful and dignified. The work that went into coordination and planning was enormous and it went off without a hitch. I haven’t seen so many adults teary-eyed and sniffling in a long time. Kent Mundell was a great police officer who was loved and appreciated by all who came into contact with him. I didn’t know him personally, but after the service, I felt as if I did. He was a true warrior, who gave his life for us. The world is a lesser place today without him. May God bless and keep his wife and children, his family and friends. And, please God, three funeral services in three months for officers killed in the line of duty should be enough for a while.
WELL, THE POLITICAL season gets more interesting as Senators Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan annonuce yesterday that they will not run for reelection in 2010. Both were way behind in the polls,and Dodd’s announcement may make that seat safe for the Democrats. His record of corruption and shady deals would have dragged him down. Dorgan was 20+ points behind the popular Republicn governor in current polls. In addition, Democrat governor Ritter in Colorado announced he would not run for reelection. Expect the bodycount to grow in coming weeks…
WELL, SO THE PRESIDENT promised eight times during the campaign to televise the committee hearings on health care, and now CSPAN has challenged him to live up to that promise. It’s pretty bad when even CSPAN acknowledges your lies and hedging…..but don’t expect the Prez to come through on his promises, why should things change now??
THESE TWO ITEMS should make you feel better and more secure. The Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security issued a report in November stating that the DHS is unable to perform the task of coordinating the 22 Federal agencies which comprise it and that it focuses too much on disaster management rather than terrorism prevention. And then, Andy McCarthy, in National Review Online today revealed that the United States has issued over 1,000 “Diversity Visas” to Yemen under a program started by Bush 41 to issue special visas to encourage immigration from countries that are not typically a source of immigrants to this country. Apparently, we don’t get enough Yemeni immigrants so we encourage them with special visas. My God, what planet are we living on?? But, don’t worry, the State Department just cancelled Abdulmuttaleb’s visa, 12 days after he tried to blow up Flight 253. I feel safer already.
My First Post of the New Year
Hope all of you survived New Years Eve. We went to see a movie, Did You Hear About the Morgans, great movie, highly recommend it, much better than either Avatar ( anti-capitalist and anti-American silliness ) or It’s Complicated.
MORE DEVELOPMENTS in the Abdul Mutallab case. In October, the top Saudi counterterrorism official briefed American authorities on Al Qaeda’s use of underwear bombs. Muhannad bin Nayef had been a target of such an attempt in August, but the bomber prematurely exploded ( there is some room for some humor here, but not now and not here ). And now, Newsweek is reporting that American intelligence believes that the two bombs were made by the same AQ bomb maker. One of the other purposes of the briefing was that the Saudis don’t believe that the administration is taking the threat of AQ in Yemen seriously enough.
The British intelligence folks apparently had a file on Mutallub three years ago, detailing his communications with Islamic extremists. While at school, MI5 knew he was ‘reaching out’ to people under surveillance, including tapped phones and email intercepts.
Apparently, on top of all this, the radical cleric guiding Mutallab posted on his website in October that a ’surprise from Yeman ‘ was coming that would make Yemen ‘ the single most important front of jihad in the world ‘. And, calls from this cleric to Mutallab werre intercepted by the NSA before Christmas. You can read more on all of this at www.hotair.com.
A further note. The National Counter Terrorism Center ( NCTC ) was established after the 9/11 Commission report pointed out that there were lots of pieces of intel out there indicating the possibility/probability of an attack, even the specific attack on 9/11, but that the existing intelligence establishment, due to lots of factors, didn’t put them together. The NCTC was set up to do just that. And as we know, and continue to learn every day, there were a lot of pieces here with Mutallab and they did not get put together.
Instead of taking immediate action, the President took three days to issue a statement, squeezed in between golf and tennis during his vacation, then had Mutallub arrested as a criminal so he could lawyer up and shut up. He needs to fire some people, make sure heads roll and take some decisive action here. Not only are the American people watching, but so are the people who hatch these plots.
BTW, the President in his weekly address this morning mentioned Yemen and it’s ‘crushing poverty’ which is true, but is irrelevent to AQ being there now, as irrelevent as my birthday month or the current weather. The blindness of the Left in thinking that we just need more compassion and social programs to deal with Islamic radicalism is maddening, has hurt our ability to defend ourselves and will do so in the future.
One further note about our security. The President did not even appoint someone to head the TSA until late September. That’s right, nine months into his administration. Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, has had his nomination held up by Republicans who are concerned over reports that while working for the FBI twenty years ago, he illegally accessed the criminal records of his estranged wife’s boyfriend, and then lied to Congress about the circumstances, saying it only happened once in Congressional testimony, then telling Senator Lieberman it happened twice, then admitting he copied the records and gave them to a friend in the San Diego police, hoping to have the guy harrassed.
Read that paragraph again. The President waited nine months to appoint a permanent TSA director, the agency in charge of airline and airport security, nine months, then appoints a former FBI agent who abused his position to gain personal and protected information, not accessible to the public, for his own personal reasons, and then lied to Congress about it. If President Bush had done this, it would be all over the front pages of America’s mainstream press, and the lead story on the evening TV news, as well as fodder for the Sunday talk shows. Oh well……
Meanwhile, in other war news, a 27 year old Somali was caught by Danish police breaking into the house of 74 year old Kurt Westergaard on Christmas Day. Police shot and wounded him in the incident. The Somali man was armed with an ax. Kurt was one of the cartoonists who drew the controversial cartoons about Mohammed which sparked controversy, death threats and riots several years ago. His cartoon depicted Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Do you think the Somali was there to do yard work, maybe cut some firewood? It seems some jihadis have long memories, longer than most Americans.
IN OTHER NEWS, Science Daily reported two days ago that a new study finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased in either he last 150 years, or the last 50 years.
ACCORDING TO DATA from the Census Bureau, in 2005, 71.3% of the homes BELOW the poverty line had cell phones, 92.2% had VCRs, 67.1% had a PC, 96.4% a microwave and 98.9% a color TV. I wonder what the Third World poor think about American poverty?
THE ECONOMIST/YOUGOV POLL, released on Thursday shows, for the first time in the poll’s history, more Americans disapprove than approve of the President’s job performance, 45 -47%. The number of independents approving has fallen from 64% in January to 43% today. Just another right wing poll that doesn’t reflect public opinion,
ACCORDING TO THE SEATTLE TIMES, Elijah Hall, the 17 year old who has pleaded guilty to first degree murder in the July 26 shooting of Ballard convenience clerk Manish Melwani, faces 23 years in prison, based on the prosecutor’s recommendation. Hall’s mother, Lori Hilliard, said ” Elijah, along with all of us, are very, very remorseful about the event. It’s a no-win situation.” Then, she said, ” I lost all of my dreams, just as Mr Melwani’s mom did. I’m not going to see him walk across the stage and get that diploma.”
Whiskey Tango Hotel?? No win situation?? Dreams?? Walk across the stage?? The little thug you raised ( or didn’t ) KILLED someone, actually he MURDERED someone, and he now faces 3 squares a day and will be out, ohh, probably before he’s 30. The Melwani family lost a son, a brother, forever. Melwani’s brother-in-law had to be removed from the courtroom during proceedings for saying out loud that Hall was a “bastard” and should ” be hanged”. He’s right. And, you will see your little bastard child walk out of prison one day, if you care, while the Melwani family will never see Manish walk anywhere again.
The Melwanis seem, from what little I have read and know about this case, solid hard-working immigrants who came here to America to build a better life, the kind of people we want here. Hall was awaiting trial when he murdered Manish for robbery and assault. Which would you want for a neighbor? Where is the justice here?
FIVE PROMINENT DEMOCRAT challengers to GOP incumbent Congressmen have dropped out of their races or declined to enter them. State Senator Laura Kelly, Kansas, ( Rep. Lynn Jenkins ), Jack McDonald, Texas, ( Rep. Michael McCaul ), Todd Book, Ohio, ( Rep. Jean Schmidt ), Paula Flowers, Tennessee ( Rep. Zach Wamp ), and Dave Roberts, California ( Rep. Brian Bilbray ) have all dropped plans to run. In October, the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee issued a statement bragging about recruiting McDonald and Kelly in particular as two of their stars. I wonder what happened.
FINALLY, courtesy of National Review’s Media Blog, guess when the following statement was published:
” Change is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business modal that has served the industry for years. This ‘great revolution’ warns one editor, will mean that some publications ‘ must submit to destiny and go out of existence…”
Any guesses about when this was published? 1990? 1995? 2009? How about May, 1845, talking about the impact that the telegraph will have on the media. The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.
