Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc, June 2006

1. Miami. The feds took down a home-grown terror cell operating out of Miami last week. These guys were all black and spoke of killing as many “Devils” as they could. Note closely the language used by these guys. The typical Wahabbi refers to non-Muslims as Infidels. The only people who regularly refer to non-Muslims, p articularly white non-Muslims as Devils are Nation of Islam (NOI) Farakahn followers. Apparently some followers of Calypso Louie have decided to join the war. It appears they have chosen poorly.

2. ABM. North Korea was rattling their nuclear saber last week, threatening to launch an ICBM on a test flight. Their last test flight several years ago did get the missile off the pad, overflew Japan (seriously upsetting the Japanese), and splashed down in the western Pacific. This threatened launch spawned some of the most disgusting public responses from former Clintonoids – the very same people that ensured that the North Koreans got both nuclear and missile technology that made this entire mess possible. Former Clinton SECDEF William Perry wrote an op-ed suggesting we destroy the missile on the pad before it launches. Of course, Perry was p art of the Clinton appeasement crowd who blinked when they had the opportunity to do something about the North Koreans a decade ago. On the other hand, the adults now in charge at the Pentagon did a couple things guaranteed to get the attention of the North Koreans. The first was to move the Ballistic Missile Defense system from a test to operational status. The second was to run a successful test intercept from an Aegis cruiser a couple hundred miles north of Hawaii. Both messages were received in Pyongyang. What they will do with them remains to be seen. Additionally, the US announced they would be moving missile defense units into Japan and is in negotiation with the Japanese to sell / produce ABM system components in Japan for their use. North Korea is China’s client state, and does little that the ChiComs do not know about or tacitly condone. I expect the prospect of a Japan with an active and robust missile defense system is not what the ChiComs expected or wanted out of this interlude. So what do we do when the North Koreans launch? I think we ought to swat it out of the sky like a bug. We do it quietly, secretly, and say nothing afterwards. Whether it takes one or four missiles to do so, we shoot it down. This sends a message to both the North Koreans and the Iranians. A Japan with operational ABM systems is not all that far from a Taiwan with an operational ABM system. Message to the ChiComs: Be careful what games you play through your proxies. Your neighbors may respond in ways other than the one you wish for.

3. Weasels. A couple follow-up articles on the failed CIA reform and temporary victory by the rogue weasels infesting it crossed my inbox last week. One was written by Dr. Jack Wheeler, the other by Donald J. Devine. Bottom line was that former CIA Director Porter Goss was appointed to clean out the leftist infestation in the CIA. He got a few high-ranking leftists fired – temporarily – before they forced him out via a series of leaks to left-wing reporters. They also worked through new Director of National Intelligence to successfully remove Goss. Once Negroponte, who came into the intelligence business via the State Dep artment (another leftist infestation), decided Goss was a distraction, he presented the Bush administration with an uncomfortable choice – either his appointment was a mistake or Goss’ appointment was, and one or the other would need to go. The WH chose for Negroponte, who appointed his old deputy, General Michael Hayden, as the new Director of the CIA. Hayden reinstated Operations Chief Stephen Kappes, who Goss forced out early in his tenure after an internal argument about leaks. Kappes is a fawning leftist, an incompetent who works well among the leftists in the agency and on the Hill. He is an example of the internal (infernal?) problem of the CIA. Both articles end concluding that the weasels have won and will next be turning their sights on SECDEF Rumsfeld and VP Cheney. One of the things that neither author mentioned was that now that Porter Goss is out of the government, he still has all his connections in the House and in the Pentagon. You don’t suppose that he would back-brief his former friends and supporters about who are rogue weasels in the CIA and who are not, would he? Perhaps he might even work closely with his colleagues in the House to shut down their operation. Remember that the House still holds the purse strings for the CIA. From here, it appears the CIA is broken. It needs to be abolished and the weasels removed from the government dole. Replace it with an operations section located in the Pentagon.

4. Treason. The NYT, in yet another leak-fueled anti-war, anti-administration article, described how the Bush administration was using the international banking system to track money transfers by terrorists. The program was classified, successful and completely legal. Reaction to the leak and the story has been swift, angry and loud – surprising the NYT and its supporters on the left. There may be congressional action in response. Hopefully there will be prosecutions, convictions, and punishment for both the leak and its publication. The action was treasonous. It must be answered by law enforcement. It is already being answered by the marketplace.

5. Energy. Former Delaware Governor Pete DuPont wrote about our failed energy policy last Wednesday in Opinion Journal.com. His bottom line is that our current energy problems are all self-inflicted, as we are legislating and regulating ourselves out of production of new energy. For example, we are the only major oil producer worldwide whose domestic production has fallen over the last 30 years – in our instance, from 10 million barrels per day in 1970 to 5 million barrels per day today. If we choose to drill in Alaska and the continental shelves, our dependence on oil imports goes away quickly – maybe completely for a generation (at a minimum). Over the course of that generation, we transition to natural gas as the primary energy source. Between natural gas and coal, we here in the US have sufficient carbon-based fuel to power energy needs in this nation for centuries to millennia. In parallel, we need to st art building nuclear reactors for primary power to the electrical grid. Last year’s Energy Bill provided some regulatory relief for new reactors. The feds recently approved the first license for a new reactor in a generation. Should we st art building refineries, the current constriction in supply at the pump will solve itself quickly. Finally, clean air laws need to be modified so that the standard Washington DC top-down, one size fits all, solution to the problems of clean air is returned back to the state and local level where it can be addressed properly. We don’t have an energy problem. We have a regulatory problem.

6. Beheadings. Islamists in Iraq captured, brutally tortured and killed a pair of American soldiers last week. Given their recent losses on the battlefield, this attack appears to be their best opportunity to get a few headlines and damage domestic support for the war. Of course, it guarantees somewhat harsher treatment for captured Al Qaida in Iraq operatives in the future. The surprising p art of this story is not what they did to our guys, but that they were able to take prisoners at all. My understanding from the Milblogs was that the unwritten word among our forces is not to be taken prisoner – for fear of the very same treatment by our enemies. The other interesting p art of the story has been the absolute silence by Amnesty International, the ACLU, CAIR, similar lefty organizations, and their cheerleaders in the Drive-by media on the brutal treatment, torture, beheading of our soldiers and desecration of their bodies afterwards. The bodies were even booby trapped when found. Our friends on the left are only concerned about inhuman treatment when our guys do it. The difference is that when we do it, it is an aberration and punished. When they do it, it is the norm, and they are celebrated – which is why they are barbarians and must be dealt with as such.

1. Zarq Rollup
2. Coulter
3. Bears
4. Beach Bomb
5. Gun Ban Tossed
6. Rove
7. Bush in Baghdad

1. Zarq Rollup. According to Big Lizards as of last Friday, Coalition and Iraqi forced had conducted over 450 raids on insurgent locations. They killed over 100 bad guys and captured nearly 800 more. They uncovered nearly 30 arms caches. This marks the successful exploitation of captured Zarq-man documents, computer files, thumb drives, and interrogation of those captured in near real time. Iraqi Interior Ministry officials released a captured document that may or may not have been written by the Zarq-man himself that painted his strategic and tactical position as dire. If it is real, we have plans for pulling the US into war against Iran before it clears out the insurgency completely, thereby giving the insurgency time to regroup, re-arm, and plan for whatever happens next. They think if we go after Iran, we will have our hands full. They forget that Iraq and Iran fought one another to a standstill a couple decades ago over the period of eight years. This was the same Iraqi military that we decimated in less than 100 hours on the ground in 1991 and in less than 3 weeks in 2003. While the Iranian military will be a problem, it won’t be that much worse of a problem than the Iraqi military. On the other hand, if the document was a CIA plant, as more than a few on the left believe, and the Islamists really do think they are doing well, who are we then to correct their delusions of grandeur? The document also wanted to jump-st art the Al Sadr Militia / Mahdi Army in southern Iraq as an anti-Coalition force. Should we deicide that Al Sadr, the Iranian sponsored and backed Shiite Cleric, is anything more than an irritant, I expect him to disappear in a cloud of MK-82 shrapnel, much like a group of insurgents fleeing a safe house did in a video making its way around the net this last week. This has been a great week for intel exploitation. We will hope it continues.

2. Coulter. Ann Coulter’s new book “Godless” sits at the top of the NYT list. More importantly to free marketers everywhere, it also sits at the top of the Amazon list. Coulter is a superb polemicist who does good research, is factually accurate, and can firebomb with the best (or worst) of them. She is absolutely fearless when taking on the Left and delights in smoking out artificial moral outrage. I hope she has a good run. I hope she sells a lot of books. It is real clear that what she is writing does well in the marketplace – probably due to those on the right who want to see our side fighting back in kind against the lies and smears of the left on occasion. This is the marketplace of ideas at work. Congratulations, Madam.

3. Bears. Well it’s early summer here in Anchorage and the bears have come out of the mountains and are visiting homeowners in p arts of the town. Maulings are not uncommon up here, with a couple deaths every year due to bear attacks, so we do take the presence of the animals seriously. The reaction of Alaska Dep artment of Fish & Game (ADF&G) biologists has been to manage the citizens rather than making rugs out of the bears. The Anchorage Daily News (affectionately referred to as the Daily Worker among local conservatives) ran an article last week about the number of $110 tickets written to local homeowners who put their trash out early and who have bird feeders (bears like both food sources a lot). The state biologists prattled on about how dangerous the actions of the homeowners were and completely ignored the very real danger of 200 – 800 pound predators wandering around neighborhoods filled with kids, old people and handicappers. Regardless of the trash storage habits of homeowners, if the bears aren’t in town, they won’t be eating from the garbage cans or bird feeders. The solution by the state is to manage the people, attempting to educate them at $110 a pop via tickets. The alternate solution is to shoot the bears, skin them and turn them into lovely rugs for walls or floors. We have primary elections for the legislature and governor in August. Perhaps we will have a few candidates out there that believe ADF&G needs to st art controlling the dangerous wildlife rather than controlling the people.

4. Beach Bomb. Last weekend also had yet another despicable act by the Palestinians, who have been shooting rockets from the Gaza into Israel for months. The Israelis shoot back, and have gotten pretty good at hitting the culprits. Last weekend, after one such an attack, the Israelis responded with 5-6 artillery rounds on a Palestinian beach. Shortly after the response there was yet another explosion on the beach, killing women and children. Hamas instantly went into “car swarm” flash-mob, victim-mode, blaming the explosion on the Israelis. Being a slow weekend, the 24/7 cable channels picked up their side of the story instantly and ran with it. Every single media outlet over the weekend ran stories blaming the Israelis for killing women and children. Not a single one of them – including FNC - mentioned the rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel. This went on for two solid days and was despicable. As the week began, the other side of the story st arted to come out. The Israelis had a RPV overhead and released the video. The final explosion clearly came after the artillery response and appeared to be a mine on the beach – a Palestinian mine on the beach. Reports later in the week had Palestinian medical people furiously removing shrapnel from everyone they could get their hands on – whether or not they wanted that shrapnel removed. Why would you do such a frantic thing? You might want to keep Israeli medical people from getting fragments for assessment afterwards. Hamas is fighting a total war against Israel. The Islamists are fighting a total war against us. We dare not ever forget it. We dare not lose it.

5. Gun Ban Tossed. Malkin reported Wednesday that a SF County judge tossed out a ballot initiative passed last election that banned the ownership and sale of guns in San Francisco. The ordinance had been passed by 58% of the voters. The NRA went to court to overturn the ban the day after it was passed. The reason given by the presiding judge for overturning the gun ban was that the state constitution allowed ownership and sale of firearms. The ordinance only applied to city residents and did not apply to tourists, visitors or non-residents. Expect this to be appealed up the judicial food chain in the state of California.

6. Rove. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced last week that he was not going to be indicting Bush political advisor Carl Rove as p art of his investigation into the Plame – Wilson Affair. Moonbat leftists were overcome with grief, as they had been celebrating Rove’s indictment and subsequent removal of Bush’s political brain for months. Not only is Fitzgerald lacking in evidence upon which to indict Rove, but he also lacked evidence to indict former Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby for leaking Plame’s name to the media – which is why he is furiously trying to hang onto Libby’s perjury indictment. It is difficult to figure out how someone can lie about something they didn’t do, that there was no underlying crime committed, and then get prosecuted for covering up something that was already common knowledge at the time. Meanwhile, Libby’s lawyers are preparing to try the underlying case, and are going to get every single reporter on the witness stand that Fitzgerald has based his case against Libby upon. The media will come to regret they ever st arted this fight.

7. Bush in Baghdad. Finally, President Bush, celebrating both the death of Zarqawi and the successful creation of the new Iraqi government made a surprise trip to Baghdad last weekend. He thanked the troops for their work. He met with the new Iraqi government and congratulated them on forming up. He promised not to leave before the job was done. Bush has a nice flair for the dramatic gesture when he decides to use it. Congratulations, for this demonstrates yet again to the jihadis, their sycophants and dhimmis that we do not fear them.

1. Zarq. An American F-16 dropped two MK-82 Laser guided bombs on a safe house north of Baghdad Wednesday night and ended the life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaida in Iraq. Along with the Zarq-man, the attack killed his wife, kid, spiritual advisor, two female intel operatives, and two others. Iraqi forces were immediately on the scene, closely followed by Americans. Zarqawi was alive for a little while, apparently outside the building at the time of impact. He was alive long enough to know that the Americans were the ones who had ended his life. Shortly after he was confirmed dead, Iraqis rolled up 17 other locations in a simultaneous set of anti-terror raids. This number may be much higher, as there was a report of up to 39 locations being raided. Coalition forces found a treasure trove of intelligence including hard drives, lists of operatives, money, and other media necessary to information necessary to run his terror operation in Iraq. As of this writing, it appears that someone turned on Zarqawi, outing his so-called spiritual advisor, who was then identified and followed for a few weeks until he led the coalition to Zarqawi himself. This is one of the great intelligence operations of the war, as the Coalition and Iraqi Intelligence were able to keep the lid on what they had for weeks (months?) until a successful strike could be executed. Over the weekend, General Casey, Commander of US Forces in Iraq confirmed that the F-16 had been pulled off a tanker and sent to the target. There was a UAV overhead with a laser designator on the house, which the MK-82 homed in and hit. CENTCOM posted the designator camera video on the net the day after the strike. It is a fine bit of viewing for those that like military action. This strike may be the most significant decapitation of enemy leadership since the US Navy shot down Japanese Admiral Yamamoto in 1943. Note that even with his death, it took the Japanese a full two more years to finally lose the war. Do not expect the terrorist insurgency or Al Qaida in Iraq to go any quicker. This was a significant victory. There will be others. We are yet another step toward ending the Islamists and terrorist efforts in Iraq and elsewhere throughout the Middle East.

2. Toronto. Fallout from Canadian takedown of the 17-man terror cell in Toronto continues. The perps have not been identified as young Muslim men in the media or by Canadian government officials. They are identified as southeastern Asians. The storefront Mosque all attend describes itself as a Sufi sect; yet the Imam appears to be the standard issue Wahhabi whining hatemonger. The perps were trying to procure materials to make a fertilizer and diesel bomb roughly three times the size of the bomb that took down the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The perps are now claiming torture by police – which is right out of the Al Qaida playbook (accuse your captors of everything possible in an attempt to garner press and judicial sympathy). Finally, there have been related arrests worldwide as a result of the takedown of this cell. Two of them were students at Georgia Tech. Appears the Canadians did well with this one. They are to be congratulated.

3. Iran. Captain’s Qu arters last Monday ran an article about big money leaving Iran – about $200 billion since Ahmadinenutjob took power last fall. They have also st arted buying gold in large quantities. Finally, Iranians have been pulling money from European banks. The article goes on to speculate that this is either pre-war panic or preparation. Either way, money from the Iranian kleptrocracy has been rapidly moving from places and forms that are easier for the West to seize to places and forms that are harder to seize – which is a reasonably intelligent action for people planning on fighting a war with the US. So what do we believe? What is real? Actually, it doesn’t really matter. For if they are panicked about impending war with the West, and are hiding their assets, then that is a good thing and can be used as a vehicle to pressure the Mullahs. On the other hand, if this is intentional pre-war preparation, making their money harder for the West to get their hand on to also makes it harder for the kleptocracy to use that money, thereby limiting their choices and putting further economic pressure on them and the regime they are p art of. Removing hundreds of billions of dollars from the world economy won’t change that economy much. But it will certainly hurt the people hiding it a lot, for money is not power unless it is able to be used freely. If we were to combine this self-imposed Iranian monetary pressure with an ongoing propaganda workup, ridiculing the Mullahs, the Islamists, everything they believe in, and impose a creative economic embargo against things Iran sells (oil) and things they need (refined petroleum products) perhaps we can soften them up nicely over the period of a year or two before we take them out.

4. Cloture. The Senate failed in two cloture votes last week – one good and one bad. The odious Akaka Bill, otherwise known as the Native Hawaiian Ap artheid and Racial Segregation Bill failed to get cloture for a conservative-led filibuster. Conservatives managed to get 41 votes in opposition. This legislation ought to be the greatest single embarrassment to the Alaska Congressional delegation in generations. This Bill was Akaka’s signature piece of legislation. Apparently he has a legislative history not unlike John Kerry – little substance, little action, much self-congratulatory noise. And his failure to get this monstrosity through the Senate is now an issue in a democrat primary in Hawaii. Akaka is up for reelection and is facing a conservative democrat who has accused him of incompetence (among other things). It does not help Akaka that the legislation is not popular in Hawaii, barely getting 50% support among Native Hawaiians. It polls much worse among everyone else. Akaka may be in no small amount of electoral trouble over this one. The second cloture vote that failed was a permanent repeal of the Death (Estate) Tax. Repeal of the Death Tax was p art of Bush’s 2003 tax cut package, but was only passed as a temporary measure, giving conservatives in Congress an issue to run with every 4-8 years. Conservatives in the Senate managed only 57 votes on cloture. John Kyl (R, AZ) is working on a compromise, intended to greatly extend the tax break in dollars. As usual, when the debate heated up on cloture, the Drive-by media focused on how much money eliminating the Death Tax would remove from the treasury. Supporters focused on the loss of family farms (not many) and small, family-owned small businesses (huge – and the vehicle driving this current economic expansion). Supporters will get something reasonable through the Senate, thereby kicking the can down the road another few years and giving conservatives up for election / reelection a freebie of an issue, for who would rather leave their businesses and estates to their kids and grandkids rather than Uncle Sugar?

5. Tinfoil Hats. And now for something completely different….. Last weekend the left-wing blog Daily Kos held a convention in DC, where the angry left bloggers gathered for the weekend and compared anti-Bush diatribes. One of the events (pictured in Michelle Malkin’s blog) was a tinfoil hat contest, where p articipants got the Reynolds Wrap out and made hats that would keep the government (and space aliens) from reading their brain waves and controlling their minds. This is a hoary old notion that some of the real loonies on both sides of the political spectrum believe. Unfortunately, tinfoil hats don’t work as advertised, which may very well be yet another conspiracy foisted upon unsuspecting conspiracy theorists / black helicopter watchers and alien abductees by Big Government. According to a Popular Science article from late last year, MIT grad students conducted experiments and discovered something completely different. They apparently wanted to play with some very expensive equipment, so came up with a tongue in cheek experiment to measure how much tinfoil hats protected the brain from external electromagnetic radiation. They made three of the most popular types of tinfoil hats, put a radio receiver under them and put them on top of a manikin head. They then swept a frequency spread against the receiver and measured the results. And what did they find? They found that in the 1.2 – 2.6 GHz frequency band, interestingly enough the same band reserved for government satellites, the tinfoil hats actually enhanced - amplified the signal under it. Conspiracy theorists beware, for your tinfoil hats may very well be yet another government conspiracy designed to make it even easier to control you and read your brain waves. And you have fallen for it. You can find their paper at the following URL: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

1. Haditha. The anti-war left and their lackeys in the Drive-by media finally appear to have their photo-op with the apparent action in Haditha. The story is that Marines went from house to house, murdering women and children in cold blood. There are at least two military investigations underway. Expect a couple congressional investigations to take place also. While I won’t comment on the guilt or innocence of what was done in Haditha, the more I read about the action, the accusers, and the town of Haditha itself, the more I st art to wonder if this represents a shift in tactics by the insurgency, from simply murdering everyone possible to murdering everyone possible and then blaming it on American troops. Here’s what we know about Haditha –

Most of the above has been gleaned from various blogs and milblogs over the course of the last week. I suspect that this was an insurgent operation, in which they popped an IED, killed a number of people, stirred up a Marine patrol, were engaged by that patrol during a series of house-to-house searches, and lost several of their members in the action. Now they have managed to give the Drive-by media and anti-war leftists yet another weapon to use against the Marines and the Bush administration. The only surprise about this entire event is why did it take the insurgents so long to figure this out? After all, they have been doing this sort of thing – murdering non-combatants – for years and blaming it on Americans. Why did this one take off and all the others failed to do so?

2. Akaka. The US Senate this week is poised to take up once again the odious Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005 – the so-called Akaka Bill. The legislation grew out of reaction to the 7-2 SCOTUS ruling against race-based preferences in Hawaii via Rice v Cayetano. According to the locals, there are over 160 federal programs that administer race-based goodies in Hawaii. All of these are aimed at the 260,000 so-called Native Hawaiians on the islands. These programs are being systematically taken to court as unconstitutional racial preferences and tossed. The theory behind the Akaka Bill is that native Hawaiians had their own government 100 years ago that was illegally overthrown by mainlanders and that we must make amends for that illegal action. Of course, when you traffic in race-baiting, you also get the history wrong. The government was multi-ethnic at the end of the 19th Century, with mainlanders, Japanese and Chinese joining native Hawaiians on the islands in large numbers. The people were not sovereign, as the only sovereign was the Queen herself. No problem for the racialists, for their solution was to simply adopt the evil Jim Crow or Ap artheid rule that anyone with a single drop of native Hawaiian blood is classified as a native Hawaiian according to this legislation. The legislation is written in such a way as to allow them to form their own sovereign government, outside the confines of the US Constitution. It allows them to sue for reparations and ownership of native Hawaiian, state and federal land on the islands – and there is a lot of that land on the islands. Ultimately, it will allow them to split off into their own nation. If this monstrosity passes, imagine the impact if any ethnic group can figure can get sufficient political power to get legislation designating them a tribe and setting in process the ability to split off and form their own nation. For example, the Mexican separatists in the Southwest US can finally form their own Aztlan. Black separatists can do the same thing. Even the Cajuns in southern Louisiana can reform Acadiana. This bill is supported by democrats in the Senate, the Alaska congressional delegation (much to the embarrassment of us all), and liberal Republican senators. If they can figure out a way to bust an expected conservative filibuster against it, the Bill will most certainly pass the Senate. Two years ago, it passed the House.

3. CA-50. The runoff to replace disgraced and convicted former Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R) in the House took an unexpected turn last weekend when the democrat candidate, Frances Busby, a long-time democrat candidate, told a gathering of illegals that they didn’t need papers to vote or to help with her campaign. This gotcha moment was filmed and recorded. Both made their way into the online community and talk radio. The event crystallized the campaign, with the Republican candidate Bilbray, who made immigration a central issue in the campaign standing in sharp constrast with the democrat inviting illegals to vote. In a related story, John McCain ( RINO, AZ) dropped out of a fundraising dinner with Bilbray because Bilbray disagreed with McCain on the issue of immigration. So much for p arty-building by McCain (more on this later). The election is this Tuesday. Democrats have targeted this seat as one of their pickups that will fuel their takeover of the House in November. If they can’t pick up this seat, with a sitting Republican Congressman stepping down, pleading guilty for bribery, and going to jail, they are going to have a very hard time picking up the House.

4. McCain. Some additional speculation on McCain and what he is trying to do from various blogs out there: While McCain has been trying to suck up to conservatives over the last couple of years, it is clear he doesn’t like it a lot and doesn’t do it real well – his he art isn’t in it. He continues to run against conservative interests like his support of the immigration bill that he originally authored. Dick Morris believes he is one of the few people that can win the election for Republicans in 2008 but cannot be nominated by Republicans due to who actually turns out to vote in Republican primaries. So what we may be seeing is McCain laying the foundation for a third p arty run in 2008. Morris thinks a third p arty campaign by McCain will turn out identical to the 1912, with a Republican split (Taft and Teddy Roosevelt then) giving the presidency to the democrat (Wilson then with 42% of the vote). I disagree. I think it is more likely that should McCain run as a third p arty candidate, we see a reverse Wilson, with the split happening in the center-left, handing the presidency to the conservative candidate. McCain so infuriates the right that they are more likely to turn out to support a suitable conservative than they will him. His play in the immigration mess works against him across the board with people on all sides of the political spectrum who want borders closed and laws enforced. Finally, McCain will do whatever the media wants him to do, for they have compromised him by going after his wife a decade or so ago. If McCain wants to run as a third p arty kind of guy, I’d say Go Ahead, Make My Day.

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations:
Debate USA, http://www.debateusa.com/ ;
MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com
and the home page: http://home.gci.net/~agimarc
Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. You can find it at: http://www.thevanguard.org/

If you would like to join II's mailing list, have comments or suggestions, please contact me at: agimarc@ak.net