Wannabe Commander-in-Chief
By Hugh Hewitt

When it was revealed last week that Barack Obama has only visited Iraq once, and that that two-day visit was in early January of 2006, many jaws dropped.

Senator Obama wants to be the Commander-in-Chief but he has been to the theater only once?--And he has never taken the opportunity to meet privately with general David Petraeus? Most Americans had assumed that--like the other candidates--Obama had been to Iraq after the surge had begun and its many successes achieved. But he hasn't, and now Americans are rightly wondering whether this indifference to seeking after facts is revealing not only of a rigid ideology but also of a deep arrogance that assumes that Obama knows everything he needs to know already.

The very extreme views of the presumptive democratic nominee are coming into focus--and they are deeply disturbing.

Iraq violence at lowest level in four years

World Tribune

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has reported a significant drop in violence in Iraq in a continuing downward trend.

Officials said May 2008 marked the fewest number of strikes in Iraq in four years. They said the decline included the use of improvised explosive devices and explosively-formed penetrators, the leading cause of U.S. troop casualties in Iraq.

Read more

Egypt sees Israel preparing for Gaza invasion

World Tribune

CAIRO — Egyptian sources said the intelligence community had concluded that Israel's military was preparing for a massive invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The sources said the invasion would attack several areas of Gaza simultaneously and seek to destroy or badly damage the Hamas regime.

"All of the signals that we have been receiving point to a massive and imminent invasion," an Egyptian source said.

[On Thursday, an Israeli was... read more

A large crowd under the bus

By Wesley Pruden

Barack Obama learns a lot of things from the newspapers. He only learned yesterday that Hillary plans to concede tomorrow by reading about it in the papers. He famously learned that his pastor - the man who he says led him to the Lord, presided at his wedding and baptized his two daughters - was a hateful old bigot who had been preaching racist nonsense only when he read about it in the newspapers. Read more

Top Hizbullah commander captued in Iraq

World Tribune

BAGHDAD — The U.S. military in Iraq has captured the deputy military chief of the Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah, coalition officials said.

Iraqi sources said the U.S. Army has arrested the No. 2 figure in Hizbullah's military wing. The sources said the unidentified Hizbullah commander was responsible for training the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army in the Baghdad area.

"The arrest is a major achievement and could provide...more

Marine Acquitted of Haditha Charges

Judge Defers Motion Decision, Delays Chessani Trial
Thomas More Law Center - News

ANN ARBOR, MI – Last night, a jury panel of seven officers acquitted Marine 1st Lieutenant Andrew Grayson of all charges involving accusations that he covered-up the killings of 24 Iraqis in Haditha on November 19, 2005. The verdict caused spectators in courtroom on the vast Camp Pendleton Marine facility to erupt in cheers.

After his acquittal, Lt Grayson made comments about LtCol Jeffrey Chessani, one of the two remaining defendants in the Haditha cases, saying he was “one of the most steadfast men… He led by example and he knew the difference between right and wrong.” LtCol Chessani is being defended by the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Read more....

Illegal Immigration
By Elizabeth Dole

There was a lot of noise last week in the media and by my opponent regarding my efforts to help local law enforcement protect our streets and neighborhoods from crimes by illegal aliens in North Carolina. I’ll talk more about this in a moment, but first I want to address the larger issue of illegal immigration.

North Carolina has had one of the fastest-growing populations of illegal aliens in America. They’ve come here for two primary reasons. First, North Carolina has historically had a growing economy, so there were jobs. Second, the liberal politicians in Raleigh were very slow to address our lax laws regarding identification, so it was very easy to get a driver’s license in North Carolina and having identification – even if received through forgery or falsification – is very important to an illegal alien.

According to 2006 estimates from the non-partisan Federation for American Immigration Reform, about 400,000 illegal aliens live in North Carolina. FAIR estimates that the cost to North Carolina taxpayers for emergency health care, education and incarceration was $997 million in 2006 alone!

Granting amnesty to illegal aliens will provide them access to many more federal and state programs – greatly increasing their cost to taxpayers. Granting amnesty without securing our borders is an invitation for millions more to come to America – illegally. This is what happened in 1986 when we had an estimated 3 million illegal aliens, and now we have an estimated 12 to 20 million.

Read more....

A GREAT ORATOR? I DON'T SEE IT... BUT OTHERS DO

Obama is good at delivering a prepared speech with a teleprompter. Without them ..... well, not so much. Pretty poor, actually.

Robert Novak notes:
The bad news for Sen. John McCain was the contrast between his speech in Louisiana and Obama's in Minnesota. Obama is a great orator, and McCain definitely is not. Obama's weakness lies in the details of what he proposes-such as dictating to corporations how to spend their profits-and that is what McCain has to start deconstructing. That is not McCain's style either, but he has to get into it.

McCain (and I think he will now that the Dem's presumptive nominee has been decided) needs to attack the shallow, and vapidness of Obama's rhetoric. Barack does indeed say nothing better than anyone else we've seen in a long time.

His inexperience and lack of understanding on topics shows up almost every time he speaks without the prepared text. He has said a lot of dumb things. But this won't matter to a lot of people. This should be interesting. I really don't know what to expect in the race for President.

McCain is not a strong candidate either in my humble opinion. We'll see.

Obama Was Selected, Not Elected
By Ann Coulter

Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.

When Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election by half a percentage point, but lost the Electoral College -- or, for short, "the constitutionally prescribed method for choosing presidents" -- anyone who denied the sacred importance of the popular vote was either an idiot or a dangerous partisan.

But now Hillary has won the popular vote in a Democratic primary, while Obambi has won under the rules. In a spectacular turnabout, media commentators are heaping sarcasm on our plucky Hillary for imagining the "popular vote" has any relevance whatsoever.

Continue reading at Human Events.

35W Bridge Collapse

A new report has come out as to why the 35W bridge in Minneapolis/St. Paul collapsed back in August of 2007.

Hassan Astaneh, a professor in University of California Berkeley's Civil and Environmental Engineering Department has reported his findings in a paper at a world conference on steel bridges in Portugal. His department has also studied the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Science Foundation.

His paper affirms what I had suspected and that is the added weight of the equipment and the construction material put too much burden on the bridge structure. The construction company on August 1st of last year had loaded 270 tons of construction materials on the bridge.

Mr. Astaneh was hired as a consultant by a victim to study the collapse. Mr Astaneh feels the bowed gusset plate should have been detected. However, what I did not know was the biggest problem was the added weight of not only the equipment and construction material, but that an additional 2 inches of concrete to the bridge deck back in 1998.

This caused an additional 30% in weight to the bridge that the trusses had to support.

Read the complete story here:
Study: Heavy construction materials, added pavement brought down 35W bridge
by Sea Stachura, Minnesota Public Radio

American Solutions has launched a campaign last week, “Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less.”

More than 318,000 people have signed the petition urging Congress to start drilling for oil here, at home, in the good old US of A.

I signed the petition with hopes to help stop the destructive Warner-Lieberman bill which would raise the cost of gasoline, diesel fuel, aviation fuel, natural gas and coal.

I hope you'll join me and sign the petition now.

Let's send a message to Congress that we need real solutions to stop the pain we are feeling at the pump and enable us to become self reliant and furnish our own energy. Doing this and developing more nuclear energy will serve our country greatly.

NO MÉNAGE-À-TROIS FOR OBAMA
By DICK MORRIS

Putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket for vice president creates a ménage-à-trois. Bill will be the unexpected roommate. Even if a President Obama can discipline Hillary and get her to play second fiddle, there is not the remotest chance that he can get the former president to accept such rules. Even if Bill Clinton wanted to rein in his newly prolific public expressions of rage and frustration, there is doubt that he is any longer capable of doing so. Read more.

Clinton urges party to unite, but she does not concede

Hillary Clinton congratulated Barack Obama tonight but stopped short of dropping out, saying she was "committed to uniting our party."

Read more at www.boston.com

The Tipping Point for Oil
By Doug Wilson

“We must strip oil of its strategic significance.” These words were spoken by Anne Korin, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS) in her presentation before the House Committee of Foreign Affairs on May 22nd.. If oil stays at or above $125 per gallon, we will export 500 billion of revenue in 2008 – equal to our national defense budget – to many nations that are not friendly to the U.S. Saudi oil reserves at $100 a barrel are worth 60 trillion… more than the market cap of all the world’s largest companies combined.

David Limbaugh:
Obama's Unity Charade

The $64 million question is how long Barack Obama can carry forward this ruse that he is a uniter, when he has placed himself in a climate that is, at the very least, quite accommodating to an anti-white racist perspective, vulgarity and anti-Americanism.

Liberalism and Victimhood

By Dennis Prager

Irrelevant Apologies

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama's latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama's belated resignation from that church.

For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.

Yet so many people are so fascinated by Barack Obama's rhetorical skills that they don't care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate's personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations.....
(Read more by Thomas Sowell)

BBC NEWS:
Navies to tackle Somali pirates

The UN Security Council has unanimously voted to allow countries to send warships into Somalia's territorial waters to tackle pirates.

Washington Post:
'Slugglish' Sen. Robert Byrd hospitalized

Initiative to ban gay marriage is on ballot

A constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in California was placed on the Nov. 4 ballot Monday, kick-starting an election struggle that will have repercussions across the nation.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen's certification of the initiative, which would amend the state Constitution to limit marriage to a union between a man and a woman, comes as no surprise to either side of the same-sex marriage issue.

When backers of the initiative, who needed 694,354 valid signatures to make the ballot, turned in more than 1.1 million signatures, the only question was when the certification would come.

"We're not surprised by this at all and have been getting ready to......

Taxes: Keep the Cuts
By Ed Feulner

Our country just marked the fifth year of the 2003 tax cuts, which gave people an incentive to work, save and invest. The results have been impressive.

McCain Criticizes Obama on Iran

Washington (AP) - Republican John McCain raised the specter of a nuclear Iran in a speech to a pro-Israel group, once again chastising Democrat Barack Obama for his willingness to meet with leaders of Iran and other U.S. foes.

McCain has criticized Obama for saying......

Anglican Church Aims to Spread Gospel to UK Muslims, Others
The Church of England has launched a campaign targeting Muslims for conversion. Paul Eddy, a priest in training, says he introduced the motion because he fears that the Anglican Church has watered down its faith in recent years. Where many Muslims are publicly robust in their faith, he said the church had “lost its nerve” and was creating a vacuum that other religions are filling.

Anglican Church Aims to Spread Gospel to UK Muslims, Others
The Church of England has launched a campaign targeting Muslims for conversion. Paul Eddy, a priest in training, says he introduced the motion because he fears that the Anglican Church has watered down its faith in recent years. Where many Muslims are publicly robust in their faith, he said the church had “lost its nerve” and was creating a vacuum that other religions are filling.

McCain Might Choose Moderate Court Justices, Forecasts Novak
As president, McCain might find it difficult to move a conservative Supreme Court nominee through the U.S. Senate, says Robert Novak. That's because Novak believes the GOP will lose four seats in the Senate.

Carol Platt Liebau:
Barack Obama: Dividing (By Race) to Conquer?

For someone whose campaign supposedly brought with it the promise of racial healing, Barack Obama has so far done little to effect any meaningful interracial understanding.

The Big Difference

“The big difference between Republicans and liberal Democrats is the way each party views people. Republicans see us as individuals and respect our God-given human dignity. To liberal Democrats, we’re not individuals; we’re members of a herd with all the dignity of a cow or pig dependent on its owner for daily rations of hay or slop. Democrats see us as being white or as blacks or as straights or as gays, or as lesbians or as heterosexuals, or as rich or poor, or as Christians or as Jews or as Muslims, or as young or as old, as working or as retired, or as housewives or as career women. They submerge us into pools that define us as members of groups instead of as what we are as God sees us—as any father sees his children—each being different from one another, and each child being a separate and distinct individual with his or her own specific talents and abilities, and all deserving of his love... This Marxist view of human nature embraces group-think, despises individuality, and seeks to eliminate all vestiges of the dignity to which every human being created in the image and likeness of God is entitled. Only the hopes and aspirations of the groups matter, and they matter solely because they create dependency on the state—which seeks to supplant God as the source of all that is good and necessary for survival.” —Michael Reagan

This is our goal.

“An opportunity society awaits us. We need only believe in ourselves and give men and women of faith, courage, and vision the freedom to build it. Let others run down America and seek to punish success. Let them call you greedy for not wanting government to take more and more of your earnings. Let them defend their tombstone society of wage and price guidelines, mandatory quotas, tax increases, planned shortages*, and shared sacrifices. We want no part of that mess, thank you very much. We will encourage all Americans—men and women, young and old, individuals of every race, creed, and color—to succeed and be healthy, happy, and whole. This is our goal. We see America not falling behind, but moving ahead; our citizens not fearful and divided, but confident and united by shared values of faith, family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.” —Ronald Reagan

*Think oil shortage and high gas prices. This current "crisis" is self-imposed. Thank you Congress!

We'll take your money for 'common good'

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." - Hillary Clinton, June 28, 2004

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” —C.S. Lewis

“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”—Thomas Jefferson

McClellan on Plame
By Robert D. Novak

In Scott McClellan’s purported tell-all memoir of his trials as President George W. Bush’s press secretary, he virtually ignores Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage’s role in leaking to me Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee. That fits the partisan Democratic version of the Plame affair, in keeping with the overall tenor of “What Happened.” McClellan’s handling of the leak leads former colleagues to suggest he could not have written this book by himself.

McCain on Iran

USA Today:
McCain to urge other nations to cut off funds to Iran
Wants effort similar to kind that helped end apartheid

Mexican Drug Problem

Washington Post:
Poll: Mexicans see drug gangs winning

Hey, Kemosabe, Kemosabe: Barack 'Tonto' Obama takes new name

Obama, Wooing Voters, Takes an American-Indian Name

Crow Agency, Mont. (AP) - The purification ceremony isn't an everyday ritual of U.S. presidential politics.

The newly named Awe Kooda Bilaxpak Kuuxshish -- better known as Barack Obama -- faced east, the symbolic source of new life. His adopted Crow father, Hartford Black Eagle, prayed over him.

Afterward, they walked arm-in-arm with Black Eagle's wife, Mary, to a podium, where Obama promised to live up to the meaning of his new name: "One Who Helps People Throughout the Land."

Gag me with a spoon.

Senate Takes Up Climate Bill

Washington (AP) - Most senators acknowledge that climate change poses a major environmental threat, but getting agreement on how to deal with it is another matter.

The Senate on Monday will take up legislation that calls for cutting carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases by about 70 percent from power plants, refineries, factories and transportation by mid-century.

But the bill's chances of passing the Senate are viewed as slim as its supporters are not expected to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a certain filibuster threat. Prospects in the House are even less certain.

But both Democrats and Republicans appeared eager to debate global warming and.......(Read more)

Iraqis Fear Rapid US Withdrawal Would Cause ‘Chaos and Anarchy’
"There is very widespread support for an American presence in the short and intermediate term," said Adnan Pachachi, a member of the National Assembly of Iraq and a former president of Iraq's Governing Council. He said the best policy now lies somewhere between the strategies outlined by Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama.

Weekend

This past weekend was pretty mellow. I mowed my yard. Had a couple of beers. Smoked a couple of cigars. Got my vehicle washed at a fund raiser. My son's girlfriend and her cohorts were attempting to raise money for their high school dance team.

We also had a family picture taken on Saturday as part of a fund raiser for the fiance (October wedding) of one of my daughter's best friend. He has cancer and has some serious obstacles and bills to pay.

Speaking of weddings. One of my daughters is getting married and it is coming up soon .. June 21. In addition to HH Jr., I have three daughters, and this will be the first marriage we have had.

Sunday Mrs. HH and I went to a matinée. We went to see the new Indiana Jones movie. All in all, a relaxing weekend.

McClellan's Kiss and Tell
By David Aikman

Kiss and Tell is an old tradition in American politics. Insiders from all sorts of administrations have left their jobs and then written books unflattering to their former employers. The Bush administration has generally suffered no worse than previous administrations.

But the latest blast from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, a book called "What Happened," is unusual in at least two ways. First, McClellan fulsomely denounced other Bush White House insiders who had decamped and then written their kiss-and-tell stories. Second, one has to wonder why McClellan stayed six years in a job serving people he thought were incompetent or were misleading Americans.

Well, money is an obvious answer as "What Happened" leapt to the top of bookstore best-seller lists. Kiss and Tell still pays.

Kennedy to have brain surgery today

Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy will undergo surgery today for his brain tumor at Duke University Medical Center.

To read more, visit http://www.boston.com