BIG TROUBLE HEADING IN HARRY REID'S DIRECTION?

This LA Times article is potentially disastrous news for Senate Democrats.

It’s hard to buy undeveloped land in booming northern Arizona for $166 an acre. But now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid effectively did just that when a longtime friend decided to sell property owned by the employee pension fund that he controlled.

In 2002, Reid (D-NV) paid $10,000 to a pension fund controlled by Clair Haycock, a Las Vegas lubricants distributor and his friend for 50 years. The payment gave the senator full control of a 160-acre parcel in Bullhead City that Reid and the pension fund had jointly owned. Reid’s price for the equivalent of 60 acres of undeveloped desert was less than one-tenth of the value the assessor placed on it at the time.

Haven’t we heard of Harry’s real estate bargains before? Did Reid think that nobody would notice? Frankly, Dingy Harry has gotten more great deals than any American politician in my lifetime.

What’s worse news for Democrats is that they’re betwixt and between on this. If they don’t make an example of Reid’s shady land deals, then they’ll be characterized as totally corrupt. Remember that Reid short-changed an employee pension fund, giving them only 10 cents on their retirement dollar. Based on this article, the assessor valued the property at more than $100,000 per acre. I’m not a real estate expert but that seems cheap in a hot real estate market.

If they do make an example of him and expel him from the Senate, that gives Jim Gibbons, the Republican governor or Nevada, the power to name Reid’s successor. If the Democrats don’t make an example of Reid, people will know that they aren’t worthy of the public’s trust. They’ll know that Democrats will sell out anyone for a buck.

Believe it or not, it gets worse:

Six months after the deal closed, Reid introduced legislation to address the plight of lubricants dealers who had their supplies disrupted by the decisions of big oil companies. It was an issue the Haycock family had brought to Reid’s attention in 1994, according to a source familiar with the events.

Can you say quid pro quo? It’s difficult, if not impossible, to conclude that this was slush money paid to Reid for his intervention on a constituent’s behalf.

If Reid were to sell the property for any of the various estimates of its value, his gain on the $10,000 investment could range from $50,000 to $290,000.

That’s probably the most conservative thing that I’ve heard from the LA Times in ages. Based on their own reporting, Reid paid $166 per acre was “less than one tenth” of what the assessor valued the land at. Frankly, I’m skeptical of that assessment. Frankly, I can’t imagine this land not being worth $50,000 per 1/3 acre lot, not $166 per acre. That would put Reid’s eventual profits alot higher than $290,000.

Based on this information, this deal makes Hillary’s futures deal all those years ago look modest. And that takes some doing. That takes alot of doing.

In a statement, Reid’s spokesman Jon Summers said that the transaction was not a gift and that the price was due to the property’s history and the fact that only a partial interest was sold. Reid’s action on the lubricants issue was unrelated to the sale and reflected the senator’s interest in fairness for small businesses, Summers said.

RIIIGGGHHHHTTT. Harry Reid, the small businessman’s hero. That should be his campaign slogan the next time he runs. That is, if he isn’t run out of the Senate before that. If he’s such a friend of small business, why would he have ripped of this small business’s pension fund that badly?

Because an employee pension fund had owned the land Reid purchased, labor law experts contacted by The Times said, a below-market sale would raise additional questions. Pension fund trustees like Clair Haycock have a duty in most cases to sell assets for their market value, the experts said.

“I think this would have been considered a potentially serious issue” at the time, said Ian D. Lanoff, who led the Labor Department’s pension division during the Carter administration…

Let’s suppose for the sake of discussion that Reid didn’t push legislation for this ’small business owner’. Let’s stipulate for this discussion that he simply paid 1/10th of the market value of the land, keeping in mind that Reid essentially bought this from the employees’ pension fund. At a time when pension funds are badly underfunded, this is serious business.

If there is justice in this world, Harry Reid will be run out of town on a rail & Republicans will have a 50-50 split in the Senate. The bad news is that I doubt that there is justice in a Democrat Senate.

Can you say ‘Democrat Culture of Corruption’?

KENNEDY'S SCREAMING TIRADE

The Democrats class warfare minimum wage increase is now being debated in the Senate .. and Ted Kennedy is about to have a stroke. Did you hear this pathetic man screaming at the Republicans? [video] "What is it about it (the minimum wage) that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

Well ... of course .. most of you will recognize this as cheap demagoguery. There are two faulty premises to Kennedy's question:

1. The working wage has some meaningful connection to "working" men and women.
   
2. Republicans are offended by working men and women.

Both premises are false.

Let's deal with this "working men and women" line first. This rhetorical nonsense is now a basic part of the left wing class warfare arsenal. The goal here is to foster the idea that the more money you make the less you work. The reality is that there we have two resources we can use to make money, physical labor and mental labor. Most of us use a combination of the two. The ugly little fact is that, generally speaking, and professional athletes aside, the more of your mind you use the more money you will make, and the more of your muscle you use the less money you'll make.

Here's another fact. The more money you make, the more likely it is that you will vote Republican. The less money you make, the more likely you will vote Democrat. Bring this all together and you'll soon figure out that the more you use physical labor to earn money, the more likely it is you will vote Democrat.

Knowing that almost all Americans value the concept of hard work, the Democrats have worked to promote the concept that the only real work that physical labor. Working with your mind -- managing investments, for instance -- just isn't work. Therefore the only real working people out there are those who work with their hands instead of their brains .... or those more likely to vote Democrat. Once you've made this absurd concept a reality you have created a wonderful class warfare weapon. If you're smarter than the average bear, and if you realize that it is not the role of government to set wages, you then become an enemy of "working men and women."

This, then, enables Ted Kennedy's demagoguery. He first asks what it is about the minimum wage that, as he says, drives Republicans so crazy. Simple. First -- there are still a few Republicans out there who believe that in a free market economy it is not the role of government to set wages. If the government can set a minimum wage, what is to stop the government from setting a maximum wage? If the government can set a minimum wage, then why can't the government set a minimum wage based on family size? Why can't the Imperial Federal Government of the United States just pass a law saying that the minimum wage goes up by $2.00 per hour for every child born to the worker? Once you allow the government to have a say in establishing the value of labor ... the sky is the limit. Where does it stop?

Secondly ... Republicans realize that less than 20% of the people in this country who earn the minimum wage live in families that are anywhere near or below the poverty level. Over six out of ten people who begin work at the minimum wage have received their first raise within the first year. Only 15% of minimum wage workers are still receiving the minimum wage after three years on their job. What percentage of the full time work force is earning just the minimum wage? Around 1 percent.

So .. to answer Kennedy's screaming questions: The minimum wage drives (some) Republicans crazy because there is absolutely nothing in our Constitution that allows the government to set wages, and the minimum wage is used by Democrats as nothing more than a tool of class warfare. Around one percent of full-time workers earn the minimum wage, and most of them are part of families that are well above the poverty line. It just isn't an issue. Knowing Republicans are also upset because they know that the Democrats push for the minimum wage increases are just another way of telling unions "thanks for your support."

And to answer Kennedy's second question, there is nothing about "working men and women" that Republicans find offensive. What they do find offensive is the Democrat use of the phrase "working people" as a tool of class warfare through their attempts to convince lower income Americans that those who make more than they do aren't really working for the money they earn.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST JIMMY CARTER

Kenneth Stein has written an article about his leaving the Carter Center. Suffice it to say that it’s devastating to Carter.

While Carter says that he wrote the book to educate and provoke debate, the narrative aims its attack toward Israel, Israeli politicians, and Israel’s supporters. It contains egregious errors of both commission and omission. To suit his desired ends, he manipulates information, redefines facts, and exaggerates conclusions.

The question I’d love asking Jimmy Carter is this: How can you pretend that the goal of your book is to “educate and provoke debate” when it’s so factually inaccurate and biased?

I ask you to think back to your favorite teachers. Didn’t these teachers have their facts straight and their logic seamless and compelling? Where is the compelling logic in Carter’s book? How many facts have been pointed out in the media alone? It’s enough to bury what little is left of Carter’s credibility.

Carter’s preferred method in writing the book was to lay a brief and somewhat selective historical foundation for each chapter and emphasize the contemporary. I sought to anchor each chapter more deeply in history and political culture. He had little patience for precedent or laborious recapitulation of history. Too often it interfered with his desire to find action-oriented solutions, which befit his training as an engineer. For Carter, history and ideology bestowed unwanted moorings and unnecessary rigidities; they shackled the pragmatism and flexibility of the would-be negotiator.

When Stein says that Carter thought that “history and ideology bestowed unwanted moorings and unnecessary rigidities”, what he’s really saying is that historical truths proved cumbersome to Carter because he was already then living in a fantasy world devoid of real truth. Carter is nothing if not divorced from reality and indifferent to historical truth.

The Roots of Carter’s Anger

Carter believes the conflict’s resolution to be simple: After the Israeli government agrees in principle to withdraw fully from the West Bank, a dedicated negotiator like himself can usher in an independent, peaceful Palestinian state. That this has not happened is, in Carter’s view, primarily due to the legacy of late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, not the fault of poor Palestinian decision-making or the Palestinian embrace of terrorism.

This is where verifiable facts get in President Carter’s way. That’s why he simply ignores the facts.

Carter believes that if the U.S. government reduces or stops its support for Israel, then the Jewish state will be weakened and become more malleable in negotiations. His underlying logic is based upon an imperial rationality that assumes Washington to have the answer to myriad issues besetting Middle Eastern societies. This plays into the notion in Arab societies that the cause of their problems lies with Western powers and other outsiders.

That’s about as wrong-headed of thinking as it gets. First of all, that’s awful policy. It’s awful policy because it’s based on the U.S. favoring a terrorist nation over a full-fledged democracy who’s biggest desire is to simply live in peace while raising their families. Arab nations have been used a myriad of excuses for the ineptitude of their governmental institutions. These institutions are inept because the terrorists aren’t interested in a government that provides for their people. These terrorist governments are only interested in wiping Israel off the face of the earth.

SUPPORTING THE TROOP SURGE IS ABOUT NATIONAL SECURITY

Unless you are Rip Van Winkle, you now know that President Bush wants to send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.

Personally, I would have felt better if the president had come to this conclusion a bit sooner. However his rational for doing this makes sense to me: there wasn’t enough troops to secure the areas that were cleaned out by our soldiers, so terrorists moved back in once the soldiers moved on to another area. Now we will secure those areas.

Alright, count me in as a supporter of the plan.

The Democrats now say that we should begin a phased withdrawal in order to force the Iraqis to get serious about training their own troops and taking responsibility for their own security. They don’t want us to be a participating referee in a religious civil war.

It all seems reasonable at first glance. Then I remembered that it wasn’t long ago when many of the same Democrats dissenting against the plan were the “hard realists” who said that we needed more troops. So what changed other then Bush’s tactical reversal and principle support for that plan?

So it’s the same old game; one where the president says “vice-versa,” the democratic leadership says “verse-vice,” or pronounces the word “tomato” differently than Bush by political design.

To show that they are people with the energy of their convictions, the democratic leadership has decided to back a non-binding resolution against the president’s plan.

It’s the past repeating itself all over again. Many Democrats voted with Bush to authorize the deposing of Hussein before the 2002 mid term elections. Left to their designs, these Democrats might have voted differently, but the tide of the American people was against them then, and they didn’t want to lose congressional seats by failing to support a popular military action.

Things haven’t changed much at all. A non-binding resolution–what’s that? It’s like keeping a guard dog tethered on a 10-foot chain in the back yard, in order to keep prowlers from breaking in through the front on the house. The dog barks and barks, but can’t bite.

The Democrats hope to appease the most left-leaning constituents within their base by wagging their collective fingers at the president. If the Democrats thought this idea were a winning strategy, then they would stop funding the Iraq campaign completely. Of course that would be a euphemism for abandoning the troops already there, and undermine the dDmocrats hard-fought for reputation that “they are patriotic too.” Apparently, even liberal politicians learned something politically useful from the aftermath of pulling out of Vietnam.

I would like to think we as a country have matured from the infantile society that spat on its soldiers, and called them “baby-killers” when they returned from Southeast Asia over three decades ago. Even abortion doctors seldom suffer such abuse and name-calling.

Non-binding resolutions are meaningless and gutless–politics at their most irrelevant level.

Apparently the New Mexico State Legislature is going to vote on a symbolic resolution to impeach Bush over Iraq. What a childish and senseless action. As the liberals often complain, let’s move on to substantive issues, rather than engage in political jousting over ideological issues that are divisive and polarizing.

The real problem is that the people who are reflexively opposed to the Iraq policy, haven’t given careful thought to what will happen if we pull our troops out without the victory of stabilizing that country. Yes, the Iraqi government must take more responsibility, but we can’t just abandon that situation because we are unhappy about the slow progress being made in training Iraqi security forces.

Those who question military strategy on the basis of whether this or that leader has sons or daughters in the theater of conflict are among the worst political propagandists. A leader has to have the fortitude to make unpopular decisions that can result in tragedy for some citizens in order to preserve national liberty for all.

I still see “letters to the editor” nearly every week that declare the president lied about Iraq—probably from the same ideological brethren who said that gas prices would go up substantially after the November elections.

This isn’t Vietnam, were we could pull out without worrying about whether the insurgents would follow us back to our shores. If I didn’t honestly see that this was ultimately an issue of national security, I might agree with those who want to pull out. Those favoring a “redeployment” of troops either ignore, or don’t understand that possibility.

—

Robert E. Meyer is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

FIGHTING BACK, TURNING UP THE HEAT

That’s what Dafna Linzner is reporting in this morning’s Washington Post:

The Bush administration has authorized the U.S. military to kill or capture Iranian operatives inside Iraq as part of an aggressive new strategy to weaken Tehran’s influence across the Middle East and compel it to give up its nuclear program, according to government and counterterrorism officials with direct knowledge of the effort.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The “catch and release” policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran’s regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country’s nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

“There were no costs for the Iranians,” said one senior administration official. “They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back.”

It’s about time we took the gloves off and let our troops fight back with lethal force. If Iran wants to deploy troops to this war, they should be made to pay with their lives. We should let Iran know that their interference will be met with extreme resistance and that we won’t worry what the world community thinks. When history records its verdict, it should be said that we replaced our ‘catch-and-release’ strategy with a ’shoot-first-ask questions-later’ strategy.

We’re told that the Islamic extremists’ greatest goal is to die a martyr’s death while fighting ‘the infidels’. The U.S. military’s goal should be to ‘unilaterally’ help these extremists meet that goal.

The new “kill or capture” program was authorized by President Bush in a meeting of his most senior advisers last fall, along with other measures meant to curtail Iranian influence from Kabul to Beirut and, ultimately, to shake Iran’s commitment to its nuclear efforts. Tehran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful, but the United States and other nations say it is aimed at developing weapons.

The administration’s plans contain five “theaters of interest,” as one senior official put it, with military, intelligence, political and diplomatic strategies designed to target Iranian interests across the Middle East.

It’d be nice if the end was in sight but I’m thankful that the Bush administration is dramatically expanding the war by confronting Iran’s influence on the region. I’m thankful that they’ve finally changed the ROE, essentially letting soldiers do the job that they were intended to do. I like this more aggressive strategy, too. Now we’re telling that region’s despots that there’s a heavy price to be paid for undercutting our allies and killing our soldiers.

Telling Tehran that we’re serious won’t stop their meddling but it will tamp down on their efforts to undermine the Iraqi government.

Iran’s sending of troops, trainers and munitions indicates just how serious a threat an Iraqi democracy is to their mullahcracy. Knowing that Tehran views a stable Iraq as major threat, we should redouble our efforts to drive them from Iraq. I’d argue that this information should provide the incentive for us to get after Iran with lethal force rather than through diplomacy.

In Iraq, U.S. troops now have the authority to target any member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, as well as officers of its intelligence services believed to be working with Iraqi militias. The policy does not extend to Iranian civilians or diplomats. Though U.S. forces are not known to have used lethal force against any Iranian to date, Bush administration officials have been urging top military commanders to exercise the authority.

That’s a smart policy. Targeting Iranian diplomats isn’t essential because they aren’t the problem in Iraq. Targeting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and their intelligence operatives is a different story, though because they’re the source of the problem. Attacking peripheral targets is of limited value. Hitting the source is how you solve problems.

On a related matter, this article tells me that Sen. Hagel’s resolution is arguing against a new, more aggressive, strategy designed to stop the Iranians. This tells me that Sen. Hagel is nothing more than a grandstanding politician who isn’t interested in the facts on the ground.

For that reason, I renew my plea to GOP activists in Nebraska to recruit a primary challenger to Sen. Hagel so we can get rid of him ASAP.

TROOPS AUTHORIZED TO KILL IRANIANS

According to the Washington Post, President Bush has granted authorization to our troops in Iraq to kill Iranian agents that are operating there. It's about time....why weren't we doing this years ago? Perhaps we finally have the chance to win and get out of there. This has been a long time coming. Iran has been sending fighters into Iraq for 4 years now.

It turns out that for over a year, we've been running this policy with the Iranians where we detain them for a couple days, make note of their identity, then send them on their way. Don't want to offend Tehran, you know. Are you kidding me? No wonder people think we're losing the war. It's just these sorts of appeasement tactics that have put us in the position we are in now.

So now we're going to kill them. Good. Any member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard ought to be shot on site and shipped back to Ahmadinejad in a cardboard box. This is war.....nobody ever won by being nice. Of course if the story in the media is to be believed, officials at the State Department are already worried that this could provoke a confrontation with Tehran. Too bad. They started it by interfering in the first place.

But at least the situation has been corrected. This has been our problem all along in Iraq. We didn't clean out Fallujah when we had the chance. We didn't shoot the looters. In trying not to offend anyone, we're doing our best to lose.