How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command — every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war — to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
-President Bush in an address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington D.C., September 20, 2001.

While al Qaeda blusters and purports to be planning new attacks, they’ve been getting their asses kicked in, all across the globe. This is especially true in Iraq, where the Iraqi government will begin paying salaries to 51,000 members of the Sons of Iraq, and where al Qaeda lost the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

Critics of President Bush’s Iraq War venture love to claim that “he took his eye off the ball; we should be in Afghanistan and Pakistan- that’s where al Qaeda is.”; “We let bin Laden get away.” And of course, they also love to point out, “al Qaeda was never in Iraq….until we invaded.”

al Qaeda has had operations in 50 countries, and we’ve killed and captured operatives in 102 different countries since 9/11. Although we have a large, visible, military footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve been engaging al Qaeda all across the globe.

Leaked to today’s NYTimes, which leaks it to the American public, is the following:
Read the rest of this entry »

Gotta love this flip-flop:

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold will not filibuster a compromise version of an electronic surveillance program although he thinks it will infringe on U.S. citizens’ civil liberties.

Feingold said he and other Senate opponents won’t try to stop the vote, but they “won’t allow it to pass quickly.”

Instead, Feingold, D-Wis., told an audience at the New America Foundation that he plans to highlight the bill’s flaws in floor speeches. There may be several procedural votes before final passage, he added. Feingold said he and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., met with Senate leader Harry Reid last week to discuss their objections.

That was a day ago. Now today: Read the rest of this entry »

The entire article by Lance Fairchok at American Thinker is spot-on excellent, and exactly what I was looking for as an answer to this, which surprisingly seemed to get little media traction. However, I’d like to cite the following passage as a lead-in for a different, if not unrelated topic:
Read the rest of this entry »

Will Obama be absent for this vote when it comes before the Senate next week?

A bipartisan deal that clears the way for a sweeping overhaul of domestic wiretapping laws will let telecommunications companies escape lawsuits over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program, congressional leaders announced Thursday.

The measure could be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives as early as Friday.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, said the bill is “not perfect” but “strikes a sound balance” between intelligence-gathering and court oversight.

It’s not perfect, thats for sure. But it does allow telecom companies to continue assisting the government in keeping tabs on terrorists who communicate with those inside our borders. The WSJ put it this way. This will: Read the rest of this entry »

When the WaPo reported that a McCain spokesman had said he supported immunity for the telecoms regarding the wiretapping of foreign communications BUT only if they testified in Congress, Andy McCarthy was a bit taken aback.

Is he saying that in a time of national crisis, the president should not be permitted to ask the telecoms for assistance that is arguably beyond what is prescribed in a statute?

Is he saying that, contrary to the indication of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, Sen. McCain does not believe the president has authority under Article II of the Constitution to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States unless a federal judge gives permission? Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get the message Siobhan Gorman at The Wall Street Journal is trying to convey (although, do a google search for Gorman and you come up with dozens of stories from him on intelligence gathering, it appears to be a pet peeve of his, how dare our intelligence agencies collect intelligence!). In a nutshell, telecom companies should not be given immunity because they already give up too much info:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system. Read the rest of this entry »

Take a guess which finger I’m giving them?

This is why politicians on both sides of the aisle should piss you off:

Hoyer said in his weekly press conference that he hoped to wrap up work on an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; “towards the end of this week or the beginning of next week.” Read the rest of this entry »

Poor lefties. They ride into Congress in 2006 with the glee of having vanquished the big bad ole’ Republicans. They rub their hands in anticipation that two of the bestest lefties they have, now leading their respective Houses, will run from Iraq, roll back all the legislation intended to secure this country, and “drain the swamp.” Remember….their slim majority was suddenly a “mandate.”

But what happened? The Patriot Act is still around and working well. We still have troops in Iraq, and hell, we sent even more in for The Surge. And now the Protect America enhancements to FISA are about to be enacted. But only if Democrats can play a shell game to protect themselves from those poor, sad little lefties: (via Hot Air) Read the rest of this entry »

The big issues for the Democrat led Congress? To investigate steroid use by sports players and to force a contempt citation on the executive branch. Both BIG losers of time, money, and brain cells.

But at least Mukasey didn’t take long:

On Thursday afternoon, Pelosi had asked Mukasey to order an investigation of whether Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify about the controversial firings of U.S. attorneys. Read the rest of this entry »

In this post yesterday I helped show the various shady dealings going on between Nancy, Hillary, and Obama with big pharma….that evil scourge, as they enjoy likening it to. But even worse is the shady dealings going on between some Democrats and the trial lawyers that are putting our country at grave risk.

The Protect America Act FISA enhancements expired last week and now we are back to the 1978 bill that was so out of date it took special action by congress to allow it to even recognize things like email and cellphones. Read the rest of this entry »

Excellent rundown of how the Democrats have made our country less safe by allowing FISA to lapse from the Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who, as he pointed out in the interview, has worked with both parties in various intelligence capacities for over 40 years but now is being labeled as partisan: (h/t Hot Air)

A partial transcript: Read the rest of this entry »

Republicans in a show of unity walked out of Congress today due to a few things. First, the Democrats continually dragging their feet on the FISA bill. Here is the video of the walkout and the GOP holding a press conference.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a wonder how this President, a man most on the left think of as dimwitted, is able to outwit and embarrass the Democrats time and time again.  This time it was Bush forcing the Democrats to accept completely their version of the FISA reform bill, hours after the Democrats had to pull their own version of the bill from the floor:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush
administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the
federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a
highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications
companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional
sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic
leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor
because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and
GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of
the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a
scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides
lobbied heavily against the Democrats’ bill, and an embarrassment for
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure’s
passage.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence
committee’s chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush’s
director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full
immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they
acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with
surveillance in the United States.

Recall that it was only two months ago when the House voted on only a short term extension of the new FISA bill so they could revise it the way they wanted.  They then went and shut out any and all Republican participation in the revising of the bill and then only allowed them to check the thing out for 24 hours prior to a vote:

It does not reflect discussions between the majority and the minority,
or discussions the Committee has had with the Administration. It is
also important to note that the minority was not consulted on specific
text before introduction of the bill, and did not receive the final
text of H.R. 3773 until twenty-four hours before the markup. In the
brief period we had to review the legislation before Committee
consideration, we uncovered numerous, serious problems rendering this
bill beyond repair.

Then when it came time to vote on the thing the Democrats went even further:

Rules Committee Chair Louise Slaughter did something unusual however,
in the hearing on legislation to extend the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act–she announced
at the start of the hearing that no amendments of any type would be
allowed for debate. Committee Democrats followed Slaughter’s lead and
voted against amendments to: authorize surveillance of those engaged in
the creation of Weapons of Mass Destruction; authorize surveillance of
foreign terrorists outside the United States; extend liability
protection to telecommunications companies that relied on government
directives and shared information deemed necessary for protection from
terrorist attack; and, allow a debate on the Bush administration’s
alternative.

But alas, the House Rules Committee was forced to relent and play by the rules.  They allowed the minority to add one amendment which read:

Nothing in this Act [H.R. 3773] or the amendments made by this Act
shall be construed to prohibit the intelligence community (as defined
in section 3(4) of the National Security Act of 1947 (50 U.S.C.
401a(4))) from conducting surveillance needed to prevent Osama Bin
Laden, Al Qaeda, or any other foreign terrorist organization designated
under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C.
1189) from attacking the United States or any United States person.

Which would have have put the Democrats in a position of voting against that directive in order to pass their bill  under the rules they wanted, no-debate, no-amendments.  As it turns out they decided that was not a great idea.

Of course after all these shenanigans by the Democrats bringing this bill to the floor they are now crying like little babies over the added section.  KOS:

But the most egregious part of this particular motion to recommit is that the language Cantor claims to want included in the bill is, depending on how you read it, either redundant (which means recommitting it is a waste of time even if you brought it right back onto the floor) or completely meaningless in any legal sense (which means recommitting it is not just a waste of time, but possibly totally stupid and/or evil).

TPM:

Here’s what Dem Rep. Jerrold Nadler had to say in his recent statement announcing his backing of the bill:

It also includes emergency provisions, including the
ability to get a warrant after the fact, to ensure that the government
will never have to stop listening to a suspected terrorist plotting an
attack.

We don’t have time to dig into the legislation right now. But if
Nadler’s description of the bill is accurate, it would appear to make
it very obvious that Cantor’s amendment was simply about scuttling the
bill and nothing else.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer:

Once again, House Republicans have chosen to engage in
politics rather than substantively address the challenges that face the
American people.

Once again, they have offered an amendment that, if passed, would have substantially delayed this important legislation — which is designed to protect the American people — by proposing language already provided in the bill.

We have every intention of completing consideration of this critical
legislation and fulfilling our twin objectives — protecting the
American people and protecting their civil liberties.

Which is all quite humorous seeing as how it was the Democrats who decided to pull the thing.  If time was of the essence then they had the votes to see it passed as-is.  But nope, with all the chest thumping they did by not allowing the minority to view the legislation prior to a vote and not allowing any amendments to it in the end they were forced to capitulate to Bush once again.

The Democrats have found that being in the drivers seat means having to act with some level of responsibility.  When they don’t act as such they are quickly brought down to reality.