Armed Liberal at Winds Of Change attended a conference call yesterday with Bill Carr, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Military Personnel Policy, about the recent smears against our military by a few news outlets on recruiting criminals.  I noted in my own post that the numbers of those granted waivers equate to one half of one percent of all recruits, not a shocking number and definitely not deserving the hyperbole and spin by the MSM to somehow show that our military is so desperate they are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  At least the NYT’s article did a decent job of showing what kind of crimes were talking about here that were granted waivers:

Lt. Col. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, said the waivers had been carefully vetted and were not as serious as they appeared on paper. The kidnapping charge involved a divorced woman who moved out of state with her child without the permission of her former husband, she said. One terroristic threat charge involved a 14-year-old who called in a bomb threat to his school, and the other also involved a minor. Read the rest of this entry »

Funny how the New York Times will put up a story on Page 1 of their paper that alleges legal land swap deals were done at the urging of McCain. Land swap deals that did not benefit him at all. But they ignored the Harry Reid land swap scandal that DID benefit him and his family directly.

A longtime political patron, Mr. Diamond is one of the elite fund-raisers Mr. McCain’s current presidential campaign calls Innovators, having raised more than $250,000 so far. At home, Mr. Diamond is sometimes referred to as “The Donald,” Arizona’s answer to Donald Trump — an outsized personality who invites public officials aboard his flotilla of yachts (the Ace, King, Jack and Queen of Diamonds), specializes in deals with the government, and unabashedly solicits support for his business interests from the recipients of his campaign contributions.

Mr. McCain has occasionally rebuffed Mr. Diamond’s entreaties as inappropriate, but he has also taken steps that benefited his friend’s real estate empire. Their 26-year relationship illuminates how Mr. McCain weighs requests from a benefactor against his vows, adopted after a brush with scandal two decades ago, not to intercede with government authorities on behalf of a donor or take other official action that serves no clear public interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Um…..yeah:

WASHINGTON (April 21) - Under pressure to meet combat needs, the Army and Marine Corps brought in significantly more recruits with felony convictions last year than in 2006, including some with manslaughter and sex crime convictions.

Data released by a congressional committee shows the number of soldiers admitted to the Army with felony records jumped from 249 in 2006 to 511 in 2007. And the number of Marines with felonies rose from 208 to 350. Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Wehner explores some of the vitriol leveled at ABC and the two moderators of the last Democrat debate and doesn’t like the double standard at play:

And what did Stephanopoulos and Gibson do to earn this scorn? Why, they asked Barack Obama some probing questions, including one about his past relationships with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and a former leader of the Weather Underground, William Ayers.

Consider this thought experiment: Assume that a conservative candidate for the GOP nomination spent two decades at a church whose senior pastor was a white supremacist who uttered ugly racial (as well as anti-American) epithets from the pulpit. Assume, too, that this minister wasn’t just the candidate’s pastor but also a close friend, the man who married the candidate and his wife, baptized his two daughters, and inspired the title of his best-selling book. Read the rest of this entry »

At least the AP isn’t alone in its bias and misreporting. Jonathan Landay and John Walcott from the tabloid news organization McClatchey ran a story via The Miami Herald that took a report about the Iraq war and omitted some key facts to make it appear as the Iraq War is a debacle today:

The war in Iraq has become ”a major debacle” and the outcome ”is in doubt” despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon’s premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush’s projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions. Read the rest of this entry »

You can actually feel the teeth grinding coming from Sameer Yocoub at the AP as he wrote this article in which he grudgingly admitted things are pretty good in Basra now after Maliki sent the army in:

CD shops sell love songs again. Some women emerge from their homes without veils, and alcohol sellers are coming out of hiding in the southern city of Basra — where religious vigilantes have long enforced strict Islamic codes.

The changes in recent weeks mark a surprising show of government sway — at least for now — after an Iraqi-led military crackdown that was plagued by desertions, ragged planning and ended in a virtual stalemate with Shiite militias in Iraq’s second-largest city. Read the rest of this entry »

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Just when you think Keith Olbermann can’t get anymore politically biased, he and MSNBC make a deliberate effort to paint comments from an Iraq War veteran as a racist for commenting that heroism deserves more respect, admiration, and recognition in America than athletes; specifically Tiger Woods.

David Bellavia is a Silver Star recipient, has been nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor, and (here’s where he undoubtedly earned the disdain of Olbermann) is running as a Republican for Congress. The other day he was at a speaking event and introduced Sen McCain-describing him as a hero.

A hero introduced a hero, and that’s racist because he said, “Tiger Woods” instead of some white athlete.

Read the rest of this entry »

Now this is interesting, but not surprising:

It’s the Politics, Stupid:

Comparing Labor Market Data in 1996 and 2008

Democrats on the Economy in 1996:

“Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades.” (President Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 23, 1996)

Democrats on the Economy in 2008:

“The bottom line is that this administration is the owner of the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover.” (Senator Charles Schumer, Press Release, March 7, 2008) Read the rest of this entry »

Check out the hyperbole in this report done by Lara Logan for CBS this morning: (h/t Newsbusters)

Well, in the last two days alone, five U.S. soldiers have been killed in fighting against Shiite militants in and around Baghdad, particularly, as you mentioned, in Sadr City, the Baghdad stronghold of Sadr’s Medhi Army militia. The streets of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad have become a bloody battleground. U.S. and Iraqi forces battling militias backed by Iran. Like the Medhi Army of Muqtada al Sadr, the anti-American cleric. Civilians are paying a heavy price. This eyewitness describing the fighting on his street says ‘one person was killed, and a child was also killed there. Everything got burned up. Everything was destroyed.’ The human cost was difficult to measure as the wounded continued to fill hospital beds and the number of dead kept rising.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been hearing for months that the U.S. troop surge has been a security success and a political failure. But with little media fanfare, Iraqis may have just found the key to resolving their differences: old-fashioned politics.

What? I must’ve missed this kind of good news over at Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Salon, and MSNBC etc.

On February 13 the Iraqi parliament simultaneously passed three new laws: one that sets the relationship between the central and provincial governments, a second giving amnesty to thousands of detainees, and a third setting the 2008 national budget. Each piece of legislation is important in its own right, but how the overall compromise came about may prove even more significant than the laws themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

LINK

The first victim, whose head had been placed at his feet, was found on March 26 by a local village head and a U.S. Army officer who had been given the orchard’s location by a man who said he had been kidnapped by Al-Qaeda last August and taken to a “jail” there, but managed to escape before execution.

Awful. If anyone has pics of the protest against Al Queda in Berkley, please link to them.

“When they first came into the area they said they were mujahedin fighting the occupation forces. But later they started forcing people from their homes and taking money. People who worked for the Iraq Army or the Iraqi police were punished,” says Sheikh Abbas Husayn Khalaf, the leader of Taiyah village.

“They imposed their rules: no music, no smoking, the women had to wear the veil, and there were no wedding celebrations. No one was allowed out after 5 p.m. Some people were shot in front of the people in the street, others were kidnapped, killed, and put in the mass graves.” Read the rest of this entry »

The tabloid newspaper McClatchy has a report out today that two lawmakers from the Iraqi government, one from Maliki’s party and another from the Badr party, went to Iran to negotiate a end to hostilities in Basra.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi lawmakers traveled to the Iranian holy city of Qom over the weekend to win the support of the commander of Iran’s Qods brigades in persuading Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr to order his followers to stop military operations, members of the Iraqi parliament said.

The backdrop to Sadr’s dramatic statement was a secret trip Friday by Iraqi lawmakers to Qom, Iran’s holy city and headquarters for the Iranian clergy who run the country. Read the rest of this entry »

Great job as usual by Michael Goldfarb in describing the fighting in Basra. Basically saying that those who moan and cry about Iraq always like to point out that the militia’s are still running rampant. Well now Maliki is doing something about it and what do we get? More whining. Michael:

Faced with an intractable problem, Maliki bet big and confronted the most powerful militia in Iraq. When one looks at the rest of the Middle East, it’s not at all apparent that the region’s more problematic regimes are inclined to do the same. Take Pakistan, where broad swaths of the country are controlled by militias, the Taliban, al Qaeda. If only Musharraf had the resolve to violently confront these threats to his government’s sovereignty. It’s the same in the Palestinian territories, where Mahmoud Abbas must rely on the IDF to keep him in power. Abbas might be willing to confront Hamas, but he is unable. And in Lebanon, a weak central government lacks the resolve to strike at Hezbollah. It strikes me as a good thing that Maliki can and will go after those who directly challenge his government–even to the New York Times it looks like progress.

Read the rest of this entry »