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London Times’ Gerard Baker sees some irony in Petraeus visit to Senate.
Something quite strange happened in Washington today. Three US Senators took a day off from their usual working routine and showed up in the US Senate.
John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama swapped for a day the life of campaign flights across the country, adoring crowds in airport hangars and soft-focus interviews with television chat show hosts for a brief trip back to their regular place of work.
The man who forced the remaining US presidential candidates to make this sacrifice was General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, who was giving his long-awaited progress report on the war to two legislative committees. …
Marty Peretz shows us the UN’s latest slap at Israel.
WaPo editorial on the continued Dem assault on free trade.
THE YEAR 2008 may enter history as the time when the Democratic Party lost its way on trade. Already, the party’s presidential candidates have engaged in an unseemly contest to adopt the most protectionist posture, suggesting that, if elected, they might pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared her intention to change the procedural rules governing the proposed trade promotion agreement with Colombia. …
Roger Simon noticed some confusion at the NY Times over who supported free trade.
Sometimes I think the NYT is a secret comedy act and I am missing the joke, their bias is so extreme. Take a look at today’s editorial “Some Truth About Trade” in which the solons at the Times urge Obama and Clinton to stop pandering on trade protection. Of course, the NYT seems to be blaming Rove for what the Democrats are doing. But never mind that. It’s a reflex. …
Daniel Henninger writes on the airline bomb plot unfolding in a courtroom in London.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain brought their presidential campaigns to the Petraeus-Crocker hearings on Iraq this week. An Iraq-based reporter appearing on one of the cable networks in the evening said the hearings struck him as oddly decoupled from the daily reality of war for the Iraqi people and U.S. troops there. Yup, never hurts to pinch yourself hard on entering presidential campaign space right now.
The three candidates addressed Gen. David Petraeus in tones of high gravitas equal to the thin altitude of the American presidency. Sen. Obama colloquied with Gen. Petraeus about the status of al Qaeda in Iraq – asking whether the terrorist organization could “reconstitute itself” and said that he was looking for “an endpoint.”
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com.dowjones.video.articlePlayer.draw(“1485891045″,”320″,”290″,”left”,”452319854″, “WSJ’s Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger discusses the disconnect between U.S. politics and global terrorism. (April 9)”)
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Here’s another hypothetical: Would this conversation be different today if in August 2006 seven airliners had taken off from Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, bound for the U.S. and Canada and each carrying about 250 passengers, and then blew up over the Atlantic Ocean?It is a hypothetical because, instead of the explosions, British prosecutors this week presented their case against eight Muslim men arrested in August 2006 and charged with conspiring to board and blow up those planes. …
We haven’t heard from the Captain for awhile. Here’s three posts from Hot Air.
In June 2004, Hillary Clinton outlined the statist philosophy in a speech to a San Francisco audience when she explained that “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.†In 2008, that task has fallen to Michelle Obama. In an appearance in Charlotte yesterday, Mrs. Obama made it just a little more specific (via Instapundit):
Should she become first lady, she said she’d focus on family issues.
“If we don’t wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership…for how we want this country to work, then we won’t get universal health care,†she said.
“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.â€
This statement should make clear exactly what either Democrat represents. Both Hillary and Obama want to extend the power of the federal government over choices that have nothing to do with their Constitutional mandate. Both want to spend more money and expand systems that already fail to operate efficiently and deliver on their promises. And both want Americans across the board to give up more of their income to pay for bigger bureaucracies.
Neither of these candidates are moderate, center-left politicians. They’re both statists, and they both make the same basic mistake of all statists. ..
Thomas Sowell advises how the GOP might appeal to blacks.
… A sober presentation of the facts– “straight talk,” if you will– gives Senator McCain and Republicans their best shot at a larger share of the votes of blacks. There is plenty to talk straight about, including all the things that the Democrats are committed to that work to the disadvantage of blacks, beginning with Democrats’ adamant support of teachers’ unions in their opposition to parental choice through vouchers.
The teachers’ unions are just one of the sacred cow constituencies of the Democratic Party whose agendas are very harmful to blacks.
Black voters also need to be told about the tens of thousands of blacks who have been forced out of a number of liberal Democratic California counties by skyrocketing housing prices, brought on by Democratic environmentalists’ severe restrictions on the building of homes or apartments.
The black population of San Francisco, for example, has been cut in half since 1970– and San Francisco is the very model of a community of liberal Democrats, including green zealots who are heedless of the consequences of their actions on others. …
Speaking of Dem payoffs to teachers, dig this NY Post editorial.
Diane Gordon, the Brooklyn assembly woman convicted Tuesday of bribe- taking, must be wondering why she’s facing 10 years in the slammer – while Speaker Shelly Silver, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and their respective henchmen are not.
It’s a good question.
After all, what lawmakers did this week in barring the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions was every bit as much a commercial transaction – a bribe deal – as what Gordon had planned.
Lawmakers OK’d the new rule, which handcuffs school districts and virtually guarantees even lousy teachers lifetime job security, for one reason only: The teachers unions paid them – outright – to do so, by shipping them boatloads of “campaign donations” over the decades.
Schoolkids? Never on the radar.
Indeed, no one even bothered to argue that the bill would help students. The sole question was whether the legislators would stay bought.
And the answer was easy: Yep. …
Victor Davis Hanson wonders where all the liberals have gone.
These days Democrats are not sounding very liberal. Classic liberals, after all, would support free markets, internationalism and the universal desire for constitutional government, while downplaying racial affinity. But the following examples highlight how far from these ideals today’s liberals are. …
CNN.Money reports on life in Canada’s oil boomtown.