This chart illustrates what percentage of our Gross Domestic Product various parts of the federal budget have comprised over a period of 35 years.
HT: Powerlineblog
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. - Robert A. Heinlein -
You know, there are people who terrorize young children and women. And they're called U.N. peacekeepers. And in the Congo, they trade in child sex with girls as young as four. They do so at sex operations not just in the child sex operations and U.N. peacekeeping, not just in the Congo, but in West Africa, and the Balkans, and out in Cambodia, too. And the press couldn't be less interested in it. So if there were really members of the 3rd Infantry Division, or the Marines or whatever, terrorizing Iraqi women and children, you can bet that CNN and the BBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post would all be there covering it 24/7. [Kerry] is just making it up.The demonic party has even tried to disenfranchise military servicemen. (In the 2000 Presidential election, after vigorous challenges by Gore canvassers, 1,527 of the postal ballots from soldiers and sailors on active service were rejected.) And to top it all off, Democrats constantly invoke their own military service in attempts to silence those who oppose their views (e.g., Kerry, Murtha - yet you never heard anyone pointing to Cunningham's military record to defend him). Given all of this antagonism from the Democrat Party leadership towards military personel, it should not surprise anyone that the vast majority of military servicemen vote Republican.
47 percent of Iraqis surveyed in October said that the country is headed in the right direction (37 percent said it wasn't). That's a higher percentage than last year, when 42 percent of Iraqis thought so (45 percent did not)
Primary-school enrollment has jumped 20 percent over the Saddam years.. In a country where 22 percent of adults never attended school, this is a momentous change. It's also a change going almost entirely unreported by U.S. news organizations. A Lexis-Nexis search for the terms "Iraq" and "school" or "schools" in the last month in the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle turns up 331 articles. None is about schools in Iraq. The terms "Iraq" and "Ministry of Education" show up only four times in the last year. Only one story covered the Iraqi education ministry.
Iraq's GDP rebounded by an estimated 50 percent in 2004, according to the IMF, mostly due to increased oil revenues. About one-third of Iraqis are unemployed -- an alarming rate -- but this is sigificantly better than two years ago, when half or more of Iraqis were unemployed. A Lexis-Nexis search shows that the terms "Iraq" and "GDP" or "Gross Domestic Product" appeared together in the above papers in just 10 articles in the last month. Only two actually discussed Iraq's GDP.
None of which readers of major American newspapers would know unless they consult other sources.
The Iraqis have held two successful, national, free elections in the past year The first in January, electing an interim parliament; number two on October 15th, ratifying the new Iraqi constitution. And a third will be held -- and will doubtless be even more successful than the first -- on December 15th, choosing the first freely elected parliament under a constitution ratified by the people in any Arab (or Persian) country in the Middle East.
"It is like night and day from 10 months ago in terms of level of participation and political awareness,"
Sunni Arabs, who account for an estimated 20 percent of Iraq's population, held most top positions in the Hussein government but have seen their influence erode significantly since his ouster. They've formed the Iraqi Islamic Party. They say, "Everyone here is excited. The mood and busyness are so much better than before when we just waited to see what would happen," said B.B. Abdul Qadir, an Iraqi Islamic Party official who said his party's goal was to win 60 seats in the 275-seat parliament. "Now we can't wait for the voting to start."
Perspective denied you by the Democrat Media - General Abizaid: The insurgency is in 4 of 18 provinces, not all 18. You do not hear about the 14 provinces where there is no insurgency and where things are going well. The insurgency in Afghanistan is primarily in Kandahar province (former home of the taliban) and in the mountain region of the Pakistan border. The rest of the country is doing well.
Iraq suicide blasts at lowest level in 7 months
Major General Rich Lynch, top spokesman in Iraq: “In the month of November: only 23 suicide attacks; the lowest we’ve seen in the last seven months, the direct result of the effectiveness of our operations.”
11.5% drop in U.S. fatalities in November
Fatalities dropped from 96 in October to 85 in November, despite the fact that November was the month of the phenomenally successful Operation Steel Curtain in Anbar and Ninawa, driving the terrorists out of their somewhat-less-than-safe houses along the Syrian border.
President Bush - There are now more than 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions actively fighting against the terrorists. Of these, about 80 Iraqi battalions are fighting side-by-side with coalition forces, and about 40 others are taking the lead in the fight. Most of these 40 battalions are controlling their own battle space, and conducting their own operations against the terrorists with some coalition support.... At this moment, over 30 Iraqi Army battalions have assumed primary control of their own areas of responsibility. In Baghdad, Iraqi battalions have taken over major sectors of the capital -- including some of the city's toughest neighborhoods.
We've officially transferred 90 square miles of the Baghdad province to the Iraqis
Over a dozen bases in Iraq have been handed over to the Iraqi government -- including Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit, which has served as the coalition headquarters in one of Iraq's most dangerous regions." The current policy of clear and hold has liberated 28 cities from terrorist control; those cities, including such major urban centers as Fallujah and Ramadi, are now controlled by pro-government Iraqis.
The terrorists and the Baathist bitter-enders have been unable to hold any territory whatsoever. Not only that, they have been unable to get a national front off the ground -- a national front is a unified and cohesive ideology that engages the support of a substantial portion of the population. But the goal of the die-hards (Saddam Hussein back on the throne) is rejected even by the Sunnis; and the terrorists' goal (a Mesopotamian caliphate with Zarqawi ruling the joint) is so terrifying to nearly all Iraqis that even with the very significant number of murders of police and army recruits, they continue to flood in... and more and more are Sunnis.
77 percent of Afghans say their country is headed in the right direction Ninety-one percent prefer the current Afghan government to the Taliban regime, and 87 percent call the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban good for their country. Osama bin Laden, for his part, is as unpopular as the Taliban; nine in 10 view him unfavorably.
Progress fuels these views: Despite the country’s continued problems, 85 percent of Afghans say living conditions there are better now than they were under the Taliban. Eighty percent cite improved freedom to express political views. And 75 percent say their security from crime and violence has improved as well. After decades of oppression and war, many Afghans see a better life.
"There will be no government in Iraq the way they're trying to structure it now," the New York Democrat told WABC-TV's "Behind the News" on Sunday. "They're going to have these elections but that's sort of being imposed on them."
" ... And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the - of - the historical customs, religious customs."
"There was a lot of reason to be concerned about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein," he told WABC Radio's Mark Simone. "I always thought that he probably had chemical and biological weapons and biological precursors as well."
Wilson said his primary policy difference with President Bush wasn't over Saddam's WMDs, but rather on the question of "how to construct a policy that gets to the national security issue of disarming Saddam Hussein and does so at minimum risk to other legitimate U.S. interests both in Iraq and in the region."
"[Joe Wilson], in a speech he delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark: “I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam’s regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.”
WITH the trial of Saddam Hussein under way, those in the God-damn-America camp find themselves uncomfortably wedged. Should they justify their opposition to the war by downplaying Saddam's crimes while sheeting home blame for the present turmoil to the US and its allies? Or do they opt for the defence of moral equivalence, conceding that Saddam was indeed a monster but those US presidents who once backed his regime, including George H.W. Bush, are the real monsters.Let's chip in a buy a copy for Mother Sheehan.
The best riposte to this warped analysis is a scholarly and sober 700-page volume recently published in France, of all places. Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The writers - Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have produced the most comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi president's war crimes, assembling a mass of evidence that makes the anti-intervention arguments redundant.
Blanco's aides were also aware of racial politics — an issue conjured up by the crowds of black New Orleanians who were forced out of their homes by flooding, then waited for days to be rescued, without food or water. When U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (news, bio, voting record), a black Democrat from California, requested security escorts for a New Orleans visit, the head of state police denied the request, saying troopers were busy elsewhere.What a dunce.