Check out Intrade today.
Looks like crowd-sourcing got it wrong for a change.
The purpose of fighting is to win. There is no possible victory in defense. The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either. The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental. As John Steinbeck once said:1. Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.
2. If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.
3. I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy.
4. When seconds count, the cops are just minutes away.
5. A reporter did a human-interest piece on the Texas Rangers. The reporter recognized the Colt Model 1911 the Ranger was carrying and asked him 'Why do you carry a 45?' The Ranger responded, 'Because they don't make a 46.'
6. An armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity.
7. The old sheriff was attending an awards dinner when a lady commented on his wearing his sidearm. 'Sheriff, I see you have your pistol. Are you expecting trouble?' 'No Ma'am. If I were expecting trouble, I would have also brought my rifle.'
8. Beware the man who only has one gun. He probably knows how to use it!
I was once asked by a lady visiting if I had a gun in the house. I said I did. She said 'Well I certainly hope it isn't loaded!' To which I said, of course it's loaded, can't work without bullets!' She then asked, 'Are you that afraid of some one evil coming into your house?' My reply was, 'No not at all. I am not afraid of the house catching fire either, but I have fire extinguishers around, and they are all loaded too.' To which I'll add, having a gun in the house that isn't loaded is like having a car in the garage without gas in the tank.

You remember Al Qaeda, right? Ten years ago this week, they bombed US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Not that we did much about it at the time. But it is worth noting, they haven’t done that to us again, nor have any of these other things, since 9/11. I blame Bush.
You remember Bush, right? The guy who goes to Asia and tells China to free her people, while the press jeers, the guy who, while in Asia also meets with Democracy Activists in Burma and gets ignored for it, the guy who drew enormous and supportive crowds in Korea, while the American press yawned?
Sure, you remember Bush! He’s the guy whose life was threatened along with Barack Obama’s but only the threat to Obama was newsworthy for a very long time at CNN. Bush? You mean the creepy moron who will be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity as soon as congress can figure out how to do that without exposing itself or having to put some of its own members under oath?
Yeah, that guy! The guy who does more than just talk about freedom and progress. The guy who has brought real hope and change to people all over the world, and yes, here in America. But you don’t want to hear it. It’s the wrong and inconvenient narrative, the embargoed one.
While Obama was telling the German crowd (lured by the free rock concert, free beer and free bratwurst) how much America sucks and how much he is sorry for what [the] American Military has been doing, McCain delivered [a] story that will make you feel yourself a proud compatriot of... Medal of Honor winner US Army Sgt. Roy Benavidez.Watch and be amazed.
Why did Barack Obama cancel his visit to see wounded U.S. soldiers yesterday at Landstuhl Medical Center in Ramstein, Germany?
According to the Politico and the Chicago Sun-Times, the Obama campaign is blaming the military, claiming that the Obama campaign was told the visit "would look too political."
But according to MSNBC, Obama and his Senate staff could have visited wounded troops; he simply couldn't bring along his campaign staff and the media.
The campaign's response? They withdrew the request to visit the troops. The official said "We didn't know why" the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. "He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him."
If he can't use them as props, it seems Barack Obama has little use
for the military. Come to think if it, that is roughly how they factor
into his feckless foreign policy plans as well.
They just happened to be Germans, not wounded Americans.ROBERT WEXLER: The allegation that Senator Obama has not been effective, yet it is his view in Iraq that is now the prevailing view that the Prime Minister of Iraq has endorsed. It is Senator Obama's view that has been endorsed by the Bush administration in concept in Iran by engaging in diplomacy. It is his view in terms of adding troops in Afghanistan that's winning the day. So it's Senator Obama, before he's even president, that's affecting policy in such a great way.
WILSON: It's amazing that you can skew things that far. Senator Obama has been dead wrong when it comes to the policy in Iraq. He opposed the surge and he is now in a situation where he's trying to deny that the surge was successful. I don't think that's particularly presidential.
...
WILSON: To say that somehow there is a wall in NATO that's running somewhere down the Atlantic shows Senator Obama's inexperience when it comes to understanding where we are. You see that on a number of other things. I mean, look at his platform. He has these kind of message-tested, poll-tested things like, we should, Barack Obama will make sure we take -- he'll negotiate with the Russians to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert. It's a great idea: it was done 20 years ago. He seems to be unaware of American history. And that's inexperience which causes people some real concern about whether he's ready for the Oval Office.
But... But... They're broken and worn out.
Didn't they listen to Barack?... There's no military solution!
This can't be happening.
They're just depressed. They're medicated.
They're too stupid and ended up in Iraq. And, now they're too stupid to know they're fighting a lost war.
Don't they know it's a failure?
The stress has made them cold-blooded killers .
Today 1,200 US troops reenlisted in Iraq- at a former Saddam Hussein palace
This was one for the record books... More than 1,200 US troops serving in Iraq signed up for extended service in the military to mark America's Independence day on Friday.
General David Petraeus led the airmen, Marines, Sailors, and Soldiers in their oath to defend their country against all enemies both foreign and domestic.
Democrats were wrong.
So this doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
Oh, and Harry Reid could not be reached for comment.U.S. Army Task Force Regulators 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment Staff Sgt. Fred Hampton, of Lexington, Ky., kneels on a knee to talk with a young Iraqi boy at the future site of Regular 6 Park in the Thawra 1 section of the Sadr City District of Baghdad on June 20. Photo: Tech Sgt. Cohen Young, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.
Thomas Sowell asks "How relevant is patriotism?"

A Limbaugh administration would seek to:
1. Open the continental shelf to drilling.
Ditto the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax.
3. Privatize Social Security.
4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education.
5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country.
6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming.
No. 5 was a joke.
I think.
...While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world-- Iran -- is moving step by step toward building a nuclear bomb.The point when they get that bomb will be the point of no return. Iran's nuclear bomb will be the terrorists' nuclear bomb -- and they can make 9/11 look like child's play.
All the options that are on the table right now will be swept off the table forever. Our choices will be to give in to whatever the terrorists demand-- however outrageous those demands might be-- or to risk seeing American cities start disappearing in radioactive mushroom clouds.
All the things we are preoccupied with today, from the price of gasoline to health care to global warming, will suddenly no longer matter.
Just as the Nazis did not find it enough to simply kill people in their concentration camps, but had to humiliate and dehumanize them first, so we can expect terrorists with nuclear weapons to both humiliate us and force us to humiliate ourselves, before they finally start killing us...
The terrorists have given us as clear a picture of what they are all about as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did during the 1930s-- and our "leaders" and intelligentsia have ignored the warning signs as resolutely as the "leaders" and intelligentsia of the 1930s downplayed the dangers of Hitler.
We are much like people drifting down the Niagara River, oblivious to the waterfalls up ahead. Once we go over those falls, we cannot come back up again...
It has always been readily apparent that the major news outlets were more than willing to broadcast/print any bad news that emerged from Iraq. And it has been equally apparent recently that there is a reticence to give equal treatment to the good news that turned from a trickle to a regular flow. The MSM have scoffed that there could be any bias influencing their reporting from this war zone, and equal scoffing from the conservative blogosphere at that claim.
Well apparently there was a copy editor asleep at the switch over at the Old Grey Lady, because they have published a very interesting article titled "Reporters Say Networks Put Wars on Back Burner". I guess no one sent them the memo on obscuring any evidence of bias....Other mainstream blogs like Powerline and Danger Room are right to point out the amazing numbers:
"According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been "massively scaled back this year." Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007."
However no one I have seen yet (though my reading time is limited here in Afghanistan) has noted the real smoking gun, found in the quote from a CBS news bigwig:"Paul Friedman, a senior vice president at CBS News, said the news division does not get reports from Iraq on television "with enough frequency to justify keeping a very, very large bureau in Baghdad." He said CBS correspondents can "get in there very quickly when a story merits it."
Oh I see. So we finally have an admission of guilt on the bias front.CBS news has now admitted that good news from a war zone does not merit coverage. Death, carnage, mis-doings of individual soldiers, and lack of good planning all drown out positive stories when they happen at the same time. But when those negatives all dry up and disappear, and the positive stories are left standing alone, the "journalists" lose interest and can't "justify" sticking around to do their jobs. If you can't justify a bureau because not enough reports from Iraq get on television....then put more reports from Iraq on television! This magically wasn't a problem a year ago. There were plenty of stories then. Gee, if we could only figure out what has changed during that time.....
Sad. Shameful. Disappointing.
How the once mighty have fallen.
In deference to Glenn Reynolds, we don't need and "Army of Davids". We desperately need an "Army of Yons", and "Army of Roggios", and an "Army of Tottens"...

Charles Johnson discovered a campaign document that made the promise to "hold accountable any perpetrators of war crimes."Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to "immediately review the information that's already there" and determine if an inquiry is warranted -- but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide...
...He worried that such a probe could be spun as "a partisan witch hunt." However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because "nobody is above the law."
For several decades, the Democratic Party has pursued policies designed to drive up the cost of petroleum, and therefore gas at the pump. Remarkably, the Democrats don't seem to have taken much of a political hit from the current spike in gas prices. Probably that's because most people don't realize how different the two parties' energy policies have been.
| Percent of Democrats against | Percent of Republicans for |
ANWR Exploration ![]() | |
| 86% | 91% |
Coal-to-Liquid ![]() | |
| 78% | 97% |
Oil Shale Exploration ![]() | |
| 86% | 90% |
Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Exploration ![]() | |
| 83% | 81% |
Refinery Increased Capacity ![]() | |
| 96% | 97% |
SUMMARY ![]() | |
| 86% | 91% |
91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of American-made oil and gas. 86% of House Democrats have historically voted against increasing the production of American-made oil and gas.