Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (329559)	3/20/2007 10:21:50 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575426

So much for the dems against pork and spending. Funding more than war By S.A. Miller THE WASHINGTON TIMES March 20, 2007 Nearly half of the $21 billion that House Democrats added to President Bush's request for emergency war funding would go to nonmilitary spending and to pork projects. The supplemental spending bill includes more than $3.7 billion in farm subsidies, $2.9 billion in additional Gulf Coast hurricane relief and $2.4 billion for social programs such as money for rural Northwest school districts, health insurance for poor children, energy assistance for poor families and others. Mr. Bush yesterday called on Congress to pass legislation that funds the troops without extraneous spending provisions or requirements for an early withdrawal from Iraq. "They have a responsibility to pass a clean bill that does not use funding for our troops as leverage to get special-interest spending for their districts," said Mr. Bush, whose initial request funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as about $3.4 billion in hurricane relief. "They have a responsibility to get this bill to my desk without strings and without delay." House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, said nonmilitary items in the emergency spending bill address vital needs that the previous Republican-led Congress neglected and that can't go unfunded until the next fiscal year begins Oct. 1. "We are responding to needs that last Republican majority ignored, such as funding for children's health care that was requested by Republican and Democratic governors," Hoyer spokeswoman Stacey Bernards said. Emergency spending bills historically are a magnet for pork projects, but critics of the war supplemental say the new Democratic majority has broken their vow to restore fiscal restraint to Washington. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, said Democratic leaders were trying to "wrap pork in Old Glory." "To call some of the stuff in this bill an emergency must have Webster spinning in his grave," Mr. Hensarling said. "The real emergency Democrats must have is the emergency of selling votes to get this thing passed." Debate is set to begin this week on the $124 billion emergency spending bill, which also would require all U.S. troops to pull out of Iraq by fall 2008 or sooner if benchmarks for progress are not met. A vote on the bill is scheduled for Thursday. The more than $9.9 billion of nonmilitary spending in the House bill includes $1 billion to buy vaccines against a major bird-flu epidemic, $750 million for State Children's Health Insurance Program, $500 million for wildfire suppression, $400 million for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and $100 million in food aid to Africa. Page 1 of 2 next » \| Email \| Print

To: combjelly who wrote (329559)	3/20/2007 10:40:06 AM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575426

THE IRAQ SURGE: ... & WHY SUCCESS UPSETS DEMS NY POST By RICH LOWRY March 20, 2007 -- WHEN President Bush announced a surge of troops into Baghdad in January, Democrats pounded him for the folly of putting U.S. troops in the "middle of a civil war." Two months later, the question is, What happens to a civil war if only one side shows up to fight it? The Shia militias that had become the main driver of violence in Baghdad are ducking and covering. Militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr is in hiding, perhaps in Iran. His fighters aren't resisting U.S. troops who have begun conducting patrols in his stronghold of Sadr City. According to Gen. Dave Petraeus, 700 members of Sadr's Mahdi Army have been detained in recent months. This hardly means that peace and harmony reign in Baghdad, but it has reduced the killing significantly. If at the beginning of the year anyone had predicted such progress from the addition of just two U.S. combat brigades in Bagdad (six brigades eventually will be part of the surge), he would have been derided as a delusional optimist. This progress might be transitory, but it illustrates the falsity of a key assumption of Democrats. They prefer to talk of Iraq in terms of a civil war because it suggests that nothing can be done about the violence, that it is running its own hermetic course. Well, it clearly isn't. What the U.S. does matters. If we hadn't surged, Baghdad already might have descended into the genocidal fury toward which it was headed earlier in the year. The other side of the Iraqi civil war - the car-bombing Sunni terrorists - hasn't stood down, of course. But these are the people that Democrats express a notional interest in fighting. In a January letter to President Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said "counterterror" should be one of the "principal" missions of U.S. troops. Sen. Carl Levin wants to restrict U.S. troops to "an anti-terrorist mission to go after al Qaeda in Iraq." According to a U.S. intelligence report quoted by The New York Times, captured materials from al Qaeda in Iraq say that the group sees "the sectarian war for Baghdad as the necessary main focus of its operations." So the Democrats profess to want to fight terrorists in Iraq, and al Qaeda in Iraq is making Baghdad its focus. It would stand to reason, then, that the Democrats wouldn't want to undermine our effort to control Baghdad. Our counterinsurgency mission there is a counterterrorism mission. It aims to squeeze out terrorists, neighborhood by neighborhood. Nonetheless, Democrats in the House and Senate are attempting to force our troops from Baghdad, exactly as al Qaeda in Iraq wants. There is an essential symmetry to the goals of Sunni militants and Democrats here at home with regard to the disposition of our forces - the fewer, the farther away from Baghdad, the better (needless to say, for vastly different reasons). In reporting on al Qaeda in Iraq's strategy, The New York Times notes, "American forces, instead of withdrawing from the capital as the Sunni insurgents had hoped, prepared plans to reinforce their troops there." Over the strenuous objections of Democrats. Each side of the domestic debate concerning the Iraq War tends to get stuck in its own self-reinforcing narratives. For Bush and supporters of the war, it was a narrative of success. Negative developments were chalked up as the inevitable difficulties of any war, amplified by the liberal media. Bush broke out of that narrative to order the change of strategy that is the surge. For Democrats, it is the narrative of defeat. Even as the civil war has de-escalated somewhat in Iraq -weakening the force of the Democrats' favorite "middle of a civil war" sound bite - and even as the surge has elevated the fight against al Qaeda in Iraq - the enemy that Democrats say they want to defeat - Democratic opposition to the surge has only intensified. Will they oppose it even more if it continues to work?

To: combjelly who wrote (329559)	3/20/2007 10:47:35 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 1575426

re: The problem is, can anybody be that inept and that unable to realize that things are going wrong? And so consistently? I know. For over 4 years I've been wondering "what's the REAL reason Bush went to Iraq". There has to be more to it... nobody could be that much of an idiot.