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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (19875)12/27/2007 6:37:32 PM
From: longnshort  Respond to of 224686
 
I picked our house



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (19875)12/27/2007 9:05:55 PM
From: Hope Praytochange  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 224686
 
6 in Family Are Found Slain in Home Outside demoRAT Seattle

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: December 27, 2007
SEATTLE — Six people were found shot to death at a home in a rural part of King County on Wednesday, and investigators arrested two people they said were responsible for the killings, law enforcement officials said. The victims included two children.

“We still don’t have a motive as such, but the suspects are known to the victims,” said John Urquhart, a spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Mr. Urquhart would not identify the suspects, but The Associated Press reported that one law enforcement official said the police had arrested the property owner’s daughter and her boyfriend. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the names, identified the two as Michele Anderson, 29, and her boyfriend, Joseph McEnroe, The A.P. reported.

The victims, members of the same family, were shot on Monday, Mr. Urquhart said. A girl, 6, and a boy, 3, were among the dead. A man and a woman in their 50s and a man and a woman in their 30s also died.

“Three generations were shot and killed,” Mr. Urquhart said. He did not say what led investigators to focus on the suspects.

Mr. Urquhart said that the suspects might have lived on the same property, which included a house and a single-wide trailer on several acres.

He said that the suspects arrived at the property on Wednesday while the police were investigating the scene but that they had not come to turn themselves in. “I don’t know what brought them here,” Mr. Urquhart said.

Several local news outlets reported that neighbors and friends said a couple owned the property; the man was an engineer at Boeing, and the woman was a postal carrier.

The property, about 20 miles east of Seattle in an unincorporated area near Carnation, was swarmed by investigators and helicopters after a colleague of the postal worker stopped by early Wednesday, saw bodies and called 911. A sheriff’s office helicopter was still flying over the property on Wednesday afternoon, “looking for evidence and anything else we can find,” Sgt. Jim Laing said.

At midday on Wednesday, Sergeant Laing said: “There is not a threat to the community. People in the community do not have to be worried.” Yet it was not until late in the afternoon that the sheriff’s office announced that the arrests had been made.

Brad Carpenter, a neighbor who shares a property line with the family, said that houses in the area were many acres apart and that he had not heard of any trouble until helicopters were overhead on Wednesday morning. Mr. Carpenter said he had had only brief exchanges with the man who owned the property, including sharing information about cougar sightings in the area.

“I pretty much stayed in the house today,” Mr. Carpenter said. “I kept the kids in the house.”



To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (19875)12/27/2007 10:14:44 PM
From: Ann Corrigan  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 224686
 
DEMS VS. SUCCESS IN IRAQ: SURGE & DENIAL

Michelle Malkin, nypost.com

December 27, 2007 -- THERE should be no question what the top story of the year was: America's counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, the Democrats' hapless efforts to sabotage it and the Western mainstream media's stubborn refusal to own up to military progress.

What happened in January defined the rest of the year. We rang in 2007 with vehement liberal opposition to the "surge" of 21,000 added U.S. troops and tactical changes to secure Baghdad.

In the ensuing 12 months, Democrats tried and failed repeatedly to undermine this military strategy and starve the war of funding. Their poisonously partisan allies at MoveOn.org attempted to smear surge architect and patriot Gen. David Petraeus as a traitor. The New York Times and Associated Press fought tooth and nail to obscure the successes of the surge with their relentless "grim milestone" drumbeat.

But by year's end, with Shiites and Sunnis marching and praying together for peace, even anti-war Democrats and adversarial media outlets alike were forced to acknowledge that undeniable military progress and security improvements had been made.

Is there still a long way to go? Hell, yes. Were there other ancillary factors that contributed to the decrease in violence and the "awakenings" in Anbar province and Baghdad? Yes again. But go back to January. Refresh your memories of the anti-surge rhetoric and the spectacularly misguided conventional wisdom.

When the Senate Foreign Relation Committee's resolution opposing the surge passed 12-9 on Jan. 24, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), the panel's chairman, disingenuously claimed it was "not an attempt to embarrass the president." Bull. That's what the Democrats have been trying to do all year.

Biden argued: The measure "is designed to let the president know that there are many in both parties, Democrats and Republicans, that believe a change in our mission to go into Baghdad - in the midst of a civil war - as well as a surge in ground troops . . . is the wrong way to go, and I believe it will have the opposite - I repeat - opposite effect the president intends."

Seven months later, staunch anti-war Democrat Rep. Brian Baird (Wash.) returned from Baghdad and recognized reality:

"As a Democrat who voted against the war from the outset and who has been frankly critical of the administration and the post-invasion strategy, I am convinced by the evidence that the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better . . . the people, strategies and facts on the ground have changed for the better and those changes justify changing our position on what should be done."

Opponents of the Baghdad mission insisted they didn't want America to fail. But let's not forget where the Democrats came from in January - and where the party leadership remains.

A Fox News poll in mid- January revealed that a disturbing 49 percent of Democrats either wanted us to lose in Iraq or "didn't know" if they wanted us to succeed. All but two Democrats voted in the House to oppose the surge.

As our troops succeeded, these surge critics went from arguing against the strategy to arguing whether violence dropped in Baghdad - and then to arguing about why that decrease occurred.

Through it all, Gen. Petraeus and the troops serving under him have remained stalwart, candid and courageous. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 23: "The way ahead will be neither quick nor easy."

That's also what I heard repeatedly from officers I interviewed while embedded in Baghdad in January - just as the first wave of surge forces was being mobilized. It's a message the instant gratification Beltway media didn't want to deliver.

There's a reason the magazine and newspaper editors are naming everything but the surge as their top story of the year. (Putin? The Virginia Tech massacre? Come on.) Good news in the War on Terror is bad news for those rooting for failure.

Far easier to play up casualties and sectarian strife, sensationalize accusations of atrocities and demonize the men and women in uniform to indulge Bush Derangement Syndrome. Washington Post staffer and NBC military analyst William Arkin did just that on Jan. 30 when he lambasted troops for enjoying "obscene amenities" and serving as a "mercenary" force.

One of the troops Arkin considers a "mercenary" was Army 2nd Lt. Mark J. Daily. On Jan. 19, a reader e-mailed me that the 23-year-old standout soldier had been killed in an IED attack in Mosul along with three other comrades. To MoveOn and Democrat leaders and the anti-surge press, he's just another number. Another "victim." Another pawn. But on his MySpace site and across the Internet, his immortal words resonate:

"Some have allowed their resentment of the president to stir silent applause for setbacks in Iraq. Others have ironically decried the war because it has tied up our forces and prevented them from confronting criminal regimes in Sudan, Uganda and elsewhere. I simply decided that the time for candid discussions of the oppressed was over, and I joined."

He declared simply: "I genuinely believe the United States Army is a force of good in this world."

It's the legacy 2Lt. Daily left on this world - and the legacy that defined 2007 against all political and media odds.<