Not that I have many readers at the moment, but I am launching my new site: The Wandering Donkey. This will have most of my political observations and rants. I will continue to post to this site with general observations comments etc. Thanks

Totally unbelievable story…….if it were not unfortunately believable.

Head on over to AmericaBlog to discuss as I caught this after John in DC posted it there.

Pat McGovern

You know, it bothers me when people distort things. I won’t blame ‘mainstream news sources’ here because this piece is an editorial and as such is more opinion than anything else. To read what annoys me go here to the Washington Post editiorial of the same name. What bothers me most is that it is so disingenuous.

Anyone following these votes know that we all expect the President to ignore the votes. Therefore, further action will have to be taken, most likely involving using the ‘purse string’ powers of US House of Representatives. This is how things are SUPPOSED to work. Checks and balances people. I know many have forgotten that over the last 6+ years but there you are. The Constitution is still there.

This particular editorial has chosen to make an American hero, Jack Murtha, appear to be plotting a devious plan to defraud the American people. Jack isn’t saying anthing in this interview that he hasn’t said openly for months. And he hasn’t been the only one saying it. No one is dismissing the debate. Nor is anyone dismissing the usefullness of having this debate and putting everyone on record, for better or for worse. We just all realize what this administrations reaction will be to this debate and vote and are trying to plan what to do next to accomplish what is the obvious will of the American people. (At least in our humble opinion.)

If you haven’t seen the video interview by Tom Andrews of MoveCongress.org it is here:

Further, no one, and certainly not Jack Murtha, is advocating leaving troops without equipment or stranded in Iraq. This is a wonderful red herring that the right seems to like to throw out there. Congressman Murtha is, more than anything, pointing out that we are already sending ill-equipped, poorly trained troops to Iraq to do a job that it has long been acknowledged is supposed to be done by the Iraqi’s themselves at this point.

Perhaps they should check their own editorial page. Congressman Murtha mades his views pretty plain there in an Op-ed piece back on Oct 15, 2006.

The red herring of “There going to leave our troops stranded by cutting the funding to them.” is going to continue as long as this battle continues. I just find it sad that someone like Jack Murtha has to be dragged through the mud on this.

P.S. : Kudos to Steve LaTourette R-OH for voting against the surge. He is my congressman and I don’t often see eye to eye with him on many issues. But I would like to acknowledge the courage it took to stand up and be counted with the other 16 republicans who voted against the surge. Thank you for voting your conscience Steve.

There was a really interesting article published yesterday by Nilanthi Samaranayake and Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center on the reliability of early polls in presidential elections. There are some interesting results here. It is fun just to be reminded of some of the foregone conclusions of yesteryear. For instance, Mondale was ahead of Reagan by 6 points in Feb. 1983. Wow, there’s something that’s easy to forget considering how it turned out! Enjoy.

Pat McG

There was discussion in several quarters yesterday regarding a story in the New York Times about the United States agreeing to accept more refugees from Iraq. A similar story appeared on AP. According to the article, we have accepted, thus far, only 466 refugees. That is not a typo; The United State of America, the country which invaded Iraq and had a hand in creating the current chaos there, has only accepted 466 refugees from Iraq. That is not last year, that number is since the invasion. Yeah, the one in 2003.

Apparently, we are now going to be magnanimous enough to settle several thousand. Perhaps as many as 7,000. Isn’t that nice? In order to accomplish this the UN is hoping to register between 135,000 and 200,000 refugees that have fled to Syria and Jordan since the start of the war to determine whether the qualify for refugee status.

Can you imagine how we would be reacting to several hundred thousand refugees of a war-torn country streaming into our country unexpectedly? And we are just a little bigger that Syria and Jordan….put together. I am amazed our relations with Jordan remain as cordial as they are and am equally amazed that our relations with Syria aren’t worse given these circumstances.

Hey! How about China invades Canada and we have to deal with half a million Canadian refugees in Minnesota, Michigan and Vermont! Even if we hated Canada, I think that might make us a bit unhappy with China.

We started this, let’s start taking responsibility for the consequences. Maybe it will teach us not to act as precipitously in the future. That would be a novel idea.