Update Iraq

The Iraqi parliament finally passed a law scheduling elections for January 31, 2009. The Clarion warned previously that elections would not be held this year, and that shortly after elections were eventually scheduled sectarian violence in Iraq would again spike. We are afraid of both of our predictions being accurate, but sadly elections are the prize the factions will fight most fiercely over, would that those fights only take place at the polls with the levers of the voting booths. Unfortunately, actual fighting appears far more likely, especially because the Iraqi lawmakers did not even address the issue of elections in four disputed provinces, three in the Kurdish autonomous region, and Tamim province, of which Kirkuk is the capital.

Can the American military enforce calm on a deeply divided, heavily armed, tense population? Will there be a fight for the levers and spoils of power?

One more on War

"May it be thy will to remove war and bloodshed from the world and perpetuate the wonders and greatness of peace. All the inhabitants of the world shall recognize and know the truth: that we have not been placed on this earth to wage war and not for hatred or bloodshed."---Rabbi Nachman of Breslav

Food for thought on War

"Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen war." ---Carl Von Clausewitz, On War


"But CENTCOM had not developed a plan for conventional ground operations in Afghanistan. Nor had diplomatic arrangements for basing, staging, overflight and access been made with Afghanistan's neighbors. There simply had been no stomach in Washington for sustained face-to-face combat in this remote primitive, landlocked country halfway around the world-no stomach since at least 1993.

From Hugh Shelton's tone, it was clear that this was about to change. America's military was going to war in a country where twenty-some years earlier the Soviet Union had invested 620,000 men over the course of eleven years, at a cost of more than 15,000 killed and almost 55,000 wounded." ---General Tommy Franks, American Soldier


"Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and his grandfather all knew, which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No one wants to hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars out of your leg with the point of a bayonet." ---Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon


"...they have been getting bombed a lot. Even if the shrapnel misses you, the bomb's shock wave is like a stone wall moving at seven hundred miles an hour. Unlike a stone wall, it passes through your body, like a burst of light through a glass figurine. On its way through your flesh, it rearranges every part of you down to the mitochondrial level, disrupting every process in every cell, including whatever enables your brain to keep track of time and experience the world. A few of these detonations are enough to break the thread of consciousness into a snarl of tangled and chopped filaments. These men are not as human as they were when they left home; they cannot be expected to think clearly or do things for good reasons." ---Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon


"The trail was perhaps a hundred meters from the woodline, and in a matter of minutes we found the bodies. The first dink's brains were sticking out from the side of his head; now I knew why the brain is referred to as gray matter. I wondered what would happen if the skull was hit with a blunt object and the brain wasn't there to absorb the impact. With the butt of my M-16 I smacked the dink's head. The skull cracked like the head of a plastic doll. That was so neat that I gave him one more. As I looked down on the now grotesque face, I thought it would be neat to reach down and grab the brain to show the guys back at the compound, but on second thought I decided not to.

What would ever possess me to do something like that to a corpse? God only knows. I felt no remorse for the gook. He was dead and I was alive, that's the way it was." ---John L. Rotundo, Charlie Rangers

What don't we get?

At the Clarion, we miss the departed Jerry Garcia. Below see a brilliant mash-up, of perhaps our favorite Grateful Dead song and an old cartoon.

To paraphrase Edwin Starr, "War? What the hell is good for? Absolutely nothing!"

McCain out in front

Senator John McCain, who is no faux reformer, was way out in front in objecting to the manner in which business was conducted at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, (the quasi-private mortgage backers who the federal government bailed out to the tune of $200 billion last week.)

Here is McCain in the Congressional Record in May of 2006 warning that the federal government must scrutinize the practices of Fannie and Freddie more closely. Of course the beholden Beltway boys did nothing, killing the bill in question in committee. Special thanks to Rantburg for picking up this story.

Sen. John McCain [R-AZ]: "Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae's regulator reported that the company's quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were "illusions deliberately and systematically created" by the company's senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight's report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's former chief executive officer, OFHEO's report shows that over half of Mr. Raines' compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.

The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator's examination of the company's accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs--and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO's report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO's report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation."

Unfortunately the bill died in committee.

S. 190 [109th]: Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005---Status: Dead

Last Action: Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Ordered to be amendmened.

48 days to the election

The elections are coming.

With that in mind, a thought from Edward Bernays...“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important (though little known or realized) element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men (that) we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires (strings or levers) which control the public mind.”

Resumes

Apparently some liberal bloggers are pissed about the comparisons between the two tickets, their resumes and relevant experience. Read one rant below...

I'm a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight.....

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're "exotic, different."

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

* If your name is Barack you're a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

* Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, you're a maverick.

* Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

* Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, you're well grounded.

* If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate's Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran's Affairs committees, you don't have any real leadership experience.

* If your total resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with less than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with only 650,000 people, then you're qualified to become the country's second highest ranking executive.

* If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters, all within Protestant churches, you're not a real Christian.

* If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you're a Christian.

* If you teach teach children about sexual predators, you are irresponsible and eroding the fiber of society.

* If, while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state's school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you're very responsible.

* If your wife is a Harvard graduate laywer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family's values don't represent America 's.

* If you're husband is nicknamed "First Dude", with at least one DWI conviction and no college education, who didn't register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that hates America and advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA, your family is extremely admirable.

OK, it's much clearer now."

Wow---Guess these people must of spent too much time reading. If they'd gotten out from behind the bookshelf and watched a few episodes of Married with Children, The Simpsons, or Family Guy this whole thing would make a lot more sense to'em.

Palin and Clinton do SNL

Tina Fey hits it out of the park as John McCain's running mate.

Political Quip of the Week

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin got off a beauty of a line last night in her speech to the Republican National Convention in Minnesota.

"In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change."

Hey maybe it wasn't totally fair, but it sure was a well written turn of phrase. Palin was, of course, hailed by the staged audience of the convention, but her speech was indeed tightly constructed and rousingly delivered.

Palin Pick

Whatever else you might think of John McCain's choice for Vice-President, do not forget that picking Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska was a play for the southern Christian vote.

As the Clarion reads the tea leaves, the only way McCain loses the electoral math on election night is if somehow the solid south starts to slip from under him. Virginia, North Carolina and conceivably even, South Carolina are poised to flip into the blue column.

With that math in mind the veep choice war room might have gone something like this: McCain, an honest to goodness maverick, wanted to reclaim that mantle. Somebody on the inside of his campaign said, "Senator, you know, you could do the maverick thing, and the southern evangelical vote in one fell swoop. Sarah Palin."

There may have been one or two other factors. And it may have taken a little longer depending on how much, or how little, one believes they vetted her.

But as for the ticket power she brings, no less of a heavyweight than Richard Land was calling for her selection in a CBSNews.com interview. Who is Land you say? Well in addition to being a prolific author, a Princeton and an Oxford graduate, Land hosts two nationally syndicated radio programs "For Faith & Family" and "For Faith & Family's Insight."

Here's what the Washington Post's David Waters has Land saying about Palin in the CBSNews.com interview, "I think that the vice presidential choice that John McCain makes is probably the most important choice he's going to make in this entire campaign. Because he has no room for error, no margin for doubt. If he picks a pro-choice running mate, it will confirm the unease and the mistrust that some evangelicals--and don't forget this, social conservative Catholics--feel about McCain."

Land continues on the his preference for the veep choice, "Probably Governor (Sarah) Palin of Alaska, because she's a person of strong faith. She just had her fifth child, a Downs Syndrome child. And there's a wonderful quote that she gave about her baby, and the fact that she would never, ever consider having an abortion just because her child had Downs Syndrome. She's strongly pro-life."

"She's a virtual lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. She would ring so many bells. And I just think it would help with independents because she's a woman. She's a reform Governor."

The Clarion is not sure where we stand on Governor Palin yet, but we wanted to note for you you, dear readers, who wanted her selection. Whether it was a shrewd political move is also unclear at this juncture. It may help McCain with certain demographics and voter turnout issues.