Blatant Reality

I subscribe to Google News Alerts, a service that emails me news articles for topics I specify, and the Iraq War is one of such topics. Today, I received an email from Google that had these two news articles in in: “2007: Deadliest year for US forces in Iraq” and “US December death toll in Iraq second-lowest of war“. Now, both articles state the same two basic facts: 2007 was the deadliest year in Iraq and December had the second lowest monthly death toll of the war. However, as you can see from the titles of the stories, each spins this information to show a different light.

My question to you now is how will you view 2007? Will you view it as a year where we initiated a successful plan in Iraq or only as the deadliest year in Iraq? Are you a glass is half empty or half full kind of person?

Gateway Pundit has a good article on the military deaths in Iraq and the media’s spin on this subject.

With the Iowa caucus just days away, Barack Obama’s campaign team has come up with a new way to compare how well they are doing with other candidates. This new and highly “scientific” method involves measuring the size of the crowd that attends his rallies and compare it to his contenders.

In their analysis of post-Christmas crowd sizes, the Obama analysts say his events have drawn more than double the attendance of Edwards events in several Iowa cities.

 

In the match-ups with Clinton, they contend Obama draws at least 50 percent more people.

Well, when your trailing Hillary in the Iowa polls by 2% and virtually tied with Edwards, every way you can say that your beating your competition might help you come January 3rd.

Huckabee’s campaign has met their 4th quarter goal of $5 million with hours to spare. Go here to his homepage to see exactly how much money has been raised.

This article just makes me laugh.

MOUNT VERNON, IOWA — Mitt Romney is never shy about talking about how much he loves his wife Ann, but today he was a bit more uninhibited than unusual.

 

“She’s a cute girl, I’ll tell ya,” Romney told the Iowa crowd that was packed into a small coffee house here. “She’s hot, too. Wow!”

 

Romney then appeared to lick his finger and make a sizzle noise, leaving many attendees and members of the media roiling with laughter (and a few others standing silently with their mouths agape).

I just wish that instead of Romney, it was Fred Thompson that would have said this. Now THAT would have been humorous.

Right Wing News posted a list of the best liberal quotes from 2007 and, as an added bonus, they included a counter quote for each. Here’s an example:

Carl Levin in March, 1999:

“Whether we like it or not, the Balkans is an important crossroads. […] This is not the time to take risks in undermining those efforts. Those who insist on a debate at this particular moment should think again, or they bear the responsibility for the possible consequences of their actions.” — Democratic Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Congressional record, March 11, 1999

Carl Levin in Feb, 2007:

“I don’t want to put a specific number on (how many troops we want to withdraw from Iraq) because that really should be left to the commanders who decide how many would be needed to carry out those limited functions. But we’ve got to—the issue we’re facing, the key issue is do we want American troops in the middle of a civil war. That’s the fundamental issue which we want to debate. We’ve been wanting to debate that for many, many weeks, but, of course, we were filibustered before.” — Carl Levin on Meet The Press, Feb 25, 2007

This quote reminded me of this sign on ProtestWarrior.com. Read the whole post because there are some pretty funny quotes. Cindy Sheehan even made the list.

Ed Morrissey posted today that the results from the latest Rasmussen poll show that it is far from certain who is the favorite going into the primaries. The poll shows that McCain is currently number one with 17% support with Huckabee and Romney tied for second at 16%. What does this all mean? Well, this is what Morrissey has to say:

In other words, the national race has become a toss-up. So what else is new? We’re now at the spot where the national polls mean little, though, and the state polls have much more significance. Still, this does show that McCain has managed to revive what everyone considered a dead campaign in mid-summer — and that resurgence could present Mitt Romney with considerable difficulties in New Hampshire.

Is anyone else just as excited as me to see how this all turns out?

South Carolina residents received fake holiday greeting cards this past week claiming to be from the Romney campaign.

Many South Carolina Republicans got a bogus holiday greeting card this week, purported to be from White House hopeful Mitt Romney, that cites some controversial passages of the Book of Mormon.

 

(…)

 

Such a mailing isn’t surprising for South Carolina politics, a state known for political mudslinging and backdoor maneuvering.

 

Those tactics backfire, said Warren Tompkins, a political consultant who ran George Bush’s 2000 campaign in South Carolina and now is Romney’s top consultant in the state. “Anything this outrageous and childish and nonsensical would have a significant fallout on whoever did it and on whose behalf it was done,” Tompkins said.

It will be interesting to see if whoever did this gets caught and we find out whom they thought it would help. If they do find out prior to the South Carolina primary, I wouldn’t be surprised if the information isn’t release until a few days before January 19th. However, As long as this thing isn’t tied to Huckabee, I doubt that it will give Romney the needed 6.5% boost in the polls to win.

The apparent success of the surge in Iraq is definitely something that has been overlooked in the media today. This overlook (or intentional ignoring) of our success is regretful because, as Michael Barone explains, there are many lessons we can learn from the surge. Here is just one of the lessons Barone gives in this article:

Lesson two is that societies can more easily be transformed from the bottom up than from the top down. Bush’s critics are still concentrating on the failure of the central Iraqi government to reach agreement on important issues — even though the oil revenues are already being distributed to the provinces. We persuaded the Iraqis to elect their parliament from national party lists (reportedly so that it would include more women) rather than to elect them from single-member districts that would have elected community leaders more in touch with local opinion.

 

But the impetus for change has come from the bottom up, from tribal sheiks in Anbar province who got tired of the violence and oppression of al Qaeda in Iraq, from Shiites and Sunnis who, once confident of the protection of American forces and of the new Iraqi military, decided to quit killing each other. They did not wait for orders from Baghdad or for legislation to be passed with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed.

 

Our own recent history should have taught us that bottom-up transformation, in local laboratories of reform, can often achieve results that seemed impossible to national leaders. At the beginning of the 1990s we seemed to have intractable problems of high crime and welfare dependency. Experts argued that we couldn’t hope for improvement. But state and local leaders got to work and showed that change for the better was possible. They included Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson on welfare and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on crime control and many others, mostly Republicans but many Democrats as well. The federal government came charging in only after success was achieved in states and cities across the country. By now welfare dependency and crime have fallen by more than half, and they have virtually disappeared as political issues.

As the article states in the last paragraph, the success of the surge in Iraq is definitely “something to be thankful for as the new year begins.”

I posted an article back in August discussing how Ron Paul had the largest Meetup support and how this service was key in Howard Dean’s surge of support. Looking at the list of presidential Meetup groups now, Ron Paul’s group has almost tripled its membership since August while Barack Obama’s group has actually lost members. Here is a list of the top presidential Meetup groups:

Ron Paul:
87,105 Members in 1,415 Meetup Groups, 8,626 waiting for a Meetup Group

 

Mike Huckabee:
6,881 Members in 318 Meetup Groups, 707 waiting for a Meetup Group

 

Dennis Kucinich:
2,513 Members in 95 Meetup Groups, 2,612 waiting for a Meetup Group

 

Barack Obama:
3,629 Members in 66 Meetup Groups, 2,120 waiting for a Meetup Group

It really is funny that the top candidates aren’t utilizing this service more fully. You would have thought they would have learned from Howard Dean’s campaign on how to really get the grassroots working for you. I’m still baffled at how much support Ron Paul seems to have online compared to how poorly he performs in all the polls. It really has to mean something though I’m not quite sure yet. A surprise surge of support in the primaries maybe? Who knows?

They all contributed to the “scientific consensus” concerning global warming.

We decided to test Dessler’s claim. So we downloaded IPCC WGII’s latest report on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. There were 380 contributors to the report […] we focused on the contributors who operate in the UK. Of the 51 UK contributors to the report, there were 5 economists, 3 epidemiologists, 5 who were either zoologists, entomologists, or biologists. 5 worked in civil engineering or risk management / insurance. 7 had specialisms in physical geography (we gave the benefit of the doubt to some academics whose profiles weren’t clear about whether they are physical or human geographers). And just 10 have specialisms in geophysics, climate science or modelling, or hydrology. But there were 15 who could only be described as social scientists. If we take the view that economics is a social science, that makes 20 social scientists.

I keep losing more and more respect for the IPCC as the days go by. For the IPCC’s full report go here.