Why is This News?

In a dog bites man story:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) – Thomas Beatie, who was born a woman but lives as a man in Oregon after surgery and hormone treatment, is expecting a second child, Beatie has told Barbara Walters in an interview set to air on television on Friday.
Beatie, 34, who is legally a man but kept female reproductive organs when he had a sex-change operation 10 years ago, is in his first trimester of pregnancy, he told celebrity interviewer Walters for the ABC news program "20/20" that will air on November 14. Walters highlighted the interview on her daytime chat show, "The View," on Thursday.

When you cut through all the politically correct BS...what you have is "Woman Gets Pregnant". But because she had her breasts removed, we act like it's a medical miracle. Ridiculous.

Colleges Confront Violence

Sort of

Fromk USA Today

The training drills teachers and students in a "survival mindset," said Randy Spivey, a former U.S. Department of Defense hostage negotiator who is executive director of the center. The center's roster includes retired FBI agents and others with federal law enforcement experience.
"There are two extremes. On the one hand is paranoia, and on the other is oblivion," he said. "We're just trying to get people to keep this on their radar."
The training discourages cowering in a corner or huddling together in fear, Brouillette emphasized at the Kansas City session.
Instead, Metropolitan Community College faculty members were taught to be aware of their surroundings and to think of common classroom objects — such as laptops and backpacks — as "improvised weapons."

You know waht really works great as a weapon? A gun. Number of gunmen stopped with laptops? Zero. Number of gunmen stopped with guns? A lot higher than zero. Of course this is a moot point, as the numbers show. Allow people to be armed and crime usually goes down. (In Missouri it has stayed constant.) Criminals are usually like everyone else...they'd prefer to not get shot. Thos who are going to kill themselves anyway CANNOT be deterred. All that stops them is dying.

Of course some stupids have to object:

The sort of aggressive survival response cited by Brouillette troubles school violence researcher Loren Coleman, a retired University of Southern Maine professor.
Showing students violent images of school shootings could trigger post-traumatic stress or other reactions that resident advisers, graduate assistants and similarly untrained workers would be unequipped to handle, Coleman said.
And the techniques shown in instructional videos such as "Shots Fired" could provide inspiration for troubled students considering their own acts of violence, Coleman suggested.
"You more or less are giving them a blueprint for how to avoid law enforcement," he said.

Not to beat a dead horse...but how many school shootings have been stopped by the police? If you guessed zero, you're correct. Cho needed no help in avoiding the police. The gunmen at Columbine had no problems getting away from police until they ended their miserable lives. The police have been a non-issue in school shootings. Even when they get there, they are completely ineffective. The main reason is that the Police are meant to solve crimes after they happen, not prevent them. The only impediment to a crime is an armed victim. Until we start dealing with defense from that position, we won't get anywhere.

The McClellan "Fiasco"

From Michelle Malkin:

Reader Kevin B. e-mails what McClellan said in his press briefing on March 22, 2004 when asked about Richard Clarke’s book blasting the Bush Administration for 9/11 and CIA intelligence failures:

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, why, all of a sudden, if he (Richard Clarke) had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he’s raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book.

Pot. Kettle.

More like at the time, McClellan was appalled by such disgusting backstabbing and called it what it was. Once he bowed out he realized he could do the same thing and get rich and loved for it.

So, we have a choice to make:
Either Scott McClellan is a liar, making this up for his 15 minutes in the spotlight to become a liberal hero, or he was a coward who had no courage to come forward and actually criticized others who did so.

With the massive paycheck, it seems pretty cut and dry to me.

And why in the hell are liberals celebrating this fool who they believe kept his mouth shut until it was too late to do anything about it?

Bush Speaks the Obvious

In 'surge of facts,' Bush emphasizes Al Qaeda-Iraq link

On Tuesday President George W. Bush delivered what some have called his longest, most detailed argument yet that Al Qaeda in Iraq is linked to the central Al Qaeda organization. Speaking to 300 troops at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, the president argued that a new unclassified report clearly indicated a connection between the Al Qaeda who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is largely believed to be composed of a strong majority of Iraqi nationals. Politicians, intelligence officials, and regional analysts have met Mr. Bush's recent assertions with much skepticism.
In his address Bush made it clear that he intended to rebut those who accused him of drawing links between the two organizations to create a "distraction from the real war on terror." In his speech, reprinted on the official White House website, Bush accused those who contested his position of having problems "with the facts."
Here's the bottom line: Al Qaida in Iraq is run by foreign leaders loyal to Osama bin Laden. Like bin Laden, they are cold-blooded killers who murder the innocent to achieve al Qaida's political objectives. Yet despite all the evidence, some will tell you that al Qaida in Iraq is not really al Qaida – and not really a threat to America. Well, that's like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun, and saying he's probably just there to cash a check.

For anyone with an IQ above room temperature, this comes as no surprise. The news worthiness of this article comes not from Bush's relatively obvious statements, but from the downright ridiculous hem and haw that came from the left of the aisle:

White House officials have ardently defended Bush's speech, but many Democratic congressmen criticized the president of exaggerating the connection between the two groups, reports The New York Times.
Democratic lawmakers accused Mr. Bush of overstating those ties to provide a basis for continuing the American presence in Iraq. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, said Mr. Bush was "trying to justify claims that have long ago been proven to be misleading."

This is much akin to trying to tell you that the local boy scout troop in your area is not affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America. Or that the Michigan Republican party has absolutely no connection to the nationwide righties. Or that the Louisiana ACLU has no ties the national ACLU. If you made any of these absolutely stupid remarks...youd be laughed out of the room. That some people are trying to argue that there is no connection between al Quida in Iraq, and al Quida...shows a deeply ingenuous desire to confuse and mislead the American people. And of course, this claim that the two are unrelated is impossible to contain under even a feather's weight of scrutiny, so the opposition seeks to reframe the debate:

"I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading," said Robert Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency's mission manager for the war in Iraq. "If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn't been there as a magnet they would have been attracted somewhere else, that's completely disingenuous."
The war "has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq," Grenier said.

Or

"The Americans have been playing up the role of Al Qaeda in the context of the insurgency.... Al Qaeda is clearly an important segment in the counterinsurgency campaign, but it's not the only one. It may not be the biggest quantitative factor but qualitatively they are important," says Martin Navias, a counterterrorism expert at the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College in London.

But those questions are not the debate. We don't care whether or not some Muslims see this as a war on Islam and have joined al Quida, nor is ANYONE on the President's side claiming that al Quida is the only threat in Iraq. The question is "Are they connected?" And the answer, as even the opposition grudgingly admits is yes, though they try to spin it...

Bush's speech may have misinterpreted the National Intelligence Estimate report upon which he based his argument say a number of intelligence officials and counterterrorism experts. The report described Al Qaeda in Iraq as an "affiliate" of the central Al Qaeda organization currently flourishing in Pakistan, reports The Washington Post. However, the report did not say that the Iraq group took orders from the main Al Qaeda organization. Rather it indicated that Al Qaeda might attempt to utilize the Iraq organization's "contacts and capabilities" for fundraising and recruiting.
That conclusion prompted Democrats and others to say that al-Qaeda is not running the war, but is instead benefiting from it, and thus that the conflict has increased the terrorist threat rather than diminished it.

So, al Quida is directly benefitting from the war, but there's NO CONNECTION! As proof, Democrats say that the Iraq branch doesn't take direct marching orders, which means nothing. The ford plant chief in Missouri doesn't call up the head of Ford every morning to ask what he should do, but it doesn't mean they're not connected. That claim is bordering on the insane. By that logic, I could claim that baseball players who ignore what their managers tell them are not part of the team. Or that quarter backs who call audibles are clearly not affiliated with their coaches.

And furthermore, what does this prove? Terrorist cells are, by their very nature, fractured...so that if one cell is caught they can't tell anything about other groups.

Furthermore, the mythical differences between al Quida in Iraq and al Quida everywhere else don't stand up to even a brief overview:

Before his death, there was clearly connection between Zawahiri and Zarqawi, and even praised him in death.

And our new bundle of joy leader in Iraq ABU HAMZA AL-MUHAJER has clear ties to Zawahiri and the endorcement of Osama himself. So, the two leaders of al Quida in Iraq have clear ties to the world wide group's leader and #2, but again, no connection, move along.

And even the high ranking Iraqi who was caught (and is being touted as proof of AQI's Iraqi membership) seems to have direct ties to Osama.

Bottom line:
If Bush's claims that al Quida in Iraq and al Quida are linked (which, name alone, isn't that much of a stretch), then it is a delusion that Osama bin Ladin, al Zawahiri, al Zarqawi, and virtually every ranking member of the two supposedly unaffiliated groups share.

And if Democratic leaders aren't willing to admit that much, then why in God's name should we listen to anything they say about the war in Iraq period?