Democratic officials said they see new signs that President-elect Barack Obama will ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stay in his post.

If Gates stays, no reconfirmation hearing would be needed, officials said.

Keeping Gates at the helm would help give Obama political cover for a gradual reduction of U.S. forces in Iraq and would enhance his relationship with Gen. David Petraeus, the former U.S. commander in Iraq and now the head of the U.S. Central Command, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Powerline

Barack Obama hasn't been sworn in yet, but he already is disappointing his supporters on the Left. Some Republicans are almost giddy at the mainstream appointments Obama has made or is reported to be considering--Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, Tom Daschle, Bob Gates, and so on. Jennifer Rubin, for example, writes:

Little did we know that "Change we can believe in" really meant "Change that will delight the Right and freak out the Left."

Jennifer posits three possible explanations for Obama's seeming moderation: indifference to national security policy; cynical opportunism; and political calculation. No doubt all three explanations contain a kernel of truth, but, with all due respect, I think that Jennifer and quite a few others are overlooking the obvious.

Throughout the campaign, when Obama talked about "change" what he mostly meant was having an African-American in the White House. His vagueness on this score was often criticized by those who care about policy, but most of his supporters understood perfectly well what he meant. A black man in the Oval Office was change enough for them. Obama's signature issue during the early phase of the campaign was the war in Iraq, but when it became inconvenient to talk about that issue, Obama dropped it without a qualm and his supporters, with relatively few exceptions, didn't hold it against him. Read the rest

Reality doesn't line up with the far left, whether it be their view of America being the problem in the world, or the view that Obama will be able to keep his promises to them. You see other than being 1/2 black, he's nothing new in Washington. He's just a politician.

Holding signs that read, "Don't Gobble Us--Go Vegetarian," two PETA members wearing turkey costumes will hand out free soy-based Tofurky roasts (generously donated by Turtle Island Foods) in Denver on Thursday. The action is part of the weary birds' multicity "Turkey Drive": To avoid ending up as someone's Thanksgiving dinner, the two feathered fugitives are heading for the border in the back of a chauffeured red convertible with a sign reading, "Mexico or Bust!" Their goal? To persuade as many people as possible to give birds a break this holiday by choosing a vegetarian meal.

Most of the 300 million turkeys who are killed in the U.S. every year--an astounding 40 million at Thanksgiving alone--endure debeaking and declawing without any pain relief. They are crammed by the tens of thousands into dark, stiflingly hot warehouses, where disease, smothering, and heart attacks are common. A recent PETA investigation at a turkey farm in West Virginia revealed that workers routinely kicked and punched animals and bludgeoned birds with metal pipes, pieces of wood, and other weapons. Workers were also caught intentionally breaking turkeys' necks and other bones and stomping on their heads.

"This Thanksgiving, we can all give turkeys something to be thankful for--by serving up delicious, healthy, and humane meatless feasts," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk. "Holidays should be about a celebration of life, not a tortured dead bird in the middle of the table."

In general, not many ballots were challenged today by either side. This is an example, though, of how far the Franken camp is willing to go:

In his first few weeks in office, Bush met with more than 150 members of Congress, half of them Democrats -- including five events with America's leading liberal menace, Sen. Teddy Kennedy.

Barack Obama’s campaign promise should prove irresistible to the millions of uninsured: guaranteed access to affordable health coverage, regardless of illness or condition. …

No participating company could turn someone away because he had cancer, heart disease or diabetes. Nor would someone have to pay a higher monthly premium based on those conditions.

The coverage guarantee is not a new concept. But it has had a troubled history in several states that tried it for people seeking coverage through the insurance market. Some states, such as Kentucky and South Dakota, eventually dropped the guarantee after insurers left. In the few states where guaranteed coverage continues, monthly premiums generally are much higher for younger, healthier people than in nearby states. …

… [visit site to read more]

We won. The Iraq War is over.

I declare November 22, 2008 to be "Victory in Iraq Day." (Hereafter known as "VI Day.")

By every measure, The United States and coalition forces have conclusively defeated all enemies in Iraq, pacified the country, deposed the previous regime, successfully helped to establish a new functioning democratic government, and suppressed any lingering insurgencies. The war has come to an end. And we won.

What more indication do you need? An announcement from the outgoing Bush administration? It's not gonna happen. An announcement from the incoming Obama administration? That's really not gonna happen. A declaration of victory by the media? Please. Don't make me laugh. A concession of surrender by what few remaining insurgents remain in hiding? Forget about it.

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat:

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ

And since there will never be a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York for our troops, it's up to us, the people, to arrange a virtual ticker-tape parade. An online victory celebration.

Saturday, November 22, 2008 is the day of that celebration: Victory in Iraq Day.

What do you need to do to participate? Simple. Just make a post on your blog on Saturday, November 22, announcing that the war is over, and declaring that day to be Victory in Iraq Day. That's it.

If you want to write a short post (or a long essay) analyzing the nature of our victory or cheering the troops for a job well done, great; but if you just want to make a simple announcement of the victory, that's fine as well. Anything will do. Just come and join the celebration to mark the day.

Keep reading below to find: evidence that the war is over (for the doubters); an historical discussion of previous postwar occupations and guerrilla violence; a list of blogs which have already joined the VI Day movement; free banners and graphics for you to download and put on your blog, if you so choose; and an invitation to submit your own "victory graphics" for posting here.

If you would like to comment on VI Day, you can do so here.

"THE WAR IS OVER AND WE WON:" Michael Yon just phoned from Baghdad, and reports that things are much better than he had expected, and he had expected things to be good. "There's nothing going on.half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons on this tour and they've been here eight months. And the place we're at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there's nothing going on. I've been walking my feet off and haven't seen anything."

MORE Read the REST

Newly named White House Counsel Greg Craig comes to team Hope via serving as Slick Willie’s legal eagle during the Impeachment and also distinguished himself by helping deliver Elian Gonzalez back to the arms of commies in Cuba.

After screaming to abolish secret ballots in thug-laden union elections, Senate Democrats will decide the fate of Joe Lieberman (you know, the guy who actually tested the promises of tolerance and inclusivity among the left) with…a secret ballot.  *Sigh*

Champion of public education that he is, Obama looks poised to show his support of reforming the highest-spending yet worst-performing public school district in America by sending his daughters to an elite private school.  This makes sense to progressive intellectual sorts.

After media outlets commented on the complete lack of oversight for the bailout, Dems quickly named some supervisory sorts, but how $2,000,000,000 (or so) is being spent remains secret. Henry Paulson stands accused of handing out money to his friends and Congressional Republicans are calling for a halt to all further bailout spending until a grown-up gets in there.

The Obamessish himself stepped down from the Senate as of Sunday.  As for what it’s like to lose a 1/2 term freshman legislator who never actually wrote legislation and showed up so infrequently that he couldn’t find the restrooms on his own, we’re told no one noticed.

As every news outlet with a view of the Potomac has breathlessly reported, Barack will likely have to give up Blackberry and e-mail, largely to protect his off the cuff comments from being part of the open record.  Because the best way to back up incessant criticism of the Bush White House for being too secretive is too…oh, wait…no, that…doesn’t make any sense.  Guess I’m not a progressive intellectual type.

Following the exodus of the legislative to the executive, Hillary may be playing diplomat.  Bill, no doubt, will enjoy having her out of the country, but it remains to be seen if his famously secretive finances will ever see the light of day.  If Obama stacks the Cabinet with Congressional Democrats, could that become a way to make appointments to vacant seats of political rats so far left they couldn’t win an election?  Nooooooo.  Not a chance.

Al Franken may be pulling ahead in Minnesota.  For the next years, die hard GOP party-line faithful can look at the Honorable Al Franken, United States Senator, and realize…YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF.

Begich may pull it out over convicted felon Ted Stevens.  The Club for Growth is having a fit at this prospect, it’s mission being to elect Republicans at all costs.  Note to Toomey: that hasn’t worked so well.

Pelosi is busy not being heavily involved in the fight between enviro-nut Henry Waxman and markedly less looney John Dingell for control of the Energy and Commerce Committee.  We repeat: she is not allowing her minions to aide loyal soldier Waxman’s bid to oust Dingell for failing to hug enough trees.  You heard it here first.  Unless Speaker Mimi is looking to shut down those blasted unfair media outlets, in which case you never talked to us.

So that’s Morning in America for you.

Mark Brown came to Saturday’s rally for gay rights for a simple reason: To honor his partner, who died suddenly earlier this week.

Brown was one of an estimated crowd of 500 to 700 people who attended a rally in support of gay marriage Saturday at the City and County Building in Denver. The rally was timed to coincide with similar rallies being held across the country.

“In honor of his memory, all three of us decided to come,” Brown, 41, of Denver said, pointing to friends Cliff Lucero, 43, of Denver, and Wade Baisden, 47, also of Denver.

Another couple came for their extended family.

Michael Weldert-Roth and Rob Weldert-Roth, of Highlands Ranch, said they were married in Toronto last year. “We’re waiting for the United States to recognize this marriage,” Michael said. They came with their two daughters, Aeshli, 13, and Emma, 10, because they’re concerned that should something happen to them, the girls might not have the same legal rights as if they were with a heterosexual couple.

Emma, 10, holding a “I Love My Gay Dad” sign, said, “We want to support the homosexuals because we’re not getting enough legal rights.” The two girls waved excitedly as drivers honked horns in support while passing by the City and County Building.

Police estimates of the crowd jibed with organizers’, who said they received 650 RSVPs on a Facebook page for the rally. The Associated Press estimated the crowd at “nearly 1,000.”

A few counterprotesters showed up, but had a hard time being seen because rally-goers would stand in front of them with larger signs. Two University of Denver students, Andrew Struttmann, 18, and Chris Duckworth, 18, said they came to show their support for the belief in traditional marriage.

There were heated conversations between the small group of counterprotesters and rally-goers but nothing that escalated. Keith Johnson, 29, of Denver, tried to engage rally-goers in conversation, which at times veered from philosophical to theological. . . .

The rally came in response to California passing Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in that state. . . .

[Rally organizer Jill] Roat noted that Colorado already has a same-sex marriage ban in place, when voters passed Amendment 43 in 2006, which defined marriage as being only between a man and woman.

(Photo: Tom Auclair, Rocky Mountain News)

Update: AP story on rallies across the country.

Ayers: [I] was not a terrorist. I never was a terrorist. And the idea that the Weather Underground carried out terrorism is nonsense. We never killed or hurt a person. We never intended to. We existed from 1970 to 1976, the last years, the last half-decade of the war in Vietnam. And by contrast, the war in Vietnam really was a terrorist undertaking. The war in Vietnam was terror on a mass scale, with thousands of people every month being murdered, mostly from the air. And we were doing everything we could to stop it. So, again, it’s hard to know where to start to interrupt that narrative. . . .

BERNADINE DOHRN: Nothing the Weather Underground did was terrorist. And, you know, we could make lots of choices if we were reliving it. Nothing we did was perfect. But decision was made, after the death of our three comrades in a townhouse, not to hurt people, to engage in direct actions that were symbolic, that were recognizable and understandable to the American people and that protected people. And that kind of restraint was widespread. There were tens of thousands of political bombings over that first three—1970, ’71, ’72, ’73, all across the country, not under anybody’s leadership, but they were overwhelmingly restrained, symbolic.

Restrained, symbolic bombings. Jesus. Moral maggots, both of them. Watch Billy evade the single specific question Goodman asks:

AMY GOODMAN: Bill O’Reilly, Bill Ayers, in the ad said that you admitted to bombing a police station and weren’t sorry about it.

BILL AYERS: What I wrote in my book, Fugitive Days, I wrote about the extraordinary decade in which many of us came of age and committed ourselves to fighting against war and against injustice and for peace. And mostly what we did was nonviolent direct action through that whole latter part of the ’60s. And then we reached a kind of crisis, which is, we had convinced the American people—we and forces—you know, it’s an interesting thing to think about the years ’65, ’68. In three years, the American people swung all the way over to oppose the war. Kind of reminds you of the recent events, where in three years a popular war became massively unpopular.

But in any case, the question was, what do you do? And in no way do I think, or in my book do I rationalize or argue, that what we did was the best thing or the only thing. But what I do say is it was understandable in its own terms. “Is it terrorism?” Juan asked. No, it’s not, because terrorism targets people and intends to intimidate and murder people in order to get a political—its political way. We never did that. We never intended to do it. And no one was hurt or killed. So that’s an important distinction.

Right. There’s lots about how happy they are Obama was elected, and Billy holds forth, vaguely of course, on his educational theories. Note at the end how Amy calls Bernardine an “attorney.” No, she’s not.

Update: Guess I could embed the video while I’m at it.

Update II: As you’ll notice, this is only part one.

Update III: Amy Goodman has the worst case of glottal fry I’ve ever heard in a TV personage.

Update IV: Snaps helpfully links to Sean Hannity’s program from yesterday, in which FBI informant Larry Grathwohl gives the lie to Ayers’ denial that he had any intention to harm people:

I was assigned [by Ayers] to Detroit, and we were planning to bomb the DPOA building in the 13th Precinct. He told us what the bomb should contain–fence staples and nails in order to injure people and kill them. When I protested that one of the bombs would destroy a restaurant, Bill said “Well, sometimes people have to die in a revolution.”

Of course he did.

Right, well that potent one-two combo is now taking a crack at religious strife.  The Charter for Compassion, a brainchild born of people who have been dealing with sectarian strife long enough to know better, is going to craft a document in under a year that will bring on the dawn of gloabl religious harmony.  All this comes about from TED, a motley assortment of self-important sorts from the worlds of technology, entertainment, and design, given to throwing money at people with plans to change the world.

Money provided by tech wunderkind, publicity from such respected stalwarts of nuanced international relations as Cameron Diaz, and thinking done by aged progressive trolls.  This couldn’t possibly fail.

According to chief ’scholar’ Karen Armstrong, this is doable because the Golden Rule is at the core of every religion.  Except it isn’t.  Most religions, historically and today, aren’t all that kind to non-believers.  Some aren’t even ordinarily humane to their own members.  In fact, if you truly believed people are inherently good and deserving of dignified treatment just by virtue of being human, you wouldn’t need religion to tell you to be nice, you wouldn’t need religion to create human value with the invention of the ’soul’, and you wouldn’t need religious apologetics to answer for your past treatment of human beings.

As a former Roman Catholic nun whose writings on her years in a convent and why she left have infuriated the faithful. Armstrong should especially know better.  Yet she has established a personal history as an Islamofacist apologist while ignoring the actual facts of history.  In fact, her own willingness to revise history to support her own theories says something about looking at humanity in a profoundly skewed way.

The truth is, human beings are at the core of every religion, and humanity’s record on the Golden Rule is abysmal.  Getting every religion into some global bunny hug ignores the problem.  It’s men who find in religion a convenient excuse for barbarity that you need to deal with.

However, there isn’t cause for utter despair.  As Ms Armstrong warns, “If we do not achieve this, it seems unlikely that we will have a viable world to hand on to the next generation”.  Never mind that people have been fighting over religion since two cavemen got into a fight over whether they should worship the rock or the tree stump.

Of course, it’s a boost to the ego of Armstrong and her pals to presume they have been charged with a mission so paramount that humanity will cease to be without her success.  And, given what visionaries with a plan to change the world have done in the past, we should all, depending on our views, pray or drink that she and her cronies are content to haggle over the most inclusive language possible.

Meanwhile, we can get back to the human question.  Because, just as humans are at the heart of most of the rottenness here on Earth, they’re at the root of most of the good.  Complicated creatures, we are.  The Compassion Nazis spend their time with devotees of milquetoast takes on religion, people who make their living by chattering about tolerance and inclusivity.  Shouldn’t it bother us a little that the people who are going to right all religious wrongs have such a rosy view of what religious hatred actually looks like? 

Religious strife isn’t a mildly tense interfaith dialogue on the meaning of deontological dualism.  It’s airplane-flying, machete-wielding, gang-raping, torture-cell owning hate filled bastards who are hell bent on destroying your mind, whether by brainwashing you with their religious tract of choice or by putting a .45 through your temporal lobe.  When they say there is no life outside the faith, they aren’t kidding.

Yet, for all this Karen Armstrong is wrong.  We’ve survived our entire human history squabbling about god and keep on passing on a viable world, full of humanity in its various incarnations to the young ‘uns.  This might incline a wiser mind to look at humanity, not the religions it creates.

But that would be admitting that strife and discord are sown into human nature, that there are those who will never see humanity in those who don’t share their beliefs and whose frenzied attacks, accordingly, must be blunted.  It would mean admitting that perfect harmony isn’t a feasible goal and that vast plans to remake human nature aren’t going to solve anything.  In fact, such stunts are likely to recreate the worst aspects of religion by forcibly imposing one’s will on another.

Considering the failings of religion to bring about global peace as, instead, an indelible aspect of profoundly human creatures, as the part of human nature given to conflict, might just rend poor Karen apart, though.  Because it would also invite reflection on why her world view requires seeing both religion and human nature in such distorted ways.

Obama is going to have to do something with her.  Consider, if she remains a Senator, then it’s a safe bet she’ll take a radical turn for the far-left and criticize the President for being unable to enact a Mandate for Marxism agenda, reminding us all how she would have done better.

But, if she’s in the Cabinet she’ll have to shut up and about her own imaginary Presidency and toe the Obama line.

Hillary is too smart not to see this offer, if it indeed has been made, as anything other than what it is.  But - the title! the office! the press covering her every step once more! the potential to have another go at Socialized medicine! Can she resist?

Bonus Fun Fact: Today is Condolezza Rice’s birthday.  And now she knows it’s overwhelmingly likely that her successor won’t be able to hold a candle to her.  Kind of thoughtful of Obama, don’t you think?

Despite Acton's overtly religious overtones, and despite the speech being given by a Catholic priest, this non-religious Jewish blogger found Sirico's speech to be something which would have made James Madison proud and which recharged my batteries to continue the quintessential American fight for liberty.

http://www.acton.org/commentary/486_the_way_forward.php

Where does the drug war, prohibition on gambling, condemnation of consenting adults' private sexual behavior and government funded "faith based initiatives" fall in the "less government, more liberty" rubric? I see a fundamental conflict between freedom and the religious right. Barry Goldwater said, "If they succeed in establishing religion as a basic Republican Party tenet," he told U.S. News & World Report in 1994, "they could do us in." Goldwater, as usual, was right.

As reported by ONN: