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Techniguys Picture Of The Week...


QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Here's to Bipartisan Consensus! Memo to the Iraq Solipsism Group: Let's say 10 sages get together and are asked, "What is 2 + 2?" If half of them say 4 and the other half say 2, it is not admirable that, in order to achieve consensus, they unanimously agree to tell everyone that the answer is 3. It is, to the contrary, moronic -- and, if the said consensus error is to be the foundation of national security policy, it is perilous. I just don't get how the media and the solons themselves are willing to celebrate error as triumph, in a life-and-death matter, simply because everyone is willing to be wrong together. I'm trying to figure out whether that is more craven or dumb -- I'll be back to you once I've reached consensus." - Andy McCarthy

LIE OF THE WEEK

"The Iraq war is the worst strategic mistake in the entire history of the United States... I would urge the President to try to separate out the personal issues of being blamed in history for his mistake and instead recognizing that it is not about him. It’s about our country." - al-Gore

COMMENTS

Has Fox News become the mouthpiece for the Democrat Party? Are you tired of seeing H. Clinton, Obama, and other Democrats every time you turn on Fox News? I know I am. All this political campaign promotion of Democrats is not even news. While potential candidates are beginning to line up for 2008 on both sides, the next election is still two years away and none of this is news worthy at this time. Give me a break!

Is Sen. Clinton's New York office putting pressure on New York based Fox News to promote her potential presidency for 08, or is this just the doings of Fox News producers? Although many of the program hosts on Fox are conservative, it's become blatantly obvious that program producers are predominately Democrats and use their influence during the news broadcasts. Brian Wilson has subtly eluded to this more than once. He openly defied his own producers last week by declaring "Weekend Live" a Britney (Spears) free zone based on his viewers own comments.

Just this morning, for example, I tried watching Fox News but after seeing the Clinton and Obama story 3 or 4 times in one hour and no real coverage of the current important stories, I switched to CNN. Each time I switched back to Fox, there again was Clinton and Obama and other Democrats. Meanwhile, there was no mention of them on CNN but rather the whole morning was news coverage of the Middle East situation and analysis and interviews with the Iraq Survey Group members which is the current hot issue. Why is Fox News ignoring it?

And what about that Fox News website? 90% of their news articles seem to be from the left bias Associated Press. Doesn't Fox News have any news writers of their own to provide material for their own website? That is why Fox News.com is not one of my primary sources for news articles. It's like reading the New York Times.

Something is very wrong at Fox News and has been for some time now. Their news is way too dominated by Democrat coverage and personal legal issues that Fox's female lawyers find amusing but I doubt too many viewers do. While they are spending most of their time on these kind of things, they are omitting the real issues that we really want to hear and learn about. I also have issues with Fox News too often acting like a local New York news station and even their weather forecasts often completely ignore anything west of the Mississippi River. They are supposed to be a "national new network", not a source for New York news.

Fox needs to make some changes. I would suggest a good start would be to fire all of their news producers and hire new ones who can promote the Fox News image of being "fair and balanced". Frankly, I've been seeing more "fair and balanced" on CNN lately. It's not so much how the story is covered, but what stories are covered, and Fox has been wasting way too much time on "who cares?" stories and not enough time on what we really want to hear about.

Kudos to Glenn Beck on CNN Headline News channel too. When you get tired of Sean Hannity sounding like a broken record, and Alan Combs sounding like an idiot, switch over to "Headline News" for a refreshing change with conservative Glenn Beck's in depth discussions of the real issues with plenty of G. B. humor thrown in. I do. Glenn is an admitted anti politically correct guy and is not afraid to tell it the way it is. I appreciate his candor.

P.S. I wanted to include an article on Iraq and the Iraq Study Group in this week's newsletter that I've been working on, but it's been difficult and I haven't had enough time to really dig out the facts on it and don't want to publish something that I really don't know enough about yet. I can tell you that Raymond S. Kraft is working on his article on the subject and is expected to be finished in time to make next week's newsletter. As you know, Ray is an accomplished conservative writer with tremendous insight into the important issues of our time, and a genuine way with words. I had the honor of a running dialogue with him all day yesterday and into the night. He will be a regular contributor to Techniguy's Newsletters whenever he has something to offer.

CURRENT WEEK'S NEWSLETTERS


Rumsfeld Bids Farewell To US Troops In IraqCanadian Press
Outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld paid a surprise visit to Iraq over the weekend and said American forces should not quit the war until the enemy is defeated. Just days after a U.S. bipartisan commission called the situation here "grave and deteriorating" and called for a major shift in U.S. government policy, Rumsfeld showed no sign Saturday of backing down from his long-standing position that insurgent groups such as "al-Qaida in Iraq" must be crushed. "We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three. At the same time, we need to have the patience to see this task through to success. The consequences of failure are unacceptable." Rumsfeld told more than 1,200 soldiers and marines at Al-Asad, a sprawling airbase in Anbar province, the large area of western Iraq that is an insurgent stronghold. "The enemy must be defeated."

It's a War, Not a Buffet
Jonah GoldbergIn Washington, sometimes it’s preferable to be wrong in a group than to be right alone. Nothing demonstrates the triumph of this truism better than the release Wednesday of the final Iraq Study Group report. The commission’s chairman, James A. Baker III, could not have been more obvious if he had used hand puppets to illustrate what he thought was most important about this supposedly momentous occasion: the fact that all the report’s authors actually agree with its contents. Their product, Baker gushed, is “the only recommended approach that will enjoy, in our opinion, complete bipartisan support, at least from the 10 people that you see up here.” Whoop-de-do. No one in the media was sufficiently motivated to ask the emperors why they had no clothes on, or to raise the simple question, “Who cares?”

Winning The Waron Terror: A Realist Strategy
Probe Ministries Lecture Series
The most deadly threat facing the Western civilization today is Islam, a teaching that is part-religion, part-totalitarian ideology, and part-geopolitical project, a blueprint for global conquest. Please note that I am not making a distinction that all too many politicians, academics and journalists like to make between an imaginary, tolerant Islam, and what they call “Islamism,” or else “Islamic fundamentalism,” with the implication that those alleged aberrations, extreme and violent as they are, distort the peaceful message of “true Islam.” Examples of this a-historical falsehood are too numerous to mention. It is almost invariably made in President Bush’s speeches on terrorism, in which he says that the ideology upheld by Muslim terrorists is very different from the religion of Islam.

Muslim-American Group Targets Radio Host
Fox News
Religious tollerance is one thing, but cultural tollerance is quite another. When Muslims try to change our cultural traditions and susceed, that is just one more win for them in their takeover of western culture. This is exactly how they intend to do it, one little piece at a time until they have the upper hand. A Muslim-American advocacy group has called on radio talk show host Dennis Prager to be removed from the governing board of the federally funded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum after Prager last week blasted a representative-elect for planning to use the Koran at his swearing-in next month. Prager, who is Jewish, slammed Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to the U.S. Congress, after Ellison announced he plans to have his oath of office photo taken with the Koran instead of the Christian Bible, which is traditional.

ISG; Smug, Arrogant, Insufferable
Bill Bennett
I’ve now read the report, and I can’t add much beyond what Andy McCarthy and Rich Lowry have written about its contents and internal contradictions. For a report to identify the outside agitators (which happen to also be the worst terrorist-sponsoring states in the world — Iran & Syria) as “provid[ing] arms, financial support, and training for Shiite militias within Iraq,” i.e., fomenting war, and then say we should negotiate and offer incentives to those countries is simply too much to bear. Insult is added to injury with the absurdity that Iran and Syria then become members of something called the Iraq Support Group. Committeeism simply got out of control here.

On a Wing and a Prayer
DEBRA BURLINGAME WSJ.com
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Those are the words that started it all. Six bearded imams are said to have shouted them out while offering evening prayers as they and 141 other passengers waited at the gate for their flight out of Minneapolis International Airport. It was three days before Thanksgiving. Allahu Akbar: God is great. Initial media reports of the incident did not include the disturbing details about what happened after they boarded US Airways flight 300, but the story quickly went national with provocative headlines: "Six Muslims Ejected from US Air Flight for Praying." Yes, they were praying--but let's be clear about this. The very last human sound on the cockpit voice recorder of United flight 93 before it screamed into the ground at 580 miles per hour is the sound of male voices shouting "Allahu Akbar" in a moment of religious ecstasy.

No Viet Cong Followed Us Home, Al-Qaeda Will
Dan Gordon
"No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." That was the battle cry of my generation, or rather it was the retreat from battle cry of my generation. The great Mohamad Ali said it, and like so many other things he said, he was of course right about this one. No Viet Cong ever did use the N word against him and truth be told no Viet Cong ever did a bad thing to me. That is because the Viet Cong stayed in Vietnam and once we left they didn't follow us. That perhaps is why it is so frightening to see the ghosts of the Vietnam War protest movement haunting the current war in Iraq. Bring the troops home. End the war. Stop the carnage. Throw the Republican bastards out. I embraced it the first time around. To do so this time, however, I believe is suicide.

Leahy: Give Me Secret Information
Jim Kouri, CPP
While Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) isn’t scheduled to takeover as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee until January 2007, he already sounds as if he’s the man in charge of oversight of our nation’s law enforcement and courts. And considering his history of being kicked off the Senate Intelligence Committee due to his propensity for revealing classified information, Americans should be afraid — very afraid. On Wednesday, Sen. Leahy — or, as he’s known inside the Beltway, “Leaky Leahy” — rapped FBI Director Robert Mueller for refusing to show how the has curbed terrorist activity in the United States. Mueller said he was unable to talk about the warrantless spying program because it is classified. To reveal this information would also reveal sources and methods which, if known by the enemy, would cause extensive damage to US counterterrorism operation.

Blue Dogs No Longer Runts of the Democratic Litter
Greg Simmons
Now that the results of the midterm election have demonstrated the strength of moderate to conservative Democrats in swing districts, the clout of the independently minded Blue Dog Coalition is on the rise, say political observers, and its bite could match its bark. "They can cause fits for the majority leadership," said Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins. Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi "is going to have a lot of trouble holding that coalition together."

Democrats will hold 232 seats in Congress come January; Republicans will have 200, and three races are still undecided but looking to go to the GOP. With 218 votes needed to pass legislation, and 44 incoming Blue Dogs next Congress, according to the group, a strong voting bloc could make or break Democratic-sponsored legislation.


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