Mid December Quick Takes

So many stories, so little time!

Most Popular Search Item at Mike's America

The hits started coming in November looking for the Christmas puzzle. Link to a full size version and the answers is here.

Figure out which Christmas Carol is described by the picture.

Now, back to the serious stuff...

Romney endorsed by National Review

The nation's premier journal for conservative thought has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate. In our judgment, that candidate is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.

National Review

Meanwhile, the New Hampshire Union Leader has endorsed John McCain and in a separate commentary concludes that Mitt Romney cannot win because of his flip flops on many of the same issues National Review cites above.

The Weekly Standard has been having some fun with Romney's executive style and offers the following paroday letter of how CEO Romney might compose his speeches.
Full size version here.

Mike Huckabee Qualified on Foreign Policy? No, but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express in Iowa Last Night!

Perhaps one reason why National Review endorsed Romney is that the editors were underwhelmed, or concerned, with Mike Huckabee's utter lack of foreign policy experience.

Huckabee's Holiday Inn Express Campaign
National Review Online: Surging GOP Hopeful's Foreign Policy Views Don't Stand Up To Scrutiny

...Don Imus, on his resurrected radio show, queried Huckabee the other day about his foreign-policy experience. Huckabee not so humbly invoked Ronald Reagan, who also, according to the former Arkansas governor, ascended to the presidency with no foreign-policy experience. As Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff has pointed out, this is - to say the least - an inapt analogy. Ronald Reagan lived and breathed the global fight with the Soviet Union for decades, and had been an important voice on the right on foreign policy long before he was president.

Mike Huckabee, by contrast, cut his teeth on typical state-level fare in Arkansas and on weight-loss and wellness programs. This is probably why he felt compelled to quip to Imus, “And the ultimate thing is, I may not be the expert that some people are on foreign policy, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.” (Powerline also points out that he used the exact same line on Imus a year earlier when foreign policy came up.) This won’t do.

Huckabee did give a long speech on foreign policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in September. It combined a superficial rendering of conventional foreign-policy wisdom - which of course included many unfair criticisms of President Bush - with Huckabee’s inimitable folksy delivery. The former governor’s bottom line was that we should be nicer to other countries.
...
On Iran, Huckabee is at his most troubling. He accuses the administration of “proceeding down only one track with Iran: armed confrontation.” This is false, and the kind of rhetoric you’d expect from DailyKos bloggers, not a Republican presidential candidate. Huckabee thinks it has been a lack of diplomatic engagement that has soured our relations with Iran: “We haven’t had diplomatic relations with Iran in almost 30 years, my whole adult life and a lot of good it’s done. Putting this in human terms, all of us know that when we stop talking to a parent or a sibling or a friend, it’s impossible to accomplish anything, impossible to resolve differences and move the relationship forward. The same is true for countries.”

This is the kernel of Huckabee’s foreign policy. He wants to anthropomorphize international relations and bring a Christian commitment to the Golden Rule to our affairs with other nations. As he told the Des Moines Register the other day, “You treat others the way you’d like to be treated. That’s to me the fundamental issue that has to be re-established in our dealings with other countries.”

This is deeply naïve. Countries aren’t people, and the world is more dangerous than a Sunday church social. Threats, deception, and - as a last resort - violence must play a role in international relations. Differences cannot always be worked out through sweet persuasion. A U.S. president who doesn’t realize this will repeat the experience of President Jimmy Carter at his most ineffectual.

Other than the general impulse to be nicer, Huckabee’s views are the uneven grab bag to be expected from someone who hasn’t thought much about foreign policy.
...In sum, conservatives should have worries about the depth and soundness of Mike Huckabee’s foreign-policy views. And staying at a Holiday Inn Express is not going to be enough to allay them.

Combine that with Huckabee's desire to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and no longer permit waterboarding of terrorists (see below) and you have a candidate that is not perhaps ready for prime time.

Ex CIA Officer: Waterboarding Works!

Amazing how Democrats seem more intent on handcuffing the people whose job it is to keep us safe and prevent another terrorist attack than they do about handcuffing the terrorists who want to kill us.

The latest example is the brouhaha over the destruction of the interrogation tapes of the two times waterboarding was used to interrogate the very worst terrorist monsters who had refused to talk until then. Somehow, it's ok to shot these monsters, just don't pour water in their nose?

Anyway, senior Democrats in the House of Representatives were informed about these procedures in 2002 and raised no objection. Now that their Code Pinko allies are upset about it, Democrats rush to the microphones to complain.

One of the usual objections is that waterboarding doesn't yield reliable information. Not so according to the Ex-CIA agent who conducted the interrogations of Abu Zubayda:

Coming in From the Cold: CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary But Torture
Former Agent Says the Enhanced Technique Was Used on Al Qaeda Chief Abu Zubaydah
ABC News
December 10, 2007

...In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

"The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News' "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline."

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

Zubaydah is now reported to be at the Gitmo facility along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ponder this:

Kiriakou said, "A former colleague of mine asked [Zubayda] during the conversation one day, 'What would you do if we decided to let you go one day?' And he said, 'I would kill every American and Jew I could get my hands on...It's nothing personal. You're a nice guy. But this is who I am.'"

Perhaps Harry Reid, who has been busy these past few days trashing the CIA for destroying these tapes and depriving Democrats of the opportunity to turn this affair into another Abu Ghraib hate-America propaganda-fest would like to offer Zubayda a place to stay at his house?

The Los Angeles Library Tower was one of those attack targets. The attack was foiled because Zubayda and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who sawed off Daniel Pearl's head with a knife in this video) were waterboarded.

Anyone who says that we should not waterboard these monsters as a last measure to gain information to stop attacks should go to the Library Tower and the site of other foiled plots and explain to the occupants why America would be a better place if they were dead at the hands of terrorists!

Global Warming "Baby Tax"
For anyone in denial about the true nature of the socialist scheme masquerading as environmentalism, this should be a wake up call.

Baby tax needed to save planet, claims expert
By Jen Kelly
News.Com.Au
December 10, 2007

A WEST Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Writing in today's Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child's lifetime.

Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

It's never been about saving the planet. Global Baloney has always been a scaremongering scheme to force the imposition of socialism and one world government on the West. The result would be a weakened United States less able to act and lead to protect the world from the evil which swirls daily around us all.

Meanwhile, if you haven't see the list of what Global Warming alarmists claim will happen to the planet if we don't listen to their scaremongering, see this. Over 600 links of
often contradictory "news" reports.

Al Gore: Was He Lying Then? Is He Lying Now?

"Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
Al Gore, September 2002

From the speech he delivered in Oslo, Norway upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize:

"We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency — a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here."
Al Gore, December 2007

Bubba Going Ballistic Over Hillary's Tumble in Campaign
As usual, it's someone else's fault!

Bill Clinton to aid Hillary's campaign
BY KENNETH R. BAZINET and THOMAS M. DeFRANK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
December 12th 2007

Insiders say Bill Clinton is furious at some of the decisions made by wife's campaign team.

Bubba to the rescue!

Alarmed by his wife's slide in the polls and disarray within her backbiting campaign, a beside-himself Bill Clinton has leaped atop the barricades and is furiously plotting a cure - or coup.

"She's in big trouble and he knows it," a top Democratic operative and Hillary Clinton booster told the Daily News.

Sources familiar with the ex-President's thinking say he doesn't believe his wife's situation is desperate. But he's unhappy with her operation - once hailed as a juggernaut - and concerned she could lose the Democratic nomination without major alterations in strategy and staffing.

Bill Clinton is mulling "a lot of different ideas and a lot of different scenarios to fix this," an official who regularly speaks with him said. "He will come up with literally dozens of ideas. The trick will be to figure out the most important one or two to get her out of this downtrend."

Another Democrat with close connections to the Clinton campaign describes Bill Clinton as "very engaged and very agitated. He's yelling at [chief strategist] Mark Penn a lot."
...
As Barack Obama has steadily narrowed Hillary Clinton's once-impregnable lead, friction inside her headquarters has flared. One post-Thanksgiving meeting erupted into finger-pointing over the loss of her advantage.

"They all want to kill each other," said a source aware of the closed-door meeting.

The backstabbing involves several high-level people in the campaign, including Penn, Mandy Grunwald, Ann Lewis and Howard Wolfson, sources said.

Penn maintained, "It's a totally false story."

"It's a totally false story" in Clinton-speak means it's absolutely true!

Bill Needs to De Stress at the Liebrary/Massage Parlor

Bill's been working too hard. Time to head back to Little Rock where the taxpayer subsidized penthouse at the top of his Presidential Liebrary awaits: