The Dems are, in fact, surrender monkeys: US Senate Leader Withdraws Bill To Cut Funds For Iraq War By Deborah Tate 29 February 2008 U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has withdrawn from Senate consideration a bill that calls for a troop pullout from Iraq and a cut-off of funds for the war because it lacked support. Congressional Democrats hope to revisit the issue in the coming months, but for now, have turned their attention to the economic impact the Iraq war is having on their domestic priorities. VOA's Deborah Tate reports from Capitol Hill. he Senate spent much of the week debating proposals by Senator Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq ...

Great stuff from From Red Planet Cartoons. Who are the Democrats rooting for in Iraq?

This is what Iraq would look like if we had abandoned Her to al Qaeda: Torture Chamber, Mass Graves Are Found in Iraq By Ed Johnson Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. soldiers in Iraq discovered a torture chamber used by suspected al-Qaeda extremists and the remains of 26 people buried in mass graves, the military said in a statement. The torture complex was found during a Dec. 8-11 operation northeast of Baghdad, codenamed Iron Reaper, in which 24 terrorists were killed and 34 suspects were detained, the army said late yesterday. ``The buildings contained chains on the walls and ceilings, a bed still hooked up to an electrical system and several blood- stained items,'' the military said. ``Evidence of murder, ...

One small comment on the Omaha murders: despite Nebraska's right to carry law, the mall is a "gun-free" zone. Perhaps this should be required reading for Nebraska legislators struggling to deal with the Westroads rampage. From the author: Media Coverage of Mall Shooting Fails to Reveal Mall's Gun-Free-Zone Status Thursday , December 06, 2007 By John R. Lott, Jr. The horrible tragedy at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Neb. received a lot of attention Wednesday and Thursday. It should have. Eight people were killed, and five were wounded. A Google news search using the phrase "Omaha Mall Shooting" finds an incredible 2,794 news stories worldwide for the last day. From India and Taiwan to Britain and Austria, there are probably few people in the world who haven’t heard about this tragedy. But despite the massive news coverage, none of the media coverage, at least by 10 a.m. Thursday, mentioned this central fact: Yet another attack occurred in a gun-free zone. Surely, with all the reporters who appear at these crime scenes and seemingly interview virtually everyone there, why didn’t one simply mention the signs that ban guns from the premises? Nebraska allows people to carry permitted concealed handguns, but it allows property owners, such as the Westroads Mall, to post signs banning permit holders from legally carrying guns on their property. The same was true for the attack at the Trolley Square Mall in Utah in February (a copy of the sign at the mall can be seen here). But again the media coverage ignored this fact. Possibly the ban there was even more noteworthy because the off-duty police officer who stopped the attack fortunately violated the ban by taking his gun in with him when he went shopping. Yet even then, the officer "was at the opposite end and on a different floor of the convoluted Trolley Square complex when the shooting began. By the time he became aware of the shooting and managed to track down and confront Talovic [the killer], three minutes had elapsed." There are plenty of cases every year where permit holders stop what would have been multiple victim shootings every year, but they rarely receive any news coverage. Take a case this year in Memphis, where WBIR-TV reported a gunman started "firing a pistol beside a busy city street" and was stopped by two permit holders before anyone was harmed. When will part of the media coverage on these multiple-victim public shootings be whether guns were banned where the attack occurred? While the media has begun to cover whether teachers can have guns at school or the almost 8,000 college students across the country who protested gun-free zones on their campuses, the media haven’t started checking what are the rules where these attacks occur.

After a brief hiatus to improve highway safety by thinning the deer population of Our Red State, we're back in action so let's check the news from Iraq.

We were down for some scheduled maintenance--for a little longer than we thought. Sorry for the inconvenience and . . . WELCOME BACK!

Gene Wojciechowski over at ESPN magazine has a great story here about some "Go Big Red" Rascals in Nebraska who laid down what they love the most -- college football -- for our injured troops in Virginia. The Hound has often heard how the Cornhusker faithful are the greatest fans in College sports. Now I am persuaded. THE HOUND

There is an old saying in the law: If you have the facts, argue the facts. If you have the law, argue the law. If you have neither the law nor the facts, obfuscate. One thing we can be sure of, Dick Durbin, Charles Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, were paying attention in law school. Faced with the reality of progress in Iraq the Democrat leadership is on the move -- before the Petraeus report has even hit Capitol Hill -- doing their best to confuse the matter. The primary complaint is that General Petraeus -- the General who actually runs the Surge on the ground in Iraq -- actually talked with the staff of the Commander in Chief of the ...

One of the consistent charges leveled by the Left against the President is that he is inflexible and intractable. Hence, the hue and cry that we need "a change in direction" in Iraq, etc. Well, we've had a "change in direction." It is called The Surge. And it is producing profound results--not just military results, but local political results as well. Charles Krauthammer describes this "far-reaching and fundamental political shift" as "The 20 Percent Solution." Since the formation of their government, we have been waiting on the Iraqis to pass grand national accords on oil, federalism and de-Baathification to unify and pacify the country. Unfortunately, the Maliki government has proved too sectarian, too weak and perhaps too disposed to ...

If you haven't read The Case for Democracy--the Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, you should. If you want to understand why the Iraqi people should be protected while they  establish a stable democracy, you must. Sharansky makes a compelling case for spreading democracy far and near. The fact is that democratic nations are more peace-loving than totalitarian regimes and, thus, make better neighbors. For critics who don't believe people or nations can change take a look at Imperialist Japan or Nazi Germany v. their modern democratic counterparts. Sharansky's analysis was hugely influential on convincing The Leader of the Free World to take a chance on establishing democracy in, of ...