Waiting For AA Rentals

Slow Friday, mid-afternoon, everybody else gone for the weekend...might as well play some three-dot monte.

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Latest (well, it's two weeks old, but work with me here...) lame open border argument (i.e. insulting put-down of their sovereignistic opponents): free trade = free flow of labor = open borders; ergo, border security = protectionism!

David Frum has a merry ol' time hacking that stinkbomb to bits.

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Don't look now, but Much-Ado-About-Nothing-gate Special Persecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has become as big a misrepresenter as Scooter Libby ever was:

The federal prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, yesterday corrected an assertion in an earlier court filing that Libby had misrepresented the significance placed by the CIA on allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger.

Last week, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrote that, in conversation with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Libby described the uranium story as a "key judgment" of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a term of art indicating there was consensus within the intelligence community on that issue. In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments and was listed further back in the 96-page, classified document.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, Fitzgerald wrote yesterday that he wanted to "correct" the sentence that dealt with the issue in a filing he submitted last Wednesday. That sentence said Libby "was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Instead, the sentence should have conveyed that Libby was to tell Miller some of the key judgments of the NIE "and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Reminds me of of a Bud Selig line (imagine pumped over a stadium PA system): "I'd like to correct the record." I'm sure Libby would like to have done just that, but his reputation and career got destroyed instead. Now that Fitzgerald has essentially done the same thing (just not under oath) in an effort to ruin the rest of Libby's life as well, and over something that had absolutely nothing to do with Fitzgerald's original mandate (Was Valerie Wilson "under cover" and did "White House officials" out her?) - which he never has even bothered to pretend to attempt to answer, because everybody knows the answer is no, including Fitzgerald - wouldn't it be an exercise in prosecutorial ethics, to say nothing of sheer human decency, to just drop the charges, call the whole thing off, stop wasting everybody's time, and let everybody go home?

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In order to help ensure that her constituents are not "gouged" at the pump, Senator Hillary Medusa Roseann Buffy Rodham Veronica Lodge Leoana Helmsley Clinton has the perfect solution: let the federal government do it instead, to the tune of an additional $20 billion via that old chestnut from the artificial "energy crisis" of the halcyon 1970s, the "windfall profits" tax!

This from the same woman that adamantly opposes any new domestic energy exploration, as well as serious alternative sources like nuclear energy.

This is your next president, folks, unless y'all do something about it before it's too late.

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Look what Hamas considers to be a retreat:

According to a Thursday report on Al-Jazeera, the Hamas government will recognize Israel if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders.

Hamas officials close to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh expect Haniyeh to announce the change in the organization's platform in the next few days, Army Radio reported.

Believe it or not, for Hamas that is a concession. Which is to say, they are now where the PLO was for the past thirty years. And like Arafatistan before it, Hamastan doesn't mean one single syllable.

Here's a question that's so obvious it's not surprising nobody ever brings it up: Given who and what Hamas is, why exactly should the Israelis give a tinker's damn whether a pack of lying, theocratic mass murderers "recognizes" them - under any circumstances?

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The bloom is already coming off Mitt Romney's health care "triumph" in Massachusetts.

While Hugh Hewitt went the extra mile to put over RomneyCare last week, along with Romney's GOP presidential aspirations, AmSpec's David Hogberg isn't nearly so kind:

Initially I was inclined to give Governor Mitt Romney the benefit of the doubt. In a scramble to have a major accomplishment he could tout in his run for the White House, he agreed to a bad piece of legislation that is supposed to reform health care in Massachusetts. But after reading his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, I'm feeling a lot less charitable. Instead of trying to play up some of its arguably market-based components, Romney spins it in a manner worthy of Bill Clinton.

Ouch.

Hogberg's biggest objection? What Romney calls "the personal responsibility principle," which in reality means forcing each and every Massachusetts citizen to buy health insurance whether they want it or not. Failure to buy health insurance will mean the incurrence of a stiff penalty via a citizen's state income tax return - which is at least first cousin to a new tax, which Romney boasts his plan doesn't have. Although it does have "surcharges" on services provided by acute care hospitals and ambulator surgery centers to subsidize something called the Health Safety Net Trust Fund. Annnnnnnd eleven new councils, boards, commissions and bureaus. But absolutely positively no new "taxes."

Hogberg prophesies the horrors Romney and his presidential ambitions hath wrought:

Perhaps the worst feature of this law is the likelihood it will create a constituency for single-payer health care. The law subsidizes health insurance costs, on a sliding scale, for the working poor not eligible for Medicaid. But now that all residents of Massachusetts are forced to buy insurance, it seems likely many will think, "If the government is requiring me to purchase insurance, why shouldn't it subsidize me as well?" Such sentiment could lead to even greater government subsidy of health insurance. As government pays more of the cost, it inevitably leads to greater regulation. Greater regulation will lead to higher insurance costs. Higher costs will lead to even more calls for subsidy. If that vicious circle goes around enough times, Massachusetts may be the first state to have taxpayers fully fund health insurance.

And if that is what Romney will bring to the table in 2008, isn't there already an elected official from a neigboring state who already has that as the tarnished crown jewel of her presidential platform?