While Former President Clinton was attending a fund-raiser in Minnesota some hecklers claimed 9/11 was an inside job.

The following video gives you his response:

Thank you, Mr. President.

Might I say, it is one with which I agree.

Beauchamp is young; under pressure he made a dumb mistake. In fact, he has not always been an ideal soldier. But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

Second chances don’t come along often in life. I hope Scott Beauchamp makes the best of his.

If you were this man, what would be your choice?

Further, if you were the judge, would you have given him any options?

Things may be looking up for the GOP in a few Senate races:

Today Bob Kerrey announced he will not seek the Nebraska U.S. Senate seat that is up for grabs in 2008…….

Meanwhile, according to the Evans-Novak Political Report, Democratic state representative Grier Mier, an Iraq war veteran, says he won’t challenge Senator Elizabeth Dole next year in North Carolina……..

And in Texas, where U.S. Senator John Cornyn appeared slightly vulnerable in recent months, Cornyn’s opponent Mikal Watts has quit the race……

Add all this to the news that the antiwar campaign against Mitch McConnell seems to have stalled in Kentucky,………

2008 sets up to be a volitile year in politics on both sides of the aisle I believe, but the above news is certainly welcome for Republicans.

Do you earn $200,000 adjusted gross income and are married?

Do you live in a place like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago or any other large city where the cost of living is high?

How far does that salary take you in those areas? Are you living in paradise or trying to save for your childrens’ education?

I don’t know the answer to these questions but I know the cost of living in my small town is high enough.

Well, folks, have no fear because Rep. Charles Rangel has plans for your money.

Rangel said the broader measure, which he has called the “mother of all reforms,” would contain a 4 percent tax-rate surcharge on adjusted gross income over $200,000 for married couples. The surcharge would rise to 4.6 percent for those with income of more than $500,000. In addition, households with income of more than $200,000 would have to pay rates as high as 19.6 percent on capital gains and dividends, instead of the current rate of 15 percent.

Let’s hope the Republicans can stave off this tax increase and the next Congress won’t be any more Democrat than this one. Or we could all quit working since there’s no incentive to do so.

I ran into an interesting piece in Slate today and thought I’d share it with you:

Politicians don’t call it dissembling, deceiving, or lying. They call it media management, and no administration has practiced this black art better in recent times than that of President Bill Clinton. In his 1998 book, Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post describes how, after the disastrous first half of the first term, the Clintonites learned how to stage and contain the news by “alternately seducing, misleading, and sometimes intimidating the press.” …

…These lessons weren’t lost on Hillary Clinton, in part because she taught many of them after having endured what she considered two years of press hell. As “co-president,” she already held a “distrust of the press … even deeper than her husband’s” when she arrived in Washington, Kurtz writes. And she acted on it. Shortly after Clinton took office, she proposed evicting the White House press corps from the West Wing and resettling them in the Old Executive Office Building, he reports.

She nursed grudges against specific publications, freezing them out. When the press criticized her—inevitable given her centrality in the White House—she withdrew even more. She thought that the Whitewater affair “had turned her into red meat” and that the Washington Post and its editor, Leonard Downie Jr., were out to get her.

The Clintons learned the importance of knowing how to take a punch, but more essentially, they learned how to change the subject and how to selectively use the White House megaphone to drown out negative stories. Clinton chucked mini-initiatives into the media air, where they worked like chaff to flummox the news radar of the press corps. He and his spokesmen stayed on message to control the agenda, sidetracking unwanted questions with quick, disdainful responses. The goal was to “manage the news, to package the presidency in a way that people would buy the product,” Kurtz writes.

Does he have her pegged, or what?

A little off-topic, but Wednesday I was at the allergist’s office for my allergy shot.

One of the patients in the waiting area started talking about co-pays etc. and then stated if Hillary is elected we won’t be able to afford health care.

There were about ten people in there and everyone started talking and agreeing. Not one–black, white or purple plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. We also agreed we are very disappointed in Lindsay Graham.

Food for thought.

From a Washington Times editorial is a description of how Bobby Jindal won the governorship of Louisiana without a runoff:

Mr. Jindal ran pledging to reform a corrupt government establishment that includes outgoing Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat who stumbled over herself prior to and during the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Oxford-educated and elected to the House in 2004, Mr. Jindal stepped up where Blanco fell short. He was able to govern in a way consistent with traditional values and fundamental Republican principles. He earned a 96 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, strong support from the National Rifle Association and a 0 percent rating from the NARAL Pro-Choice abortion-rights group. He ran for Congress as a conservative, he legislated as a conservative and as a conservative he trounced his gubernatorial competition.

OK, so you think we don’t have a presidential candidate conservative enough for you. The only one I can find is Mike Huckabee, and he really has no chance at the nomination and would be eaten alive in the general election.

Thompson, so far, has been a disappointment. Maybe we had built him up too high in our minds and his style doesn’t match what we had in mind.

That leaves us with liberal or soft conservatives for the top of the ticket, but that’s not all bad.

We, as a party, must choose people with conservative values for the down ballot positions because eventually they will rise to the top.

That’s how we’ll win and that’s what Bobby Jindal did. He never abandoned his principles for office. Other candidates should take a lesson from it.

When the late Sen. Paul Tsongas’ wife ran for Congress against an unknown veteran named Jim Ogonowski the conventional wisdom was that Tsongas would win in a cakewalk.

After all, this is Massachusetts, the liberal bastion of American politics.

But something happened. Yes, Mrs. Tsongas won the special election for the seat of Marty Meehan, who left to pursue other interests. The interesting part is the election was close. 6% if my memory serves me.

Some quotes on the election as published by Reuters:

Mary Burns has the kind of Democratic pedigree that dominates Massachusetts politics. Her family and friends vote Democratic, and she lives in a district that has not elected a Republican in 35 years.

But on October 17, she joined other disgruntled Democrats, voting for a Republican in a special congressional election.

Her candidate, Jim Ogonowski, who campaigned as an anti-immigration crusader, lost to Democrat Niki Tsongas by only 45 percent to 51 percent, a much closer margin than expected in a district Democrats saw as safely theirs.

Now political strategists across the country are trying to figure out what Ogonowski’s strong showing means for the nation as a whole and how worried Democrats should be about next year’s elections for president and Congress.

Why wouldn’t a Democrat run away with this election in this very Democrat state?

“He was like one of us,” Burns said of Ogonowski.

“He wasn’t from a political background or a political family. He was just looking for changes in Washington like we all are. I have a lot of Democratic friends who voted for him because he understood their concerns,” the 46-year-old advertising executive added.

Some Republicans also drew confidence from Saturday’s election of Republican U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal as governor of Louisiana. The incumbent Democratic governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, still blamed for post-Hurricane Katrina incompetence, decided not to seek re-election.

“Jindal walked away with that race,” said Democratic pollster Dave Beattie, who is not affiliated with a campaign.

“There’s a real anti-incumbent, anti-Washington mood out there,” he said. “Democrats cannot take for granted that just because voters are upset with the Republican administration it doesn’t mean they think Democrats are much better right now.”

“He was like one of us” caused this lifetime Democrat to vote for the Republican and get within an eyelash of taking out a safely held Democratic seat in the House.

Tsongas had Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi campaign by her side and still barely won the election.

Jindal won in Democrat Louisiana by a landslide considering he was running against 11 people. Never in recent memory, at least, has anyone been elected Governor in LA. without having to go through a run-off because no one reached 50% plus 1 on the first ballot.

Republicans, don’t lose hope. Keep plugging away and working for the candidates you support. If we can almost pull it off in Massachusetts and did pull it off in Louisiana, the chances are we can pull it off in some of the Republican districts that flipped Democrat last time with candidates running as conservatives.

Try to name one significant piece of legislation this Congress has passed. If you can do that, then maybe it’s a successful Congress. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything this Congress has done except fight over Iraq.

Nancy Pelosi and the House did a great job of making a mess out of Kurdish Iraq when they passed their resolution in committee to condemn the Turks for genocide of Armenians nearly 100 years ago.

Now we have nearly as many Turkish troops in Iraq or ready to go into Iraq as we have American soldiers.

As one of the candidates said the other night, I believe it was Tancredo, “Nancy Pelosi is a lousy Speaker and an even worse Secretary of State.”