Rush Limbaugh Live Thread Thursday Sept 07, 2006

More Good News from Iraq the Junk Media is trying very hard to either ignore or spin.

Posted on 09/06/2006 8:01:29 PM CDT by SandRat WASHINGTON, Sept. 6, 2006 -- For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the Iraqi prime minister, through the Iraqi minister of defense, will take operational control of the Iraqi ground forces command structure and the country’s air forces and navy tomorrow, a U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said today.

“This is such a huge, significant event that's about to occur tomorrow,” said U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a Multinational Force Iraq spokesman. “It's the one event that puts the prime minister directly in the operational control of his military forces as his role as the commander in chief.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will take control of the air force, navy and one army division -- the 8th Iraqi Army Division, Caldwell said. It is then Maliki’s decision how quickly to take over more divisions, but he will probably assume control of about two divisions a month, Caldwell said.

The chain of command will now run from Maliki, through the minister of defense and the joint force headquarters, to the Iraqi ground forces command headquarters, down to the division and the individual soldier, Caldwell said.

“This event, again, continues to show the progress as we move forward with the Iraqi army's capabilities,” he said.

Throughout Iraq, coalition forces are transferring operational control to Iraqis as the security environment and their capabilities improve, Caldwell said. Currently, six of 10 Iraqi army divisions are in the lead in their areas of operations, and underneath the divisions are 26 brigades and 88 battalions in the lead, he said.

“They're maintaining the lead in coordinating, planning and conducting security operations in the area in which they're operating,” he said. “With more and more Iraqi security forces in the lead, the number of counterinsurgency operations being conducted by Iraqi security forces, with coalition forces in support, continues to increase steadily.”

As Iraqi security forces assume the lead, they're also setting the conditions to allow for provincial Iraqi control, Caldwell said. Provincial Iraqi control refers to civil authorities in a province assuming independent governance and civil security duties, he said.

“Whether it's Iraqi security forces taking the lead or handover of governance and security responsibilities to Iraqi civil leadership in the province, we continue to see Iraqi forces, Iraqi security forces and Iraqi governance moving forward here,” he said.

Then there is this little treat. I love this woman! The headline says it all.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1696690/posts

Joe Wilson: The End of an Error [Ann Coulter]

As National Public Radio described the story behind Joe Wilson's amusingly titled book, "The Politics of Truth" (available on the $1 table in fine bookstores everywhere), in May 2004:

"Last July Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times saying that this particular intelligence regarding Iraq was false. A week later, columnist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative."

This is like saying: "John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan; Reagan later died." Every word of that is true, but what it implies -- that Hinckley killed Reagan -- is false.

In the exact same way, the grand White House conspiracy promoted by Wilson and the mainstream media cites chronological events to prove causation.

The media's conspiracy theory is:

Wilson said Bush's famed "16 words" in his 2003 State of the Union address -- "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" -- were a lie.

Wilson's wife was then revealed to be an "undercover" spy at the CIA, exposing Wilson and his family to danger.

Therefore, she was "outed" by the White House as retaliation against Wilson for calling Bush a liar. Point No. 1 of liberals' conspiracy theory has been proved false since Britain's Butler Commission reviewed its government's pre-war intelligence on Iraq and concluded that "the British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium."

It was again proved false when our own Senate Intelligence Committee also concluded, in July 2004, that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium from Niger.

So there went the White House's motive for muddying up Wilson: Government fact-finding commissions, here and in the United Kingdom, were muddying up Wilson on their own simply by finding facts.

Point No. 2, that Wilson's wife was an undercover agent, has been proved false even to the willfully blind since Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced the conclusion to his pointless investigation last year, saying that Plame's employment with the CIA was not undercover, but merely "classified."

Everything is "classified" at the CIA. They have no idea when 19 terrorists are about to hijack commercial aircraft and slaughter 3,000 Americans, but the CIA is very good at play-acting James Bond spy games.

How covert was Valerie Plame at the CIA? Her top-secret code name was "Valerie Plame."

All this should have been enough to end conspiracy theories of White House skullduggery. But the nation's newsrooms simply continued asserting that someone in the Bush White House had "outed" Valerie Plame, despite the fact that revealing her employment with the CIA was not illegal.

Thus, as recently as January of this year, a New York Times editorial said the issue of the "leak" about Wilson's wife, whom the Times called "a covert CIA operative whose identity was leaked" (two strikes already), concerned "whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion."

Wilson was more precise about the White House "leaker," variously naming Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and Dick Cheney as the source. He even described "a meeting in the suite of offices that the vice president occupies, chaired by either the vice president or Mr. Libby," where, Wilson said, the decision was made to destroy him.

(If the secret plan hatched in the vice president's office was to send evil spirits to enter Wilson's body and make him act like a fool, the plan worked brilliantly.)

Now it turns out, even point No. 3 of liberals' conspiracy theory was false: The original "leaker" of Plame's name to columnist Bob Novak -- not a crime -- was not in the White House at all. It was Richard Armitage, a State Department official and opponent of the Iraq war.

The information that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA had nothing to do with harming Wilson. It did not come from the White House. It did not even come from someone who supported the war in Iraq.

The rest of the world found out Armitage was Novak's source last week, something Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew from the first week of his investigation. So what was Fitzgerald investigating?

Even people who think the president should not be subject to civil suits in office do not deny that Bill Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky and lied about it in a civil suit brought by Paula Jones. However irritating it is to liberals that lying about sex under oath is a crime, there was a crime that Ken Starr was investigating.

What was Fitzgerald investigating? Not only was there no underlying crime, there was not even -- as the Times put it -- "an attempt to silence Mrs. Wilson's husband" (or an attempt "to respond to people calling you a liar in the New York Times," as normal people put it).

Fitzgerald's entire investigation was nothing but a perjury trap from beginning to end for anyone who misremembered anything about who told whom what about a low-level nobody at the CIA who happened to be married to a Walter Mitty fantasist.

Conrad Black, without being convicted of anything yet, has been forced to give up $90 million of property and possessions.

Allow me to follow up Rush's story from yesterday. In 7 Steps to Freedom II legendary direct mail marketer Benjamin D Suarez describes how federal bureaucrats seized his private property to protect the vested interests of the competition.

We were in one of the most tightly controlled and most vigorously controlled market areas - food and drugs. . . . The FDA is one of the most powerful regulatory agencies because it has seizure powers. That is, it can seize your personal property without your right to a defense. . . . Since the Kefauver Amendment, the FDA had really become powerful. It can arbitrarily say that a product, food or drug, can or cannot be marketed. It can seize your personal property, destroy you financially, sabotage your character and business, all without your right to a fair trial. . . . The judge cannot legally turn down the seizure order. . . . "You mean this one unelected civil service worker in Cincinnati has the power to be, in effect, enforcement officer, judge, jury and executioner?" [My attorneys] said, "That's right." . . . I asked, "What about going to our congressmen?" [My attorney] said "No, that won't help. They don't have to power to stop a seizure." "You mean nobody controls these guys?" I exclaimed. "They have complete control of the citizens, elected officials, and the courts?" "That's right," he stated. . . . The FDA would be tipped off that a natural-health remedy was being used that might become a viable market item. The FDA would make the necessary arrangements to seize the product. They would then arrange to plant a story in a major news media. This occurred usually in established network media, such as one of the large TV networks, a key influential newspaper, or through the Associated Press. The FDA actually went so far as to have certain planted reporters actually working for them. The media would be tipped off when a seizure would occur and coordinate it with agents. The agents and their media cohorts would burst into the business' or doctor's office, seize the products, splash the story across TV, radio, and newspapers, all before the victim had a right to a fair trial. There was no such thing as "innocent before proven guilty." To get ahead of our story, coincidentally or uncoincidentally, ours followed the same pattern. It all started on March 2, 1978, on the NBC's "Today" show. Betty Furness did a hatchet-job story on our bread and tried to become a prophet, "predicting further action on this bread from governmental agencies." Later she also aired a totally unwarranted news report on my book, before she even had the product in hand. This brought up another incredible point. The FDA had made a decision to seize our bread, as Simmons [regional director for the FDA] admitted, without testing it and without any consumer complaints. There couldn't have been any consumer complaints, because none of the product had been shipped. Simmons had alluded to the fact that there were a lot of complaints. Since it was impossible for them to come from consumers, we contacted Mr. Simmons to ask from whom the complaints were coming. He said, "I'm just loaded with complaints." I asked, "Are the from consumers?" He said, "No." I said, "Well, then obviously they are from our competitors then, right?" He wouldn't answer me. So apparently the decision was made to seize without testing the product, without consumer complaints, but from complaints from the competition. . . . After our confrontation with our congressmen, we investigated their voting records. Glenn and Metzenbaum are two ultraliberals, two of the worst senators in the country with regard to voting for free enterprise. . . . We had gone through just about every elected government official and government agent whom we paid for the service of protecting us from injustice. We were refused from top to bottom, starting with the president [Carter] down to the lower bureaucratic agencies. We were not only refused, but treated rudely and told by many that they didn't even have to give us the reason why they would not help us. Where on earth did the government ever develop this attitude? The attitude of the regulatory agencies even went further. Not only were they unfriendly, unhelpful and arrogant, but they were malicious. It's amazing, people whom you pay to perform services for you not only refuse to help you, but they actually look for ways to try to hurt you. . . . The New York attorney decided it would be a good idea to go on a goodwill mission to Cincinnati to talk to Mr. Simmons, to show that we made an effort to review the new ad with him. . . . [My attorney] Jim described the meeting as follows:
"We went into a federal building where we received a security badge. We went up a certain number of floors to where the FDA offices are located. Everything was waxed and cleaned to an excessive degree. When we got to Mr. Simmons' office, his secretary met us and gave us instructions on how the introductions would take place, the way you would if you were meeting the King of England or someone noble."

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