Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

It is no longer true, as your mother may once have told you, that you are judged by the company you keep. Former President Barack Obama had a few diamonds in the rough on his friends list. There were the Chicago terrorist bombers Bill Ayers , a former leader of the Weather Underground, now an American elementary education theorist, and his wife Bernadine Dohrn, responsible for bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several police stations in New York, as well as the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of its members. Dohrn left a position in 2013 as “Clinical Associate Professor of Law" at the Northwestern University School of Law. Far from being a repentant sinner, Ayres told the New York Times in 2001 "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Ayers and Obama served together on the board of directors for the Woods Fund of Chicago, their terms overlapping for three years, and Ayres is credi...

Dick Blumenthal, the nation’s first full time consumer protection senator, has now weighed in on merchants who “may be selling lower quality items produced specifically for outlet stores without properly informing consumers,” according to a Philadelphia television station . The Senator has asked the Federal Trade Commission to examine claims that merchants have misled consumers in their ads. “There’s a lot of evidence,” Blumenthal breathlessly told the television consumer protection watchdog in Philadelphia, “that people shopping at outlet malls or at outlet establishments have no idea that goods and merchandise are made specifically for outlet malls.”

In Hungary, of all placed, novice U.S. Senator Chris Murphy got McCained. U.S. Senator John McCain made a pit stop in Budapest on his way to Munich where he led a large congressional delegation to the Munich Security Conference, a catch basin for “defense ministers, international arms dealers, oil sheiks and angry Ukrainians,” according to  Jeffery Goldberg of Bloomberg News . Mr. Goldberg suspects that Mr. McCain met the press in Hungary “so that the delegation would be asked questions about a woman named Colleen Bell,” a soap opera producer chosen by President Barack Obama to serve as U.S. ambassador to Hungary. Ms. Bell’s creds are much weaker than those of the late Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya who was murdered, according to a whimsical notion peddled by the White House, by a crowd of “ protesters ” dissatisfied with the quality of a brief film made by a relatively unknown auteur.  All ambassadors are the personal representatives of the president...

The Associated Press is reporting that “Sixty-one detainees who have been released from the U.S. Navy base prison in Cuba are believed to have rejoined the fight, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said. That's up from 37 previously… The new figures come as President-elect Barack Obama prepares to issue an executive order during his first week in office to close the controversial prison. It's unlikely, however, that the Guantanamo detention facility will be closed anytime soon as Obama weighs what to do with the estimated 250 al-Qaida, Taliban or other foreign fighter suspects who remain there.” It’s going to be a little difficult for President-elect Barack Obama to turn around this particular fast moving train. Even before it has been installed in office, the Obama administration “modified” several seemingly non-negotiable positions it affirmed during the lately concluded campaign. Obama won quite a few votes, not to mention monetary pledges, on the left by stating early in his...

joe_lieberman-746022 Originally uploaded by girlforgirlforme Once again, US Sen. Joe Lieberman has grievously disappointed Pharg, CGG, Anonymous , and countless other bloggers and Liebercritics. The left side of the blogsphere is in full cry against Lieberman’s endorsement of John McCain, a Republican. The right side of the blogsphere, unlike the prescient Lieberman, has not yet settled on a candidate. It is not known at this point if Lieberman will endorse McCain or some other forbidden Republican presidential wannabe in the general election, but the smart money says he will endorse the Democrat candidate -- provided the foreign policy of said candidate is substantially different than that of US Sen. Chris Dodd, who favors abject surrender at the earliest possible moment. Having lost a military struggle with al-Qaida props like Syria and Iran, Dodd thinks it is possible to sweet talk these puppet regimes into peace. Lieberman, at this tender point in the rout of al-Qaida ...

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, considered by many a liberal think tank, published on July 30 a column in the New York Times that immediately caused ripples in the leftist anti-war community. The lede was startlingly blunt: “Viewed from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administration’s critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place.” And the second paragraph, written by two thoughtful consistent critics of President Bush’s prosecution of the war, was a stunner: “Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we ...

According to the New York Times, not generally regarded as kind to moderate Democrats or lingering fanatics who do not wish to see Iraq dismembered by theological oppressors in Syria and Iran, Hillary Clinton is moving cautiously towards a position on Iraq that is likely to get her into Dutch with the kind of people who think Joe Lieberman has cloven hooves and a tail. Clinton told the Times in a half hour interview on March 13th that, were she elected president, she would “keep a reduced military force (in Iraq) to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.” In the interview, the Times' reporter thought, “Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of ‘bringing the troops home.’ She said in the interview that there were ‘remaining vital national security interests in Iraq ‘that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.’”...

The "blanket bit" in this interview with Christopher Hitchens is hilarious and helps to explain why there will always be an England. Bitterly critical of the CIA, it is also a manual in how get yourself a file in the CIA, the FBI and whatever comgressional committee is charged with overseeing international sleuthery. Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 11/09/2006 Reporter: Tony Jones Tony Jones speaks with the prolific writer and outspoken commentator Christopher Hitchens about the New York attacks and their implications. TONY JONES: Well just a year after September 11, the prolific writer and outspoken commentator Christopher Hitchens joined me on the roof of a building overlooking Ground Zero to talk about the New York attacks and their implications. Now, five years after the event that changed the world, we invited him to join us again - this time from our Washington studio. Christopher Hitchens thanks for being there. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Thanks for having me...

According to a Hartford newspaper , this is the kind of remark, made by Senator Joe Lieberman on a “Face the Nation” broadcast, that has “infuriated” a lot of his critics: “"If we leave precipitously - if we say we're going on X day, everybody's getting out - as bad as things are, they will get worse. There will be an all-out civil war in Iraq. Iran will surge in to control large parts of that country. There will be a wider regional war. And al-Qaida and similar radical Islamist terrorists will use Iraq as a safe haven from which to attack us and others." Some of Lieberman’s hot-headed critics are easily infuriated. Now, the first thing we should notice about the infuriating remark is that it is predictive rather than descriptive. Lieberman is saying “If A happens, B, C, and D will follow. There are only two ways to answer a prediction: You may wait until an event happens and then view the consequences to see if the prediction is true; or you may use your intelligence...

Count Michael Barone among Sen. Joe Lieberman’s defenders. In a recent column, Barone let loose on head-in- the-sand progressive bloggers by reminding them of the important difference between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. After Chamberlain had been foxed by Hitler, he willingly gave up the mantle of leadership to Churchill – and supported him : Chamberlain proceeded to build up Britain's military forces and to embark on a vigorous diplomacy to cabin Hitler in. He realized instantly that he had been, as Winston Churchill was to say in his funeral oration in the House of Commons, "deceived by a wicked man." He prepared to call Churchill, his bitter critic on Munich, into government. Chamberlain's diplomacy ultimately failed: Hitler wanted war too much. But Chamberlain stayed true to his countrymen, yielding his place to Churchill and strenuously supporting him when Britain was in peril. But the left in the United States seems overcome with cognitive disson...

The usual sleuths are snooping around the corpse in an attempt to find out who done it. An Associated Press report indicates that “Tips from within al-Zarqawi's own terror network helped the U.S. locate and bomb a safe house where the al-Qaida leader was meeting in secret with top associates.” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser told a reporter from the New York Times , “"We have managed to infiltrate this organization,” but the tight-lipped security advisor declined to elaborate. An unnamed Jordanian official told the Times – which also tends to be tight-lipped concerning its sources – “the mission that killed Mr. Zarqawi was a joint operation conducted by the Americans and Jordanian intelligence. The source inside Mr. Zarqawi's group, the Jordanian official said, had been cultivated at least in part by Jordanian intelligence agents. ‘There was a man from Zarqawi's group who handed over the information,’ the Jordanian official said.” The good new...

Al-Qaida’s man in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, is now being attended by scores of virgins in heaven. He was reduced to his present estate, according to recent reports, as a result “of intelligence reports provided to Iraqi security forces by residents in the area” and Jordanian assistance. According to an Associated Press report, A Jordanian official said that Jordan also provided the U.S. military with information that helped in tracking al-Zarqawi down. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was addressing intelligence issues, would not elaborate, but Jordan is known to have intelligence agents operating in Iraq to hunt down Islamic militants. Some of the information came from Jordan's sources inside Iraq and led the U.S. military to the area of Baqouba, the official said. Baqouba has in recent weeks seen a spike in sectarian violence, including the discovery of 17 severed heads in fruit boxes. It was also near the site of a sectarian atrocity last week in which masked...