Alaska industry and political leaders reacted with disappointment, even vehemence, to the decision Wednesday to protect the polar bear as "threatened," despite assurances from the Bush administration that the listing would mean no new regulation in Alaska.

Industry officials worried that the listing decision would give environmentalists a new tool for opposing development in the Arctic, especially new offshore oil exploration and development. Politicians attacked the science behind the decision as speculative.

"Reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act in this way is an unequivocal victory for extreme environmentalists who want to block all development in our state," said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska.

National conservative groups are already promising to sue over the decision, predicting that Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne's effort to rule out regulation of greenhouse gas emissions would be overturned in court. One group, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said the barriers erected by Kempthorne "have all the strength of tissue paper."

For their part, environmental groups responded more positively to the "threatened species" listing, a goal they have sought for three years. They, too, were talking about lawsuits, predicting Interior would be forced to yield on the logic of regulating emissions.

"This is a huge victory for the polar bears. They're now protected," said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, and lead author of the 2005 petition. "The administration's attempts to make an exception for greenhouse gases won't stand up in court. The law says what it says, not what the administration wishes it says. The oil industry is probably smart enough to know that."

Kempthorne, announcing his decision Wednesday, said no new regulation of industry or subsistence hunting in Alaska would be necessary under the Endangered Species Act. He said protections already given to the polar bear under the Marine Mammal Protection Act are "more stringent" than those under the ESA and would continue in place.

In an interview, Kempthorne said his approach "gave predictability to the oil and gas industry."

Interior officials cited only one change: polar bear trophies could no longer be imported from guided sport hunts in Canada.

'PANDORA'S BOX'
Under the ESA, the federal government is required to develop a plan for protecting critical habitat, write a recovery plan for the bears, and consult about bear protection before approving federal permits. All now appear to be sources of potential litigation, especially on the issue of excluding greenhouse gas emissions.

The marine mammal act has governed industry activities in northern Alaska for three decades, and the result has been only "negligible" impacts on polar bears, federal biologists say.

But it's probably oversimplifying to say there will be no different regulation of industry in Alaska as a result of Wednesday's decision, said Scott Schliebe, a polar bear specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska.

"It draws a brighter light of scrutiny to our management activities in Alaska," Schliebe said. "We will take a closer look at the activities, particularly the offshore activities."

Industry is not as worried about government scrutiny as it is about environmental lawsuits and resulting costly delays, said Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.

"The activities taking place in polar bear habitat are the ones that will become targets," she said. The administration's effort to keep the marine mammals act as the law affecting oil and gas is "very helpful," she said, but the decision to list at all is disappointing.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, made the point more strongly, calling the decision "grossly premature" because climate change models vary so much. She said the decision "opens a Pandora's Box that the administration will now be unable to close."

While no one knows who first uttered the sentiment “It’s better to say nothing and seem a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt,” Republican presidential hopeful John McCain’s speech this week on climate change certainly supports the phrase’s validity. McCain spoke at the facilities of Vestas Wind Technology, an Oregon-based firm that manufactures wind-power systems. The irony of the setting was rich given McCain’s outspoken opposition to pork-barrel spending.

He even risked his presidential hopes by criticizing ethanol subsidies ahead of the all-important Iowa caucuses. Next to solar power, however, wind power is the most heavily subsidized form of energy.

Taxpayers cough up an astounding $23.37 per megawatt hour of electricity produced, according to the Wall Street Journal. In contrast, coal and natural gas are only subsidized to a tune of 44 cents and 25 cents, respectively.

McCain lauded wind as a “predictable source of energy.” He must have missed this Feb. 27 headline from Reuters: “Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency.” The electric grid operator was forced to curtail 1,100 megawatts of power to customers within 10 minutes.

“Our economy depends upon clean and affordable alternatives to fossil fuels,” McCain stated.

What he’s talking about is not quite clear since our current economy is about 75 percent dependent on fossil fuels and will remain that way for at least the next 25 years, as solar and wind technologies remain only marginal sources of energy. If anything, we are likely to be even more dependent on fossil fuels in the future as nuclear power, which provides about 20 percent of our electricity, shrinks in availability as a supply of energy.

Although our energy needs are ever-growing, construction of nuclear power plants is not keeping pace - not one has come online in the last 30 years. Even if a few nuke plants are constructed during the next decades, they will not supply enough power to keep nuclear power at the 20 percent level.

McCain then demonstrated how little he knows about the science of global warming.

“No longer do we need to rely on guesswork and computer modeling, because satellite images reveal a dramatic disappearance of glaciers, Antarctic ice shelves and polar ice sheets. And I’ve seen some of this evidence up close…”

Global warming alarmism, however, is entirely based on the “guesswork and computer modeling” that McCain says isn’t necessary. The reason the United Nations relies on “guesswork and computer modeling” is because the glaciers that are receding have been doing so since at least the 19th century, before significant human output of greenhouse gases.

In any event, the melting of glaciers is not evidence that humans are involved. Glaciers have been advancing and retreating for hundreds of millions of years. Just because humans are witnessing changes in glaciers does not mean that humans are causing them; moreover, Antarctic ice is expanding while any melting of Arctic ice is not likely due to warmer air temperatures.

“We have seen sustained drought in the Southwest and across the world average temperatures that seem to reach new records every few years. We have seen a higher incidence of extreme weather events,” McCain stated.

But that “sustained drought” is why the Southwest is commonly known as a “desert” - and it was a desert long before industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

As to global temperature, the world has cooled since 1998 and the latest research from U.N.-approved researchers indicates that more global cooling is on the way. With respect to extreme weather events, I can’t think of a single scientist - even an alarmist scientist - who has the temerity to stand up and link specific weather events with climate change.

McCain’s apparent climate mentor, Al Gore, learned this lesson the hard way last fall.

McCain touted a so-called cap-and-trade system for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, citing the supposed success of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments’ cap-and-trade system for the sulfur dioxide emissions linked to the alleged phenomenon of acid rain.

But even if acid rain were a genuine environmental problem - and studies leading up to the 1990 law cast significant doubt - controlling sulfur dioxide emissions is many orders of magnitude easier than controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

The volume of sulfur dioxide emissions to be eliminated is much smaller, the sources (coal-fired power plants) are relatively few and the smokestack technology is comparatively inexpensive.

McCain said that “A cap-and-trade policy will send a signal that will be heard and welcomed all across the American economy.” This is unlikely since cap-and-trade’s economic harms have been exposed and condemned by the likes of the Congressional Budget Office, the Environmental Protection Agency and renown economists such as Alan Greenspan and Arthur Laffer.

Even the Clinton administration warned of the economic harms that would be caused by cap-and-trade.

Although China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, vows not to reduce its emissions, McCain says the U.S. should act anyway. So as China, India and other developing nations become the world’s greenhouse gas smokestacks, thereby nullifying any reductions made by the U.S., McCain willingly condemns the U.S. to more expensive and less available energy supplies for no environmental benefit whatsoever.

Undaunted by facts, McCain appears to be programmed with every nonsensical green platitude and policy - a truly worrisome situation since global warming regulation is shaping up to be the most important domestic policy issue of the upcoming election.

Many McCain supporters believe he is the candidate to lead the country at a time of war. But there is a war of sorts at home, too - the struggle against the greens for control over vital domestic energy and economic policy. We can’t afford to lose the latter war, either.

On Tuesday night, Republicans lost a Republican congressional district in a special election in Mississippi. 

Party insiders fear the loss may be just another sign of a coming bloodbath for congressional Republicans this November.

Democrat Travis Childers’ victory over Republican Greg Davis in Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District yesterday dealt the GOP its third straight loss of a solid Republican district to insurgent Democrats in this year’s special elections.

With nearly all precincts reporting, Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Childers held a 54 percent to 46 percent lead over Southaven Mayor Davis.

The seat was vacated by Republican Roger Wicker when he was appointed to fill the Senate seat that Republican Trent Lott vacated when he retired.

Wicker had held the seat since 1994, never winning re-election with less than 63 percent of the vote, the Washington Post reported.

The district, a Republican stronghold, had backed George Bush with 59 percent of the vote in 2000 and 62 percent in 2004.

Childers’ victory hands the Democrats their second special election victory in the South in less than two weeks. On May 3, Democratic State Rep. Donald Cazayoux Jr. defeated former Republican State Legislator Woody Jenkins in a Louisiana district that had been in GOP hands for 33 years.

Richard Baker had vacated the seat when he resigned in February.

And in March, Democrat Bill Foster defeated Republican Jim Oberweis in an Illinois district that former Republican House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert had held for nearly 21 years.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen said in a statement: “After three consecutive special election defeats in districts that President Bush twice won easily, it is abundantly clear the American people have turned their back and shut the door on the special interest-driven agenda of the Republican Party. There is no district that is safe for Republican candidates.”

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole acknowledged that the GOP faces a challenge and “must undertake bold efforts to define a forward-looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for.”

 

DALLAS -- In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers.

The hairy, reddish-brown creatures are known as "crazy rasberry ants" _ crazy, because they wander erratically instead of marching in regimented lines, and "rasberry" after Tom Rasberry, an exterminator who did battle against them early on.

"They're itty-bitty things about the size of fleas, and they're just running everywhere," said Patsy Morphew of Pearland, who is constantly sweeping them off her patio and scooping them out of her pool by the cupful. "There's just thousands and thousands of them. If you've seen a car racing, that's how they are. They're going fast, fast, fast. They're crazy."

The ants _ formally known as "paratrenicha species near pubens" _ have spread to five Houston-area counties since they were first spotted in Texas in 2002.

The newly recognized species is believed to have arrived in a cargo shipment through the port of Houston. Scientists are not sure exactly where the ants came from, but their cousins, commonly called crazy ants, are found in the Southeast and the Caribbean.

"At this point, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate the ant because it is so widely dispersed," said Roger Gold, a Texas A&M University entomologist.

The good news? They eat fire ants, the stinging red terrors of Texas summers.

But the ants also like to suck the sweet juices from plants, feed on such beneficial insects as ladybugs, and eat the hatchlings of a small, endangered type of grouse known as the Attwater prairie chicken.

They also bite humans, though not with a stinger like fire ants.

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner's gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA's Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven't caused any major problems there yet.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants _ which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season _ appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

"The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good," said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It's not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

At the same time, the ants aren't taking the bait usually left out in traps, according to exterminators, who want the Environmental Protection Agency to loosen restrictions on the use of more powerful pesticides.

And when you do kill these ants, the survivors turn it to their advantage: They pile up the dead, sometimes using them as a bridge to cross safely over surfaces treated with pesticide.

"It looked like someone had come along and poured coffee granules all around the perimeter of the rooms," said Lisa Calhoun, who paid exterminators $1,200 to treat an infestation of her parents' home in the Houston suburb of Pearland.

The Texas Department of Agriculture is working with A&M researchers and the EPA on how to stop the ants.

"This one seems to be like lava flowing and filling an entire area, getting bigger and bigger," said Ron Harrison, director of training for the big pest-control company Orkin Inc.

C H A P T E R   O N E - Be Not Afraid

You shall cross the barren desert, but you shall not die of thirst.
You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way.
You shall speak your words in foreign lands and all will understand.
You shall see the face of God and live.
Be not afraid. I go before you always;
Come follow me, and I will give you rest.

FROM A PRAYER CARD I FOUND ON A BASE IN ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ
• Baqubah, Iraq, June 19, 2007 •

 

 

Thoughts flow on the eve of a great battle. By the time you read these words, we will be in combat. Few ears have heard even rumors of this battle, and fewer still are the eyes that will see its full scope. Even now—for the battle has already begun for some—little news of it reaches home. I have known of the plans for a month, but have remained silent.

This campaign, a series of carefully orchestrated battalion- and brigade-sized operations, is collectively the largest battle since “major hostilities” ended more than four years ago. Even the media here on the ground do not seem to have sensed its scale.

On the very day of a special election to fill a vacated congressional seat this week in Mississippi, The New York Times accused the Republican candidate of running racist ads against his Democratic opponent.

Talk about dirty tricks! By The New York Times, that is.

The Republican thus accused of racism narrowly lost the election the night the Times article appeared, so I guess the Times can proclaim: "Mission Accomplished."

 

The ad in question, on behalf of Republican Greg Davis, pointed out that Barack Obama had endorsed Davis' opponent, Travis Childers -- another in a long line of fake-American goobers claiming to be "conservative Democrats," but who get to Congress and promptly vote to ban guns, surrender in Iraq and fund full-term abortions.

These days, I guess you can call yourself a "conservative Democrat" if you refrain from being sworn into Congress with your hand on a Quran.

The ad showed a clip of Obama's pastor g-damning America and mentioned Obama's recent remarks ridiculing rural folks for clinging to guns. It then concluded that Childers "took Obama's endorsement over our conservative values."

The Republicans had also run ads connecting Childers with other Washington liberals, such as Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry. (Times editors are still looking for the racist angle to those ads.)

To call that ad racist is a monstrous libel. Greg Davis and the Mississippi Republicans should bring a defamation action against The New York Times -- although such an action might be perceived as "racist" because some black people work at the Times.

Republicans are constantly linking the local hayseed Democrat to national liberals like John Kerry. The technique goes back at least to Michael Dukakis in 1988.

It is beyond outrageous for liberals to complain about the practice of linking Democrats to the national party when their calculated strategy in race after race in the red states has been to run Democratic candidates who appear to be Americans. They're not Americans. They're liberals! I don't care how much hay is sticking out of their straw hats.

As the Bush presidency enters its final months, and the Middle East becomes a more violent, dangerous place, Washington's policies seem increasingly disconnected from reality. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei routinely call for Israel's destruction; Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps train militia members and smuggle weapons into neighboring Iraq in order to maim and kill American soldiers; Tehran and Damascus support the Hamas terror state in Gaza that fire rockets at Israel on a daily basis; and last week in Lebanon, Hezbollah staged a series of violent attacks in Beirut (while U.S.-armed and -trained Lebanese security forces stood by) that in all likelihood will topple the Lebanese government. For now, Hezbollah's lightning strike against its enemies in West Beirut has made Iran and Syria the dominant powers in Lebanon.

In the wake of last year's controversial National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran stopped part of its nuclear weapons program in 2003 (the product of a cabal within the intelligence community that has systematically worked to undermine the efforts of the president to hold Iran accountable), the international community believes that the Bush Administration has taken military action off the table with regard to Iran's nuclear program.

The administration gives no indication that it is prepared to launch military strikes against Iranian military bases and training camps involved in supplying Iraqi militias responsible for killing and maiming American soldiers, and the Democrat leadership in Congress is hostile to any kind of action against Iran. It's not hard to see why Ahmadinejad and Company perceive American political leaders of both parties as weak and vacillating - and will likely become even more brazen about throwing their weight around in the near future.

Given these unpleasant realities, the best thing Washington could do would be adopting a "do no harm" policy when it comes to Israel and the security challenges it faces - particularly in the West Bank, where the Israeli security forces retain substantial freedom to act against Palestinian terror cells and have been remarkably successful against proxies of Tehran and Damascus such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But that is not what's happening. Instead, Bush and Rice are determined to achieve something they can plausibly spin as a legacy to be proud of: a peace agreement between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. And they want to do it by bludgeoning a weak Israeli government into taking down security roadblocks that have become an essential component of its defense against suicide attacks.

It would be hard to imagine two weaker leaders more ill-suited to reaching a viable peace agreement than these two. Olmert is hardly in a position to make far-reaching concessions to Abbas - concessions that many Israelis are justifiably skeptical of. Olmert is the subject of myriad corruption investigations, his approval ratings are abysmal, and the Israeli newspapers are filled with rumors of his impending political demise. Add to this the fact that the Israeli government's point man on West Bank security is Labor Party leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Barak, one of the greatest war heroes in Israel's history, was a disaster as prime minister of the country from 1999-2001 - a period in which he unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon, turning that area over to Hezbollah, and then unsuccessfully tried to give away the store to Yassir Arafat at Camp David (only to have Arafat reject an extremely generous offer and launch a war of terror against Israel.) Ariel Sharon ousted him in a 25-point landslide in February 2001.

While attempting a political comeback, Barak has sought to recast himself as a sort of "Mr. Security" figure. But in order to do this, he will have to fend off the Bush Administration's efforts to wring security concessions out of Israel. In short, neither Barak nor Olmert is in any political position to make such concessions to Abbas.

But the Bush Administration sees an opportunity to pocket some Israeli concessions, so the president and secretary of state are using the occasion of the Jewish State's 60th birthday (on May 14, 1948, the United Nations voted to approve a plan partitioning British-controlled Palestine into separate independent Arab and Jewish states) to pressure Israel into making life-and-death concessions to Abbas. This is a man who says nice things about making peace with Israel (even as newspapers and radio and television stations under the authority of his Fatah organization spew out the most incendiary anti-Semitic propaganda, a point amply documented by Palestinian Media Watch, at www.pmw.org.) But Abbas is a serially incompetent leader, a man who lost an election to Hamas two years ago and whose security forces in Gaza were routed by Hamas last year.

None of this appears to matter to Bush or Rice. The secretary of state and her diplomatic team have pronounced themselves dissatisfied over the pace at which Israel has been removing anti-terrorism security roadblocks in the West Bank, and last week the secretary dispatched observers to various West Bank locations in order to verify that Israel is taking down the barriers rapidly enough. It's ironic that 60 years ago at this time, Secretary of State George Marshall was lobbying furiously to prevent Israel from coming into existence. Today Secretary of State Rice professes solidarity with Israel while pressing it to play Russian roulette with its own security.

As we mark Israel’s 60th birthday today (May 14), people across the world can, once again, breathe a collective sigh of relief thanks to the Jewish State. Last September, a handful of Israeli fighter jets conducted a pre-dawn raid in which they destroyed what the Israelis claimed was a nuclear facility in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria close to the Turkish border. Recently, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the facility, termed Al Kibar, was mere weeks away from being operational and could have, in the first year of operation, “produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons."

A few months prior to the strike, the Israelis had managed to acquire aerial and ground-based photographs of the facility, a video of North Korean scientists inside, and a sample of some of the nuclear material. According to various sources, in July 2007 when the material was tested and confirmed to have come from North Korea, the Israelis took all of the evidence to their American allies. Condoleezza Rice’s State Department responded to the overwhelming proof of a NK-assisted nuclear weapons program in Syria by deliberately trying to downplay the value of the data.

U.S. officials told to the World Tribune that the CIA and State Department claimed that the nuclear facility “was years away from bring completed or even tested.” The officials also admitted that the State Department, particularly Secretary Rice herself, “sought to play down the Israeli evidence” and specifically “recruited CIA analysts who asserted the Syrian facility was not designed for a bomb.” This was all done because Rice and Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill believed “that any determination of a North Korean nuclear facility in Syria would torpedo U.S.-led negotiations for Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.”

Despite all of the pressure against a strike emanating from Foggy Bottom, the Israelis decided to take action, and last week they were finally vindicated for doing so.

It has now been revealed that evidence collected after the bombing left no doubt as to what kind of facility Israel destroyed. The devastating and infallible quality of the evidence of a Syrian nuclear program is what led to the U.S. intelligence community’s very public reversal recently. It seems that they have now come to terms with the fact that “Pyongyang violated its February 2007 pledge to halt nuclear proliferation” and had been helping Syria's nuclear program since as early as 1997.

The Al Kibar strike isn’t the first time that the Israelis have spared the world from the consequences of a terrorist-sponsoring state with nuclear weapons.

Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama says Israel is a "constant wound" and a "constant sore" that infects "all of our foreign policy."

Obama, under fire for attracting praise and support for his presidential run from the terrorist group Hamas, spoke to Atlantic Monthly at length about his views of the Middle East.

Asked if he thought Israel represented a drag on America's reputation overseas, Obama said: "No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that, and some of the tensions that might arise between me and some of the more hawkish elements in the Jewish community in the United States might stem from the fact that I’m not going to blindly adhere to whatever the most hawkish position is just because that’s the safest ground politically."

"I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we’re going to be stuck in the same status quo that we’ve been stuck in for decades now," he said.

JERUSALEM – The Hamas terrorist organization is strongly considering issuing an official statement claiming it doesn't endorse any U.S. presidential candidate and that remarks made by an official supportive of Sen. Barack Obama were "misunderstood," a top Hamas leader told WND.

Other Hamas sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the terror group "understands" praise for Obama last month from Ahmed Yousef, Hamas' chief political advisor in the Gaza Strip, is harming the Illinois senator.

In an interview with WND and WABC Radio last month, Yousef said he "hopes" Obama becomes president and compared the Illinois senator to President John F. Kennedy.

"We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the elections," said Yousef.

"I hope Mr. Obama and the Democrats will change the political discourse. ... I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principal. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance," Yousef said, speaking from Gaza.

Yousef was not asked which presidential candidate he supports. He volunteered his endorsement in response to a question inquiring whether he was surprised Obama and other presidential candidates criticized Jimmy Carter's recent meetings with Hamas.

For the past several years pro-illegal immigration groups have rallied at the beginning of May to demand citizenship opportunities for the estimated twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States and an end to raids on and deportations of these immigrants. This year was no different. There were protests in California, Michigan, Florida, Texas, Illinois and other places. One slight change, however, was the attendance: this year the protests were markedly smaller than before. In 2006, the first these immigration rallies were held, the attendance was around one million people. This year crowds were down to between 300 and 500 per rally.

Many activists were quoted as saying that the drop in attendance was due to fear of government reprisal and deportation among the illegal immigrants themselves. This is highly implausible. Since 2006 the Federal Government has made little progress in enforcing our borders and deporting illegal immigrants.

What worries me is that all three of the remaining presidential candidates – Senators John S. McCain III (R-AZ), Barack H. Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) – support a general amnesty for illegal immigrants. And this amnesty is without any prior successful closure of the U.S.-Mexican Border that would halt further waves of immigrants. McCain pays lip-service to border security and assimilation on his campaign website. He states, “A secure border will contribute to addressing our immigration problem most effectively if we also: recognize the importance of a flexible labor market to keep employers in business and our economy on top, and recognize the importance of assimilation of our immigrant population, which includes learning English, American history and civics, and respecting the values of a democratic society.” Obama’s website is similar, listing border security as his main priority, followed by “bring[ing] people out of the shadows” to become citizens. Clinton uses much more flowery language but essentially posits the same message.

It should be noted that illegal immigrants do not live in the shadows. They attend American schools, use our hospital emergency rooms as though they were a general practitioner’s office and work in specific businesses. If the federal government wanted to enforce our current immigration laws, which are sufficient to solve the problem, it could. But there is no willpower to do so.

I suspect that the reason for the drop in attendance at the rallies is not a new burst of patriotism for America among prior attendees but because the issue is not as pressing. What we need to do is return the debate to the topic of assimilation, of learning to speak English, of the value of becoming a citizen, and of pride in a country that provides immigrants from around the world with more opportunities for success than any other country on earth. The latter will be the most difficult. Immigrants need to assimilate to American culture but if we are to demand that they do we must first restore a proper sense of patriotism among American citizens. How can we demand that foreigners respect our country when our own elites so vehemently criticize and disdain everything connected to American history, culture, ideals, governance and traditions?

A return to assimilation and a coherent culture will not begin until we put our own house in order. We cannot expect others to respect us when many Americans themselves are ashamed of their country.

 

Hillary Clinton, declaring “this race isn’t over yet,” beat Barack Obama by a decisive margin in the West Virginia Democratic primary Tuesday.

Early returns indicated Clinton was beating Obama by better than 2-to-1. She is capturing almost every demographic group, and doing particularly well among the large group of white, working-class voters in the state.

West Virginia offers just 28 pledged delegates, and so Clinton’s victory Tuesday, which was widely expected, will have little impact on the overall trajectory of the race. Obama, leading Clinton by a wide margin in total delegates, has already started turning his campaign toward the general election.

But the Clinton win prolongs the race and fuels the New York senator’s argument that she is able to carry groups that will be important to Democrats in November.

“We know from the Bible that faith can move mountains, and my friends, the faith of the Mountain State has moved me,” Clinton said at her primary rally in Charleston, W. Va. “I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign until everyone has had a chance to make their voices heard … This continues to be a hard-fought race from one end of our country to the other.”

Final West Virginia returns showed Clinton won with 67 percent of the vote, compared with Obama’s 26 percent. John Edwards, who dropped out of the race in January, remained on the ballot and still drew 7 percent.

Cheers of “It’s not over! It’s not over!” broke out at Clinton’s state headquarters in Charleston after the race was called.

Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe told FOX News before polls closed that he doesn’t see it as inevitable that Obama will become the Democratic nominee.

“Hillary Clinton is in this to the end, she’ll win this nomination,” he said in the evening, before introducing Clinton to a raucous audience.

Clinton's victory in West Virginia was decisive. She won men and women. She carried a majority of voters in every age group. She captured liberals, moderates, and conservatives. She took a majority in every income bracket.

Clinton's largest margins, as expected, were registered among voters at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. Among white voters without a college degree, Clinton defeated Obama by 50 points. Among white voters making less than $30,000 a year, Clinton's margin of victory was more than 60 points.

Older voters and white women -- part of Clinton's core constituency -- also rallied strongly to her beleaguered campaign. Voters age 65 and older supported her by a 38-point margin. White women backed her by 51 points.

Clinton's proposal to suspend the 18.4-cent-per-gallon federal gasoline tax for the summer -- an idea belittled by most economists and rejected by Obama as a political gimmick -- proved to be a winner in West Virginia. Voters supported the gas tax suspension by an almost 2-to-1 margin. Those voters who supported suspending the gas tax broke for Clinton, 74 to 19 percent.

 

One major warning sign for Democrats could be found in the percentage of Obama and Clinton supporters apparently unwilling to support the opposing candidate. Only 38 percent of Clinton's voters said they would vote for Obama in a general election matchup against presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain. A bare majority (54 percent) of Obama's voters said they would vote for Clinton against McCain.

While Clinton registered an impressive margin of victory in West Virginia, there are serious questions as to whether her victory there will do much to diminish Obama's aura of inevitability. The Illinois senator has benefited from a steady stream of superdelegate endorsements since his win in North Carolina last week. He is edging steadily closer to the 2,025-delegate threshold needed to claim the Democratic nomination.

The Clinton camp is nevertheless likely to seize upon the West Virginia results to press her argument to the dwindling pool of uncommitted superdelegates that she would be the stronger Democratic candidate against McCain in the fall.

A Christian pastor says he has filed an ethics complaint with the Texas Bar Association seeking an investigation into U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton's "willfully misleading" statements in the case against former U.S. Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean.

Don Swarthout, president of Christians Reviving America's Values, today confirmed his ethics complaint cites Sutton's actions in the case in which Ramos and Compean were convicted of shooting at a drug smuggler who had dropped a load of marijuana near the Texas border and was fleeing back into Mexico.

An announcement from his organization confirmed, "Swarthout charges Sutton's office willfully misled the jury in order to convicted Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean."

On Feb. 17, 2005, Ramos and Compean pursued Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila on foot after Aldrete-Davila abandoned a van containing 743 pounds of marijuana worth an estimated $1 million. During the chase, Ramos shot at Aldrete-Davila in the belief that the smuggler had drawn a gun of his own. Aldrete-Davila escaped across the border, and Ramos assumed Aldrete-Davila was unhurt. In fact, Aldrete-Davila had been shot in the buttock.

Sutton's office later charged Ramos and Compean violated Border Patrol policy by pursuing Aldrete-Davila without supervisor approval, moving spent shell casings and improperly reporting the fired shots. Aldrete-Davila was granted immunity to testify against the agents. Ramos and Compean currently are in solitary confinement in maximum-security prisons.

Their cases are on appeal before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"This whole case stinks to the highest parts of heaven," Swarthout said. "How is it possible in America to convict two border agents for simply doing their jobs and send them to prison for 11 and 12 years? How is it possible for Johnny Sutton's office to ruin the lives of two of our border agents based on the word of a known Mexican drug smuggler? Why did Johnny Sutton's office twist the facts of this case and hide evidence simply to get a conviction?" Swarthout said.

Officials with the Texas State Bar told WND they could not comment on complaints about inappropriate behavior unless a public penalty was imposed on an offender. And a spokeswoman for the federal office for Sutton told WND the media officer was out of the office today, and no one else could respond to questions.

Swarthout told WND he wrote to the prosecutor's office, including information about the situation.

"This just doesn't add up," he said.

He cited inconsistencies: Why would a drug ring trust a newcomer, or unknown, with drugs worth nearly $1 million. Why do several jurors report they were pressured into a guilty verdict?

"There is a reason behind it somewhere," he said.

Swarthout compared Sutton to Duke lacrosse rape case prosecutor Mike Nifong, who has faced a series of penalties for allegedly withholding evidence that could have cleared the defendants.

Swarthout also said nearly 100 members of Congress have reviewed the case and have asked President Bush to pardon the two.

"These … elected officials represent both Democrats and Republicans. All of them agree Johnny Sutton's prosecution leaves a lot of unanswered questions," Swarthout's statement said.

Sen. Barack Obama has harshly criticized Sen. John McCain for making an issue of an endorsement by Hamas, but the Democratic candidate said in a new interview he understands why the terrorist group supports his presidential bid.

"It's conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, 'This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he's not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,'" Obama told the Atlantic magazine.

"That's a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they're not confused about my unyielding support for Israel's security," the Illinois senator said.

The controversy unfolded last month when Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef told WND's Aaron Klein, author of "Schmoozing with Terrorists," and WABC radio his group hopes Obama will win the presidential election and change America's foreign policy.

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, responded, prompting sharp exchanges between the two candidates and their campaigns.

"If Sen. Obama is favored by Hamas, I think people can make judgments accordingly," McCain said.

The U.S. State Department regards Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Tehran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that Israel would "be soon swept away" from the Palestinian Territories by the Palestinians. It is the second time within less than three years that the Iranian president predicted the eradication of the Jewish state.

The first time was in 2005 when Ahmadinejad hoped that Israel would be eradicated from the Middle East map.

"This terrorist and criminal state is backed by foreign powers, but this regime would soon be swept away by the Palestinians," Ahmadinejad said in a press conference in Tehran.

Referring to worldwide celebrations for the 60th anniversary of Israel's foundation, he said that "it would be futile to hold a birthday ceremony for something which is already dead."

"As far as the regional countries are concerned, this regime does not exist," Ahmadinejad added.

The Iranian president said last week that the anniversary feasts could not save this "rotten and stinking corpse."

Ahmadinejad caused international outrage in the past by hoping for the eradication of Israel, the relocation of the Jewish state to Europe or Alaska and questioning the historic dimensions of the Holocaust.

A German couple already being threatened with jail time because they have been homeschooling their children say their nation has taken a turn for the worse, with a new federal law that gives family courts the authority to take custody of children "as soon as there is a suspicion of child abuse," which is how that nation's courts have defined homeschooling.

"The new law is seen as a logical step in carving up family rights after a federal court had decided that homeschooling was an abuse of custody," said a letter from Jurgen Dudek to officials with the U.S.-based Home School Legal Defense Association, an international advocacy organization in support of homeschooling.

It was about a year ago when WND reported a prosecutor in the German state of Hesse was seeking three-month prison terms for Jurgen Dudek and his wife, Rosemarie, the parents of six children, even after they already had paid a series of fines.

Officials with Netzwork-Bildungsfreiheit, a German homeschool advocacy group, said the prosecutor, unsatisfied with the fines, wanted 90-day terms in custody for the parents.

The latest letter from the family described the new law as granting various local social services agencies vast new powers, especially the "Jugendamt" offices, which are responsible for looking into situations if there are allegations of "child abuse."

"They have in effect been authorized to give expert evidence in court which the family judge has to follow … The withdrawal of parental custody as one of the methods for punishing 'uncooperative' parents thus is made even easier," the letter said.

In recent years Germany has established a reputation for cracking down on parents who object, for reasons ranging from religious to social, to that nation's public school indoctrination of their children.

WND has reported several times on custody battles, children being taken into custody, and families even fleeing Germany because of the situation.

Now comes the new law that, according to Dudek's letter, has, "understandably, led to a kind of panic among the homeschool community in a country where ever since Hitler's times it has been against the law to educate your offspring completely without the state."