Free kibbles

US sends top diplomats to Turkey to try and limit the damage done by Congressional resolution condemning Turkey for genocide of the Armenians.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urges Muslim nations to boycott the US sponsored Middle East summit. It must be a worthwhile summit.

Sec. of State Rice encourages Russian human rights activists then claims she doesn't want to interfere in Russian affairs. She can't have it both ways. I think she wanted to tweak Putin because of his aggressive anti-Americanism and his power grabs. Rice worries about Kremlin power. Did she just notice? Apparently she isn't that worried because she hasn't even acknowledged the new Cold War of Terror being waged against us by Russia and China utilizing their proxies North Korea, Iran, Syria and now Venezuela.

Gen. Sanchez is correct that the "surge" in Iraq is a desperate attempt to make up for years of failure. But it seems he's failed to notice its working. If Sanchez had pushed for a counterinsurgency strategy when he was the commander in Iraq, maybe we would have won by now. Surely the lions share of the blame for failures in Iraq falls on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bremer, but there's plenty left over for Democrats, Sanchez, Casey and the Iraqi government. Sanchez is just trying to shift his share of the blame.

Democrats may provide immunity to telecoms for their assistance in fighting the war on terror. It sounds stupid to have to even report that, but there it is. Many liberals want to punish telecoms for helping fight our enemies. I think all this bluster about the telecoms was just pandering to the loony left. No grown up can honestly think we should punish companies for assisting the war effort at the request of the government. I think this was a fait accompli from the beginning. Many Democrats will vote against it to appease their loony base, but it will pass.

China's export boom is fueled by companies that have fled the US to China because of our punishing income tax. Even China has better tax policy than we do. Adopt the FairTax.

If you wait to vote until shortly before the polls close, you may end up loosing your chance to vote. If everybody tries to vote at the same time, long lines will form. What's so hard to understand about that?

Oil hits new high on supply worries. This just puts more money in Iran's and Russia's coffers while draining our resources. It's a shift in power from the free world to despots. We could ease the supply worries and lower prices by drilling for oil in the US. We could ease the demand by building clean coal and nuclear plants. Opponents of US drilling need to explain why they are more concerned about the convenience of caribou and fish than the human lives lost in the war on terror. Opponents of clean coal and nuclear power need to explain why they are willing to allow people to die in the war on terror instead of building these plants. Opponents of both need to explain why they think it's good to shift power and wealth from the free world to despots.

Dutch consumer group recommends XP over Vista. Anybody buying a new computer should demand XP, or better yet, Linux.

Gmail to increase capacity faster. Good. Not that I use a fraction of my capacity.

Bjorn Lombard exposes Gore's lies.

Rudy Giuliani vows fiscal restraint. I have a question for supposed Reagan Republicans. Did you agree with Reagan that government was too large and too intrusive in 1980? Did you agree that in 1980, government was the problem, and people freed from government were the solution? If you did, then you must support cutting government to pre-1980 levels. That means cutting our federal budget by more than half.

Fiscal restraint is Republican code for statism. For Republicans, fiscal restraint means growing our titanic government at 5% instead of the 6% annual rate Democrats prefer. Republicans love to rail against the size of government, but every election, Republicans at best want to continue growing government, just at a slightly smaller rate than Democrats want, no matter how titanic our government is. Bush did much worse. We need massive cuts in the size and scope of government, not the statism promised by fiscal restraint.

I'll believe in Reagan conservatives when they draw a line in the sand and demand cutting government back to pre-1980 levels.

Europe, like China, is catching and on a trajectory to surpass the US because they have VAT taxes and we have the punish federal income tax. The answer is easy: adopt the FairTax.

Pat Buchanan reports that Bush will sign the Law of the Sea Treaty, transferring our sovereign rights to the UN and providing the UN the ability to tax countries, and push it through the Senate. Time to write my Senators.

Anybody who is surprised that 2 New England liberals are the leading candidates for the Republican nomination has been deluding themselves. This is is who conservatives and Republicans are, and except for the few years of the Reagan revolution, always have been. If conservatives and Republicans really believed in Reagan's libertarian ideals of small government staying out of people's lives, the Reagan years wouldn't have been a revolution. Americans are starving for a Reagan libertarian, but one that is more effective than Reagan was at reducing the size and scope of government. Unfortunately the socialists who have dominated conservatives and Republicans except during Reagan's revolution, gave us religious socialist George Bush, Trent Lott, John McCain, John Boehner, and other men who think ever bigger government is the answer, not the problem.