Political Vindication Radio!

Josh Morgan of Intense Debate will join us tonight on Political Vindication Radio! Josh was a reservist Marine who served in Haditha, just prior to the unit that was ultimately slandered by Representative Jack Murtha as cold blooded killers. He will tell us about his experience in Iraq and what Haditha was like when he was there. If you’ve ever had any questions about that faraway land so many of our soldiers have died bringing freedom to, here is you chance! We will also discuss his new project Intense Debate, a comment system that has become one of the hottest commodities in the blogosphere. We will also be announcing the new members of the Intense Debate community!

We will also talk about the lies and exaggerations of Al Gore’s schlockumentary and Bobby Jindal’s victory in the Louisiana governor’s race. All that and more tonight 6pm Pacific time!

The chat room will be open 10 minutes before show time, and if you want to talk to Frank and Shane live on the air, give us a call at

(646) 652-4598.

Anybody who’s surprised by the same Hillary Clinton that decries the NSA terrorist surveillance program on “civil liberties” grounds having overseen an ongoing illegal wiretapping operation as part of her husband’s political machine before and during the first Clinton administration, stand on your head.

A strike by Hollywood’s film and TV writers?  Isn’t that kind of the creative equivalent of mass constipation?

Is the triumph of Louisiana Governor-Elect and GOP wunderkind Bobby Jindal an isolated spark in an ocean of gloom, or perhaps the catalyst for a Republican comeback in 2008?

Or “Innovative Conservatism”, in J-Ger’s parlance - could that serve as Mitt Romney’s trampoline to the GOP nomination?

An adviser to one of Romney’s rivals told me this morning….that he doesn’t understand the Romney strategy: “I’m not a huge fan of what Romney did in Massachusetts, but it was successful enough to be the foundation of a his message: I’m Mr. Fix-It, I’m the the can-do, get-it-done governor.”

It’s a shame that President Bush left the term “compassionate conservatism” a punchline, because Romney could take his record of accomplishments in Massachusetts and package them as something like “Innovative Conservatism” — i.e., “I solved the health care crisis, got every resident health insurance, and took that issue off the table from the Democrats. I balanced the budget, every year. I rewarded good students by providing the top 25% a full-ride scholarship for four years to state universities - big incentive, big reward, big results. You look down the list of common-sense conservative goals that have been hindered and held back for years - national tort reform, stopping illegal immigration, entitlement reform, eliminating earmarks, tax simplification and reform - I’m the guy who can get that done. If I can get common sense initiatives through a legislature controlled by Massachusetts Democrats, I can get common sense initiatives through Congress.”

Three - no, four problems with that idea, as I see it:

1) Selling your success at compromising with overwhelmingly Donk legislatures probably isn’t the best thing to highlight to a Republican nominating electorate;

2) Rudy Giuliani is already squatting on that ground;

3) Larry The Cable Guy has probably already copywrited “Git-er-done”;

4) The track record of ex-Massachusetts governors who downplay ideology in favor of practical, nuts & bolts governance isn’t all that stellar.

Michael Yon, independent embed reporter in Iraq, is decrying the blatant propaganda and inaccuracies being fed to us by the mainstream media. In this brief excerpt from his latest post Resistance is Futile - You Will be (Mis) Informed, he writes:

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions.

Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq.

In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

Michael Yon, one of the most widely read reporters from the war theater, says Iraq is definitely turning a corner. Not only are Sunni and Shia talking in Baghdad, but the fighting is definitely abating. Gen. Petraeus’ ideas are starting to work.

I’ve been watching for days as LTC Patrick Frank pulls neighborhoods together here in the Rashid district of Baghdad. We’ve been swamped going to reconciliation meetings. (Spent hours in meetings today.) LTC Frank is one of many battalion commanders I have seen who are winning in their zones. A Washington Post writer was here for several days and his observations were similar.

Yon suggests the media get in touch with Infantry battalion commanders around Iraq, noting they are the sweet-spot on the ups and downs in Iraq. He’s working with the National Newspaper Association to get the increasingly good news about Iraq to a wider audience.

With reader support, this effort can get current news from the ground in Iraq in to 2700 daily and weekly newspapers in the US.

Blogger AJ Strata writes about the success on his site too. See Newsweek Declares Iraq Unsafe For al-Qaeda, Iraqis See War Deaths Drop Nearly 100%.

Tonight on my radio webcast program David Marron — author of Thunder Run, a military blogsite — and I take a closer look at Yon’s report and what’s really going on in Iraq — what you’re NOT being told on the nightly news or by Reuters, AP, the New York Times and its acolytes.

We get underway at 9 p.m. ET — and in case you miss it, ALL my shows are archived for your convenience.

Hit the button below at 9 to hear us live. Hit it before then and you’ll hear last night’s archived show when my regular Monday night guest co-host,  BTR’s Political Pistachio Doug Gibbs and I reviewed Sunday night’s Presidential Debate.

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Perhaps it’s a case of the Democrats feeling that the President is trying to “run up the score” on them.  After their capitulation on Iraq funding last spring, their failure to stampede Republicans into abandoning war support over the summer, and the “Betray-Us” fiasco last month, Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry are on a significant and demoralizing losing streak on what they believe is the raison d’etere of the majorities they re-captured a year ago.  Now Bush is pressing his advantage by seeking $46 billion more “while the iron is hot” - or, in other words, doing precisely as they would have done in his position - and their resentment boileth over in the only way open to it: childish, short-sighted petulance.

Counting on conditions getting worse in Iraq made sense a year ago, and perhaps even six months ago.  It makes zero sense now.  But the Dems just can’t help themselves.  Which makes Dubya’s fresh Iraq funding request downright Pavlovian.