The words for today, boys and girls, are “well-connected” and “nepotism”. Can you say those words, boys and girls?

Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner announced she will appoint Ted Kaufman of Wilmington, a long-time aide to Sen. Joe Biden, to fill the Senate seat Biden will soon vacate to become vice president.

Kaufman’s term will expire after a special election in 2010. Picking someone so close to Biden fueled speculation that Democrats want to keep the seat warm for a 2010 run by Biden’s son, Beau Biden. The younger Biden, Delaware’s attorney general, is currently serving in Iraq.

Kaufman, 69 years old, was chief of staff in Biden’s Senate office for 19 years and has worked on all of his campaigns. He is also advising Biden on the transition.

This is The Great Hopenchange in action…

A verdict at last regarding the Holy Land Foundation:

On the very day, November 24, 2008, that the United Nations spent all day and countless sums of money “mourning” the alleged Palestinian catastrophe, a federal jury in Dallas found all five former officials of the Holy Land Foundation, guilty of having illegally raised money in the United States to assist the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, in its hot war against Israel.

According to terrorism expert, Steven Emerson, the defendants, “Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.”

All five defendants are “Palestinians” and/or American citizens as well. Elyashi was born in Gaza; Abu-Baker moved to the “Palestinian territories” as a child; both Abdhulqader and Odeh were born in the West Bank; El-Mezain was born in Gaza.

It is this sort of stern effort on the part of the Bush Administration which has curbed terrorism and kept us safe since 9/11 – and it is the same sort of thing Obama will have to do if he wants to build on the amazing success of the Bush Administration in this area. The worry is that Obama and Administration simply won’t have their heart in this sort of thing – much as the Clinton Administration let things slide out of indifference.

It remains a dangerous world out there, and anyone who thinks that Obamania will magically turn those who hate us for what we are into people who love us for what Obama does are ignorant fools.

Michael Yon reports:

As we rolled out from dusty Forward Operating Base (FOB) Falcon, I asked how many casualties the unit had taken since they had arrived, from Fort Hood (Texas), in March 2008. The soldiers told me that one Humvee had taken an EFP strike, but that a Private Rafael Martinez had received only a ruptured eardrum.

It represents vast progress to observe that the current rotation in 2008 has lost only two soldiers to an EFP strike. As sad as those losses are, the extreme distinction over the 100 lost in the Dragon Brigade from the previous year is immense and exultant. The area has fallen nearly completely silent. The war has ended. The canary in the mineshaft survived. It is starting to chirp and it is just a matter of time before it begins to sing.

One battalion in the Dragon Brigade was the 2-12 Infantry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Michael. His right hand man, Command Sergeant Major Charles Sasser, was open to and confident with the press and provided more than just combat expertise. I went on missions with his men, who spent important time educating me about their area when they could have been sleeping. LTC Michael is a native of Guyana in South America. The Guyanese are famously soft-spoken. In fact, Major Kirk Luedeke said of LTC Michael, “Soft spoken guy, but an extremely bright and tenacious fighter.” It was true. The commander seemed gentle and grandfatherly, but he commanded his units with great expertise in what must have been one of the most complicated areas in Iraq. LTC Michael’s battalion took 18 KIAs and more than 150 wounded, mostly during the surge. (2-12 was one of the battalions in the Dragon Brigade.) The 2-12’s old area has fallen quiet now. The soldiers accomplished their mission, though I doubt anyone will ever know how hard they worked.

Read the whole thing – and remember to thank those glorious men and women of our armed forces, and their international and Iraqi allies, who fought so hard to bring this victory to you, my fellow Americans. And, also, the courage of President Bush, Senator McCain, Senator Lieberman and all those others who refused to back down and pressed for victory when many Americans, to their shame, were calling the war a failure and demanding we pull out regardless of consequences.

President-elect Obama will inherit a victory – I hope he knows how to use it.

Uh, governor, the place to make such a statement is anywhere but Iowa:

Jindal to Iowa: I’m not running for president

Strictly speaking, of course, this is ok – governor Jindal is running for re-election as governor of Louisiana at the moment, and as that election happens prior to 2012, its all good. Meanwhile, however, Jindal isn’t coming in top ranked in GOP enthusiasm at the moment:

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are most interested in seeing Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Those three received the highest scores among the 10 possible candidates evaluated in a recent Gallup Panel survey.

GOPers are clearly not blaming Palin for the loss – and rightly so; without Palin it would have been a bigger loss. McCain was crushed when the financial crisis hit and, in hindsight, all the effort post-crisis was towards lessening the loss, and in this Palin did far more than McCain. Jindal, on the other hand, is still my early favorite, though his numbers are much weaker than Palin’s – on the other hand, he’s not nearly as well known as Palin and it could be that once people get a good look at him, his numbers will rise.

HAT TIP: Hot Air

Seems that the people of Venezuela are out of step with American leftists:

President Hugo Chávez’s supporters suffered defeat in several state and municipal races on Sunday, with the opposition retaining power in Zulia, the country’s most populous state, and winning crucial races here in the capital, the National Electoral Council said.

Pro-Chávez candidates won 17 of the 22 governor’s races at stake. Many of the seats that Mr. Chavez’s supporters did win were in relatively sparsely populated rural states.

The losses were Mr. Chávez’s second setback at the polls in the past year, after the defeat of a proposed constitutional overhaul last December that would have enhanced his powers. The results will put opponents of Mr. Chávez in charge of areas with more than a third of Venezuela’s 26 million people.

In the early hours of Monday, electoral officials announced opposition victories in two important states, Táchira, on the border with Colombia, and Carabobo, with a large industrial base.

An opposition candidate also won in Sucre, a municipality in Caracas with sprawling slums that had been a symbolic bastion of support for Mr. Chávez since he rose to power a decade ago.

“These victories came in the economic and political centers of the country,” said Luis Vicente León, director of Datánalisis, a polling firm here. “They represent the most important symbols in terms of cities and population.”

It is clear that the shine has worn off of Chavez – who has spent Venezuela’s wealth in foolish arms build ups and sponsoring terrorism, and now faces the economic bill as oil prices collapse. It is now hoped that Chavez will read the writing on the wall and gracefully exit the scene. Unfortunately, Chavez might not be reasonable – one of the challenges Obama might face is what to do if Venezuela, under Chavez, becomes a full blown dictatorship as Chavez refuses to step down…

And, in the end, it might prove beneficial for the United States – that is, the more Obama follows the policies of President Bush, the better off we’ll be:

In light of the downturn, Mr. Obama is also said to be reconsidering a key campaign pledge: his proposal to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. According to several people familiar with the discussions, he might instead let those tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011, effectively delaying any tax increase while he gives his stimulus plan a chance to work.

And just figure the odds that Obama will really let them lapse a year out from his re-election bid.

You want to know what might end up annoying me most? That by 2011 we’ll have a strong economic recovery propelled by Obama holding to Bush economic policies our mindless liberals trying to convince us that Obama was the guy who figured this all out…

Ah, well, it’ll be ok if Obama does it – the main thing to be concerned about here is the United States.

Iowahawk strikes again.

It is one of the more fun aspects of being right-of-center, ya know? While our liberal friends wet their beds over what to say and wear, we on the right get to see things as they are – and Victor Davis Hanson has 10 un-PC things to say, this one striking me as most important:

The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.

A very large percentage of the American population is primed for slavery – to become the mere cogs in a totalitarian machine. This is because a very large percentage of Americans simply does not know what is what. I’m stunned at times at what people don’t know, and at what they do know which isn’t so…probably 9 in 10 Americans can state at least some part of one of the many bogus conspiracy theories explaining the Kennedy assassination, but I’ll bet not 1 in a 100 can identify what happened at Leyte Gulf. Too many of us know too much that didn’t happen or is irrelevant; too many of us don’t know the things necessary to make an informed decision – and thus the continuing strength of liberalism.

Part of this state of affairs is intentional, part of it the result of sheer laziness. The intentional part comes in from those elements of the left who despise, out of ignorance, the civilization they live in, the laziness part of it comes from the fact that a government employee gets paid the same regardless of whether the kids in school learn much or learn nothing…and its much easier to teach them nothing. The upshot of all this is people who think that “rights” means the right to wear strange clothes and have sex; that freedom is the ability to be irresponsible with no consequences; who believe “question authority” means “reject authority without question”; that evil doesn’t exist; who’s knowledge of history would embarrass an 8 year old of 100 years ago. Such people are easily convinced that a cartoonish, two dimensional fairy tale reflects reality – and are also people easily convinced that a particular person and/or movement has all the answers and, furthermore, that to oppose such person and/or movement is not just mistaken, but pernicious.

My view is that a majority of Americans still knows enough of what actually exists and what actually happened to control, for the moment, the ultimate destiny of the United States. I could be wrong – we could have already tipped over into majority-servile in our population. If that is the case, then the enslavement of the American population to its ultimate destruction will proceed unchecked from now until such time as an outside power raises its banner over Washington, DC and proclaims the end of the United States of America. If such is the case, then my fellow Americans will have obtained nothing more – and nothing less – than their desire. People do get the government they deserve – and usually get it good and hard, as Mencken once noted.

As for me, it is my duty to do what is right, as best as I can determine it – even if I were to end up a minority of one. There really is no reason for anyone to ever despair. Ultimately, good will triumph over evil, even if a particular nation in existence today – and which has done much good in the world – fails to survive until that ultimate victory. The torch of reason and morality is inextinguishable, no matter how obscured it can be, at times. So, into the battle I go, convinced of victory – and pitying rather than hating those who oppose me, because they have so sadly limited themselves in the enjoyment of knowledge.

While  Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s collapse during his speech at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Federalist Society got a lot coverage, the speech itself has not gotten a blip… So, I encourage all of you to read it in full.. but I will post a short part of it here to capture your interest:

As the end of this Administration draws near, you would expect to hear broad praise for this success at keeping our Nation safe. Instead, I am afraid what we hear is a chorus with a rather more dissonant refrain. Instead of appreciation, or even a fair appraisal, of the Administration’s accomplishments, we have heard relentless criticism of the very policies that have helped keep us safe. We have seen this in the media, we have seen this in the Congress, and we have heard it from the legal academy as well.

In some measure, those criticisms rest on a very dangerous form of amnesia that views the success of our counterterrorism efforts as something that undermines the justification for continuing them. In an odd way, we have become victims of our own success. In the eyes of these critics, if Al Qaeda has not struck our homeland for seven years, then perhaps it never posed much of a threat after all and we didn’t need these counterterrorism policies.

And Jerry Pournelle neatly encapsulates why this is so:

It is probably irrelevant given the election results, but my remedy is simple: any company that is too large to be allowed to fail is too large, and ought to be subject to anti-trust regulation.

In the argument about whether we should or should not bail out, I think this is Q.E.D. for those who have argued against.