Liberal Whiners

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is receptive to the idea of prosecuting some Bush administration officials, while letting others who are accused of misdeeds leave office without prosecution, she told Chris Wallace in an interview on "FOX News Sunday."

"I think you look at each item and see what is a violation of the law and do we even have a right to ignore it," the California Democrat said. "And other things that are maybe time that is spent better looking to the future rather than to the past."

Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced Friday he wants to set up a commission to look into whether the Bush administration broke the law by taking the nation to war against Iraq and instituting aggressive anti-terror initiatives. The Michigan Democrat called for an "independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities."

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New York Post Editorial 

Filmmaker Michael Moore may have built his career on the political exploitation of others' grief, but it's to be hoped that won't protect him from the long arm of US copyright law - or the righteous outrage of a particularly wronged war-zone journalist.

Award-winning independent correspondent Michael Yon is getting ready to sue Moore for the unauthorized use of one of his most heart-rending photographs - a 2005 shot of an American soldier holding an Iraqi girl who'd been fatally wounded in a car bombing.

Moore, in typical fashion, last year pasted the shot on his Web site next to pictures of Hillary Clinton, George Bush and John McCain to illustrate his latest anti-war screed, implicitly blaming the three for the girl's death.

Such a stunt, Yon says, is not only illegal: It amounts to "war porn" - a "cynical attempt at manipulation" that's completely dismissive of the facts.

And he would know.

Yon, a former Green Beret, has been embedded in America's war zones since 2005, most notably with the "Deuce Four" - the Army's storied 24th Infantry Regiment in Mosul, where the photo was taken.

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Democrat Al Franken's campaign lodged a protest today over 133 votes that it said could not be accounted for during the U.S. Senate recount of a precinct in Minneapolis, which resulted in a loss of as many as 46 votes for the candidate.

Campaign officials sent a letter to the Secretary of State's office and Minneapolis elections director Cindy Reichert demanding that the votes in one city precinct not be officially reported until a search is conducted for the ballots.

Reichert, who said the discrepency was resolved "to my satisfaction," said she plans to report it to the Secretary of State's office.

In the first precinct of the city's Third Ward, the recount showed Franken with 1,010 votes, 80 fewer than the Election Day count. It showed Republican Sen. Norm Coleman with 34 votes fewer than on Election Day. Only two votes were challenged in the precinct, one by each campaign.

(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com …

By David Keene

As the final votes were still being tabulated on Nov. 5, I found myself on National Public Radio as liberals celebrated what they saw as the transformational election to end all transformational elections. Pundits were suggesting that Obama’s “landslide” was the result of voter turnout so high as to exceed the turnout record set in 1908 and that these voters tromped to the polls to endorse an ideological agenda that would keep liberals cheering for a generation.

As the sun came up that morning, liberals assumed that anything was possible. Indeed, one caller expressed such “elation” and faith in the future that he said he was sure we would now cure cancer in short order. I suggested that it was at least possible that his expectations and those of his friends on the left were perhaps a tad high.

It turned out, of course, that voter participation hadn’t increased by that much, so the 1908 record stands. In fact, the Obama “landslide” resembled the 1992 Clinton victory more than any other. Clinton won that year by five points; Obama this time by six. More new senators rode in on Obama’s coattails than on Clinton’s, but Democrats didn’t do as well as they’d hoped at the state legislative level.

Still, regardless of his margin, no one should minimize the importance of the Obama victory or doubt that our 44th president is perhaps the most personally liberal president in modern times, but there are signs that our president-elect is also a realist. This makes him a far more formidable adversary to those of us who are apt to disagree with much of what he will want to accomplish in office, but could disillusion a huge number of those who cast Obama in the role of some sort of ideological soul-mate.

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THE "I WANT MY MOMMY" ELECTION

I brought this up several months ago … a slogan for this election. "I want my mommy." The phrase really says it all. This is not an election where the American voters were looking for someone to protect their freedoms. Instead, it was an election where people were looking for someone to take care of them. Self-sufficiency seems a bit old-fashioned right now. Why work so hard to be self-sufficient when candidates are falling all over themselves to provide the American people with womb-to-tomb or, if you will, cradle-to-grave paternalism. The voters who put Barack Obama into office bear little resemblance to the people who fought for independence 224 years ago. Colonists fighting for our independence actually left their bloody footprints along the icy roads of New York and Pennsylvania while marching to engage the British troops. Today we can't even drum of a decent plurality of voters who will vote for liberty, let alone fight for it.

This has been a "what's in it for me" vote. Are you going to give me health care? Are you going to make sure my job is guaranteed? Are you going to cover my child care costs? You aren't going to make me pay taxes, are you? How about all those evil rich people? Aren't you going to take some of their money away from them and give it to me? After all … I work for my money, they cheated and stole for theirs. Make them pay their fair share of taxes. Me? I'm tired of paying any share.

The big question for me today is whether or not freedom, economic liberty and self-sufficiency can make a comeback in America. Right now it seems that a dismaying number of Americans think that they are owed a living; that it is the government's job to guarantee their economic security. Can we ever turn that around and return to a time when people accept the responsibility for their own lives and eschew the idea of using government as a tool of legalized plunder?

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An emotional moment on ABC News, as Georgie Congressman and Civil Rights leader John Lewis told Charlie Gibson that today's election was "a nonviolent revolution" and an "unbelievable, and unreal transformation of American politics."

Asked about his emotions if there's an Obama victory, Lewis continued.

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By Bob Cusack

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday defended the so-called Fairness Doctrine in an interview on Fox News, saying, “I think we should all be fair and balanced, don’t you?”

Schumer’s comments echo other Democrats’ views on reviving the Fairness Doctrine, which would require radio stations to balance conservative hosts with liberal ones.

Asked if he is a supporter of telling radio stations what content they should have, Schumer used the fair and balanced line, claiming that critics of the Fairness Doctrine are being inconsistent.

“The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.”

In 2007, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a close ally of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) told The Hill, “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”

Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last year said, “I believe very strongly that the airwaves are public and people use these airwaves for profit. But there is a responsibility to see that both sides and not just one side of the big public questions of debate of the day are aired and are aired with some modicum of fairness.”

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Republican congressional candidate Bill Russell's rally on Sunday featured several Iraq war veterans vehemently criticizing U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Johnstown), who they say betrayed them when he said troops in Iraq killed innocent civilians in Haditha "in cold blood."

Those remarks sparked Russell to run against Murtha and have been a theme of his campaign ever since.

During the rally, Shawn Bryan, a former sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps., said Murtha visited his unit in Iraq in 2005. At the time, Murtha told the troops "what a great job we did," Bryan said, only to see him tell his district back home he no longer supported the effort.

Bryan said he didn't put his life on the line for his country "just so some fat little bastard can come back and run his mouth."

It was the second time during his speech that Bryan, who flew in from Albuquerque, New Mexico, had called Murtha a "fat little bastard" during his speech. His remarks were not publicly repudiated at the rally.

In an interview after the rally, Russell told PolitickerPA.com Bryan's comments didn't reflect his own feelings, but he did the defend the fellow veteran.

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If Barack Obama loses the election, will he graciously concede? According to an open letter signed by author Gore Vidal and a gaggle of leftists, Obama should not concede under almost any conditions. If Jon Voight had signed an open letter to John McCain asking him not to concede, that would be big news. So far the only sound from the mainstream media to Gore Vidal's dangerous request is the sound of crickets chirping. Here is the open letter plea to Obama signed by Vidal among others (emphasis mine):

An Open Letter to Senator Obama and the Democratic Leadership:
On Election Night, DO NOT CONCEDE!

Even if Obama loses? This sounds like Vidal wants the aftermath of Election 2008 to be like the followup to Election 2000 on steroids.

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A Democratic lawmaker on Saturday asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to investigate a leak to reporters regarding the immigration status of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's aunt, suggesting the Bush administration may have been behind it.

"I was startled to read in today's Associated Press that a 'federal law enforcement official' has leaked information about an immigration case involving a relative of Senator Obama," said a letter sent to Chertoff by Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee.

"Even more troubling, the AP reports that it 'could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved,' a very disturbing (suggestion) indeed," the letter said.

"This leak is deplorable and I urge you to take immediate action to investigate and discipline those responsible."

The AP reported Saturday that Obama's Kenyan aunt, Zeituni Onyango, is living in the United States illegally, even though an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago. The story cites two sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official.

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