Some of you maybe can tell by the light posting I am on travel again. It’s going to be like this for about 3-4 weeks. Anyway, I should be able to update some posts later this afternoon but here are some stories I find interesting:

On the politics front the GOP is being given a sign that Rudy Giuliani is more than capable of taking down Her Hillaryness in 2008. Assuming Texas stays GOP and CA stays Dem in the electorial college (remember, this is not a popularity contest) then FL and NY become pivotal. And Giuliani has NY:

t’s the middle of October and Rudy Giuliani is still leading the race for the Republican nomination. His old enemies in New York can’t understand it.

“It’s totally unbelievable,” said Charles Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation and a longtime adversary of Mr. Giuliani. “I refuse to believe that this could possibly happen to our country. I have too much confidence in our country to believe that this could really happen.”

…

But now, with Mr. Giuliani up nearly 10 percentage points in national polls and unexpectedly competitive in the early primary states of New Hampshire and South Carolina, a mixture of nervousness and disbelief is running through the ranks of his old antagonists.

These career politicians and political hacks know something folks. They know The hero of 9-11 in NY City will be the two term, carpet bagging Illinois Senator from New York. Even if he did not take NY he would force Clinton (or Obama) into some serious spending to protect NY, NJ and PA (to some extent).

OK, off the 2008 race and onto the Democrats FISA debacle. First, the Washington Times – which apparently broke the story on how FISA paralyzed search and rescue efforts for kidnappend soldiers in Iraq – provides more details on how the Dems plans are dangerous:

The case of the three soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division based in Ft. Drum, N.Y., who were ambushed by al Qaeda operatives in May, has become a clear and present danger to the RESTORE Act.

Briefly, here are the facts (reported on this editorial page weeks ago and more recently picked up by other news organizations): Three U.S. soldiers were kidnapped May 12 south of Baghdad in an al Qaeda attack that killed four of their colleagues. As U.S. soldiers searched for the men May 13 and May 14, intelligence officials learned about jihadist communications that were possibly related to the ambush. On May 15, more than nine hours elapsed while U.S. intelligence officials discussed the need to obtain a FISA court order to monitor these communications and obtained authorization to do so.

We had a possible lead, and because of a series of decisions by one liberal judge on the panel (which could be overturned by the FISA Review Court – but that takes weeks to go through) made ‘adjustments’ that led to doubt. As the Washington Times points out it was the threat of a Congressional show trial on this matter that forced people to be so cautious we lost three of our own:

On May 15, U.S. intelligence officials — fully aware that the legal ground justifying the ability to conduct warrantless searches was shifting beneath their feet — did what they had to do to prevent the likes of Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers from hauling them before their committees for allegedly “violating the rule of law”: They jumped through all manner of bureaucratic hoops before eavesdropping on the terrorists who kidnapped the three American troops (one of whom was found dead, while the other two remain missing.)

This is what happens when you misuse power. The Dems have show they are interested in one thing and one thing only. Show trials for their paranoid conspiracy theories and cirppling the war effort in Iraq. That is why they have gotten absolutely nothing done. What must residents in NJ be thinking as Dems cripple the government’s efforts to monitor the potential terrorists in their midsts?

Federal counterterrorism officials in New Jersey told the Record of Bergen County that agents have disrupted their activities and deported several.

Click here for the full story in Record.

“There are many people who are like-minded who want to commit acts of terrorism and have just not taken that extra step,” Kevin Cruise, the director of the bureau’s 100-member task force in Newark, N.J., told the Record, calling the individuals “facilitators.”

Every major terrorist organization in the world, except the Taliban, has contacts in northern New Jersey, the paper reports.

Not to worry New Jersey, the Dems are watching out for the rights to privacy for the possible terrorists among you! You will an experiment in the price of civil libery paranoia.

And speaking of crippling the war in Iraq, the Democrats’ attempts to destroy our relations with an ally of the Iraq war – so we cannot get material and supplies to our troops readily – is falling apart as the rank and file dems realized the kind of traitorous action the vote on Armenian genocide truly was:

Worried about antagonizing Turkish leaders, House members from both parties have begun to withdraw their support from a resolution supported by the Democratic leadership that would condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago.

Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure over the last 24 hours, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some representatives made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has called the measure dangerously provocative, and from the Turkish government, which has said House passage would prompt Turkey to reconsider its ties to the United States, including logistical support for the Iraq war.

This was a back stabbing attempt to cripple our forces on the ground in Iraq. Why else wait nearly a century before bringing this up now? It would be like Congress in WW II passing legislation to make the UK (Europe) or Australia) (Pacific) break the Alliance against Japan and the Nazis. Watch the roll call on this one folks. These will be people so obsessed with tearing down this country they would even vote to cripple a key national ally and hurt supply trains to our troops.

Want to know how sick these liberal nuts are? One liberal blogger is calling the dead soldier who was caught up in that FIS mess above ‘a poster child’:

Alex Jimenez As FISA Poster Boy

If some conservatives have their way, Alex Jimenez will become to an expanded domestic-spying program what Graeme Frost became to the expanded S-CHIP program: A human face on a contentious political issue.

This kind of disparaging remark is when a simple mind tries to connect to irrelevant issues, uses Malkin as an example of behavior and tries to do her one better by making fun a man who died at the hands of al Qaeda – after enduring real torture know doubt. This juvenile attempt at humour is the best of the left right now.

Let me end this overly long Fly By with some news from Iraq. While Sunni and Shiia extremists are targeting the other’s innocent civilians to insight a bloody civil war (and thus shows the drepravity of al-Qaeda’s visions for the future of Islam) the leaders of said innocent communities are reaching out to each other.

To understand the vector Iraq is on one story is quite enlightening. It is how Iraqi forces have apparently taken out another al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, this one in the Northern region near Mosul. What is great about this story is how they identified the terrorists as they drove off, gave chase, engaged in a deadly gun battle and killed the terrorists. That is what al-Qaeda faces now – not sanctuary among Iraqis from which to attack the US and Iraqi government. They are being hunted.

And finally Strategt Page has something on the apparent crumbling of al-Qaeda and suspicous deaths of key members, pointing to possibly severe in-fighting and implosion.