I posted earlier about Hillary Clinton’s moving to the right of the Bush Administration on immigration. But, Michelle Malkin noted this three weeks ago. She argues that this issue transcends party lines and could siphon off voters who don’t feel that border security is being taken seriously by the Republican party.

Unlike the Wall Street Journal editorial board, she seems to understand that the overwhelming support among Americans of all backgrounds for stricter immigration enforcement is grounded not in knee-jerk “nativism,” but in rational self-preservation. It isn’t just bigots who want secure borders. It’s families like the parents and widows who formed 9/11 For A Secure America, many of whom are lifelong Republicans fed up with the pro-amnesty antics of the Bush White House. It’s families of victims of illegal immigration, whom both the Beltway and media have ignored.

I myself would never vote for Hillary. But the Republican establishment takes for granted at its peril the significant number of party faithful who may be sorely tempted to do so if the Bush betrayal at the border continues.

I am content to let Hillary talk about it all she wants, if it forces potential Republican candidates to focus on it. We need immigration reform–especially tighter border controls. And as Michelle points out, this issue isn’t about racism but about protecting this country. And if Hillary’s taking a decisive stand on this issue doesn’t get Republicans talking about it, then they’ll more than likely get what they deserve come 2008.

Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko has encouraged his supporters to participate in a tour of Eastern Ukraine designed to spread the Orange Revolution to that region.

Yanukovych and Yushchenko face off in a Dec. 26 repeat vote ordered by the Supreme Court.

While Yushchenko garnered support in western and central Ukraine, Yanukovych draw much of his backing from eastern, mainly Russian speaking regions.

Yushchenko’s supporters said that was where the Orange Revolution - which draws its name from his campaign color of orange and the street protests that erupted after the Nov. 21 runoff - was headed.

“We would like the spirit of civil resistance to reach everyone’s heart,” said Vasyl Kuderiavets, a 34-year-old businessman from the western city of Lviv. “Everyone wants to be free. But not everyone realizes that.”

The convoy of more than 150 opposition supporters left Kiev with sirens blaring and orange flags unfurled. They plan to show videos of the protests from Kiev’s Independence Square, to organize rallies - and to leave graffiti on every gray wall they find.

In a sure sign that John Kerry ran one of the most forgettable presidential campaigns in American history, one of Minnesota’s ten Democratic electors cast a presidential ballot for “Ewards”. Presumably, it was a vote cast for John Edwards, the Democratic candidate for vice-president. John Edwards then received all ten ballots cast for vice-president. So, did an elector want to lodge an anonymous protest, or did that person just forget the name of the Democratic candidate for president? Either way, none of the electors has come forward to admit the mistake (or take credit for it, if you prefer).

An unknown Minnesota Democrat earned a footnote in history Monday by casting one of the state’s 10 Electoral College votes for John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential running mate for John Kerry.

The Edwards vote gives Minnesota its first “faithless elector,” the dubious name for Electoral College members who snub the candidate who won the state’s popular vote in the general election. Kerry, who beat President Bush in Minnesota but lost overall, wound up with nine of the state’s electoral votes.

No one claimed credit for the Edwards vote. Several electors said they suspected that someone unconsciously mixed up the two Johns on the ticket rather than purposefully made a political statement.

Look for the critics of the Electoral College to use this incident as another argument for abolishing the it altogether. Although, Timothy Noah in Slate makes the case for exposing the Electoral College vote to the public, thus establishing a method of accountability which might prevent “faithless” electors.

When a ballot is cast in secret in an ordinary election, the result is good for democracy because no voter need worry about being criticized or penalized over his choice. But when a ballot is cast in secret in the Electoral College, the result is bad for democracy, for precisely the same reason. We want electors to worry about being criticized or penalized over their choice, because electors aren’t supposed to exercise choice in the first place. Secrecy makes it impossible to know whether the elector did what the voters sent him to do; it renders the Electoral College unaccountable to the people.

Afghan security forces arrested two high ranking Taliban commanders, one of which was a former security chief for Mullah Mohammad Omar.

Tohr Mullah Naqvi, the Taliban rebels’ military commander for Kandahar province, and his deputy Mullah Qayum, also known as Mullah Hunger, were nabbed Monday night at a home in Kandahar city, said Abdullah Laghmani, the provincial intelligence chief.

Laghmani said another suspect apprehended in the city earlier Monday driving a vehicle containing 460 pounds of explosives, allegedly intended for Taliban fighters, had led them to the two commanders.

More details on the arrests. Hopefully, Mullah Omar isn’t far behind.

“Nezalezhnastsi” means “independence” in Ukrainian. Daniel Henninger writes on the burgeoning democracies in Iraq and Ukraine and wonders if the Western European governments, who have supported the opposition in Ukraine over the past few weeks, will support the Iraqi people come January 30.

Iraq’s instability, notably in the country’s center, is well advertised by now. Less appreciated, however, is Iraq’s growing measure of economic stability and vitality.

“Baghdad is booming,” says Mohammed Fadhil Ali, one of three remarkable Ali brothers who oversee the Web log, Iraqthemodel.com. Mohammed and his younger brother Omar came this week to the Journal’s offices, their first trip to the States, to discuss Iraq’s future.

They were not overwhelmed by New York’s holiday crush; Baghdad’s population is roughly 5.7 million people. Stores there are verflowing with goods and the streets jammed with shoppers. It appears that the number of cars has doubled in a year. “The middle class is growing,” says Omar. After the April 9, 2003, “liberation,” Mohammed was determined to photograph every new building in Baghdad. “Now there is a new building in Baghdad every day; I can’t count them all.” Land and real-estate prices are surging. Most of the investment is coming out of the Arab world, not the West.

They made a couple of other interesting points about Iraq’s political mood. One, Iraqis won’t vote for a government dominated by Islamist religionists. Why? The abhorred next-door example of Iran’s mullahs. This mirrors elections already held in Iraq. In a local election last year in Nazariya, with 47,000 votes cast amid imams urging support for Islamic parties, the biggest vote-getters were teachers, engineers and other professionals.

I remain hopeful but not optimistic that France, Germany and other nations opposed to the U.S. involvement in Iraq will respond in kind to the forthcoming Iraqi elections. In any case, we shall soon see.

For first time visitors, I have changed the color of my header to orange in support of the opposition in Ukraine.

Yet more members of the reality based community refuse to accept Kerry’s loss:

Led by a coalition representing the Green and Libertarian parties, the dissidents are paying for recounts in each of Ohio’s 88 counties that will begin this week. The recount is not expected to be complete until next week.

“John Kerry conceded so early in the process that it’s maddening,” said Kat L’Estrange of We Do Not Concede, an activist group born after the election that believes Kerry was the real winner in Ohio and nationally.

L’Estrange, Susan Truitt of the Columbus-based Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, and others demanded that the electoral vote be put off until the recount is completed.

“In Ohio, there has not been a final determination. Therefore, any meeting of the Electoral College in Ohio prior to a full recount would in fact be an illegitimate gathering,” said John Bonifaz of the National Voting Rights Institute.

This quote from the end of the story sums it up nicely: “‘It’s a shame they do not believe in the honesty and the professional people working the polls,’ said Mumper. ‘I just think they are sore losers and money and time (for the recount) could be spent on other things.’”

Fortunately, saner people are handling things in Ohio.

As members of the Electoral College met across the nation to affirm the results of last month’s election, the 20 GOP electors in Ohio voted unanimously for Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

“The vast majority of people understand this election is over,” said Gov. Bob Taft, who was at the electors’ voting session in the state Senate chamber.

UPDATE: Captain Ed has discovered a similar occurrence of PEST in Arizona.

Hindrocket links to a Washington Times article noting Hillary Clinton’s move to the right regarding immigration. She is beginning the advance work for her Presidential ambitions in 2008.

I don’t, however, think she’s only doing this to take advantage of a perceived weakness in the Republican party. Hillary is positioning herself to be able to say, “I warned you; I saw this coming” in the event of another attack on American soil. Peggy Noonan wrote last week that Hillary was positioning herself to the right of the Republican party on key issues for this exact reason.

Why does she want to get to Mr. Bush’s right on these issues?

Three reasons. The first is that she knows another attack on American soil is inevitable and wants to position herself politically as The Wise One Who Warned Us.

Second, she knows that a woman perceived as a liberal has no chance at winning the presidency while a woman perceived as a tough, pragmatic moderate does. So she is tough where Mr. Compassionate Conservative is soft (immigration), or is vulnerable, after a coming attack, to charges that he was soft (homeland security). She can’t lose on this one. Security can always be better, and after America is attacked again anger and finger pointing will be widespread.

Third, Mrs. Clinton knows the Democratic Party as a whole is to the left of the electorate. She is used to this. It is the story of her life. The electorate in Arkansas were always more moderate than Gov. and Mrs. Clinton, and President and Mrs. Clinton for that matter. She knows how to operate in such conditions. She does not intend to go down in flames as a leftist when she runs for president. This will take guile. She has guile.

As Hindrocket notes, how this will play out depends, to a large degree, on how successful the Bush administration is in preventing terrorist attacks domestically and prosecuting terrorism abroad.

Arthur Chrenkoff notes a remarkable achievement in Afghanistan in the latest installment of his “Good news from Afghanistan” series.

A few days ago, hundreds of Afghan leaders and some 150 foreign dignitaries, including the Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, got to witness a historic event; the swearing in of Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president, Hamid Karzai:

“Wearing a black lambskin hat and traditional striped silk coat over his shoulders, Mr. Karzai took his oath before the aging former king, Zaher Shah. The president himself then swore in his two vice presidents, Ahmed Zia Massoud and Mohammed Karim Khalili, who represent the two largest ethnic minorities, the Tajiks and the Shia Hazaras, after Karzai’s own ethnic group, the Pashtuns.”

“We have now left a hard and dark past behind us, and today we are opening a new chapter in our history, in a spirit of friendship with the international community,” said Karzai in his inauguration speech, switching between Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s two main languages.

The irony of the situation, if irony is indeed the correct word, is that the country that only three years ago was still ruled by the most dictatorial and backward of regimes can now claim to have one of the few democratically elected leaders in the whole region. Electing a president, of course, is only a start; great many challenges remain for this impoverished and war-scarred country. How much still remains to be done to improve security, eradicate the scourge of drugs, and rebuild the physical and human infrastructure should not blind us to how much has already been achieved in the three years since the overthrow of the Taliban regime - indeed, how much continues to be achieved every day throughout Afghanistan, for most part out of the media spotlight.

And while you are visiting his site, you should also read his post on the 23rd anniversary of the imposition of martial law on Poland. As always, when Arthur details life behind the Iron Curtain, it is a fascinating read.

And a belated welcome to those who are visiting from Athur’s link to my photos of Florida’s Everglades. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them. Visiting the Everglades is always a wonderful experience for me. In the near future, I plan to post some photos I took on my recent trip to Las Vegas and California. I had the opportunity to visit Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Yosemite and Kings Canyon & Sequoia National Parks along with a couple of other places in the Las Vegas area. Check back for those soon.

Last week, I commented in a post that Old media will spend the next four years attempting to discredit the blogosphere in order to silence its most vocal critics and as an effort to return to the “good old days” when mainstream media could insulate its preferred candidate from negative news stories. Well it seems we didn’t have to wait long for the attacks to begin.

The same day I posted that comment, CBS reported an ethical lapse by two South Dakota bloggers, Jon Lauck of Daschle v Thune and Jason Van Beek of South Dakota Politics, who did not disclose that they were paid by the Thune campaign.

Both blogs favored Thune, but neither gave any disclaimer during the election that the authors were on the payroll of the Republican candidate.

No laws have apparently been broken. Case precedent on political speech as it pertains to blogs does not exist. But where journalists’ careers may be broken on ethics violations, bloggers are writing in the Wild West of cyberspace. There remains no code of ethics, or even an employer, to enforce any standard.

At minimum, the role of blogs in the Daschle-Thune race is a telling harbinger for 2006 and 2008. Some blogs could become new vehicles for the old political dirty tricks.

This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black as CBS was party to political dirty tricks of its own in this election cycle. But beyond that, the CBS story hints at possible regulation of blog content.

Like all media, blogs hold the potential for abuse. Experts point out that blogs’ unregulated status makes them particularly attractive outlets for political attack.

“The question is: What are the appropriate regulations on the Internet?” asked Kathleen Jamieson, an expert on political communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communications. “It’s evolved into an area that we need to do more thinking about it.

“If you put out flyers, you have to disclaim it, you have to represent who you are,” Jamieson said. “If you put out an ad you have to put a disclaimer on it. But we don’t have those sorts of regulations for political content, that is campaign-financed on the Internet.”

First Amendment attorney Kevin Goldberg called blogs “definitely new territory.”

“[The question is] whether blogs are analogous to a sole person campaigning or whether they are very much a media publication, which is essentially akin to an online newspaper,” said Goldberg, who is the legal counsel to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Of course such regulation doesn’t cover the MSM:

Generally, the Supreme Court has ruled that restrictions on political advocacy by corporations and unions does not apply to media or individuals. The reasoning has been that media competition insures legitimacy. This has historically been the argument against monopolies in media ownership.

Personally, I read both Daschle v Thune and South Dakota Politics to follow the Daschle/Thune Senate race and I don’t feel particularly aggrieved that neither blog disclosed its relationship to the Thune campaign. Both bloggers made it clear that they supported Thune in the race. Should they have disclosed the connection? Absolutely. Did the failure to do so impact their coverage of the race? No more so than the New York Times or CBS pretending to be objective and non-partisan. Is federal regulation necessary to ensure the credibility of the blogosphere? Not at all. The blogosphere has a track record of sniffing out credibility issues (here is an example and one more example and yet another) and exposing them, far more so then the mainstream media does. And CBS’s example that old media is self-policing in this regard is laughable. Just look at Peter Arnett, for example. It looks like old media First Amendment hypocrisy is alive and well at CBS.

More commentary on this from Captain’s Quarters and Power Line.

This is a perfect example of the up is down, left is right, black is white type of thinking from the American political left these days.

The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that’s a good thing.

I don’t mean that the loss of American and Iraqi lives is to be celebrated. The death and destruction are numbingly tragic, and the suffering in Iraq is hard for most of us in the United States to comprehend.

The tragedy is compounded because these deaths haven’t protected Americans or brought freedom to Iraqis. They have come in the quest to extend the American empire in this “new American century.”

So, as a U.S. citizen, I welcome the U.S. defeat for a simple reason: It isn’t the defeat of the United States – its people or their ideals – but of that empire. And it’s essential that the American empire be defeated and dismantled.

(From LGF)

The author’s premise is that President Bush is seeking to establish an empire based on the control of oil.

The United States doesn’t want to absorb Iraq or take direct possession of its oil. That’s not the way of empire today; it’s about control over the flow of oil and oil profits, not ownership.

In a world that runs on oil, the nation that controls the flow of oil has great strategic power. U.S. policy-makers want leverage over the economies of competitors – Western Europe, Japan and China – that are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

Only half of this is true: the control of oil does grant strategic power over oil dependent nations. However, if the U.S. invasion was solely about control of oil, then the easiest way to ensure such control would have been to embrace Saddam and to leave him in power. Removing the sanctions would have been the easiest, safest way politically for George Bush to guarantee a steady supply of oil from Iraq.

The author then goes on to equate our leaving Iraq with admitting defeat. “When we admit defeat and pull out – not if, but when…” As if the only way we will ever leave Iraq will be as a defeated colonial power. Instead, I think when our troops leave Iraq–and they will leave Iraq–they will do so, not because they were defeated, but because they were victorious and because democracy has been established in Iraq. Then, we will leave because we will have then created in Iraq a liberal, democratic government, one which respects its people and the rights of its people. And that is something that Iraq under Saddam never had.