A RI SOS candidate did what?!?

DEMOCRATCIC Secretary of State CANDIDATE was caught attending a Bush-Cheney event in Rhode Island.

Why is Guillaume de Ramel, who filed papers last week to raise money for a run for the 2006 Democratic nomination for secretary of state, listed as having given $1,000 to the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign in August 2003?

The Newport real estate consultant chalks it up to a joint checking account, and his wife's political preferences.

"Molly's a smart girl, she went to Harvard, she makes up her own mind, and I love and respect her for it," de Ramel said. "She's a Republican, and I'm definitely a Democrat."

De Ramel said the money was for his wife's ticket to a $1,000-a-head fundraiser featuring Vice President Dick Cheney at the Bellevue Avenue mansion of Rhode Island GOP Committeewoman Eileen Slocum.[...]

De Ramel portrayed himself as a Democratic loyalist in announcing his bid earlier this month; Newport city records confirm he has been registered there as a Democrat since 1992.

He joked of his mixed marriage, to a former television news reporter: "We're the James Carville and Mary Matalin of Rhode Island."

Speaking of 2006 candidates, from the same article, Senator Mitch McConnell will be making a trip to Rhode Island. If he wants to visit Newport, he could go to Newport on the Levee on the Ohio River.

The featured speaker at Chafee's event is Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, well connected in the Washington GOP hierarchy.

Joseph Farah, an Arab-American, writes:

Israel's Auschwitz borders
Condoleezza Rice may know a lot about the old Soviet Union, but she sure doesn't know squat about the Middle East.

The secretary of state recently explained how it is necessary for Israel to give up more land to help fashion a viable, contiguous Palestinian state - from Gaza through Judea and Samaria.

Perhaps if you don't understand the geography, this might seem like a perfectly reasonable demand. After all, how can we expect the new Palestinian state to function normally if its people are divided by artificial barriers?

What I trust Rice does not understand - in fact, what I hope she simply fails to comprehend - is that Israel has no more land to give. Israel has no moral obligation to give any land. Israel will be jeopardizing its own security in doing so.

Let me make this crystal clear. Look at a map of the Middle East.
After glancing at it for a few minutes, can anyone honestly tell me they
believe the problems of violence and terrorism there have to do with the
fact that Israel has too much land?[...]

There's lots of land in the Middle East. Most of it is populated sparsely by Arabic-speaking people, culturally, linguistically, religiously and ethnically at one with the so-called "Palestinians," a people who have never had a country of their own in the history of the world. Why then is it Israel's obligation to carve itself up to create this Palestinian state?

The tiny sliver of land that represents the current state of Israel is only about one-tenth the size of the original United Nations mandate that created the Jewish state in 1947.

Now, I'm not a Jew. I'm a Christian Arab-American journalist who believes in freedom first, peace second. And I've got to tell you that the demands on Israel right now are demands for the nation to commit political, military and cultural suicide.[...]

They are willingly helping to build a national concentration camp of half the world's Jewry surrounded by hostile maniacs who want to eradicate them. Israel's new borders under a Rice plan will be indefensible. Creating a new Palestinian state with contiguous borders and relying on Israel to come up with all the necessary real estate requires cutting Israel in half from north to south.[...]

Now I am not going to suggest that Rice or the Bush administration are intentionally trying to destroy Israel or the Jews. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are ill-informed, that they are making profoundly bad decisions based on bad data and bad analysis.

But I will make no such assumptions about the leadership of the Palestinian Authority and the Arab states that back it. They are not promoting a Palestinian state because they believe in freedom and self-determination for the Arab people who live there. Instead, they are doing so to create a permanent staging ground from which they will continue their war of attrition against the Jewish infidels who have the audacity to live in what they consider to be Dar al-Islam.

It's that simple. I wish Rice and Bush and even the Israeli government could see it.

It is a national disgrace that the U.S. government is spending $350 million more to subsidize the Palestinian Authority, which holds that no Jews are permitted to live within its territory or future nation. It is a national disgrace that the U.S. government would join with the rest of the anti-Semitic world to force Israel to abandon its own security needs and its own Jewish communities on historically Jewish lands. And it is a national disgrace that the U.S. government, while supposedly fighting a global war against Islamist terrorism, is appeasing them in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In response to these two editorials bashing Sen. Bayh, I wonder how they would feel if it had been on the issue of global warming. Sen. Bayh voted with his conscience. If I recall, then-VP Richard Nixon favored Vietnam before he was against it.

A nice article on Natalie Portman.

Now, time to make up for lost sleep.