Rep. John Murtha is really beginning to rue the day he made disparaging remarks about marines involved in the Haditha Incident where Iraqis in a home were killed. Murtha had called the actions of the marines "cold blooded murder" although the facts of the incident were not known at the time. Murtha had stated that the people killed were innocent Iraqi civilians but, again, the complete facts of the incident are not completely known.

One of the marines whom Murtha referenced as a killer, Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich has filed a defamation of character suit against Murtha. Murtha sought to have the case dismissed, but according to the AP the judge, Rosemary M. Collyer, has refused request.

"You're writing a very wide road for members of Congress to go to their home districts and say anything they choose about private persons and be able to do so without any liability. Are you sure you want to do that?" Collyer said, adding later, "How far can a congressman go and still be protected?"

Murtha will now be required to make a deposition in the case.

According to the article, Murtha's primary purpose was to draw attention to the pressure the troops in were under and to show that there were efforts to cover up the incident. What Murtha failed to take into consideration was the fact that the case had not been tried and all the facts had not surfaced. By jumping the proverbial gun, Murtha stated untrue allegations about the marines and did so on television. Ultimately, the charges were outright dismissed against several of the marines.

The decision of the judge not to dismiss the case comes on the heels of Murtha's embarrassing performance when a college student cornered the congressmen and asked him point blank and asked him if he would retract his statements. Murtha responded that the trial was not over yet.

John Edwards got himself in some hot water yesterday, although I'd be shocked if you read it in tomorrow's paper:

"We cannot build enough prisons to solve this problem. And the idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating - pretty soon we're not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They're all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two."

Now imagine if Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney had said something akin to that.

NRO makes it clear that the African-American community is not all Bloods/Crips, Kanye West/50-Cent and Glock/Mac-10 but is a community that is sending their children to college and making great inroads. Of course we have inner city violence and that is more of a cultural issue hat must be addressed but Edwards made a huge mistake here, even more than the mistake the prominent GOP candidates made by not attending the debate last night.

Edwards sounds a bit Dixiecratish. For those who think the GOP is the party of racists, do yourself a favor and read of current Senator Robert Byrd's KKK Kleagle days or the fact that Al Gore's father was anti-civil rights. Educate yourself on where the parties history on racism lies.

Every so often, a Democrat actually proposes a bill that shows exactly how they would act if they were given a clear majority in both houses and the presidency. Rep. John Dingell is doing that now:

Dealing with global warming will be painful, says one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. To back up his claim he is proposing a recipe many people won't like - a 50-cent gasoline tax, a carbon tax and scaling back tax breaks for some home owners.

"I'm trying to have everybody understand that this is going to cost and that it's going to have a measure of pain that you're not going to like," Rep. John Dingell, who is marking his 52nd year in Congress, said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.

First off, 52 years in Congress? If that isn't a reason to propose term limits, what is?

Dingell wants gas constantly over $3-4 per gallon and he'll use the money to fight "global warming," a crisis that scientists can't even agree on, right? Well, not exactly:

Some of the revenue would be used to reduce payroll taxes, but most would go elsewhere including for highway construction, mass transit, paying for Social Security and health programs and to help the poor pay energy bills.

If that is not a Democratic plan, nothing is. The esteemed Representative wants to raise taxes under the guise of fighting global warming and will instead use the money to pay for social programs created by Democrats that have grown to large for the government to support. This show exquisitely that every single program the Dems enact needs a huge tax burden to support: Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, etc. The list goes on. The fact is, this is all a drop in the bucket if socialized medicine ever passes.

When your campaign is trailing in the polls and your ability to raise money is seriously hampered, there are certain things you should do and certain things you should not do.

Of the things you should do, making the following statement at an MTV/Myspace Forum is not one of them:

"...pretty soon we're not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They're all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two."

Who would make such a racially insensitive comment? Of all people, it was Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards and with that statement, there will be serious repercussions and those repercussions will be deserved.

What was Edwards inferring? In all honesty, only Edwards truly knows and more than likely he misspoke. However, he misspoke in an incredibly offensive matter. Consider the following: for a person to be arrested for a crime, they have to commit a crime. Examining the statement on a surface level, it would seem that Edwards' is saying ALL African-American men commit crimes. Regardless of what Edwards meant or did not mean, he needs to apologize for this statement and apologize immediately.

The 2008 Defense Budget is an integral part of the wars we are now fighting, in addition to being essential for preparing for conflicts to come. It's the base funding for the entire Defense Department - our military. This bill in particular takes care of some issues that have been in the news recently - increased military pay, increased benefits and care for soldiers that have been wounded fighting our wars, and more armored vehicles - to name just a few. These are all things that the Democrats have been screaming about for months. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid once promised that the bill would go through clean, with no unrelated extraneous amendments added to muddy it up.

So why are the Democrats now jeopardizing the passage of the bill by adding, at the last minute, a Ted Kennedy authored homosexual hate crimes amendment, having nothing to do with the Defense Department, to the spending measure? The Army Times reminds us that the House passed the 2008 Defense Budget in May. Since then, the Senate has spent alot of time attempting to attach anti-Iraq War amendments to their version of the bill, but each one failed. So they throw one last minute unrelated liberal social agenda amendment onto the bill, in effect challenging Bush to veto the entire measure. It's almost as if the Dems did this out of spite.

The Kennedy amendment is a transparent attempt to get back into the good graces of the Left after the Democrats failed to do what they had promised (actually guaranteed) their base that they would do - get the US out of Iraq. The amendment passed, gaining 60 votes, but that's not enough to override a Presidential veto. Let's say the 2008 Defense Budget passes, and gets to conference committee with the House. There's a good chance that this amendment won't be in the final version sent to the President. But let's say it survives.

There's a good column by Gail Collins in The New York Times this morning titled The Democratic Dark Side. She's commenting on the recent pledge that the top Democratic Presidential candidates made to not campaign in Florida. That's because Florida defied the DNC and scheduled their primary before they were supposed to, which was a big DNC no-no. The decision by Florida Democrats to defy Howard Dean has resulted in Florida 'losing' all of it's delegates to the Democratic Convention next year, and the Dem candidates pledging not to campaign in Florida

Collins points out something that I haven't seen anywhere else. The Democrats promised not to campaign - but they didn't promise not to visit Florida to raise money!

Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama have all vowed to honor the Democratic National Committee rule that only New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada can hold primaries before Feb. 5. At the urging of the Democratic chairs of the four firsties, they signed a pact promising not to campaign in any state that tries to break into the front of the line. There is, however, an exception for "activities specifically related to raising campaign resources."

Exactly what are they supposed to do when they visit Florida to raise money, not talk about politics or their campaigns for the Presidency? How will that be policed. The Florida primary will go forward as scheduled. The Democratic convention as a whole can, when meeting in Denver in August 2008 to define their platform and convention rules, over-rule the DNC and vote to accept the Florida delegates. So what does the ban actually do? Is Howard Dean really that impotent within the Democratic Party?

Surprising many, the UAW voted to strike General Motors yesterday, in the first national autoworkers walkout against GM since 1970. With Democratic Presidential aspirants Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards scheduled to speak today before a forum in Illinois sponsored by a union umbrella organization, Change to Win, I thought it would be interesting to see what those campaigns had to say about the UAW strike. I found a collection of quotes on this page and found the responses interesting.

Obama seems to think that the strike is over wages and benefits - but it's not. Hillary avoids the factual missteps and claims that all would be better if the UAW and the automakers had met in the Oval Office - although that meeting couldn't have possibly settled the issue that the UAW went out on strike over. (But it's nice that she indicated that her Presidency would jump right in the middle of union-management contract negotiations.) Edwards just spewed union boilerplate, also neglecting to mention the primary strike reason. He's much better when his wife Elizabeth speaks for him.

It takes an Associated Press article from last night and a columnist from the Detroit News to tell us what this is all about, and why the strike is a dangerous idea for the union and an equally dangerous idea for the Democrat candidates to embrace. The union walked out on GM, a company that is now one fifth of its size in 1990, because GM wouldn't promise the current employees permanent job security. GM, for its part, is also worried about setting up a $55 billion trust fund to administer its retiree programs.

Gallup has a new poll out this morning that shows that the Democratic Party has a 15 point lead nationally over the GOP in overall approval. The Democrats also hold leads over the Republicans on the formally GOP-safe questions of which party would best maintain the nation's economic prosperity and which party would keep us safer from terrorism. The methodology revealed in the analysis accompanying the poll has no party identification figures for the respondents, so we don't know if one party was oversampled over another. But that's meaningless for my purposes -- the GOP should have such commanding leads in the national security and economic prosperity categories that sampling games would be inconsequential to the ultimate polling results.

The Republican party has handed the Democrats the advantage on what has previously been seen as central GOP strengths for decades. And this is not a one-time aberration. These dropping poll numbers started in the second half of 2005. If that isn't a clarion call directed at the Republicans to clean out their house and get back to basics, I don't know what is.

Is there hope for the GOP? Sure, but only if they start acting now. Why? Because Gallup also tells us that the advantage that the Democrats now have has nothing to do with themselves:

The recent gain in the Democratic Party's image advantage is due primarily to a sharp decline in Americans' favorable perceptions of the Republican Party more than an improvement in the public's perception of the Democrats.

The Republicans should feel happy about stopping the Democrats from surrendering our national security interests in Iraq and intentionally losing the war. But that's just one victory, and it will be meaningless if they lose more Congressional seats in 2008, let alone the presidency. If the GOP is serious about not only reforming its image but its message as well, they should start now. Next year will be too late.

There was an article in yesterday's Providence Journal that I'm surprised hasn't gotten more attention -- a reprint of a story Saturday in the Washington Post -- In Swing Districts, Democratic Enthusiasm Is Harder to Come By. It reports on an internal poll taken by Democratic pollsters in August that, until the article by Chris Cillizza and Shailagh Murray, had remained secret:

Conventional wisdom dictates that Democratic voters are thrilled with their choices for president, bursting at the seams to rally behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) or whoever gets the party's nod next year. A recent survey by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, however, showed Clinton and Obama trailing former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) in the 31 Democratic-held House districts regarded as most imperiled in 2008, and even potentially serving as a drag on those lawmakers' reelection chances. A poll found that if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton tops the ticket in 2008, some vulnerable Democratic House incumbents will have reason to worry. The poll was conducted in August but has not been previously reported. It paints a "sobering picture" for Democrats, according to a memo by Lake and Daniel Gotoff that accompanies the poll report.

In those Democratic districts polled, voters were asked to choose between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, followed by the same question on Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani. Rudy beats Clinton 49 to 39, and he beats Obama by a surprisingly small 41 to 40. This poll was taken before the losses suffered by the Democrats during the past two weeks on the Iraq War. With the above Presidential poll results, I'm gathering that the districts in question are more conservative than the usual Democrat held district. I'm wondering if the events in Congress over the past two weeks would make the Democrats' problems in those districts even greater.

Simply put, she's good at what she does. Everyone seems to know this by now, including President Bush. Witness her handling of the Washington talk-show circuit this Sunday. She made a two-hour blitz, appearing on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and FOX, one right after the other. As the Politico reports, it was all no sweat for the soon-to-be Democratic nominee:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton beamed her way through a barrage of questions from five political talk show hosts Sunday morning, appearances that offered some details of her plans on health care and the war in Iraq, but left her basically unscathed politically after the toughest grilling Washington has to offer.

Call her the Timex of American politics. Takes a licking and keeps on ticking. In fact, what the Sunday media barrage demonstrated was just how self-assured and in control Hillary is at this point in the race. Today she also picked up the endorsement of Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, a moderate, red-state Democrat who would make an interesting choice for V.P. And if there was one message from Sunday's walk in the park, it was that Hillary will position herself as a centrist come the general election, whatever Chris Wallace would have you believe. Witness, for instance, the evolution of her health care plan:

The only real piece of news in the interviews came on ABC, where Clinton said for the first time that her health plan will not mandate or include coverage for illegal immigrants, who already receive emergency coverage under federal programs for children and the poor. It was yet another sign that her plan is designed, most of all, for passage, aimed as it is to assuage the concerns of those who opposed her 1993 effort most fiercely: small businesses, and people who are satisfied with their current health care.

No, Hillary is not my first choice in this race, but the fact is she has run an expert campaign. A big upset in Iowa may yet reverse her fortunes, but as of now, Mrs. Clinton looks awfully hard to beat.

Drudge is reporting that President Bush has gone on the record stating that he believes Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic presidential nomination, but she will lose the general election to a Republican challenger. This comes from an excerpt in the forthcoming book The Evangelical President by Bill Sammon, in which Bush states: "She's got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary...And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated."

While it seems a certain that Clinton will win the nomination, the certainty that she would lose is, well, not so certain at this stage of the game. The comments by Bush that a Republican will win the White House are not necessarily echoed by those close to the president. Former adviser Karl Rove feels the race will be too close to call and this sentiment is basically repeated on the record by Vice President Dick Cheney in the following comment: "[The election] could go either way."

Hillary Clinton spent some time on Fox News Sunday and told us that she would rather not be talking about MoveOn.org:

WALLACE: Senator, you have refused to criticize the MoveOn.org ad about General Petraeus. And in fact, this week you voted against a Senate resolution denouncing it.

President Bush said that you and other Democrats are more afraid - his word - afraid of irritating the left wing and MoveOn than you are about insulting the American military. Does he have a point?

H. CLINTON: No, he doesn't. But I think it's clear I don't condone attacks on anyone who has served our country with distinction and with honor, and I have been very vocal in my support of and admiration for General Petraeus.

I did vote for a resolution that made it clear I do not condone and do condemn attacks on any American, impugning their patriotism, and that includes people like Senator Max Cleland and Senator John Kerry.

I think we need to call a halt to any kind of attacks, from wherever they come, that would go after anyone based on their service to America.

Pretty standard so far, but at this point she does a perfectly disciplined Jane Hamsher pivot and attack.

But you know, this is not a debate about an ad. This is a debate about how we end the war in Iraq. That's the debate that I want to be participating in, and I think a lot of people on the other side don't want us to have that debate.

Nicely done!

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was known as a man who wouldn't back down from a fight while serving as attorney general for the state. He went after corporations (his favorite targets) including: insurance, record and financial firms. He stuck it to the man at every opportunity like a good anti-Capitalist.

Now, as governor, he has the opportunity to stop crime by doing nothing, just letting a law on the books stand. But no, Spitzer has gain street cred with the other Dems and try to increase his vote among Hispanics by changing a law that stopped illegal immigrants from getting driver's licenses:

The change rolls back rules adopted four years ago under the Pataki administration that made it difficult, if not impossible, for tens of thousands of immigrants to obtain driver's licenses because they could not prove legal status. Under the new rules, the Department of Motor Vehicles will accept a current foreign passport as proof of identity without also requiring a valid yearlong visa or other evidence of legal immigration.

Just a question, governor: didn't at least three of the ten men in two planes kill thousands of people in your biggest city overstay their visas? They all had passports as I recall, so your little plan here would not have caught them.

It's coming folks, the individual states are making their moves to subvert federal law and pass their own amnesty plans. The same party that freaks out every time someone suggests that abortion should be decided by the states will have no issue with states acting on this issue. They couldn't care less about the national security implications or even the implications to local security, as long as it gets them more votes and keeps them in power, it's all good.

Spitzer has his eye on a run at the presidency and he's being a good soldier for the real leadership in New York, Hillary Clinton and Chuckie Schumer. They are the power players and whatever they want, Spitzer will give them. Keep that in mind when he runs in 2012 or 2016.

The continuing saga of Norman Hsu is showing more and more the dark underbelly of political fundraising. It keeps getting worse for the Democrats as a whole and Hillary in particular:

A Laguna Beach investment firm filed a lawsuit against Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu on Friday, claiming he defrauded investors out of at least $23 million and required them to donate to Democratic candidates.

According to the lawsuit filed by Briar Wood Investments, Hsu persuaded the company's operator to do business with him by taking him to star-studded Democratic Party events. There, the 56-year-old Hong Kong native was praised by New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown and others, the lawsuit said.

As a condition of doing business with the fundraiser, Hsu directed investors to make contributions to certain Democratic candidates, the lawsuit said. The investors turned over tens of thousands of dollars, including $30,000 worth of checks to Clinton's campaign on a single day.

Read that again, Hillary knew who he was and probably invited him to events. He used that access to persuade investors to give him money which he duly defrauded them of and also coerced them to donate to Hillary's campaign. One would think that $30,000 in one day would make the campaign take notice. $23-million will definitely make the country take notice.

The latest Harris poll shows Fred Thompson leading Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton leading Barack Obama:

... One-third (32%) of those who say they will vote in a Republican primary or caucus will vote for Thompson while 28 percent will vote for Giuliani. Much further back is John McCain, who continues his downward slide with 11 percent saying they would vote for the Arizona Senator, and 9 percent who say they would vote for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

... Just under half (46%) of those who would vote in a Democratic primary or caucus would vote for the former First Lady while one-quarter (25%) would vote for Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Former vice president candidate and North Carolina Senator John Edwards is further back with 14 percent saying they would vote for him. No other candidate is in double digits.

The only really surprising thing in this poll is that young Democrats will vote for Obama while the older (61 and over) favor Hillary overwhelmingly. A return to the Al Gore, Sr. Dixiecrat roots perhaps?

The Thompson lead is to be expected as he is the "new" candidate. His performance in the debates will be extremely important, should he falter, Rudy will grab this race and run with it setting up the election we were robbed of back in 2000 when Rudy had to bow out because of cancer and Hillary ran against lightweight Rick Lazio.

These are good, strong numbers for Thompson and he should take heart, however they could change dramatically should he not make a good showing. I suspect he'll do fine but also that Giuliani will get a small bump be his brouhaha with MoveOn.org so things should even out. Mitt Romney and John McCain are toast at this point and only can be saved by a complete upset in the early primary states.

On the donk side, John Edwards just hasn't found his stride and is hovering at 12-16% based on polling. He stands no chance of advancing if he hasn't grabbed the electorate by now.