News item:

Russia announced plans on Sunday to revive its once-mighty navy by building several aircraft carriers and upgrading its fleet of nuclear submarines in the coming years.

Russia’s power at sea is a shadow of the formidable Soviet navy which challenged U.S. military dominance in the Cold War. But, with a strong economy now from booming oil exports, it is seeking to raise its profile on the world stage by modernizing the armed forces.

Russia will build five or six aircraft carrier battle groups in the near future, RIA news agency quoted Navy Commander Vladimir Vysotsky as telling Navy Day festivities in St Petersburg, the second city.

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Ten: Values. Romney has proven himself acceptable to evangelicals on moral issues. His speech on religion was a home run which underlined the bedrock principle that liberty is bound to religious faith:

RUSH: I want to start with Mitt Romney today, Mitt Romney’s speech. Frankly, I thought what we saw today, folks, was a Republican candidate for president giving an inspiring speech. It was an inspiring speech about American values, including religion.

-snip-

I thought he showed today his ability to confront, to articulate, to persuade, and to lead.

Mitt’s Christmas- card-picture-perfect wife and kids are reminders that the traditional family is the fundamental cornerstone of America.
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What’s gotten into T. Boone Pickens? Apparently, a lot of wind and gas. Anyone who has watched any amount of cable television lately has seen his commercial, which concludes:

“I’ve been an oil man my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. I have a plan…”

Not only does he have a plan, but Pickens also has a flair for the theatrical. He has adopted the Deomocrat talking point that “we can’t drill our way out of this” and is repeating it every time the ad airs, which, if the Fox News Channel is any indicator, is quite often. But like so many Democrat mantras, it’s a canard.


So what is the Pickens Plan? Basically, it’s to switch from gasoline to natural gas as a motor fuel and replace the natural gas and coal we have been using for heating and generation of electricity with wind power. Doing this, Pickens contends, will buy us time to develop other technologies, presumably solar and hydrogen.

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Liberal myths often quickly become talking points for the Democrats, and even as conservatives punch holes in them, the Left simply patches them up and floats them again. Such is the case with the latest liberal myth/Democrat talking point - that oil companies aren’t drilling on the lands they currently hold:

“Big Oil is more interested in pumping up prices and pumping up their own profits rather than pumping more oil,” said Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass), who has co-sponsored a bill to charge oil companies a fee for land they hold that’s not producing oil. “We should not even begin discussing handing over more public land to the oil companies until they first use [the land] they already hold.”

The oil companies are already “paying fees” for the lands they are holding, since they are leasing these lands from the government. Markey’s bill would have put additional fees on top of the amounts the oil companies had already negotiated with the government. Fortunately, two such bills went down to defeat in the House in recent days.

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I call them the impeachnuts. They’re a small but zealous group of members of the congress who are obsessed with their hatred of President Bush and members of his administration. Displaying the late-stage symptoms of BADS (Bush Administration Derangemnt syndrome), they’ve been grandstanding with the prospects of impeaching the president and vice president. Never mind that the odds of actually convincing the full House to bring such impeachment proceedings are somewhere between nil and none, they press on.

It should come as no suprise to anyone that the impeachment fixation had its genesis on the extreme left end of the political spectrum. Let’s go back to 2006:

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