Sometimes it seems that since Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette there has not been as dominant a pair as Nicolas and his wife Cecilia.

If you look at the numbers in Iraq for the almost concluded month of September, you’ll find an encouraging story.  This month saw 61 American casualties.  That’s down from 84 a month ago and 126 in May at the surge’s peak.  The breakdown between hostile and non-hostile fatalities is even more encouraging.  There were only 41 American fatalities due to hostile action in September, down from 60 the month before and 123 in May. 

Of course, American military casualties aren’t a necessarily reliable indicator of American military progress.  Throughout 2006, American casualties were low (though generally not as low as they were this past month) while Iraq was going to hell in a hand basket.  For most of ’06, American troops were garrisoned and their commanders devoted most of their attention to force protection, Iraq was falling apart and thousands of Iraqi civilians were dying violent deaths each month.

On both the left and the right, we’ve had a shared philosophical understanding that the best hard number to indicate the state of play in Iraq is the amount of civilian casualties.  In September (so far), 813 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths.  That’s down from 1674 the month before and roughly 3,000 in what would have been a bad pre-surge month. 

How amazing is this progress?  The lefties at Icasualties.org who truly do yeoman’s work in tallying up these numbers have led their page for the past few days with a link to a CFR report that questions whether David Petraeus has changed the definition of civilian casualties in Iraq and in so doing driven the number of Iraqi civilian casualties down.  The lefties at Icasulaties.org neglect to mention that their numbers don’t come from Petraeus; they gather their numbers from news reports around the world.  If five bodies are found in Baghdad, they go into Icasualties.org’s tally; Petraeus doesn’t get a vote.

I guess you’d expect the left, when addressing Iraq, to resort to such transparently disingenuous subterfuges in order to discount the progress being made.  Actually, that would be Plan B.  Plan A would be to just ignore the good news out of Iraq.  Media outlets that have rushed to commemorate every “grim milestone” out of Iraq the past three years have grown strangely reticent in recent weeks.  If you expected to flip open your edition of the Sunday Times or the Sunday Globe and see a thoughtful piece on what was a very successful September, you were sadly mistaken.  You should also get yourself fitted for a straightjacket. Both papers have nothing to say about Iraq’s big picture this morning, although the Times does offer a helpful piece describing the woes of a long Iraq deployment.  God bless the Grey Lady – she’s always thinking of the troops.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the Times and the Globe, for merely ignoring the progress in Iraq, win today’s prize for truthfulness displayed by a mainstream media outlet.  The Washington Post today presents a huge Rick Atkinson spread on our often-losing fight against IED’s .  Like everything else that Atkinson writes, the piece is well worth reading.  While there’s nothing earth shattering in the expos, it is a thoughtful discussion of how our inability to quickly adapt to changing battlefield conditions was our pre-surge Achilles’ heel. 

Nevertheless, the Post’s timing is ridiculous.  Presenting this enormous piece without acknowledging in any way, shape or form the progress that we’ve recently made is absurd.  Yes, America’s military strategy before the Senate (in all its sagacity) unanimously confirmed David Petraeus to lead a different kind of war left a lot to be desired.  But one can only wonder why the Post is choosing today to look back in anger, while ignoring the remarkable numbers out of Iraq.

But it is the L.A. Times that snares the award for “Unmitigated Chutzpah from a Once-reputable Newspaper.”  The L.A. Times runs a front page story today with the headline, “Petraeus Admits to Rise in Iraq Violence.”  Let’s put aside the tendentious headline which suggests, ala Moveon.org, that Petraeus would naturally incline to cook the books and thus any statement he makes about Baghdad that makes it sound like anything less than a little slice of heaven had to therefore be flogged out of him by our watchdog media. You’re still probably wondering, “What in God’s name is the L.A. Times talking about?  The September numbers declined.  A lot”

Here’s how the Times puts it:

BAGHDAD -- Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, acknowledged today that violence had increased since Sunni Arab militants declared an offensive during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

"Certainly Al Qaeda has had its Ramadan surge," Petraeus said in his first comments to reporters since he returned from Washington to give lawmakers a status report on the war in Iraq. But he said the level of attacks was "substantially lower" than during the same period last year…At least 11 Iraqis were killed in bomb blasts, mortar and gunfire today.

Notice the scare quotes around “substantially lower”.  Also notice that the Times makes no effort to quantify what substantially lower means.  In case you’re more curious than the typical L.A. Times reporter or editor, here’s what “substantially lower than during the same period last year” means:  In September of ’06, there were 3,539 Iraqi civilian and security forces casualties. In September of ’07, there were 813. 

Additionally, and this may be just my fertile imagination running away with me, the tendentious headline combined with the scare quotes seem to imply that General Petraeus’ isn’t altogether trustworthy.  All the more wonder then that the Times didn’t do the simple legwork to verify or debunk his numbers. Perhaps the editors were too busy hatching plans to disingenuously minimize the progress in Iraq to have a spare minute to punch up Icasualties.org on their computers.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will not run for president in 2008 after determining he could not legally explore a bid and remain as head of his tax-exempt political organization, a spokesman said Saturday.

"Newt is not running," spokesman Rick Tyler said. "It is legally impermissible for him to continue on as chairman of American Solutions (for Winning the Future) and to explore a campaign for president."
....

Just last week, Gingrich said he had given himself a deadline of Oct. 21 to raise $30 million in pledges for a possible White House bid, acknowledging the task was difficult but not impossible.

He abruptly dropped the idea Saturday, apparently unwilling to give up the chairmanship of American Solutions, the political arm of a Gingrich's lucrative empire as an author, pundit and consultant.

American Solutions, a tax-exempt committee he started last October, has paid for Gingrich's travel and has a pollster and fundraiser on staff. The outfit has raised more than $3 million, mostly from two benefactors who each gave $1 million: Sheldon Adelson, chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., and North Carolina real estate developer Fred Godley.

Gingrich makes hundreds of speeches each year, many paid. He will not say how much he charges, and neither will the Washington Speakers Bureau, which books him. But some clients have said they paid $40,000 for a speech.

He also has a contract with Fox News for commentaries and specials; Fox said it does not disclose the terms of its contracts. Gingrich also is a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Gingrich has a daily radio broadcast on more than 400 stations, and he writes a free online newsletter with 200,000 subscribers that is distributed by the conservative news magazine Human Events.

He also has a for-profit think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, which grew out of the consulting firm he started after leaving Congress in 1999.

On Thursday, when I interviewed Newt Gingrich, he made a comment about Governor Romney which immediately struck me as newsworthy.  Turns out, it was; it's quoted by reporter Kit Seelye in today's New York Times print (and online) edition:

“As a middle-class person, I can’t compete with Governor Romney, who can write a personal check for a hundred million dollars,” Mr. Gingrich told Matt Lewis, a blogger with Townhall .com, referring to Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate and the former governor of Massachusetts. “But if there is a big enough citizen movement that wants to have somebody who could debate Senator Clinton next year and somebody who could outline and articulate our values, then I think we’d be compelled to run.”

Reporters (and bloggers) love conflict, and that's why this quote made a splash.  Speaker Gingrich knows this unwritten rule as well as anyone, and clearly wanted me to quote this line ... But why? (I have my theories, but that's for another day).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out ...

My Townhall column this week is about Alaska Governor (and possible GOP vice presidential candidate?) Sarah Palin, slayer of the Bridge to Nowhere. Check it out here.

I think if there is anything you can glean from this Blog is that I believe Americans are fed up with having a government that spends too much of their tax dollars behind closed doors and in secrecy. If an earmark is worthy of one cent of taxpayer money, it must be able to withstand public scrutiny. 

Republicans are circulating a petition that would force House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow all earmarks to be publicly disclosed and debated.  The petition requires 218 signatures,  in order to succeed; the support of fiscally responsible House Democrats is needed.

So far 193 Members have signed on.  Unfortunately, after Democrats won the majority by campaigning on the promise of more transparency in Congress, there hasn’t been one Democrat to add their name to the petition as of now.

Disclosure alone will not solve the earmark problem. But it’s a start, and Democrats refuse to even do that.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.  You can sense his keen legal mind at work in this Rocky Mountain News opinion piece where he beclowns himself attacking Bill Kristol:

But how respectable is Kristol, really? Anyone who pays the least attention to him soon discovers that the ruling passion of Kristol's life is to involve the United States in as many wars as possible, with as many enemies as he can find or create.

In short, Kristol thinks about war in much the same way the narrator of Lolita thought about 12-year-old girls: with a constant, obsessive, perverse longing.

I choose this analogy with some care(!)… For my part, I'd rather give the Porn King the Presidential Medal of Freedom than shake Bill Kristol's hand.

Try not to be thrown the by the Porn King reference.  Professor Campos spent literally the entire first half of his story writing about a local character known as the Porn King, all to set up that final line of how unrespectable Bill Kristol is.  Good Lord – in addition to thinking sloppily and lazily, the professor can’t write!

Why am I linking to this?  Because it is an excellent thing when the American left reveals itself.  Paul Campos, in spite of his years of academic training, can’t even begin to grapple with the idea that men of good will can disagree on things.  For Campos, the world apparently separates into two camps – fellow travelers and Porn Kings. Why do I somehow suspect that when he sits in the faculty lounge, Campos often lashes out at President Bush’s Manichean worldview?

I humbly suggest that Moveon.org put Professor Campos in charge of all future print advertisements.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.

Yesterday, during an interview with Rob Bluey and Ed Morrissey, Newt Gingrich said this:  

I think Republican consultants are mostly very stupid. I think they have no education. I think they have no sense of history. ... If I throw away African Americans, and then I throw away Latinos, and then I throw away suburban women, and then I throw away people under 40, and then I throw away everything north of Philadelphia -- there's a morning where Republicans can't get to a majority.

When Newt talks about "throwing away" votes, he is talking about what consultants refer to as "targeting."  The concept is simple: Campaigns live in a world of limited resources, so it makes sense to ignore "hard-to-get" votes and instead, focus your time, talent, and treasure toward likely voters you deem to be undecided and/or persuadable.  The problem with this, as Newt points out, is that over time it means you are losing -- not gaining -- supporters. 

I asked a few top GOP consultants to chime in on Newt's comments.  To my surprise, they thought he made some good points ...

Terry Nelson who served as Political Director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, as well as campaign manager for John McCain told me this:

Newt is right. We have to compete for these constituencies in order to win elections. And we have a message for them, so we should not be shy about saying what we believe. If we don't, we will lose. This is one of the reasons the Bush-Cheney campaign focused so much on expanding our vote with these voters.
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h/t allah