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Dear RNC Members:
 
Welcome to fun week!
 
Just a quick note from me to knock down a silly rumor.  Several blogs today erroneously reported that I am making a deal with Chairman Mike Duncan.
 
As I’m sure you know, this is absurd, complete fiction.  I’m running for Chairman, not for deal-maker.
 
Here is what is true -- this weekend a senior Republican official called me to offer me some sort of power-sharing deal with Chairman Duncan.
 
I completely dismissed the concept out of hand, interrupting before the deal could even be fully articulated, and thanked the gentleman for calling.
 
I’ve always felt that the best way to deal with silliness like this is to address it straight up.
 
I look forward to seeing all of you this week.
 
--Michael Steele

None of the funds provided by this Act may be made available to the State of Illinois, or any agency of the State, unless (1) the use of such funds by the State is approved in legislation enacted by the State after the date of the enactment of this Act, or (2) Rod R. Blagojevich no longer holds the office of Governor of the State of Illinois.

Setting aside the fact that Israel is a friend to the Western world while many Palestinians would prefer to see us dead, that Israel wants peace and the Palestinians want genocide, and that the Pals are a pathetic, parasitic, backwards, savage, unsympathetic people who wouldn't know what to do with a state if they had it, consider the message that is sent when the world backs these sort of tactics,

Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

His first day of work in the al-Quds neighbourhood was January 1, the sixth day of the war. "Mostly the war was not as fast or as chaotic as I expected," Mr Shriteh told the Herald. "We would co-ordinate with the Israelis before we pick up patients, because they have all our names, and our IDs, so they would not shoot at us."

Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.

"After the first week, at night time, there was a call for a house in Jabaliya. I got to the house and there was lots of shooting and explosions all around," he said.

Because of the urgency of the call, Mr Shriteh said there was no time to arrange his movements with the IDF.

"I knew the Israelis were watching me because I could see the red laser beam in the ambulance and on me, on my body," he said.

Getting out of the ambulance and entering the house, he saw there were three Hamas fighters taking cover inside. One half of the building had already been destroyed.

"They were very scared, and very nervous ... They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to put them in the ambulance and take them away. I refused, because if the IDF sees me doing this I am finished, I cannot pick up any more wounded people.

"And then one of the fighters picked up a gun and held it to my head, to force me. I still refused, and then they allowed me to leave."

Mr Shriteh says Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds Hospital's fleet of ambulances during the war.

This is not an Abu Ghraib, where a few yahoos got out of hand and the world's biggest over-reaction occurred, it's standard operating procedure for Hamas.

They use ambulances to move their soldiers around. They use aid money given to them for civilians to buy weaponry. They don't wear uniforms. They hide amongst civilians. They deliberately target civilians. They use children as suicide bombers. They openly proclaim they want genocide and have no interest in peace -- ever. In other words, they are far more vile than the defining standard for evil, the Nazis.

Yet, people are rooting for them to win.

There are a number of reasons for that. There's raw anti-Semitism, Muslims who will always root for Muslims over unbelievers, people who hate Israel, people who've been brainwashed by propaganda, those who will always root for the weaker over the stronger, no matter what the situation may be, on and on.

However, do people realize what they are legitimizing by rooting for the Palestinians to win this way? In other words, have they thought about what would happen if the Palestinians were perceived as having "won" somehow because of these tactics?

Surely people are not so foolish as to believe that if these tactics work, they won't be used in other places -- and not just the United States. If the Palestinians can win a "victory" like this, then why shouldn't the "Muslim youths" who are burning cars in France use the same tactics? How about Muslims who want Spain to belong to Islam again? How about Pakistanis who feel, with some justification, discriminated against by Italians?

The world is full of people with grievances and if blowing apart Israelis or Americans is Ok, then why isn't blowing apart Western Europeans? If anything, they have proven to be much more susceptible to being "persuaded" by murderous violence and as we have seen, Muslims across the world, would be sympathetic or at least largely silent about those sort of attacks.

If the Palestinians were to achieve their aims and instituted a Holocaust part 2 against Israel, I suspect there would be quite a bit of cheering not just in Muslim capitols, but all around Western Europe. However, you have to wonder how long the cheering would continue once they realized that they had in effect, sanctioned that very same behavior against their own people in the future.

John Hawkins is a professional blogger who runs Conservative Grapevine, Right Wing News, and Right Wing Video.

Beleaguered Citigroup is upgrading its mile-high club with a brand-new $50 million corporate jet - only this time, it's the taxpayers who are getting screwed.

Even though the bank's stock is as cheap as a gallon of gas and it's burning through a $45 billion taxpayer-funded rescue, the airhead execs pushed through the purchase of a new Dassault Falcon 7X, according to a source familiar with the deal.

The French-made luxury jet seats up to 12 in a plush interior with leather seats, sofas and a customizable entertainment center, according to Dassault's sales literature. It can cruise 5,950 miles before refueling and has a top speed of 559 mph.

"Why should I help you when what you write will be used to the detriment of our company?" replied Bill McNamee, head of CitiFlight Inc., the subsidiary that manages Citigroup's corporate fleet, when asked to comment about the new 7X.

"What relevance does it have but to hurt my company?"

Haley Barbour, popular Governor of Mississippi and former chairman of the RNC,  provided an interview to the Wall Street Journal (January 11) that provided some of the sharpest available advice for a party hoping to hack its way out of the political wilderness:

  “There’s a temptation after a loss like this, he continues ‘to purify our party by running off the people who aren’t with us 100% of the time, or the people who aren’t social conservatives, or the people who aren’t this or the people who aren’t that.’ He says party purges like that would be catastrophic. ‘This is a time for the party to be figuring out how to multiply. Politics is about addition and multiplication, not division and subtraction.’ He fumes that efforts to evict moderate Republicans in primaries are counterproductive…His view is that Republicans need to elect a lot more moderates from the Northeast to regain operating majorities.”

This common sense approach follows the position I’ve advocated for many years, and contradicts the self-destructive notion that party-building requires chasing away current members, rather than encouraging new members to join. Governor Barbour shows why many GOP insiders see him as one of the state-based leaders who could provide Grand New Hope to the Grand Old Party.