I got the following in an email today from TheStreet.com.  I'm sure it's been sent out by other distributors as well. 

Congress Must Renew the Bush Tax Cuts!

Urgent Message From Sen. Fred Thompson

Sen. Fred Thompson

On Dec. 31, almost every working American will be hit with a massive, across-the-board tax increase on their income and investments.

On this date, the Bush tax cuts, enacted in 2001 and 2003, completely expire.

We must urge Congress and the president to renew the Bush tax cuts early, before they expire and before investors lose confidence in the U.S. economy.

The automatic tax increase will begin on Jan. 1, 2011 and could have catastrophic consequences for the economy.

As the nation faces a terrible recession -- now is not the time to raise taxes!

Help me, our country, and the League of American Voters get Congress and the president to renew the Bush tax cuts.

Please sign this online petition today to have Congress and President Obama renew the Bush tax cuts as soon as possible.

Sign the Petition -- Go Here Now.

Yours for America,

Fred Thompson
U.S. Senator 1994 - 2003

Note the statement "almost every working American will be hit with a(n) ... tax increase."  Not nearly true.  The Republican strategy appears to be to try to convince a lot of Americans who got nothing from the Bush tax cuts that they actually did.  Again, not nearly true, but it could be effective if not countered.

The hits keep coming.  Rush Limbaugh says he will leave the US and move to Costa Rica if HCR passes:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/limbaugh-ill-leave-us-if_n_491536.html

For that I'll pay the tax on cadillac health insurance if turns out that's what I have.  There's one problem, Rush can't move to Costa Rica.  I mean, this is a country with no standing army, and whose citizens pride themselves on having more teachers than police.  Costa Rica is the country where eco-tourism was invented.  If the western hemisphere had an official Liberal Wuss Homeland it would be Costa Rica.

No, Rush needs a country where there is no govt. health care, where the central government is weak, where guns are unregulated and freely available, where women are kept covered up and quiet, and if drugs are freely available that too would be a plus.  He needs to go to Afghanistan!

This is too good.  Sarah Palin now admits that she has croosed the border into Canada to get treatment from anada's sinlge-payer health care system ... death panels and all, I suppose. She calls it "ironic."  More here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/08/palin-crossed-border-for_n_490080.html

All of the publicity around the e-mails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has centered around what the messages do, or do not say about the state of the science on climate change.  The question of who did the hacking, which was, of course, a criminal act, has not been discussed in the news at all until yesterday.  According to a report in the UK daily, The Independent, there is evidence that the hacking may have been the work of a government intelligence service. If not, the hackers would have had to have been a group with comparable sophistication. Here are a few excerpts and links to the original articles.

(T)he former Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, has declared that the leaking of the now notorious emails was too sophisticated to have been the work of a simple hacker, and he has even suggested it may have been the work of a national intelligence service.

.....

"A very clever nerd can cause a great deal of disruption and obviously make intelligence services very nervous, but a sophisticated intelligence operation is capable of yielding the sort of results we've seen here," Sir David said.

"Quite simply, it's the sophistication of the operation. I know there's a possibility that they had a very good hacker working for these people, but it was an extraordinarily sophisticated operation. There are are several bodies of people who could do this sort of work. These are national intelligence agencies and it seems to me that it was the work of such a group of people," he said.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-we-should-know-who-leaked-the-emails-on-climate-change-1885182.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-emails-hacked-by-spies-1885147.html

And of course, as the articles indicate, there had to be some very deep pockets involved to keep a highly sophisticated operation such as this is alleged to be going for many years, the e-mails date back as far as 1996.  Climate change denialists have gone to great expense and resorted to criminal activity to try to derail any action and will do so again.  Finding out who did the hacking and who funded it will be extremely difficult. But for starters some publicity light should be shed on the scale, and the expense, as well as the sheer cynicism of this project.

Excerpting from the post on the TPM main page, Sen. Webb said, in part,

"Those who have committed acts of international terrorism are enemy combatants, just as certainly as the Japanese pilots who killed thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor. It will be disruptive, costly, and potentially counterproductive to try them as criminals in our civilian courts. "

This drives me crazy.  Terrorists are criminals, period, paragraph, the end.  They should be tried as such, the only effective way to combat terrorism has always been through law enforcement methods.  The military option against terrorism only works in limited SWAT-type operations. Calling terrorists "enemy combatants," is as much as calling them soldiers, which is how they want themselves to be viewed.  Senator Webb and others who think about this issue the way he does, and there are many, are starting by handing the terrorists a huge PR victory by calling them soldiers, and proceeding from there to try to combat them from a framework that doesn't work.

The fact that these suspects will be tried in a civilian court, suggests that maybe the administration gets it.  We can only hope, and hope that they will start making that point more explicitly.