Ok here's the first of the press releases...

Eighteen Admirals, Generals and Senior Defense Officials on Why They Support Hillary Clinton to be the Next Commander-in- Chief

Eighteen admirals, generals, and senior defense officials today gave their reasons for supporting Senator Clinton to be our next Commander-in- Chief.   In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, some of the nations most distinguished flag officers testified to Senator Clinton's qualifications, experience, and strength of character.

They are among the nearly 30 general and flag officers who have endorsed Hillary Clinton to be the Nations next President.   Senator Clinton has received five endorsements in recent days, including those of General Henry Hugh Shelton, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Owens, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba.   Overall she has the endorsement of two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, five admirals and generals at the four-star rank.   They are in addition to over 2,000 veterans and military retirees who are members of Senator Clintons national and state veterans steering committees.

The list of those taking part in today's call is below.

General Wesley Clark
Admiral William Owens
General Johnnie E. Wilson
Lt. Gen. Joe Ballard
Lt. Gen. Claudia J. Kennedy
Vice Admiral Joseph A. Sestak
Lt. Gen. Frederick E. Vollrath
Major General George A. Buskirk, Jr.
Major General Paul D. Eaton
Rear Admiral Stuart Platt
Rear Admiral David Stone
Major General Antonio M. Taguba
Brigadier General Michael Dunn
Brigadier General Evelyn "Pat" Foote
Brigadier General John M. Watkins, Jr.
Brigadier General Jack Yeager
Former Secretary of the Army and Veterans Affairs Togo West
Former Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton

And then the follow up complete with links to audio / mp3 files of several of the participants (let me know if you have trouble with the links and I'll see what I can do to sort them out)...

TESTIMONIALS: Former Admirals, Generals and Senior Defense Officials on Why They Support Hillary Clinton to be the Next Commander-in-Chief

In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, former Admirals, Generals, and senior defense officials today gave their reasons for supporting Senator Clinton to be our next Commander-in-Chief.  

Their testimonials highlight Senator Clinton's qualifications, experience, and strength of character.

Snip

General Wesley Clark

Click here for audio

"She has done her homework on national security and I know from my personal discussions with her and with many other friends that go in and brief her in her role in the Senate Armed Services Committee. She knows the facts, she knows the details, plus she has the big picture. She is a strategic thinker but she has the building blocks of the strategy in her personal knowledge. This is someone that when she is president our military is going to respect very highly, and when our Senior Officers brief her and meet with her they are going be very, very impressed by what she knows and the intelligence that she brings to these problems."

Brigadier General John Watkins, Jr.
Click here for audio
"As I think about the challenges facing the nation and having been in uniform for almost thirty years, worked with a number of presidents to include the last four, I can't think of a single person - those generals included - who is better qualified to walk into the Oval Office than Hillary Clinton. I don't make that statement very lightly. She is more qualified, in my view, than her husband Bill was when he entered the office. It is no surprise to me that you would have as many flag officers who serve this country and Secretaries of the Army and Navy who have served this country who would come out and support Hillary."

Major General Paul Eaton
Click here for audio
"On a personal note, I have a Special Forces Captain son and a Sergeant Paratrooper both in Afghanistan and I find Senator Clinton the perfect choice to be their Commander-in-Chief and to display the loyalty to command our armed forces and to rebuild them after the conflicts in which we are engaged right now."

Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy
Click here for audio
"I support her because I trust her. I trust Hillary Clinton because of her judgment and her leadership. I have confidence that she is responsive to the needs of people. I believe that she understands leadership the way we do in the Army and that is that it's about building connections and relationships and establishing guidance and leadership for others.

I think she'll rebuild relationships with other countries that have been suffering for the last seven or eight years; those relationships have really been strained beyond anything I would have anticipated. Another part of Hillary Clinton that I think is just tremendous is that she knows our reality. She is in touch with people, she listens to people. She decides what she believes about policy based on what's right, she has integrity, and on what works, so she's practical."

Lieutenant General Frederick Vollrath
Click here for audio
"I support Senator Clinton because I believe it's time for change in our country, a new direction. And I know change carries with it risks. Senator Clinton is the candidate, in my opinion, with the proven experience that truly understands the risks and how to possibly cope with those risks to get the job done. We shouldn't shirk from change because of the risks, but we absolutely have to have a leader with the proven experience. America , in the area of national defense, must be successful and Senator Clinton has that experience to create change, to understand the risk, and to get the job done."

Admiral William Owens
Click here for audio
"In this world that we face today, very complex as all of us know, I think experience will be really at a premium, especially at the level of the Commander-in-Chief. There's not time to learn. The phone rings and you have to be ready. You have to ready with intuition, with experience and with skills. And this world will have the complexities that perhaps we've never before seen. I've been impressed with and admire Hillary Clinton for her work in the Senate. And we need people with great judgment. I think she brings the best of talent, intuition and experience to handle these unknown threats in the future."

These men and women, who've served our nation with honor and are (I'm certain) very keen on how our troops and veterans will be treated by our next leader are in Hillary's corner 1000% in this campaign.  As you can see by what they had to say in today's call, they're confident she'll know what to do when push comes to shove.  They know she'll have what it takes to make the right call when that phone rings in the middle of the night.

Senator Obama's been making a lot of noise about Hillary's claim that she's ready to lead on day one - that she'll know what to do if when that phone rings at 3 am.  He's falling back on his argument that she voted for that war resolution 6 years ago, as if that single vote was the sole cause for the things Bush has done since.

Sen. Obama's tried repeatedly to shift the blame for this war from George W. Bush's shoulders onto Hillary's.  I've pointed out repeatedly that this is an unfair claim - that her main focus was in making sure we got inspectors into Iraq to prove there weren't any WMDs, and go the diplomatic route in dealing with Saddam Hussein, so I won't repeat myself on that tonight.

Rather, I'll let Amb. Joe Wilson do the talking.  He posted an article on Huffington Post earlier today - he starts off by pointing to several statements BO made in 2004 regarding is views at the time.  In once instance he said he had no idea as to how he would have voted since he wasn't in the senate and wasn't privy to all the information, and in another was quoted as saying there wasn't much difference between his position and Bush's when it came to Iraq.   In his book, The Audacity of Hope, (2006), he wrote, "...on the merits I didn't consider the case against war to be cut-and- dried." He goes on to say...

I was involved in that debate in every step of the effort to prevent this senseless war and I profoundly resent Obama's distortion of George Bush's folly into Hillary Clinton's responsibility. I was in the middle of the debate in Washington. Obama wasn't there. I remember what was said and done. In fact, the administration lied in order to secure support for its war of choice, including cooking the intelligence and misleading Congress about the intent of the authorization. Senator Clinton's position, stated in her floor speech, was in favor of allowing the United Nations weapons inspectors to complete their mission and to build a broad international coalition. Bush rejected her path. It was his war of choice.

There is no credible reason to conclude that Obama would have acted any differently in voting for the authorization had he been in the Senate at that time. Indeed, he has said as much. The supposed intuitive judgment he exercised in his 2002 speech was nothing more than the pander of a local election campaign, just as his current assertions of superior judgment and scurrilous attacks on Hillary Clinton are a pander to those who now retroactively think the war was a mistake without bothering to acknowledge Senator Clinton's actual position at the time and instead fantasizing that she was nothing but a Bush clone. Obama willfully encourages and plays off this falsehood.

Now I've written about his failure to hold substantive meetings or hearings of the subcommittee BO chairs since taking charge over a year ago on several occasions.  I won't cover that ground again but Wilson does point out that BO's choice to campaign for the presidency over holding hearings of meetings to find ways to involve NATO more in what's happening in Afghanistan show's (ahem) poor judgment.  He goes on to say...

As a consequence of Obama's dereliction of duty on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a feckless administration has had absolutely no oversight as it careens from disaster to disaster in Afghanistan, including the central governments loss of control over 70 percent of the country and yet another bumper crop of opium to fuel the efforts of the Taliban and their terrorist allies. Of course, if you don't hold hearings, conduct oversight, make recommendations or sponsor legislation, then you have no record to explain or defend and you are free to take whatever position is convenient when attacking those who actually did address issues. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Obama holds forth on Afghanistan, chiding the administration and our allies as though he's a profile in courage and not someone who has abandoned his post in establishing accountability.

Wilson doesn't pull any punches in his close - not one bit...

Obama's gyrations on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran are not the actions of one imbued with superior intuitive judgment, but rather the machinations of a political opportunist looking to avoid having his fingerprints on any issue that might be controversial, and require real judgment, while preserving his freedom to bludgeon his adversary for actually taking positions as elected office demands. It is hard to discern whether Senator Obama is a man of principle, but it is clear that he is not a man of substance. And that judgment, based on his hollow record, is inescapable.

As for readiness to take on McCain in the general election, take a look at what Hillary had to say to her press corps on the plane today...

This campaign's been going on for over a year now and I'm guessing the candidates are getting a bit tired - easily confused maybe.  I found something earlier today that points to how tired the candidates must be getting at this point in the campaign.  We all make mistakes and I'm going to chalk this down to folks being human, but I thought it was worth straightening something out here regarding something BO claimed in one of his stump speeches in OH earlier today.  Take a look...

Sen. Obama Misleads on Hillary, NIE
3/2/2008 4:51:44 PM

Today in Ohio, Sen. Obama attacked Hillary Clinton by making a highly misleading statement about the Iraq war resolution:

Now I have to say, when it came to making the most important foreign policy decision of our generation - the decision to invade Iraq - Senator Clinton got it wrong. She didn't read the National Intelligence Estimate. Jay Rockefeller read it, but she didn't read it.

Sen. Rockefeller voted for the war resolution, not against it, as Sen. Obama suggested to the people of Ohio. On national television, his top strategist also falsely claimed that Sen. Rockefeller voted against the war resolution.

Sen. Clinton explained to Tim Russert, "I was fully briefed by the people who wrote [the NIE]. I was briefed by the people from, you know, the State Department, the CIA, the Department of Defense." Sen. John Kerry, a supporter of the Obama campaign, echoed these sentiments this summer saying, "I didn't read the full report because I got it from them straight."

(Source)

Lastly, I thought I'd close with something fun.  Hillary was giving a big foreign policy speech at a campaign event in DC a week ago, and she got a surprise guest at this event.  And oh yeah, she was joined on that stage by - you guessed it - all those top brass who're backing her in this election (they really ARE stepping up to the plate for this lady!).  Take a look...

Gotta love Ellen Degeneres!

This woman is ready to lead on day one.  Those officers know it and so do millions of other folks.  If you want to see her make it to the White House - if you want her answering that phone with it rings in the middle of the night then we've got to dig deep and send her some love...

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Thanks gang - together we can make this happen!