A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Crackdown in Iraq spurs violent day “Iraqi insurgents, using a suicide bomber to explode a fuel tanker, waged one of their biggest assaults in months on a joint U.S. and Iraqi outpost yesterday, killing two U.S. soldiers and wounding 17 others.” (READ MORE)
Iran cash lapse puts nuke plan in peril “The opening of a Russian-built nuclear power plant in Iran could be delayed because Iran has fallen behind in payments, Russian officials said yesterday.” (READ MORE)
In S.C., Sen. Clinton Targets Black Vote “Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York courted black voters, considered crucial to securing the Democratic presidential nomination, in a series of campaign stops in South Carolina on Monday in which she cast the 2008 election as a chance to make history.” (READ MORE)
Army Fixing Patients' Housing “Walter Reed Army Medical Center began repairs yesterday on Building 18, a former hotel that is used to house outpatients recuperating from injuries suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan and that has been plagued with mold, leaky plumbing and a broken elevator.” (READ MORE)
Terrorist Networks Lure Young Moroccans to War in Far-Off Iraq “In the Arab world, this hilly North African city is about as far as you can get from Iraq. But for many young men here, the call to join what they view as a holy war resonates loudly across the 3,000-mile divide.” (READ MORE)
BREAKING: Scores choke in poison gas attack “A cloud of deadly toxic gas engulfed an Iraqi town Tuesday, killing six people and leaving dozens of others choking on fumes after a tanker carrying chlorine exploded outside a restaurant. An Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said the blast in the town of Taji, 12 miles (20 km) north of Baghdad, was caused by a bomb on board the tanker.” (READ MORE)
From the Front:
Bill Roggio: The Tarmyia Suicide Attack “Attack on a U.S. Combat Outpost is an old al-Qaeda tactic - Monday's suicide and subsequent conventional attack on a U.S. Army Combat Outpost (or COP) in the city of Tarmyia claimed the lives of two U.S. soldiers, and wounded another 17. The attack took place in broad daylight, and involved two to three suicide car bombers, followed up by a conventional assault on the compound.” (READ MORE)
Bill Roggio: Al-Qaeda regroups in Pakistan “The American intelligence community finally recognizes al-Qaeda command has regrouped in Pakistan - Throughout the course of 2006 and through 2007, I documented the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the Northwest Frontier Province, and in Baluchistan.” (READ MORE)
Mohammed: Bombs strike again but hope remains. “As we expected in the last post, the terrorists committed another crime against civilians by detonating two bombs in a market area. Although soldiers and policemen are filling the streets, the terrorists are too coward to face the troops and choose to massacre unarmed civilians instead. What are they trying to prove with these cowardly acts?” (READ MORE)
GWOTdotUS: The Reality of War “…Many of my fellow Americans feel that this war is distant, that it concerns them none. Heck, they don’t even know anyone in the service or haven’t even had a family member in the service in all of the generations. This poem shows them that they have known someone in the service, whether they realize it or not.” (READ MORE)
Acute Politics: Faces in the Crowds “Every time I get into a conversation about Iraq with someone back home, they ask me what the kids are like, or what the people are like, or what the women do. Normally, the only time I see given to the Iraqi people in the news is for the numbers of the dead, and the rantings of radical Muslims. I can look around me as I go on patrol and see faces everywhere that belong to neither group.” (READ MORE)
Badger 6: Badgers Down: Prelude “Falluja, Al Anbar, Iraq. I walked into the supported unit’s Combat Operations Center (COC) a little before 1400 on February 7, 2006. ‘Hey Badger 6. You showed at just the perfect time, we need to call your 3 element off of their current mission. A CH-46 went down and we need to get out there.’” (READ MORE)
On the Web:
David Limbaugh: Racing for Defeat “I hope those who dismissed the consequences of a Democratic takeover in Congress last November are beginning to see the error of their ways.” (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: Priceless politics “Are the taxpayers being asked to support municipal golf courses so that the poor and the downtrodden can play? Not bloody likely.” (READ MORE)
Patrick J. Buchanan: Baghdad on the Potomac? “Both houses of Congress have now gone on record opposing Bush's dispatch of 21,500 more troops to Iraq. Yet neither house is willing to end U.S. involvement by cutting off funding for the war.” (READ MORE)
Cal Thomas: Congressional 'Indian Givers' “This is what a majority in the House did last week when they ‘gave’ their support to American forces fighting to stabilize Iraq and defeat our enemy and then promptly took it back.” (READ MORE)
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann: Hillary Clinton's Bad Judgment on Iraq Vote “What kind of president would Hillary Clinton be? To grasp the essence of how her Administration would run aground, watch the way she's handling the Iraq War controversy right now.” (READ MORE)
Jules Crittenden: Tet for Tat? “Frontal assault on a base in Iraq kills two. This raises a question I’ve been wondering about. We’ve seen surge results, and we’ve seen the brief peace broken. No surprise here. Obviously it is to the benefit of the enemy to paint the surge as a failure, and well with the enemy’s capability to keep launching attacks. They can continue launching sporadic attacks as they are able, and the Surrender Camp will seize on them as signs of failure.” (READ MORE)
Crazy Politico: More Reindeer Games “Congress is getting ready, after their short hiatus, to start playing more reindeer games with Iraq. Since they know that an actual vote to defund Iraq won't pass, guys like John Murtha are now looking instead towards ideas like setting training bars so high for military units that they can't be deployed anytime in the next couple of years.” (READ MORE)
Victor Davis Hanson: Tapping Ahmadinejad’s Egg “We all know the Iranian M.O. — nuclear proliferation, Holocaust denial, threats to wipe out Israel, vicious anti-Western rhetoric, lavish sponsorship of terrorists at work attacking Israel and destabilizing Lebanon. If that were not enough, we now learn that Iran has been sending agents into Iraq to destroy the fledgling democracy and supplying sophisticated roadside bombs to blow up Americans.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: Video: What’s worse, an Al Qaeda nuclear attack or the teachers’ unions? “The answer may surprise you!” (READ MORE)
Patrick Ruffini: How to Oppose Hillary “Yesterday's New York Times seems to be speaking in forked tongues on the subject of Hillary Clinton. On the one hand, her critics are more marginalized than ever. But don't worry -- those left behind are just as hate-filled as ever:” (READ MORE)
Kim Priestap: Bob Woodward Says What the Dems and Media Refuse to Acknowledge “NewsBusters has a great post (link via Lucianne) that outlines Bob Woodward's comments to Chris Matthews on Iraq War. He stated what no one else in the media wants to acknowledge: that the war in Iraq is as much the Democrats' war as it is the Republicans' and Bush's. Check this out. First Bob said this:” (READ MORE)
N.Z.: White Flag Incumbents and Victory Candidates “With the nonsensical dance of nonbinding resolutions in the House and Senate over (for now), it is time to focus on more productive activities. Namely: looking forward to 2008, and beginning the task of idenitfying opportunities for victory-oriented candidates to unseat White Flag incumbents.” (READ MORE)
TigerHawk: Iran's declining oil and gas production and the nuclear power excuse “The Wall Street Journal is running a couple of articles this morning that highlight Iran's growing energy crunch. Consumption of electricity and gasoline are rising and the country's production is stagnant to falling because of insufficient capital investment.” (READ MORE)
Dymphna: The Feminislamists: Women of Woe “Over at Brussels Journal, Fjordman has an essay which describes how feminism leads to the oppression of women. He’s right, of course. I sneaked away from “feminists” the same way I backed off from academia, though I had originally thought to make my intellectual home in both places.” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Hillary ‘Alf Landon’ Clinton “In the novel, “Bonfires of the Vanities,” the scared white mayor tried to appease black voters by giving awards to black leaders. An aide derisively called them ‘plaques for blacks.’ In real life, Hillary does him one better:” (READ MORE)
Right Wing Nut House: A Rock, A Hard Place, and The Deep Blue Sea “When I wrote back in September about Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s “Faustian Bargain” with the tribes of North Waziristan, counterterrorism experts predicted disaster. I summarized their concerns for The American Thinker: ‘More ominously, another country now has a terrorist state within a state operating virtually free of the control of the central government but with one potentially catastrophic difference:’” (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: "Field of Dreams" Diplomacy “In Kevin Costner's last decent movie, Field of Dreams, the story was encapsulated by the repeated quote, ‘If you build it, he will come.’ This seems to be the same fantasy underlying diplomacy in the Middle East. Unfortunately the Middle East is film noir to the Field of Dreams fantasy wish-fulfillment.” (READ MORE)
Scott Johnson: CAIR supports terror: A case study “After his acquittal of certain terrorism charges and a hung verdict on others, Sami al-Arian pleaded guilty to one count of providing financial assistance to a terrorist organization -- Palestinian Islamic Jihad, of which al-Arian was the North American leader. Judge James Moody sentenced al-Arian to the maximum time on the charge and addressed a few choice words to al-Arian:” (READ MORE)
McQ: Why Hillary won’t apologize for her vote “The other day, in answer to the Iraq war vote question which seems to dog Hillary Clinton at every appearance, she answered:
‘If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast a vote or who has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.’” (READ MORE)
Curt: Democrats Trying To Circumvent The Constitution “First we had Murtha trying to usurp the President's power granted to him by our Constitution, now Senator Levin and Biden are getting in on the act....shocking I know:” (READ MORE)
ChickenHawk Express: Another Haditha Marine Family Speaks “Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich is a Marine charged in the Haditha incident. His story has received more attention than the others because he actually spoke out against John ‘Slow Bleed’ Murtha. Staff Sgt Wuterich and his family have been subjected to intense scrutiny ever since Murtha decided the Marines were guilty without a trial. I can't imagine what a situation like this does to someone, much less their Mom and Dad.” (READ MORE)
Dan Riehl: McCain Should Shut Up And Sit Down “Maybe he's feeling shunned by the MSM and the Sunday talk shows and wanted to give them a reason to have him on. There's nothing wrong with admitting mistakes have been made in Iraq, but that's already been done. Also, Rumsfeld came to the Pentagon to modernize it, not fight and win two wars in record time - which he did.” (READ MORE)
Cassandra: Best Things Never Said “How do so-called 'timeless quotes' get into our collective consciousness? And why are they so often wrong -- and so often misattributed, or as my small sons and I used to quip in one of the malapropisms we delighted in making up, why do we so often "dismember" them? And what do we do when we find out we've gotten it wrong?” (READ MORE)
John Hawkins: The Democrats Oppose An American Victory In Iraq “Initially, the Democrats were just pushing the non-binding resolution opposing the surge and were holding off on cutting funds for the war. But now, they're escalating in the house and John Murtha and company are actually going to try to block the surge. Why?” (READ MORE)
Fuzzilicious Thinking: The Wounded are "Combat-Addled" Druggies “That title offend you much? Well, that's how the Washington Post paints wounded American warfighters. Yesterday they published a story about a run-down facility off the Walter Reed grounds that houses some of the outpatients. I have some thoughts about what can be done to help, but that's a separate post.” (READ MORE)
Greyhawk: The Beast of Abu Ghraib “Colonel Janis Karpinski blogs at the Huffington Post. She seems to be writing as if the event described is well known, a failure perhaps shared by many with an over-developed ego. Or maybe the details she excludes are just, well, not supportive of her point. Anyhow, here she is - endorsing an upcoming film:” (READ MORE)
Confederate Yankee: More Fauxtography “You would think that after the downfall of Adnan Hajj that the professional media would have developed a sharper eye for noticing crudely PhotoShopped photographs, but even though Charles Johnson and others debunked a crude Iranian PhotoShop purporting to show U.S. munitions being used to subvert the government of Iran over the weekend, it didn't keep the ever-gullible L.A. Times from running the photo today.” (READ MORE)
Wretchard: The Jihad in Indochina “A little background research on the insurgency in Thailand's south turned up the little-known fact that it is Southeast Asia's deadliest insurgency. About 1,200 people have been killed in connection with it in the last decade but fully one thousand of those have been since 2004.” (READ MORE)
Have an interesting post or know of a "must read?" Then send a trackback here and let us all know about it. Or you can send me an email with a link to the post and I'll update the Recon.
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