A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Obama, Clinton Sparring Early “Standing in front of a large banner that blared "Clinton," surrounded by students in Clinton Community College sweat shirts, Sen. Barack Obama offhandedly mentioned the obvious.” (READ MORE)
Insurgents Burn Homes in Shiite Area “The armed men who entered a village in Diyala province Saturday after sunset seized the residents' weapons and made a request that turned out to be an ultimatum.” (READ MORE)
Mexico Tries a Slower Path To Changes on Immigration “When President Bush lands in the Yucatan colonial city of Merida on Monday night, he will encounter a new Mexican government that wants the same thing the old one wanted: comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.” (READ MORE)
Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile “European Officials Say Traits of Suspected Islamic Extremists Are Constantly Shifting” (READ MORE)
Bush defends surge in Bogota “President Bush yesterday braved a different kind of terrorism, from paramilitary groups that control parts of this South American country, and found himself defending his new troop increases to combat terrorism halfway around the globe.” (READ MORE)
CAIR OK'd to meet in Capitol “A House Democrat has arranged for a conference room in the Capitol building to be used tomorrow by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group criticized for its persistent refusal to disavow terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.” (READ MORE)
U.S.-Iran rift exposed at Baghdad meeting “A rare encounter between Washington and Tehran over the weekend exposed the deep differences between the two countries, with the chief participants unable to agree whether they talked at all.” (READ MORE)
From the Front:
Duke in Iraq: Heroism “I have been thinking about three words lately and those are: courage, bravery, and heroism. It seems like they are often used interchangeably, but as I went to the dictionary for a precise definition I received an education. As I thought about these words, I thought courage was a willingness to be brave and bravery was when you really had to come through when things were scary or going very badly. Here are the actual definitions:” (READ MORE)
Badger 6: Badgers Down: Memorial Day “Some days you dread. Some days you hope will never arrive, or if they are inevitable, you hope you do not know exactly when that day will arrive or in what guise. Then there are days you dread and you know exactly when they are going to arrive. Following the deaths of SGT Holtom, SGT Clevenger, and PFC Werner, this day had become an inevitability: Memorial Day, 13 February 2007.” (READ MORE)
Bill Ardonlino: An Interview with a Civil Affairs Marine “Marine Staff Sergeant Tyler Belshe has a hard job. In addition to the natural difficulty of winning hearts and minds in a xenophobic city iconic among Arabs for resistance to occupation - the birthplace of insurgency in Iraq - he navigates bureaucratic hurdles regarding what types of reconstruction money are authorized to be spent on what, works with a constantly evolving mission, limited manpower, residents unaccustomed to doing for themselves, poorly functioning provincial and national Iraqi governments, language and cultural difficulties, and more challenges ... all while insurgents try to kill him.” (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Robert D. Novak: Hillary, King and Goldwater “While Hillary Rodham Clinton came out second best to Barack Obama in their long-range oratorical duel at Selma, Ala., the real problem with her visit there a week ago concerned her March 4 speech's claim of her attachment to Martin Luther King Jr. as a high school student in 1963. How, then, could she be a ‘Goldwater girl’ in the next year's presidential election?” (READ MORE)
Michael Barone: A Tale of Two Crimes “‘History will be kind to me,’ Winston Churchill once said, ‘for I intend to write it.’ Indeed, he did. His multiple-volume histories of the two world wars are still widely read, though discounted by professional historians as incomplete and in some ways misleading.” (READ MORE)
Suzanne Fields: Nobody Here but Us Believers “There are no atheists in foxholes, as any dogface soldier could tell you, and neither are there many atheists in politics.” (READ MORE)
Dinesh D'Souza: The lie that Bush lied “If you want to know how the Iraq debate got so acrimonious, the tipping point was when mainstream Democrats went from accusing Bush of bungling the Iraq war to accusing him of lying to get America into that war.” (READ MORE)
Star Parker: Today's NAACP symptom of black problems “Bruce Gordon, who has resigned as president of the NAACP, got a crash course in the difference between the world of politics and the world of business.” (READ MORE)
Mike S. Adams: Julio Pino: Islam’s Most Effeminate Jihadist “I’m beginning to feel sorry for Julio Pino. After his department chair ‘outed’ him as the man behind the pro-Jihadist website ‘Global War’ he’s apparently been getting some threatening messages from people not tolerant of the religion that likes to kill innocent Christians and Jews.” (READ MORE)
Some Soldier’s Mom: My Guys Are Gone... Again “My Guys left for Iraq today... again. I wasn't at Fort Benning as I was in 2005, and my son didn't deploy this time, but I found myself thinking about my other ‘sons’ all day -- Vinny & Rob. This time the Guys are married (both of these and many others will miss their first wedding anniversaries)...” (READ MORE)
Bryan Preston: Montel Williams ambushes military families “I haven’t watched an episode of Montel Williams’ talk show in at least a decade. But I’ve heard from people who have caught his show that he’s gone moonbat on the war. One can be against the war and treat military families with respect. Or not.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: (Video) UPI reporter gets emotional over Iraq; Update: Clip added “A reader in Thailand e-mails to say he caught this on C-SPAN yesterday and remembered our post about her from January 14. That clip got plenty of play at the time from righty blogs simply due to the gawk factor involved in watching a reporter who’s more interested in winning the war than revisiting Bush’s mistakes.” (READ MORE)
Dean Barnett: Still Taking Kos Seriously “I feel an odd obligation to address the Democratic presidential candidates’ withdrawal from a Fox News-sponsored debate. After all, Kos is my beat, and this story is about him. The first story I wrote for the Weekly Standard, the one that provided me entrée into the hallowed halls of the punditocracy, was titled ‘Taking Kos Seriously.’ I wrote the piece in February of 2005, ten short months removed from Markos’ infamous “screw them” moment. I concluded the article by saying, ‘Moulitsas leads an influential movement, a movement whose influence is likely to grow even larger.’” (READ MORE)
Jay Tea: Gee, I never saw this coming... “Last week, Kim posted a piece here that triggered my ‘well, duh’ reflex. In that posting, she linked to a study that showed that illegal aliens are more likely, statistically speaking, to break other laws than legal aliens or citizens. The ‘well, duh’ was not aimed at Kim, but rather the study. The conclusion, couched in scientific and scholarly lingo, was that folks who willingly break one law or set of laws will have no compunction about breaking other laws to achieve what they want.” (READ MORE)
Augean Stables: Narcissism’s Brittle Identity: Shrinkwrapped on Self-Criticism “And here we get at one of the key ‘sins’ of the ‘progressive left.’ They have systematically given the Palestinians this sense of specialness, fed their sense of grievance, and encouraged their immediate recourse to conspiracy theory to explain anything that might undermine that sense of specialness. By making the Palestinians their ‘chosen people,’ the ‘Left’ has done their self-appointed job of countering the outrageous notion that the Jews are the ‘chosen people’.” (READ MORE)
TigerHawk: The Berger/Libby disparity “Michael Barone, like many conservatives, wonders at the arrestingly different treatment of Scooter Libby and Sandy Berger, a topic on which many of us have written before. Unfortunately, Barone dodged the question that has dogged me since Sandy Berger got past his rather egregious violation of national security with a slap on the wrist…” (READ MORE)
Baron Bodissey: L’Allée de la Perdition “In his 1968 novel Damnation Alley, Roger Zelazny depicted a post-apocalyptic future in which the heartland of America has been turned into an anarchic and radioactive wasteland, leaving only isolated enclaves of civilization on the east and west coasts.” (READ MORE)
Blue Crab Boulevard: A Bad Harvest “The myths of ethanol get a thorough airing by the Associated Press today. This is a long article that examines a lot of different issues and questions about the sudden ethanol craze. (It is a Yahoo News link, so it will expire, sorry). But a few highlights stand out.” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Lefties eat their own “A bunch of lefty protesters gathered Sunday outside the home of a government official to demand that the U.S. cut off funding for the war in Iraq, the AP reported. The official’s name: Nancy Pelosi.” (READ MORE)
Right Wing Nut House: Did UN Agency Serve as ATM for North Korea? “That’s the title of this Chicago Tribune jaw dropper about the United Nations Development Program – an agency largely funded by US tax dollars – and how the North Koreans ripped them off to the tune of $150 million while the clueless bureaucrats did nothing:” (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: Guilt & Repetition “The Democrats in Congress have come up with yet another way to register their displeasure with the war in Iraq. ‘Democrats Rally Behind a Pullout From Iraq in ’08’ Those if us who take note of the positive news coming from Iraq, despite its conspicuous absence from the MSM, with the surge barely underway (significantly decreased violence in Baghdad, downward slope in sectarian killing, increasing agreement on the distribution of oil revenues, a revitalized political process, the disappearance of Muqtada al-Sadr, etc) must question the behavioral underpinnings of the Democratic party's manifest behavior. A few facts are irrefutable:” (READ MORE)
Jules Crittenden: Assailable Position “Because the greenhouse gas nazis are such a reasonable crowd, hard to imagine that The Great Global Warming Swindle’s ‘climate denial’ scientists could be shunned, threatened with death.” (READ MORE)
McQ: For most, further involvement in Iraq boils down to this “And, surprisingly, the LA Times says it very well: ‘This is not to say that Congress has no constitutional leverage - only that it should exercise it responsibly. In a sense, both Bush and the more ardent opponents of the war are right. If a majority in Congress truly believes that the war is not in the national interest, then lawmakers should have the courage of their convictions and vote to stop funding U.S. involvement.’” (READ MORE)
AirForceWife: Another Reason Not to Trust the Media “Early this week, I received what seemed like a cool chance of a lifetime. Our family support center had received an invitation from the Montel Williams Show to participate in the audience of a program about deployments and the effect that it has on military families. As any military family knows, there is often a great gulf between what we experience and what the public sees.” (READ MORE)
Dan Riehl: Liberals All But Defeated On Iraq Bill “Precisely how it will play out remains to be seen, but read this inside politics post from Chris Bowers at MyDD and you'll know the nutroots has been given a boot right up the butt from the Democrats they so fiercely supported in the last election. ‘If, upon the defeat of this bill, a supplemental without any strings attached will easily pass through the House, then I have serious concerns over the leadership's willingness to even fight for this compromise bill once it is either vetoed or defeated via filibuster in the Senate.’” (READ MORE)
Cassandra: The Unbridgeable Divide “Funny, for all the talk of how the President has divided us, it seems people who complain of bitter partisan division over the war might want to take a look in the mirror: ‘What is interesting about the clash from a psychological perspective is not that supporters and critics disagree, but that large numbers of people on both sides claim to know the motives of people who disagree with them. When was the last time you heard people say that those who disagree with them on the Iraq war are well-meaning, smart, informed and thoughtful?’” (READ MORE)
Neptunus Lex: Why is this so hard? “I don’t know what to think about Global Warming, and it’s driving me rather bonkers. Having lived through a time when we were threatened with an Imminent Ice Age, having had people try to frighten me about Our Fatally Diminished Ozone Layer - whatever happened to that, by the way? - and now seeing the same groups of people agitating for Less Debate and More Instant Action on Global Warming I have inherited the right to skepticism, I believe.” (READ MORE)
Greyhawk: No Military Solution? “Just two months ago, President Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq: ‘The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq's sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis. Only Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.’ While security was obviously priority one, he acknowledged that a military solution alone wouldn't solve all Iraq's problems:” (READ MORE)
Captain Ed: The Democrats And CAIR “CAIR will hold an event in a tony venue tomorrow in the DC area, a panel discussion on the effect of global attitudes towards Islam on American policy. The venue? A conference room in the Capitol building, courtesy of New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell. The organization got access to the room despite the history of CAIR leadership in support of terrorism:” (READ MORE)
The Armorer: DC District Court overturns the DC gun ban. “As I noted Friday, the Federal District Court for DC ruled for some DC citizens seeking to be able to have ‘serviceable and usable’ firearms in their homes - something the DC gun law prohibits, requiring what weapons the DC council reluctantly allows citizens to own to be disassembled or gun-locked, with the ammunition stored separately from the weapon. In other words, the most common peaceable use of a firearm in your home - self-defense, is defacto prohibited.” (READ MORE)
Cool, Calm & Collected: We Are Free! “I am still devastated with everything that has happened, and have plenty of tears to cry...But today was one of those days where I reflected back on the memories, Thanking God I had the chance to love Jim as much as I did... What a blessing!” (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.
No comments:
Post a Comment