A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Maliki, Petraeus Visit Volatile City “For months in this battered city, Sunni Muslim militants took over mosques and used their loudspeakers to broadcast propaganda. So a few weeks ago, U.S. soldiers went to the local market, bought speakers and placed them on a tall, white tower inside their base.” (READ MORE)
Senate Passes Bill Containing Proposals of 9/11 Panel “The Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation yesterday to implement many of the remaining reforms suggested by the Sept. 11 commission, answering its three-year-old call for better emergency communications; more money for cities at high risk of terrorist attacks; and tighter security for air...” (READ MORE)
Sharp Drop in Gays Discharged From Military Tied to War Need “The number of homosexuals discharged from the U.S. military under the ‘don't ask, don't tell’ policy dropped significantly in 2006, according to Pentagon figures released yesterday -- continuing a sharp decline since the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts began and leading critics to charge that the military is retaining gay men and lesbians because it needs them in a time of war....” (READ MORE)
Gonzales: 'Mistakes Were Made' “Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales took responsibility yesterday for ‘mistakes’ related to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year but rejected calls for his resignation from Democrats who accuse him of misleading Congress.” (READ MORE)
Dow falls 243 points on housing “Stocks plunged yesterday on signs of weak consumer spending and deepening turmoil in the housing market, with foreclosures hitting a record high...” (READ MORE)
Pope stands ground on abortion, gay 'marriage' “Pope Benedict XVI yesterday set out ‘nonnegotiable values’ as he urged Catholic lawmakers to oppose laws favoring divorce, abortion, homosexual ‘marriage’ and euthanasia.” (READ MORE)
Calderon condemns border fence “Mexican President Felipe Calderon yesterday criticized the 850 miles of border fence that President Bush and Congress approved last year, saying there are better ways to stop illegal immigration.” (READ MORE)
Pace clarifies gay comment as his 'personal moral views' “The Pentagon's top general yesterday did not apologize for calling homosexual activity ‘immoral’ in the context of a discussion earlier this week about the military's ‘don't ask, don't tell’ policy.” (READ MORE)
Hillary, Obama woo Jewish vote “Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are going head to head for the money and backing of Jewish voters, trying to woo them by asserting their support for Israel and concern about Iran.” (READ MORE)
Islamic Militants in Pakistan Bomb Targets Close to Home “Suicide bombers have recently turned on Pakistan itself as Islamic militants threaten to open a new front in their war.” (READ MORE)
Group Advocating for Muslims in U.S. Gets More Scrutiny “A debate rages behind the scenes in Washington about the financing and motives of the Council on American- Islamic Relations.” (READ MORE)
From the Front:
Omar: Action follows calm... “The front in Baghdad has been remarkably quiet in the last 48 hours, until about an hour ago when we started to hear many explosions in the distance. From the increased activity of jetfighters and the way the explosions sound it looks like a wave of aerial bombing is underway somewhere on the peripheries of the city…not sure yet what's going on but we'll provide an update if we find more info.” (READ MORE)
Michael Fumento: Survey of Afghans Says Time Running Out “Afghanistan may be called ‘The Forgotten War’ but we’d better hurry up and remember it, for time is short. That’s increasingly the word from experts both military and non-military, including an exhaustive survey based on 1,000 interviews with Afghans just released by the D.C.-based -based Center for Strategic and International Studies.” (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Michelle Malkin: All the News That's Fit to Pay For? “The New York Times prides itself on ethical journalism. The company boasts a 57-page ‘handbook of values and practices’ for its newsroom. ‘Our greatest strength,’ the paper intones, ‘is the authority and reputation of the Times.’” (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: Is Newt Gingrich Back “The enthusiastic reception given to a speech by Newt Gingrich at a recent meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee has revived speculation that he may enter the presidential nomination race, after all.” (READ MORE)
Ben Shapiro: Why The Left Hates ‘300’ “300 is not a particularly good movie. The comic-book tale of the battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) brims over with excessive nudity and violence. The dialogue is often laughable -- lines like ‘This is madness! This is Sparta!’ leap to mind.” (READ MORE)
Michael Medved: The Core Of Conservatism: Distinctions And Consequences “In addition to all our other problems in the bitter aftermath of dispiriting electoral defeat, conservatives in 2007 face major challenges of self definition. Who are we, and what issues remain essential, irreducible elements of our political identity?” (READ MORE)
Victor Davis Hanson: Bipartisan Hypocrisy “Recently, several conservative politicians, moralists and evangelicals have been embroiled in scandal. As congressmen, Tom Delay and Duke Cunningham had publicized brushes with ethics laws, while their former colleague Mark Foley and Ted Haggard, who was pastor of a large evangelical church, were implicated in embarrassing sexual affairs.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: (Video) Iraqi police at work “The other day I joked about them working for Sadr in their downtime. Some do, of course, but not all. Check this out. The video was shot last week during one of the Shiite pilgrimages to Karbala for Arba’een.” (READ MORE)
Dean Barnett: What Conservatives Want “Last night I had the pleasure of appearing on TV on our local New England Cable News channel. For those of you who want to remind yourselves how handsome I am or how thick my Bahstahn accent is, the link can be found here. At one point, host Jim Braude asked me how the Republicans can win the presidential election if things remain rotten in Iraq. I responded bluntly with words to the effect of, ‘We can’t.’” (READ MORE)
Jay Tea: Jay Tea Vs. Hillary: This Time It's Personal “Well, there she goes again. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-IL AR NY) has trotted out her classic whine about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ again. Normally, I'd just shrug (or giggle) and MoveOn, but this time she decided to cite as evidence a particularly nasty black mark in our history here in New Hampshire: the 2002 phone jamming scandal.” (READ MORE)
Kim Priestap: About those fired US attorneys “Paul at Power Line has a post about how the firing of the eight US attorneys is not the scandal that the media is portraying it: ‘The alleged scandal over the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys has made it to the front page of the Washington Post as today's top headline. Let's take a look at the Post's story and the scandal.’” (READ MORE)
Atlas: CAIR Throws Out the Christians “At today's CAIR press conference announcing the lawsuit against US Airway ( my favorite terror free airline) CAIR threw out the Christian broadcasting network and a reporter from the Washington Times, reported John Gibson on The Big Story (FOX)” (READ MORE)
Dafydd: America's Newest Civil-Rights Group: CAIR “This truly is ‘media madness,’ as the post category says. The New York Times has just published a virtual hagiography of the Council on American Islamic Relations, our chums of CAIR. In it, we discover that the ‘critics’ of CAIR are all Moslem-hating fanatics -- and Jews:” (READ MORE)
Captain Ed: Gray Lady Uses Skirts To Hide CAIR “The New York Times runs a remarkable article today on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), painting the group as a victim of bigotry and anti-Islamist fear. Neil MacFarquhar uses the latest controversy over Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell's arrangement for the use of a House conference room by CAIR to cast criticism of the group as wholly unfounded:” (READ MORE)
Neptunus Lex: Halliburton, anyone? “I get the impression that the highly self-actualized kinds of people who don’t much care about money, and who don’t much care about ‘success’ - at least the way it’s commonly defined - don’t much care about the rich or the successful, either. It’s the people who care about money, but not enough to actually go out and do what it takes to make some more of it that tend to be unhappy that anyone else has more than they do.” (READ MORE)
John Hawkins: The Non-Scandal Scandal Over The Fired US Attorneys “This silly little, manufactured kerfluffle over these fired US Attorneys has much more to do with the political ineptness of the White House than anything they did wrong. Here's the reality: the 93 US Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President. He can hire and fire them as he wishes. In fact, Clinton fired all 93 of them and replaced them when he was in office.” (READ MORE)
Major Z: Patriots needed. “For those of you who have not heard, Hanoi Jane Fonda (Commie Traitor Bitch), Cindy Sheehan (Crazy Commie AttentionWhore, who used her dead son to gather attention for herself) and the anti-war (but still support the troops--unm, yeah...) crowd have permits to be in three seperate locations surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial this weekend.” (READ MORE)
Flopping Aces: The Fired Prosecutors & The Bias From Our MSM “All this hand wringing and soul searching over 7 fired political appointee's is just plain ludicrous. ‘The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.’” (READ MORE)
Dr. Rusty Shakleford: 300 Most Important Piece of Propaganda Made Since 9-11 “I just saw ‘300’. It is probably the most important movie made since 9-11. I know enough about history to know that the movie was terribly inaccurate. I also know enough about both Sparta that if given the choice of living under the Persian yoke or the Spartan yoke, I'd gladly take Persia. But this movie was fiction. No, more than fiction. This movie was propaganda. But longtime readers know how much I believe in the necessity of propaganda. Propaganda is neither good nor bad. Propaganda is about adding purpose to ideas. It is only when either those purposes or those ideas are bad, that propaganda becomes a problem.” (READ MORE)
Jules Crittenden: Negotiating Positions “George Friedman at Stratfor gives his take on what the US and Iran bring to the table, in the wake of the March 10 chat: ‘… everyone went out of their way to emphasize that the meetings either did not mean anything or that they were not formally one-on-one, which meant that other parties were present. Such protestations are inevitable:’” (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: Nihilism and Oral Rage “Many people have commented on the apparent incongruity of the de facto alliance between the left and radical Islam. On the surface, there appears to be little point of agreement between leftist atheists who are strongly feminist and favor homosexual rights and those who adhere to a fundamentalist Islam which advocates death to immodest women and gays, yet in the deeper structure of both ideologies, there are significant similarities which do much to explain their alliance.” (READ MORE)
Right Wing Nut House: Dems New Industrial Strategy: Manufacturing Scandal “When the Democrats were campaigning last fall, they promised that if they took over the Congress that there would be numerous changes in the way that things got done in the nation’s capitol. Judging by what’s been happening these first months of Democratic rule, I think congratulations are in order.” (READ MORE)
Fjordman: Will the Third Rome Fall to Islam? “I recently read the book The Reformation by Owen Chadwick, about the Protestant Reformation and the situation in 15th and 16th century Europe. It is fascinating to read about Western Europe during a period when it was genuinely dynamic, not the anemic and self-loathing continent it is now. But still, I was also struck by how many similarities there are between the situation then and now.” (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: The Raiders Versus the Intimidators “The news snippet above illustrates how asymmmetric warfare results in the two opposing sides pursuing qualitatively different approaches on the same battlefield. One of the main tactics employed by the Coalition against insurgents’ cells has been the targeted raid.” (READ MORE)
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