Web Reconnaissance for 05/30/2007

A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.



In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Bush Hits Foes of Alien Bill - President Bush yesterday rebuked members of his own political party for trying to "frighten people" into opposing his immigration bill, prompting a quick backlash from some Republicans. (READ MORE)

Report Confirms Terror Dry Run - A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 and reveals several missteps by government officials, including failure to file an incident report... (READ MORE)

Taliban Learns Tactics, Propaganda from Al-Qaeda - The Taliban has merged its propaganda and field operations with those of the global al Qaeda network led by Osama bin Laden, say senior Afghan officials and the group's former leaders. (READ MORE)

Bush to Name Zoellick to Lead World Bank - President Bush is expected to announce today that he will nominate former U.S. Trade Representative and Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick to replace Paul Wolfowitz as World Bank president, a senior Bush administration official said yesterday. (READ MORE)

Bush to Pick Zoellick for World Bank - President Bush today plans to name Robert B. Zoellick, a career diplomat and trade negotiator, to head the World Bank, seeking to dispatch the leadership crisis that has gripped the institution under Paul D. Wolfowitz, senior administration officials said last night. (READ MORE)

Over Ginsburg's Dissent, Court Limits Bias Suits - A Supreme Court once again split by the thinnest of margins ruled yesterday that workers may not sue their employers over unequal pay caused by discrimination alleged to have occurred years earlier. (READ MORE)

Americans in Iran Accused of Spying - Iran yesterday formally charged three Americans with espionage and endangering national security, the government's judicial spokesman said, signaling a widening clampdown against U.S. citizens in Iran. (READ MORE)

Green Gone Wild in Vegas - 'Gosh, I learned an important lesson," said Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons last fall. "Never to offer a helping hand to anybody ever again." His quip referred to a state program offering tax breaks if businesses built environmentally friendly buildings -- a program that has since triggered a major fiscal crisis. The real lesson here is that politicians ought to think before rushing ahead with a "green" agenda. (READ MORE) *Reg Req*


From the Front:
Gene E. Blanton: Featured Report from Iraq: The Intellectual Grunt – Part One “CAMP HABBANIYAH, AL ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ: According to Mr. Webster - the guy that wrote the dictionary - an intellectual is one who is “engaged in activity requiring the creative use of the intellect.” From the Commanding Officer to the newest Marine fresh out of the School of Infantry, today’s fight demands each Marine in the unit be an “intellectual grunt” who can think on his feet. Nothing could better describe the job of the infantrymen of 3rd Battalion 6th Marines (3/6) in Al Anbar Province.” (READ MORE)

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross: Baghdad: Update on the Security Situation in the International Zone “Shortly after arriving in Iraq, I blogged about the worsening security situation in the International Zone (IZ, also sometimes known as the ‘green zone’). In criticizing the media's coverage of the increase in mortar attacks against the IZ, I noted that the press has failed to answer some basic questions: ‘has there been an increase in attacks, or just an increase in their lethality? When did the IZ begin to see the increase in lethal mortar strikes? Are they being carried out by Sunnis are Shias? What is motivating these attacks?’ At the time I wrote that, my sources in the IZ were unable to answer all of these relevant questions -- but a recent briefing by Major Brynt Parmeter has helped to clarify these critical questions for me.” (READ MORE)

LTC Rich Phillips: Week 19--Progress "Well, progess continues on the hospital. Some major milestones were passed in the last few days. The hospital in now tied in to the main water lines for the FOB. Later it will be tied in to Prime Power. No generators, except for backup power. Ah, the luxuries of progress. One day we will be providing healthcare in a clean, dust-free environment. With no leaks and no puddles when it rains." (READ MORE)

JD Johannes: Not My Time to Go "Mortars are not like on TV. You barely hear them coming and you do not have time to run. Mortars being lobbed onto the International Zone and bases around Baghdad have been the theme in May. I was walking on base a few weeks ago when a series of crashing booms filled the air--a brief high pitched 'shhzzzz' before the next crashing explosion. One of them exploded 25 feet from me." (READ MORE)


On the Web:
Michael Medved: Should Mormonism Disqualify a Candidate? “Mitt Romney’s increasingly credible Presidential campaign raises urgent but uncomfortable questions about his Mormon faith. Does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints constitute a benevolent, mainstream religion or a dangerous cult with a deranged and bloody past?” (READ MORE)

Walter E. Williams: FDA: Friend or Foe? “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is charged with ensuring that only safe and effective drugs are marketed. Such a task is highly complex and fraught with difficulties. Consumers, the ostensible beneficiaries, should examine and question the incentive structure that FDA officials face.” (READ MORE)

John Stossel: The Double "Thank-You" Moment “Some people hate me because I defend free markets. Once someone accosted me on a New York City street and said, ‘I hope you die soon.’” (READ MORE)

Austin Bay: Counter-Insurgency and "The Single Narrative" “In war, the simple is difficult. Given the Internet and the glare of 24-7 news cameras, no war is more complex than contemporary irregular warfare.” (READ MORE)

Ben Shapiro: What I'm Doing To Stop Global Warming “According to the global left, the evidence is in: The earth is warming, and it's all your fault. Don't blame the sun. The giant ball of fiery gas responsible for all climate change over the past few million years isn't the problem. It's you.” (READ MORE)

Michelle Malkin: Doing the Booing Americans Won't Do “The United States government is on the verge of approving a mass amnesty to millions of illegal aliens -- a plan pushed aggressively by meddling Mexican officials who reap billions of dollars in remittances (illegal aliens' earnings sent back to Mexico) without having to lift a finger to clean up their own country. And the thanks we get? Internationally televised public humiliation.” (READ MORE)

David Limbaugh: Keep a Sharp Eye on Warming Zealots “Whether or not blind faith in man-made, catastrophic global warming has become a new religion, many of its adherents, ironically, embrace it with the same type of unquestioning zeal they sloppily attribute to and summarily condemn in Christians.” (READ MORE)

Thomas Sowell: A War of Words: Part II “With gasoline prices rising, political rhetoric is rising even faster. Liberals in Congress and in the media have launched a war of words, whose net result may well be a demand for some form of price control.” (READ MORE)

Maggie Gallagher: 'Hypocrisy' at the top “If you want to know why the immigration bill makes people so mad, just listen to the Bush administration defend it:” (READ MORE)

Cal Thomas: Unending War “Before Congress adjourned last week on another of its lengthy holidays, Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeated a phrase she has previously used about the war in Iraq. She again referred to it as ‘the Bush policy of unending war in Iraq.’” (READ MORE)

WSJ Review & Outlook: The Legal Visa Crunch “The Senate immigration bill continues to take lumps from all political sides, with some criticisms more deserving than others. The vote last week to halve the size of a guest-worker program for low-skilled workers is a big step in the wrong direction; skimping on visas will only lead to more illicit border crossings. But the bill's handling of high-skilled immigration is even more troubling: The proposed changes are worse than current law.” (READ MORE)

Norman Podhoretz: The Case for Bombing Iran “Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.” (READ MORE)

Kim Zigfeld: Russia: Postcards from the Neo-Soviet Union “Reporting in the Times of London, Moscow correspondent Mark Franchetti adds more evidence that Russians have rejected the concept of democracy and are willingly returning to the dark days of Soviet dictatorship, underlining the extent to which we were misled by the idiots who said, during the first cold war, that ordinary Russians were decent democrats who would do the right thing given a chance, and that they could ‘never go back’ to dictatorship once the Berlin Wall fell.” (READ MORE)

John Hinderaker: Alternative Reality at the Associated Press “We have written several times about Jennifer Loven, a reporter for the Associated Press who uses her ‘news’ articles as a platform to push her own partisan agenda, as, for example, when she wrote an AP article critiquing President Bush's environmental policies, without mentioning that her husband was an environmental adviser to the John Kerry campaign. Today, Loven authored an ‘analysis piece’ rather than a ‘news story,’ so she could tell us what she really thinks about President Bush. Not that it's easy to tell the difference. Loven's article is titled The Bush Take on U.S. Opinion. It portrays the President as out of touch and living in an ‘alternative reality:’” (READ MORE)

Jules Crittenden: Plame Game “So Valerie Plame was covert after all. Sort of.* Which raises the question, not particularly well addressed in this NBC article, of why $2 million worth of special prosecution produced only a highly questionable off-topic charge. Newsweek offers a little more but suggests some ambiguity, ‘Was She or Wasn’t She?’” (READ MORE)

Baron Bodissey: Youth Bulges, Violence, and the Fifth Village: “The Game is Over for Europe” “Below is a translation of an interview by Lars Hedegaard of the German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, from the May issue of the online magazine Sappho. The article was translated from the Danish by Zonka, who deserves our thanks for undertaking such a Herculean task. Dr. Heinsohn elaborates on a theme that Mark Steyn has made familiar: the impending demographic collapse of the West, particularly Europe, and the accompanying threat from a surplus of angry young Muslim males.” (READ MORE)

Flopping Aces: Peace: Theory and Reality “Following the 6 Day War and again, after the stunning reversal of the War of Atonement, Israeli troops utterly and completely defeated the Egyptian Army (and with them the army of Syria, Jordan, and troops from Iraq.) Israel had doubled the size of its country, put its cities out of artillery range, and opened up Jerusalem, which had been forbidden to them. But rather then revel in their victory, Israel later gave up most of this territory for the promise of Peace with Egypt in the Treaty with Sadat.” (READ MORE)

Crazy Politico: Explaining Eugene “Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post actually has some pretty good insights into the current presidential race today. Usually I don't agree with him, but I do today on almost everything he says. However, he never actually gets to the point in ‘Losing Focus’; why candidates for an election that is 18 months away are being fuzzy about where they stand. The reason is easy, the election is 18 months away.” (READ MORE)

Ed Morrissey: Media Embarrassment Over Socialist Rhetoric? “Hillary Clinton announced that she would campaign on a platform that would emphasize the need for collective economics and move away from individual performance and success. It could be called an extension of ‘It Takes A Village,’ and it might have been -- had the newspapers bothered to cover it:” (READ MORE)

The Belmont Club: Re-configuring to fight Terrorism “Captain's Quarters examines which political milestones in Iraq may be reached by September and whether the milestones are in fact the right ones. Some of the old ones may no longer be so relevant, suggests Captain Ed, because the US is gradually changing its strategy. Taking a new path. Westhawk definitely thinks the administration will change its strategy in September to one which may emphasize more local alliances and fewer American troops.” (READ MORE)

Augean Stables: Moral Equivalence as Moral Inversion: A Mediation of the Yawning Chasm “Rabbi Avi Shafran has an interesting meditation on the moral chasm that separates Israeli/Jewish culture from Palestinian culture. This essay seems to date to about 2002, but its points remain relevant today. In some senses, this gap is so huge, so terrifying to behold, that anyone not wanting to sound like a moral racist by acknowledging it ends up having to take the kind of position that JeffB took in his exchanges with me in an earlier discussion. When I asked him why, if [what he perceived as] Israeli refusal to admit error infuriated him, he was not frothing at the mouth about Palestinian demonizing and refusal to accept any responsibility, he responded:” (READ MORE)

Jay Tea: Contagious Myopia "Over the past few days, I've noticed more and more stories that seem to not only reflect a certain level of short-sightedness, but 'push' that as a fair reflection of reality.It -- no surprise here -- relates to the fighting in Iraq.I have, since the first day of the invasion, thought of the fighting there as 'the Iraq campaign of the War on Terror.' Just as Pearl Harbor did not result in us declaring war on Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander and architect of the attack, 9/11 did not result in us declaring Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda the ultimate foe." (READ MORE)

Big Dog: Mr. President, I Will Tell You What Is Right for America "I have been a supporter of President Bush since he was nominated by the party over eight years ago. He was certainly a better choice than either of the Democrats running and I have generally agreed with his policies. I support the war on terror and the war in Iraq and I believe that we need to wipe out what people call Islamic extremism but what is really mainstream Islam. I have however, disagreed with him on several issues and the most important one is ILLEGAL immigration." (READ MORE)

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