A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
Immigration Bill Gets 2nd Chance - The top Democrat and top Republican in the Senate last night said the immigration bill, which stalled last week, will be revived and back on the Senate's agenda next week. (READ MORE)
Reid Adjusts Antiwar Strategy - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has refocused his antiwar crusade as his and Congress' job-approval ratings plummet to all-time lows. (READ MORE)
Hamas Takes Control of Gaza - Hamas fighters took over two security command centers and vanquished the rival Fatah's movement in the Gaza Strip yesterday, prompting beleaguered Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the Hamas-Fatah unity government. (READ MORE)
States Can Put Rules on Use of Union Fees - The Supreme Court yesterday ruled unanimously that states may require public-sector labor unions to get permission from workers before using their union fees for political activities. (READ MORE)
Takeover by Hamas Illustrates Failure of Bush's Mideast Vision - Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared. (READ MORE)
Libby Loses Bid to Stay Out of Jail For Appeal - A federal judge ordered Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff to surrender in six to eight weeks to begin serving his 30-month prison term, increasing the pressure for President Bush to decide soon whether he will pardon the only administration official prosecuted in a White House leak... (READ MORE)
Abbas Dissolves Government As Hamas Takes Control of Gaza - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian government Thursday and declared a state of emergency after rival Hamas forces took complete control of the Gaza Strip in what the Islamic movement called the territory's "liberation." (READ MORE)
From the Front:
Badger 6: Lucky To Be in al-Anbar Province “Normally I don't comment on readers comments or the comments on other blogs and discussion boards that have linked to Badgers Forward for two reasons. First and foremost is that I want to set the tone for the discussion; second is it would simply take too much time and I would never get to write about anything else. That being said, I am going to make a little exception because I think it points to a fundamental problem with the discussion of our mission in Iraq.” (READ MORE)
Matt Sanchez: Oil, Oil, Everywhere but not a Drop of Fuel! “For years, I’ve heard the fantastic tales of untapped black wealth beneath the sun-beaten Iraqi earth. So, when the mayor of Fallujah insisted he had no gas to run school and hospital generators, I had to ask the obvious question, where's the gas? From day one, we've seen the slogan ‘No war for oil’ painted on makeshift signs and held up in different languages.” (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Sen. Joseph Lieberman: What I Saw in Iraq “I recently returned from Iraq and four other countries in the Middle East, my first trip to the region since December. In the intervening five months, almost everything about the American war effort in Baghdad has changed, with a new coalition military commander, Gen. David Petraeus; a new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker; the introduction, at last, of new troops; and most important of all, a bold, new counterinsurgency strategy.” (READ MORE)
Peggy Noonan: The Old Affection “Go deeper. That's what I keep thinking as Americans fight the Washington establishment (the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, their big contributors) on immigration. Go deeper. Look at the real emotions driving the struggle as opposed to what politicians and the media claim are ‘the high emotions surrounding this issue.’ You know what I think is the American mood right now on immigration? Anti-immigration and for the immigrant. Against the abstract and for the particular.” (READ MORE)
Kimberly A. Strassel: Green Goodies “First came Big Labor. Then the tort lawyers. What special interest lobby remains for the Democratic majority to reward for services rendered this past election? The answer rests in the ecstatic press releases tumbling out of the nation's largest environmental groups, as they oversee the House's pending energy legislation. That is, if ‘energy’ is the right word for West Virginia Rep. Nick Rahall's green-payoff of a bill. Ostensibly the legislation is a rollback of any energy production advances of recent years. But also tucked deep in its heart is an extraordinary new tool to allow environmentalists to lock up private property across the country. Bill presented; bill paid.” (READ MORE)
Tony Woodlief: Boys to Men “I think Father's Day ought not to be a celebration of every man who managed to procreate, but instead a time to honor those increasingly rare men who are actually good at fathering. But what makes a good father? This question holds more than philosophical interest for me. Though my father left when I was young, and my stepfather found me uninteresting, I now have three sons of my own (ages 7, 5 and 2). Not knowing any better, they think I have fatherhood figured out. They believe Father's Day is rightly my day.” (READ MORE)
WSJ: Congress Loves Coal “The Senate is debating another energy bill -- and the direct cost to the government is already estimated at between $140 billion and $205 billion over 15 years in subsidies, tax preferences and loan guarantees. Most of it will go to ‘alternative’ energy. But now the country's cheapest and most abundant source of normal energy -- coal -- is also sidling up to this federal trough. Is this what the global warmists had in mind?” (READ MORE) *Reg Req*
Bill Roggio: Iraq Report: The Day After Samarra “Yesterday's destruction of the twin minarets of the revered Askaria mosque in Samarra threatens to reignite the sectarian war which began in February of 2006 after the dome of the same mosque was destroyed by al Qaeda in Iraq. Almost immediately after the minarets were bombed, Iraqi and Coalition forces dispatched units to secure mosques and religious sites nationwide and imposed a curfew in the major flash-point cities. Iraqi and U.S. forces also cordoned Sadr City to prevent the Mahdi Army from attacking Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad.” (READ MORE)
Cassandra: Congress "Supports The Troops" “Today America was once again reminded how very sincerely Congress supports our armed forces: ‘Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Thursday that he told liberal bloggers last week that he thinks outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is “incompetent.”’ Reid also disparaged Army Gen. David Petraeus, head of Multinational Forces in Iraq. ...Reid, whose comments to bloggers first appeared in The Politico, also told reporters: ‘I think we should just drop it.’” (READ MORE)
Jay Tea: Pass the popcorn “So, can we call the current kerfuffle in the Palestinian Territories a ‘civil war’ yet? Let's see... we have two political parties that don't like each other. Both parties are outgrowths of terrorist groups who have tried to hide behind the polite fiction that they can have ‘political’ and ‘militant’ wings. And they have decided to settle their differences the old-fashioned way -- killing each other (and anyone else who gets in the way).” (READ MORE)
Kim Priestap: President Vaclav Klaus: Freedom, not climate, is at risk “The president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus hits the environmental nail on the head: ‘In the past year, Al Gore's so-called "documentary" film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain's - more or less Tony Blair's - Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.’” (READ MORE)
Jules Crittenden: Put It On A Bumpersticker “‘I think we should just drop it.’ Harry Reid’s finally laid out his Iraq strategy in bold and uncompromising terms. It came out of the big debate over whether Reid called Peter Pace ‘incompetent,’ which raged all over the Internet yesterday. Not sure why. None of the liberal bloggers on the conference call remember him saying that. Doesn’t matter.” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: John Edwards the witch doctor “John Edwards has solved America’s health insurance woes. And he should know all about medicine because he made millions suing doctors because babies had cerebral palsy.* David Aguilar of the AP reported Edwards has a plan that includes stripping the patents from medicines, which certainly will lower the prices of medicine.” (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: Kindling and Human Events “As Gaza descends toward a primordial state of nature, Lebanon stands on the brink of civil war, and Iraq threatens to unravel into a multi-part sectarian free-for-all, it is worth pulling back and considering the fundamental human conflict between those forces which seek to bring order out of chaos and those destructive forces that tend to create disorder. The tension between order and chaos occurs from the smallest level of biological organization up to higher orders. Homeostasis is a dynamic equilibrium between all the various forces which act upon the organism.” (READ MORE)
Donald Sensing: “Elite” – again “Here we go again. Reporting of the violent takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the AP reports, ‘Abbas, for the first time in five days of fierce fighting, ordered his elite presidential guard to strike back. But his forces were crumbling fast under the onslaught by the better-armed and better-disciplined Islamic fighters.’ The presidential guard is ‘elite’ but it crumbled fast when attacked by ‘better-armed and better-disciplined Islamic fighters.’ So just how was the presidential guard ‘elite’? For some reason, Western media seem compelled to label Arab troops ‘elite.’ Not all of them, of course, but it's an adjective that falls off their keyboards and broadcasts so easily it's become habitual.” (READ MORE)
TigerHawk: Combatants and criminals: Apply the Die Hard standard “I have been otherwise engaged, and am not particularly up to speed on the Fourth Circuit's decision in the al-Marri case. For that you will have to read more learned bloggers. (For those of you equally late to the party, the case essentially holds that an alleged terrorist is entitled to the protections of the criminal justice system if he neither took the battlefield against the United States nor came here at the behest of an enemy state). However, I have read a bit of the mainstream media analysis of both left and right, enough to know that I hope the Supreme Court overturns the decision.” (READ MORE)
Ron Winter: Hamas Crushing Fatah in Gaza Fighting; Is Paris Hilton Ahmadinejad's Decoy? “It's probably be safe to suggest that most Americans are aware that factions within the Palestinian organization are fighting each other somewhere 'over there,' but beyond that they probably don't know and care even less what this means for Israel and the wider western world. Basically, Hamas, the more aggressive of the two sects, is kicking the hell out of Fatah, which ruled for a long time but now is not doing so well. For the time being this is only in the Gaza Strip. Fatah is still controlling the West Bank, but who can say how long that will last.” (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Counterinsurgency Strategy Working So Far - Even Though It's Just Beginning “This is very good news that the Washington Post is trying to spin as bad news (yes, I know you're too stunned to speak). The fifth and final U.S. Army brigade is now in Baghdad and being readied, along with the Iraqi battalions; while the battalions have moved into Anbar. Thus we have completed prepping the battlefield and are just about to commence the actual security operation. The Pentagon has just issued a report titled Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq, June 2007; the report covers the three-month period from February to mid-May.” (READ MORE)
Blackfive: Lance Corporal Daniel Kim - Someone You Should Know “Lance Cpl. Daniel Kim (front row, second from left), 20, of San Francisco, poses with his fellow Marines for a unit photograph. Kim is an unlikely hero who rescued a fellow Marine from an IED blast June 7. Kim is a vehicle commander with A Company, 2nd Assault Amphibian Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 6. RCT-6 is currently conducting combat operations in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. Photo by: Staff Sgt. Matthew M. Joseph.” (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Immigration Bill Resurrected “It's baaaa-aaaaack. The immigration bill will return to the Senate floor next week after a a flurry of deals between Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, and the White House reinvigorated the compromise. Each party will get eleven amendments, and the White House has agreed to spend over $4 billion immediately to secure the border:” (READ MORE)
Blue Crab Boulevard: Laying Down Smoke “For whatever reason, the media continues to carry water for the Palestinian terror group Hamas, even though they just forcibly took over Gaza by force. The AP is shopping their story and the Washington Post dutifully picks it up and touts it.” (READ MORE)
Confederate Yankee: The Seditious Senator Reid “Comfortable among his own kind, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has dropped all pretenses of the insincere ‘...but we support the troops’ mantra utterly by the far left, the Politico reports: ‘Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "incompetent" during an interview Tuesday with a group of liberal bloggers, a comment that was never reported.’” (READ MORE)
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross: Strategic Implications of the Attack on the al-Askariya Mosque “Yesterday's attack on the al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra, Iraq is potentially disastrous. Suspected al-Qaeda bombers knocked down the minarets of the revered Shia shrine that was also struck by a dramatic bombing early last year. It is worth recalling the dramatic effect that the February 22, 2006 bombing of the shrine had on events on the ground in Iraq. In my estimation, no single event has had as dramatic an effect on the course of the Iraq war than that bombing. By late 2005, a number of secular and nationalist insurgent groups had decided to join the country's political process -- which is traditionally how insurgencies are ended.” (READ MORE)
Dymphna: Honest Arab: “We Are Extinct” “Last year, Memri carried several excerpted translations of interviews with Adonis, the nom de plume of a Syrian national who lives in Paris. These interviews didn’t seem to gain much attention at the time; trawling through Technorati and Google fails to bring in a large haul of notices about this man's views of Arab culture. Adonis was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. For his poetry, no less. It is remarkable because Arab culture permits the expression of Truth and Beauty only in its architecture. It has little use for the written word — except for beautiful copies of the Koran (in Arabic only, please). Music as an aesthetic experience has no place in Muslim society, as the Taliban demonstrated so extremely.” (READ MORE)
La Shawn Barber: Whatever It Takes “America may be too good for its own good. The qualities that draw people from all over the world – religious and political freedom, the rule of law, due process, a vibrant economy, and a high standard of living – are the same qualities bad eggs use against us. There are an estimated 10 million illegal aliens in the United States. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the net cost of illegal immigration is about $70 billion per year, which doesn’t include unemployment compensation for legal citizens who lost jobs to illegal aliens.” (READ MORE)
Kobayashi Maru: CO2 Emission Caps: Calling Everyone's Bluff; Ignoring the Wahabbists “Those Canadians. They just don't understand that half the fun in any political debate (or in any sporting contest) is in the rabid, chest-beating, yelling and screaming for one team--and utter demonization of the other. We Americans, by contrast, are skeptical of moderates who throw reasonable-sounding proposals into the political fight ring--or who smile beautifically as my grandmother once did and laud the wonderful athleticism and sportsmanship of both teams.” (READ MORE)
MountainRunner: Finally, a National Strategy on Public Diplomacy “I finally had a chance to go through the so called ‘US National Strategy for Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication’. I'm not impressed. It might be better than nothing, but not much. Whatever she's been doing over the last few months, it's too bad she's not exercising intelligent leadership over American public diplomacy and public affairs. This plan reinforces this sad fact. Holding on tight to her ‘Diplomacy of Deeds’ and ‘empowerment’ of women without acknowledging the inconvenient reality (which is not allowed) of the former and the far from near-term impact of the latter, she continues to focus on second tier goals without initiative or apparent understanding of the power of information in today's environment.” (READ MORE)
Amy Proctor: Civilian Harry Reid Calls Military Leaders 'Incompetent' and 'Yes Men' “Bottom Line Up Front: Harry Reid insults military leaders despite his lack of military service. The Politico reported today that Democratic Senator Harry Reid, in an interview Tuesday with liberal bloggers, called outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘incompetent.’ Reid, who has no military experience whatsoever, also connoted that head U.S. commander in Iraq GEN David Petraeus is a suck up to the President on the war; a yes man “not in touch with what is really going on in Iraq or just trying to make the president feel good.” When exactly was the last time Harry Reid was on the ground in Iraq?” (READ MORE)
Kat in MO: Reid: Pace failed on Iraq war assessment “You know, the only way Reid and his ilk would be happy with the Generals and not accuse them of playing politics is if they stood on Capitol Hill, declared Iraq a loss and requested orders to retreat. But, he knows these guys are easy marks because they are in the military and they are not supposed to make political comments that would place them in one party or the other.” (READ MORE)
Alexander Baldwin: Auf Wiedersehen Fatah “The news continues to filter in as the triumph of Hamas in the Gaza strip becomes apparent, culminating with the Palestinian government being dissolved by President Mahmoud Abbas this past hour. Fatah is running with its tail between its legs (quite literally -- 40 Executive Force soldiers loyal to Abbas had to blow up a section of the Israeli-constructed Gaza-Egyptian wall to escape Hamas), much to the dismay of the Western governments who trumpeted Abbas as the heralded moderate in post-Arafat Palestine. It seems his time is dwindling as a serious power broker in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or in Palestinian internal affairs (the tally for Abbas brokered cease-fires to be ignored the next day is in the teens).” (READ MORE)
Fern Sidman: The Birth of "Hamastan" “June 14 - According to breaking new reports from Gaza, the escalation of infighting between Hamas and Fatah forces has reached a zenith, with Hamas claiming victory after conducting a series of execution style killings of Fatah members. Over 80 Palestinian terrorists have been killed in Hamas-Fatah factional fighting since Sunday. Hamas declared that it had taken control of the town of Rafiah in southern Gaza after blowing up the Fatah headquarters there. All of northern Gaza is already under Hamas control. According to an Arutz Sheva report of 6/14/07, "Fatah was beaten so badly that Egyptian reports said 40 PA officers broke through the Gaza-Egypt border fence and fled to Sinai for safety.” (READ MORE)
Stop the ACLU: The Environmentalists’ War on the Poor “Denver has recently announced a policy that plans to remove 500,000 cars from the road in an aggressive attempt to curb the effects of global warming. This follows on the heels of other plans nationwide to reduce emissions as well as commentary from elites who encourage the further increase in gas prices so fewer people will be able to drive, or at least, will moderate their driving habits. There is on thing that immediately comes to mind about the Denver plan. To identify which 500,000 cars will be taken off the road, line up every resident with a car and have them organized from poorest to richest.” (READ MORE)
Meryl Yourish: War crimes and humiliation in Gazastan “When Israel does this, headlines and editors around the world scream, HUMILIATION! When the Palestinians do it: Not so much. If Israel did this, the world would scream, WAR CRIMES! MASSACRE! ‘In all, 14 fighters and civilians were killed and 80 wounded in the battle for the complex, bringing the day’s death toll to 25, hospital and security officials said. About 90 people, most of them militants, have been killed since a spike in violence Sunday sent Gaza into civil war.’” (READ MORE)
Right Wing Nut House: NETNUTS RIGHTEOUS FURY A LITTLE MISPLACED "It’s days like this that make blogging so much fun… We on the right have had precious little to laugh about lately. The Republican party seems intent on going ahead with the suicidal Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill that is guaranteed to comprehensively alienate the base while comprehensively leading to a Democratic sweep at the polls in November of 2008. We were promised a comprehensive reform of the Republican party. What we didn’t realize is that it would involve shrinking its numbers and losing elections – comprehensively, of course." (READ MORE)
Rep. Thaddeus McCotter: Compassionate Communism "Due to the devotion of Lev Dobriansky and Dr. Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, on Tuesday, June 12, 2007, the Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. The memorial is modeled on the statute of Lady Liberty which inspired the Chinese students and their fellow citizens in Tiananmen Square, and symbolized their hope to realize their God-given and inalienable right to freedom. And, as is indelibly etched in the most ignoble annals of history, it was beneath this statue of Lady Liberty the communist Chinese government’s totalitarian stranglehold tightened and these human beings’ cries to breathe free were choked from their throats." (READ MORE)
DJ Drummond: Twelve Million Invisible People "This one is going to set off the rabid rowdies, I know already, but I have to put this in print. I am a Republican, have been since I was 8 years old and I couldn't understand why more taxes were supposed to be a good thing for regular folks. I am also a Conservative. I believe in the rights and power of the individual, in limited and accountable government, in strong support of the Constitution as it was actually written, and in promoting and expanding American-style to as many places as possible, because no other system works half as well or promises half as much. I am also a fundamentalist Christian, and I believe we are all accountable for those things put into our power to help or hurt fellow human beings. It is not fear of hell which moves me, half so much as fear that I might act of a hellish character." (READ MORE)
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