A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates - As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national gover... (READ MORE)
Clinton's Foreign Policy Balancing Act - While preparing to give a major critique of the war in Iraq last month, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton read a draft of the speech and added a few lines of her own. (READ MORE)
Same Agencies to Run, Oversee Surveillance Program - The Bush administration plans to leave oversight of its expanded foreign eavesdropping program to the same government officials who supervise the surveillance activities and to the intelligence personnel who carry them out, senior government officials said yesterday. (READ MORE)
House Panel Suspends Its Probe Of Jefferson - The House ethics committee has suspended its investigation into Rep. William J. Jefferson, acceding to requests from federal prosecutors who believe the congressional inquiry could interfere with the criminal case against the Louisiana Democrat, who was indicted this summer on 16 corruption charges. (READ MORE)
Bush: Pakistan is Trusted Ally - President Bush said yesterday that the United States and Pakistan, if armed with "actionable intelligence," could take out al Qaeda leaders, but he did not say whether he would ask permission from the Pakistani president before sending U.S. troops into that nation. (READ MORE)
Russian Navy Covets Mediterranean Sea - Having just staked a claim to the North Pole, Russia is now eyeing the Mediterranean. (READ MORE)
Roads to '08 Leaving Footprint - Former Sen. John Edwards' 2008 presidential campaign has paid nearly $22,000 to offset its global-warming emissions this year, including more than $5,000 a month from April through June, making him the candidate with the largest acknowledged output of greenhouse gases. (READ MORE)
Effort to Reach 6 Utah Miners Frustrated - HUNTINGTON, Utah (AP) -- Teams of rescuers frantically cleared debris from underground tunnels early Tuesday, trying to reach six coal miners trapped by a cave-in beneath more than 1,500 feet of solid rock. (READ MORE)
GOP Field Warms to YouTube Debate - The majority of Republican presidential candidates are backing off their objections to participating in the unconventional YouTube debate. (READ MORE)
From the Front:
Jack Army: Bash Bush “I love the ‘head in the sand’ routine... or is it ‘head in the clouds?’ It's been proven again and again that the President gave the generals prosecuting the initial invasion and all subsequent operations all the troops they asked for. Stop blaming Bush for there not being enough troops. Sure, there were those that said there wasn't enough, but they weren't in charge of anything in the war zone at that time, so their opinions aren't really the one's that counted, then. Please receive your first clue.” (READ MORE)
Ranger Sid: Patience is a virtue... “Our last little trip brought to mind the importance of patience....and how quickly mine runs thin....We had a little gear grinding with our counterparts that we were forced to work with.....It took alot not to say anything out loud....the level of unprofessionalism was a high I've rarely seen in the military…” (READ MORE)
West Coast Notorious: How not to act when your being shot at! “Yesterday we had to escort some Air Force personel to a certain location in Baghdad as we made our way through the city streets we started to take small arms fire just about twenty minutes before we were supposed to arrive at our destination. All I hear is ‘I'm being shot at, move up!’” (READ MORE)
Matt Sanchez: The Military Might? "The 'forgotten war' or the one that should have been remembered, Afghanistan is a place that looks suspiciously like Palm Springs except the women wear Burkas instead of bathing suits. Logically, this is the 'good war', the legal and justified war, but like the sibling to the prodigal son, the son who did everything right, Afghanistan is both neglected and misunderstood." (READ MORE)
W. Thomas Smith Jr.: "Sir, I Will Die For This Post" "A NAMELESS OUTPOST ON A HILL OVERLOOKING THE EUPHRATES RIVER (A classified communications battle-position) — Though it will be several hours before I have an Internet connection, I'm currently sitting here on top of a wall of sandbags, writing away in a tattered notebook, at an outpost in which I cannot disclose its name and location for operational security reasons. So I'll just call it Battle Position Zeb (You'll understand why in a moment)." (READ MORE)
Michael J. Totten: An Iraqi Interpreter's Story "Iraqis who are not American citizens and who work as interpreters for the American military cover their faces when they work outside the wire. Mahdi Army militiamen and Al Qaeda terrorists accuse of them of collaboration with the enemy. They and their families are targetted for destruction. Here is the story of one such interpreter who works with the 82nd Airborne Division in Baghdad. He calls himself 'Hammer.'" (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Ion Mihai Pacepa: Propaganda Redux “During last week's two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged ‘the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism’ and vowed to follow Winston Churchill's lead and make Britain's ties with America even stronger.” (READ MORE)
John Fund: Northern Exposure “Republicans faced a time for choosing last week, when Senate Democrats brought to the floor an ethics ‘reform’ bill that may make it easier for Congress to dole out pork-barrel spending. In the words of GOP Sen. Tom Coburn, the bill ‘not only failed to drain the swamp, but gave the alligators new rights.’ Rather than block the legislation and insist on better reforms, image-sensitive Republicans largely backed the bill.” (READ MORE)
Bret Stephens: Kernel of Evil “It's hard to fault the logic of the sale, announced last week, of $20 billion in U.S. arms to Saudi Arabia, with trinkets going to the smaller Gulf states. The wisdom of the deal is another matter. The Wahhabi kingdom is not, as of yet, an outlaw state: It can buy large quantities of sophisticated weapons on the international arms market from whomever it chooses. If the U.S. does not sell the Saudis upgraded versions of Boeing's F-15 Eagle, the Europeans can sell additional numbers of EADS's Eurofighter Typhoon (the Saudis already have 72 of these wonderjets on order). If the U.S. doesn't sell the Saudis laser-guided ‘JDAM’ bombs, again courtesy of Boeing, they can buy the PR-632, an equivalent munition produced by Ukraine.” (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: A Bridge Too Far Gone “It took a collapsing bridge in Minnesota to alert people across the country to the fact that many other bridges in many other places have been allowed to deteriorate without adequate maintenance.” (READ MORE)
David Limbaugh: Social Liberals Long Shots for GOP Nomination “For the longest time I have believed -- and continue to believe -- Republicans will not nominate a social liberal as their presidential candidate, but even more so that if they do, they will severely handicap themselves in the general election.” (READ MORE)
Bill Steigerwald: The Sun, Stupid “The sun is a furnace of nuclear fusion beyond human comprehension. Although just an ordinary star, it produces an incomprehensible 386 billion-billion megawatts of energy per second. It’s also real hot.” (READ MORE)
Austin Hill: Agenda Items For Social Conservatives: Part I “In the days immediately after Jerry Falwell's death, I know where I was - - on radio talk shows throughout the United States and Canada as a ‘guest expert’ from Townhall.com. My role in those venues was to explain in two to three minutes the impact that Falwell had on American public life (American politics in particular), and why it mattered.” (READ MORE)
Amanda Carpenter: Laptop Liberals Plan Takeover at YearlyKos “The extreme left has grown into an organized, radical 21st century online force, more interested in raising taxes to fund universal broadband than donning hippy headbands.” (READ MORE)
John Boehner: Enough is Enough “Seven months have passed since I handed the gavel to Nancy Pelosi, formally returning control of the House to Democrats for the first time in 12 years. In my remarks to the House that day, I offered a bit of advice to the members of the incoming majority.” (READ MORE)
Steve Schippert: Assisting Misperception On Iraq “Much has been made about the sea change in Americans' general perception of the situation in Iraq since O'Hanlon and Pollack penned their apparently startling observations of tangible and significant security progress in last week's New York Times. But who could be surprised that an op-ed changes perceptions? To be sure, the 'hard news reporting' from Iraq wasn't going to have much of an effect. After all, in the month of July, most readers will be surprised to know that only twelve journalists were embedded with military units in Diyala province north of Baghdad…” (READ MORE)
Ron Winter: O'Reilly's Ratings Must Be Slipping; Attacks on the Base Don't Work “The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News cable channel has long been the show that liberals love to hate. Not that they don't also hate Sean Hannity, but he is offset at least in presence by Alan Colmes, while O'Reilly is a solitary lightning rod. Well, he used to be. But for some time now O'Reilly has been ... off his game.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: (Video) Newt pitches “green conservatism” “He’s making a point I’ve made before myself, that what conservatives really object to about environmentalism isn’t so much the policy as the collateral leftist causes — and loathsome celebrity spokesmen — that come bundled with it. Putting Gore and various fey British pop stars out in front is like signing up Bush and Cheney to spearhead an African anti-poverty drive:” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Surge-ing expectations “Regular readers were not surprised by two stories on the Surge today at the Drudge Report. They are not surprised because I have been following the progress — the polls edging a little up — the violence down — the Democrats getting desperate and scrambling to surrender before we do something foolish and win!” (READ MORE)
The Sundries Shack: Let’s Not Fall for the Propaganda “There’s no doubt that we’re being spun by our enemies. There’s no doubt that the rabid hatred for President Bush is doing us a lot of damage, not only here but also around the world. Much of that hatred is plainly manufactured simply to gain a few extra votes and a couple years more at the Congressional trough. It’s good, though, to hear these facts confirmed by a man who was in the business of instigating that hate.. He’s the highest ranking member of a Communist country every to defect to the West and he deserves our attention. His close:” (READ MORE)
TigerHawk: The dropping of eaves and the arrogance of judges “Andy McCarthy says that the FISA court has unlawfully and dangerously overstepped its authority, and that the only genuine solution is to abolish it: ‘FISA has been blatantly violated, but the Left is not complaining because vindicating “the rule of law” has never been the purpose of its high-minded defense of FISA. It’s a game, and it has always, for every minute, been all about politics. If it doesn’t hurt Bush, who cares?’” (READ MORE)
Richard S. Lowry: Al-Qaeda on the Run “In March of 2003, Abu Musab al-Zargawi was holed up in his mountain terrorist training camp in Eastern Iraq. He had already been fighting Americans for quite some time. He had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan in 2002 but managed to escape to Baghdad, where he was treated and brought back to health in an Iraqi hospital. Once recuperated, he established a terrorist training camp along the Iranian frontier. He selected a mountain perch that would be easy to defend and would also provide a quick escape route into Iran. His men controlled a 300 square kilometer finger of land that protruded into Iran, just east of the ghost town of Halabja.” (READ MORE)
La Shawn Barber: Liberal Bloggers Conference ‘Sea of Middle-Aged White Males’ “It is so funny to hear liberals complaining about the lack of skin color-only diversity at their own gatherings. (Lord knows they complain enough about other groups’ events.) The Washington Post has a write-up about the predominance of middle-aged white men at Yearly Kos, a convention held this past weekend for liberal (political only?) bloggers. By the way, the title of the article is, ‘A Diversity of Opinion, if Not Opinionators.’ It should read, ‘A Diversity of Opinionators, if Not Opinions.’ Different skin colors, not opinions, is the kind of diversity liberals obsess over.” (READ MORE)
Quid Nimis: Fashion Statement: Americans Are Losers, Vote for Me! “I'm not the only one. The day I wrote about the gender confusion/obliteration of the Democrat presidential candidates, James Taranto was interviewed for WSJ Report about the androgyny of same, and how the left-wing press praises this. Barack has feminine qualities, Hillary has masculine qualities, and John Edwards... well, I would say something but then I'd have to go into rehab. Because talking about John Edwards makes me want to drink and drive. Not because any one has any questions about his sexuality. Ever.” (READ MORE)
Dymphna: Send in the Clowns… “Don’t bother — they’re here. The House of Representatives voted today for a big increase in the taxes paid by the large oil companies. It also voted to subsidize clean green alternative fuels. The oil companies will face a burden of $16 billion levied by our economics-challenged representatives. Are new taxes supposed to make our oil companies more productive? Are new taxes going to give America the leading edge in oil production? Or is this new policy simply designed to appeal to the envy vote?” (READ MORE)
Fishwrap: 'Kossacks' on faith “One of the overlooked events from the four-day Yearly Kos convention was a interfaith prayer service, held Sunday morning as most convention-goers left Chicago. Some Daily Kos users complained that reporters skipped the interfaith service at last year's convention and cited the lack of press from the service as an example of how the mainstream media misunderstand left-leaning bloggers. At this year’s service, the 100 Kossacks attending heard from a variety of faith leaders -- including a Muslim from Connecticut, a Quaker from Arlington and an atheist from Phoenix -- about the importance of morality and the need to seek international peace.” (READ MORE)
Euphoric Reality: I Would Rather Die in a Terrorist Attack “Sometimes I go over to Daily Kos. I admit it. I don’t visit there out of a sense of “fairness,” or because I think I need to see how crazy the other side of the fence is. I’m well aware of the Left’s inability to string together anything coherent. The reason that you can find me at Daily Kos, Democratic underground, and other cesspools of breeding ‘progressive’ bacteria is simple. Entertainment. Where else can you read about the adventures of Bush the Weathermaker and his hatred of ‘black people?’ How else would I know that hurricanes aren’t caused by nature but by Republicans?” (READ MORE)
Counterterrorism Blog: War is Deception “Last week, we reported that an FBI agent identified Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) executive director Nihad Awad among those invited to a 1993 meeting of HAMAS members and supporters. On Monday, jurors in the terror support trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) were taken inside that 1993 meeting through transcripts obtained by the FBI. Federal agents were aware of the meeting and wired the Philadelphia hotel where it took place.” (READ MORE)
Jonathan Winer: Paradoxical Policies For Pakistan and Iran “The recent dust-up between the Clinton and Obama campaigns over whether one talks to Iran, followed by Senator Obama's warning to Pakistan that if Pakistan doesn't act against Al Qaeda the U.S could act on its own, provide fresh reminders that beyond Iraq, the U.S. is highly likely to be facing two ongoing -- and distinct -- terrorist threats over the next few years. Although they have some things in common (truly dangerous extremists who who are virulently anti-American), the differences between the terrorist threats in Iran and Pakitan are also profound. And so are the policy options.” (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Britain Discovers Its Retreatist Foreign Minister “When Gordon Brown picked former Kofi Annan deputy Lord Malloch-Brown as his Foreign Minister, Americans groaned at the message that the appointment made towards appeasement and unaccountable internationalism. Americans knew Mark Malloch-Brown from his attack on American free speech last year, and his insistence in 2005 that despite a plague of sexual exploitation scandals and the Oil-For-Food scandal that the UN was ‘not in the mood for more wholesale change.’ Now the British can get to know Malloch-Brown as the man who wants to give away the British veto power at the United Nations -- to the EU:” (READ MORE)
Blue Crab Boulevard: When The Circus Comes To Town…. “There are always klowns. Dennis Byrne reports on the lefty bloggers reactions to Hillary Clinton at the Koz Kidz Konfab. ‘When Clinton spoke the truth at the forum about lobbying practices in Washington, the crowd roundly booed her. Asked about taking campaign money from lobbyists, she pointed out that lobbyists “present real Americans. They actually do.”’” (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Democrat Inadvertently Blurts Out Truth “A spokesman for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL, 95%) accidentally let slip an inconvenient truth... and nobody noticed! (Except the lizards, of course; the lidless eye sees all.) Defending Obama's feckless threat to invade Pakistan if their war against al-Qaeda doesn't proceed fast enough for Obama, Bill Burton spake: ‘The fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn’t agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights proves why Americans want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy.’” (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: Thirty Days of Night “AP military writer Robert Burns looks at Iraq. ‘The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working. In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it's apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year. It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.’ Burns says that progress at the grassroots has not succeeded in bringing politicians together in Baghdad.” (READ MORE)
A Soldier's Mind: Dreams For Democracy “Often here at ASM, we’ve shared stories of Iraqi people that our Troops have helped and shared their thankfulness for the job our Troops are doing in their country. Sure there are those who are so bent on their hatred of this country’s political leadership, that they completely ignore the postive strides our Troops are making, the lives their saving and the hope for a new future they’ve brought to millions of Iraqis. In the past, we’ve featured several other Iraqis who have expressed their gratitude to our Troops for helping to free their people from the oppression of Saddam. When I saw this story, I knew it was one that our readers needed to hear about. This is the story of a man, a native Iraqi, who left his homeland 30 years ago, with dreams of freedom for himself and his family, and eventually came to the United States by way of Canada. That man is now back in Iraq, helping Coaltion Forces and his fellow Iraqis. Meet Rudy Lirato…” (READ MORE)
Bill Roggio Pakistan strikes al Qaeda two camps in North Waziristan "Pakistan strikes al Qaeda two camps in North Waziristan - Artillery, helicopters assault two camps near the Afghan border. As the security situation in North Waziristan and the greater Northwest Frontier Province, the Pakistani military launched an assault on two "militant" bases near the Afghan border. The military struck two Taliban and al Qaeda bases in the village of Daygan with artillery and Cobra gunship helicopters. 'No ground forces were used in the assault,' the Associated Press reported. The attack, which occurred 10 miles west of Miramshah, lasted four hours." (READ MORE)
Fjordman: The West in the 21st Century — Developed or Developing Nations? "In the debate regarding how the relationship between the Old West, Europe, and the New West, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, will be in the 21st century, many observers seem to take for granted that much of Europe will fall to Islam, and that native Europeans will flee and resettle in the New West. There is, however, another scenario that is theoretically possible, but little discussed. What if the opposite happens? There are Europeans emigrating/fleeing to these nations already now, but I think they will discover once there that the problems they are fleeing from are already present in their new homelands. Some of them are even worse there, especially since many of those fleeing will be white, and they will discover that whites are rapidly diminishing as a factor in these countries and that hostility towards whites is rising." (READ MORE)
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