A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.
On the Web:
Lawhawk: What Pressure? - MSNBC headlines that Robert Mugabe is bucking international pressure after stealing the election this past Friday. What pressure? The UN can barely scrape together a consensus to write a weakly worded statement. Sanctions are being blocked by China and South Africa, and the African Union's members are busy calling Mugabe a hero. For that matter, MSNBC reported that Mugabe was lauded as a hero. Do they not read their own copy? Meanwhile, today's MSNBC report leads with the fact that Mugabe dismisses out of hand the idea of a power sharing agreement, which is the proposal put forth by the African Union. “Zimbabwe on Tuesday dismissed calls for a Kenya-style grand coalition government to resolve its election crisis, saying the way out would be decided the ‘Zimbabwean way.’” (READ MORE)
The Anchoress: Blogger Free Speech, Humanae Vitae - So, these Obama True-Believers are an insecure bunch. It seems to me if you are confident in your candidate, you don’t need to run around doing all you can to silence opposition by shutting down blogs that dare to dislike your guy. When you act like a jack-booted silencer of dissent, you do your candidate no favors. You (and by extension your candidate, even if he doesn’t know you’re doing it) seem more like “liberal fascists” than like champions of free speech and liberty. And the American President needs to be a champion of free speech and liberty, which is why the current American president - unlike some others, does not silence the endless and noisy dissent in books, mainstream media, films, alternative media, whackadoo media or ironic and paranoid plays, and why he liberates people from tyranny and tumult. (READ MORE)
Atlas: IT'S IRAN NOT IRAQ, STUPID - Dr. Andrew Bostom expands upon what I touched on yesterday in his hard hitting analysis: Iraqi “Democratization,” With Shameful Outsourcing of the Real Jihadist Threat—Iran—to Israel. He pulls no punches in his clear, objective sum up of events on the ground in Iraq and hits the nail square on the head. All that blood and treasure in pursuit of a dream like liberal democracy in Iraq is a lovely, fluffy dream, but it is Iran that must be dealt with and now. Reality must be dealt with. “we can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality,” so said Ayn Rand. Fantasists are a luxury we can ill afford and what amounts to as knuckleheadedness, is, at this point, fatal. “According to the London Telegaph, Israel is apparently preparing to neutralize a real time threat—Iran’s nuclear program—while the US apparently has other (absurd and delusional) ‘priorities’ in Iraq.” (READ MORE)
Big Dog: Harry Reid Says Coal and Oil Make us Sick - Harry Reid, the mental midget who runs the US Senate, has declared that coal and oil make us sick. According to the Wizard of Odd we humans take carbon out of the ground and put it in the air and it makes us sick and it causes global warming. The same Harry Reid who could not pour water out of a bucket if the directions were written on the bottom is using his vast intelligence to tell us that all the oil and coal that we use is making us sick. Certainly, the process of combustion causes gases that can, in sufficient quantities, cause illness because, after all, the dose makes the poison (water is poisonous if you drink enough of it). However, we have been using these items for a very long time and we are not all keeling over and dying from noxious gases sweeping across the land. Oil and coal have no other purpose than what we use them for so it is reasonable to assume they are here for us to use just as we are. (READ MORE)
The Captains' Journal: Will the Sons of Iraq Re-emerge as Insurgents? - As background, recall not too many months ago that U.S. forces rolled out a plan to split off the indigenous insurgents from al Qaeda, Ansar al Sunna, former Ba’athists and Fedayeen Saddam. We offered to pay them for services rendered, these services specifically being the provision of security for neighborhoods and intelligence gathering. Basically, we co-opted their services. The Captain’s Journal strongly supported this move, initially called the concerned citizens, but we knew at the time that nothing was cast in stone. Nothing was irreversible, and the progress was tentative. The Iraqi government had to reconcile and incorporate them into the system, and this was pointed out to us by contacts from field grade officers in Iraq at the time. (READ MORE)
Counterterrorism Blog: Al-Arian Contempt Trial Set for August - ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A trial date has been set for August 13th in the case of Sami Al-Arian, who is charged with criminal contempt in a two count indictment for refusing to testify before grand juries investigating Islamic charities with suspected ties to terrorism. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said she expected a "straightforward" trial that would last one day, but Al-Arian's attorney, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, indicated that he would continue to challenge the indictment and suggested the trial may be more complicated. The indictment charges Al-Arian with refusing to testify when called before federal grand juries Oct. 16, 2007 and March 20, 2008 despite a grant of immunity from the prosecution. (READ MORE)
Democracy Project: Obama Just Defined Himself As Unpatriotic - Not having Boone Pickens’ millions, I wager a dollar to your dime if you can prove, by Barack Obama’s own definition, that he is patriotic. At his Independence, Missouri speech (live stream here, or text here or AP report here) today on patriotism, Obama says: “I also believe that patriotism must, if it is to mean anything, involve the willingness to sacrifice – to give up something we value on behalf of a larger cause.” All you have to do is prove that Barack Obama ever personally sacrificed anything tangible “on behalf of a wider cause” instead of just benefiting and personally profiting. That includes working in the various social services he mentions. (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Ethano! - Republicans want to roll back the requirement to roll back corn prices. 51 Republican congressmen have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back the amount of ethanol that must be blended into real gasoline. A Republican Congress allowed this ethanol requirement to be rolled back if it caused environmental or economic harm. It is doing both. Roughly a third of the nation’s corn crop is devoted to ethanol. Corn prices have nearly doubled in the past year (actually an 80% increase). “The (Bush) administration can immediately impact the supply of corn that will be used for food and feed and lessen the severe economic harm facing millions of Americans,” Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte wrote to the head of the EPA on behalf of himself and 50 colleagues. (READ MORE)
David Zublick @ Heading Right!: A Birth Certificate Could Doom Obama - Barack Obama is on fire. The presumptive democratic nominee for president has thoroughly defeated Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, the two of them have apparently kissed and made up, she’s now on the campaign trail hawking his wares, and all is right with the world as far as the Democratic National Committee is concerned. All polls seem to indicate that Obama is beating his republican rival John McCain. McCain himself has indicated that he is the underdog in this race, and has a lot of work to do between now and November. Obama is the oncoming juggernaut that cannot be stopped. Hold the phone. Obama may not even be qualified to run for president. And I don’t mean because of his lack of experience in any of the areas that the commander-in-chief and the leader of the free world has to deal with. No, I mean he may not meet constitutional requirements to run for the highest office in the land. (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: Audio: Rand Beers on how McCain’s captivity left his national security experience “sadly limited” - John Poor of BMI was there when Beers spoke and was kind enough to forward the audio. I wanted to reserve judgment until we had a fuller quote or a transcript; feel free now to judge away. As expected, his point is mainly a rehash of that obnoxious Times piece arguing, per McCain’s anti-Iraq vet colleagues in the senate, that he doesn’t grasp how difficult war is because he spent the Vietnam years merely being tortured instead of in combat. Beers (himself a former Marine and Vietnam vet) actually takes it a step further: Because McCain never got to taste the excitement of the “turmoil” here at home in the late 60s, that too limits his policy vision. (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Video: Harry Reid says energy makes him sick - Harry Reid declared surrender for our economy last night. If anyone has any doubts about the Democratic direction on energy policy, this should dispel them for all time: This isn’t some fringe character, some crazy uncle that one has in the attic. This is one of the Democratic Party’s leadership explaining why he and his party will never allow for extensive increases in domestic supply for coal and oil, the two leading sources of energy in the US, along with natural gas. “Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country, it’s ruining our world. We’ve got to stop using fossil fuel.” That would be great, except that no other mass-market solutions exist. (READ MORE)
Chuck Freilich: What will Iran do, if hit? - Thirty years ago, in his magnificent book on Perception and Misperception, Robert Jervis argued that people’s views are self-reinforcing. Once we believe something to be the case, we further develop an array of arguments to discount those pesky doubts that we may harbor and to fully convince ourselves that our initial position is indeed correct. Opponents of military action against Iran thus tend to be believe that its negative consequences will be broad and severe, whereas those who believe that action may be necessary, if not preferable, tend to believe that the costs are far more limited. Of course, we may all be wrong. But before I offer my own assessment of costs, here is the good news. As I recently wrote in the Jerusalem Post, Iran is highly vulnerable to external pressure and we may never have to reach the stage of military action, if the West gets its act together. (READ MORE)
The Monkey Tennis Centre: Desmond Tutu, Neocon - It took a few years, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu is finally coming around to the idea of using military force to topple dictators and liberate their subjects. In an interview with the BBC, Archbishop Tutu urged the international community to intervene in Zimbabwe, and said he would support the deployment of a UN force to restore order in the country. Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme, the former anti-apartheid leader said: "I think that a very good argument can be made for having an international force to restore peace." This is a welcome development. And if the Archbishop’s going to be consistent, then we can shortly expect him to revisit his opposition to the Iraq war, and perhaps even confer retrospective approval on the Bush administration. (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: Doctors of Death Revisited - One year ago yesterday, two men attempted to destroy the terminal at Glasgow International Airport. It turned out that as many as 6 of the people behind the attack were Doctors. Usually, we think of Doctors as being dedicated to saving lives, yet under certain, thankfully rare, circumstances Doctors can become agents of death. When a future Doctor is raised in a culture that elevates death, hatred, and sadism to idealized heights, it can dangerously skew his development. Islam has long held a strain within it of supremacist based hatred that has poisoned much of the Islamist movement. Since the collision of the modern world and the backward Arab world began in earnest with the influx of Jewish refugees to Palestine in the 1920s, anti-Semitism and anti-modernism have merged and mutually reinforced each other. (READ MORE)
Warner Todd Huston: CNN Finds NEW Way to Count Body Bags, Now in Afghanistan - We’ve taken notice that Iraq is suddenly out of the news now that things are consistently going so well for U.S. forces there. Well, since CNN can’t find much bad to talk about in Iraq they’ve finally found some “bad” news they can use as a needle to stick in the Bush Administration’s collective eye. In Coalition troop deaths in Afghanistan surpass Iraq, CNN has discovered that they can make a body bag contest out of casualties between Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh, joy! “For the second month in a row, U.S. and allied troop deaths in the Afghan war have surpassed those in Iraq, according to official figures tallied by CNN… In June, 46 foreign troops died in Afghanistan and 31 troops died in Iraq. In May, 23 foreign troops died in Afghanistan and 21 died in Iraq.” Stop the presses! And, did you notice that now they are adding foreign troops up because they can’t get enough American deaths to report? Can you remember the last time the American press was worried about the casualties among our foreign coalition? (READ MORE)
Ron Winter: Tanking Stocks, Skyrocketing Oil Prices, Obstructionist Congress Require Presidential Emergency Actions - It is high time for President Bush to declare a national emergency, override objections to drilling for additional oil, invoke a workable national energy policy and stop the manipulation of petroleum supplies and prices by the Congressional Democrats. Precedent for this action comes straight from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Dems number one Icon, who took similar action to put a stop on the market free fall known as the Great Depression. You can also look to Democratic President Harry S. Truman, although he wasn't as successful as his predecessor. Roosevelt started off by declaring that the US was in a state of emergency under the auspices of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. By virtue of that law which hadn't been used since WWI, Roosevelt then took a series of actions to protect banks and prohibit the flow of gold and silver reserves out of the US. (READ MORE)
THE TYGRRRR EXPRESS: Carbon Credits–The next liberal lie - One person I have had the pleasure to get to know over the last couple years is Jonathan Hoenig. He runs a hedge fund known as Capitalist Pig Asset Management. As his name suggests, he is an unabashed unashamed capitalist who worships at the altar of Ayn Rand and free markets everywhere. I have had several conversations with him over drinks and over the telephone. Those conversations are off the record. I consider him a friend, and look forward to sharing drinks with him again the next time I am in his neck of the woods. I will be doing an interview with him shortly, with a heavy part of the interview focusing on oil. Yet today the focus in on the latest attempt at elitist liberals to convince other Americans that the left are not a bunch of liars, hypocrites and screwups. The most recent liberal lie comes in the form of carbon credits. (READ MORE)
Dennis Prager: Why I Support John McCain - Last week, a conservative magazine reported that I would not vote for John McCain for president. The magazine based its claim on a column I had written in May 2007 about why I could not support John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination. The magazine was wrong. Though I did not support Sen. McCain in the Republican primaries, the moment he became the presumptive Republican candidate I endorsed him wholeheartedly for president of the United States. Having not been a supporter from the outset, perhaps my endorsement of John McCain will carry more weight among conservatives who are still undecided about whether to vote for John McCain. My bottom line is this: The gulf between John McCain and conservatives is miniscule compared to the gulf between John McCain and Barack Obama. (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: High-Stakes Courts - Recent landmark court decisions are reminders that elections are not just about putting candidates in office for a few years. The judges that elected officials put on the bench can remake the legal landscape, change fundamental social policies and even affect the way wars are fought, long after those who appointed them have served their terms and passed from the scene. The Supreme Court recently created a new "right" out of thin air for captured enemy soldiers and terrorists-- the right to seek release in the federal courts, something that neither the Constitution nor the Geneva Convention provided. The High Court has also struck down gun control laws as violations of the Second Amendment. Whatever the legal merits or the policy merits of that decision, it is a major change, created by judges. (READ MORE)
Chuck Norris: Oorah! - This past week, Congress approved a $162 billion spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also provides veterans (who have served actively for at least three years) free college educations. That is the least we can do to help these patriots who serve this country so valiantly. We must continue to fight to care for those who have fought for us, particularly those who now are disabled for doing so. As we approach another Independence Day, I've been thinking a lot about all of the great service members who have served, past and present, to provide and maintain the freedom we experience today. While we complain and murmur about gas prices at home, I call all Americans this week to reconsider the costs our service members continue to pay to fuel freedom -- especially those wounded in heart, mind and body. (READ MORE)
Cal Thomas: Unity Is Not Union - In keeping with his "messiah" image, Barack Obama might have been more at home in Bethlehem, Pa., than in Unity, N.H., when he and his "former" nemesis, Hillary Clinton, opened their new act on the road to mixed reviews. We are supposed to forget everything they said about each other during the primaries. They didn't really mean it; or did they? This is why so many people are cynical about politicians. You never know if they are telling you what you want to hear, or what they hope you'll swallow in spite of evidence to the contrary. As recently as late February, Hillary Clinton told "The 700 Club," "...there is a certain phenomenon associated with (Obama's) candidacy dangerously oversimplifies the complexity of the problems we face, the challenge of navigating our country through some difficult, uncharted waters." Has Obama become a ship's captain in so short a time? (READ MORE)
Jon Sanders: When in the Course of Political Doublespeak - In recent weeks, Sen. Barack Obama has found himself having to make two major speeches to address significant, unavoidable issues facing his campaign. The first was his original attempt at addressing his race-mad mentor, pastor, and family friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. This week has seen his answer to questions about his patriotism. Both speeches use the same formula: hearken to America's founding, hail the shining ideals of America's revolutionary liberty, invoke the greatness and even the rhetoric of American luminaries gone by, and then subtly change the focus to suggest that the next step for American liberty is to become a socialized nanny state for the greater good. In the Wright speech, Obama used the phrase "to form a more perfect Union" from the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States as his starting point and brought it to this conclusion, what he saw as the way to make the union more perfect: (READ MORE)
William Rusher: Beware the Supreme Court - It must be fun to be Justice Anthony Kennedy. You show up for a conference at the Supreme Court and almost always find that four of your colleagues (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens) are lined up on the liberal side of every ideological issue, while the other four (John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) are on the conservative side. So all you have to do is make up your mind, and presto! -- your opinion becomes the supreme law of the land. None of this is Kennedy's fault. It's pure happenstance that the Court is so evenly divided, and that his opinion carries the day. But the result is, inevitably, that the Court has come to be called "the Kennedy Court" -- which, in large part, it undeniably has been. In the 2007-2008 term just ended, of the 11 major cases that resulted in a 5-4 split, Kennedy voted with the majority (or, in other words, provided the winning vote) in seven of them. (READ MORE)
Bill Steigerwald: Your Right to Bear Arms - Constitutionalists everywhere cheered the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday, June 26, affirming that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms. The 5-4 vote in District of Columbia v. Heller struck down Washington's super-strict ban on handguns and ended decades of debate about whether the Framers meant to constitutionally protect the gun rights of all individuals or only those who were members of militias. No one was happier on Thursday morning than Bob Levy, the senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. He spent a lot of his own money and five years of careful legal plotting to make sure Heller made it to the high court. I talked to him by telephone from his office in Washington shortly after the decision was announced: (READ MORE)
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison: Citizens' Rights Reloaded - The District's gun ban had prohibited residents from registering handguns and keeping them in the city. Immediately after the ban was imposed in 1976, the homicide rate dropped and it has leveled off in recent years, after peaking in 1991. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark decision protecting constitutional rights by overturning the District of Columbia's ban on individuals owning handguns. The consequences of that decision will be felt throughout the nation. Because of the high court's decision to affirm the Second Amendment as an individual right, local, state and federal governments will have a much harder time infringing on citizens' rights to protect themselves and their families. This is the biggest victory for individual rights in decades. (READ MORE)
Doug Wilson: The Missing Long Term Solution to the Energy Dilemma - The energy problem is not new. For the past thirty-five years, seven presidents, beginning with Richard Nixon, have called for the U.S. to free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. We in fact have gone backwards. We are more dependent today than we were thirty years ago. We have also made very little progress in implementing energy alternatives that strip oil of it’s strategic signficance on a world wide basis. In other words, over the past thirty years we have had a lot of political rhetoric, but very little progress. Here is an opportunity for conservatives to frame a long term solution to the problem. We can and should take the lead! I suggest a three pronged approach. Number one long term priority: A commitment to set us free from our dependence on oil as a transportation fuel. (READ MORE)
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