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)
Obama Leads by 8 Points In Poll - Sen. Barack Obama holds his biggest advantage of the presidential campaign as the candidate best prepared to fix the nation's ailing economy, but lingering concerns about his readiness to handle international crises are keeping the race competitive, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. (READ MORE)
U.S. to Give Czechs Ballistic Missile Defense - U.S. Navy ships in the Mediterranean will provide ballistic missile defense to the Czech Republic under a commitment contained in the agreement to place a U.S. radar site in that country, according to State and Defense Department officials. (READ MORE)
China Expresses 'Grave Concern' Over Indictment of Sudan's Bashir - China voiced concern yesterday over charges by the International Criminal Court implicating Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in state-sponsored acts of genocide in the country's embattled Darfur region... (READ MORE)
Andy Stern's Pensions - The Service Employees International Union is staging nationwide rallies this week, vowing to "Take Back the Economy" from wealthy private equity firms. Based on the evidence of union policies, however, SEIU members would do better to take back their own pensions from their union chieftains. (READ MORE)
More Darfur Posturing - The International Criminal Court's decision to seek an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar Bashir is being hailed in the usual places as a landmark in the effort to stop the bloodshed in Darfur. In fact, the indictment is of a piece with the same toothless moral posturing that has already prolonged Darfur's misery for more than four years. (READ MORE)
Pittsburgh Stealers - The citizens of Pittsburgh are getting an unpleasant lesson in the consequences of punitive taxation, courtesy of their beloved NFL franchise. Inside the Pittsburgh Steeler boardroom, a fraternal squabble is under way over future ownership—thanks in part to a sacking from the realities of estate and capital gains taxes. (READ MORE)
On the Web:
John Hall: A Tribunal Worth Paying For - For years, the United States withheld funding from Cambodia's Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal. Before opening its wallet, Washington insisted that the court meet international standards for fairness and anticorruption measures. That stance has now paid off, contributing to international scrutiny that has led to dramatic improvements in the tribunal's operations. It's now time for the U.S. to contribute funding and preserve the gains its earlier policy has helped foster. This matters because the tribunal represents Cambodians' last best hope of healing the wounds they suffered under decades of Khmer Rouge rule. Roughly one in three Cambodians perished under the Khmer Rouge's Maoist experiment to send the country back to what they called "Year Zero." If Cambodia is ever to find its way to economic growth and a stable, democratic political system, it's important for its former leaders to stand trial for their alleged crimes. (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: Autism Cures? - "New Ways to Diagnose Autism Earlier" read a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. There is no question that you can diagnose anything as early as you want. The real question is whether the diagnosis will turn out to be correct. My own awareness of how easy it is to make false diagnoses of autism grew out of experiences with a group of parents of late-talking children that I formed back in 1993. A number of those children were diagnosed as autistic. But the passing years have shown most of the diagnoses to have been false, as most of these children have not only begun talking but have developed socially. Some parents have even said, "Now I wish he would shut up." I did absolutely nothing to produce these results. As a layman, I refused to diagnose these children, much less suggest any treatment, even though many parents wanted such advice. (READ MORE)
Michael Medved: The Candidate As Cult Leader - Barack Obama isn’t just conducting a political campaign; he’s launching his very own religious cult. Under the headline “Obama Supporters Take His Name as Their Own,” the New York Times reported on a bizarre fad among the candidate’s enraptured acolytes: across the country, they’ve begun adopting his middle name, Hussein. “The result is a group of unlikely sounding Husseins,” writes reporter Jodi Kantor, “from Jaime Hussein Alvarez of Washington, D.C., to Kelly Hussein Crowley of Norman, Oklahoma, to Sarah Beth Hussein Frumkin of Chicago.” One of the key elements in many religious cults involves a name change – like transitioning from Richard Alpert to Baba Ram Dass, or from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X. To Obama’s true-believers, adding an Islamic middle name is a small price to pay for connecting with a candidate who qualifies as a “lightworker” and “an enlightened being,” according to San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford. (READ MORE)
Walter E. Williams: Oklahoma Rebellion - One of the unappreciated casualties of the War of 1861, erroneously called a Civil War, was its contribution to the erosion of constitutional guarantees of state sovereignty. It settled the issue of secession, making it possible for the federal government to increasingly run roughshod over Ninth and 10th Amendment guarantees. A civil war, by the way, is a struggle where two or more parties try to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more wanted to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington wanted to take over London. Both wars are more property described as wars of independence. Oklahomans are trying to recover some of their lost state sovereignty by House Joint Resolution 1089, introduced by State Rep. Charles Key. The resolution's language, in part, reads: "Whereas, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows: (READ MORE)
Michelle Malkin: Diplomas Won't Make Jihadis Go Away, Barack - In all the brouhaha over the New Yorker's satirical cover cartoon of Barack and Michelle Obama, a truly "tasteless and offensive" passage in the magazine's feature article got lost. The magazine piece quotes Obama's recommendations for how to stop jihad, which he had previously published in a local Chicago newspaper eight days after 9/11. It's a self-parody of blind, deaf and dumb Kumbaya liberalism: "We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. (READ MORE)
Brent Bozell III: Less Accessible Obama - The press has been endlessly dazzled with the prowess and the promise of the Barack Obama campaign. Observers of these quivering scribes have to wonder if they don't collapse from exhaustion at the end of the day from all the involuntary spine tingling and shortness of breath over Obama's inspirational aura. One obvious sign the media have been too dazzled is by their utter lack of concern about Obama's accessibility to journalists. Obama may be the least accessible primary winner in decades, but this press avoidance has in no way damaged his standing with reporters, who instead of growing frustrated with said lack of access, hounded Hillary Clinton to step aside and let the general election campaign begin. This must be incredibly frustrating for John McCain. After all, when McCain ran against George W. Bush for president in 2000, the liberal media heaped their collective adoration upon him. (READ MORE)
Kathleen Parker: America's Satire-a-Thon - WASHINGTON -- "Damn you and the likes of you to the bowels of hell, you ignorant racist bastard!" So wrote an outraged Muslim to political cartoonist Doug Marlette a few years ago after he drew a cartoon featuring the prophet Muhammad. Tens of thousands of Muslims bellowed, blogged and clogged until servers collapsed with hate mail and death threats. No cartoon -- or cartoonist -- would go unpunished. Here we go again. Similar passions are being expressed this week in response to another cartoon, this time on the cover of the liberal-leaning New Yorker magazine. And this time, those railing against an "offensive" image are not religious fundamentalists of the far right, but political secularists of the far left. (READ MORE)
Austin Bay: Darfur's J'Accuse! - For stirring drama from the moral high ground, it's tough to beat Emile Zola's letter of 1898 to France's President Felix Faure. "J'Accuse," Zola wrote -- "I accuse." Zola accused the French government of wrongly convicting Alfred Dreyfus of espionage and treason, and pressing the trumped-up charges because Dreyfus was Jewish. Moreover, Zola concluded the entire French defense ministry had hidden the truth and committed a heinous cover-up. Dreyfus' conviction was later annulled -- but after he served time in the wretched French prison on Devil's Island. The French judicial system was corrupted; the corrective process was slow. Still, democratic France existed within the precious sphere of "the rule of law." Poor Dreyfus received belated but deserved justice. This week, a senior International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor decided to seek an arrest warrant for Sudan's noxious leader, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. (READ MORE)
Tony Blankley: Tacking to the Center Is Tacky - From Australia to London to almost all points in between, if there are two things people know about Barack Obama, one of them is that he recently has changed his positions on abortion, gun control, capital punishment, FISA laws, the status of Jerusalem, faith-based federal programs, public financing of his campaign, welfare, NAFTA and free trade, the surge in Iraq, and his commitment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church, among other public policies. But it is said by his supporters -- and readily acknowledged by most public commentators -- that this is what candidates for president routinely do. If Republicans, they run to the right in the primary and run to the center in the general election. If Democrats, they run to the left in the primary and then to the center in the general. This is the policy version of the cynical Clinton defense: (READ MORE)
Donald Lambro: Obama's Iraq policy still a work in progress - WASHINGTON -- About a week ago, I reported in this column that a top defense adviser to Barack Obama was proposing that a large "residual" U.S. military force remain in Iraq under his mercurial troop-withdrawal plan. The freshman Chicago Democrat pooh-poohed such reports at the time, saying those who accused him of changing his position on pulling out all U.S. combat forces from Iraq "haven't apparently been listening to me." But in an op-ed column in Monday's New York Times, Obama said he will leave behind "a residual force in Iraq" that would carry out a number of missions, including going after al-Qaeda insurgents, defending remaining U.S. servicemen left behind and training Iraqi security forces. It is hard to follow the swiftly changing positions in his troop-withdrawal plan, but at last count, it has gone from removing all U.S. military forces to all "combat forces" to his most recent position: (READ MORE)
Jacob Sullum: Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Pill Policy - "This is a difficult case," writes Judge Michael Hawkins, dissenting from a recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. That is not the way most people respond when they hear about Savana Redding, who was strip-searched in 2003, when she was 13, by Arizona public school officials looking for ibuprofen pills in her underwear. Nor is it the way most of Hawkins' colleagues reacted. Eight of the 11 judges who heard the case agreed that Vice Principal Kerry Wilson's decision to order a "grossly intrusive search of a middle school girl to locate pills with the potency of two over-the-counter Advil capsules" violated Savana's Fourth Amendment rights. But Hawkins' conclusion that the fruitless strip search was reasonable under the circumstances, an opinion shared by two of his 9th Circuit colleagues and the federal judge who first heard the case... (READ MORE)
Jonah Goldberg: Throwing Gas on the Oil Fire - Contrary to nearly all received wisdom in Washington, not to mention the rhetoric of the presumptive nominees of both major parties, the scariest moments in American politics are often its most bipartisan. Some would say this was demonstrated in the wake of 9/11, when all those allegedly terrible national security laws were enacted by both parties, or in the run-up to war, when Democrats and Republicans united to topple Saddam Hussein. But I find it is most true when Washington takes a populist turn, which it is doing now with pugnacious stupidity, attacking that classic populist boogeyman: the "oil speculator." Sen. John McCain has declared the profits of American oil companies "obscene" and wants to hunt down "speculators" with congressional investigations. Sen. Barack Obama also sees "speculation" as the culprit behind our energy woes. (READ MORE)
Amanda Carpenter: Michelle Obama's $600 Earrings - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, complained the government’s $600 economic stimulus check was only enough to buy “a pair of earrings” while stumping for her husband. “You're getting $600 - what can you do with that?” Mrs. Obama said in Pontiac, Michigan last week. “Not to be ungrateful or anything, but maybe it pays down a bill, but it doesn't pay down every bill every month. The short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good, and it may even feel good that first month when you get that check, and then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings." She made these remarks at a “working women’s roundtable discussion.” Although Mrs. Obama has been praised by fashionable outlets like Vogue magazine for her sense of style, her comments about $600 earrings reinforces an unflattering image of the Ivy-league educated Obama lawyers. (READ MORE)
Jerry Bowyer: How Chuck Schumer Set Off a Bank Panic - The founding fathers gave us a legislative branch divided into two ‘houses’. The lower house is the House of Representatives, modeled to some degree on the British House of Commons. That’s where the firebrands were supposed to go. Some would be responsible populists, and some would be reckless demagogues, but spread out over a large number of reckless demagogues of opposing views, their damage would be mitigated. The upper house, the Senate, on the other hand was supposed to be deliberative. If the House of Representatives was the hot cup of coffee, the Senate was the saucer in which the coffee cooled. Our founders intended that the Senate would be the chamber which would house the statesman of our legislative body. But, then again, our founding fathers never met Chuck Schumer. Bob Dole once said the most dangerous spot in Washington was between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. That may be true. (READ MORE)
A Soldier's Mind: Where Has The Desire To ‘Serve Our Country’ Gone? - When my son decided in, 1988, during his Junior year of High School to join the National Guard, as a mother I had mixed emotions. I was very proud of my son for deciding that he wanted to serve our country. At the same time, the “mother instinct” was there as well, which caused me to worry about what might happen to my son if he were deployed during wartime. The advice I gave him at that time was to make sure he researched his options and was well aware of the positive and negative aspects of joining the military. I knew the reasons that led him to the decision to join the military and fully supported him in his choice. He still serves in the National Guard today and he has been deployed and I’m damn proud of the choices he’s made and the direction that his life has taken. (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Here's How to Get That Scientific Consensus on Globaloney: Jail "Deniers" - Though he now insists he didn't mean it "literally" (any of the several times he said it), Canadian anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) advocate and occasional scientist David Suzuki has called for imprisonment of politicians who didn't kow-tow to globaloney hysteria, for the "intergenerational crime" of rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and other international global-warming demands: “‘What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act,’ said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. ‘It's an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years.’ The statement elicited rounds of applause.” After a furor erupted over the "scientist's" call for an end to freedom of speech on this issue, Suzuki claimed he didn't really mean it literally. It was just a joke. (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: John McCain on Afghanistan - John McCain laid out his strategic thinking in the War on Terror in an integrated way, examining in particular the link between the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. In describing the situation McCain extends the logic of the Iraq counterinsurgency effort and employs the framework of the “lessons learned” to the global campaign against Islamic extremism. One of the lessons of the Surge has been the need to create lasting security in one place before haring off in pursuit of mobile enemy forces. This was sometimes referred to in the media as the “ink spot” theory of counterinsurgency. McCain, in addressing overall strategy, warns that Obama’s plan to evacuate in Iraq in order to “get” Osama Bin Laden is precisely a repetition of the cardinal mistake of leaving an operation half-finished in order to begin a new one. “Senator Obama will tell you we can’t win in Afghanistan without losing in Iraq. In fact, he has it exactly backwards. It is precisely the success of the surge in Iraq that shows us the way to succeed in Afghanistan.” (READ MORE)
The Captain's Journal: Taliban Cross-Border Operations - As we have discussed before, nationalism is out of accord with both the tenets and goals of radical militant Islamism. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Salafists and Wahhabistsworldwide have no recognition of the legitimacy of borders. This characteristic of being a transnational insurgency coupled with Pakistan’s capitulation to them has caused problems for the so-called border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Recently The Captain’s Journal said that the most recent deals with the Taliban made Afghanistan the sacrificial lamb while intending to maintain Pakistan’s stability. Almost as if on cue, a report comes to us on current Taliban freedom to roam to and fro about the border region. “RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - In early June, about 300 fighters from jihadist groups came together for a secret gathering here, in the same city that serves as headquarters to the Pakistani army.” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Hookerquiddick - Democrat Eliott Spitzer had his campaign pay for his trysts at the Mayflower Hotel. Ah, the irony of a man who made his name by challenging how corporate America spent stockholders money then using money from political campaign donors to pay for his cheating on his wife. No, the New York Times report on this did not say he paid the hooker out of this money. But yes, it was used by “Client 9” to pay for his berths at the Mayflower. His successor as governor, Democrat David Paterson also used campaign cash to pay for motel rooms for his trysts with his mistress. But he used Hillary Clinton’s campaign cash. And he stayed at the Days Inn, the New York Post reported. (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: The I-Can’t-Afford-Another-Flip-Flop Timetable - The Washington Post editorial board rips Barack Obama for what it calls The Iron Timetable, but that doesn’t quite capture the willful ignorance Obama shows on Iraq. The Post notes, as did John McCain, the fact that Obama wrote his policy on Iraq before speaking with the commanders on the ground to determine the facts, and concludes that Obama is “ultimately indifferent to the war’s outcome,” but that’s not the real problem. Obama has to stick with his Iraq policy, not for the good of the country, but because he can’t afford to cut his last tie to the Left. “BARACK OBAMA yesterday accused President Bush and Sen. John McCain of rigidity on Iraq: ‘They said we couldn’t leave when violence was up, they say we can’t leave when violence is down.’ Mr. Obama then confirmed his own foolish consistency. Early last year, when the war was at its peak, the Democratic candidate proposed a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces in slightly more than a year. Yesterday, with bloodshed at its lowest level since the war began, Mr. Obama endorsed the same plan.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: University apologizes to student after accusing him of … “openly reading” a book - Behold the ne plus ultra of campus tolerance, in which the act of reading scholarly material now constitutes an actionable offense. Our culprit? A student-janitor named Keith Sampson. His weapon? “Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.” The charge? Racial harassment, for thoughtlessly brandishing this anti-Klan book with an image of Klansmen on the cover where others might see it. The AP story describes what happens next, but to get the full Orwellian flavor you need to read Dorothy Rabinowitz’s op-ed. Quote: “Mr. Sampson stood accused of ‘openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your Black co-workers.’ The statement, signed by chief affirmative action officer Lillian Charleston, asserted that her office had completed its investigation of the charges brought by Ms. Nakea William, his co-worker - that Mr. Sampson had continued, despite complaints, to read a book on this ‘inflammatory topic.…’” (READ MORE)
La Shawn Barber: Why Black People Don’t Care that GOP Is Civil Rights Party - I’m only one black American among millions, and I’m no authority on black people, nor do I speak for black people. But I can provide insight. Back in 2004, Republicans were trying to appeal to black voters. Newt Gingrich and the rest wanted to secure at least 25 percent of the “black vote.” Dream on! I poured a bucket of water over their piddling flame. Won’t work, I said. I explained my reasoning in “Why Courting the Black Vote Won’t Work,” which was published in the Washington Times. Unlike some black conservatives and Republicans I know, I don’t think the party should appeal to voters based on skin color. I criticize white Republicans when they do it, and I’m disappointed when right-leaning blacks encourage them to do it. (READ MORE)
MountainRunner: Stop saying “Hearts and Minds”, you don’t mean it - There is a terrible plague in public diplomacy and the War of Ideas / GWOT / whatever it’s called today. This plague is the wholesale adoption of the phrase “winning the hearts and minds” without any real understanding of its history or meaning. Taken out of context, as it is, “hearts and minds” fits and further shapes the view of “soft power” so often seen as the essence of public diplomacy. Ideational engagements is perceived as a way to increase how the United States is liked, loved, or at least attractive. This is expected if you start from the false premise of “Why do they hate us?” Buddy Steve Corman at Arizona State U has a good response to Foreign Policy blog’s Melinda Brower’s lament that we’re moving away from the beauty contest model of public diplomacy. Brower was critical of Under Secretary Jim Glassman’s Washington Institute speech begins the return public diplomacy to its purpose: (READ MORE)
Greyhawk: While America Slept (Part one) - Mike Yon: "But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won." I can't recall if I discussed that with Mike when he was in the States. We might have, I honestly don't remember. There's a reason Mike didn't realize until now that we had won the war, and it's a pretty good one. Mike likes to be where the fighting is, and throughout his last visit to Iraq there was fighting, and he could find it. This time last year he was reporting from Baqubah where intense battles were ongoing - but had he wanted he could have been telling the same stories from many other locations, especially the neighborhoods of Baghdad and points south that were then referred to as "the belts". Or, from a different angle, as I wrote as the surge was barely beginning, there were a lot of missed opportunities for news media to get stories (instead of just death tolls) from Iraq: (READ MORE)
John Hinderaker: The AP Is Beginning to Notice - You know Barack Obama's campaign is getting into trouble when even the Associated Press notices that it has become something of a joke. Following up on the blogosphere, the AP noted today that Obama's web site has airbrushed his former opposition to the "surge" in Iraq: “Barack Obama's aides have removed criticism of President Bush's increase of troops to Iraq from the campaign Web site, part of an effort to update the Democrat's written war plan to reflect changing conditions.” One could put that differently, of course: now that Obama's position has definitively been proved wrong, he is trying to slink away without anyone noticing. But the AP does a decent job of putting Obama's about-face in context: “After Bush delivered a nationally televised address on Jan. 10, 2007, announcing his plan, Obama argued it could make the situation worse by taking pressure off Iraqis to find a political solution to the fighting. ‘I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,’ the Illinois senator said that night, a month before announcing his presidential bid. ‘In fact, I think it will do the reverse.’” (READ MORE)
Right Wing Nut House: RUMBLINGS FROM BELOW THE MOUNTAINTOP - Way up on top of the mountain where our messiah-in-waiting is hurling his thunderbolts at John McCain and dispensing manna in the form of soothing bromides and empty platitudes, a distant, ominous rumbling can be heard far below the summit that portends some possible trouble for our hero when his coronation takes place in Denver late in August. It is an unconfirmed story and indeed, sounds like one of those rumors that are circulated during the dog days of summer in the interregnum between the time a candidate clinches the nomination and the convention. There may be more wishful thinking than truth here but it nevertheless presents an interesting scenario. Are some Superdelegates having second thoughts about Obama as the nominee? (READ MORE)
David Bernstein: Why Doesn't Israel Have the Death Penalty for Murder by Terrorists? - The farce plays itself out over and over. Israel captures terrorists, some of whom are guilty of horrific mass murders. Capturing the terrorists often requires the sacrifice of great human, financial, and intelligence resources. The terrorists' allies respond by planning various operations to obtain human "bargaining chips," dead or alive, to use in exchange for their captured allies. Israel then agrees to release anywhere from a handful to hundreds of terrorists in exchange for dead bodies or one or a handful of live captives. The released terrorists become heroes, and some go on to commit new murders. The prisoner exchange taking place today is hardly the worst of them, but it illustrates the point. Israel is releasing Samir Kuntar, guilty of the horrific, cold-blooded murder of a child (and who is shamefully apparently a national hero in Lebanon) and two adults, in exchange for the bodies of two dead soldiers. (READ MORE)
Jay Tea: Flop Sweat - Well, as the general election draws nearer, I find Senator Obama is doing more and more things that I agree with. First there was the DC gun ban. He'd spent a lot of time (although not much energy) supporting the ban, saying that he thought it was the right thing to do. That was entirely consistent with his history on gun control -- he's been in favor of outright bans of handguns, draconian restrictions on gun stores, and the like for well over a decade. Then, when the ban was struck down by the Court, he agreed with that, too. So, in essence, he supported a law that he found unconstitutional. But that's not really important. What's important is that he now backs the Court's decision. He doesn't just accept it, he agrees with it. So he's with me there. (READ MORE)
Matt Sanchez: Deadly diversity in Afghanistan - If you haven't noticed, there is another war going on, in Afghanistan, and it's heating up. According to the 2008 Pentagon Report on Progress toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan, "The Taliban regrouped after its fall from power and have coalesced into a resilient insurgency." For the first time, there were more Americans killed in action in Afghanistan than in Iraq. The situation in Afghanistan will get worse, unless the American military commands the leadership role and implements many of the same counterinsurgency strategies that have proven successful in Iraq. A change in course will require facing some painful truths. Not all armies are equal. (READ MORE)
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