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)
Trade Talks Crumble in Feud Over Farm Aid - International talks aimed at ushering in a new era of free trade collapsed in Geneva yesterday during a bitter split between developed and developing countries over the future shape of global commerce. (READ MORE)
Sen. Stevens Indicted On 7 Corruption Counts - Alaska's Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, was indicted yesterday on seven charges of making false statements about more than $250,000 that corporate executives doled out to overhaul his Anchorage area house. (READ MORE)
McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence - For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true. (READ MORE)
U.S. Wary of Pakistani Appeal for More Cooperation - Bush administration officials have responded with skepticism to an appeal by visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani for increased intelligence cooperation, which he said would help his country attack militant groups and terrorist encampments near its border with Afghanistan. (READ MORE)
Chinese Officials Give Club District A Brusque Cleanup - BEIJING -- Ryan Horne loves living in China. He arrived in March from Los Angeles to manage the opening of a club in the heart of the city's night-life district. Drawn by the promise of wealthy investors and an ultra-creative founder, Horne set about trying to shape the "it" factor in Beijing... (READ MORE)
Rivalry to Taliban 'not welcome' - The Bush administration's senior official for South Asia said Tuesday that a reported buildup of the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance's forces in Afghanistan to counter the Taliban's expanding influence is "not welcome" and that "ethnic politics" should not impede the central government's efforts to unite the country. (READ MORE)
U.N. thermostat to be set higher - UNITED NATIONS Everyone complains about climate change, and the United Nations is finally doing something about it - on Friday, the temperature inside U.N. headquarters in New York will rise by 5 degrees. (READ MORE)
Farm tariffs sink world trade talks - For the fourth time in five years, global trade talks collapsed Tuesday, dealing what could prove to be a fatal blow to the nearly seven-year-old Doha round of negotiations. (READ MORE)
Campaign trail drains the Hill of staffers - After months of sitting on the sidelines and watching the presidential race unfold in Iowa, Florida and Colorado, Capitol Hill staffers are leaving for the campaign trail in droves. (READ MORE)
U.S. homelessness on decline - Some 1.6 million people were forced to use an emergency shelter or transitional housing at some point between 2006 and 2007, but the number of people who are chronically homeless dropped nearly 30 percent from 2005 to 2007, according to a report made public Tuesday. (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Austin Bay: Challenges of the Muslim World: Oil, Testosterone and War - Oil and unemployed testosterone don't mix, they collide -- with war the likely result. "Economics and demographics" lack the sizzle of oil and testosterone, which as eye-grabbers are an Oprah-notch below money and sex. But in the grand sense of geo-strategy and the intricate 21st century problems that produce wars, poverty and other forms of sustained misery, economics and demographics are the fire. Anyone looking for instant soundbites won't find them in William Cooper and Piyu Yue's "Challenges of the Muslim World, Present, Future, and Past" (Elsevier, 2008). Cooper is an economist at the University of Texas. A spry 94 years old, he's comfortable with detailed history as well as voluminous data. Yue works at the University of Texas' IC2 Institute. The book is not a political polemic -- it is penetrating scholarship addressing persistent, fundamental structural issues that defy polemics. (READ MORE)
Michelle Malkin: The Brangelina-fication of the Obamas - You couldn't pass a grocery store line this weekend without seeing the picture-perfect smiles of the Obama family. There were Barack Obama's young daughters (whose privacy their parents so sanctimoniously claim to want to protect) flashing their pearly whites on the cover of People magazine. Malia and Sasha competed for attention right next to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's toddler daughter, Shiloh, whose cherubic face was splashed on the cover of another celebrity tabloid. Next to them beamed basket-case starlet Lindsay Lohan and her new lesbian lover -- oh, and that formerly pregnant "man" who just gave birth to a baby girl. The Obamas blended seamlessly into this Hollyweird pop culture galaxy. The spread in People, which earlier this year fawned over a photo of the bare-chested Obama in his swimsuit, was supposed to be an "exclusive" first and last look at life at home with the Obamas. (READ MORE)
Walter E. Williams: Environmentalists' Hold on Congress - Let's face it. The average individual American has little or no clout with Congress and can be safely ignored. But it's a different story with groups such as Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. When they speak, Congress listens. Unlike the average American, they are well organized, loaded with cash and well positioned to be a disobedient congressman's worse nightmare. Their political and economic success has been a near disaster for our nation. For several decades, environmentalists have managed to get Congress to keep most of our oil resources off-limits to exploration and drilling. They've managed to have the Congress enact onerous regulations that have made refinery construction impossible. Similarly, they've used the courts and Congress to completely stymie the construction of nuclear power plants. As a result, energy prices are at historical highs and threaten our economy and national security. (READ MORE)
John Stossel: How Many Wives Is Too Many? - "Texas authorities on Tuesday indicted the leader of a polygamous sect ... on charges of felony sexual assault on a minor, the first criminal charges to stem from a massive raid on the group's West Texas compound," The Los Angeles Times reported last week (http://tinyurl.com/6oenlz). The Associated Press and other media used similar words: "indicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs ... charges of felony sexual assault of a child." Straightforward reporting? In my "20/20" special "Sex in America", polygamy activist Mark Henkel said no, it's an ignorant distortion. "The media kept saying, 'Polygamist leader, polygamist leader,'" Henkel told me. "But the case actually involved incest and arranged marriage of a girl with her 19-year-old cousin. There wasn't anything [that] had to do with polygamy. [Jeffs] wasn't called an incest leader. He wasn't called an underage-marriage leader. He was called a polygamist leader." (READ MORE)
Brent Bozell III: Barack's No Reagan - Newsweek's love for Barack Obama knows no bounds. After Obama's speech in Berlin, Newsweek published a headline that suggests an editor who's spent six days drunk on a merry-go-round: "Obama's Reagan Moment." That deserves the Lloyd Bentsen retort: "I knew Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine. Barack Obama is no Ronald Reagan." The Newsweek piece sneered that while Obama and John Kennedy spoke to more than 100,000 people, Reagan spoke to a much smaller audience, "only about 20,000," and they were outnumbered by leftist protesters the night before. They recalled, "Even some of Reagan's aides were embarrassed by the 'tear down this wall' line, thinking it was too provocative or grandiose." Newsweek would concede only that "Reagan understood stagecraft," and communism's fall "made his words prescient." In other words, the Gipper was a showboat who got lucky. (READ MORE)
Mike S. Adams: The Al-Jazeera Constitution - "It is puzzling to the court that the promotion of tolerance would take the appearance of such intolerance as is contained in the religious materials distributed with the Safe Space program.” Federal Judge Owen Forrester writing on diversity at Georgia Tech. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution (AJC) may have taken the place of The New York Times as both the most liberal and least credible paper in America. And Andrea Jones may well be the least professional reporter at the AJC. Some will recall Jones’ crass assertion that plaintiffs in the recent Sklar v. Clough federal case against Georgia Tech were suing for the right to be “intolerant.” When I called her out on this, she responded via email suggesting I lacked credibility by saying that I was just a “blogger.” This is significant because I have never “blogged” nor inhaled while doing so. (READ MORE)
Harry R. Jackson, Jr.: Are You Ready For $6.00 a Gallon Gas? - Two weeks ago, more than two-dozen civil rights, African-American, agriculture, senior citizen, and veteran advocacy groups came together to begin the STOP THE WAR ON THE POOR Campaign. We announced our support of legislation of any kind that will increase domestic energy supplies and decrease energy costs for our domestic poor. We especially like the Americans for American Energy Act (HR6384), which offers significant short-term and long-term solutions to our energy woes that amount to economic enslavement of the poor. The increase of African-American and senior groups speaking out on this issue is a new and unexpected twist in this debate. Evidently, it has made a lot of people nervous on Capitol Hill. This week a partisan political group, funded by radical green groups, is answering our call. (READ MORE)
Jon Sanders: Tell the Legislators: Low Taxes and Regulations Are Good for Growth - If there were a handbook produced for state lawmakers entitled "Economic Growth: How Best to Stop It Without Making Voters Think That's What You Want," it would promote high progressive tax rates to care for the poor and high regulations on business to protect people. There's no better way for states to rid themselves of the people responsible for the lion's share of state revenues, both directly through paying their taxes and indirectly through growing the state's economy. That is a lesson that resounds in a new study by the American Legislative Exchange Council written by Dr. Arthur B. Laffer and Stephen Moore. In their study, "Rich States/Poor States: The ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index," Laffer (yes, the Dr. Laffer of Laffer Curve fame and Reagan's supply-side revolution) and Moore (economist and editorial board member of The Wall Street Journal)... (READ MORE)
Michael Medved: War on Middle Class Values, Not on Middle Class - Despite demagogic and alarmist claims that a relentless “War on the Middle Class” has left ordinary Americans pummeled and powerless, middle income people still manage to find enough money to secure most of life’s true necessities – like the grotesquely violent and anti-authoritarian video game Grand Theft Auto IV, which shattered all sales records in its first week of release. Despite a price tag of sixty dollars (more than ninety dollars in the special edition), and despite its release on April 29, 2008, at the very height of national concern over a potential recession, the game sold an astonishing 6 million units in its first week. By the end of 2008, at least 11 million Americans will have purchased GTA IV, placing the game in nearly one out of ten households in the land of the free. (READ MORE)
The Virtuous Republic: A Perfect Example of the Media’s Leftist Bias - We in Hell know that much of the mainstream media–an extension of the left, despises their country and make every effort to let that hatred be known. Though We are surprised the VOA published such a piece, it is a perfect example of a typical “America is evil” leftist journalism. First, the report has to include a statement from the Taliban. What the hell? Did we call Hitler after every skirmish in WWII and ask him for his take on events? The Taliban are our enemies. Remember 9/11? Remember they provided safe haven for al-Qaeda? Hello, they are our enemies, not Big Oil! Second, why is it that every story from Afghanistan has to include a statement that NATO forces killed “innocent” civilians? For the love of God, did this author check out the credentials of those who claim that civilians were killed? (READ MORE)
John Hawkins: John Edwards, The Democratic National Convention, & A Rielle Hunter Inspired Catch-22 - Since the National Enquirer caught the Silky Pony at a hotel room with his mistress, Rielle Hunter, the media landscape has been surreal. Even though Fox News has spoken with a security guard who has confirmed that Edwards was there, this huge story has been largely ignored by most of the mainstream press. In some cases, the Left has even gone to bizarre lengths to try to keep the story quiet. After a blogger at the LA Times wrote about the story, they ordered their bloggers not to discuss the story again. Even Wikipedia initially blocked any mentions of the story on John Edwards' page (As of today, they do have a small mention of the story). The reaction on the left side of the blogosphere, with a few exceptions, has been to either ignore the story or protest that it's not true....Which brings us to the Democratic National Convention next month. (READ MORE)
abu muqawama: Ackerman & Kilcullen hullabaloo - Here's some one-stop shopping for those of you who may be following the fall-out from Spencer Ackerman's story yesterday about the new inter-agency COIN manual,* wherein Spence includes a profanity-laden quote from one David Kilcullen regarding the stupidity of the Iraq war. This prompted Herr Doktor Kilcullen to post a clarification on SWJ: “Spencer Ackerman, in yesterday’s Washington Independent, claims I told him the Iraq war was ‘f*cking stupid.’ He did not seek to clear that quote with me, and I would not have approved it if he had. If he HAD sought a formal comment, I would have told him what I have said publicly before: in my view, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was an extremely serious strategic error. But the task of the moment is not to cry over spilt milk, rather to help clean it up: a task in which the surge, the comprehensive counterinsurgency approach, and our troops on the ground are admirably succeeding.” (READ MORE)
This Ain't Hell: Gitmo’s poets - Debra Burlingame writes in the Wall Street Journal about Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, a former Guantanamo detainee cum homicide bomber in Mosul last March. His poetry was included in the book “Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak,” (Iowa University Press, 2007) and read for a Guantanamo “teach-in” in 2006; “In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. [Marc] Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as ‘gentle, thoughtful young men’ who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future. ‘One thing you won’t hear is hatred,’ he said, ‘and the reason you won’t hear it is not because I edited it out, it’s because it’s not there in the poetry.’” Two years after the “teach-in”, that gentle, thoughtful young man drove about 10,000 pounds of explosives into an Iraqi army compound and detonated the truck killing 13 and wounding scores of others leaving a smoldering 25-foot crater where his “gentle, thoughtful” personage evaporated. (READ MORE)
Soccerdad: A passive aggressive national ethos - The other day I commented on a story from the Washington Post that Arab states were failing to fulfill their commitments to fund the Palestinian Authority. Since then a few other bloggers have written about the story as well as a related story in the Jerusalem Post. Boker Tov Boulder points out that by focusing on what wasn’t paid to the PA, the story misses the bigger picture: what’s been paid to the PA and gone for naught. In fact 3 weeks ago, we learned that $1 billion in international aid had been disbursed to the PA in 6 months. (This is something that Boker Tov Boulder followed up on.) “The international community has paid out nearly a billion dollars in direct aid to the Palestinians in six months, officials of the International Donors’ Conference for the Palestinian State said here late Monday, while hitting out at Israeli restrictions on movement by Palestinians.” (READ MORE)
Jay Tea: Bull, China, Shopping - Well, the 2008 Summer Games are drawing nearer, and it seems that everyone is getting into the spirit of celebrating the Olympics and their host, Beijing, China. Those of us who opposed awarding the Games to that city and nation from the outset are growing fewer and fewer -- but the evidence that we were right is growing. My reasons for opposing Beijing were twofold. First up, the Olympics are a "reward" for being a good member of the international community. Countries that have a brutal record for outward aggression and inward oppression are usually excluded from the honor. And on that front, China's record -- on both fronts -- is indisputable. Outward aggression? Talk to Tibet. Or Taiwan, formerly known as the Republic of China. Inward oppression? Try being a Christian there. (READ MORE)
Winds of Change: From Counterinsurgents to Peacekeepers - Associated Press Baghdad Bureau Chief Robert Reid and his chief military reporter Robert Burns published a dispatch from Iraq over the weekend that should have made banner headlines. “It's not the end of fighting,” they wrote. “It looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.” This is exactly right, but millions of Americans still have no idea. Coverage from Iraq has diminished as much as the casualty rates since General David Petraeus implemented an effective counterinsurgency strategy in early 2007. At least we’re finally seeing a media consensus emerge after a year and a half of looking at the data as though it were inkblots on a Rorschach. It’s nearly impossible to work in Iraq anymore and deny what has happened. Even so, this is no time to get recklessly drunk on victory and declare “mission accomplished.” Nor is this the time to bolt for the exits from an unpopular war. (READ MORE)
Orin Kerr: The War on Terror and Measuring the Threat - I've been enjoying the Opinio Juris blog debate on Ben Wittes's new book, Law and the Long War. I'm almost done with the book, which I have found a really excellent read: As with all of Wittes's work, it is thoughtful, balanced, and independent. But before posting some substantive response to the book, I wanted to flag a dynamic that I think is driving both the book and the blog responses to it: Assessments of the terrorist threat. My sense is that each person's assessment of the terrorist threat heavily influences where they come out on what measures the government should take in the war on terror. At bottom, everyone in this debate is a pragmatist. Everyone balances the values of advancing public safety by taking aggressive measures against the value of advancing civil liberties by rejecting those measures. (READ MORE)
Steve Schippert: Intelligence, Pakistani Whispers and 'Fighting The War For Ourselves' - Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani’s demands that the United States hand Pakistan intelligence and allow the Pakistanis to exclusively “do the job” themselves has been irking me all day and into this morning. Again, here’s what he said right after meeting with President Bush. “If the missile strike was proven to have been a US operation, it would be a violation of Pakistani sovereignty, he said. ‘Basically, Americans are a little impatient. Therefore in the future I think we’ll have more co-operation on the intelligence side and we’ll do the job ourselves,’ Mr Gilani said.” I was going spend significant time writing why this is a wholly untenable alternative and explain it in simple, plain terms. But there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. An August 2007 PrincipalAnalysis on precisely this - cause and (adverse) effect in sharing target intelligence with Pakistan - is precisely the round peg for today’s round hole presented by Prime Minister Gilani. (READ MORE)
ShrinkWrapped: The Youth Vote and Hubert Humphrey - In 1968, the counter-culture was flush with fervor, passion, and glamor. The youth of America were going to stop a war, end inequality, and bring peace, love, and happiness to all. The embodiment of the pacifist, anti-war position was Eugene McCarthy. He mounted such a successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson that Johnson decided not to seek re-election. Hubert Humphrey, a good man and a long time figure of great stature among liberal politicians (who had become invisible as LBJ's VP*) eventually took the Democratic nomination. Prior to his stint as LBJ's VP, Hubert Humphrey was known as an impassioned liberal who pressed a legislative agenda based on progressive ideas. His one failing as a nominee was that he could not bring himself to completely break with the policies of LBJ. He supported the war in Vietnam and tried to hedge by explaining how he would end the war and bring the troops back home. (READ MORE)
McQ: Obama wants a "peace dividend" - This was linked previously by Lance, but it deserves a post of its own. We’ve been through this before: “Barack Obama said Friday that persuading NATO allies to contribute more troops to Afghanistan could lead to U.S. troop cuts and help improve the U.S. economy, with reduced military expenditure being diverted into tax cuts to help middle class families.” As you see more and more specifics from this guy (see reparations post) the scarier he gets. We’re presently engaged in building up the military because we’ve found that our doctrine of being able to fight two mid sized wars simultaneously can’t be done with the military of the size it is today. Why? Because it puts too much stress on the force, doesn’t allow for the appropriate amount of downtime for training and can’t be sustained. All of those points were points the Democrats have been pounding for years. (READ MORE)
Dale Franks: Madness! Madness! - This election cycle is just stunning. I really am amazed at the level of sheer insanity being played out on the Left side of the political spectrum. Just scroll down on the current home page here at QandO. One idiot doesn’t want a bomber pilot as president. Another idiot wants to tax the top 50% extra to defray the costs of their global warming burden. South Central LA may have all new fast food joints banned, presumably because they’re keeping Whole Foods from opening up a combination market and organic tofu deli straddling Crip and Blood territories. All I can think of is that it’s because the Left is now positive they’ll sweep the election in November. "Finally, we’ll have a real progressive in the White House, not some half-Republican like Bill Clinton. And we’ll control the Senate! We’ll finally get to remake the country the way we always wanted, back when we were dope-smoking hippies at Berkeley in ’68!" (READ MORE)
Political Vindication: Liberals Reveal Their Problem With Democracy - The problem? Americans might get to vote on issues that the left has been ramming through the courts! John Fund of the Wall Street Journal has a wicked column unmasking the tactics of leftist who are opposed to Ward Connoly’s Civil Rights Initiative that seeks to “approve race-neutral government policies in public hiring, contracting and university admissions.” Here in California I worked for the campaign that ultimately passed, called the California Civil Rights Initiative. It was my first dip into the dirty pool of politics, and after two months of being spit at, called a racist and hollered down in my classrooms when I rose to defend it, I learned a bitter lesson - liberals don’t want to debate you, they want to beat the shit out of you. (READ MORE)
Missiles and stilettos: 54% Back Military Tribunals for Terrorists over U.S. Courts - Most Americans believe suspected terrorists should be tried by military tribunals rather than in U.S. courts, as the first such trial began this week at the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. Seventy-one percent (71%) say the suspects should not be given the rights U.S. citizens have in court, while only 18% think they should, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national survey. While some politicians, foreign officials and non-government groups like Amnesty International argue that the Bush administration is acting outside of the law in its treatment of these terrorist suspects, just 30% of Americans believe they should have access to U.S. courts, as opposed to 54% who favor the special military trials. (READ MORE)
Neal Boortz: DESPERATE TO BE GREEN - The Democrats have their thongs so far up their politically correct behinds that they are unable to think rationally. They are drunk on OwlGore's kool-aid. Take this Democrat Convention coming up in Colorado. First it was the food. No fried food. Food must be organic or have a small carbon footprint. You get the point. Well now it looks like their entire scheme for offsetting their carbon footprint for the convention has completely failed. Eager to utilize their latest scheme – carbon offset programs – the Democrat Convention chose the eastern Colorado wind turbine as their offset investment. The only problem: It doesn't generate electricity. None. An investigation reveals that the turbine which was to begin producing electricity February 15th but it is incapable of producing its intended output. They found that the district's turbine has never produced marketable energy because of massive equipment malfunctions. (READ MORE)
Amy Proctor: Iraqi Official Visits Walter Reed, Thanks Troops, Praises Facility - Iraq ’s interior minister Jawad al-Bulani visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center and thanked U.S. servicemembers and their families for their sacrifices on behalf of his country. From the DOD: “Jawad al-Bulani told reporters that he wanted to convey his country’s ‘gratitude and appreciation for the sacrifices made by these great warrior-soldiers, in the freeing of the Iraqi people and in helping us in Iraq to recover from tyranny and dictatorship.’ The senior Iraqi official also told reporters that he’d witnessed ‘the level of technical and medical sophistication’ that is being practiced at Walter Reed. Observations at Walter Reed will be employed ‘to help our own wounded and many, many victims of terrorism and violence in Iraq,’ Bulani said.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: The One: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions”; Update: GOP launches “Audacity Watch” - Spaketh He Who Is to a choir of Democrats, “[T]his is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for.” But wait, says Jake Tapper, rushing to the rescue. He didn’t mean it the way it sounds. He’s not claiming to be the incarnation of America’s “best traditions;” he’s merely claiming to be a blank screen on which the Andrew Sullivans and Doug Kmiecs of the world can project their fondest hopes and dreams — which is true enough, as even Hillary once acknowledged. Feel better now? All geared up for Commander-in-Chief Blank Screen? “His entire point of that riff was that the campaign is NOT about him,” says a House Democratic staffer. The Post “left out the important first half of the sentence which was something along the lines of ‘it has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. Its about America. I have just become a symbol.’” (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Will Congressional Dems back down on oil ban? - David Freddoso sees a showdown coming six weeks before the election in Congress — and he looks forward to it. The ban on drilling in the OCS and in shale formations expires on September 30th, and Congress usually extends these bans in the appropriations process. Freddoso expects Nancy Pelosi to remain obstinate in supporting the ban, and hopes Republicans in both the House and Senate rise to her challenge: “Democrats will likely propose a continuing resolution to extend funding for the government through the end of the calendar year without making major changes. This bill will certainly include a continuation of the drilling ban — Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), a zealous opponent of offshore drilling since the 1980s, has resisted all attempts to change it.” (READ MORE)
Flopping Aces: “Settled science”? 31,072 American scientists just say no to AWG - The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine - an organization poo poo’ed by AGW proponents as insignificant, ties to “big oil”… the usual mantra - has released the results of their petition drive to American scientists. 31,072 of them who reject the assertation that global warming is a crisis, or that it is caused by human activity. The release of the list has managed to elude most MSM outlets, but can be found reported in Heartland Organization’s July 2008 newsletter, Environment & Climate News. Tho SourceWatch has a less than complimentary review of both the OISM and it’s head, Arthur Robinson, the petition has garnered the support of credible scholars. “The current list of 31,072 petition signers includes 9,021 PhD; 6,961 MS; 2,240 MD and DVM; and 12,850 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Blackwater follies - Remember that defense contractor that Obama blasted in the primaries? Its employees protected him in Afghanistan. And by protected, I mean, were willing to take a bullet for him. Toby Harnden of the London Daily Telegraph reported: “A tight-lipped Anne Tyrrell, spokeswoman for Blackwater, said she could neither confirm nor deny that the company had been involved in the visits by the senators to Afghanistan or Iraq. My request to Bill Burton, Obama’s national spokesman, for comment on the Bedard story - including whether the alleged quote or its sentiment was genuine - went unanswered. But a source familiar with Obama’s security arrangements told me that Blackwater, along with the Secret Service, did pull security for the three senators in Afghanistan, though not Iraq.” Harnden reminded readers of what Obama said in the winter and spring: (READ MORE)
Dadmanly: Kinds of Allegiance - Last week, Presidential Candidate Senator Barack Obama made a speech in Berlin, Germany. The Grand Revision on Iraq may be underway in earnest, but there were other revisions on display as well, when Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama gave a grand speech in Berlin. It is no doubt true that those who win wars get to write history, but it is just as true that just about anybody, from any political legacy, can attach themselves to a victory they did not foresee, in a struggle they did not support, for an objective they did not seek. This is just as true when speaking of the Cold War, as when speaking of our emerging victory in Iraq. Sen. Obama, presumptive Democratic Party nominee for President, hails from a political tradition and party that devalued and obstructed both. For many on the Left, the Cold War was an invention and a series of provocations; communism and socialism were appealing doctrines, marred only by unfortunate implementations. (READ MORE)
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