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)
Rice: Draft Truce Protects Georgia - TBILISI, Georgia, Aug. 15 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived here on Friday in a show of support for Georgia's embattled government, even as Russian troops maintained key positions just a few dozen miles away and Cold War-style rhetoric escalated between Moscow and Washington. (READ MORE)
Murtha Intervenes for Company That Broke Export Law - Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat known for delivering federal money to defense contractors in his district, is now going to bat for a constituent's company that was convicted last year of illegally exporting components of military equipment. (READ MORE)
Russian Relations In Doubt, Gates Says - Russian behavior in Georgia has "called into question the entire premise" of relations between Washington and Moscow, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday, even as the Bush administration appeared willing to let Russia take its time removing its forces from disputed areas inside the... (READ MORE)
China's Choreographed Detentions - BEIJING, Aug. 14 -- As he sat munching Kentucky Fried Chicken with his captors at a Beijing police station last week, the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney couldn't help thinking that he was going to be used as a star in an upcoming Chinese propaganda film. (READ MORE)
Georgia signs cease-fire agreement - TBILISI, Georgia (AP) -- Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said Friday he has signed a cease-fire agreement with Russia that protects the former Soviet republic's interests despite some concessions to Moscow. Visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Russia's invasion has "profound implications" for the West. (READ MORE)
Humanitarian supplies reaching Georgian capital - The Pentagon has flown 86 tons of humanitarian supplies into the Georgian capital of Tblisi on two C-17 and two C-130 aircraft as of Friday, a top military official said Friday. (READ MORE)
Phelps' 6th gold brings him closer to record - BEIJING Leading from start to finish and establishing another world record, Michael Phelps moved within two steps of Olympic immortality by winning the 200 individual medley Thursday night EDT at the Water Cube. (READ MORE)
HRW claims Russia used cluster bombs - A leading human rights group claims to have evidence that Russia used cluster bombs against civilian population and infrastructure in Georgia. Human Rights Watch late Thursday announced it had eyewitness accounts, as well as video and photographic evidence, that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring dozens. (READ MORE)
Oil price dip, rising dollar signal relief - A big drop in fuel prices and a rise in the dollar are providing a breath of fresh air for the economy, easing inflation and re-energizing consumer buying power at a critical time when the boost from tax rebates is fizzling. (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Phyllis Chesler: The Burqa Bomber Strikes Again in Iraq. We Propose a Ban on Burqas - Yesterday in Iraq, a female homicide bomber, masquerading as a Shiite religious pilgrim, murdered 20-30 pilgrims, half of them women, and injured at least 100 others. Once again, the homicide bomber stopped at a resting tent for pilgrims. Please note: The target was not American or European “occupiers,” but Shiite Muslims. And, just as Muslims have historically attacked Jews on their most religious holy days (Yom Kippur, Passover), this possibly Sunni attack targeted Shiite religious pilgrims when they were at their weariest and most vulnerable: while they were resting along the pilgrimage route. Ironically, the Shiite’s pioneered the modern suicide/homicide bombing in the early 1980s in Lebanon with their truck bombings. The tactic has now returned to haunt them. This homicide bomber camouflaged herself three times. (READ MORE)
Suzanne Fields: Lessons From Literature - Like Dorian Gray, John Edwards had a painting of himself in the attic, absorbing all the wrinkles from a dissolute life, freeing him to campaign for the presidency fresh, perfectly coiffed and without a trace of a care on his brow. Now we watch the man derided for his vanity as "the Breck girl" age before us, with puffs under his eyes, a strained expression about his mouth, the lilt gone from his voice. The Breck girl has disappeared. Like "the two Americas" he discovered and deplored, he's a divided self -- one for public consumption and the other for private indulgence. His political career was destroyed in the collision of his two lives. We all weep for his family and can even feel the pain of those who believed in him. The allegorical figure of Hypocrisy moves unseen among all of us. "Neither Man nor Angel can discern Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible," writes John Milton in "Paradise Lost." Such evil can be deadly. (READ MORE)
John Hawkins: 25 Reasons You Might Be a Liberal - With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, you just might be a liberal if... * You're sure the Constitution explicitly guarantees the right to abortion and gay marriage, but not the right to own a handgun. * You think Dan Quayle is the dumbest Vice-President we ever had because he believed a flash card that misspelled "potato," but think Obama is a genius despite the fact he believes we have more than 57 states. * You'd be more upset about your favorite candidate being endorsed by the NRA than the Communist Party. * You think the same criminals who use guns in the commission of a crime will just hand them over to comply with the law if guns are made illegal. * You know that 86% of all income taxes are paid by the top 25% of income earners and you still feel that the rich "aren't paying their fair share of the taxes." (READ MORE)
Michelle Malkin: Cheating ChiComs, Crouching IOC - I have an 8-year-old daughter. I know what 8-year-old hands and feet and hips and teeth look like. They look a lot like the hands and feet and hips and teeth of the purported "teenagers" on the gold medal-winning Chinese girls' gymnastics team. The two pounds of frosty blue eye shadow and Bubblicious pink blush that the ChiComs piled on the cherubic faces of their gymnasts backfired. Rather than masking their youth, the pedo-friendly makeup made them look even younger, like 5-year-olds dressed up for a Beijing Halloween Gone Wild. One of the Chinese team members has an unexplained missing tooth -- explicable if someone knocked it out, or if she's the only "16"-year-old on the planet still losing her Chiclet-sized baby teeth. Take your pick. The coaches refused to elaborate on the gap. Apparently, the ChiComs hoped all that iridescent glitter glopped onto the wee foreheads of their athletes would blind spectators' eyes to the screamingly obvious. (READ MORE)
Burt Prelutsky: Talking Back to a Black Man - A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio talk show when a black man called in to take Barack Obama to task for suggesting that black men were sloughing off their responsibility as fathers. The caller didn’t deny recent data that indicated that 80% of black babies were being born to unwed mothers. Instead, he said that this dire situation wasn’t the fault of irresponsible young men and women, but, instead, was the logical result of rampant racism in our country. He claimed that black American males simply can’t find jobs, and that’s the reason they don’t support their families. I waited for the talk show host to set him straight, but it never happened. So I guess, as is so often the case in this cowardly, politically correct, age, I’ll have to do it myself. First of all if I had been hosting the show, I probably would have laughed in the caller’s face. Which may very well explain why I’m not hosting a radio talk show. (READ MORE)
Ann Coulter: Even By Trial Lawyer Standards, Edwards A Real Sleazebag - The good news: DNA testing has confirmed that John Edwards is not the father of Rielle Hunter's baby. The bad news: The father is Bill Clinton. Ha ha -- just kidding! It's almost impossible to get pregnant by having the type of sex Bill Clinton prefers. Also, by now, everyone has heard the news that Edwards' mistress, Rielle Hunter, has refused to grant a paternity test. I wonder if Edwards knew that when he was making his chesty offer to take a paternity test? Edwards gushed to ABC's Bob Woodruff: "I would welcome participating in a paternity test, be happy to participate in one ... happy to take a paternity test and would love to see it happen." As Edwards knows, our paternity laws were written by Gloria Steinem, so if the mother doesn't want a paternity test, it can't happen. So when Woodruff asked if he was going to actually take the paternity test soon, Edwards quickly noted, "I'm only one side of the test." (READ MORE)
Oliver North: Report From a Forgotten War (2nd in a Series) - CAMP BASTION, HELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan -- This British-built fortress, perched on a plateau in southwestern Afghanistan, is well-named. Surrounded by miles of open desert, the citadel has its own concrete runway, water supply, sewage, electricity, Level 3 trauma hospital, even fire mains -- all constructed in the past 30 months. The heavily armed camp is home to British, Danish, Estonian and Czech troops of the International Security Assistance Force. It's also home to Task Force 2/7 -- built around the legendary 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, out of the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, Calif. -- a good place to prepare for this austere terrain and oppressive heat. Camp Bastion is an outpost of sanity in an otherwise insane part of the world. Helmand province is the heartland of the Taliban -- the Islamic radicals who won a bloody civil war to rule Afghanistan in 1996. (READ MORE)
Diana West: Roars About Russia, Bare Whispers About Islam - Amazing how quickly the punditocracy switches maps, time zones and histories, simultaneously mastering new combinations of consonants and vowels, to report and react to a "surprise" conflict in Georgia. It's almost hard to recall that, just a few days ago, the most urgent questions confounding most of the media had to do with just how narcissistic John Edwards really is, or what the ramifications of Barack Obama's plans to announce his vice presidential pick via text message might finally be. Since the sight of tanks rolling usually has a way of concentrating the media mind, the question has become: Whither Russia? In truth, the demise of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn earlier this month was a journalistic godsend. After all, who hadn't already dusted off their long-retired Soviet history books -- not to mention their long-retired Soviet history experts, all of whom have had the busiest couple of weeks in years: (READ MORE)
David Limbaugh: Relentless Race Narrative - Sadly, there isn't the slightest chance liberals will forgo the race narrative in this presidential race because painting the other side as racist is essential to their need to feel morally superior. They can't accept Obama's candidacy as evidence of progress toward racial equality. They can't permit the advancement of colorblindness because they sense it is detrimental both to their political interests and their self-esteem. After all, if liberals lost their self-anointment as moral paragons, they'd have nothing left because their policy agenda has the track record of an Edsel, with the exception that it won't ever be taken off the market. A mainstream media favorite, MSNBC's Howard Fineman, in a piece criticizing McCain for allegedly painting Barack Obama as less American and patriotic than McCain, couldn't help but throw in a pointed reference to race. (READ MORE)
Jonah Goldberg: Nightmare on Dem Street - For months now people have been saying to me, "Do you really think they're gone?" "Is it finally over?" "Is the coast clear?" The questions have been in response to Barack Obama's supposedly yeoman service in putting an end to the Clintons in public life. My response to those who believe our long national nightmare is over has always been: "Have you seen no monster movies?" Freddy Krueger always comes back. Jason re-emerges from the pond one more time. Dracula had so many comebacks, nobody was surprised to see him hanging with Abbott and Costello. Of course the Clintons will be back. If the monster-movie thing is too offensive for you Clinton voluptuaries out there, think of it like this: They're like Richard Gere in "An Officer and a Gentleman" (who, coincidentally, is hounded by a charismatic black dude but never gives up). They've got no place else to go. (READ MORE)
Dick Morris & Eileen McGann: The Lesson of Georgia: Bring Ukraine Into NATO - As we watched Russian tanks and planes attack yet another small neighbor, the world had to be reminded of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, three other countries that had to watch their freedom crushed beneath tank treads. The blatant, outrageous, and long planned invasion of Georgia should make it clear to the United States and Europe that there is an urgent need to pre-empt further Russian expansionism by spreading the NATO umbrella more widely. In Eastern Europe, Ukraine is the name of the game. With close to fifty million people, is, by far, more populous and important than any other former Soviet republic or satellite. Russia, with a population of 142 million and dropping, needs to take over Ukraine to reassert itself as a global power. Moscow is terrified that Ukraine will become part of the west. (READ MORE)
The Captain's Journal: Financing the Taliban - Some Taliban and al Qaeda support comes from radical Salafists in Saudi Arabia, but the Taliban also harvest their own support. Regular readers of The Captain’s Journal know that we’re not particularly fond of the notion of mixing the war on drugs with Operation Enduring Freedom, since the idea of destruction of a farmer’s means of income does not comport with the need to win the population. What about support for the Taliban from poppy? This has been asked thousands of times in the main stream media, and indeed, the State Department wants badly to war against drugs in Afghanistan. So do some military (mostly Army, not any Marines to our knowledge, since Marine operations in Helmand specifically avoided destruction of crops). Our contention all along has been that the problem is not poppy, any more than it is any other crop. It’s the Taliban, and they are more than capable of obtaining income through bullying tactics whether from farmers who grow poppy or women who weave clothing with yarn. (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: The ghost in the machine 2 - Foreign Policy has a long article on the Russian cyberwarfare campaign. The most interesting aspect was how they mobilized bloggers to carry the Kremlin’s agenda forward. “But sophomoric pranks and cyberattacks were only the first shots of a much wider online war in which Russian bloggers willingly enlisted as the Kremlin’s grass-roots army. For Russian netizens, ‘unconventional’ cyberwarfare—winning the hearts and minds of the West—became more important than crashing another server in Tbilisi. Managing information seemed all the more urgent as there were virtually no images from the first and the most controversial element in the whole war—the Georgian invasion of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia—and the destruction that, were one to believe the Kremlin’s account, followed shortly thereafter.” In January of this year the old Belmont Club, hosted on Blogspot, carried a long post called the “Ghost in the Machine” focusing on cyberwarfare. (READ MORE)
Cassandra: The Morality of Abortion: The Dishonest Debate - Reading Linda Hirshman's recent essay, one cannot help but marvel at the glaring logical inconsistencies in the unrestricted right to abortion plank. With more than three decades under their belt since Roe v. Wade was handed down, you'd think they'd have a few of the kinks ironed out. As a conservative who has reluctantly remained in the pro-choice camp, my support for the limited availability of abortion is balanced against the awareness that this is a complex issue for which there are no easy answers. Ms. Hirschman's morality argument smacks of absolutism. It can be neatly summed up in one sentence located near the end of the third paragraph of her magnum opus: "Abortion is about the value of women's lives." (READ MORE)
McQ: The gang of ten and the "bipartisan" sell-out - I've mostly been out of the loop while all of the "gang of 10" nonsense was developing, but I have to say, as usual, the Republican members (to include my two senators from GA) have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once again on an issue they owned. I'll have to admit either not being smart enough or nuanced enough to understand why a group of Republican senators would decide to compromise on an issue on which compromise just wasn't necessary. On the issue of drilling, the country was with the Republicans all the way. Democrats were nervous (and beginning to switch sides or making noises about switching sides) and the Democratic leadership looked foolish and out of touch. And 5 Republican senators decided, apparently, that was too much of an advantage to own and handed it all back. (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: New lefty ad: You know who’s not an adulterer? Barack Obama - For once, Tapper’s search for secret subtext has led him to solid ground. Lest you doubt that this is actually a thinly veiled attack on McCain (the Matthew 25 Network is part of Obama’s Christian outreach effort), see the comments here from Kirbyjon Caldwell — a friend of Dubya turned Obama supporter who appears in the ad — and Rick Warren making it abundantly clear that character should count at the ballot box. I agree, but note well the reply in the updates to that last link: “McCain spokesman Brian Rogers has responded to Caldwell’s criticism by saying: ‘These people are Obama campaign surrogates. These kinds of personal attacks are disgraceful. This absolutely exposes the hypocrisy of Obama’s claim to represent a “new kind of politics.”’” (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Would John Kerry report for duty … as running mate? - The closer we get to the Magic Text Message from The One, the more frenzied the Democratic running-mate speculation gets. Today’s humorous suggestion comes from Massachusetts television station WBZ, where Jon Keller thinks that John Kerry might have an inside track. Oh, sorry … Keller’s actually serious: “Kerry brings more money and name recognition to the table than any other name on the Obama list so far. Americans do tend to love a comeback kid and this would be the most amazing political comeback since Richard Nixon came back from the dead forty years ago. [...] Polls show many voters question Obama’s foreign policy credentials to be a wartime president. As a decorated veteran and longtime member of the senate foreign relations committee, Kerry could fill that gap.” (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Dude, where’s my lead? - Gallup: Republican Sen. John McCain wipes out a 6-point lead in 2 days to tie Democratic Sen. Barack Obama. I pay scant attention to the polls. It is too early. People are frolicking on the beach, or sitting at home and watching people frolic on the beach. But when Gallup’s tracking poll gets bumpy, well, that interests me. Obama on Tuesday was up 6 points, 48-42. On Thursday, the two tied at 44. What happened? I’d say Georgia. Gallup said: “Voter preferences have been closely divided between Obama and McCain in each of the last three individual nights of polling, underscoring the notion that the race has tightened for the moment. This could to some degree reflect Obama’s absence from the campaign trail while he vacations in Hawaii. He will return to the spotlight over the next few weeks upon naming his vice presidential running mate and accepting his party’s nomination for president at the Democratic national convention, and both events have typically been associated with a bounce in support for a presidential candidate.” Given that Gallup tracks registered voters and not likely voters, Obama might be a little behind among likely voters. (READ MORE)
The Sundries Shack: Criticizing the Mote in McCain’s Eye While Mostly Ignoring the Beam in Obama’s - Hmm, let’s see. If you’re Barack Obama, you can make up your own Presidential Seal and give a campaign rally in front of a quarter of a million Germans and that, in the MSM’s estimation, is just fine. Oh sure, they might note that the bloggers on the right are all in an uproar over it, but who listens to those guys anyhow? But if you’re John McCain, you can’t even speak out decisively on a matter with which you will be dealing should you get elected, nor can you have a couple sitting Senators visit our ally in a time of need without it raising a “question of propriety” (via memeorandum). How, exactly, is that fair? John McCain has had an exceptional week. Aside from his statement earlier in the week that “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations”, McCain has been…presidential. (READ MORE)
Warner Todd Huston: NY Paper: July’s Killing of Liberals in Tennessee Church is Rush Limbaugh’s Fault - Rush Limbaugh killed some church goers in Tennessee last July. That is the message from a Newsday.com columnist for a local New York newspaper chain. Now, I’ve listened to Rush Limbaugh many times. Because of my schedule, I cannot listen every day, so certainly I have not heard every word the man has ever uttered, but I am sure that you won’t be able to find a time when he told people to go out and kill liberals. Neither have I ever heard Sean Hannity advocate murder. Michael Savage…. well, I haven’t heard it but I almost wouldn’t be surprised, almost. Still, even Savage is smart enough not to do so I am sure. Regardless of a complete lack of such incitement to murder made by these “right-wing Shock jocks,” as she puts it, Jenna Kern-Rugile is sure that the killings of the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville last July is the fault of Limbaugh, Hannity and Savage. (READ MORE)
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