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)
Palin Comes Out Fighting - ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 3 -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin electrified the Republican convention Wednesday night, pitching herself as a champion of government reform, mocking Democratic candidate Barack Obama as an elitist and belittling media criticism of her experience. (READ MORE)
U.S. Troops Crossed Border, Pakistan Says - ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sept. 3 -- Helicopters carried U.S. and Afghan commandos many miles into Pakistan on Wednesday to stage the first U.S. ground attack against a Taliban target inside the country, Pakistani officials said. At least 20 local people died in the raid, according to the officials. (READ MORE)
Radiation Detector Plan Falls Short, Audit Shows - An ambitious Bush administration program to use new technology to stop radioactive materials from being smuggled into the country has fallen far short of its aims and will likely be sharply curtailed, according to an audit report obtained by The Washington Post. (READ MORE)
Study Finds No Autism Link in Vaccine - A common vaccine given to children to protect them against measles, mumps and rubella is not linked to autism, a study published yesterday concludes. The findings contradict earlier research that had fueled fears of a possible link between childhood vaccinations and a steep increase in autism diagnoses. (READ MORE)
Palin takes on 'Washington elite' - Her prime-time moment arrived, Republican presumptive vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin introduced herself to the nation Wednesday night as a feisty small-town mayor turned governor who was more qualified than Democrat Barack Obama to serve in the White House and more willing to challenge "Washington's elite." (READ MORE)
Evangelical faith drives Palin's pro-Israel view - ST. PAUL, Minn. Sarah Palin displays an Israeli flag in her governor's office in Juneau, even though she has never been to the country, and attends Protestant evangelical churches that consider the preservation of the state of Israel a biblical imperative. (READ MORE)
Derided lobbyists continue to party - ST. PAUL, Minn. They've long been derided in public by John McCain as part of what's wrong in Washington. And during prime time of the Republican convention, some were even singled out for being "corrupt." But that hasn't kept special interest lobbyists and their corporate patrons from carrying on their normal business this week in the shadows of the Republican Party event, where they are hosting many of the 200 parties and receptions in the Twin Cities. (READ MORE)
U.S. ground forces hit al Qaeda targets - U.S. ground forces crossed the border from Afghanistan and attacked suspected al Qaeda targets in Pakistan on Wednesday as part of an aggressive new strategy to kill or capture Osama bin Laden before President Bush leaves office, U.S. officials said. (READ MORE)
Press turns personal against Palin - There was not much of a honeymoon between Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and the press. Coverage has turned personal and invasive against the Republican vice-presidential nominee, pitting journalists intent on "vetting" a newcomer against those who say such treatment is unfair, biased - and sexist. (READ MORE)
McCain embraces Palin's daughter - 72-year-old Sen. John McCain at the airport where he met the pregnant 17-year-old daughter of his running mate and, for the first time, her boyfriend, and putting a hand on each of their arms and pulling the couple close. (READ MORE)
On the Web:
Wesley Pruden: No caving for the moose killer - This is where you expect Republicans to cave, to start crawfishing, to surrender convictions in the wan hope that their adversaries will ease up and maybe even say something nice. There's a familiar mantra: "Vote Republican. We're not as bad as you think." But Sarah Palin, clearly a new kind of Republican, looked feistier and more determined than ever when she was introduced Wednesday night to a roaring welcome from a hall of delegates on fire. If the lady's dead, she makes a comely and lively corpse. The Xcel Energy Center arena rocked. The relentless media pressure over nearly a week, one of the sleaziest campaign ordeals since Thomas Jefferson was accused of fathering a child with one of his slaves, was meant to intimidate John McCain into throwing the lady off the ticket. (There's no room under Barack Obama's bus.) (READ MORE)
Ann Coulter: The Best Man Turned Out To Be A Woman - John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate finally gave Republicans a reason to vote for him -- a reason, that is, other than B. Hussein Obama. The media are hopping mad about McCain's vice presidential selection, but they're really furious over at MSNBC. After drawing "Keith (plus) Obama" hearts on their denim notebooks, Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews stayed up all night last Thursday, writing jokes about Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the presumed vice presidential pick. Now they can't use any of them. So the media are taking it out on our brave Sarah and her 17-year-old daughter. They claimed Palin was chosen only because she's a woman. In fact, Palin was chosen because she's pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling and pro-tax cuts. She's fought both Republicans and Democrats on public corruption and does not have hair plugs like some other vice presidential candidate I could mention. In other words, she's a "Republican." (READ MORE)
Cal Thomas: What Standards? - ST. PAUL, MINN. - We are such hypocrites. When it was announced that Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant, the media pounced. Did this damage Palin's preference for abstinence-only policies? Shouldn't she be staying home at this difficult time in her daughter's life? What about Palin's new baby, who has Down syndrome? Shouldn't he be getting much more of her time and attention? How can she be vice president and a good mother? Haven't critics forgotten that Palin has a husband to help? Speaker Nancy Pelosi has five children. No one has asked her such questions. One female journalist said to me it makes a mockery out of the Republican Party's family values platform. No it doesn't. (READ MORE)
Matt Towery: McCain Refuses To "Quayle" His Running Mate - Those who say there's no media bias aren't saying anything right now. They're laying low. First, my own minor mea culpa: A week ago, I wrote that Barack Obama had enjoyed little or no bump in the polls from the first nights of the Democratic National Convention. Then came a bump after all, thanks mainly to his high-flying acceptance speech and ringing endorsements from Bill and Hillary Clinton. Now on to the latest epidemic of media bias. Obama and David Axelrod, his chief strategist, together have probably triple the combined brain density of both their activist supporters and many among the pundit class. Know that Obama and Axelrod are privately furious over the endless attacks, snide comments and second-guessing about John McCain's choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, and now about her unwed daughter's pregnancy. (READ MORE)
Victor Davis Hanson: Want Real Change? Quit Nominating Lawyers! - The 2008 presidential campaign is supposed to be a referendum on "change" -- who brings it and who doesn't. Real change, however, hasn't yet proven to mean new politics. The "hope and change" Barack Obama sounds like a traditional Northern liberal who always wants to raise taxes on the upper classes and businesses, expand government services and provide more state assistance to the middle class and poor. "Maverick" John McCain talks like a conventional Western or Southern conservative in favor of spending cuts, across-the-board lower taxes and smaller government. This year the media seem to think change means race and sex -- whether Barack Obama's background of mixed racial ancestry or the gender of Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. (READ MORE)
Amanda Carpenter: Top Five Sexist Attacks on Palin - There’s a savage narrative developing among the media’s elite that suggests Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin will be a bad mother if she becomes the nation’s first female vice president. MSNBC, CNN and the Washington Post have each hinted Palin may neglect her five children, including one with Down’s Syndrome should the Republicans win the White House in November. Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden even spent a considerable amount of time opining about Palin’s looks while attempting to lay out the differences between himself and Palin. Here is a list of the five worst lines used so far to discredit Palin’s candidacy: "There's also this issue that on April 18th, she gave birth to a baby with Down Syndrome. The baby is just slightly more than 4 months old now. Children with Down Syndrome require an awful lot of attention. (READ MORE)
Johnnie B. Byrd: God Working Through the Unlikely - After having awakened with a political hangover the morning after Obama’s spectacle acceptance, rank-and-file Republicans were rejuvenated by the Maverick’s selection of Governor Sarah Palin to be his second in command. And, the Democrats are now “reeling” from the pick: We may be seeing the first woman president. As a Democrat, I am reeling . . . That was the best political speech I have ever seen delivered by an American woman politician. [Sarah] Palin is as tough as nails… Good Lord, we had barely 12 hours of Democrat optimism… It was a stunningly timed piece of PR by the Republicans. —Camille Paglia Albeit most who are infatuated with Palin are just beginning to articulate their reasons, the general consensus is that Sarah Palin is truly the breath of fresh air Americans needed to inspire them and give them real “hope for change.” Why does she inspire Middle America? First, she is one of us—like a good neighbor down the street. (READ MORE)
Lawhawk: Palin's Fine Speech: Now the Hard Part - Like Sen. Barack Obama last week, Governor Sarah Palin delivered a fine speech tonight introducing herself to the American people and delivering a forceful argument against the Obama/Biden ticket. Palin's selection as Sen. John McCain's running mate certainly shook things up, and got the media into an absolute tizzy, to say nothing of the frothing "progressives" who sneer at the very idea that a woman is running on the Republican ticket. The contrasts between the two campaigns couldn't be any clearer. As Palin noted, the Democrats simply cannot come to terms with the idea of victory in Iraq and the only time the word victory comes to mind, it's only in terms of their political chances. The Democrats have put politics ahead of country, and it will be to their everlasting detriment. People are having their eyes opened to the venomous attacks on Palin's family, and she handled those attacks with dignity and grace. (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Sarahphobia: Fear the Teddy! - First, John Hinderaker at Power Line posted about a Peggy Noonan column in which she noted that John S. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, "could become a transformative political presence;" Noonan goes on to say, "So they [the feminist Left] are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick." In response, Paul Mirengoff demurred: “Noonan notwithstanding, the Democrats I know don't see Palin as a ‘real and present danger to the American left.’” Alas, I believe that Paul is out of touch with the today's mainstream Democratic activist. The response among lefties to Palin's selection has been so over the top, so bizarre, so disturbing, that I now fully understand the genius of Charles Krauthammer in "diagnosing" a new delusional thinking called Bush Derangement Syndrome. These are the people that Noonan is talking about. They are the New Left in full squeal. (They don't call themselves that; most think they're centrists, but only because they define the "center" as running right through their own belly buttons.) (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: Stranger in a strange land - Every four years a fresh set of candidates promises to lay siege to Washington. Barack Obama himself has adopted the role of a kind of exotic Mr. Smith coming to Washington; and so as we see does Sarah Palin. Both present themselves as outsiders. But the media, which wants them to be “rebels” also demands they possess “experience”. So both say they have “experience”. But how can a candidate simultaneously be an insider and outsider at one and the same time? One answer apparently, is to create a parallel country; a place of alternate belonging to which the candidate can claim to represent. In that way the candidate can be experienced in government — but only as an infiltrator — and simultaneously be a person from somewhere else. Mickey Kaus at Slate has watched the emergence of the “other country” in political speech. Even John McCain has said he wants “to understand what you’re going through, to stand on your side and fight for you … to make government stand on your side and not in your way.” (READ MORE)
Dr. Sanity: THEY WERE FOR PALIN BEFORE THE WERE AGAINST HER - Let's see what the MSM had to say about Palin in 2007: “In 1998, voters in a focus group were asked to close their eyes and imagine what a governor should look like. ‘They automatically pictured a man,’ says Barbara Lee, whose foundation promoting women's political advancement sponsored the survey. ‘The kind you see in those portraits hanging in statehouse hallways.’ They most certainly didn't visualize Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a former beauty-pageant winner, avid hunter, snowmobiler and mother of four who was elected to her state's highest office last November. Or Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a badge-wielding former federal prosecutor and onetime attorney for Anita Hill who has redefined the debate over illegal immigration in her state....” Gosh. Did they fail to vet her? And, speaking of "established social orders that tend to block women from power"--that seems to be descriptive of today's left, where all the women are strong, except if they don't robotically agree with leftist ideology. (READ MORE)
Don Surber: Columns - The one I wrote on deadline and the one it substituted. Believe it or not, this is not my job. I write editorials and columns and do sundry other stuff. This blog is for mine own amusement and perhaps 2,000 other people a day. I appreciate every one. My column this week: “Perhaps more a Thatcher than a Reagan.” But I’d already written a column, so here is the one I threw away: AS I was dreaming over the weekend, I was stirred from my slumbers by the ack-ack-ack sound of the cable TV. At first I thought it was the National Weather Service breaking in to tell me a thunderstorm was coming. Apparently, the federal bureaucracy has not figured out that the Surber family is alerted to impending weather doom by the sight of its indoor cat, Baby, diving under the chair. She is a fraidycat who can sense thunderboomers roughly 20 minutes before they appear. But the ack-ack-ack was not for a weather bulletin but rather for breaking news. (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Clinton aides on the record calling attacks on Palin “sexist” - Maybe the PUMA movement has some life in it after all. Following a three-day stretch in which the media attacked Sarah Palin for the quality of her motherhood, even Democrats have seen enough. Politico notes that some have started pushing back against the media for its sexist approach to covering this woman in politics, including one top-ranking member of Hillary Clinton’s campaign team: “Sarah Palin found some unlikely allies Wednesday as leading academics and even former top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed the Republican charge that John McCain’s running mate has been subject to a sexist double standard by the news media and Democrats. Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen, who has written best-selling books on gender differences, said she agrees with complaints that Palin skeptics — including prominent voices in the news media — have crossed a line by speculating about whether the Alaska governor is neglecting her family in pursuit of national office.” (READ MORE)
Allahpundit: Peggy Noonan: Let me explain - Just posted at the Journal. She claims “it’s over” was taken completely out of context via video editing, which, given her specificity as to what that part of the conversation was really about and the fact that this did, after all, come from MSNBC and TPM, seems at least reasonably plausible. Not sure I buy the explanation about narratives, though: “It was just after the 1988 Republican convention ended. I was on the plane, as a speechwriter, that took Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, and the new vice presidential nominee, Dan Quayle, from New Orleans, the site of the convention, to Indiana. Sitting next to Mr. Quayle was the other senator from that state, Richard Lugar. As we chatted, I thought, ‘Why him and not him?’ Why Mr. Quayle as the choice, and not the more experienced Mr. Lugar? I came to think, in following years, that some of the reason came down to what is now called The Narrative.” (READ MORE)
Jules Crittenden: OK, Now Panic! … I Dunno, Something Like That - Gloria Steinem: Affirmative action is wrong! Ambitious, accomplished woman doesn’t belong on a national stage. Women deserve power, except when I don’t agree with them. Republican baby mamas belong in the kitchen. I dunno, something like that. Alter at Newsweek: Please, Obama has been inexperienced much longer that Palin, and is more prepared to be more inexperienced in high office. I dunno, something like that. Huffpo: Lefty women impressed by Palin, inspite of themselves. I dunno, something like that. The Nation: We know you are, but what are we? I dunno, something like that. Judis at the New Republic: Great speech. Now it’s up to the lefty media’s smear campaign to deal with this. I dunno, something like that. Joe Klein, TIME: Angry McCain camp, at war with the press, wants you to think there’s a smear campaign going on. Press on with your righteous Jihad, my ink-stained brothers, do not falter now. Allah akhbar! I dunno, something like that. (READ MORE)
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