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)
No news reports today…not enough time.
On the Web:
Phylis Chesler: The new American Doctrine of "Changing Course" and the Asian Doctrine of Bribes - The street had been closed to traffic, the lines were long, the security was tight, the place was packed, and the joint was jumping. No, I was not at the airport or attending an event at the Israeli Consulate-although, these days, more and more places have been forced to adopt Israeli-like security measures. It always starts with the Jews but it never ends with us. Anyway, I, and my friend from Afghanistan, were at the Asia Society to hear President Hamid Karzai speak. A warm and colorful carpet had been invitingly placed on the stage. And then suddenly, there he was, in his karakul cap and vaguely Indian, but western attire. Karzai has a slight, whimsical charm. His English is absolutely impeccable. (READ MORE)
Lawhawk: New York Times Smears McCain Adviser For Toxic Paper Ties - The New York Times claims that John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, has received money from Freddie Mac until last month. Here's the lede: “One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.” The McCain campaign responded quite vigorously, claiming that the Times is nothing more than an Obama shill. “In fact, the allegation is demonstrably false. As has been previously reported, Mr. Davis separated from his consulting firm, Davis Manafort, in 2006. As has been previously reported, Mr. Davis has seen no income from Davis Manafort since 2006.” (READ MORE)
The Barnyard: Stanley Kurtz On Obama, Ayers, And Education Policy - Barack Obama said in an early debate that Bill Ayers was just a guy in his neighborhood that he didn't exchange ideas with but that now appears to be a blatant lie. Obama once bragged about his work on the board of the Chicago Annenburg Challenge when was running for Senate but now he and his cronies in the MSM have been doing everything in their power to bury it. Stanley Kurtz gained access to the archived records of the CAC and finds substantial linkage between the two and radical efforts to reform the Chicago school system. They spent 150 million to not teach kids reading writing and arithmatic but how to be little socialist grievance mongers agitating to overthrow their oppressive overlords. “In works like ‘City Kids, City Teachers’ and ‘Teaching the Personal and the Political,’ Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? ‘I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist,’ Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, ‘Sixties Radicals,’ at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.” (READ MORE)
The Belmont Club: Who can you trust? - A 3 month old video produced by the Boston Globe describing the effect of Barack Obama’s housing reforms in his district makes interesting viewing. The accompanying article explains that “the squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else. But it’s not safe to live here. … In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale - a score so bad the buildings now face demolition. Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing - an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.” (READ MORE)
Dafydd: Democrats: the Party of Fiscal Prudence and Political Streamlining - Democrats bolster their already sky-high reputation for fiscal responsibility: The Democrats are skeptical, even suspicious. They're not going "simply hand over a 700-billion-dollar blank check to Wall Street and hope for a better outcome," as Squeaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Haight-Ashbury, 93%) said, referring to the rescue plan proposed by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke: “Lawmakers said brisk talks toward a deal by week's end included an agreement that the US Treasury could acquire some equity from banks in exchange for bailing out bad debts, and an accord on an oversight plan. But as markets plunged amid impatience and uncertainty with the process, some senior politicians warned they would not be hurried into agreeing to the biggest US bailout since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” No pig in a poke for them! (READ MORE)
Big Dog: Tancredo; Send the UN Packing - Congressman Tom Tancredo has introduced legislation that would remove the United Nations from US soil. The plan calls for the buildings that the UN uses be sold to the highest bidder and the money placed in the treasury to pay down debt: “‘The U.N. has coddled brutal dictators, anti-Semites, state sponsors of terrorism, and nuclear proliferators – while excluding democratic countries from membership and turning a blind eye to humanitarian tragedies and gross violations of human rights around the globe,’ Tancredo said. ‘The U.N.’s continued presence in the United States is an embarrassment to our nation, and the time has come for this ineffective organization to pack its bags and hit the road.’” It is about time someone actually took action to rid this nation of those parasites. The UN consists of criminals from many nations posing as diplomats. (READ MORE)
Noah Shachtman: Army Anthropologist's Controversial Culture Clash - Seven years ago, Montgomery McFate was sitting in a bar in Washington, DC, trying to figure out what to do with her life. She was an unemployed, overeducated Army wife with advanced degrees in anthropology and law from Harvard and Yale — and few career prospects. University jobs were out. Her former colleagues in academia didn’t care much for her focus on warfare, especially insurgencies. The military didn’t seem like fertile ground, either: The Pentagon hadn’t shown an interest in social science since the Vietnam era, when public outrage erupted over the use of anthropological research to target enemies. McFate worried that this self-imposed cultural boycott would come back to haunt the Department of Defense. She wrote on a cocktail napkin: “How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?” Turns out, all it took to get it done was a coup within the American military; near-losses in a pair of wars; (READ MORE)
Baron Bodissey: The Dialogue Police - I’ve written previously about the modern liberal conviction that dialogue is all that’s necessary to solve any political issue. Last weekend the Swedish police put that theory into practice: to implement a new strategy during demonstrations in Malmö last Friday, police fielded a special unit known as the “Dialogue Police”. A reader in Sweden has translated excerpts from an article in Dagens Nyheter: “The police are investing in talking - The new police line concerning violent demonstrators is termed dialogue and respect. Gone are the shields and the line formations. ‘All participants in this kind of action are trained under our new concept,’ said police officer Eva-Gun Westford who was on the spot in Malmö on Friday.” (READ MORE)
GayPatriotWest: Why Won’t MSM Explore Obama’s Lies about Ayers? - Perhaps a liberal friend of mine is right and there’s nothing much to the story of his candidate’s longtime association with an unrepentant terrorist. But, I keep asking him if there’s nothing to that story, why does Obama keep misrepresenting his relationship with William Ayers. First, the Democratic presidential nominee describes him as just a guy in the neighborhood, contending in April he’s “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Earlier this month, when Bill O’Reilly asked him about his relationship with Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn, Obama dismissed the question, saying that those two terrorists were among the “thousands of” people he knows. But, did Obama work with “thousands of” people on certain projects over an extended period of time? (READ MORE)
Ed Morrissey: Biden hits McCain for war Biden supported … again - Joe Biden went on offense on national security against John McCain today, but skipped a few points in making his attack. He painted McCain as dangerously out of touch, and used Iraq as an example. However, Biden made the counterpoint himself — without even realizing it: “‘John is more than wrong — he is dangerously wrong. On a question so basic, so fundamental, so critical to our nation’s security, we can’t afford a commander in chief so divorced from reality and from America’s most basic national interests,’ Biden said.”We need to do better in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to be sure. But part of the problem there is the NATO command structure — the very multi-nationalism that Biden and other critics of the Bush administration wanted in Iraq. The muddled chain of command and the unwillingness of most of our western European allies to contribute to actual fighting in Afghanistan has handicapped our effort there for years. (READ MORE)
Paul Mirengoff: Is the shape of the race "altered" - An ABC News/Washington Post poll has Barack Obama leading John McCain by a a 52-43 margin. Noting that this is Obama's "first clear lead" during the campaign, the Post declares that the "shape of the race" is "altered." But the Post may be overstating things. First, the tracking polls don't show a substantial alteration Rasmussen's has Obama up by 2 points; Gallup's has him up by 3. This is familiar territory. In addition, an Ipsos-McClatchy poll has Obama leading by a narrow 44-43 margin, while ARG has Obama up by 2 points. In my opinion, the Ipsos-McClatchy poll is more accurate than that of ABC News/Washington Post when it comes to measuring the number of true "undecideds." As to the Obama-McCain split, who knows? The second possible problem with the ABC News/Washington Post poll relates to the tricky issue of party identification. (READ MORE)
One Marine's View: Do you really know what is happening in Iraq? Part II - The area I was in this tour was a decentralized isolated area that had gypsies in it. They couldn’t go into Fallujah or Baghdad because they were perhaps wanted or some other reason kept them away so they lived near us. We didn’t locate our base at this are by chance, it needed Coalition Force support and now. The area had no law in the area and was outside the city. Many people were poor and just wanted a good life and this was perhaps their only chance. We began by building water wells and providing basic life support structure. Then we turned on their economy once we help them survive. Think about that for a second, they were just trying to survive before we helped them. As time continued we brought in water purification systems to help them obtain clean water, then we taught people to use and maintain them and helped fund them to hire more people to the same to grow. (READ MORE)
Quid Nimis: The Politics of Personal Destruction - I was tripping down memory lane earlier today, and one of my favorite non-productive things to do is to ask, "What is the left NOT bleating about that they used to bleat about constantly? One answer: the Politics of Personal Destruction. Why aren't we hearing about that old stand-by from the 90's? Two reasons. Number One is that PPD has been superseded in the vernacular by "Swift-boating." But the other reason, the more common reason we stop hearing outrage from the Left, is that they are engaging in whatever it is to such a degree that even they would blush to be called hypocrites. And that takes some doing. So, when I say "Politics of Personal Destruction," who do you think of as the victim? Bill Clinton? Hillary, whom I believe was the last public figure to use the phrase, as recently as this spring? No: the person whose name comes to mind immediately is Sarah Palin. (READ MORE)
Thomas Sowell: A Political "Solution": Part II - Estimates of how much money a government program will cost are notoriously unreliable. Estimates of the cost of the current bailout in the financial markets run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some say it may reach or exceed a trillion. Many people have trouble even forming some notion of what such numbers as billion and trillion mean. One way to get some idea of the magnitude of a trillion is to ask: How long ago was a trillion seconds? A trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet could read and write. Neither the Roman Empire nor the ancient Chinese dynasties had yet come into existence. None of the founders of the world's great religions today had yet been born. That's what a trillion means. Put a dollar sign in front of it and that's what the current bailout may cost. (READ MORE)
Michelle Malkin: Illegal Immigration and the Mortgage Mess - The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers. As panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion in taxpayer funding to rescue the financial industry, they've fingered regulation, deregulation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, greedy banks, greedy borrowers, greedy short-sellers and minority home ownership mau-mauers (can't call 'em greedy, that would be racist) for blame. But there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis. It's no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave -- Loudoun County, Va., California's Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters -- also happen to be some of the nation's largest illegal alien sanctuaries. (READ MORE)
Walter E. Williams: Scaring Us to Death - There is a H.L. Mencken quotation that captures the essence of this year's politics: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." The media, economic "experts" and both presidential candidates are making bad-talking our economy key features of their campaign messages. For politicians and their hangers-on, keeping the populace alarmed is a strategy to seize more control over our lives. It's so important that Senator John McCain took his economic adviser, former Senator Phil Gramm, to the woodshed for saying that America had "become a nation of whiners" and described the current slowdown as a "mental recession." Had Senator Gramm added that economically today's Americans are better off than at any time in our history, he might have lost his job altogether. Let's look at it. (READ MORE)
John Stossel: What Happened to Market Discipline? - Barack Obama says, "[Today's economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of ... an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary" (). What? Does that mean that until last week the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels have regulated and subsidized the housing and financial industries for years. Nothing changed under President Bush. The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created precisely to interfere with the housing and mortgage markets. In effect, Freddie and Fannie diverted money to people who wouldn't have qualified for mortgages in a real private market. Had actual private companies performed these activities, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. The results were predictable. (READ MORE)
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