Just saw her maiden speech as GOP vice presidential pick.

Verdict: Wow.

See the video of the arrest here.

I asked my friend the retired-cop to take a look at the video of the arrest and give a professional assessment. Here's what he wrote:

For the police to legally take a physical action like this would require some sort of obstruction of the sidewalk, blocking other pedestrians from passing, or some sort of alarming physical or verbal harassment of other citizens (disorderly conduct is the catch-all phrase).  I didn't see either of those situations here as the video cut into the action.  I don't know what happened prior to the beginning of what we see on the video. Now, as to the BCSO Deputy pushing the newsman across the street, I know that the officer will say that he saw that the newsman was in danger of being struck by traffic and pushed him across the street to "safety".  Did he have to do that?  I don't know if he was ordered to do it.  I'm with the news man here on the press conducting business on a public sidewalk issue....

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Birthplace of Greek democracy by day...White House Rose Garden by night? So reports the New York Daily News.

He likes it.

If Obama wins, don't be surprised if the White House becomes a tear-down.

Via Jihadwatch, more evidence of the sharia-fication of England:

Muslim council chiefs ban ALL members from 'tea and sandwiches' in meetings during Ramadan

So reads the headline in the Evening Standard.  I don't think the tea and sandwich ban will actually stand, but look at what passes for language of  defiiance from Liberal Democrat leader Stephanie Eaton in the East London Advertiser:

  “This sends out the wrong message to our community. Our community consists of a huge number of different religions, all of which should be valued, and no one religion should be accorded more status or influence than others. “Freedom of belief is an important human right, and we Liberal Democrat councillors, Muslim and non-Muslim, agree that this request is inappropriate.” She has also written to Town Hall bosses about her concerns that their...

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As we await Obama and his Speech to advance his Campaign, ponder these stories about actions of the Campaign to repress Speech about Obama.

1. Attempting to shut down the Obama-Ayers commerical

2. Attempting to smear a reporter (Stanley Kurtz) researching the Obama-Ayers relationship. Hair-raising eyewitness account from Guy Benson, who, among other things, points out:

In a matter of hours, a major national campaign had called on its legions to bully a radio show out of airing an interview with a legitimate scholar asking legitimate political questions. Coupled with the Obama campaign's recent attempts to sic the DOJ on the creators of a truthful political advertisement...

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Reuters reports:  "Obama speech stage resembles ancient Greek temple." 

Or maybe Imperial Rome: All Hail Barackus Huss-heinous Obamaius!

From Reuters:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's big speech on Thursday night will be delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple. The stage, similar to structures used for rock concerts, has been set up at the 50-yard-line, the midpoint of Invesco Field, the stadium where the Denver Broncos' National Football League team plays. Some 80,000 supporters will see Obama appear from between plywood columns painted off-white, reminiscent of Washington's Capitol building or even the White House, to accept the party's nomination for president. He will stride out to a raised platform to a podium that can be raised...

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From the AP via Michelle Malkin:

DENVER (AP) - Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign.

Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations airing the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial.

It's the type of going-for-the-jugular approach to politics many Democrats complain that Kerry lacked and that Republicans exploit.

"Going-for-the-jugular"? How about going-for-the-totalitarian?

Obama's target is an ad by the conservative American Issues Project, a nonprofit group...

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Here is this week's column as it appears in The Washington Times, the first of 125 papers that now regularly run my column.

While we're on the subject of  questions for the presidential candidates, I realize this column introduces another question for them:  What, even under the best of conditions  the US military can achieve, can the US expect to "get" out of its immeasurable investment of blood and treasure in Iraq? 

If the answer is "an ally," please explain how this can be so.

If the answer is "a bulwark against Iran," please explain how this can be so.

If the answer is "another Kuwait," please explain why we bothered. (If the explanation includes reference to the Bush administration's complete misunderstanding of...

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Robert Spencer poses key questions for the presidential candidates.

1. What would you do to deal with the national security aspect of immigration? With plans afoot to bring large groups of Iraqis, including Iraqi Muslims, into the United States, what kind of screening will you implement to try to ensure that we are not importing jihad terrorists into the country? Will you reevaluate immigration levels from Muslim countries based on recognition of the fact that there is no reliable way to distinguish a peaceful Muslim from a jihadist sympathizer or potential jihadist?

2. Forty percent of the foreign jihadists fighting against American troops in Iraq come from a putative ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is also one of the world’s leading bankrollers of terror. A Treasury Department official who tracks terror financing,...

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If the Bright Idea behind the US surge was, in essence, to Surge 'Till They Merge--meaning, provide the requisite security conditions under which Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis and  Kurds  and, presumbly, remnant Christians still not ethnically cleansed by the above, would achieve "reconciliation"--we may have hit a wall.

Not in providing the requisite security conditions: That is the successful part of the surge story. The dodgy bit comes from the misbegotten twist of so-called strategic thinking that removed chances of ultimate US success from US hands, entrusting it instead to what we blithely (arrogantly and ignorantly) assumed would be the Iraqi reaction to enhanced security: the "reconciliation" of warring Iraqi parties. The surge succeeded, improving overall security conditions in Iraq, but the Iraqis have failed to fulfill the rest of the plan--at least, the rest of the US plan.

Of...

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The Washington Post weighs in, lightly, on "The Jewel of Medina"  debacle. In recounting the story--by now much blogged on and written about by Yours Truly--they start describing the author's experience thus:

She started writing a fictionalized story of Aisha, a young and much-beloved wife of Muhammad. Seven drafts later, in April 2007, Random House gave Jones a $100,000 contract for "The Jewel of Medina" and a sequel.

Aisha wasn't just "young"; she was six.

 



I mostly read this stuff, so I haven't actually seen McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, but he's scored twice in 24 hours with some target-nailing responses to the Obama campaign: first here, and now this:

From National Review's Byron York writing at The Corner:

From McCain spokesman Brian Rogers, in response to the Obama campaign's new offensive on John McCain's houses:

Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses? Does a guy who worries about the price of arugula and thinks regular people “cling”...

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Photo: Major General Hammond apologizing for the Koran sniper incident.

I was on a plane to Europe on June 6, the day this column by Col. Hunt appeared on the Fox News website, and missed it until someone sent it to me this morning. It's about the Koran Sniper incident, which, I am reminded, took place at the end of May. When I looked up my own two columns on the subject, I was actually surprised at how recently these events took place in a blur disgrace that never receieved the appropriate amount of clarifying attention. Col. Hunt puts it all into sharp focus by concentrating...

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Responding to an Obama commercial linking John McCain with the Abramoff scandal, a McCain spokesman comes back good and strong. ABC's Jake Tapper reports:

“Barack Obama’s ad is ridiculous," responded McCain spox Brian Rogers. "Because of John McCain, corruption was exposed and people like Jack Abramoff went to jail.

“However, if Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let’s start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama’s political career was reportedly launched. Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and banks. In recent years, Mr. Ayers has stated,...

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The Gates doctrine?

Remember back in 2003 when Turkey refused to allow US troops passage over Turkey into Northern Iraq? That meant no Northern front in Iraq, as well as  creating a logistical scramble.

Well, as the MEMRI Turkish Media Blog reports, Turkey's done it again: "Turkey once again rejected America’s request to allow passage through the Bosphorus straits into the Black Sea for U.S. vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Georgia. Similarly Turkey denied permission to NATO naval forces to use the straits for deployment in the Black Sea...."

So much for Turkey's NATO membership.

From the New Statesman via Gates of Vienna's News Feed: A report on Carla Del Ponte's disturbing new memoir, which lays out a case against the injustices and fabrications that the US-led international community brought to bear in its intervention in Kosovo.The book, which has so far been published in Switzerland and Italy, isn't scheduled for US (Random House, oh no!) and UK publication until January 2009.

John Pilger writes:

The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about...

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Case in point: How jihad terrorism--and the threat of jihad terrorism--makes a nation-state into a dhimmi state. From IsraelNationalNews.com:

In a letter appearing in the weekend edition of the respected Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, former Italian President Francesco Cossiga revealed that the government of Italy agreed to allow Arab terrorist groups freedom of movement in the country in exchange for immunity from attacks in Italy.

Cossiga wrote that the government of the late Prime Minister Aldo Moro reached a "secret non-belligerence pact between the Italian state and Palestinian resistance organizations, including terrorist groups," in the 1970s. According to the former president, it was Moro himself who designed the terms of the agreement with the foreign Arab terrorists. Ironically, Moro later met his death at the hands of homegrown Italian...

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Why won't the University of Illinois at Chicago allow inquiring minds--or, rather, inquiring mind (NR's Stanley Kurtz)--to examine its collection of documents deposited in its library relating to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation founded and guided by former Weather Man Bill Ayers where Barack Obama once served as board chairman?

From NRO's The Corner, an exchange between Chicago radio host Jerry Agar and a UI spokesman:

Q: Who’s the donor?

A: I’m not sure I’m at liberty to release that information.

Q: Is the donor Bill Ayers?

A: Not to my knowledge.

Q: Why is this a problem? If they give the material to a library, why would they hold up after giving...

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The eagle eyes at The Brussels Journal picked up on a fascinating report from the press agency AKI:

The Islamic Community in Serbia said on Monday it was not satisfied with the withdrawal of Sherry Jones’ novel, The Jewel of Medina, from the country’s bookshops. Referring to the book released by Belgrade publisher Beobuk three weeks ago, the organisation’s leader Muamer Zukorlic said it was “offensive to Muslims” and demanded all of the published copies be handed in. He also called for director Aleksandar Jasic to repent for what he had done.

Whoa, there. First of all, who, post-Milosevic, knew there even was an Islamic community in Serbia? And who knew Sherry Jones' execrable Islamic apologetic/romance...

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What is the story on Barack Obama's relationship with former, but unrepetant Weather Man Bill Ayers? 

National Review's Stanley Kurtz wanted to find out examining  the extensive records of The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation  founded and guided by Ayers where Obama served as board chairman, that are stored in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The apparently close working relationship between the two men, Kurtz writes, makes it more than happenstance that Ayers and his former, unrepetant Weather Man wife, Bernadine Dohrn, hosted Obama's first kick-off political event. Kurtz continues:

This much we know from the public record, but a large cache of documents housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is likely to flesh out the story. That document cache contains the internal files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The records in question are extensive, consisting of 132 boxes, containing 947 file folders, a total of about 70 linear feet of material. Not only would these files illuminate the working relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, they would also provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations, including Obama-approved foundation gifts to political allies. Obama’s leadership style and abilities are also sure to be illuminated by the documents in question....

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Another US soldier goes to the dock for the politically correct crime of fighting a war--this time, for the first time, in civilian court.

Reader challenge: Read this story (below) from CNSNews.com and ask yourself how long the United States will have any military  forces at all after just a couple of travesties of judicial overreach like this one. And don't stop reading before you get to the plight of the 28-year-old ex-Marine sergeant and his wife on being indicted.

Irvine, Calif. - A former Marine sergeant facing the first federal civilian prosecution of a military member accused of a war crime says there is much more at stake than his claim of innocence on charges that he killed unarmed detainees in Fallujah, Iraq. In the view of Jose Luis Nazario Jr., U.S. troops may begin to question whether...

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LIBYA TO RECEIVE REPARATIONS FOR REAGAN AIR STRIKE

I've been forgetting to mention this kind of thing so here goes:

I'll be on CNN's "Lou Dobbs This Week" at 7pm EST Saturday and Sunday. I will also be on the radio with John Batchelor on Sunday at 7:50 pm. You can hear John's new Sunday show from 7 to 10 pm on WMAL in DC, WABC in NY and KSFO in San Francisco.

Today's column:

Roars about Russia, Nary a Whisper 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...

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I went to the map store in downtown DC yesterday--the one up the street from  the White House, across Farragut Square from the New York Times bureau, around the corner from the Washington Post.... Not surprisingly, the shop had sold out of maps of Georgia. But they still had plenty of maps of the overall Caucausus region. This struck me as an apt metaphor for the way we are covering and commenting on events in Georgia--without fully considering all the implications of the bird's eye view. Here is Walid Phares on the subject, adding much-needed perspective to our assessment of unfolding events in a piece at The American Thinker called "South Ossetia: The Perfect Wrong War."

Here is a key stretch:

Is the Russian current leadership displaying features of superpower-return,...

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What does "Sprogbrug og Terrorbekæmpelse" mean in Danish?

"Self-Censorship as Dhimmitude."

Well, that's the loose translation. Literally, it means "Language Use and Fighting Terrorism," which is the title of another one of those suggested language guides that seek to divorce  words from reality. Problem is, this one is issued by the Danish Security Service, PET, which, Islam in Europe reports, is proposing that the Danish government refrain from using the words "war against terror" and "Jihad."

More from Islam in Europe: In an eight page report the language use PET recommends that the authorities choose their words with care in order to deescalate the conflict between the West and the Muslim world. Besides refraining from using the phrase "war against terror" PET recommends to refrain from speaking of Muslims as a population group related to terror and extremism.  Other expression to refrain from using are "jihad", "holy war", "Islamism", "fundamentalism" or "mujahedines"....

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Starting to see the light:

Rasmussen reports that in a poll conducted on  Tuesday, August 12--four days after Russian troops moved into Georgia--61 percent of Americans said Congress should vote on offshore oil drilling ASAP.  On Sunday, August 10--two days after Russian troops moved into Georgia--64 percent of Americans said they now support offshore drilling.

 



According to Haaretz:

The American administration has rejected an Israeli request for military equipment and support that would improve Israel's ability to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. A report published last week by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) states that military strikes are unlikely to destroy Iran's centrifuge program for enriching uranium. The Americans viewed the request, which was transmitted (and rejected) at the highest level, as a sign that Israel is in the advanced stages of preparations to attack Iran. They therefore warned Israel against attacking, saying such a strike would undermine American interests. They also demanded that Israel give them prior notice if it nevertheless decided to strike Iran.

If it is not, as "the highest level" of...

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George Will writes:

For only the third time in 72 years (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980), the [Olympic] Games are being hosted by a tyrannical regime, the mind of which was displayed in the opening ceremonies featuring thousands of drummers, each face contorted with the same grotesquesly frozen grin. It was a tableau of the miniaturization of the individual and the subordination of individuality to the collective. Not since the Nazi's Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film "Triumph of the Will," has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.

A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.

David Brooks writes:

Surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one--drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We've seen mass displays before, but this was collectivism of the present--a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China's miraculous growth. 

...

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Today's Washington Post has unearthed a treasure trove of information--literally. It turns out that through a program called the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP), US troops have been passing out what you might call "walking around money" to Iraqis. A lot of walking around money to Iraqis--some $2.8 BILLION to date according to  government records which the Post has made accessible online (link above).

From the Post:

In the five-year struggle to finish the war in Iraq, military leaders and their troops have said a particular weapon is among the most effective in their arsenal:

American cash.

Soldiers walk the streets carrying thousands of dollars to pay Iraqis for doorways battered in American raids and limbs lost during firefights. Sheiks appeal to commanders to use larger pools of money locked away in Humvees and safes at military bases for new schools, health clinics, water treatment plants and generators, knowing that the military can bypass Iraqi and U.S. bureaucratic hurdles.

...

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Some analysis from Debkafile that seems to make sense, unfortunately:

DEBKAfile’s military analysts: By flouting US demands to accept mediation, Moscow highlights America’s lack of leverage for helping its embattled Georgian ally. The Bush administration has trapped itself in its foreign policy commitment to dialogue and international diplomacy for solving world disputes but is short of willing opposite numbers.

Russia is following Iran’s example in exploiting Washington's inhibition to advance its goals by force. Therefore, the Caucasian standoff has profound ramifications for the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Moscow’s disdain for Washington’s lack of muscle will further encourage Tehran and its terrorist proxies to defy the international community and the United States in particular.

DEBKAfile’s military analysts reported Saturday: Tiny Georgia with an army of less than 18,000, having been roundly defeated in South Ossetia, cannot hope to withstand the mighty Russian army in Abkhazia.Therefore, President Saakashvili, who had bid to join NATO, must consider both breakaway regions lost to Georgia and gained by Russia.

...

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I've been following Salah Choudhury's horrendous case for years. Now, in Bangladesh, the intrepid and kindly journalist finally goes to court to fight for his life, charged with the crime of advocating ties with Israel. (Now, is that un-Islamic, or un-Islamo-fascist?) As he put it in a message to supporters, reported in the Jerusalem Post:

"Now my luck hangs in the balance of being either acquitted from the charges by the court or accorded capital punishment."

"But let us remain strong. Pray for me, for God is with us and we shall win," he said.

And boycott Bangladesh.

Why are we whispering, indeed?

Andrew Klavan asks this excellent question in today's Washington Post of conservatives in the arts who bow to prevailing leftist assumptions including: "American might is sinister, soldiers are criminalized by war, Christians are intolerant and hypocritical, housewives are desperate, corporations are evil, the environment is in mortal danger from wicked man and, in general, something is terribly wrong with mainstream society that only the wisdom of radical types can cure."

Trying to get at the reasons behind conservative acquiesence to these assumptions, he concludes:

I believe there is a deeper, more troubling reason for conservative reticence. The left has somehow succeeded in convincing the rest of us that there is virtue in a culture of lies, that some truths should not be spoken and that if you speak them you are guilty of racism or sexism or some other kind of bigotry. Right-wingers may disagree philosophically with this sort of political correctness, but I think they may have incorporated some of its twisted values psychologically and walk in fear of seeming "offensive" or "insensitive."

...

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Did I say "tripe"?

Having just read the prologue of "The Jewel of Medina" online, I hearby apologize to all stomachs and entrails of oxen or similar animals. But everything else still goes--just hold your nose.

From the original story in the  Wall Street Journal, we  got only a  snippet

The pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life.

On the one hand, those among us who are not devotees of the disposable romance novel groaned and even hooted...

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Sherry Jones is an unlikely martyr of free speech in that her censored book, the cover of which (above) I found lingering in the line-up at Amazon UK,  sounds like tripe of the more rancid kind. That is, the only bit of it to make it into print so far is a snatch of  a scene in which Mohammed's marriage with child-bride Aisha is consummated in that risible, "soft core" pornographic style perfected by today's "romance" writers. According to the historical record, Aisha was nine years old at the time. We don't know if Jones has adhered to this part of the record, but if she has, no layering on of hearts and flowers can cover up the fact that what is being depicted is a bona fide act of pedophilia according to Western law.

This doesn't make pleasant reading for most of us. But this isn't one of those...

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From CQPolitics.com:

GAO REPORT BOLSTERS CASE FOR PUSHING IRAQ TO PAY MORE RECONSTRUTION COSTS

Congressional demands that Iraq increasingly fund its own reconstruction will be a prime focus of the upcoming defense authorization debate next month, bolstered by new financial estimates provided by the Government Accountability Office.

No comment as yet from our old pal Abdul Basit,  the head of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, the body that oversees Iraqi government spending. He's the one who, back in May, in reaction to the very thought of oil-soaked Iraq paying its own way to reconstruction, hit the roof, telling the Chicago Tribune that,...

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Forty-one years after the debut of "Hair,"  New York's  Public Theater has revived--resucitated?--the hippie rock-sical that, as the New York Times reliably put it, "became the soundtrack of a generation enraged by the war in Vietnam...."

Was it really just the war in Vietnam that they were enraged by? Or was there also something else a little closer to the bone?  If we look back at the antiwar protestors-- "the moral conscience of our society," according to one (self)-satisfied, 65-year-old theater-goer who first saw "Hair" as  a Berkeley grad student--there is a terrible coincidence the morality-mythology never admits: the fact that "the movement" dwindled before the Vietnam war ended, but shortly after the Nixon administration made  its intentions known to "Vietnamize" the war and end the...

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What ho, Jeeves--Al Qaeda is just like the Drones Club!

So say, in effect, a pair of academics the Washington Post saw fit to showcase in today's paper. It seems that there these two Poindexters have been pondering the big bad world from their particularly picturesqe ivory towers (Stanford and UC Santa Barbara, respectively) and An Idea has come to them (uh oh):

The generic problem is the question of why people having useful knowledge can't be bribed to reveal it," said David Laitin, a political scientist at Stanford University who has studied why terrorist groups that specialize in suicide attacks are so rarely undermined by defectors and turncoats.

Along with Eli Berman, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Laitin has developed a theory to explain why the Hamdans ...

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Today's column is on British reaction to best and brightest Muslim attitudes toward killing in the name of religion, sharia, the caliphate and more.

Meanwhile, over in Germany...

Haaretz today reports on Joseph Yousef, who is, amazingly enough, the Christian convert son of a popular Hamas leader. He now lives in exile in California.

"Send regards to Israel, I miss it. I respect Israel and admire it as a country," he says. "You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death." Is that the justification for the suicide attacks? "More than that. An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In Palestinian culture a suicide terrorist becomes a hero, a martyr. Sheikhs tell their students about the 'heroism of the shaheeds.'"

Good thing the Israeli security cabinet met this week for the first time...

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Jonathan Spyer reports (via Andrew Bostom):

On Wednesday, the Israeli security cabinet held its first discussion ever on the issue of the global jihad.

Blink. Blink....

Given theat Israel stands on the front line of global jihad,  I guess it's--understatement of the milennium--about time.

Spyer writes:

One may assume that this discussion was not held purely for the general education of cabinet members. Salafi-Jihadism, with its hard-to-trace links between idea and deed, its loose frameworks of organization, and its utterly uncompromising ambitions, has arrived among us.

Let's hope Better Late Than Never is still operational.

...

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Between Obama's Ego Explosion and Americans Wanting to Drill--69 percent!--John McCain suddenly looks more like a winner (despite himself).

The Washington Post reports: In his closed door meeting with House Democrats this evening, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama... concluded, "this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for."

The 200,000 souls who thronged to his speech in Berlin came not just for him, he told the enthralled audience of congressional representatives.

"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," he said.

Air sickness bag, anyone?

Is this the end of Obama? I'm serious. An ego this OUT OF CONTROL just isn't electable.

...the top ten "public intellectuals" in the world are Muslims?

That's what Foreign Policy magazine determined, having turned its decision over to an Internet poll in which over 500,000 voters participated in just four weeks.

FP explains:

For example, a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites. Others issued press releases or gave interviews to local newspapers. Press coverage profiling these intellectuals appeared around the world, with stories running in Canada, India, Indonesia, Qatar, Spain, and elsewhere. No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list. In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman, a Turkish daily newspaper closely aligned with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen....

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All in a day's work: The indefatigable Robert Spencer, far from shrinking from, or even just ignoring the personal attack--"Spencer hates Muslims"--transforms it into an inspirational object lesson on distractingly deceptive smear tactics.

From the ultimate point of Spencer's post:

3. In saying "Spencer hates Muslims," [Grover] Norquist does what he has done for years. [Frank] Gaffney says in his article that Norquist "made repeated ad hominem attacks on Fox TV and elsewhere against me and anyone else (including noted experts like Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson) who dared to warn about the dangers of Islamism. More often than not, he portrayed such warnings as bigoted, racist denunciations of all Muslims."

The bottom line on that, however, is that even if Pipes and Emerson and Gaffney and I really did hate Muslims, that wouldn't establish a thing about the Islamic supremacist agenda, or about how Grover Norquist has helped to push that agenda forward. If we really did hate Muslims, would that mean that Grover Norquist has not enabled Islamic supremacists to gain access to the highest levels of the U.S. government? As common as this "hate" charge is, it is just a red herring, a diversion from the genuine issues.

...

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When is the world gonna wise up and see the crocodile in the Arab tears for the "Palestinian people"? It's all just another way to bleed the West.

From the Washington Post report on the 19 out of 22 Arab nations who have not made good on their pledges to the Palestian Authority (even as the US and the Eu strap themselves to pour money over the PA):

Out of 22 Arab nations that made pledges, only three -- Algeria, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates -- have contributed funds this year, while oil-rich countries such as Libya, Kuwait and Qatar have sent nothing and still owe the Palestinian government more than $700 million in past-due pledges.

The...

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Last month, I highlighted the confusion of our government, which, in its effort to stop the insidious cultivation of Afghan opium, has, for example, been issuing sharia-compliant micro-loans to Afghan farmers NOT to grow opium poppies, even as it has been ordering the military to turn a blind eye to such poppy cultivation. Meanwhile, the poisonous harvest continues to expand across the country, thus enriching and funding the Taliban (not to mention elements of the Afghan government)--who, of course, our military is supposed to be defeating.

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine carries a lucid and sobering explanation of how and why our policy is such a shambles. It is by Thomas Schweich, a former Bush administration counternarcotics official, and it offers further proof of how...

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From The New York Times:

  

Dear Parents: Please Relax, It’s Just Camp

By TINA KELLEY



HONESDALE, Pa. — A dozen 9-year-old girls in jelly-bean-colored bathing suits were learning the crawl at Lake Bryn Mawr Camp one recent morning as older girls in yellow and green camp uniforms practiced soccer, fused glass in the art studio or tried out the climbing wall.

Their parents, meanwhile, were bombarding the camp with calls: one wanted help arranging private guitar lessons for her daughter, another did not like the sound of her child’s voice during a recent conversation, and a third needed to know — preferably today — which of her daughter’s four varieties of vitamins had run out. All before lunch.

...

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