April 2008

According to Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press, despite the recent controversy over Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright, the Illinois senator continues to gain on Senator Clinton in the super-delegate count. At the moment, Obama has 243 while Clinton has 263. But overall, Obama leads…

The latest Fox News Poll: Nearly half of Democrats (48 percent) think Hillary Clinton has a better chance of beating John McCain in November - 10 percentage points higher than the 38 percent who think Barack Obama can win, according to a FOX News poll released Wednesday. This represents a…

It seems that Congressional Democrats may finally take up legislation next week to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of 2008, and into 2009. Because so many liberal are unwilling to vote for a funding bill however, and because Congressional leaders won't pass a bill that…

I wrote yesterday about Travis Childers, the Democratic candidate for Congress in Mississippi's first Congressional District. Childer's Republican opponent has been airing an ad that points out that Childers has received support from Barack Obama. In what seems a desperate attempt to preserve his…

I'm so over the Rev. Wright stuff. The question I've been obsessed with all day is this: How good a baller is Obama? My interest was first peaked by a New York Post photo of Obama putting up a shot over UNC's enormously over-rated Tyler Hansbrough. Evidently, the Big O played in a scrimmage with…

Maybe now is the time to buy stock in Barack. Futures contracts in Obama winning the election in November have tumbled more than 8 percent in the last week and are now trading at 43.4. Bettors now give Hillary a 25.5 percent chance of winning the nomination--up 50 percent over the last week.…

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey notes an oddity in the Washington Post's water-carrying editorial that lauded Barack Obama's most demonstrative denunciation of Jeremiah Wright to date: "But Mr. Obama is right when he says that his entire career is antithetical to the divisiveness of the Rev. Wright's…

Hillary's been trying to goad Obama into scheduling another debate. He won't bite, and she's done everything but call him chicken (though her supporters have shown no such restraint). Yet Obama looked deep within himself to muster the courage for an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend, after…

After several days of heavy fighting in the Mahdi Army stronghold of Sadr City, the press tells us that over 900 "people" have been killed during fighting in Sadr City over the past five weeks. But how many of those killed were Mahdi Army fighters? AFP doesn't even try to answer these questions,…

CBS News reporter Richard Butler was rescued by Iraqi troops in Basra on April 10 after being held captive for two months. Throughout his ordeal, his hands were kept in restraints and a sack kept over his head, although he was able to hear plenty of Hezbollah propaganda and ringtones. His sparse…

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Earlier this morning, House Republican Leader John Boehner gave this presentation to all of his colleagues in the House Republican Conference. Boehner's message is straightforward and sobering -- House Republicans have a tough road ahead, but with hard work and a few breaks they could have good…

David Denby, the lesser half of the New Yorker's critical duo, made a revealing couple of comments in his review of Iron Man. First, he takes issue with the character's origin, deriding the fact that Tony Stark was "captured and enslaved by Wong-Chu--a chubby Commie tyrant. One might blush at this…

While the rest of the country debates the ongoing fallout from the Pastor Disaster, I want to take just a moment to address another urgent concern - the sagging ratings of American Idol. While American Idol remains a ratings juggernaut, this year's numbers have dropped significantly from previous…

From TWS Online: Obama a Wimp? by Dean Barnett. From the Wall Street Journal: Getting to Know John McCain, by Karl Rove. From the Wall Street Journal: Hook-Up or Shut Up, by Harvey Mansfield. From National Review: Obama Still in Danger, by Byron York. From the Daily News: Ayers Tried to Kill My…

He's good enough, he's rich enough - but, doggone it, he isn't smart enough: Senate candidate Al Franken says he will pay about $70,000 in back income taxes in 17 states going back to 2003. The Minnesota Democrat has been under attack by Republicans for failing to file tax returns in California for…

After Jeremiah Wright's recent speeches to the NAACP and the National Press Club, Obama took the advice of bloggers and denounced his former pastor once and for all: Barack Obama said he was "outraged" by Wright's comments at the National Press Club Monday, and "saddened by the spectacle."... "The…

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor in New York, is author of the new, much-discussed book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. I'm in the middle of reporting two pieces and haven't yet had a spare minute to read it, but it is my top priority when my current obligations are met (next…

Again, Obama at yesterday's press conference: And as I said before, I continue to believe that Reverend Wright has been a -- a -- a leader in the South Side. I think that the church he built is outstanding. I think that he has preached in the past some wonderful sermons. He provided, you know,…

Obama at the press conference yesterday: Now, to some degree, you know -- I know that one thing that he said was true, was that he wasn't -- you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, "spiritual adviser." He was never my "spiritual mentor." He was -- he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you…

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE the United Nations' reputation as an international peacekeeping organization could sink any lower, but it just has. The BBC's flagship investigative news program, Panorama, revealed this week that the UN's biggest peacekeeping mission, in the Democratic Republic of Congo…

IN HIS NEW YORK TIMES column yesterday, Bob Hebert became the latest pundit to lob a slew of hyper-charged code words at Barack Obama:

Geraghty has some interesting poll analysis: So while Survey USA is the only one putting North Carolina in single digits, their track record lately suggests we shouldn't expect them to be too far off the final results. Also note that Survey USA puts Hillary ahead in Indiana by 9 percent. Geraghty…

First Obama said he could no more disown Wright than he could disown his own grandmother, or the black community. Leaving aside the fact that, in retrospect, this was an insult to the black community and his grandmother, the decision to distance himself now begs the question, what changed? Wright…

Pew Research released a new survey yesterday titled "Gen Dems: The Party's Advantage Among Young Voters Widens," outlining a growing Democratic advantage with younger voters (age 18-29) in party identification. The report argues the shift in allegiance foreshadows even greater Democratic Party…

The Battle for Sadr City is on. Several weeks ago, U.S. and Iraqi forces took control of the southern third of the city and began constructing concrete barriers to secure the area. Since U.S. and Iraqi forces moved into Sadr City, units have conducted patrols and distributed humanitarian aid to the…

As things currently stand, the Space Shuttle program will be suspended in 2010, as the existing orbiters reach the end of their useful lives. The U.S. will then have a window of approximately 5 years in which it will have no independent capacity for manned space flight until the Orion system comes…

Remember all that talk about how Barack Obama was a trans-partisan uniter who could help Democrats be competitive in solidly red states? He was going to help boost African-American turnout and bring out waves of new voters to back Democrats at all levels? Well, it's appropriate that as Obama…

It seems that average Americans focus on race when events in the news conspire to force the topic onto the front page. And so in recent years, Americans have considered how race influences our country in the context of crimes, riots, and controversy. Our breast beating is associated with names like…

CBS reports: "This lady right here makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy," said Governor Mike Easley, D-N.C., today, referring to Hillary Clinton. "There's nothing I love more than a strong powerful woman." Lefties are getting their panties in a bunch over the fact that Easley used a word that could…

President Bush has signaled that he is open to a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, increasing the possibility that one will be adopted this summer. If enacted, will it help? The Washington Post collects opinions on both sides, and points out that Illinois's recent experiment with the…

Allahpundit: After 20 years of friendship, if Obama didn't know Wright held these beliefs he's a moron and if he did know he's a fraud. It's better for everybody that we assume Obama is a fraud, and it's almost certainly the correct explanation. As Bob Herbert wrote today, "Barack Obama went to…

Allahpundit: After 20 years of friendship, if Obama didn't know Wright held these beliefs he's a moron and if he did know he's a fraud. It's better for everybody that we assume Obama is a fraud, and it's almost certainly the correct explanation. As Bob Herbert wrote today, "Barack Obama went to…

Obama said today of Rev. Wright: "The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago." Obama's recollection in Dreams from My Father of his first time at Trinity United 20 years ago: The title of Reverend Wright's sermon that morning was "The Audacity of Hope." He began with a…

Statistical tie. And Frank Newport adds, "There have been minor changes in the shape of the national registered voter preferences for the fall, with John McCain now leading Obama by a slim two percentage point margin, while Clinton has a slight 2-point margin over McCain." The question is, why has…

It's official - Barack Obama, however belatedly, threw his Meshugenah Minister under the bus at a press conference today. According to Obama's telling, Jeremiah Wright's appearance yesterday at the National Press Club made it clear to Obama that Wright is a crackpot, a lunatic, a nut. (The…

Any lingering doubts that the Obama campaign is a cult of personality should be erased by this news that the campaign is offering a "limited edition" car magnet for donors who give $15 or more before Wednesday. The campaign is marketing its own collectibles! (Will donors get a certificate of…

From TWS Online: The Wrong Stuff, by Dean Barnett. From Contentions: The Virtue of Obama's Trials, by John Podhoretz. From Real Clear Politics: Questions without Answers, by Jay Cost. From City Journal: Sexism Isn't Holding Hillary Back, by Kay Hymowitz. From the New York Times: The Pastor Casts a…

There's not much I can add to the remarks regarding Rev. Wright's "Take Down Obama ‘08" tour, currently playing to packed houses everywhere. However, one of his comments seems to have slipped by without analysis. In speaking of one of his dearest friends, Rev. Wright said, "Louis Farrakhan is not…

Rev. Wright continues to sink Obama. At the Real Clear Politics blog, Tom Bevan sums up the buzz after Wright's National Press Club speech: "Jeremiah Wright has managed to do the impossible this political season: unite pundits from the left and the right in agreement about how badly he's hurting…

One of the low points in the often keel-scraping Mitt Romney for President campaign was the day when some junior staffer had the none too bright idea of signing poor Romney up for a lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association. Romney, who previously had done most of his big game hunting…

David Axelrod says of Rev. Wright's performance yesterday: "Obviously, it's not ideal," said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama's senior strategist. "It's pretty clear that Reverend Wright is not out there to help Obama - he's out there to help himself. It's a sideshow, and the media is consumed by it." And…

Andrew Sullivan on March 14: You don't disown a man this close to Obama's spiritual development over the years for political reasons. Obama's not a Clinton. Andrew Sullivan on March 18: I would think much, much less of him if he disowned a spiritual guide because of that man's explicable if…

Obama at the press conference yesterday: Now, to some degree, you know -- I know that one thing that he said was true, was that he wasn't -- you know, he was never my, quote-unquote, "spiritual adviser." He was never my "spiritual mentor." He was -- he was my pastor. And so to some extent, how, you…

THERE ARE MORE MISUNDERSTANDINGS about the oil market than perhaps any other. In America, drivers are fuming and politicians are demanding explanations because gasoline has hit about $3.50 per gallon. That's less than half the price being paid by motorists in most industrialized countries. High to…

THE JEREMIAH WRIGHT IMBROGLIO PROBABLY would have thrown even the most capable political movement for a loop. But the left's reaction to the still continuing crisis has drifted into high comedy. With one full-throated political primal scream, Obama defenders will insist that Reverend Wright doesn't…

At the National Press Club this morning, Rev. Jeremiah Wright deflected a number of questions by accusing the press of being uninformed. When asked to explain his remarks that 9/11 was payback for American misdeeds, Wright replied: "Have you heard the whole sermon?" The moderator said she had heard…

Speaking of Fareed Zakaria, I found the following passage in his column this week puzzling: "The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all…

Earlier today I wrote that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's hard fought campaign in Pennsylvania benefited John McCain in the Keystone state, based on the most recent polling. But the brutal primary fighting is also exposing broader weakness for the Illinois Senator in national surveys and…

Fareed Zakaria attacks McCain's talk of purging authoritarianism from the G8: In his speech McCain proposed that the United States expel Russia from the G8, the group of advanced industrial countries. Moscow was included in this body in the 1990s to recognize and reward it for peacefully ending the…

As I noted yesterday, the Fightin' Netroots were none too pleased with Barack Obama for taking his road show to Fox News over the weekend. Today, the king of the progressive blogopshere, Markos Moulitsas himself, filed an extensive grievance on the matter. Moulitsas had four main complaints: 1) "A…

Jonathan Alter on Barack Obama: "Opposition to him is not so much old-fashioned racism as fear of the 'other,' with the subtext not just our tortured racial history, but tangled views of class and patriotism." Hmm. Maybe opposition to Obama is not so much any of the above as it is opposition to…

George F. Will on Michelle Obama: "Michelle, who was born in 1964, says that most Americans' lives have 'gotten progressively worse since I was a little girl.' Since 1960, real per capita income has increased 143 percent, life expectancy has increased by seven years, infant mortality has declined…

Barack Obama has promised to roughly double capital gains tax rates -- a move that he acknowledges might reduce tax revenues, but which is needed because it's 'fair.' Friends of ATR points to this piece from USA Today, which explains how much the Obama capital gains tax increase will cost you: If…

A number of contributors to this blog have written on the controversial tanker deal awarded by the Air Force to EADS, and currently being investigated by GAO (examples here, here, here, here, and here). Now it looks like the House at least, is getting ready to pass legislation to undo the deal:…

The Post reports (via Ben Smith) on Wright's speech at the National Press Club: ...Wright praised Louis Farrakhan, defended the view that Zionism is racism, accused the United States of terrorism, repeated his view that the government created the AIDS virus to cause the genocide of racial…

Attacking the politics of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is like subjecting Penthouse Forum to literary criticism. So when I took in a matinée of the stoner sequel last Friday, I was prepared to overlook the film's distasteful depiction of our president. I was even prepared to…

I hate to pick on Jay Leno, but he really makes it too easy. While Leno is a famous gearhead, he seems to share the same basic misunderstanding as many environmentalists who paint the internal combustion engine as the scourge of the planet. Specifically, he seems to think that if a car is powered…

Stuart Rothenberg is an analyst and columnist for the beltway publication Roll Call. He's also the father of the Rothenberg Political Report, and a contributor to CNN. He suggests that John McCain's 'perfect' choice for VP would be his colleague Joe Lieberman: Lieberman's selection to McCain's…

On Meet the Press yesterday, Tim Russert questioned the accuracy of a new DNC ad about John McCain. Others have even accused Howard Dean of illegally making the ad in coordination with the Clinton and Obama campaigns. In any case, almost nobody will see this inaccurate, possibly illegal ad, because…

From Rev. Wright's address last night to the NAACP: "Africans have a different meter, and Africans have a different tonality," he said. Europeans have seven tones, Africans have five. White people clap differently than black people. "Africans and African-Americans are right-brained,…

Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, wrapped up the Coachella music festival with his classic prop, an oversized inflatable pig -- this time, with a trendy twist: The pig, which was led above the crowd from lines held on the ground, displayed the words "Don't be led to the slaughter" and a cartoon…

The party's over: In a Democratic Primary in Indiana today, 04/28/08, 8 days until votes are counted, Hillary Clinton finishes ahead of Barack Obama, according to a SurveyUSA poll conducted for WHAS-TV in Louisville and WCPO-TV in Cincinnati. The results are identical to a SurveyUSA TV poll…

And here I thought it was Pershing Missiles and the Strategic Defense Initiative, not boring soap operas. After a long hip parade of unironic countercultural icons such as Luke of "Cool Hand Luke" and Randle Patrick McMurphy of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Dallas" created a new archetype of…

From the New York Times: Hillary Gets No Respect, by the boss. From THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Go For the Bitter Bloc, by Reihan Salam. From the New Yorker: Bill vs. Barack, by Ryan Lizza. From Newsweek: Dear Senator Obama..., by Karl Rove. From City Journal: An Anatomy of Surrender, by Bruce Bawer.

It seems like Obama's pastor problem isn't going away anytime soon. Obama appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday, and Hot Air's Ed Morrissey sums it up: "It wasn't a disaster, but it still reveals Obama to be out of touch and hard to the Left. Don't expect this to help in Indiana." The most…

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In Afghanistan. I hope this one involves member states actually...y'know, fighting. NATO will be changing tactics and strategy in Afghanistan, according to the head of the alliance's Operations Section. "We've learned the lessons and we're refocusing [ISAF's campaign]," said Brett, adding that one…

An old political boss of mine liked to say, "Sometimes in the heat of battle you shoot some of your soldiers." I've seen his observation play out -- figuratively of course -- numerous times over the years. And now it looks like it happened again, as some electoral shrapnel landed on the Democrats…

Lots of babble in the press and among the cable TV gasbags about the network exit polling being off in Pennsylvania due to race. This is worth some discussion over the entire pagan's Cathedral of media polling. First, the media's obsession with polls is a big weakness in modern political coverage.…

As my colleagues noted earlier, Barack Obama made his long-awaited sojourn to Fox News Sunday. Barnett and Goldfarb hit on a couple of important topics, but the boss may have had the most succinct evaluation: An "elegant and attractive performance, but somewhat substance free." About the only thing…

Landing on an aircraft carrier is...To begin with, you travel out to the carrier on a powerful, compact, and chunky aircraft--a weight-lifter version of a regional airline turboprop. This is a C-2 Greyhound, named after the wrong dog. C-2 Flying Pit Bull is more like it. In fact what everyone calls…

The protracted political struggle over the future of American health care stems in large part from a fundamental disagreement over what should be done to address the seemingly inexorable rise in costs.

Smart People

Freedom's Orphans

Despite the widespread impression that there are gobs of dirt and barrels of toxic waste flying all over the People's Republic of China, its government clearly sees hosting this year's Olympics as crucial validation of the country and its regime, and is entrusting the Art of Architecture to…

Travelers can be forgiven if their first reaction to the proposed Delta-Northwest merger is to wonder what additional atrocities will be inflicted on them. It can't be deterioration in the quality of the peanuts now offered in lieu of meals in most classes of service. Nor can it be a reduction in…

Much ado has been made of the Israeli security fence isolating the West Bank. When it is completed in 2010, the barrier--which runs roughly along the 1967 border between Israel and Palestinian territory--will span nearly 500 miles. Israelis say the purpose of the structure is to curtail terrorist…

In order to understand the steep rise in world food prices that set off food riots in Haiti last week and toppled the government, you need to travel to Iowa. Right now, we're trying to run our cars on corn ethanol instead of gasoline. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves taking food out of the…

Barack Obama appears to be America's first homegrown global candidate. His core constituency is the New Age tribe of the Internet, which promotes the illusion that we can now start to live in "a world without borders." A posting by an African from Italy on the official Obama '08 website, featured…

A Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post

Jeb Runcible, the narrator in Mark Goodman's 1985 novel Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies, remembers Hobey Baker at St. Paul's School, practicing alone at night on a frozen pond with a hockey stick. He was perfecting his ability to control the puck without looking at it:

On the eve of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's visit to Washington last week, a British pollster suggested Brown's meetings with presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain would be more important than his talks with President Bush. The president is "irrelevant," the…

A war-torn country with a democratically elected government, plagued by militias, terrorists, and drugs--but one that is steadily making progress against all these evils--wants to strengthen its ties to the United States. The Bush administration acts to help this ally. What does the Democratic…

WE THANK THE WEEKLY STANDARD for reminding its readers of the criticisms we made of the Bush administration's linkage of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda ("Not What They Supposed," April 14). It would have been nice if Stephen F. Hayes--in his indefatigable quest to prove that connection--hadn't…

Robert Fagles, the quietly competent scholar-poet and oracular channel of ancient voices, died of cancer at the end of March, and of the man and his work we must now sing.

Every man, they say, has his price, and I believe I may now have established mine. In fact, I seem to be establishing and reestablishing my price almost daily.

Crime rates peaked nationally in 1995 and have declined substantially over the last decade. In 1995, there were 684 violent crimes nationally per 100,000 residents; in 2006, there were 473. The much-publicized decline in New York City's violent crime rate saw it go from 2,384 per 100,000 residents…

Jihad and Jew-Hatred

Creepy orangutan proves it's only a matter of time.... hunting ape.jpg A male orangutan, clinging precariously to overhanging branches, flails the water with a pole, trying desperately to spear a passing fish. It is the first time one has been seen using a tool to hunt. I, for one, welcome our new…

Chris Wallace asked Obama if he would vote to confirm Petraeus as commander of CENTCOM. Obama responded: Yes. I think Petraeus has done a good tactical job in Iraq. I think as a practical matter, obviously that's where most of the attention has been devoted from this administration over the last…

It seems like a long time ago that Barack Obama delivered these stirring words in the wake of his victory in the Iowa caucuses: On this January night - at this defining moment in history - you have done what the cynics said we couldn't do. You have done what the state of New Hampshire can do in…

In their own kooky way, the Kos Kids are making peace with Barack Obama's decision to appear on Fox News. Diarist "Eugene" explains how he has managed to make peace with Obama's apparent betrayal: When Obama suggests going to Tehran to meet with Ahmedinejad, he's saying the functional equivalent of…

In Friday's New York Times, Paul Krugman attacked Barack Obama's campaign for its reliably vapid tone: From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama's soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that "we are the ones we've been waiting for" (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would…

PBS will debut their new reality series Carrier on Sunday night. The show features an unvarnished look at life aboard the USS Nimitz and includes some scenes that may reflect poorly on the Navy according to the Los Angeles Times. But the paper also reports that Adm. Gary Roughead emailed…

Winning Pennsylvania is the worst thing that could have happened to Hillary Clinton. Had she lost, her now ragtag campaign would have been mercifully put out of its long misery. Barack Obama alone would be accountable for his general election performance. Instead, Clinton won Pennsylvania's primary…

From the Times Online: "Iraqi forces see victory in Basra" The paper's Baghdad correspondent notes that "Iraqi soldiers are standing proud in Basra," and that "many of them say the operation has boosted their confidence." So, more evidence that this wasn't quite the humiliating defeat the New York…

Via Hit & Run, a Harris Interactive poll of climate scientists: A slight majority (54%) believe the warming measured over the last 100 years is not "within the range of natural temperature fluctuation."... Based on current trends, 41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very…

Last year Congress cracked down on banks making too big a profit off of student loans. Democrats were delighted to stop rapacious lenders like SLMA from taking a pound of flesh from America's students. Speaker Pelosi was so proud of the bill that she even convened a photo-op intended to make it…

Marc Ambinder found it, and it's pretty consistent with the rest of the stuff they've tried lately.

He's expected any minute at the Indianapolis Star. Click on the video to watch. Via Ben Smith.

An unvarnished assessment from Dan Wofford, the son of Harris Wofford and an Obama supporter: 8. Working class PA folks, esp those over 45, don't trust Obama...this is a problem and other than getting them to meet Obama retail style...don't know how we solve it, unless we can get him to do a quick…

Wait a minute. I don't think I can keep up with the science of climate change. I was pretty sure that the ozone hole was bad. Now I discover that it was helping to keep global warming from raging out of control... The scientists found that as ozone levels recover, the lower stratosphere over the…

Speaker Pelosi recently appeared with Larry King to discuss the rise in gas prices, but she doesn't seem to pump her gas very often. She's off on the price by about $1.00 per gallon. Remind me again, who's out of touch with ordinary Americans? It might be helpful to review the climbing price of gas…

Says Gallup, "Support for Clinton is significantly higher in these post-primary interviews than it was just prior to her Pennsylvania victory, clearly suggesting that Clinton's win there is the catalyst for her increased national support." The pollsters also add that "Clinton is running two points…

From the Hotline: Hillary Clinton, with eight retired military leaders at her back, challenged Barack Obama to let North Carolinians have their own debate, offering to meet him "anytime, anywhere." If that's not a challenge to Obama's manhood, I don't know what is.

John McCain keeps on flogging the N.C. GOP for this ad featuring Rev. Wright and Barack Obama. This morning McCain said on CBS's Early Show: "I'll do everything in my power to make sure not only they stop it but that kind of leadership is rejected." And he said on the Today show: "They're not…

From the Washington Post: Obama's 'Distractions'? by Charles Krauthammer. From TNR: Barack in Iraq, by Michael Crowley. From the Times: Two Cynical Losers, by Gerard Baker. From the New York Times: How Not to Build a Ship, by Philip Taubman. From Contentions: Obama's Radioactive Potato, by Abe…

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McCain spoke with bloggers this morning on a number of issues ranging from William Ayers to Rev. Wright to Tony Rezko. Jennifer Rubin noted that Hamas had endorsed Senator Obama and asked McCain whether Obama might have given "an unhelpful signal" to the terrorist group. McCain's response: All I…

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS RECENTLY reported that several congressmen and senators are looking into the renewal of Colt Defense's sole-source contract for the manufacture of the M4 Carbine, the most widely-used personal weapon in the U.S. Army. Derived from the M16 assault rife, the M4 retains the same…

HOW CAN YOU TELL THAT Philip Seymour Hoffman is the best known and most-beloved character actor working today? Well, for starters, people actually know his name. Character actors typically get stuck with the "that guy" appellation. They're recognizable and do a solid job, but not good enough to…

A reminder that Obama was a politician before he was a Christian, that it was politics that first led him to the church, and that it was politics that formed the foundation of his relationship with Wright. The irony here is that Wright has offered a perfectly exculpatory explanation for Obama's…

Ambinder reports: Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton's internet director, confirms that, by midnight last night, the campaign had recieved more than $10 million in web-based contributions. efforts. Not pledges. Not promises. But $10 million transferred directly from the credit and debit cards of about…

Jamie Kirchick writing in today's Journal: In short, Mr. Mugabe's opponents need weapons soon. This is not to effect regime change, but for simple self-defense. Critics of American support for dissidents abroad often cite how such backing, once it becomes public, could endanger the dissidents'…

I'm pretty sure I've detected the left's new meme that has arisen out of the ashes of the Pennsylvania disaster: In short, America is not worthy of Barack Obama. In his Time Magazine column, Joe Klein elaborates: In his 1991 book, The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that…

Organic foods are suddenly not so popular: The percentage of consumers who believe organic products are good for them is down to 45%, while those who believe they're good for the environment has fallen to 48%, according to the latest survey from consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail. Both measures…

According to David Paul Kuhn writing at Politico: For all the campaigning and money spent, Hillary Rodham Clinton won Pennsylvania with the same base of white women, working-class voters and white men that revived her candidacy in Ohio last month. Imagine spending all that money and only having…

A candidate prone to mistakes on the campaign trail just made another, according to Lynn Sweet: McCain denounced the North Carolina GOP party ad. "It's not the message of my campaign," he said. He wrote a letter to the state party chairman imploring them to pull the spot. The ad "degrades our…

The number one Senate Republican takeover target this cycle is the Louisiana the seat held by Mary Landrieu. Chances of success improved after the GOP enticed state treasurer John Kennedy to switch parties to challenge her, and after Bobby Jindal won such a resounding victory in the state's…

Aside from Pennsylvania, the recurrent buzz this week has been Obama's connection to terrorists/criminals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. The conservative blogosphere has been particularly dilligent in covering yet another of Obama's alarming connections. Power Line's John Hinderaker describes them…

Bloomberg reports several potentially massive oil finds off the coast of Brazil: Brazil's state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA in November said the offshore Tupi field may hold 8 billion barrels of recoverable crude. Among discoveries in the past 30 years, only the 15-billion-barrel Kashagan…

Political pundits and the media will bestow a lot of attention on Minnesota this political season. Its Governor Tim Pawlenty is on John McCain's short list for vice president. Minneapolis-St. Paul is the site of the Republican Convention in November. And, it features one of the country's most…

Robert Kaplan weighs in: That they will again constitute a team overseeing the Iraq war, now at an even higher level of command, means the Bush administration is going for victory in Iraq over all other priorities. Indeed, the personnel changes indicate that the administration is desperate to show…

To secure U.S. permission, Israel actually presented the United States with a video of the Syrian nuclear facility it bombed last September: Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core's design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including…

The new Pakistani government has wasted no time in kicking off negotiations with the Taliban. Just two months after taking office, the government has cut a deal with a radical Taliban group in the Malakand Division of the Northwest Frontier Province. This Monday, a peace deal was struck with the…

As a Sopranos fan, I was disappointed to be cheated out of a great death scene to end a superb series. Insult was added to injury however, when one of the more show's more interesting characters -- Johnny Sac -- was revealed to be a Clinton fan. Now at least, Johnny Sac is pushing a cause I can get…

From TWS Online: Paying for the War, by Frederick W. Kagan. From the Wall Street Journal: Is Obama Ready for Prime Time, by Karl Rove. From the New Republic: The Next McGovern? by John Judis. From the Atlantic: Whose Party? by Reihan Salam. From the Wall Street Journal: What's at Stake in Colombia,…

Andrew Sullivan provides a provocative anecdote this morning: I found out that a friend supported Clinton last night. I was stunned. I asked him why. He said he liked the 1990s, they were good times, he'd like them back. That was it. He had no real feelings about Obama, but he knew the Clinton name…

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It's nearly impossible for Clinton to surpass Obama's pledged delegate lead, but that's been apparent for some time. The question remains how heavily the uncommitted superdelegates must break in Clinton's favor in order to cover the delegate gap. If the total delegate gap stays at about 130,…

Nothing: Kansans will be able to own machine guns, other fully automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns and silencers starting July 1. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed a bill Monday to legalize the possession of such weapons. The state banned owning machine guns in 1933, but some legislators said a…

The New York Times' Patrick Healy, apparently drawing the short straw among Times Obama supporters, has penned a column defending Obama's electability compared to Hillary Clinton's. Most noteworthy is this ringing endorsement: Yet for all of her primary night celebrations in the populous states,…

When Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats shot down the Colombia Free Trade Agreement earlier this month, I wondered when we'd see mainstream reporters point out their arrogant, go-it-alone foreign policy. Well, Nick Kristof does just that today. Worth reading.

CONGRESS IS PREPARING TO consider (finally) the remaining $108 billion in supplemental authorizations to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Previous talking points of the antiwar party--the surge has failed, Iraqis will never reconcile, Iraqi troops won't fight, violence won't fall or, if it…

THE GOVERNING CONVENTION of America's third largest religious body meets this week. And the results might be a pleasant surprise for conservatives.

We get a lot of really interesting feedback, and it is always appreciated. I'm going to try and put more of the stuff up here going forward, so please keep sending it...wws@weeklystandard.com Re: Reid Statement on Petraeus It's also pretty low for Reid to even suggest, as he does in the last line…

Despite continuing to lag in pledged delegates, if Hillary can win the popular vote it would create a strong moral argument for boosting her superdelegate support and chances for the nomination. Even that seems like a heavy lift given the remaining primary schedule, but Jay Cost at Real Clear…

An Air Force intel wonk responds to my post on Secretary Gates: I wanted to provide a bit of commentary on the SECDEF's comments about the Air Force, particularly about UAVs. He and most of the press have focused on the "front end" of the problem - aircraft and pilots. This is a red herring. The…

An inconvenient truth: On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film [An Inconvenient Truth] was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow." Adding delicious insult to…

Army Times reports: Concerned that the military is selling pornography in exchange stores in spite of a ban, one lawmaker has introduced a bill to clean up the matter. "Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit," said…

Is it Barack Obama, or the one who's pushing his party to shelve the attack ads? Presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) has written a letter to the North Carolina Republican Party asking officials to stop running an ad targeting Democratic gubernatorial candidates that features…

Harry 'the war is lost' Reid put out this statement on Petraeus's move to CENTCOM: The next CENTCOM commander and field commander in Iraq will have to help the next President with a number of critically important challenges: making America more secure, restoring America's power and influence in the…

Hillary Clinton fundraising chief and noted Fox News admirer Terry McAuliffe took to MSNBC's airwaves (cable-waves?) a few hours ago to boast that that Hillary has raised over $10 million online from over 50,000 new donors since her victory last night. Markos Moulitsas channels my own thoughts on…

Writing at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat speculates on McCain's standing in the head to head, hypothetical match-ups for November. Douthat says this should be a high-point for McCain and yet he seems to have hit a ceiling at 45 percent in most national polls. The problem with this argument is that…

Despite Hillary Clinton's victory yesterday, the Democratic party is likely to nominate for president a candidate who lost primaries in large, key states like California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One reason this will happen is that Obama leads in states won and in…

At this point, it's rather unclear how Hispanics will vote this year. Barack Obama has had a hard time with this constituency, and John McCain's record of support for legislation to grant visas to illegal immigrants may give him an edge. On the other hand, McCain has been firmer on border security…

From the WORLDWIDE STANDARD: Kristol: Petraeus to CENTCOM From TWS Online: Hillary Builds Her Case, by Fred Barnes From the Wall Street Journal: Obama's Media Army, by Dorothy Rabinowitz From RealClearPolitics: Unconventional Thoughts on the Democratic Primary, by Jay Cost s-BILL-AYERS-large.jpg…

From the Wall Street Journal editorial page: " ... Mr. Obama can be forgiven if he wakes up at night thinking he's in one of those 'Terminator' movies where the machine in the form of a human being just keeps coming. Nothing - not Bill Clinton's gaffes, not the Bosnian sniper-fire fantasy, not even…

Not John McCain, that's for sure. Despite being out-spent, out-hoped, and out-changed, Hillary won yesterday's Pennsylvania primary by about 10 points. She will continue the primary fight, even though she remains out-delegated, and unless she unexpectedly sweeps the upcoming primaries, Obama will…

09_laurenbush_lgl.jpg Lauren Bush and date with her hideous FEED bag.

We may conclude three things with absolute certainty after the Pennsylvania primary. The first is that Hillary Clinton is a formidable campaigner, and as her deadpan consumption of a shot of Crown Royal attests, possesses the requisite combination of nerve and psychosis to run for president, serve,…

DURING FOX NEWS' COVERAGE of last night's Pennsylvania primary, the Keystone State's favorite son and prominent Obama supporter Senator Bob Casey Jr. made an appearance. Like many Obama supporters, Casey didn't shy away from hyperbole when discussing his candidate. Referring to Obama, Casey flatly…

David Gergen from a March 14 broadcast on CNN: Well, because there's a long tradition, Anderson. And among black leaders to have a different view of American history, going all the way back to Frederick Douglass, who was one of the greatest American heroes of the 19th century, you know, who -- who…

Paul Auster, looking back at the 1968 Columbia University student uprising: "I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

A few thoughts in the wake of Pennsylvania. 1) Another reminder that demographics are often far stronger than the campaigns the press obsess over. Despite Obama's huge spending muscle and campaign firepower advantage, PA still looks like Ohio and voted like Ohio. Downscale whites gave a 10 point…

AP reports: The Associated Press has learned that Gen. David Petraeus, the four-star general who has been leading troops in Iraq, has been tapped to become the next commander of U.S. Central Command.... Taking Petraeus' position as the senior commander in Iraq would be Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, who had…

Do you find yourself somehow inexplicably drawn to CNN's coverage of the primaries? I do, but for months I didn't know precisely why. There was something so comforting about the format, something so familiar. Then it dawned on me: The studio set-up, the double panel of guests, the host going to…

Other than the sacking of museums during the early days of the liberation, Iraq's culture hasn't gotten much press. Melik Kaylan of the Wall Street Journal tried to set things right on that score. Among the several people he interviewed, all connected to the Iraqi art world, was Nazar Rawy, the…

Fred Kaplan stakes out a risky position: In other words, we find ourselves lassoed into an armed intra-Shiite power struggle on two fronts-and the Iranians are positioned to benefit from one or both contests, no matter whether the side we're backing wins or loses. Whatever the outcome, Kaplan can…

John Podhoretz on the chances of wrapping this thing up early: Yes. Sure. Because politicians with the most valuable votes in America are just going to choose up sides and not spend three months being courted and feted and promised. They are going to forswear having their feet kissed, their backs…

FORGET DELEGATES AND the popular vote for the Democratic presidential nomination. The most important thing Hillary Clinton gained by winning the Pennsylvania primary yesterday was a better argument--indeed, a much better argument.

IF FURTHER PROOF BE needed of the terminal decline of the United Nations as a world body that purports to advance human rights, look no further than the recent appointments of Richard Falk and Jean Ziegler by the UN's Human Rights Council (HRC). Both appointments should be of major concern to U.S.…

Hillary Clinton's convincing Pennsylvania victory is the third consecutive back-to-the-wall big-state win she's managed (following on Ohio and Texas seven weeks ago). She's done this despite being outspent by Obama, and with most of the Democratic establishment and the media rooting against her. In…

The numbers are coming in, the exit polls can be seen here, the raw vote totals here. It looks like Hillary will meet but not exceed expectations. A couple observations... Obama supporters are already starting to spin to the effect that tonight changes nothing, that Hillary remains a huge underdog…

As I mentioned in my post this morning, I'm watching the late deciders tonight in Pennsylvania. The exit polls report 24% decided in the last week and Clinton won 56%-44% among those voters. Those are encouraging numbers for the Clinton camp. See the CBS exit poll here. ABC news pollster Gary…

AP reports: The Iraqi army command in Basra is giving top leaders of the Mahdi Army in the city 24 hours to surrender. The order comes from Gen. Mohan al-Freiji, who told reporters Tuesday that Basra city and the surrounding province are back under government control. Al-Freiji says he has warrants…

And the revolution is televised by the capitalists at reason.tv:

American cultural hegemony continues to abound throughout the world. Indeed, even as McDonald's revenue fell in the United States, it grew by a double-digit margin in Europe. McDonald's Corp., the world's largest restaurant company, said first-quarter profit rose more than analysts estimated after…

We've heard about the waffles. Now Illinois's Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, dogged by questions over his relationship with indicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, recently deployed the trademark political dodge: Blagojevich came out of his Capitol office after meeting with top legislators about a…

The New York Times featured an intriguing profile of Robert Downey Jr. this Sunday. Star of the upcoming Iron Man, Downey is best known as the most-wasted talent of his generation (both literally and figuratively). His drug problems became so bad that he even spent some time in the clink; since his…

Not only is the Labour Party expected to lose local elections, Prime Minister Gordon Brown risks a revolt from his own party in Parliament. Labor's problems stem from Brown's support for the elimination of the 10p tax bracket, which will result in a tax-increase for five million of Britain's…

The latest salvo? The SECDEF says that the Air Force is sandbaggin' it in Afghanistan and Iraq. "In my view we can do and we should do more to meet the needs of men and women fighting in the current conflicts while their outcome may still be in doubt," he said. "My concern is that our services are…

Pennsylvania voters might produce a surprisingly close outcome in today's Democratic primary. The buzz in Washington from several Democratic operatives I talked to yesterday suggests Team Obama is fired up and ready to over perform. "They're putting out the word they won't win, but it will be…

In recent days Barack Obama has made his closing argument to Pennsylvania voters. It doesn't seem to have gone too well. And that's what bloggers generally sympathetic to Obama are saying. Naturally, those bloggers are making excuses for Obama: The New Republic: "As for Obama's closing-night…

Now that E.J. Dionne is asking whether or not Obama is Adlai, we're on the cusp of it becoming conventional wisdom.

Multinational Forces Iraq has dramatically changed it's messaging concerning the Mahdi Army and attacks in Baghdad. While MNF-I continues to refer to the Shia militias as "criminals" or Special Groups in their press releases, there are no longer any calls for the Mahdi Army to obey Muqtada al…

Air Force news story here. But I was more taken with this delightful quote from General Gary Harencack: "The B-2 is airpower at its purest, most elegant and deadliest form," the general said. Open admiration for air-delivered death and destruction is rare in this day and age of politically correct…

From a Bay Area protestor's sign: Would we allow Nazi Germany to host the Olympics? No. Of course not. ....except for that one time.

From TWS Online: Sadr's in a JAM, by Tom Donnelly. From the Wall Street Journal: Enlarging the Atlantic Alliance, by the Big Boss. From the New York Post: Green and Smart, by Glenn Reynolds. From Politico: A Measure of Racism: 15%? by Roger Simon. From National Review: Change That Sees No Evil, by…

We keep hearing that Muqtada al Sadr has gained the upper hand after fighting "bogged down" in Baghdad and Basra. Time magazine has led the charge on this front. The April 15 article titled "Al-Sadr Tightens the Screws" epitomizes the tone of Time's coverage in Iraq. "Sadr's Mahdi Army has…

Happy Pennsylvania primary day. Since this is the first Democratic primary in weeks, here are two - count 'em, two - quotes from Democratic voters that may spell trouble for Barack Obama in November: "I originally started out with Barack, but the more and more I learned about him, the less and less…

In the debate last week Hillary warned that an Iranian attack on Israel "would incur massive retaliation from the United States." In response to the same question, Obama offered a lame threat of "appropriate action." So yesterday Hillary upped the ante in an interview with ABC. Her response to a…

Happy Earth Day -- (one day late)! AEI's Steven Hayward offers a useful reminder of how much cleaner the environment has become in the last 40 years: Air pollution is on its way to being eliminated entirely in the U.S. in about another 20 years. Levels of air pollution have fallen between 25 and 99…

From Centcom: Use silenced guns to kill Coalition forces at Iraqi security checkpoints, smuggle weapons in gradual shipments to reduce the risk of detection, and poison Iraq's water supply with nitric acid to spread disease and death. Such tactics were fleshed out in a terrorist letter intended for…

I take it the Associated Press is not a fan of the "Dirty Dozen" approach. Under pressure to meet combat needs, the Army and Marine Corps brought in significantly more recruits with felony convictions last year than in 2006, including some with manslaughter and sex crime convictions. Data released…

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are facing a difficult primary in Pennsylvania today, and bloggers are sizing up each candidate's chances. Hillary is doing well in PA. Yesterday Marc Ambinder said that Hillary's campaign has "a fierce urgency of the now." The Fix's Chris Cillizza noted that…

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ALMOST FROM THE MOMENT IT began on March 25, the inside-the-Beltway Conventional Wisdom about the Iraqi Army's offensive against Muqtada al-Sadr's "Jaysh al Mahdi" militia and other, more criminal elements in the city of Basra--the second-largest city in Iraq and whose port is Iraq's lifeline to…

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Washington Capitals outshot the Philadelphia Flyers 40-35 tonight, and won 4-2. Game seven -- and the potential extension of the Caps extraordinary season -- is Tuesday at 7pm in Washington.

A video has surfaced showing Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell heaping praise upon Minister Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam at a Philadelphia church on April 14, 1997. Andrew Sullivan is in an uproar: One thought that this video inevitably raises: what if Obama had ever said such a thing or been…

The Washington Post ran a story on McCain's temper over the weekend, but the piece seems to be falling apart amid accusations that the reporter distorted, exaggerated, and perhaps even fabricated some of the events he described. McCain aide Mark Salter responded yesterday that: If one half of it…

Because I don't get invited to Howard Dean's conference calls, I have to rely on the reports of others present to monitor the goings on. I found Ben Smith's write-up of today's confab provocative: During the Q and A part of a DNC conference call Howard Dean defended his 2004 statement where he…

Gallup's Frank Newport: Despite the enormous attention paid to global warming over the past several years, the average American is in some ways no more worried about it than in years past. Americans do appear to have become more likely to believe global warming's effects are already taking place…

From Susan Estrich's latest column: It's too bad, in a way, that John Kerry was able to win the Democratic nomination so easily last time, without any of his competitors in fact taking him on about his war record and then his post-war criticisms of American troops. It might have caused him to think…

With the news over the weekend that the Iraqi Army has now effectively cleared Basra, that the Iranians are backing away from their support of the Mahdi militia, and that Sadr suddenly appears rather desperate and marginalized, writing at Contentions, Abe Greenwald observed: What a strange…

I think Maureen Dowd is actually on to something: Asked about his friendly relationship with the former Weather Underground anarchist William Ayers - an association that The Wall Street Journal suggests could turn into the Swift Boat of 2008 given Ayers's statement that "I don't regret setting…

Drudge reports: Controlled excitement is building inside of Clinton's inner circle as closely guarded internal polling shows the former first lady with an 11-point lead in Pennsylvania! Given the ferocity of Obama's attacks on Clinton this weekend, his internal polling may show the same result. But…

From the New York Times: Exodus Exegesis, by the boss. From THE WEEKLY STANDARD: 24 Hours on the 'Big Stick', by P.J. O'Rourke. From the Wall Street Journal: The Keystone Primary Stakes, by Michael Barone. From the New Republic: The End of History, by Robert Kagan. From the Washington Post: Afghan…

German conservative interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has come out with a bold initiative to provide asylum for thousands of Iraqi Christians forced to leave their homeland in recent years because of religious persecution at the hands of Muslim extremist groups. According to the Schaeuble plan,…

Closing in on the Pennsylvania primary, it's no surprise that the principle topic of conversation on the talk shows this weekend was Hillary vs. Barack. Their surrogates were all over the place, and Ed Rendell made an intriguing point on Face the Nation about Obama's spending. Earlier in the race,…

Woody Allen will film his next movie in New York, and then promptly return to Europe to do three more pictures in Spain. Everyone knows the pint-sized Jewish auteur was in something of a lull before departing for England to shoot Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra's Dream. And he just completed the…

It's true this blog is dedicated mostly issues of politics and national security. But the Washington Capitals will play a crucial game six this evening against the much-despised Philadelphia Flyers (i.e. Goldfarb's team), and it's just too important to let it pass without comment. The Flyers, like…

Reports from the trail indicate that Barack Obama has been off his game, apparently having been beaten into a lifeless campaigning torpor by the veritable waterboarding that George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson put him through last week. Even noted Obama-phile Joe Klein has taken note of the…

Oh, the indignities a politician must suffer! Our own Bill Kristol devotes his New York Times column today to discussing the messages that the three presidential campaigns released to celebrate Passover with their potential Jewish voters. Chances are, all three would let Passover come and go…

Rick Santorum is supporting John McCain and urges other conservatives to do the same.

Spring 2006: The Mullab section of Ramadi, Iraq. Graffiti boast that this is "the graveyard of the Americans." Leaving your base camp virtually guarantees a fight, and I'm in one the first day of my embed. When shots ring out, I jump into the street to start snapping pictures. I look back and see a…

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Farewell, Charlton Heston

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

John McCain is for low taxes, rapid economic growth, and free trade. Those are the underpinnings of everything else he deems important:

The Case for Greatness

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Last weekend, I happened on a recording of the Scottish traditional "The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie" played by the Pipes and Drums of the 48th Highland regiment. It's a catchy tune and, though I couldn't recall the last time I'd heard it, the words of the chorus popped into my head--thanks undoubtedly to…

The last time General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker reported to Congress on the state of the Iraq war, "benchmarks" were all the rage. Congress had established 18 criteria in early 2007 both to pressure the Iraqis and to keep score on their progress. And in September, Congress faulted…

Our Story Begins

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Anthony Minghella died of a hemorrhage last month at London's Charing Cross Hospital, and the news took the creative world by surprise. The filmmaker was just 54 years old and few knew that he had been operated on the week before for cancer. With the astonishing critical and commercial success of…

No Excuses

Lectures in the History of Political Thought

The McCain campaign was offended last week, mightily offended. Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said McCain didn't care about the people he dropped bombs on during the Vietnam war. "You have to care about the lives of people," said Rockefeller, who supports Barack Obama for…

This time there were no peace marches. There was no MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times calling the commander of coalition forces in Iraq "General Betray Us." There was no suggestion from Senator Hillary Clinton that crediting the commander's report on military progress in Iraq required the…

On April 18, 2007, a series of five car bombs hit Baghdad, killing almost 200 people. Showing his customary lack of restraint and his trademark political opportunism, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, attempted to score partisan points. Seeking out a gaggle of press microphones the next day,…

Blockbuster: To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11…

Earlier this week, much hay was made when an Iraqi Army company deserted its position in Sadr City. The next day, the New York Times interviewed an Iraqi Army company commander, also from Sadr City, who left his unit to take leave and speculated he may not come back. In two days, the narrative for…

Get ready to laugh, America! The 9/11 comedies are on their way: Over the next few weeks, theaters will be screening far-out fare such as an Osama bin Laden documentary by the maker of "Super Size Me"; an absurdist slam against merchants of war featuring John Cusack; a zombie soldier flick with XXX…

It seems that some on the Left (and we're looking at you, ThinkProgress) have forgotten how federal budgeting works. They're trying to turn Senator McCain's promise to veto all bills with earmarks into a statement that he won't provide any financial aid to Israel: It is astounding then that McCain…

Sometimes graphs convey a message more powerfully than words. University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Charles Franklin recently posted this plot of the "most important problem"--comparing the economy to the Iraq war. The visual representation of CBS News survey data is pretty dramatic.…

Infamous Taliban leader assumes room temperature: A senior Taliban commander who became a hero to Islamic militants for his role in shooting down a U.S. helicopter in 2005, killing all 16 special forces troops aboard, has been killed by Pakistani security forces, officials and Taliban militants…

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A number of members of the Congressional Black Caucus appear to be judging one of their colleagues on the color of his skin, rather than the content of his character (or the quality of his representation): At least two members of the Congressional Black Caucus are supporting an African-American…

According to plan, the Bertelsmann Foundation has landed in Washington and has partially taken over the ninth floor of an ultramodern office building in the heart of downtown. It's actually hard to explain the precise location of the foundation. It is technically on I Street, NW, but Mapquest will…

Wired's David Axe makes Canberra's case The F-22's long range and twin engines make it a good choice for replacing aged Australia's F-111s and F/A-18s. On a recent visit, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said there was no reason Canberra couldn't be trusted with the radar-evading Raptor. "The…

I've pointed out recently how House Democrats have threatened to block Canadian oil imports. The proverbial thumb-in-the-eye of Colombia has also been well-chronicled. Now comes news that House Democrats may soon get the chance to kill the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. That's because Korea has…

Liberals are still whining about the debate, and I love it: Will Bunch, a Philadelphia Daily News writer, posted an open letter to Gibson and Stephanopoulos on his blog. He wrote that he was so angry that "it's hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking." He said the ABC newsmen…

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So Howard Dean proves once again he has no integrity, but McCain's age is a perfectly legitimate issue, and no one really believed that Democrats wouldn't make it central to their general election strategy. Still, this strikes me as a horrible way to go about making the case that McCain is too old…

Bill Clinton tells ABC: But you know, this is a contact sport. If you don't want to play, keep your uniform off." You know what would be news, if Bill told somebody to put their clothes back on.

Hamas endorsed Obama yesterday, and Philip Klein got the reaction from David Axelrod: "I have no idea about that, I have not heard that," Axelrod replied. I told him that the words were spoken by Ahmed Yousef, and offered to read him the quote, which I proceeded to do from my Blackberry: "We like…

In the wake of last night's debate, bloggers disagree about the performance of the moderators, but as to who won, well, nobody thinks it was Barack. The debate certainly defined the differences between the candidates, says the Fix's Chris Cillizza: "Clinton billed herself as a known commodity and a…

The left wanted a two hour infomercial for the Democratic party in prime time. They didn't get it and now they're staging a massive backlash against ABC, so massive in fact that it is almost sure to spark a backlash against the backlash. The left has basically dared the media to ask Obama…

The prejudice against Tibetans that has been exhibited by Chinese people living in America has been startling. Not only did college students bussed to San Francisco to see the Olympic torch literally attack pro-Tibet protesters, many seem perfectly willing to deny or downplay their country's…

Advocates for causes ranging from Cancer to AIDS to animal kindness--and certainly presidential aspirants--love to engage celebrities on their behalf. Famous people hawking a cause or a candidate are thought to raise an issue's or office seeker's visibility and build support. But are celebrities…

During last night's Democratic debate, moderator Charles Gibson asked Barack Obama about Jeremiah Wright. Here's the exchange: MR. GIBSON: Senator Obama, since you last debated, you made a significant speech in this building on the subject of race and your former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah…

This is weak stuff, but it is Washington, and considering that the federal government is the only thing that keeps the District from reverting to the uninhabited swamp it once was, not terribly surprising. They don't want to pay for Cold War weapons systems, boo hoo. I don't want to pay for…

I'm reconsidering sending my kid to college when she comes of age. From the Yale Daily News: Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement. Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially…

Upon first witnessing Barack Obama on the campaign trail, I thought he might be something different, or maybe even new, in American politics. The more I saw of him, the more I suspected he was a conventional figure--basically this generation's Gary Hart. But some time around Wisconsin it occurred…

With all the attention to Barack Obama's association with Bill Ayers, I thought it readers might be interested to see what Ayers has had to say recently about the actions of the Weather Underground. The most often-cited recent piece to examine Ayers' views on his days as a fugitive is this one from…

Eh, I suppose that's one way to conduct counterinsurgency operations: The US Air Force wanted to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam in 1959 and 1968, and Laos in 1961, to obliterate communist guerrillas, according to newly declassified secret US Air Force documents. In 1959, US Air Force chief of…

From TWS Online: Nothing to Lose, by Fred Barnes. From the New York Times: No Whining About the Media, by David Brooks. From the New York Daily News: Obama's Honeymoon is Over, by Michael Goodwin. From the Washington Post: Mr. Zahar and Mr. Carter, by the editors. From Middle East Journal: Now They…

Amidst the pummeling he took last night, did Barack Obama lie about his position on guns? There's been a lot of attention to the questionnaire he filled out for a local organization when he first ran for the Illinois State Senate in 1996. This is from the debate last night: Mr. GIBSON: But do you…

Hillary zings, Obama zaps. After watching this debate all I can think is that John McCain is the luckiest man in America. My take: Hillary probably made some Super-delegates a little more worried about Obama in the general. But to what end? Still hard to see how she ultimately prevails, and if she…

So says ABC News: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, seemed to give a thumbs down to bipartisan legislation that would greatly expand educational benefits for members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan under the GI Bill. McCain indicated he…

Luntz's focus group is agitated and bickering amongst themselves, a whole lot of them say they'll vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win the primary, and they look pretty evenly split between Obama and Clinton after tonight's debate. If this isn't the worst case for the Democratic party, I…

TAKING A STEP BACK from the pomp and circumstance surrounding his visit to the U.S., Pope Benedict XVI descended last night into the tiny Crypt Church at the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. There he addressed over 300 U.S. Catholic bishops. As he sat in front of an altar…

YOU ONLY HAD TO watch last night's Democratic presidential debate to understand why Hillary Clinton stays in the race. She's losing the nomination fight to Barack Obama in both the delegate count and the popular vote. But if bad things happen to her in a debate or while campaigning, she'll be no…

Obama isn't the underdog anymore, and Charlie Gibson isn't rolling over for him a la SNL. Gibson and Stephanopoulos have, on behalf of their colleagues, responded to the ridicule with, as Hillary might say, massive retaliation. Obama stumbled badly with that first question about bittergate,…

Power Line notes that Barack Obama has picked up an important endorsement--from Hamas. Why do they like His Hopeness? Because "He has a vision to change America." Another victory for the Change AgendaTM! It's interesting to note how clear-eyed America's enemies are about what Barack Obama stands…

Noted lefty homophobe Spencer Ackerman lasted a full three days in his new job as a blogger for the Center for American Progress before writing something entirely beyond the pale: May Bush and bin Laden die in exactly the same way: alone, afraid, and in captivity. Frankly, I'm surprised it didn't…

Tory leader David Cameron is in dire need of a dry cleaner, or a new suit: Kingsley Cardi, 15, was given a caution by police for "wiping snot" on the back of Mr. Cameron's jacket today. Afterwards Kingsley said: "I sneezed in my hand and wiped it on him. It was just a joke -- I was showing off. "To…

Is this the corollary to the rule that as Iraq becomes more peaceful, it is reported on less and less? The story I'm referring to is the poll finding that the people of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom no longer see the United States as the greatest threat to world peace.…

Democrats frequently complain about gasoline prices, right before they take action to limit our available supply of oil -- thereby increasing prices further. The energy bill that they passed last year is an excellent example. In that legislation, Congress reclassified oil derived from Canada's tar…

Tonight, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will debate in PA ahead of next week's primary. Given the recent ad wars between the candidates--over Bittergate and campaign money from oil companies--the debate might provide some hilarious prime-time nastiness. Bring the popcorn! The Bittergate ads…

Jennifer Rubin comments on Hillary's latest Pennsylvania ad: Hillary Clinton is now letting Barack Obama have it. Karl Rove, some think, could not have done a harsher ad on Snob-gate. She says in her latest ad that his "I don't take money from oil companies" line is a lie, or at least an…

I thought this exchange sums up pretty nicely what the new J Street lobbying effort will look like. We have an angry leftist, Daniel Levy, whose name appears frequently at the J Street website, berating an Israeli about settlement construction, checkpoints, and occupation, as if most Israelis…

The Iraqi government's willingness to take on the Mahdi Army in its strongholds in Baghdad, Basra, and elsewhere in the South is perhaps the most significant news story from Iraq this year. In 2006 and 2007, analysts, pundits, military officers, and politicians said the Shia militias--particularly…

The New York Times reports that food preferences actually reveal who you will likely vote for in November. If there's butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you're likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You…

A couple months ago I asked whether or not Barack Obama's sonorous voice resembled the Voice of Saruman in its power to enthrall and persuade. (You can get the full geek here.) But now geektastic reader B.G. sends in a note wondering if Obama's latest bitter/cling problems don't also have an eerie…

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The Maoist-controlled assembly in Nepal intends to dethrone King Gyanendra if he will not step down "gracefully." Grace is not a trait one generally associates with Maoist party members let alone the Nepalese royal family. Do recall King Gyanendra ascended to the throne after the Crown Prince of…

From the Wall Street Journal: Enlarging the Anglosphere, by Gordon Brown. From TWS Online: The Good, the Bad, and the Greenwald, by Dean Barnett. From TWS Online: Legitimizing Hamas, by Michael Levitt. From USA Today: Obama's Claim of Independence Questioned, by Ken Dilanian. From Politico: Who has…

From the John Judis piece yesterday: These difficulties were clear before Obama spoke in San Francisco, but they're much more glaring now. In the speech, Obama appeared to say that Pennsylvania voters' opposition to gun control or abortion or immigration or free trade was pathological--a product of…

Taliban conventional and suicide attacks in Pakistan have dropped dramatically since the election in February, when the new government has indicated it was willing to negotiate with the terror groups. The Taliban have largely abided by their cease-fire. Meanwhile the U.S. State Department has been…

Rob Portman is frequently mentioned as a possible vice presidential nominee for John McCain. If you believe Bob Novak, he's the favorite. The biggest reason is that he is seen as giving McCain a big boost in the critical state of Ohio. Rasmussen's latest Ohio poll however, suggests that the former…

Ethan Gutmann, author of "Carrying a Torch for China," this week's cover story for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, noticed yesterday that his story couldn't be found through Google News search, though it showed up in a search just the night before. In light of other suspicions that Google might be doing the…

I missed this yesterday, but it seems that most blogs did as well. Is it just me, or is this an awfully tortured construction for someone as eloquent as Barack Obama: ABC News' Eloise Harper and Sunlen Miller report: Barack Obama made a new argument in trying to quell the fire that his remarks over…

It wasn't supposed to play out this way. Obama's new politics and electrifying campaign style would energize Democrats and help the party's down ticket candidates? Turns out Democrats may be too busy clinging to their guns and religion to get too excited about Obama's White House bid. His comments…

IMAGINE THE ALICE IN Wonderland scene that will take place later this week, when U.S. Secret Service agents entrusted with protecting former president Jimmy Carter stand guard over a meeting with the head of a designated terrorist group responsible for near daily attacks targeting civilians,…

HEZBOLLAH, THE RADICAL Shiite terrorist organization in Lebanon, is best known for attacking Israelis. But the organization also attempts to gain the support of Lebanese citizens with a sophisticated network of social services, political outreach, and financial aid. And recently, the militia has…

I KNOW THIS WON'T endear me to many of my fellow conservatives, but I like Glenn Greenwald. I've spoken to him a few times on the radio and have enjoyed our jousts. Mind you, I agree with virtually nothing Greenwald says or writes and recognize his unbecoming fondness for the personal insult, but I…

AIPAC has some new competition. It's called J Street and it bills itself as a "pro-peace, pro-Israel political voice," in contrast with AIPAC, which the folks at J Street clearly perceive as a pro-violence, anti-Israel political voice. I took part in a conference call today with J Street's founder…

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New York's new Governor David Paterson is in the news today. Like other prominent Democrats, his donations to charity are stunning: Gov. Paterson and his wife last year gave a shockingly low $150 to charity, despite a combined income of nearly $270,000, the couple's income-tax filings show. The…

From TWS Online: What's the Matter With Liberals, by Dean Barnett. From Pajamas Media: Deep Inside Bittergate, by Bill Bradley. From the Wall Street Journal: Obama's Flaws Multiply, by John Fund. From the Washington Post: Obama on a High Horse, by George Will. From the New Nixon: Sixty Years of…

Roll Call reports: The House agenda appears thin even for an election year, and majority Democrats are in no hurry to send bills to die in the Senate or to provide targets for Republican sniping. Democrats are counting on picking up seats this year, and observers say they plan to run on the…

Is he going to prosecute Bush administration officials for war crimes? Depends on what answer you want to hear: What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to…

AFP reports: Three weeks after Iraqi troops swarmed into the southern city of Basra to take on armed militiamen who had overrun the streets, many residents say they feel safer and that their lives have improved. The fierce fighting which marked the first week of Operation Sawlat al-Fursan (Charge…

Last week, former president Jimmy Carter made headlines with his plans to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria. Carter arrived in the Middle East on Sunday, and Reuters reported yesterday that "Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans…

Cynthia Moy points out that one of Obama's big 'bundlers' is Jodie Evans, a radical left co-founder of Code Pink, as well as the Rainforest Action Network, one of whose members is the number-one domestic terrorist organization (as ranked by the FBI), the Earth Liberation Front. She's also a…

The BBC's Peter Taylor has been reporting on terrorist groups for the last four decades. He doesn't seem to hesitate in describing al Qaeda as far more dangerous than anything that preceded it. But ultimately Taylor and other journalists, describing how terrorists they've interviewed managed to…

On Friday Canada's National Post asked: How does a BBC story that starts off saying, "Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 ... This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory," become "Global temperatures will drop…

Glenn links this BBC report that China is now the world's 'top carbon polluter.' The Onion broke this story a few weeks back:

Some British universities are reestablishing dress codes, forcing students to leave their unsightly Burberry caps and trainers at home. Students are being made to sign contracts which may force them to throw away their scruffy jumpers and torn jeans. A growing number of universities are presenting…

An interesting story from the Times on the woman who broke bittergate wide open last Friday night at HuffPo: Ms. Fowler said she found his response "professorial" and judgmental toward blue-collar voters and that even though she supports him, she was "taken aback" by them. "I'm a religious person,…

"INFAMY, INFAMY, THEY'VE all got it in for me!" That wail from a British comedy spoof of the last days of Julius Caesar might now be heard in the private offices of most of the world's key central bankers. Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan is being blamed for America's…

EARLIER THIS WEEK PRESIDENTIAL hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama got a chance to brandish their religious credentials before a conservative Christian college in rural Pennsylvania, site of the next Democratic primary contest. The Compassion Forum, hosted by Messiah College and CNN, allowed…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2004, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas became the left's "it" book of the moment. Lefty luminaries such as Jeanine Garofalo, Molly Ivins, and tireless class warfarist Barbara Ehrenreich crowded the book's back flap to offer eager blurbs.

It's not like when we crushed them in paintball, or when we spent six months beating them senseless over the fabulism of Scott Beauchamp, but interesting and entertaining nonetheless. You can see the whole match between our own Matt Continetti and Noam Scheiber here.

ARG has Obama down 20 points, a number which serious observers seem to put almost no stock in beyond the fact that it would indicate a shift in momentum. Obama had been gaining in Pennsylvania for weeks, and all of a sudden a poll shows things moving in the other direction in a big way. The race is…

George Will says he could, but I don't buy it. First off, I suspect most Ron Paul supporters aren't really Republicans, but people who are generally disenchanted with the two-party system and fiercely oppose the war in Iraq, the international monetary system, immigration, desegregation, and…

With Silvio Berlusconi's sweeping back into power in a rather unsurprising general election victory, it's worth taking stock of where Bush's friends and enemies have ended up over the years. The left has long fancied the notion that friendship with Bush was political suicide for foreign leaders,…

When you take on Barack Obama's recent comments, there's a lot to debunk. There are the gun and God insults, the hypocrisy on trade, the accusations of racism, and more. One item that has gotten little attention is Obama's thesis -- that voters are embittered because Washington has done nothing to…

Senate Republicans face some tough electoral sledding in 2008. Right now the big question is not if the GOP numbers will fall below 49, but by how much. Rasmussen regularly conducts state level polling and the landscape looks increasingly challenging for Republicans. It starts with one open seat…

We are continually told how the Iraqi government was beaten and humiliated in Basra after it launched an offensive to clear the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia militias from the city. Yet when the Iraqi Army announced it was going to dismiss the approximately 1,300 soldiers and police who…

A reader emails: So you are all upset that Obama goes around and tells people what they want to hear--depending on geography, means, color, and religion. What is the big deal? It is politics. What do you want, a politician that tells the Vietnamese who are torturing him to go to Hell? A politician…

My unofficial sampling of the weekend news suggested that Barack Obama benefited from a somewhat favorable spin on his San Francisco remarks: many major news outlets reported that he called rural voters bitter, without mentioning the controversial portion of his statement. As many have pointed out,…

When I visit the 'Barack TV' portion of the Obama campaign website, the Obama ad which automatically loads centers on a school in the Bronx, New York. But according to the New York City Education Department, the video -- which was also featured in an Obama fundraising appeal -- was shot in…

Barack Obama's "bittergate" blew up the blogosphere over what would have been an otherwise quiet weekend. At a San Francisco fundraiser last Sunday Obama said, You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25…

Mickey Kaus summarizes the four major problems with Barack Obama's ruminations: It lumps together things Obama wants us to think he thinks are good (religion) with things he undoubtedly thinks are bad (racism, anti-immigrant sentiment)... Even if Obama wasn't equating anything on his list with…

From the New York Times: The Mask Slips, by the boss. From the New York Post: Memory Fails, by Stephen Hayes. From TWS Online: The Politics of Condescension, by Noemie Emery. From City Journal: Hope for Iraq's Meanest City, by Michael Totten. From Slate: What's the Matter With Obama? by Mickey Kaus.

Have you heard the good news? US Ambassador Ford Fraker said in Sakaka that his country aims to double the number of student visas issued to Saudis. "Currently there are 15,000 Saudi students in the US," he said during an event on Sunday with local business leaders to an audience at the Al-Jouf…

Over the weekend John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei had an interesting piece at the Politico pondering why the Clinton crew won't come out and say what they really think about Obama. In fact, the Democratic race has not been especially rough by historical standards. What's more, our conversations with…

In 2001, shortly after Beijing won the bid to host this year's Olympics, People's Daily proudly declared that China will "host the best ever Games in the history of the Olympiad." With the country's recent PR setback, culminating in the fracas over the torch relay last week, the catchphrase…

The Scotsman has a story that might not have been laugh-out-loud funny three or four days ago: DEMOCRAT grandees Jimmy Carter and Al Gore are being lined-up to deliver the coup de grâce to Hillary Clinton and end her campaign to become president. Falling poll numbers and a string of high-profile…

The most striking news to come out of the Sunday morning talk shows was Stephen Hadley's dismissive response when asked whether or not the United States should boycott the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. On Fox News Sunday, Hadley said the following: "I think this issue is, in some…

My friend Jody Bottum once suggested that there are three basic stories in fiction: (1) boy meets girl; (2) a stranger came to town; and (3) there once was a man a long way from home. I've long held that the same is true for advertising. Advertisements can be classified into three basic pitches:…

BALKAN BRAWL

Coincidentally

No one wants to see Iraq war movies. The latest major Hollywood release about Iraq, Stop-Loss, cratered at the box office in its opening weekend, and flop sweat is already pouring by the bucketful from the editing bays where the remaining three Iraq pictures are being readied for release.…

It was the strangest art exhibition you ever did see.

When is 1,252 greater than 1,414? Apparently, when Hillary Clinton has the 1,252 (delegates, that is). Clinton is making a strong push to convince Democratic voters and superdelegates that her big-state wins matter more than Barack Obama's assortment of smaller-state wins.

Paris

Culture and Conflict in the Middle East

Four months after the start of the Iraq war, two former senior Clinton administration national security officials took to the pages of the New York Times to demand accountability for the Bush administration's claims about Iraq and terrorism. Or, as they put it in their opening sentence, "Iraq's…

The Friends of Obama

During an appearance in Philadelphia last month, Hillary Clinton introduced a controversial couple as part of her presidential campaign. She defended them as victims of smear attacks. "Valerie and Joe have had their patriotism questioned," she insisted. "They have been maligned as un-American…

Basic Brown

Busy times for us sinners--there are now an additional Seven Deadly Sins. The fresh abominations in the eyes of the Lord were announced by Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Vatican body that oversees confessions and plenary indulgences. This organization goes by the contrition-inducing name of…

In 1817, nearly a century before Roald Amundsen first navigated the long-sought Northwest Passage, the Royal Society in London got word of "new sources of warmth" in the Arctic. The society was the Victorian-era equivalent of NASA, and its president reacted with great enthusiasm to the sudden…

Both are purveyors of "the politics of hope." Both run optimism-heavy, light-on-specifics campaigns, exhorting voters to "take a chance on your own aspirations." Both read from David Axelrod-penned speeches--often the same David Axelrod-penned speeches.

The Conservative Ascendancy

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus

On March 24, 2008, Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) under Lieutenant General Mohan al-Fireji launched a series of attacks against illegal Shia militias and criminal elements in the city of Basra.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF May 25, 1984, the rising It Candidate of the current electoral season committed an unwitting faux pas at a fundraising event for le tout California that set his high-flying campaign on its heels. As recounted by Jack Germond and Jules Witcover in the book they wrote, Gary Hart…

The Iraqi Interior Ministry has released the official numbers on the number of police and soldiers dismissed in the aftermath of the fighting in Basra. At first glance, the numbers may be surprising: 500 soldiers and 421 police, including 37 senior police officers, were dismissed for failing to…

She loses points for saying she's not driving, and lighting up a smoke would have been a very nice touch. But, as far as panders go, this is pretty solid work. Allahpundit notes that she's out today (hungover?) talking about how her father taught her to shoot when she was just a wee little girl. To…

According to New York Times reporter Andrew Rivkin, one of the leading proponents of the science linking hurricanes to global warming has backtracked in a recent study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society: The research is important because the lead author is Kerry…

An interesting observation from Noam Scheiber in response to Clinton's latest assault: Strange how the Clinton approach to strengthening the Democratic Party is remarkably similar to the GOP's approach to strengthening the Democratic Party. At this point, it is possible that the biggest hurdle…

Via Ambinder: [O]bviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that. The underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so. What a horrible…

Last night's episode of Bill Maher's Real Time featured evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins (the very poor man's version of Christopher Hitchens), explaining why scientists can't be certain of much of anything: I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is…

Earlier this week, the Today show ran a remarkable story about a Marine serving in Iraq: If you've ever wondered what the Marines have in mind when they advertise for "a few good men," look no further than Gunnery Sgt. William "Spanky" Gibson. Two years ago, he lost a leg to a sniper's bullet in…

I want to come back to a story that had quite a bit of media traction in Germany but went virtually unnoticed in the United States. About two weeks ago, I co-hosted a luncheon discussion for visiting Bavarian conservative CSU Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann at the German Marshall Fund here in…

There's no better way to prove a woman is ready to be President than to make her out to be a scolding nag: Former US president Bill Clinton said Friday he has been ordered to hold his tongue by his wife Hillary for reviving an embarrassing story about her trip to Bosnia in 1996 while out…

John Podhoretz has a really sharp take on all this: Well, it has finally happened. Barack Obama has done what Democratic candidates for president invariably do - he has revealed the profound sense of unearned superiority that is the sad and persistent hallmark of contemporary liberalism. Obama's…

It's stunning to view the different reactions on the right and left to Obama's comments about rural voters. While it's natural for religious voters, gun-rights voters, and opponents of illegal immigration to be offended at Obama's statement, it's amazing how many on the left fail to see what's…

You have to give Obama credit: he acted quickly to try to defuse the anger over his condescending remarks towards rural voters in Pennsylvania. But he's not going to be able to get past this as long as he refuses to apologize. Let's look at what Obama said that got him into such hot water. Boil it…

As reported by the Politico's Ben Smith, Obama psychoanalyzes Pennsylvania's white voters: You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton…

Megan McArdle had a lengthy post a little while back on the question of whether liberals actually believe they are undertaxed. She argued that few really believe they pay too little in taxes; what they really mean is that they would be willing to pay higher taxes as long as other Americans were…

Gallup's Frank Newport says it's bad: Bush's approval is lower than that of any president since World War II, with the exceptions of Jimmy Carter (who had a low point of 28% in 1979), and Richard Nixon and Harry Truman, who suffered ratings in the low- to mid-20% range in the last years of their…

With Bill Clinton's brazen and factually challenged defense of his wife's heroics in Tuzla, many people are noting the former POTUS's frequent estrangement from the truth and wondering precisely what it is that makes Clinton lie. If I could successfully psychoanalyze Bill Clinton, I would go to…

Obama says, "I'm not going to comment on former President Carter. He's a private citizen. It's not my place to discuss who he shouldn't meet with." By this standard, isn't former President Bill Clinton also a private citizen? I guess Obama would have us believe former presidents who criticize him…

This is a remarkable story from Canada's National Post: How does a BBC story that starts off saying, "Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 ... This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory," become "Global…

Jamie Kirchick has a piece at the Advocate titled "Liberals and Their Invisible Homophobia." This jumps out: The liberal journalist Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, is a particularly nasty example of the liberal homophobe.…

So a German opera house is staging Verdi's A Masked Ball "in the ruins of New York's World Trade Centre." This rendition also "features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators." One critic who attended rehearsals observes, "Mr Kresnik's anti-capitalist…

CQ Politics reports that the sponsors of the chief Senate climate change legislation are pleased with the cost estimate of the bill released by the Congressional Budget Office. That's because their proposal won't cost the federal government a dime. In fact, it will raise taxes by about $1.2…

The big news today is Bill Clinton's latest campaign-ending remarks about Hillary's 1996 Bosnia trip . ABC reports: President Clinton's described his wife's experience, saying, "There was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately…

At Hit & Run, Nick Gillespie flags this video that originally appeared at Radar. The video shows a debate between Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Alex Koroknay-Palicz of the National Youth Rights Association. It aired Monday on Fox News. The response from Marty…

The Washington Post has an excellent piece today on Barack Obama's bundlers -- fundraisers who solicit multiple donations from a range of donors, and then combine those donations into much larger lump sums. The Post says there are 79 bundlers who raised more than $200,000 each -- for a minimum of…

From TWS Online: Wasting a Golden Chance, by Michael Auslin. From the Jerusalem Post: Ahmadinejad's Smile, by Caroline Glick. From the Washington Post: The Holocaust Declaration, by Charles Krauthammer. From the New York Post: Press 1, Troops 0, by Ralph Peters. From the Times: Flame of Democracy…

NEXT WEEK, new South Korean President Lee Myung-bak will visit Washington on his first foreign trip abroad, hoping to cement closer ties with the U.S. government. His hopes are likely to be dashed, and the effect on the 50-year-old U.S.-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance could be catastrophic. Both…

The U.S. military has long worked to divide Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army and force Sadr to participate in the political process. This strategy became evident in early 2007, when Sadr ordered his fighters off of the streets at the onset of the Baghdad Security Plan. The U.S. military touted Sadr's…

This is certainly a first. Steve Clemons, writing at the Huffington Post, accuses Barack Obama of selling out to "The Lobby" by refusing to negotiate directly with Hamas: Obama, in my view, has tarnished his foreign policy credentials here. If he can't embrace what these Americans have been able to…

John Dickerson at Slate has an interesting look at John McCain's next campaign tour. (I wrote about that tour and McCain's general election campaign here.) McCain will be visiting places "Republicans fear to tread," as the somewhat overwrought headline puts it. The plans include stops in…

Michael Yon has a must-read piece in today's Journal. He makes a lot of interesting observations based on the unprecedented amount of time he's spent in Iraq reporting on the war, but I think most important is this: Soldiers everywhere are paid, and good generals know it is dangerous to mess with a…

Earlier this week, the Government Accounting Office released a report detailing the systematic misuse of government credit cards by public servants, who have used tax dollars to pay for everything from lingerie to gambling. One of the bigger price tag items was a $13,000 dinner for 81 people hosted…

The laugh is back! And CNN was lucky enough to witness it: Hillary Clinton used her trademark laugh Thursday to deflect a question about the $800,000 her husband earned in 2005 giving speeches for a Bogota-based group that supports the Colombia free trade agreement--the same trade deal she…

The middle class squeeze is in the news a lot these days and on the minds of elected officials. And since about half of Americans consider themselves part of this group, the squeeze is likely to have big political consequences. The Pew Research Center just released a new study, "Inside the Middle…

LAST YEAR THE New York Police Department (NYPD) issued a clear-sighted and path-breaking document titled Radicalization in the West: The Home-Grown Threat. Prepared by Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt of the NYPD Intelligence Division, the report was serious, well-researched, and articulate. It…

YESTERDAY AFTERNOON, the House of Representatives voted to postpone consideration of the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact, which President Bush sent to Congress earlier this week. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama oppose the Colombia deal on the grounds that Bogotá has not done enough to curb…

THERE ARE ANY NUMBER of ways to classify films. You can label them by genre--what's the best noir, or comedy, or science fiction movie? You can break them down by era--were the pre-Hays code gangster movies better than the watered down (but far cleverer) films that followed? You can identify them…

Obama was asked again yesterday about his church's relationship with Louis Farrakhan and he responded, rather presumptuously, that "nobody has spoken out more fiercely on the issue of anti-Semitism than I have." It's an absurd claim given Obama's long relationship with Jeremiah Wright, but it also…

AFP reports: The US State Department said Thursday it has advised former US president Jimmy Carter against meeting with the radical Palestinian group Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal if he visits Syria.... The State Department will help Carter with arrangements if he visits Syria but "will not…

Obama has managed to anger gay journalists and groups by refusing to talk with them. A leader of Obama's National LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) Leadership Council explains this is all part of the campaign's "postmodern approach" to protecting gay rights. In particular, he says, while…

In the virtual pages of Commentary's Contentions blog, Max Boot makes a fairly astonishing confession: "I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally have never read a single book by either Trotsky or Strauss." With his brave show of honesty, Boot is attempting to show that not all neocons are…

In response to this op-ed in the New York Times, CUNY Hunter College professor Jessie Daniels, Ph.D., writes: While some might argue that having a prominent writer for the New York Times such as Bill Kristol address racism and sexism at all is a sign of progress (a point I can sometimes be…

The folks at Red State have noticed a troubling quote from Barack Obama, regarding his views on how to deal with China: "It's very hard to tell your banker that he's wrong," Obama said, after talking about the need to restore America's stance in the world, "And if we are running huge deficits and…

Bad news for Al Gore, great news for millions of impoverished Indians: India's Tata Power group just gained important financial backing from the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank, for its planned $4 billion, 4-billion watt "Ultra Mega" coal-burning power plant complex in…

From TWS Online: Interview With the President, by the boss. From TWS Online: The New Deterrence, by Elbridge Colby. From the New York Times: Trying to Influence McCain on Foreign Policy, by Elisabeth Bumiller. From the New York Post: Iran's Busted Iraq Bid, by Amir Taheri. From the Washington Post:…

The Politico reports on the RNC's internal polls: Internal polling data, presented privately last week at the Republican National Committee's state chair meeting and provided to Politico, shows John McCain with a solid lead over both his potential general election rivals. Powered by the same appeal…

Elton John sang at a Hillary Clinton fundraiser last night at Radio City Music Hall. The event raised over $2.5 million for the campaign--but I'll leave the potential legal issues to others. What really made headlines after the event was Elton John's comments to the 5,000 concert-goers. The New…

Four days after the Iraqi government, with the backing of the full spectrum of the political parties, moved to bar the Sadrist movement from running in provincial elections if it failed to disband the Mahdi Army, Muqtada al Sadr received yet another blow, this time from the clerical establishment.…

Last night marked American Idol's second annual installment of "Idol Gives Back," an episode of the wildly popular talent competition in which Hollywood mobilizes to raise money for a plethora of noble causes. Virtually everyone who is someone or was someone made an appearance -entertainment…

Haven't seen news like this since the Cold War... New B-52 Squadron Coming to Minot AFB: North Dakota's congressional delegation announced Tuesday that the Air Force has informed them Minot Air Force Base will get a second squadron of B-52 bombers and about 1,090 more personnel. The Air Force…

With the House of Representatives likely to vote today to kill the Colombia trade deal, it's worthwhile to look at what the deal would do for our trade with that nation. The U.S. Trade Representative sends the following data: ...Since 1991, Congress has given Colombian products almost complete…

From the UK's Daily Mail, top brass force Brown to review £1bn defence cuts: An emergency review of the country's defences is due to take place following a crisis meeting between the heads of all three armed services and Gordon Brown. The chiefs are understood to have said that cuts ordered by the…

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Katie Couric is on her way out at CBS. After two years of Couric compiling "record-low ratings" and with her ratings currently having a trend line that resembles a ski-slope, CBS will finally cry uncle and part ways with its $15 million/yr. news reading…

I SPENT ABOUT 40 minutes with President Bush in the Oval Office late yesterday afternoon, in a meeting whose purpose was to allow the president to preview the Iraq speech he's giving today.

While the worldwide media has been focusing their attention on the torch and Tibet, I think we're ignoring a greater travesty. Namely, the awful pandas that will serve as the official mascots of the 2008 games. A taste... china panda.jpg Beijing 2008 Like all antelopes, Yingying is fast and agile…

In an interview with GQ last week, Karl Rove accused Barack Obama of falsely writing in The Audacity of Hope that "'people like . . . Karl Rove say we are a Christian nation.'"

THREE WEEKS AFTER THE outbreak of violence in southwest China, Beijing's officials have apparently restored order. Before they were able to do so, they often spoke in grim terms. Tibet Communist party chief Zhang Qingli, for instance, stated that the country was locked in "a life or death struggle."

IN A LITTLE NOTICED speech on February 8, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley announced that the United States had recently adopted "a new declaratory policy to help deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States, our friends, and allies." This policy would…

Ambinder seems to think there's a pretty good possibility: A provocative headline, I know, perhaps needlessly so, but it remains one of those hidden secrets in Washington that a Democratic Justice Department is going to be very interested in figuring out whether there's a case to be made that…

Just as a follow-up to this, AFP reports: Two Israeli civilians and seven Palestinians were killed on Wednesday in an explosion of violence on the Gaza Strip border after Palestinian commandos stormed into Israel.... The Israeli army said Palestinian fighters, under cover of mortar fire, breached…

Now that Nancy Pelosi and company have stalled the Colombia Free Trade deal -- after their presidential candidates thoroughly trashed NAFTA -- I'll be eagerly awaiting the coming stories about the Democrats' disregard for U.S. allies and their arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy.

A high school student thinks his textbook is biased...and James Hansen agrees with him: LaClair said he was particularly upset about the book's treatment of global warming. James Hansen, the director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, recently heard about LaClair's concerns and has lent…

Speaker Pelosi won't admit it, but if the House backs her recommendation to indefinitely postpone the consideration of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, then the accord is dead for the foreseeable future. That's because the decision removes the single most important driver for support of…

Goldfarb points out that Barack Obama is getting ready to backtrack on his promise to accept public financing. On the left, there will be claims that he didn't exactly promise to accept public financing; that he merely suggested he might. The last time there was a flareup over Obama's pledge, his…

In anticipation of the first May Day Parade since the Soviet-era, a panel of U.S. and Russian defense experts has an important message for Ivan: you're weak. A panel of U.S. and Russian defense experts yesterday painted a deeply pessimistic portrait of the state of Russia's military and defense…

Andrew Sullivan makes the perfectly reasonable point that Iraq is not South Korea, or Japan, or Germany. He says that if American forces could stay in those countries for 100 years, the same may not be true of Iraq, a country at the heart of a Muslim world: There is no way an Arab Muslim country…

Fox News is reporting that former president Jimmy Carter will meet with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, later this month. Hamas has been designated by the U.S. government as a "foreign terrorist organization." It is committed to Islamic fundamentalism, destroying Israel, and, according to the…

Michelle Obama apparently takes a dim view of the notion that a rising tide lifts all ships: Most Americans, she said, don't want much. "They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is…

Air Force Cyber Command's mission remains unclear: While the U.S. Air Force is busy setting up a cyber command, defense experts are busy debating what, exactly, a cyber command should do... When describing the new command's mission, its chief, Air Force Maj. Gen. William Lord, said it is defending…

Just when you thought MoveOn.org's massive PR blunder was fading into the shadows, HuffPo rescues it from irrelevancy: General Betray Us? Of course he has. MoveOn.org can hardly be expected to recycle its slogan from last September, when Gen. David Petraeus testified in support of escalating the…

Obama is making noises about abandoning his pledge to use public financing for the general election. For conservatives, this is kind of a non-starter. We aren't supposed to believe in public financing anyway, and Allahpundit pretty well sums up the predicament McCain is going to find himself in…

Those Chinese guys accompanying the Olympic Torch (Codename: Flambeaux Keep-away) are actually paramilitary police who have developed quite the reputation for bullying even non-Tibetans. Track star Lord Coe had this to say: The Olympic medallist and organiser of the 2012 Games was overheard saying…

From TWS Online: The 'Real' al Qaeda, by Frederick W. Kagan. From the Wall Street Journal: Obama's Minister Problem, by Lanny Davis. From Slate: Obama Is No King, by Christopher Hitchens. From the Times: Unreality on Iraq, by Gerard Baker. From Commentary: The Klein and the Fury, by Peter Wehner.

Moviemaker Spike Lee received Chrylser's Behind the Lens award the other night. His thank-you speech turned into an angry denunciation of the current studio system. From the Hollywood Reporter: "I [had to take] my ass on a plane to Europe and got the financing for this film," Lee said of his latest…

The concept of grand strategy certainly does escape the left, doesn't it? From a strictly military point of view, the Democrats' position on Iraq can be maddening. We have to stop fighting the enemy in one theater so that we can fight them in another? We have to cease action mid-battle so that we…

Yesterday morning, about 450 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rallied outside the Capitol to support General Petraeus and the mission in Iraq. "We're here to tell Congress not to micromanage the war from air-conditioned offices on Capitol Hill," said Pete Hegseth, a decorated Iraq…

The left is thrilled that Senator Biden yesterday got Ambassador Crocker to 'admit' that it's more important to defeat al Qaeda along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border than it is to defeat them in Iraq. Next up: getting FDR to admit that it's more important to defeat the Nazis in Berlin than in…

It's easy to lose sight of the dramatic shifts in the Democratic nomination contest that have occurred just since January. This new Gallup study provides some useful perspective on what a long strange trip it's been in the Clinton/Obama contest. Consider these moves in the polls in less than three…

So sayeth two official biographers of the Bush presidency. Faster than usual for an Oliver Stone movie, the film hasn't even entered production and it's already being sharply criticized for favoring left-wing talking points over historical accuracy. Reactions to the script from the biographers were…

As General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker begin day two of their Capitol Hill testimony, bloggers are wrapping up the buzz from yesterday's hearings with the Senate Armed Forces and Foreign Relations committees. Check out the Lede's concise liveblog of the hearings (and Michelle Malkin's for a…

WHATEVER THE ACTUAL results of Egypt's municipal elections yesterday, the fix is in: President Hosni Mubarak made sure that even the most moderate and reform-minded candidates would be shut out of the process. The charade of democratic elections in Egypt typifies the Bush administration's faltering…

THE TESTIMONY DELIVERED YESTERDAY by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker provides an opportunity to assess progress in Iraq since last September (the last time the two men were in Washington, D.C.), and evaluate what is needed moving forward. Last fall's testimonies noted the initial…

ONE THEME THAT emerged clearly at the Senate hearings with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker was the need to abandon Iraq in order to deal with the real center of the war on terror in South Asia. A series of questioners put on the airs of grand strategic sophisticates to remind…

The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon's student newspaper, reports on a campaign event featuring Michelle Obama: While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama's event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan's…

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I know a few venerable Strategic Air Command warriors who will be more than a little peeved when they see the new Air Force Cyber Command unit patch.

An interesting take from Paul Ibrahim: Obama does not talk about the war on terror as a war we are winning, or about the surge as a strategy that has given us back control of much of Iraq. Instead he talks of our remarkable success against terrorist plots at home and Iraqi terrorists abroad as…

In response to Jay Rockefeller's disgraceful attack on McCain, and for which Rockefeller has since apologized, the McCain camp wants Obama himself to repudiate the comments: "Why does Senator Obama refuse to personally condemn this type of despicable attack? Senator Obama has run for president on…

Multinational Forces Iraq released statistics on the improving security situation and the current level of violence in Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq's area of operations, and the development of the Iraqi security forces. Violence in Iraq continues to drop as the Iraqi security forces increasingly take…

Air Force cuts totally awesome flyovers by over 50 percent: ...it can seem there's hardly an event without a flyover these days. The roar of jet engines is heard at everything from Major League Baseball games to NASCAR races to town fairs and community parades. With requests for flyovers rocketing…

Armed Forces Journal reports: It might be tempting to dismiss the U.S. Navy's potential focus on China as a passing fad - part of the now-familiar phenomena of "China fever." Another perspective holds that this focus can best be explained by a simple case of enemy deprivation syndrome. While there…

There have long been rumblings that Senate Democrats no longer believe Robert Byrd (D-WV) capable of fulfilling his duties as Appropriations Committee chairman. There have been backroom whisperings that the time had come to push him aside and allow someone younger and more energetic to take the…

Sen. Jay Rockefeller explains his endorsement of Barack Obama to the Charleston Gazette and he also takes this bizarre shot at John McCain: Rockefeller believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He…

McCain mixed up Sunni and Shia before catching himself about half a second later. Lefty bloggers are in a state, and the DNC has already posted the item. This is getting beyond ridiculous. Sometimes people make mistakes, even liberals--like when Arianna Huffington, in the midst of attacking McCain…

Senator Lieberman began his questioning of Petraeus with this: Thanks, Mr. Chairman. General, Ambassador, thank you for your extraordinary service in the cause of freedom in Iraq. I must say that as I listen to your testimony, which is encouraging and yet quite realistic, and in my opinion, not…

Via Jonathan Martin, Obama's appearance on the Today show this morning. Martin also notes the irony of "Meredith Viera...using Frank Rich of all people to make the McCain case". Updated: Sorry, had posted the wrong video. Fixed now.

From World Affairs: Neocon Nation, by Robert Kagan. From the Los Angeles Times: Resist the Urge to Leave Iraq, by Max Boot. From the New York Times: Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss's Orgy Draws Calls to Quit, by John Burns. From the Times: Mahdi Army Willing to Lay Down Arms? by James Hider.…

From Alec Baldwin's latest at the Huffington Post: McCain is another right-wing, retro, deficit-loving, never-seen-a-defense-appropriation-I-didn't-like tool. But there are a lot of people in this dumbed-down country that will buy that. There are a lot of people in this "dumbed-down" country that…

If ABC News wanted to write a story about which candidate Democratic troops are supporting in their primary, so be it. But this story appears to be a bigger-picture piece about the election, and yet not a single troop talked to says he's going to vote for McCain. Are our troops now voting…

Barack Obama is in the midst of his "I Love America, Honest, No Kidding" tour, peppering his speeches with patriotic bon mots, according to the AP: But Obama is smart to go even further now, said Rogers Smith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He called it crucial for…

I was beginning to dismiss Conservative leader David Cameron as a wet blanket. That he was so smug in installing that sissy windmill atop his house. That he led the Tories disgraceful call for an inquiry into the decision to go to war--a war Cameron and his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague,…

From Amb. Crocker's opening statement: · The first is at the national level in the form of legislation and the development of Iraq's parliament. In September, we were disappointed that Iraq had not yet enacted some key pieces of legislation. In the last several months, however, Iraq's parliament…

From Petraeus's opening statement: · Security in Iraq is better than it was when Ambassador Crocker and I reported to you last September, and it is significantly better than it was 15 months ago when Iraq was on the brink of civil war and the decision was made to deploy additional US forces to…

And now a letter from a McCainiac: Barack Obama has demonstrated new heights of arrogance and provided fresh insight into his foreign policy designs. His description of Congressional travel is very revealing. Obama claims, "I know what those trips are like! I've been on them. You go from the…

NASA's James Hansen has changed his mind--it's worse than anyone thought: One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated…

THE END OF THE Cold War deprived our foreign aid system of its strategic underpinnings. No longer could official development assistance be justified as part of a global struggle between two great superpowers and their competing economic systems. Foreign aid became a more amorphous exercise,…

THE FINANCIAL WORLD changed last week, and no one noticed. No one, that is, except policymakers in the Bush administration and Congress, and the free-wheeling investment bankers whose favorite pastime once was trumpeting the virtues of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism. On Thursday staffers from the…

This post appeared on Spencer Ackerman's blog this afternoon: TWINKLETOES, YOU'RE BREAKING MY HEART: Forgive me, but this post is for the dudes. You know how you come out of the shower -- at the gym, say -- and you're toweling off, and you feel all dry, but then you put on your underwear and you…

Barack Obama talks VP: Last night at a fundraiser in San Francisco, Barack Obama took a question on what he's looking for in a running mate. "I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not as expert on," he said, and then he was off and running. "I think a lot of people assume…

It's less than a third of what Obama's raising each month, but Jonathan Martin says "business community types in flyover country are now warming to McCain." Why? According to an unnamed GOP fundraiser who Martin says is no McCainiac: "The economic policies of Obama and Clinton scare the [stuffing]…

It seems to me that Obama interprets patriotism not that differently from Joe Klein--or perhaps Klein has created a new definition of patriotism that better suits this particular Democratic candidate. Either way, in this view patriotism hinges on a general optimism about the power of government to…

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Paul Krugman denounces "demon ethanol" in his New York Times column today: [E]ven on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains.... And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to…

Apparently the beating the Obama campaign is taking for this distortion has forced a general retreat. But left out of this clip is Obama's most offensive distortion of McCain's comment. Obama said over the weekend that McCain "wants to continue this war in Iraq maybe for another 100 years." McCain…

The Clintonites have found their scapegoat, and his name is Mark Penn. The pollster and political consultant announced yesterday that he will step down from the post of chief strategist for the Clinton campaign. This, after it was revealed that Penn had met with representatives from Colombia, the…

The Ishigaki city council, in the Okinawa prefecture of Japan, has passed a resolution allowing the capture of goats on the Uotsuri Island. Satellite images show that overgrazing by the goats is endangering the island's delicate ecosystem. Ishigaki city councilmen plan to seek the National Diet's…

Roll Call reports that the Members of Congress who are deciding how to address the depressed housing market and economic slowdown are among those who've lost the most. And one of the contenders for the title of biggest loser is John Kerry: Congress' uber-rich had the most at stake. Sen. John Kerry…

Classless Ed Schultz spells out on CNN why he calls John McCain a warmonger. He mentions McCain's tough stands towards Russia and Iran, and then the kicker: "... and yesterday on your network he said he wants to increase the military. Now I ask Americans this morning, what kind of message does it…

How thin is Barack Obama's resume? Well, after tomorrow, no one will be able to say that he's never chaired a Senate hearing before. Because while the subcommittee he chairs has still never met (who cares about 'European Affairs' anyway), he's been given the honor of chairing the Senate hearing on…

Bloggers on both sides of the aisle say good riddance to Mark Penn, pollster and now-former chief Clinton campaign strategist. Penn--who continued his PR work while working for the Clinton campaign--created huge controversy last week when he met with Colombia's ambassador to discuss a free-trade…

This Condi for Veep hype is political madness. Whatever Condi's impressive attributes, picking her for VP would be a lunatic move: 1) It is the perfect way to make the general election an endless re-hash of the Bush Teams many mistakes in Iraq. By picking her McCain would endorse those epic…

From the New York Times: The Shape of the Race to Come, by the boss. From the Wall Street Journal: Pastor Disaster Not Over Yet, by Nick Timiraos. From the Washington Post: Obama's Gun Control Confusion, by Robert Novak. From the Wall Street Journal: Iraq and Its Costs, by Sens. Graham and…

Maybe Democrats are too distracted by the state of their candidate's campaigns. Or maybe they, like everyone else, were counting on Romney or Giuliani to be the Republican candidate. Whatever it is, their current strategy isn't working out. Politico's Ben Smith reports: Democratic talk of an early,…

Like most members of the defense community, I've grown tired of hearing about Chinese hacks against DoD databases. To live out a military campaign (cyber or otherwise) solely on the defensive is every soldier's nightmare. So I found this to be most welcome news: U.S. military officials seeking to…

Stephen Colbert fans know that Congressmen will appear on his Comedy Central show at their own political peril. Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland (R-GA) for example, admitted to Colbert that he could only name three of the ten commandments and that he thought of himself as a "Georgia Peach." Not to be…

David Axe over at Danger Room, in a fine display of alliteration, puts the latest mishap into perspective. B-1 Crash: Bad Year for Bombers The B-2 crash was the type's first, and took out a full five percent of the fleet. Today's crash is the ninth for the currently 70-strong B-1 fleet. Prior to…

As the dusts settles in Basra, more information about Iran's involvement in the conflict comes to light. The Times reported yesterday that military and intelligence officials believe Iran's covert military command assigned to direct operations in Iraq "were operating at a tactical command level…

I won't kick Mark Penn now that he's down. I kicked him months ago for running what I think was a near hapless strategy and I've been a fierce critic of the Clinton campaign since the beginning. But for all Penn's mistakes and fumbles and difficulties there are two things worth remembering. First,…

After a long battle with Alzheimer's Disease, Charlton Heston passed away this weekend at the age of 84. His roles are too numerous to catalog in their entirety here, but highlights include Moses, Thomas Jefferson, and our very own Cardinal Richelieu. Heston's most important work was fighting for…

This is a development I have been expecting for some time. The longer Muqtada al Sadr remained outside the political sphere and used his Mahdi Army militia to attack the Iraqi security forces and government, the greater the pressure became for the government to ban his political party and militia.…

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John McCain appeared on Fox News Sunday this morning to discuss the presidential campaign with Chris Wallace. The Arizona senator called for more honesty from the Obama campaign and its surrogates when they claim that he called for our military to stay in Iraq for a century. "This, quote, ‘100…

Obama made an appearance in North Dakota last night: Obama was introduced by North Dakota's three-man Congressional delegation, whom he greeted as friends, Sens. Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan and, as Obama called him, "Ed Pomeroy." Rep. Earl Pomeroy gave Conrad a sheepish grin at the joke. Radio…

There's no other explanation for his refusal of Secret Service protection. But Marc Ambinder points to excerpts from this week's Fox New Sunday in which McCain tells Wallace he will accept protection starting next week. Obviously there is something deeply admirable about McCain's reluctance to…

Earlier this week we wondered what, precisely, Obama meant when he talked about keeping a "strike force" in Iraq after withdrawing the bulk of U.S. combat forces. It turns out that he may not be planning to withdraw the bulk of U.S. combat forces after all. Eli Lake reports for the New York Sun: A…

The memorial mass this morning for William F. Buckley, Jr. packed St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is no small feat. Christopher Buckley delivered a touching speech in which he mentioned the lovely music played as part of the ceremony was a dress rehearsal for an upcoming visit by Pope Benedict. He…

Barack Obama's success when it comes to web-based political tactics--especially fundraising--is well known. But as it turns out, it also takes some new media investments to generate those results. This chart compiled by Webguild paints a dramatic picture of differences between the Obama and Clinton…

Hate the game: CUMULATIVE TOTAL(GROSS) INCOME: $109,175,175 Including, among other items: * Senator Clinton's Senate Salary: $1,051,606 * President Clinton's Presidential Pension: $1,217,250 * Senator Clinton's Book Income: $10,457,083 * President Clinton's Book Income: $29,580,525 * President…

Ace notes the U.N. finding that 2008 is likely to be a cool year -- a trend that has now lasted for a full decade. He sarcastically comments that 'this is all just further evidence that the earth is boiling over.' But Ace misses the essential basis of apocalyptic environmentalism. It's not that the…

A new global opinion survey conducted for the BBC World Service has revealed that Germany is viewed as the one country having the most "positive influence" on world affairs. On average, 56 percent of the more than 17,000 respondents in 34 countries around the globe had a positive view of Berlin's…

The FEC currently has just two out of its six board members because of a Senate dispute over the nomination of Hans Von Spakovsky. For months, Barack Obama had a hold on Von Spakovsky's nomination because of Democratic anger over his activities at the Department of Justice (although he has recently…

You can get your t-shirt here. I'm pretty excited for the new season, and have been watching reruns in HD all week in anticipation. I try and keep the geek blogging to a minimum here, but the lack of TV the last few months has finally started to get to me. And it prompts another question I think is…

The Senate is considering a bipartisan housing bailout bill, loaded with tax breaks, that seems destined for easy passage. But it's also guaranteed to meet stiff resistance in the House from fiscal hawks. The legislation aimed at helping ease the pain of the deflating housing market includes about…

Charles Hurt in today's New York Post has some downbeat news for the GOP. Not only is John McCain a retread of the 1996-style Bob Dole, but: Even before settling on their own nominee, Democrats have begun ridiculing the Republican challenger as a kooky old man. A recent Democratic campaign video…

Last week Think Progress blogger Amanda accused John McCain of plagiarizing a speech from Admiral Timothy Ziemer only to retract the story hours later. Amanda, last name unknown, had failed to check with McCain's office before running her "exclusive," and she failed even to check McCain's website…

From TWS Online: The Press Botches Basra, by Daveed Garteinstein-Ross & Bill Roggio. From NRO: Missing Michael Kelly, by Peter Wehner. From the Wall Street Journal: Obama and King, by Juan Williams. From the Washington Post: The Fabulist vs. the Saint, by Charles Krauthammer. From City Journal: The…

So smoking-bans save lives, right? As it turns out, they kill: The researchers analyzed data from 120 American counties, 20 of which had banned smoking. They found a smoking ban increased fatal alcohol-related car accidents by 13% in a typical county containing 680,000 people. This is the…

So Nielsen has apparently put together a nice chart indicating which web sites are the most liberal. Mother Jones squeaks out the DailyKos and Huffington Post for top-honors, with 70 percent of its readers self-identifying as "very liberal" or "liberal". (I presume this is the difference between a…

This Insider Advantage survey from Pennsylvania shows Clinton's lead now cut to just two points (45%-43%)--continuing the Obama surge several of us have discussed in the last couple of days. While they don't report details on the sampling procedure, I assume those numbers are within the margin of…

In case you missed it, PBS has been airing a superb, grunt-level documentary on the War in Iraq called Bad Voodoo's War. Director Deborah Scranton, employing her revolutionary "virtual embedding" process made famous by The War Tapes, masterfully weaves an inside-out story of the "Bad Voodoo"…

Mixed bag at the big NATO Summit this week: NATO leaders agreed Thursday to endorse a United States missile defense system based in Europe and to provide more troops for Afghanistan, but they refused to back President Bush's proposal to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO membership.…

Just like Edwards, Portman doesn't want to be vice president: "I'll be frank with you," Portman said. "I think there are a lot of great choices out there and I think he's got plenty of other people to call first. I just don't think about it much because I don't think it's going to happen." The…

For those looking for a candidate who can unite Americans in support of a new style of politics, there truly is a choice: Christopher Walken for president! He's a persevering Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war. He's got experience as a small businessman and a no-nonsense CEO. He's served as…

LESS THAN 48 HOURS AFTER Iraqi security forces began their campaign against militant Shia factions in Basra, the media had already declared the operations a failure. The operations, which were initiated on March 25, were designed to quell rogue factions of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. In covering…

MARTIN SCORSESE'S Shine a Light opens with Scorsese and the Rolling Stones negotiating over just how to shoot the film. Scorsese wants a set list well in advance so he can figure out how to position his fleet of cameras and choreograph their movements; the Stones want to ensure that the camerawork…

The Economist reports: In the wake of Condoleezza Rice's shuttle diplomacy last year, Israeli officials reportedly coined lecondel, meaning to go back and forth repeatedly to no effect. Rice devoted herself to the peace process and has nothing to show for it. In Iraq, the Pentagon has made more…

The Politico reports that Speaker Pelosi is setting out parameters for the content of General Petraeus' testimony when he appears before the House: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Army Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on Thursday not to "put a shine on recent events" in…

Kimberly Kagan has an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal on Iran's involvement in Iraq and the recent fighting in Basra. In the article, she notes that Iran's Qods Force was instrumental in drafting Sadr's cease-fire. She also notes that Muqtada al Sadr demanded the release of Qais…

I've written before on Congressman Heath Shuler's claim that John McCain has quietly intervened to discourage House Republicans from forcing a debate on immigration. I've argued that the claim is implausible, since 175 out of 198 Republicans have signed a discharge petition designed to force a…

Apparently there's more to a certain candidate than meets the eye. The teaser for an upcoming episode of Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel: As Senator Barack Obama continues his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, his every move is scrutinized in detail. To truly understand this…

Iraqi Army applicants wait outside the army recruitment center in Basra, 550 km (340 miles) south of Baghdad on April 1, 2008. About 1,000 men from the southern cities of Basra, Amarah, and Nasiriyah trooped to the recruiting center in Basrah to apply to be government soldiers.

Here's the video of Lieberman giving Obama a good smack on Fox. Jane Hamsher, instead of putting the man in blackface, decides to just insert an error in her transcript of the interview. She quotes Lieberman: If we did what Sen. Obama wanted us to do last year, Al-Qaeda in Iran would be in control…

How nice: The narratives on McCain are also revealing. McCain is disliked because he is a republican, because he is close with Bush, and because of his views on Iraq. While the main punchline on McCain these days is his age, only 7% of those opposed to McCain listed his age as the main reason. It…

The latest celebrity endorsement, via TMZ: Jane Fonda. Andrew Malcolm at the LA Times's Top of the Ticket blog reports: Jane Fonda, the actress and ardent anti-Vietnam War advocate who visited North Vietnam during those hostilities, has endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president... The problem…

An excellent column from Michael Barone on the different appeal of Clinton and Obama: The academic who hears the Rev. Jeremiah Wright declaiming, "God damn America," is not unnerved. He hears this sort of thing on campus all the time. The Jacksonian who watches the tape sees an enemy of everything…

From the Wall Street Journal: The Second Iran-Iraq War, by Kimberly Kagan. From the New York Sun: General Petraeus's Return, by the editors. From TWS Online: Obama-Kerry '08!, by Dean Barnett. From Commentary's Contentions blog: Silly Season for McCain, by John Podhoretz. From the Long War Journal:…

The Democratic Leadership Council was the intellectual core of the only two-term Democratic administration since FDR. Ten years ago, if the DLC spoke, people listened. Nowadays the DLC is more or less ignored by the leading Democratic presidential contenders. It's ironic that the Clinton…

Bill Richardson refuses to be a human punching bag. CNN reports: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on Wednesday sharply disputed Bill Clinton's reported claim that Richardson promised to endorse Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House. "I never did," Richardson said. "I never saw [President…

McCain has one son serving in Iraq and another may be on the way. I follow this stuff pretty closely and while I'm sure McCain has made some reference to his sons on the trail, I can't recall it, and it's certainly not something that comes up often. Neither have I heard about McCain's sons from any…

Two endorsements he could do without, but at least Carter's a superdelegate. TMZ has the video of Fonda's endorsement, which prompted one spectator, presumably an Obama supporter, to exclaim, "oh God! Heaven help us all." It does set up a nice contrast. McCain spent five odd years in the Hanoi…

Five eligible right-wing blogettes are profiled here, and several of them won't date liberals. As Cassy Fiano explains, "How smart can this guy be if he thinks John Kerry is a great politician?" Truer words have never been spoken. I'm sure any number of Weekly Standard Blog readers (at least 90…

If the Obama surge in Pennsylvania is real, the race will be over on April 22. But what if it's not? Winning the expectations game (at least in the primaries) is pretty important. When Ohio and Texas went to the polls, Hillary had long been expected to win big in the former, but Texas...in the days…

This new Gallup poll asks an interesting open-ended question, probing why Americans say they oppose a particular candidate. It says something about the state of the campaign today, but also points to probable attack ads just over the horizon. When it comes to Obama, "inexperience" (39%) is by far…

AS THE REDUCTION IN violence in Iraq has become incontestable (the insistence of early critics that no such reduction was possible notwithstanding), war opponents have fallen back on their next line of defense--that the military progress has not been matched by the political progress it was…

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The Hill reports: Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Wednesday returned to his popular message of wanting to take on the status quo in Washington and fighting special interests to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Obama, who is campaigning in Pennsylvania, spoke to the state's AFL-CIO and…

Michael Yon's must be seen to be believed: The few remaining serious troublemakers are being hacked off and mulched in these incessant operations, which gives the enemy no rest (in the old days, when they were murdering Iraqis and Americans by the thousands, AQI used Tal Afar for training and R&R).…

Quoth Michelle Obama this afternoon: Barack Obama will always be the underdog. No matter how much money he raises, now matter how many wins he pulls together, no matter how many delegates he accumulates, he is still the underdog. That's the way it works. Obvious exit question: That's the way what…

What other Republican, perhaps with the exception of Mike Huckabee, could go in front of a live studio audience and get so many laughs?"Maybe a little too funny?" I doubt Romney would be getting that kind of love from Letterman.

In response to this ad from Senator Clinton, the premise of which is that only Hillary is ready to take a 3 am phone call on the housing crisis (does anyone think Clinton wouldn't bite off the heads of at least three staffers if her much needed beauty sleep was disturbed by a middle of the night…

A top Democratic goal in recent years has been passage of the 'Employee Free Choice Act,' also known as Card Check. The measure would end the secret ballot system by which workers currently choose whether or not to unionize. Instead it would allow unionization based on the majority of a shop's…

Seems like they've been cleaning up lately. This time from across the channel: French electronics firm Thales announced here April 1 that it had won a multi-million-pound contract to provide submarine support services to Britain's Royal Navy. The deal, worth an initial 35 million pounds (44 million…

Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, a black supporter of Hillary Clinton, told Fox News he's concerned about what a Barack Obama win would mean in November: "I think whites would say, ‘How could anybody say we were racist, that we have any racist residue when you look what we just did (potentially electing…

Interesting discussion from Tom Ricks at the Washington Post: As the experts poke the ashes, I think the emerging consensus is that Moqtada al-Sadr won more than he lost, because he and the government agreed to a cease-fire. That makes him 3 for 3 in taking on state powers (the U.S. in the previous…

Boy the Aussies weren't kidding when they said that they wanted the F-22, were they? DEFENCE Minister Joel Fitzgibbon will step up pressure on the US to overturn its ban on the sale of the F-22 Raptor fighter, amid growing federal government concern about delays and cost increases affecting the…

Because it sounds a lot like "insurgent" to me. The report from CENTCOM: Soldiers from 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, were traveling in a combat patrol to investigate a possible point of origin for an indirect fire attack when their Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle was…

heidi.jpg Heidi loves America.

Ben Smith at Politico flags this exchange between Karl Rove and GQ: GQ: I get the sense you respect Hillary more than you respect Obama. Rove: Off the record? GQ: Please don't go off the record. Rove: Off the record... [Yeah, it's good. Sorry.] GQ: Damn! Now say that on the record. Rove: No. Nope.…

Via Newsbusters, which has the video, Ted Turner appeared on the Charlie Rose show with this global warming prediction: Not doing it [taking action] will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people…

Former President Bill Clinton threw another temper tantrum. The target of his wrath--Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton--said she was upset that James Carville referred to Richardson as Judas. Still more peculiar is what happened next: "When delegate…

From TWS Online: The Basra Business, by Fred Kagan and Kimberly Kagan. From the Politico: McCain's 100 Years Comment Could Haunt Him, by Jamie Kirchick. From the Columbia Journalism Review: Distorting McCain's 100 Years, by Zachary Roth. From the Wall Street Journal: Obama and the 'L' Word, by…

It's hard to tell exactly what's happening in the run-up to the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania (on April 22). However, several polls show Hillary's advantage over Obama narrowing, and one shows Obama in the lead. Given her big lead in the state as recently as a few weeks ago, a loss in…

If Jeanne Assam didn't convince you that individuals should have the right to carry a gun, perhaps this case of a Des Moines pizza deliveryman who shot an armed robber in self defense will: An armed pizza deliveryman told Des Moines police that he shot a man who tried to rob him at gunpoint…

The Washington Post had the story yesterday: That September morning, Monsoor and a group of SEAL snipers took up position on a residential rooftop as part of an operation to push into a dangerous section of southern Ramadi. Four insurgents armed with AK-47 rifles came into view, and the SEAL…

I haven't really been following this issue, mostly because I'm pretty sure that whatever the government is doing to these terrorists wouldn't "shock my conscience." Like my man Scalia says, sometimes you're going to have to take these terrorists and "smack them in the face." But, some folks are…

Is it me, or are others tired of Democrats speaking about their holy trinity of revulsion - Nixon, Vietnam and Watergate - as if they never went away? John Kerry made the first two the entire basis of his presidential campaign, playing on the memories of my fellow baby boomers who are at their…

It seems that Democrats are in full bore chase-Hillary-out-of-the-race mode. Are they eager to see her quit the race because she may wind up the leader in votes cast in the Democratic primaries, or despite it? These two projections, if they come to pass, seem likely to cause maximum pain among the…

AS THE 26 leaders of the NATO Alliance gather in Bucharest this week for the organization's 59th summit, there will be simmering tensions between the United States and what Donald Rumsfeld memorably described in 2003 as "Old Europe." As the Bucharest meeting will show, the traditional rifts between…

The lame excuse from Obama spokesman David Axelrod for his guy's pathetic outing at the lanes in Altoona: Obama only played seven frames--which really makes the showing no less pathetic. Still, how a man rolls may not be terribly indicative of how he would perform as a commander in chief. Quitting…

Daniel Larison responds to this post from earlier today in which I asserted that "there is no doubt that the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war. The slaughter at Beslan, the apartment bombings in Moscow--there have been any number of terrorist acts perpetrated on Russian…

McCain ripped Obama today over his comments yesterday that he would leave a "strike force" in Iraq after withdrawing the bulk of U.S. forces. McCain said "I think it might be appropriate to describe exactly what that means? Does that mean 100,000 troops, where are they based? What is their…

A reader writes in to the Blog: Obama on why he doesn't have any records as a state senator: "I had one staff person, that was what was allocated. I don't have archivists in the state Senate. I don't have the Barack Obama state Senate library available to me, so we had a bunch of file cabinets. I…

Could labor issues hurt Democrats this election? According to new survey data from McLaughlin & Associates and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, Democrats may suffer at the polls if labor issues like the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) become big election issues. EFCA would change…

Maybe it was the battle fought in my high school when the administration tried to foist an honor code on us (the students voted overwhelmingly against), but I've always thought it was ridiculous to ask teenagers to rat out their friends. And this teacher, Mr. Ravenal--did he fight in the First…

MUCH OF THE DISCUSSION about recent Iraqi operations against illegal Shia militias has focused on issues about which we do not yet know enough to make sound judgments, overlooking important conclusions that are already clear. Coming days and weeks will provide greater insight into whether Maliki or…

A student at Episcopal High School, where McCain made a campaign stop today, was apparently displeased that her busy academic schedule was interrupted by McCain's visit, attendance at which was compulsory. McCain joked that he should have "cut this thing off" sooner, and apologized if the student…

Roll Call reports on the epiphany that appears to have come over Republican campaign strategists over the last six weeks or so -- the realization that a McCain-Obama race is likely to produce a comfortable political climate for Republican candidates: "Hillary certainly looked like she would help us…

Within the last week, Senators Casey (PA), Leahy (VT) and Klobuchar (MN)--all Democratic super delegates--either endorsed Barack Obama or urged Senator Clinton to drop out of the race. You can almost hear the sounds of the party thumbscrews tightening. And today's Rasmussen poll showing the…

In 1998, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) -- a senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee -- obtained and distributed to the media an illegally-obtained tape of a private conversation of Representative John Boehner (R-OH). After litigating the dispute for ten years, and losing each step of…

I just got done making a short web video for ABC that had me squaring off against liberal blogger and occasional photoshop artist Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake. Just some quick observations.. The netroots, of which Hamsher is certainly a card carrying member, seem insistent on attacking John McCain's…

jesse.jpgMinnesota is set to host one of the nation's highest-profile Senate races this year -- between incumbent Republican Norm Coleman and former funny man Al Franken. But one-time Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura (immortalized in Predator) recently told the Associated Press that he's not…

As many readers have probably discovered, the short film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders is freely available on Youtube. Apparently the crybaby Islamo-fascists who threatened Liveleak staffers until they removed Fitna (though they have subsequently reposted the video) have not succeeded in…

Apparently they're in Hamas controlled Gaza... They think he can bring "change" to the Middle East. LGF: "we can guess what kind of 'change' that might be."

From TWS Online: Politics of Hope, by Dean Barnett. From the Wall Street Journal: Does Obama Understand Defeat? by Bret Stephens. From Michael Yon Online: Color of War, by Michael Yon. From GayWired: Obama's Other Pastor Disaster, by Duane Wells. From Middle East Journal: The Liberation of Karmah,…

Michael brings up excellent points about Senator Barack Obama's vague plans to keep a measure of combat troops in Iraq. Saying an unspecified number of troops will be kept somewhere in the Middle East to tackle an unspecified problem is far from a clear policy. There are two more things to consider…

Happy April Fools Day! I know you wouldn't believe me if I tried to trick you and said Goldfarb was henceforth replacing all guns-and-aircraft posts with fashion coverage. But here are some funny--true and untrue--tidbits from around the blogosphere. Enjoy! 10. A true story yesterday that got more…

Oliver Stone, the moviemaker that everybody but ticket-buyers loves, is in the midst of shooting his latest project, W, the story of President George W. Bush. According to Marcus Baram of ABC News, it's--and stop me if you've heard this before--a "warts and all portrayal" of the man. If Stone is…

Max Boot wrote in yesterday's Washington Post that "Islamist militants were emboldened by the Soviet Union's retreat from Afghanistan in 1989." That seems like such an obvious understatement, but Yglesias and others take issue: Did the emboldened militants follow the Red Army home from Afghanistan?…

The headline from the Los Angeles Times: Iraq showdown made Sadr stronger, backers say Besides quoting Sadrists praising Sadr, the article quotes an Iraqi officer lamenting the poor performance of Iraqi security forces. The Iraqi military may not have performed well, which is troubling, if it's…

WITH BARACK OBAMA LIKELY headed to the Democratic nomination, it's time again to check in on Obama's secret-sharer of rhetoric and other political stylings, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. As a neophyte politician, Patrick rode a wave of hope into Beacon Hill's corner office, just as Obama is…

THE INVESTMENT BANKING industry as we knew it is no more. Change has been inevitable ever since the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve Board decided to use taxpayer money to back J.P. Morgan Chase's takeover of Bear Stearns. R.I.P. the deregulatory trend that has dominated policy towards…