A must-read from Christopher Hitchens:

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

Hitchens is outraged, and eloquently so as always--it's definitely worth reading through. Still, I'm surprised that anyone can be surprised by the Clinton's lies anymore. Frankly, I find them rather comforting in comparison to Obama's new kind of politics, which best I can tell seems to be the same old politics in a new self-righteous package. All politicians lie, and the Clintons more than most. I can't imagine that voters haven't already internalized this reality--which is why I tend to think the explanation for Hillary's plummeting poll numbers must lie elsewhere. Samantha says it's the whining, which is as good an explanation as any.

Long before the start of the Iraqi offensive against the Mahdi Army and the associated Iranian-backed Special Groups in Basra, pundits had been bending over backwards to claim Muqtada al Sadr is an Iraqi nationalist with no ties to Iran. As Matthew Duss wrote, "the repeated attempts by conservative defenders of Bush’s Iraq policy to dispute Sadr's nationalist credentials and treat him as an Iranian puppet indicate a real and troubling lack of knowledge of the Iraqi political scene, and of Sadr’s place within it." Such claims have been made despite the fact that Sadr is sheltering in Qom to study the Iranian strain of theocratic Shia Islam known as wilayet al-faqeeh. Sadr’s Mahdi Army has also been caught red-handed with Iranian made weapons, and there's ample evidence that Hezbollah and Iran’s Qods Force have trained his militia.

Today, McClatchy Newspapers pens an article that should blow the doors off any notion that Sadr is not in the Iranian sphere of influence. Sadr was apparently persuaded to issue yesterday’s order to end hostilities after Iraqi lawmakers lobbied the commander of Qods Force and accused Sadr of inciting the violence and using Iranian-made weapons to attack the people of Iraq.

The backdrop to Sadr's dramatic statement was a secret trip Friday by Iraqi lawmakers to Qom, Iran's holy city and headquarters for the Iranian clergy who run the country.

There the Iraqi lawmakers held talks with Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Qods (Jerusalem) brigades of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps and signed an agreement with Sadr, which formed the basis of his statement Sunday, members of parliament said.

Ali al Adeeb, a member of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's Dawa party, and Hadi al Ameri, the head of the Badr Organization, the military wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had two aims, lawmakers said: to ask Sadr to stand down his militia and to ask Iranian officials to stop supplying weapons to Shiite militants in Iraq.

Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, who has been accused of receiving his marching orders from Iran, refuses to abide by the Iranian diktat. Maliki has said Iraqi security forces will continue operations to target anyone who fails to comply with Sadr’s order, and has demanded that the Mahdi Army surrender its medium and heavy weapons. The Iraqi military, for its part, is moving more forces to Basra. The Mahdi Army has taken significant casualties in Baghdad, Basra, and the greater South after seven days of fighting.

Obama chooses his words very carefully in this exchange with a reporter at a gas station (?) press conference:

What I said is I would have a strike force in the region, perhaps in Iraq, perhaps outside of Iraq, so that we could take advantage of--or we could deal with potential problems that might take place in the region. That's very different from saying we're going to have a permanent occupation in Iraq...

Allah is shocked (shocked!) that Obama continues to distort McCain's position. I think that misses the point. Obama is saying he will maintain a troop presence in the country, a "strike force," and he refuses to say for how long. A strike force means combat troops. How many troops? He doesn't say. He does say that these troops will be used to "deal with potential problems."

Surely there will be plenty of potential problems to deal with if only a small contingent of U.S. forces remaining in Iraq, but what are these troops meant to do about it? If things go south, will this small contingent "strike" at insurgents in Ramadi? Baghdad? Basra? And to what end? This has Black Hawk Down written all over it--or are they going to drive into battle from their desert redoubt? If so we must be talking about a fairly large number of troops.

Obama has layed out a plan for an indefinite troop presence of undetermined size, and yet he mocks John McCain for saying he would keep U.S. forces in Iraq indefinitely and at undetermined levels. If nothing else we now know what the general election pivot will look like. And Allah does ask the right exit question: How does Obama define victory in this scenario? My guess: our guys not getting mauled in a fight with AQI when reinforcements are delayed by the trip from Kuwait.

Update: I deleted the video here, I think it was causing problems on the site. Click through the Hot Air link above to see the video that originally accompanied this post.

Many pollsters and pundits pointed to Republican underperformance among independent and moderate swing voters as the cause of their mid-term congressional demise in 2006. Winning those voters back must be on the minds of many in the McCain high command and among GOP congressional election strategists. And while surveys still show the GOP lagging in party identification, the makeup of the electorate in the primaries to date tells a slightly different story.

This post by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee political scientist Tom Holbrook breaks down the Republican and Democratic primaries (through Mississippi) and demonstrates the two parties are near mirror images of each other so far this year in attracting independent voters to their primaries. This is surprising given all the attention in the media surrounding the appeal of Barack Obama to these non-aligned voters.

According to Holbrook, "About 76% of the votes in each of the parties' primaries have come from their own partisans, 20% from independents and around 4% from the other party. The bottom line is that neither party is doing a better job attracting independents or rival partisans. Once again, this finding is a bit at odds with the common perception that the Democrats have been more successful at drawing independent voters."

Next Holbrook looks at the primary electorate from the standpoint of ideology, showing a different picture. Democratic primary voters break down 47.4% liberal, 39.8% moderate and 12.8% conservative. GOP primary voters are 54.8% conservative, 26.5% moderate and 8.7% liberal. He suggests the Democratic primaries so far this year may be more "ideologically heterogeneous." Probably true at one level. But "liberal" may still be somewhat of a pejorative among certain Democrats. So many of the "moderates" here may indeed be "liberals" in disguise. They just don’t choose that label with pollsters.

Since 2005, Barack Obama has donated three times as much as Senator Clinton to Democratic superdelegates:

The study found that the presidential candidate who gave more money to the superdelegates received their endorsements 82 percent of the time. That's based on a review of elected officials who are serving as superdelegates and who'd endorsed a candidate as of Feb. 25.

In cases where superdelegates received money from Obama's Hope Fund but none from Clinton's PAC, Obama got the superdelegates' support 85 percent of the time. And in cases where superdelegates received money from Clinton's Hillpac but none from Obama's PAC, 75 percent backed Clinton.

If 82 percent of the superdelegates are endorsing the candidate who donated more to them, that's indicative of something other than a belief in 'the audacity of hope.' It sounds more like good old-fashioned bribery.

Last week I wrote about the three dozen or so Democratic challengers running on a platform to withdraw all troops from Iraq. Implicitly or explicitly, these candidates are telling the voters that the Democratic leadership in Washington is ineffective (at best) or hypocritical (at worst). That message has not been lost on Democratic leaders in Washington:

“They’re very upset about it,” the Democratic operative said. “When they found out that there were a lot more people signing on, they were getting worried. I don’t know exactly what their problem is...”

“You can see these candidates are pushing the envelope a little bit, and perhaps that’s why organizations like the DCCC would be getting a little nervous,” said the operative...

Burner said that whenever possible, the plan points out existing legislation that accomplishes the group’s goals. When asked about the DCCC’s reaction to the challengers’ proposal, Burner said it was never their intention to look inside the Beltway for support.

“The answer is that they have certainly done nothing to hurt us,” Burner said in a conference call Thursday afternoon. “But as a I said before, this has not been an effort that is drawn from inside the Beltway.”

Even Democratic challengers recognize that Pelosi and Reid are too unpopular to allow them to run as defenders of the status quo. Instead, they're arguing that the Democratic Congress has failed, and that voters need to elect real change agents to Congress. You can bet that Republicans in competitive races against Democrats will repeat this charge. That will make it even harder for Democrats in Washington to navigate a path that pleases the base while addressing the priorities of moderate voters.

Obama's endorsements are piling up, and the cries for Hillary to exit the race are getting louder. But even if you're not a Hillary fan, the claims that she alone is dividing the party seem ludicrous--certainly the Rev. Wright fiasco is as much to blame. Yet Hillary seems to determined to squander what little chance she has left of winning the nomination with her phony feminist outcries.

Hillary played the gender card again over the weekend. According to a New York Times report, "Mrs. Clinton told aides that she would not be 'bullied out' of the race. In a conversation with two Democratic allies, she compared the situation to the 'big boys' trying to bully a woman, according to interviews with them." Sorry, honey--that's politics.

Are women getting tired of her "poor little bullied woman" rhetoric? Although she still leads Obama by as much as 27 points among white women, her favorables are falling even among this group of core supporters. According to last week's NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, "women voters with negative views [of Clinton] narrowly outstrip those with positive ones, 44% to 42%. That compares with her positive rating from 51% of women in the earlier March poll.” She should probably cut the pathetic "poor little me" act--if women aren't buying it, who will?

The liberal blogger who put together this video, a Clinton supporter at the prominent left-wing site MyDD, darkly warned:

If we choose Obama as our nominee, we are locked-in to this narrative. There is no going back, no bogus NBC polls to save the day. No Anderson Cooper softball interviews or phony charges of racism that will rescue us.

The opponent doesn't care. All the thoughtfulness and restraint of a Democratic adversary will be gone.

Yes, the thoughtfulness and restraint of Clinton and her supporters have historically been very impressive. Once Obama has to deal with those Republicans, who will do anything to win, God knows what will happen.

Vladimir Putin will propose an underwater tunnel linking Russia to Alaska--two places no one in the world wants to go--in a meeting with President Bush next week. Tsar Nicholas II initially proposed the tunnel in the early 1900s. One imagines if constructed, hoards of Russians will infiltrate Alaska a la Red Dawn. Only instead of imprisoning freedom-loving Americans, they’ll simply demand the $1,600 annual subsidy paid to each resident for living on the real-world set of Waiting for Godot.

The tunnel would cost $66 billion. No word on whether Russia will pay this entire sum, or expects America to go Dutch on this frivolous project. In any case, this is only slightly dumber than another underwater tunnel idea to emerge in the last few months. A private real estate developer is pushing for approval to build a $10 billion tunnel connecting Long Island and Westchester. Under his plan, commuters would pay $25 each way for the benefit of using the private road. At least this tunnel has the benefit of being privately paid for and not a deceased tsar’s vanity project.

Former vice president Al Gore is back in the media spotlight, and the blogosphere is buzzing about what's next for everyone's favorite sore loser. The weekend news was Gore's $300 million campaign "to try to push climate change higher on the nation’s political agenda." The Politico reported yesterday:

The three-year campaign by the Alliance for Climate Protection will begin Wednesday with network television advertising that will include “American Idol” and other non-traditional shows that reach a non-news audience...

Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton just filmed an ad for the We Campaign, sitting on a couch on the beach...

The campaign is being paid for in part with profits from Gore’s global-warming book and movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and with the prize money from his share of the Nobel Peace Prize, which he matched.

As blogger McQ at QandO notes, "for a guy who just said in an interview that skeptics are a 'tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view, they're almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat,' he sure is behind spending a lot of money to convince the world there's a 'climate crisis' problem."

And of Gore's ad choices, Ed Morrissey says, "What other strange bedfellows can Gore pair for his campaign? Jeremiah Wright and David Duke? Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Dupre?" Michelle Malkin also finds it ludicrous.

The launch of the campaign coincides perfectly with a Telegraph report that some Democratic party bigwigs are discussing the possibility of a Gore nomination in hopes of uniting the party. Conservative bloggers tend to find this idea equally laughable.

Gateway Pundit snarks, "It looks like Al Gore has already saved the planet from warming as evidenced by the record snow and low temperatures this past year and scientific data proving the planet is cooling...Can Al Gore save the Democratic Party, too?" And PoliGazette's Michael van der Galien imagines Gore's stump speech: "'I invented the Internet and I won the Nobel Peace Prize (which I also may have invented); elect me president!'"

Clearly the Democrats are panicking, as Ed Morrissey says, "Desperation leads the unwise to folly, and this is perhaps the best example yet seen." Jules Crittenden adds, "I think my favorite part … aside from the whole thing, that is … is the idea that replacing the Hero of Tuzla and the change-hoping bigot buddy with an exaggerating doomsayer somehow gets this train back on the rails."

Most bloggers think a Gore nomination would not be the best idea--for the Democratic party, or democracy in general. Dave at the Political Machine thinks this could never happen: "Both sides would have to be convinced that Gore is an acceptable alternative to their candidate winning in their own right. And we're not there yet at all. Barack has a lead in the delegates, and Hillary still thinks she owns the nomination." And Mark Levin at the Corner explains exactly why a Gore nomination would be bad for the Democrats, concluding, "It seems to me that a Gore nomination creates serious problems for the Democrat Party. So, I would encourage the Democrats to do it."

Politico reports:

Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.

Al Franken was reported to have the same problem a few weeks back. No wonder Democrats want the government to cover health care. They don’t want to do it themselves. Or could it be they’re just hypocrites? No way!

From the New York Times: Biography Isn't Enough, by the boss.

From TWS Online: McCain's Democratic Realism, by Joseph Loconte.

From U.S. News: Hillary Can Win the Popular Vote, by Michael Barone.

From Newsweek: How to Win a Knife Fight, by Karl Rove.

From the New York Post: Patriot Games, by Kirsten Powers.

Update: Another RedLasso video deleted. Apologies.

Obama is apparently one terrible bowler. He scored a mere 37 at a Pennsylvania campaign event on Saturday. If there had been a children’s birthday party going on simultaneously, one fears a 4th grader or two would have bested the Democratic frontrunner.

"My economic plan is better than my bowling," Obama told fellow bowlers Saturday evening at the Pleasant Valley Recreation Center.

"It has to be," a man called out.

Bad bowling may be an omen. After all, there is some historical connection between bowling and the White House. President Truman opened up an alley in the West Wing. In 1955, President Eisenhower moved it to the basement of the Old Executive Office Building. This is actually where the photograph of President Nixon was taken. The alley was closed after 9/11.

Given this weekend’s performance, it seems doubtful that Obama will undo the Bush administration’s biggest blunder and reopen the bowling alley. In fact, earlier this month, Obama said if elected, he would install a basketball hoop on the White House grounds. Maybe if the ceiling is high enough, he could fit a whole court where the bowling alley once was and then invite MTV Cribs in for a tour.

The fighting in Basra might rightfully be seen as Iraq's critical and long-awaited "Altalena Moment." This refers to an incident in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, shortly after Israel proclaimed its statehood. Newly elected Prime Minister David Ben Gurion declared that all Jewish militia groups either had to turn in their guns, or accept amalgamation into the newly formed Israel Defense Forces (IDF), built around the pre-Independence Haganah. The Irgun Zvai Leumi, the militantly nationalist militia (in reality a terrorist group) led by Menachim Begin, did not accept this decree. Instead, it had a load of weapons and ammunition shipped from Europe to Israel on a converted LST renamed the Altalena. When Ben Gurion learned of the Altalena's arrival off Haifa, he ordered all the armaments aboard turned over to the IDF. Begin refused, unless the Irgun got its cut and was allowed to remain independent. Ben Gurion ordered the Altalena to remain offshore and instructed the IDF to stop any attempts to offload the cargo.

Begin had the Altalena run up on the beach at Haifa, and Irgun members began unloading the weapons. IDF troops then cordoned off the beach and ordered the Irgun both to stop unloading and to put down their arms. A firefight broke out, and Ben Gurion ordered the IDF to sink the Altalena. It was a seminal moment in the history of Israel: would the IDF refuse to fire on fellow Jews (a very sticky proposition, given that the Holocaust ended just three years earlier)? If they would not obey the order to fire, would Israel be able to establish itself as a modern nation state, a state in which military power resided exclusively with the legitimate government?

The IDF obeyed orders. The ship was shelled, caught fire, and sank. A number of the Jewish crewmen were killed or wounded. More members of the Irgun were killed and wounded in street fighting throughout the beach district of Haifa. Most of the survivors, including Menachim Begin, were arrested. For a while, Ben Gurion's name was mud. But he had made his point: the government of Israel would continue to exercise civilian control over the military. Jewish militias would not be allowed to compete for power. Authority was vested in the political process, and not in violent action. Israel would survive, and thrive, as a democratic state.

This stands in marked contrast to the experience of the Palestinians, who have, throughout their tragic history, been unable to transcend the tyranny of the gunmen. Mahmood Abbas proved unwilling or unable to disarm the factions--not merely Hamas, but his own Fatah militia as well. The security forces of the Palestinian Authority remain impotent against these and other armed militias, and thus the PA itself is incapable of wielding authority against the will of the gunmen. Had there been a Palestinian "Altalena Moment" (e.g., if Abbas had taken action against Hamas rocketeers firing into Israel), there might be more hope for peace between Israel and Palestine today. At least, the Israelis would actually have someone with whom to negotiate a settlement.

In Iraq, there was always the danger that Malaki's government would only take action against Sunni factions, and not against fellow Shi'ites. In particular, there was the strong possibility of Sadr setting himself up as a state-within-a-state, and thus a constant conduit of unrest and Iranian interference. By taking strong action against Sadr and other Shi'ite intransigents, Malaki is demonstrating to some extent that he places national above factional interests. If he succeeds in suppressing the Mahdi Army--by far the most numerous and dangerous of the Shi'ite private armies--this will go a long way to establishing the credibility of the Iraqi Security Forces, and thus, the legitimacy of the Malaki government and its successors. In short, it could be a decisive turning point in the political as well as the military struggle, the moment at which Iraq's transition to a functioning representative democracy and a legitimate nation-state became irreversible.

The Guardian reports:

For years now, Nato nations have been committed to reach a minimum defence spending target of 2% of GDP. Yet 20 of them, including Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, have fallen far short. Among the six that have reached the target, the shares of four (including Britain and France) are in decline. Inevitably, that means the US carries ever more of the load and becomes ever more sceptical about taking Europe seriously....

The experience of Iraq, coupled with Europe's increased role in the Balkans, has tempted some Eurocentrics to say that Nato is outmoded and that an enhanced military role for the EU should replace it. This is fantasy land. If there is one thing that would be even worse for Europe than fighting a war with the Americans as allies, it is fighting a war without them. While it is true that Europe spends too little on defence because it knows it can rely on the Americans, it does not follow that European nations would be keen to spend more if Nato broke down.

The Bucharest Summit pings my interest on two fronts. First, I'm curious to see how Sarkozy--who seems to be taking his role as Chef des Armées of Europe's largest military seriously--will lay out his plans for French involvement in Afghanistan. He's hinted that the French army will be relieving the beleaguered Canadians, but there's been no firm announcement on proposed troop strength.

Second, I'd like to see if France's strong leadership role in the European Union inspires more NATO nations to follow their example. Big changes *could* be coming to an alliance near you, but the United States, Canada, France, and Great Britain can't make that happen on their own.

In the end, the Guardian is right. NATO can preach reforms until they're blue in the face, but unless European nations start shouldering the burdens of their own defense, the alliance's purpose and utility will continue to be called into question

China seems determined to ascribe the unrest in Tibet to a concerted effort aimed at sabotaging the Beijing Olympics.

The world community, meanwhile, has demonstrated that it has little appetite for a boycott. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) clearly prefers "silent diplomacy." None of the 27 foreign ministers of the EU, meeting in Slovenia this past weekend, favored a boycott of the Games as a whole and none even "wished to speak about" boycotting the opening ceremony.

Not without irony, the handful of world leaders who have so far declined invitations to attend the opening ceremony--German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Czech president Vaclav Klaus, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves and prime minister Andrus Ansip--are all from former Eastern bloc countries that experienced life under communist rule.

That sports and politics should not mix was a theme voiced frequently by Beijing even before Tibet focused world attention on the Games. This past February, for example, after Steven Spielberg cut ties with the Beijing Olympics over the Darfur crisis, China criticized the famed director’s decision as "naïve and simple-minded," adding that it was "unacceptable" to link politics to sports.

The Save Darfur Coalition has noted how China itself has had a long history of politicizing the Olympics--from its bullying of Taiwan within the IOC to its own participation in the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

For decades, China used the Olympics as a political weapon against Taiwan. In 1956, it pulled out of the Melbourne Games one day before they were to start to protest the presence of the Taiwan delegation. It was not until 1979 that the "two-China problem" was settled by the IOC and Beijing agreed to participate.

In February 1980, China took part in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. In May that year, it joined the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In July 1980, Chinese athletes, along with those from 28 other nations, took part in the Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia, organized as an alternative to the Moscow Games.

Reasonable people can disagree as to whether China’s crackdown in Tibet merits an Olympic boycott of any kind. Indeed, even the Dalai Lama has said that a boycott is not the answer. Beijing’s righteous indignation in suggesting that the Olympic Games should not be linked to politics, however, is clearly disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical.

From the Obama campaign:

With more than 56% of the results tallied from today's 284 Democratic district conventions across Texas, Senator Barack Obama currently is projected to earn a 38-29 pledged delegate win in the Texas caucuses, exactly as projected on the day after the March 4th precinct caucuses. The nine delegate margin in the caucuses means Obama will gain a net margin of five pledged delegates from Texas because Senator Clinton narrowly won the Texas primary by only four delegates, 65-61.

To which the Daily Kos frontpager BarbinMD reponds:

Now let's see how long it takes for the media to catch onto the fact that Obama won Texas.

Savor the flavor on that. He lost the popular vote--by 4 points!--but because of some bizarre and arcane electoral rules, he walks away with a win. How long will it take the media to catch on? Who knows. It's been more than seven years and the Kos Kids still can't wrap their heads around the fact that Bush won the 2000 election despite losing the popular vote. Apparently the result is more important than the process, or the ends justify the means, or something like that.

Like Obama, I don’t want to suggest I’ve absorbed all of the facts, but a couple of thoughts.

First, it's too soon to tell the outcome. As Roggio pointed out on Friday, "this operation needs to develop before it can be called a success or failure, and that will take weeks or even months." We and our Iraqi allies were going to confront these militias at some point. Ever since al Qaeda was routed from Anbar, critics of the war pointed to the remaining Shia militias as the insurmountable obstacle to victory. Now we're finally seeing some action on that front--it's not clear that this particular action will be successful, but at least there's movement, and from the Iraqis.

Anthony Cordesman says the fighting "is better seen as a power grab, an effort by Mr. Maliki and the most powerful Shiite political parties to establish their authority over Basra and the parts of Baghdad that have eluded their grasp…" That doesn't sound so bad to me.

Faced with an intractable problem, Maliki bet big and confronted the most powerful militia in Iraq. When one looks at the rest of the Middle East, it's not at all apparent that the region's more problematic regimes are inclined to do the same. Take Pakistan, where broad swaths of the country are controlled by militias, the Taliban, al Qaeda. If only Musharraf had the resolve to violently confront these threats to his government's sovereignty. It's the same in the Palestinian territories, where Mahmoud Abbas must rely on the IDF to keep him in power. Abbas might be willing to confront Hamas, but he is unable. And in Lebanon, a weak central government lacks the resolve to strike at Hezbollah. It strikes me as a good thing that Maliki can and will go after those who directly challenge his government--even to the New York Times it looks like progress:

For starters, the Shiite rebels are fighting mainly Iraqi soldiers, rather than Americans. Their leader, Moktada al-Sadr, is not defending against attacks from a redoubt inside the country’s most sacred shrine, but is issuing edicts with a tarnished reputation from an undisclosed location, possibly outside the country. And Iraq’s prime minister, a Shiite whom Americans had all but despaired would ever act against militias of his own sect, is taking them on fiercely.

Finally, Allah links this quote from a former political adviser to the American military in Baghdad: "The Sadrists will likely view their survival as victory." If we were to leave Iraq, surely they'd set their sights higher.

Update: And as Roggio notes in his latest, a lot of them aren't surviving.

The Democratic primary drags on, and the debate rages within the commentariat as to what Hillary Clinton should do in the face of overwhelming odds against her success. David Brooks showed up on Meet the Press and described just what Clinton’s continued campaign is doing to her party.

"Is this what the Democratic Party really wants? What happened this week? Her approval ratings are now at their seven-year low. This has begun to hurt her, in particular, but it's begun to hurt the entire party. Barack Obama used to lead among independent votes against John McCain. Now, according to some polls, John McCain leads among independent voters."

Brit Hume, on the other hand, pointed out the problems the tough primary has created for Obama in his inevitable race in the general against John McCain during Fox News Sunday’s panel:

"Let me just make this point: Those polls are mainly a reflection of Obama’s continuing strength among Democrats. It was always the case, I think, that the Reverend Wright controversy was going to hurt him much less with Democrats than it would with the broader general electorate, to include Republicans and Independents. And there is polling data that indicates that among Republicans and Independents he has been hurt."

Joe Lieberman, the independent Democrat from Connecticut, explained just how the party has changed over the last decade, and why it will cause problems for the Dems in ’08. "The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000," he explained to George Stephanopoulos on This Week,

"It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will--and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain, a reformer, somebody who understands 'ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country' and remembers the other part of the Kennedy inaugural, which said that we will bear any burden, pay any price to assure the survival and sustenance of liberty. That’s John McCain."

As Michael Scherer says of Lieberman's performance, "nearly two years after being rejected by his lifelong party in the Connecticut primary, it appears that Lieberman has only begun his effort to exact revenge."

Theatre critic-turned-pundit Frank Rich of the New York Times recounts the story of Hillary Clinton’s lie regarding Bosnia, asking the question that’s been on the lips of all of her fans in the press:

Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded?

Let’s see. Lies about Bosnia, Northern Ireland, where Chelsea was on 9/11, being a Yankees fan and even how she got her name . . . The legendary healthcare fiasco . . . Questionable investments . . . Not so subtle racism . . . Crying when votes don’t go her way . . . Embarrassing herself by putting up with a husband that any other woman would have kicked to the curb eons ago . . . Assuming a presidential coronation, then staying on as the guillotine gets sharpened . . .

Somebody help me here. Where did this "Hillary is so smart" meme get started?

This morning on Face the Nation, Gov. Bill Richardson explained the differences between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nothing surprising--Obama asked for his endorsement in a series of personal phone calls while the Clintons used "hundreds" of surrogates to strong-arm him. That kind of thing.

It wasn’t until Richardson went into deeper detail that he said something that really caught my ear. Obama, he said, possesses "judgment, temperament, and patriotism."

Well, it’s no secret that Hillary--and Bill, come to think of it--have a problem with judgment and temperament. But patriotism? This sounds like Richardson is either reassuring us that, despite the ties to Rev. Wright, Obama indeed loves his country . . . or, more interestingly, Hillary Clinton doesn’t.

I think the Governor of New Mexico might have ratcheted the nasty factor in the Democratic campaign up a notch.

Thanks, Bill!

Jeffrey Lewis flags some interesting testimony from a recent hearing on the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). Here's Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, apparently unaware that the Pentagon was not responsible for the program, or maintaining the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile in general:

MR. ENGLAND: So Mr. Hobson, I guess I was not aware that we were not paying for these programs —

REP. HOBSON: You’re not.

MR. ENGLAND: — with Department of Energy, because — okay, I guess that’s a surprise to me. I mean, I always thought we were funding those development programs and funding the DOE labs to do work for us. So I though there was a money transfer to DOD (sic) to do this. I guess I’m surprised —

That's like finding a couple billion in your pocket, right? Maybe it's even enough to convince England that the Air Force can afford a few extra F-22s.

Hugh Hewitt links a 1995 profile of Obama in the Chicago Reader. It's worth reading in full. He shares his views on black churches and the Christian Right, and he makes clear his preference for "collective action" over individualism. And at the end, after discussing his participation in Minister Farrakhan's Million Man March:

"But cursing out white folks is not going to get the job done. Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up. We've got some hard nuts-and-bolts organizing and planning to do. We've got communities to build."

It doesn't seem like Barack had any real problem with cursing out white folks or making anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements, it's just not as productive as he'd like. It's the same when he discusses the "wonderful preachers" in Chicago. "As soon as church lets out," he says, "the energy dissipates." You see it's not enough to just say "God Damn America" on Sunday, you have to organize your community and get on with the damning come Monday.

Update: Since Hugh's linked back here...in response to his question ("Did many mainstream Dems join that march?"), the short answer is no. Only two members of Congress attended, as did a couple of mayors (including Marion Barry), Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. President Clinton gave a speech endorsing the goals of the march, but condemning its organizer.

At the time Clinton said "One million men are right to be standing up for personal responsibility, but one million men do not make right one man's message of malice and division." He did not refer to Farrakhan by name, but in retrospect this looks like pretty strong stuff compared to Obama's "Anti-Semitic and anti-Asian statements are not going to lift us up." And of course Clinton didn't actually attend the march.

Also check out Matt Labash's reporting on the march from the October 23, 1995 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The front page story on Hillary Clinton in today's Journal includes this gem:

Heather Arnet, a Clinton supporter who runs a Pittsburgh organization that lobbies for more women on public commissions and corporate boards, recently surveyed the Internet and found more than 50 anti-Hillary Clinton sites on Facebook. One of them, entitled "Hillary Clinton Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich," had more than 38,000 members.

"What if one of these 38,000 guys is someone you, as a woman, have to go to and negotiate a raise?" she asks.

I see the group now has more than 43,000 members. Maybe young people really are reading newspapers. Also it looks to me (just clicking through a few pages) like 40 percent or more of the group is female--it's certainly not all "guys." And most of the members, male and female, are probably Obama supporters. After all, Republicans want Hillary to keep running...and make us a sandwich.

MTV’s antiwar picture, Stop-Loss, bombed at the box-office, taking in only $1.6 million on its opening day. This comes in spite of near universal fanfare and loads of free-media. A studio exec dismisses the poor showing anyway, saying, "No one wants to see Iraq war movies." That’s not quite right. What people don’t want to see are preachy antiwar movies about how awful their country is. At least not while we have 150,000 troops in Iraq.

During World War II, plenty of war-films did extremely well, and they did so by telling inspiring stories about the very best our country and allies had to offer. Hollywood’s most talented directors made films about U.S./British moral superiority, not its equivalence. One of my favorites is William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver, which Winston Churchill called, "propaganda worth 100 battleships." After completing the film, Wyler even enlisted despite being eligible for an exemption. Mrs. Miniver reached the screen in the same year as Casablana.

Even the Vietnam War, which inspired some great work, can be distinguished from Stop-Loss and the like. The antiwar movies of that era--most notably, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Good Morning, Vietnam, and Platoon--all followed the conclusion of hostilities. What we’re seeing today, with Hollywood actively tearing this country down from within, is quite unique.

Jim Gerghaty of the National Review Online found an interesting tidbit in the magazine's archives:

On January 5, [2003] Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's former personal pilot dropped a bombshell that has been ignored by just about every major U.S. news organization: The Venezuelan president, according to the pilot, gave al Qaeda a substantial sum of money following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Memo to Joe Kennedy: How goes that little oil business with your buddy Hugo? Any idea if Osama’s getting his cut?

A photo in today’s New York Post features two men in Basra. Both wear masks that completely cover their faces. One stands with an assault rifle in his hand and what appears to be electrical cord in the other. His comrade-in-arms is hunched over a bucket and what appears to be a rock. The caption:

Shiite thugs prepare a roadside bomb in Basra yesterday, where government forces have ratcheted up their campaign against the terrorists.

It would be nice if the unidentified photographer (the credit goes to AFP/Getty Images) gave a heads-up to the proper authorities. However, I’m betting journalistic objectivity takes precedent. Somebody’s got to look out for our way of life, after all.

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell spoke yesterday at his alma mater, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. The whole speech is worth a read. Perhaps the most entertaining moment comes when McConnell shares his personal email and that of his assistant with the crowd. In classic DNI fashion, this bit of information has been redacted for the version sent out by his office. Hilarious.

The most important moment of the speech came in response to a question about the greatest current threats to the U.S. For those who took comfort in last year's misleading NIE on Iran, McConnell provides a welcome wake-up call.

My biggest worry at the moment: nuclear weapon in Iran. If the Iranians are successful in achieving fissile material, which they are pursuing, and if they turn it into a nuclear weapon, the dynamics in the Middle East will change literally overnight. We will have a nuclear-arms race because if the Iranians have them, my guess is all of the surrounding nations would immediately attempt to secure nuclear weapons and now we’ve got a situation where we have to have access to energy and not only is in destabilized in the current politics of what we all know about, you have the risk of weapons of mass destruction added to it.

China’s brutal crackdown on Buddhist protesters in its annexed Tibet province has sparked a heated discussion in Europe about whether or not to boycott (at least parts of) the upcoming Beijing Olympics, which are set to begin with a grandiose opening ceremony on August 8. So far, the 27 EU countries currently meeting at the foreign minister level in Slovenia have failed to agree on a common approach on how to deal with this thorny issue.

Among the big three EU powers, French President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be most open towards considering various potential Olympic boycott options. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in contrast, has already announced his intention to participate at the games. Finally, Germany just announced today that President Horst Koehler, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will not be attending the games. However, Merkel’s spokesman was eager to stress that this was nothing unusual and that none of the three had ever planned to go to the Olympics in the first place. Foreign minister Steinmeier also reiterated his government’s view that a complete boycott of the games should be avoided. Germany is certainly treading very carefully as it just weathered a dramatic deterioration in its bilateral relations with Beijing following Chancellor Merkel’s controversial meeting with the Dalai Lama at her official residence in Berlin last September.

France is already emerging as a key player in shaping Europe’s response to the Tibet crackdown. President Sarkozy, after all, will hold the rotating EU-presidency at the time of the Olympics this summer. Political leaders in Poland and the Czech Republic, for their part, have already announced that they will personally boycott the games and are urging other European politicians to do the same.

In this context it is interesting to draw a comparison between Europe’s response to developments in Tibet and Darfur. For example, previous attempts by U.S. human rights activists like Mia Farrow and others to effectively bill the Beijing games as "The Genocide Olympics." (because of "China’s role as business partner, diplomatic protector and underwriter of Sudan’s campaign of ethnic destruction in Darfur") have had only a very limited if negligible effect on international public opinion. For sure, the U.S. human rights campaigners scored some relatively minor points back home, as evidenced by Steven Spielberg’s recent resignation as an artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

In response to the ad McCain released this morning (see the Cardinal's take here), Howard Dean puts out this statement:

"The American people have been waiting for a president who understands the challenges they face, not another out of touch Bush Republican who promises four more years of the same failed leadership. John McCain can try to reintroduce himself to the country, but he can't change the fact that he cast aside his principles to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with President Bush for the last seven years. While we honor McCain's military service, the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant opportunist who doesn't understand the economy and is promising to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years."

McCain put out an ad that makes no mention of the Democrats, an ad that is 100% positive, and Dean rants "blatant opportunism!" Could it be that the McCain ad was effective because it highlighted the difference between McCains record of service and, yes, demonstrated patriotism with that of another candidate who shall go nameless here and went nameless in the ad? Perhaps Dean thinks his guy particularly vulnerable on this point to get so heated in his response.

Then again, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a Dean Scream is just a Dean Scream.

Glenn Reynolds has posted a fresh interview with Michael Yon. I just listened, but Glenn sums it up nicely:

(1) It's likely to get worse before it's better; (2) No one seems to doubt Iranian backing for the violence; (3) This isn't about religion, it's about money and power; and (4) Unlike Al Qaeda in the north, this isn't so much a fight to the finish as violence as a negotiating tactic.

Go listen to the whole thing, and if you missed it be sure to check Roggio's post from earlier today, "Give War a Chance." Roggio just got back yesterday from a few weeks in Iraq, and he adds some fresh reporting from MNF-Baghdad as well.

And the title of this post, good stuff from this album.

In the first sermon Obama ever heard preached by Jeremiah Wright, the reverend proclaimed that "white folks' greed runs a world in need."

In Dreams from My Father, Obama recalls listening to this sermon by Wright entitled "The Audacity of Hope." Obama writes: "And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House."

While Ben Smith, Rich Lowry, Mickey Kaus, Hugh Hewitt, and Sean Hannity have drawn attention to this passage, a search in Nexis of the terms "Wright" and "white folks' greed" yields a whopping 11 results--none of them from national newspapers or network news programs.

Over at the Washington Post's Trail blog, Perry Bacon Jr. notes that Obama's aides still have not "specified which of Wright's sermons the candidate attended or if there was a difference between 'objectionable' comments Obama did not hear and 'controversial' ones he did."

We'll see how well the Obama campaign can obfuscate and stonewall the press about what Obama knew and when he knew it. But is it too much to hope that some intrepid reporter in the mainstream media will crack open Obama's autobiography and point out that Obama heard Wright make racially charged statements the very first time he attended Trinity?

In response to Fitna, the much anticipated short-film released by Geert Wilders earlier this week (which we posted on our site here, although Liveleak has since removed the video after threats were made against members of their staff), UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had this to say:

"We must also recognize that the real fault line is not between Muslim and Western societies, as some would have us believe, but between small minorities of extremists, on different sides, with a vested interest in stirring hostility and conflict."

Where is this small minority of extremists on our side of the fence? If Ban is talking about Wilders, and it appears that he is, then he draws an outrageous and false equivalence. Admittedly drawing outrageous false equivalences is the UN's trademark, but comparing a mediocre 15-minute film to the attack on the World Trade Center pushes things to a ludicorus extreme. Hot Air notes the irony of Ban's characterization of the film as "offensively anti-Islamic" given that Article 19 of the UN's Universal Declaration on Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

This is unequivocal, and yet Ban's criticism plainly seeks to inhibit Wilders's freedom to hold opinions and to impart those opinions through the media. And where are the left's free speech advocates? I don't see even a mention of the film at any of my favorite lefty blogs.

Great catch from Tom Maguire, regarding Barack Obama's appearance on The View. Obama told the girls this:

Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church

I imagine we'd all feel a lot better to know that Reverened Wright has seen the light. But as Maguire discovers, Wright has never apologized for any of it, but Obama continues to stand by his man. More from Taranto under the appropriate headline "Deeper and Deeper."

Update: Allah reads it another way. --Ed.

Will disappointment and anger at the Bush administration do significant damage to John McCain's presidential campaign? Apparently not:

"I am so angry at President Bush that I will not vote for Republican John McCain for president this November." In general, about 5 percent of Republicans and more than 40 percent of Democrats agreed, but those figures should be neither surprising nor terribly worrisome to McCain.

The numbers for independents — the swing voters in most elections — were larger. In Florida, 22 percent of independents agreed with that statement; in Ohio, 19 percent agreed; and in Pennsylvania, 16 percent agreed.

But further analysis found that most of the independents who agreed were Democratic leaners, and relatively few of them had actually voted for Bush in 2004.

In Ohio, 72 percent of independents who agreed with the statement identified as Democratic leaners, and 9 percent said they did not lean toward either party. The comparable figures were 70 percent and 19 percent, respectively, in Florida and 75 percent and 12 percent, respectively, in Pennsylvania.

Looking at it another way, only about 5 percent of those who said they had voted for Bush in 2004 said they would not vote for McCain.

We'll see how much this figure changes as Democrats work harder to tie John McCain to George Bush -- probably after the Democratic convention. But for now, at least, there seems to be very little appetite among voters to blame John McCain for George Bush's perceived sins.

That makes sense, of course. The election that determines who succeeds George Bush is not a referendum on George Bush. It's a choice between two different candidates.

The headline on "Political Ticker" grabbed me:

Clinton tells Democrats: Don't vote for McCain

My first thought was: How much worse can it get for Hillary when her own husband is begging voters not jump ship because they can’t stand her? Then I read the story. It was Hillary doing the begging.

Oh. That much worse.

McCain's first general election spot is on the air. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks and feels and sounds much more like a primary spot to me. I think McCain's amazing story should be a key part of his general election message. But if that is the opening move -- and I can make good arguments both for and against that strategy -- should they do a spot that commits to that idea instead of just implying it as this ad does.

More importantly, what exactly is the McCain general election message strategy? Hard to find in this ad, unless the plan is to hang the whole general election campaign entirely on the war. If so, that would be Axelrod's dream come true. My fear is that McCainland doesn't have a general election message strategy.

P.S. The tagline is not only mumbo jumbo, it is going to spark trouble. Expect an immediate Obama/media assault on Americanism.

The Iraqi military launched Operation Knights' Assault against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terrorist groups in Basra three days ago, and the media is quick to call the operation a failure. The New York Times has declared the military offensive in Basra has "stalled" just two days after the operation began, with the Mahdi Army controlling some neighborhoods and Iraqi armored vehicles are unable to enter some neighborhoods as the streets are too narrow.

The Times Online is claiming the Mahdi Army has overrun checkpoints throughout Baghdad, some without a fight. The Multinational Division Baghdad categorically denied this in a follow-up question to THE WEEKLY STANDARD earlier this morning.

"All checkpoints and ISF [Iraqi security forces] buildings are in ISF and/or Coalition control. No checkpoint is in enemy control," said Lieutenant Colonel Steve Stover, the Public Affairs Officer for the 4th Infantry Division and Multinational Division Baghdad. "There were several cases where the ISF needed our assistance (and more often than not--did not) and either CF 9Coalition forces ground or air responded and either reinforced or took back in a couple occasions the CP or IP (Iraqi Police) building--none of that happened today."

Keep in mind how the newspapers and television were quick to declare the initial invasion in Iraq a quagmire as a sandstorm slowed the U.S. assault force in southern Iraq for several days. Also remember the media was quick to declare the surge a failure in its opening month in February 2007, despite the fact that sufficient forces would not be in place until June 2007.

Military operations take time to develop, and, as the saying goes, the enemy also gets a vote. The Mahdi Army has been entrenched in these neighborhoods in Baghdad and Basra, so it is natural that it will take time to root out the militias in these areas. This operation needs to develop before it can be called a success or failure, and that will take weeks or even months.

One thing to keep in mind is Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army, is pressing for an end to the fighting. If Sadr's Mahdi Army was doing so well, why would he call for an end to the fighting? Another item to consider is that U.S. troops have yet to enter the fighting in full force. Other than some skirmishes in Baghdad--the U.S. has killed at least 60 Mahdi Army fighters in Baghdad the past three days--support in Basra has been limited to air, logistical, and special operations support. The U.S. military has yet to fully weigh in as it is letting the Iraqi Army take the lead in Basrah. Sadr knows this.

Obama on Jeremiah Wright:

Part of what I hope to do in this campaign and as president is to get us beyond these divisions that distract us from our common challenges and our common opportunities and move the country forward.

On going to war in Iraq:

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Obama on attacks by Hillary:

We knew that the closer we got to the change we seek, the more we'd see of the politics we're trying to end -- the attacks and distortions that try to distract us from the issues that matter to people's lives, the stunts and the tactics that ask us to fear instead of hope.

On gay marriage:

The heightened focus on marriage is a distraction from other, attainable measures to prevent discrimination and gays and lesbians.

Obama on race, gay marriage, abortion, and illegal immigration:

We get distracted from solving problems such as health care, employment or the environment because of these divisions. It happens in every election, and it's not just race. It's immigration, gay people or abortion. There's always one of these issues that crops up and prevents us from focusing on vital issues that this country's long-term well-being depends on us solving.

It's not all that original to note that much of Obama's rhetoric is pretty vague -- often vapid. But I've begun to notice how many things Obama regards as distractions. When he labels a given issue a 'distraction,' he's saying that someone is whipping up a an issue from whole cloth simply for political gain.

So who does he think is being insincere: gays who want to marry, or people of faith who think marriage is for a man and a woman? How about in the competition between border enforcement advocates and those who want amnesty for illegal aliens? Or between those who favor abortion on demand, and those who believe life begins at conception?

All of these are important public policy questions, with divisions among Americans that prevent easy solutions. Obama shouldn't denigrate broad swaths of the population just because it would be difficult to address their concerns.

Michael posted this quote last night from a 2003 sermon by Reverend Wright:

"Remember it was soldiers of the Third Marine Regiment of Rome who had fun with Jesus, who was mistreated as a prisoner of war, an enemy of the occupying army stationed in Jerusalem to insure the mopping up action of Operation Israeli Freedom."

What can one say but. . . Wow! It takes real talent to make up stuff like that. Where can one even begin to deconstruct it. Wright has such a breathtaking insouciance with regard to truth that his statements simply deny contradiction. "Third Marine Regiment of Rome"? He's got a Roman order of battle a lot better than any I have seen. In any case, there were no "Roman" troops in Judea in March of AD 33. The nearest legion was up in Syria. There was a cohort of auxiliary troops, but these men were not Roman citizens; most were probably Syrians and Egyptians; a few were probably Jews. We "garlic noses" get a bum rap on that one.

On the matter of an "occupying army" in Jerusalem, again, there were only about 500 (at most 1000) auxiliary troops in all of Judaea. Only a hundred or so were regularly stationed in Jerusalem (at the Antonia Fortress); the Praefect Pontius Pilate probably brought a few hundred more from his capital at Caesarea Maritime. If only we could be so efficient at "occupation"!

On that subject, Reverend Wright is apparently unfamiliar with just how Pontius Pilate got to be the Praefect of Judaea (a thankless job if ever there was one). Judaea, you see, had been an independent client kingdom under Idumean Jew King Herod the Great. When he died, his son Archelaus inherited his kingdom, which he continued to govern for another six or seven years at least. But his rule proved so brutal and inept (his dad had been brutal, but efficient) that his subjects, the Jews, appealed to Caesar Augustus in Rome to be made a province of the Roman Empire. Thus, Archelaus was deposed, and Judaea made a second-rank province under a Praefect from the Equestrian order, subordinate to the Senatorial province of Syria. Pilate was appointed to his post by Tiberius Caesar, and held his position from about AD 26 to AD 36. He may not have been popular, but he was governing Judaea because the Jews themselves asked Rome to govern on their behalf.

And for the most part, the period from the 20s through the early 40s were relatively peaceful; there may have been some sporadic rebellions here and there, and endemic banditry in the countryside, but there is no evidence of widespread dissatisfaction with Roman rule until the time of Gaius Caligula. If you want to point to when the situation truly deteriorated, look to the 50s and 60s, under Nero, when a series of brutal and corrupt governors sparked rising nationalist sentiments. It is at this time that we find Jewish terrorist groups like the Zealots and the Sicarii causing widespread violence, culminating with the Jewish Revolt of AD 66.

Which brings us to an interesting side note: the two most ancient and authentically African Christian Churches, the Church of Ethiopia and the Church of Eritrea, both venerate the "garlic nose" Pontius Pilate as a saint, canonized in the sixth century and commemorated on 25 June.

The McCain camp held another in their series of calls with bloggers this morning, this one announcing McCain's "Service to America" tour, which will kick off next week. Ed Morrissey has a pretty comprehensive write-up of the call over at Hot Air, but the comments about Gen. McPeak (and indirectly Rev. Wright) are certainly worth putting up here.

In response to my question about whether the McCain campaign had any concerns about the company Obama keeps (you'll remember Obama made the comment that McCain has "made some bad choices about the company he keeps"), senior adviser Steve Schmidt said:

When you look at General McPeak's comments and other comments, a lot of these comments are disturbing, the American people will focus on them. I think Barack Obama's comments, though, are very instructive in the following sense: it is a very good example of the detachment between reality and his rhetoric. With regard to his rhetoric, he talks about a new kind of politics, but literally day after day after day, Barack Obama steps forward with inaccurate, misleading attacks, many of them character based, and he is practicing the worst of the old kind of politics. And I think over the long duration of the campaign, the American people will focus very acutely on the discrepancy between his rhetoric and his actions, should he be the nominee of the party. And of course, I think it would be a mistake for anyone to count out Hillary Clinton at this stage in the race.

So, it looks like the McCain folks are no more eager to engage on this issue than Hillary was when the story of Rev. Wright first broke. Of course, at this point Howard Wolfson would probably give a pretty colorful answer if he was asked the same question. It may be that the McCain folks won't make hay out all this until they, too, have their backs up against the wall, at which point, like Hillary, it may already be too late--notwithstanding the encouraging words Schmidt offers her here.

From Reason: In Defense of Geert Wilders, by Michael Moynihan.

From the New York Times: Tested Over Times, by David Brooks.

From the Washington Post: A Rank Falsehood, by Charles Krauthammer.

From TWS Online: Evangelicals Like It Hot, by Mark Tooley.

From the New York Sun: The Age of Abundance, by Edward Glaeser.

The headline is for emphasis; what the Democrats are really promising is to end all our efforts in Iraq -- including anti-terror efforts, training of Iraqi security forces, and anything else you can think of:

More than three dozen Democratic congressional candidates banded together yesterday to promise that, if elected, they will push for legislation calling for an immediate drawdown of troops in Iraq that would leave only a security force in place to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad...

The starkest difference between the group's proposal, dubbed a "Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq," and those embraced by many senior Democrats and the party's presidential candidates is that it rejects the idea of leaving U.S. troops on the ground to train Iraqi security forces or engage in anti-terrorism operations. The group instead calls for a dramatic increase in regional diplomacy and the deployment of international peacekeeping forces, if necessary.

While it is both novel and reckless to propose withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq, these Democrats share one critical element with the Democrats already elected to power in Washington -- they refuse to commit to a timetable. Nevertheless, the anti-war wingnut crowd should really believe them this time, since they pinky-swore it.

The document also seems to follow the Obama Doctrine on Iraq: we're getting out as fast as we can, regardless of conditions on the ground, and we reserve the right to get back in if we learn that al Qaeda is, in fact, operating in the country.

McCain reiterated in his foreign policy speech this week the need for a new international organization comprised of the world's democracies--a League of Democracies as McCain calls it. Despite McCain's repeated insistence that this new organization "would not supplant the United Nations," Charles Krauthammer gave hope to conservatives everywhere when he said McCain's "got a hidden agenda...to essentially kill the U.N." Now Mike Boyer gives us another reason to hope that's true.

Boyer reports that the U.N. "Human Rights Council has appointed Princeton University Professor Richard Falk to a six-year term as the special investigator into Israel's actions in the Palestinian Territories." And what's the problem with this? Boyer quotes from an article Falk wrote last June:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.

Is Professor Falk a smug left-winger with a penchant for pretentious prose and moral equivalency? I think so. Anyway, no real surprise that the new Human Rights Council is as morally bankrupt as the old Human Rights Commission. I only wish I was as certain as Krauthammer that McCain really does have a hidden agenda to rid us of this kind of hypocrisy once and for all.

And just as an aside, this is the second second-rate Princeton professor I've come across in just the last two days. The first was Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African American studies, who I caught yesterday on a rerun of Bill Maher's show. Describing Harris-Lacewell's performance on the show as mediocre would be irresponsible overstatement, and she also said she "spent seven years attending Reverend Wright’s church when I lived in Chicago." Maybe the Rev. should open a new ministry at Princeton, it sounds like he'd find a receptive audience for his anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism among the faculty there.

Update: To their credit, Princeton students remain committed to this country's alliance with Israel, even if their professors do not.

The NAACP is now claiming that legislation to ban students from wearing low-riding pants is unconstitutional discrimination. That’s right. The Civil War and the 14th amendment have been reduced to vindicating the rights of people to wear low-riding pants, leaving their skivvies exposed to the light of day.

The Florida branch of the NAACP says a bill that would ban students from wearing their pants too low could lead to more legal trouble for black males.

Orlando Senator Gary Siplin’s bill was approved 28-11 last week by the Florida Senate.

The bill calls for no criminal sanctions, but it would prohibit students from wearing pants low so that they expose undergarments.

Violators would receive a warning for a first offense, and suspensions from school would be issued for each subsequent infraction.

NAACP President Adora Obi Nweze called it a “clearly discriminatory bill.’’

Other groups such as the Advancement Project, a Washington social advocacy organization, say the proposal is directed primarily at black males and could lead to arrests.

Needless to say, the claim of discrimination is questionable as a matter of Constitutional law. Although many of the legislators who have introduced these bills represent predominantly black neighborhoods, the laws are framed in racially neutral terms. I would also argue it is unclear that they will have a discriminatory effect since plenty of white youths have appropriated this fashion.

This Gallup report on Wednesday morning caused a few Democrats to lose their donuts. It found almost one out of three (28%) of Clinton supporters say they would support McCain if Obama were the nominee. Let’s call them the Benedict Arnold Caucus.

But who are these potential partisan turncoats? Are their answers to pollsters mere grousing or permanent pique? And have we seen this kind of behavior in previous elections? Some believe the traitor talk is overblown.

Yesterday Gallup followed up with a more detailed analysis demonstrating Democratic leaning independents (39%) and self-identified Democratic conservatives (38%) were the primary culprits, saying they would vote for McCain if Obama were the nominee. Blacks (15%) and self-identified liberal Clinton supporters (18%) were the least likely to defect, the report observes. These numbers are consistent with this piece by David Paul Kuhn in yesterday’s Politico, suggesting the McCain campaign is considering a major offensive to attract Reagan Democrats back to the GOP if Obama were to win the nomination.

The Gallup report also suggests the Benedict Arnold contingent is bigger within team Clinton. The poll finds that, on average, Obama supporters across various subgroups are less apt to defect than the Clinton partisans. According to Gallup,

The percentages of Democratic voters who support Obama for the nomination but who would vote for McCain if Clinton is the nominee are lower across most subgroups than is the case for Clinton supporters…This is a reflection of the basic finding that Obama supporters are less likely to abandon their preferred party and vote for McCain -- even if their candidate does not get the Democratic nomination -- than is the case for Clinton supporters in the reverse scenario (19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain if Clinton is the nominee, compared to 28% of Clinton supporters who would vote for McCain if Obama is the nominee).

Read the full Gallup demographics of desertion report here.

But are these traitorous traits signs of real problems or temporary political annoyance? Won’t these Democrats ultimately come back to the fold? Political scientist Brian Shaffner posts this bubble buster for anyone hyperventilating too much about the Gallup results. "Following Bush's victory in the 2000 primaries and McCain's exit from the race, the Pew survey found that 51% of those who backed McCain during the primary campaign would vote for Gore in the general election." And this initial disloyalty knew no partisan bounds, Shaffner adds. Even the Gore supporters looked like deserters. Shaffner notes "…a significant share of Bradley [Gore’s principal rival in 2000] supporters also said that they would be supporting Bush in the general election, including 39% of his independent backers." He suggests the Clinton supporters will come home and support Obama after the requisite amount of electoral wound licking and political forgiveness occurs. Read the full post here.

Jay Cost has a smart post about numbers, dynamics, and the humility of predictions:

I agree that Clinton is more likely to lose than win. I also do not necessarily disagree with these low estimates. However, I disagree with the way these estimates are occasionally presented. There is sometimes an implication that these are precise predictions - when in fact a prediction like this must be very imprecise. This is why I was so vague in offering my own estimate last week.

There are reasons to expect imprecision in this kind of situation. Precision depends in part on the number of variable factors that create that which we are predicting. The more things that must happen for the prediction to come true, the less precise it is. Take an example. Suppose we are predicting whether a pitcher will strike out a batter. We can be reasonably precise. After all, there are just two factors to account for - the pitcher and the batter. Suppose, on the other hand, we're predicting who will win the World Series. Precision is very difficult here. After all, our prediction depends on thousands of factors shaking out in a certain way.

As if on cue, Slate has launched its clever (yet un-counterintuitive!) Hillary Deathwatch which calculates that Clinton's chance of winning the nomination is 12 percent.

Not 13 percent. Not 11.5 percent. 12 percent.

From a sermon delivered on April 13, 2003, titled, "Confusing God and Government."

"Remember it was soldiers of the Third Marine Regiment of Rome who had fun with Jesus, who was mistreated as a prisoner of war, an enemy of the occupying army stationed in Jerusalem to insure the mopping up action of Operation Israeli Freedom."

That comes around the nine minute mark if you want to hear the 'context.'

Obama in an interview today with CNBC:

Well, look, there's no doubt that anything I do is going to be premised on what the economic situation is when I take office. I'm going to be sworn in in January, we don't know what the economy's going to look like at that point. And, you know, the thing you can--you can be assured of is that I'm not going to making these decisions based on ideology. I'm not a dogmatist. I know that some, you know, my opponents to the right would like to paint me as this wooly-eyed, you know, liberal or wild-eyed...

Isn't this exactly what Samantha Power was saying about Iraq that got her fired? And wouldn't any reasonable person (or any person who believed themselves reasonable) promise to take such an approach in every decision? So why don't we get the same thoughtfulness on the war? Unless Obama's defeatism is dogmatic, or he's some wolly-eyed, you know, liberal who thinks everything's just going to be sunshine and daisies when he pulls U.S. troops out of Iraq.

CNN's Michael Ware on the violence in Basra:

This is a window into the future of Iraq after the American withdrawal...

What many people suggest is that we're looking at a situation that will be akin to Lebanon in the 1980s, with vicious, well-armed militia proxy wars where all the factions are supported by one foreign sponsor or another.

But this will be Lebanon on steroids.

The British withdrew from the city in September. The Times (London) puts the choice facing the British government in stark terms: more combat troops or "an ignominious withdrawal and handing over control of Basra to the Americans."

So Mumia is entitled to a new sentencing hearing due to a mistaken jury instruction, but before death penalty opponents start proclaiming his innocence, keep in mind the following:

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Abu-Jamal's conviction should stand, but that he should get a new sentencing hearing because of flawed jury instructions. If prosecutors don't want to give him a new death penalty hearing, Abu-Jamal would be sentenced automatically to life in prison.

The fact is what is happening now has nothing to do with Abu-Jamal’s guilt. It only has to do with a very limited procedural issue, and at the very least, Abu-Jamal will spend the rest of his life in jail. Activists who have been proclaiming his innocence will undoubtedly declare victory, but this rules does not vindicate nearly any of their claims. The only fact of the crime that remains in dispute: whether Mumia screamed upon his arrival at the hospital, and as a security guard testified at the trial, "I shot that motherf--, and I hope he dies."

But Mumia is still getting great press from the French.

The big exclusive from Think Progress:

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) gave a foreign policy speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council....

These lines are not McCain’s own. As TP reader 5th Estate discovered, they were in fact taken largely from a 1996 speech by ret. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer. Below is a comparison of McCain’s address yesterday with Ziemer’s in 1996.

We were never that impressed with the flap over Obama's plagiarizing of a Deval Patrick speech. Stealing great lines is what politicians do. My only observation at the time was that Patrick delivered the lines better (click through to see the video for yourself). But this time, it turns out that Ziemer had ripped off a 1995 McCain speech! Ambinder gets the scoop in an email from Mark Salter, who delivers a link to the original speech delivered by McCain to the VFW.

Think Progress has since updated their post explaining they "regret the error." Errors do tend to happen when your source can only be identified as "5th Estate." Over at the Huffington Post, which gave top billing to the phony story before disappearing it off the front page, the article remains uncorrected. But we have to give Arianna credit, she did correct her piece from earlier this week in which she accused McCain of not knowing the difference between Sunni and Shia before mixing up Syria and Iran herself. I'm sure she'll get around to posting an update to this story as well.

Update: A reader objects to the title of this post: "Think Progress did not just 'get sloppy.' They're sloppy in everything they do and routinely get stuff wrong. This just happens to be a very high-profile mistake. But it's of a piece with their hackwork, not a departure from it."

The New York Times tackles the hottest trend since carbon offsets:

Green jobs are especially good “because they cannot be easily outsourced, say, to Asia,” said Van Jones, president of Green for All, an organization based in Oakland, Calif., whose goal is promoting renewable energy and lifting workers out of poverty. “If we are going to weatherize buildings, they have to be weatherized here,” he said. “If you put up solar panels, you can’t ship a building to Asia and have them put the solar panels on and ship it back. These jobs have to be done in the United States.”

Many advocates of green employment say the jobs should be good for the workers as well as the environment. Two weeks ago in Pittsburgh, more than 800 people attended a national green-jobs conference, where much of the talk was about ensuring that green jobs provided living wages. Many speakers anticipated that the jobs would do so, because they often required special skills, like the technical ability to maintain a giant wind turbine (and the physical ability to climb a 20-story ladder to work on it).

It's hard to decide where to wade into this silliness. First off, what's wrong with Asia? Do environmentalists not want Asians to have jobs? Second, if a green job cannot be outsourced, does that mean that manufacturing solar panels isn't green? After all, they can be produced anywhere. And why do green jobs -- not including functions such as accounting -- require more skill than traditional jobs? Another green jobs advocate tells the Times that a traditional mining job magically becomes green when the metal is used for a green purpose. So which is it?

Advocates also say that green jobs are different because they produce things 'the world wants.' I suppose that sets them apart from traditional capital intensive and polluting jobs such as say, producing food and energy. Those are clearly things that have been forced on the reluctant consumer.

It seems it might be time to conduct a poll and figure out how much Americans are willing to spend to create more green jobs. I bet it's about the same as they'd spend to combat global warming.

Congressman Heath Shuler (D-NC) is claiming that John McCain has been pressing Republicans not to sign onto the discharge petition for his legislation to enhance immigration enforcement. In considering the likelihood that this is true, let's look at the reality of the situation:

A discharge petition needs 218 signatures to bring a bill to the floor. The petition was filed just 4 legislative days ago -- on March 11, with March 14 being the last day to add signatures before Easter recess. In those 4 days, Republicans got 172 signatures (out of 198 Republicans in the House). In the same time, the Democrats got 9 signatures for the petition (out of 49 cosponsors of the legislation). We know there's heavy pressure from senior liberal Democrats not to sign the petition.

So the petition has been signed by 90 percent of all Republicans in the House, and by less than 20 percent of all its Democratic sponsors. Shuler seems to be more concerned with CYA and blame spreading than with getting the bill to the floor.

Congressional Republicans are looking into possible disciplinary measures for Jim McDermott and Jim Thompson, two House Democrats who traveled to Baghdad on the eve of votes in Congress to approve the Iraq War. The third member, David Bonior, has since retired from Congress.

Murthanna al Hanooti was arrested yesterday for working on behalf of the former Iraqi regime. Federal prosecutors say that he helped pay for the trip using funds that came from the Iraqi Intelligence Service. Shakir al Khafaji, another person who accompanied the representatives and made arrangements for their meetings with senior Iraqi government officials, has not been charged. However, he had a long record of working on behalf of Saddam Hussein and hosted "expatriate conferences" -- days-long propaganda workshops -- financed and sponsored by the former Iraqi regime. Al Khafaji moderated one panel during which the U.S. was accused of "terrorism" and "genocide" against the Iraqi people for its backing of UN sanctions. Al Khafaji was later named in reports detailing individuals who had taken Oil-for-Food allocations from Saddam Hussein. But it was his work on behalf of Saddam Hussein before the trip that has piqued the interest of congressional Republicans, in large part because he had been reported by the news media and because Saddam Hussein had thanked him for his efforts.

If these Democrats were traveling with at least one person known to have worked on behalf of the Iraqi regime, shouldn't they have known that it was possible the Iraq regime was behind their trip? Did these Democrats even ask those questions? And if not, why not?

“We're just beginning to look at the facts of the case," says Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Minority Leader John Boehner, who is traveling in the region. "But it is certainly troubling that three Members of the House – including a Member of the Democratic Leadership – would act as pawns for a genocidal dictator. Their trip was nothing more than a propaganda tool for Saddam and his murderous regime.”

One specific concern is that Jim Thompson is currently a member of the House Intelligence Committee. Some congressional Republicans want to know if service on that committee is consistent with having served -- even unwittingly -- as a propaganda tool for Saddam Hussein.

David Axe flags what looks like a a major scoop in the latest issue of Men's Health. Apparently the SEALs allowed a reporter from the magazine to embed with their unit in Anbar last fall. The story:

But in November 2006, Chris W.’s SEAL team, sensing an opening, used an al-Qaeda attack on a local Iraqi sheikh as its first wedge. Working with U.S. Army units stationed in the area, SEAL Team 4 wiped out about 30 of the sheikh’s enemies, set up sniper positions overlooking his home and village, and began a brisk lend-lease program of supplies, such as generators, water pumps, and ovens. In return, the sheikh encouraged his followers to become Iraqi police and army recruits. That was the start of the now famous, if controversial, Anbar awakening.

Awesome. The piece is called "Bravery and How to Master It." Read the whole thing.

The New York Times reports on the war between vegans and feminists:

This isn’t the first time animal rights activists have been accused of sexism. Many vegans have long criticized PETA for using naked celebrities in its advertising campaigns and for staging stunts like naked protests.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, a cookbook author, is among those who believe such images twist the vegan message. “As a feminist, I’m not keen on the idea of using women’s bodies to sell veganism, and I’m not into the idea of using veganism to sell women’s bodies,” she said.

Who do we like in this one? Well, the vegans are all carrot, and the feminists, of course, are all stick.

Remember Gary Kasparov's op-ed in the Journal a few weeks back--the one where he said the "thought of [McCain] in the White House strikes fear into authoritarian leaders everywhere"? Kasparov also made a big deal in that piece of the need to eject Russia from the G-8. He wrote:

Russia was finally mentioned in one of the seemingly endless U.S. presidential primary debates. Mrs. Clinton, prompted by the moderator, managed to stutter out something resembling "Medvedev" when asked for the next Russian president's name during a debate in Cleveland....

Unfortunately, it was only a trivia question that served to show how far off the American radar Russia is. I would have been delighted to hear the answers to the follow up, "will you, as president, push for the removal of Russia from the G-7 since you have just said it is no longer a democratic nation?"

If the next U.S. president fails to address that question, any attempts to speak on behalf of global democracy will be hollow. In that case, for many of us around the world, change will be no change at all.

In his foreign policy speech yesterday, McCain said:

We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia. Rather than tolerate Russia's nuclear blackmail or cyber attacks, Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organization's doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom.

If there was any doubt that Kasparov, something of a hero of the America left for his anti-Bush comments over the last few years (see his recent interview with Bill Maher), favors McCain...yesterday's speech should put the matter to rest.

Just to prove that one of us in the right-wing attack machine is jiggy with the kids, let’s examine the recent article in the Los Angeles Times regarding the 1994 murder of rapper/drug dealer/sexual abuser/humanitarian Tupac Shakur. In trying to implicate fellow rapper Sean "Puffy" "P. Diddy" Combs in the crime, reporter Chuck Phillips based his theory on, quoting the Times:

FBI records in which a confidential informant accused two men of helping to set up the attack on Shakur -- James Rosemond, a prominent rap talent manager, and James Sabatino, identified in the story as a promoter . . . [The] two allegedly wanted to curry favor with Combs and believed Shakur had disrespected them.

I know what you’re thinking: Violence among rap artists? What is the world coming to?

But that’s not the meat of the story. No, it was when the Smoking Gun website did its own investigation of the Times piece. It seems that Phillips based his entire thesis on interviews with James Sabatino, a conman described by his father as "a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug." The FBI "records" were not only forgeries, the Smoking Gund discovered, but badly-spelled forgeries at that, created on a typewriter three decades after the feds switched to computers. Sabatino’s claims of being a Diddy insider were false to the extreme.

So what do we have? A news outlet that’s seen better days. A reporter with an agenda. A delusional conman churning out forgeries of official documents easily disproven by people in pajamas. Ring a bell with anyone? (Hint: CBS. Dan Rather. Bill Burkett. Pres. Bush’s National Guard "documents.")

Perhaps these professional journalists need to take a lesson from the hated bloggers. Like, oh, how to be professional.

From TWS Online: Meet the Obama Doctrine, by Dean Barnett.

From the Current: The Stakes in Iraq, by Ross Douthat.

From U.S. News: Polls Show Obama Damaged by Wright, by Michael Barone.

From the New York Times: Equal Alliance, Unequal Roles, by Robert Kaplan.

From Forward Movement: Blackwater Fever, by Jules Crittenden.

The simple answer: Iran.

As I understand it, a few of days ago U.S. troops started going after elements within Sadr's militia that maintain close ties to Iran. The response was a hail of mortar and rocket fire in Baghdad and Basrah. The attacks killed quite a few people in the Green Zone and elsewhere. At the same time, Sadr, from his hideout in Iran, made a Gandhiesque call for non-violent protest. It seems clear that Sadr and Tehran are playing a game of good-cop-bad-cop/bait-and-switch/pick your metaphor. Gen. Petraeus kept it simple: Iran is shooting at Americans. Unfortunately, some seem to prefer the storyline that Sadr is leading a "peaceful protest," and that the violence is the work of rogue elements within his Mahdi militia.

The willingness to ignore his role in the violence only gives Sadr more street cred by distancing him from the current flare-up, and it allows the Iranians to get away with murder (literally), while sending the message that this type of thing can and will go unpunished. But in the run-up to Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker appearing on the Hill, the Iranians and their proxies will do whatever they can to increase the political pressure in Washington. So far the strategy seems to be working.

Journalists are often confronted with ethical dilemmas: Do I let personal feelings get in the way of a straight reported story? Suppose I am friends with someone mentioned negatively in my article? Will an unfavorable profile of a subject end my access to that person for all time? Despite the temptations, I cannot stress enough the importance of remaining true to the profession.

And there couldn’t have been a more tempting situation than the one I found myself in last Monday night. The public relations firm JSH&A, “named by PR Week as one of the top boutique agencies in the country” according to its website, invited me to a dinner at the Palm hosted by one of its clients, Jim Beam. The more than 50 guests each ponied up $125 for a four course meal not only paired with Jim Beam products (primarily Knob Creek, but also Booker’s, Baker’s, and Basil Hayden’s), but also infused with bourbon. For instance, the Ahi tuna carpaccio was served atop a Basil Hayden brown sugar reduction. The prosciutto-wrapped sea scallops were glazed with Knob Creek. And my grilled pork chop came with Booker’s Creole mustard sauce. All of which, by the way, were exquisite.

Of course my fellow journalists did not pay $125 for the experience. It is strictly assumed that we might favorably mention the client in return for the free dinner. But if Jim Beam is hoping for free publicity (once again proving there are no free meals), it is mistaken. I do not feel obligated in any way to mention that Kentucky bourbon is a true American spirit--in fact, the official spirit of the United States by law since 1964--and that Knob Creek in particular possesses a maple sugar aroma, full body, and a richness only made possible by its nine-year aging process in charred American white oak barrels. Or that Basil Hayden’s is a silver medal winner, light in body with just a gentle bite, and ends with a clean finish. Not to mention gold medalist Baker’s, with a whopping 107 proof, yet containing a vanilla-caramel aroma and silken texture. Not on my watch.

The dinner also featured a lecture by the distinguished whiskey professor Bernie Lubbers, who made it clear there was a war going on. Between bourbon and vodka. (The latter of which was met by boos from the bourbon-crazed crowd.) I asked Bernie how much bourbon he drinks as part of his job. Said the professor: “I don’t want to think about it” and later added, “enough.” He is a great American selling a great American product. And if you don’t like bourbon, in the words of Barney Gumble, “go back to Russia!”

But like I said, it would not be appropriate for me to shill something I got for free. Nor would it be entirely appropriate for Jim Beam to send to my office a bottle of Basil Hayden’s. Or a case.

Last night came the news that Saddam Hussein's regime paid for a high-profile trip taken by three congressional Democrats to Baghdad in the fall of 2002. The visit, by Democratic Representatives David Bonior, Jim Thompson, and Jim McDermott, was brokered by Muthanna al Hanooti, a Michigan resident with close ties to the Iraqi regime. Hanooti is being prosecuted for spying on behalf of Saddam's regime.

Reacting to the latest news, Mike DeCesare, a spokesman for Jim McDermott, one of the three congressmen, said his boss wasn't aware that the money came from Saddam Hussein's regime when he accepted it. He told me the same thing in 2004, when I asked him about the $5,000 McDermott had accepted for his legal defense fund from Shakir al Khafaji, one of Saddam Hussein's biggest U.S. boosters before the war. Khafaji, who accompanied the congressmen and made the arrangements for their visit, had run "expatriate" conferences in Baghdad for Saddam as recently as 2000. He also provided $400,000 to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter for Ritter's propaganda film on behalf of the former Iraqi regime. In an interview back in 2001, Ritter told me that Khafaji was "openly sympathetic" with Saddam Hussein.

All of this was public record -- available to the lawmakers with a Google or Nexis search. But they went anyway. Reacting to the news yesterday, Jim Thompson pleaded ignorance.

"Obviously, had there been any question at all regarding the sponsor of the trip or the funding, I would not have participated."

Thompson and McDermott would have us believe that they visited a sworn enemy of the United States -- one who had tried to assassinate a former president and declared that the "Mother of all Battles" had never ended -- without doing even the most basic research about who was funding their trip? That's hard to believe. And Bonior, who was from Michigan and had taken money from al Khafaji before, had no idea that he was backed by Saddam Hussein? When I spent a week reporting in Michigan for a story on Iraqi exiles, virtually every Iraqi I spoke to told me about al Khafaji and his dirty money. Is is possible that nobody ever mentioned this to Bonior, who recently chaired John Edwards' presidential campaign, before he traveled to Iraq with al Khafaji? Again, hard to believe.

In any case, they knew well that they would be used as propaganda tools before they left. This is how we put it in a piece on the trip back in October 2002:

EVEN BEFORE the Baghdad boys left Iraq, media outlets throughout the Middle East gleefully highlighted divisions in the U.S. government and the travels by the "antiwar" congressmen. The Iraq Daily, for example, published by Saddam's Ministry of Information, printed daily updates of the trip and posted them in English on their website.

For example, a September 30 report says, "the members of the U.S. Congress delegation has underlined that this visit aims to get acquainted with the truth of Iraq's people sufferings due to ongoing embargo which caused shortage in food and medicine for all Iraqi people." (That article appeared next to a report on Saddam's continuing financial support for the families of Palestinian suicide bombers or, to use the paper's formulation, "intrepid Palestinian uprising martyrs." Also in that issue is an article by American white supremacist Matthew Hale, "Truth About 9-11: How Jewish Manipulation Killed Thousands.")...

So how does it feel to be used as a propaganda tool against your own country? McDermott, who was asked that question by CNN's Jane Arraf when he was still in Baghdad, said it feels fine. "If being used means that we're highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children, then, yes, we don't mind being used."

Once again? "We don't mind being used."

In travel news today, AP reports:

Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.

You remember seeing the Representatives--Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan, and Mike Thompson of California--glowering at the news camera every night as they implored America to let Saddam provide a training ground for terrorists and torture his people in peace. Normally I’d say it’s a good thing they weren’t doing this on the taxpayers’ dime, but in this case the phrase "rock and a hard place" comes to mind.

Their little junket reminded me Ted Kennedy’s outreach program to the Soviet Union in 1983. As reported by the CNS News service, "Kennedy offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan's foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts." Whether he took a fee for his consulting work is unknown.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but here are four guys who, as members of Congress, actively worked against America’s best interests during dicey times. I’m loathe to use a loaded word like “traitors” but at the very least, they’re ungrateful louts with no concept of shame.

Sleeping with the enemy under the guise of loving your country: the p.r. strategy favored by Democrats 4-1.

Brian Faughnan’s here yesterday deserves some follow up and elaboration. What’s most interesting about the "Obama Leaves Red State Democrats Cold" narrative is how it differs from the spin echoing in the halls of Congress.

Over the past six months, many Democratic political "pros" (and Obama supporters) have tried to cast this down-ticket debate only in anti-Clinton terms. For example, many worried privately and publicly that "her polarizing personality," among other things, would create a drag on congressional candidates in certain pivotal regions. Former Democratic Majority Leader (and Obama surrogate) Tom Daschle openly fretted about the impact of Senator Clinton at the top of the ticket in key battleground states in the Midwest and Rocky Mountains--an argument that cost her the endorsements of many well-respected red/purple state lawmakers, such as Senators Claire McCaskill (MO), Ben Nelson (NE), Tim Johnson (SD), Russ Feingold (WI), Byron Dorgan (ND), and Kent Conrad (ND), and a slew of House members from these same pivotal areas. "Many Democratic Senators and other elected officials from the middle part of the country are scared to death about the prospects of her leading the ticket on other races," a Democratic campaign strategist told me, repeating a common inside-the-Beltway refrain.

Far less speculation to date, however, has focused on Obama’s down-ticket impact. And the small amount of conjecture about his influence on congressional races was significantly more positive. So the article Brian refers to in his post is one of the first to raise similar doubts about Obama. Obama was supposed to help Democrats expand support, not chase it away. So will the Obama candidacy mean down-ticket candidates might don cement fleeces in the choppy waters of congressional elections this November?

I recently had a chance to interview Ken Spain, press secretary at the National Republican Congressional Committee, about the impact of an Obama candidacy on House and Senate races. He also believes the "Obama will help Democrat congressional candidates more than Clinton" argument is a pipedream.

"In the districts where we need to win, Barack Obama will almost assuredly be handily defeated," Spain told me yesterday. "Obama’s so-called red state appeal cannot transcend the partisan discrepancy in places like suburban Houston, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Georgia, or Arizona. The situation couldn’t be any more different for Republicans at the top of the ticket. John McCain is a candidate with widespread national and bipartisan appeal who can impact races across the board while Obama faces a steep drop-off in support in certain regions of the country, particularly in post-industrial areas. Republican congressional candidates have been handed the best possible scenario for them at the top of the ticket while Democrats continue to watch in bewilderment as a long, protracted battle continues to take place, thus further bloodying up their potential nominee."

Many Democratic elected officials fueled the Obama-drama by stoking fears about the impact of Senator Clinton at the top of the ticket on down-ballot races. But gambling on Obama--particularly in the battleground states and congressional districts that President Bush won in 2004--may turn into the bigger bust.

Marc Ambinder wrote today of Obama's troubles with McPeak and Rev. Wright:

The problem with guilt by association arguments is that they tend to render insignificant the degree or quality of the association that allegedly tarnishes one participant.

Fair enough. But there comes a point when one looks at the people Obama has surrounded himself with and begins to wonder. On Israel, Obama has no real track record, so voters can judge him only by his words and the words of those who advise him. Will Gen. McPeak, whose "odious" statements on Israel have drawn condemnation from supporters and foes alike, have Obama's ear on such issues? We don't really know. But if their association is insignificant in degree and quality, why doesn't Obama toss him overboard?

Obama also refuses to disown Rev. Wright, whose anti-Semitism is overt and unabashed. That Obama would show such loyalty to a character as poisonous as Wright is considered a sign of character by some, but it is another reason for supporters of Israel, of whom Jews make up only a small portion, to doubt Obama's commitment to the security of that close American ally.

Which brings me back to a quote that has gotten surprisingly little mileage in the last few days. Last month, long before the chickens came home to roost, Obama attacked McCain:

"I am looking forward to a debate with John McCain. John McCain is a good man. He's an American hero. We honor his service to this nation. But he has made some bad choices about the company he keeps."

If this is how we are to judge a candidate, then Obama still has a lot of explaining to do.

The New York Times ran a lengthy story this past Sunday on Hollywood’s latest effort to address the Iraq war, the bomb-to-be Stop Loss. The film stars Ryan Phillippe and deals with the tragic story of khoevemcpw3fwc c cmwpowmsmnedheidndccelalaslepfecnecmeclececwwpe – I'm sorry, I feel asleep at the keyboard. Anyway, I found this passage from the Times story revealing:

The film doesn't shy away from the story's visceral horror, showing one hospitalized soldier's burns and stumps in lengthy close-up. A drawn-out raid in a housing complex in Iraq is ear-shatteringly loud and look-away bloody.

"We shot the sequence in Morocco during Ramadan, which made me uncomfortable," Mr. Phillippe said in an e-mail message. "We were storming real homes and real neighborhoods, and at times I felt like a monster."

It would take a lot of pixels to tease out all the obtuseness in Phillippe's e-mail message, but here’s a start at what will hopefully become a productive national conversation on the imbecility of self-important Hollywood types.

I'm assuming Phillipe has a basic fact confused and that in truth he was not really "storming homes." Seeing how Phillippe is an actor, it's much more likely that he was pretending to storm homes. Although this is a minor distinction, it is a critical one, especially if you don't want to get shot while "storming homes.' The director yelling things like "Cut!" and "Action!" should have been Phillippe's first hint that the whole "home storming" thing wasn't what the rest of the world calls "real." The lighting and the cameras also could have helped clue him in as I don't believe such things accompany the typical soldier, even during Ramadan.

And what's with this "I felt like a monster" comment? Surely Phillippe isn't suggesting that the typical American soldier behaves as a monster. What else was Phillippe doing on that set? Cutting off the ears of innocent Moroccans between takes in the manner of Jengis Kahn? The monster comment shocks me. I thought Hollywood supported the troops.

It is however nice to see the young actor was so sensitive to the traditions and holiness of Ramadan. Still one wonders about the Moroccans whose homes were being "stormed" and exactly how bothered they were by the timing. Did they not grant their permission for pretend home storing to the movie-makers? Or perhaps Phillippe's email has it right, and he really was storming Moroccan homes. At Ramadan no less.

In which case I guess I’ll owe him an apology.

Jonathan Chait has a short piece at TNR on the conservative strategy for dealing with climate change:

If you want to know how little sacrifice most Republicans are willing to endure to make a dent in global warming, here is your answer. They're not even willing to take back a special interest subsidy--worth $1.3 billion per year, roughly 1 percent of the industry's annual profit--that nobody was willing to defend when it was enacted.

That's about right. There is a shift taking place within the conservative movement on this issue, but Chait largely misses the point because he can't resist harping on some boring and silly subsidy that no one on the right would care to defend or repeal. But then Chait makes a good living writing on topics that bore me to tears. The larger issue, though, is interesting. So I'll lay it out for Chait.

Conservatives have been forced to concede defeat in the debate over climate change. Americans believe in it, they believe they're responsible for it, and they want their politicians to do something about it. Which isn't to say that conservatives actually believe in global warming, just that they tend to be slightly more pragmatic than their liberal counterparts on such issues. So we're working on a new strategy, and as Chait found out, it can be boiled down to two simple words: do nothing.

If the American people want something done about climate change, they don't necessarily want to pay for it. Take for example cap and trade. It's a marvelous system for obscuring the true costs of regulation, but it clearly isn't the most effective way to reduce carbon emissions. So what happens? You get conservative economists like Steven F. Hayward and Kevin A. Hassett joining forces with far left environmentalists in agitating for a direct carbon tax. I won't assume that Hayward and Hasset have anything but pure intentions, but their position gets a lot of support from conservatives who've never advocated for a tax on anything. Cynic that I am, I think I know what's going on here.

Chait writes of Republicans, "If you're not willing to inflict a one-cent hike at the pump, you're not willing to endure any sacrifice whatsoever to reduce global warming." True, but nearly half of all Americans are not willing to endure a one-cent hike at the pump:

Forty-eight percent of Americans are unwilling to spend even a penny more in gasoline taxes to help reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new nationwide survey released today by the National Center for Public Policy Research.

So there's the strategy--and skeptics have good reason to think it'll be successful.

He said: "Those who claim we should withdraw from Iraq in order to fight Al Qaeda more effectively elsewhere are making a dangerous mistake. Whether they were there before is immaterial, al Qaeda is in Iraq now, as it is in the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Somalia, and in Indonesia."

Whether they were there before is immaterial. I understand the point. He said several weeks ago that while he still believes that going to war in Iraq was the right thing to do he wasn't going to spend his time now debating whether it was a wise thing to do. I get that, too.

But lines like the ones above strike me as unnecessary and unwise. We know al Qaeda was in Iraq before the war. Nobody disputes that. Reasonable people can disagree on how much the regime aided them in Iraq and whether Saddam Hussein knowingly gave them sanctuary in Baghdad. But Abu Musab al Zarqawi and two dozen al Qaeda members were in Baghdad before the war. There is no question about that. So taken literally the effect of McCain's statement is to turn a plain fact into a debatable issue.

But the real debate isn't about whether those two dozens jihadists were in Iraq, as McCain surely knows. It's about whether Iraq was part of the global war on terror from the beginning or is now only because we went to war there five years ago. He seems to be saying that the answer doesn't matter. But he's wrong. And the new IDA study makes clear that any serious global war on terror -- or, as McCain prefers, struggle against radical Islamic extremism -- had to include Iraq. In the twelve years before the war, Saddam Hussein was supporting an alphabet soup of jihadist terror groups across the globe -- from Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines to Ayman al Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad to the radicals in northern Iraq to the "Sudanese fighters" he trained on Iraqi soil throughout the 1990s. This matters. And John McCain, who has a better record on Iraq than anyone else who ran for president this year and still probably doesn't get enough credit for fighting back the forces of withdrawal in the Senate last summer, should know better.

In 2007, Barack Obama committed to accepting public financing if he was the Democratic presidential nominee. While the Obama campaign has tried to cloud the issue, this was his response to a 2007 survey by the Midwest Democracy Network:

If you are nominated for President in 2008 and your major opponents agree to forgo private funding in the general election campaign, will you participate in the presidential public financing system?

Yes. I have been a long-time advocate for public financing of campaigns combined with free television and radio time as a way to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests... My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election.

Recently however, Obama has backed away from the commitment -- saying that he will 'pursue an agreement,' that calls for the McCain campaign to control the spending of outside groups that are legally prohibited from coordinating with McCain. Thus Obama's public financing commitment dies a quick and dirty death.

The release of Obama's tax returns adds another vaguely interesting twist: Obama checked the $3 public financing set-aside up until 2004, only to stop checking it in 2005 and 2006. He's an advocate of public financing, he just doesn't want to finance it himself. That actually makes perfect sense.

A great profile in the Post:

Some time back, McCain posted to her Web site a detailed explanation of her campaign trail makeup regimen, including her approach to maximizing lash "density" by blending two brands of mascara, and her technique for priming lips with concealer before applying Benefit brand lip gloss.

"I just decided to do it 'cause a lot of girls were asking," she says. "And then I was dutifully punished on the Internet for writing about makeup." She starts to giggle. "But I got a lot of good response and Benefit actually sent me an e-mail being like, 'We love that you love Benefit!' Yeah. So, I was like, 'Yay.' "

Meghan's probably a liability (the profile isn't going to help her father much with Asian voters, but then he already had his own problems in that department) but she's not self-righteous. That's enough for me.

If 48 months is a sensible amount of time for a car lease, than why not for a Plan B to win the White House? Currently Hillary Clinton's plan is to win PA, score an upset win in NC, win IN and hope that this late surge, along with more bad press for Obama, causes a huge number of super delegates to flock to her campaign, wreck Obama, and nominate her. It could happen, but it won't. The odds are ten percent at best and the problem with any scenario that nominates Clinton is that it also requires very rough treatment of Obama; featuring lots of sneaky double crosses and smoke filled rooms. That would cripple the Democratic party and hand the election to John McCain. While dreams may live on, the art of practical politics requires cold calculations about long odds and harsh realities.

So why not the 48 month plan? Hillary drops out now. She crowns Obama, to great cheers from the media and the party base. Let Obama, now rather brutally removed from Sainthood, go off and lose to McCain. Let McCain serve one term and then run against him in 2012 as the united pick of the Democratic party?

Sure it's hard to quit. Especially if you are a Clinton. And sure, nothing in the future is certain. But a Hillary Clinton basking in new-found "did the right thing" glory is certainly a better shot to ultimately win a Presidential race than a beaten and defeated spoiler finally forced out of the race after losing North Carolina and finally facing the loser's math in early May. Such beaten down goods are unlikely to rise again to seize the nomination in 2012.

Ask Rudy Giuliani. What would his political life be like today if he'd realized back in Florida that his chances were nill a little before it had to be proved to him and had then dropped out right after South Carolina to endorse John McCain? He'd be a major party kingmaker and VP contender now, not a has-been.

It's almost starting to seem that way.

The group Judicial Watch has sought to force both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to release the records that speak to their activities while in the White House (in Clinton's case) and the Illinois legislature (in Obama's). The only problem? There is no paperwork to speak of in Obama's case:

Judicial Watch, which has been seeking access to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) records from her time in the White House, argued Wednesday that the Illinois senator, who has criticized the former first lady for a lack of openness, has his own “records problem...”

“It appears that Obama never kept records of his time in the Illinois state legislature, or he discarded them,” Fitton stated. “Either way, he clearly intended to leave no paper trail.”

So which is it: was Obama cunningly minimizing his paper trail to protect himself from scandal and enhance his electability down the road, or was he destroying documents?

Obama’s Jewish problem is not "largely fabricated" as Andrew Sullivan claims. (What part isn’t fabricated, Andrew?) It also isn’t just guilt by association with an anti-Semite policy advisor and a bigot reverend. It has to do with his own proposals--in particular, Obama’s willingness to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad absent even modest conditions. Saying you intend to shake hands with the world’s foremost Holocaust denier, a man who has said he wants to wipe Israel off the map, is a problem for Jews. While I don’t speak for the Chosen People as a whole, this may, in part, explain why Obama fares so poorly relative to Clinton in at least one swing-state.

The Teacher’s Union in Britain is calling for a ban on cell phones in schools. Surely there are good reasons for adopting this proposal--to stop cheating, chatting, and the proliferation of the latest Britney ring-tone. The Union relies on none of these justifications. Instead it says banning cell phones is essential to winning the war against bullying. In another article, the Union takes TV quiz shows to task for allegedly fuelling bullying. What will they blame next? Unicorns? I have a better idea: how about a culture bankrupt of personal responsibility. You know, the kind of society that would blame cell phones and television programs for violent acts.

Bullying is a hot-topic right now. Everyone’s been talking about cyber-bully because of the tragic Myspace suicide. The New York Times even went old school the other day in profiling poor Billy Wolfe, the victim of a series of brutal attacks in his Arkansas public school. A montage of black eyes and other bruises accompanies the piece. Now Billy’s parents are suing several of the perpetrators, and this litigious result seems apt. Yeah, lawsuits are good, in some cases, especially when the police and school refuse to do their job. Bear in mind one of the great cases of American tort law involved a case of 19th century bullying. Bullies populated the earth even in the bygone days before cell phones and Charles Van Doren . . .

Jason Gluck of the Institute for Peace writes today on an unnoticed milestone in Iraq's effort to establish a 'normal' democratic government:

First, Iraqi lawmakers deployed a technique familiar to anyone who lives in a developed democracy: logrolling, the essence of political compromise. Iraqis bundled together three laws that each constituency—Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds—prioritized differently. By treating the three issues as one legislative package, each group could make trade-offs to get what it wanted most...

For Iraq, this was a radical departure from the issue-by-issue approach that failed so spectacularly in 2007. Last year, Iraqis failed to achieve consensus over such critical, contentious matters as the hydrocarbon legislation, the constitutional review, and resolution of the disputed territories. Like the laws passed on February 13, these issues are connected in a way that could lead to a larger compromise. For example, Iraqi Arabs might find the Kurds’ annexation of Kirkuk more palatable if the Kurds agree to let the central government manage natural resources and give it more leeway to coordinate national legislation. In this way, the February 13 compromise could serve as a road map for resolving other deadlocked disputes and moving forward on national reconciliation.

Read the whole thing.

This is unexpected:

Despite Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Ill.) promises, many Democratic congressional candidates in conservative districts remain unconvinced that he can redraw the general election map by competing in red states.

While Obama is popular among some challengers seeking an edge in contested primaries, other non-incumbents have shied away from endorsing him. Most are staying out of the fray, endorsing neither Obama nor Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Obama has is tied with Hillary Clinton in the polls, and he trails McCain by more than Clinton does. A state-by-state breakdown suggests he's no more likely than she is to assemble an electoral vote majority.

Tell me again how Obama is a candidate who can change the nature of the race?

A few years ago, tobacco executives testifying before Congress said they didn’t believe cigarettes caused cancer or heart disease. That’s how you get around lying under oath--by not believing.

Now we have Hillary Clinton saying, “I remember landing under sniper fire.” Note that she didn’t say, “We landed under sniper fire.” That would have been a lie. But “I remember” can signal anything from a faulty memory to a dream to a wish that it really, really happened--a wish so strong that she decided to make it true. Because it isn’t a lie if you “remember” it happening, right?

Put Hillary under oath and she’ll “remember” being at Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Gettysburg and the sinking of the Maine. And you know what? You won’t be able to prove her wrong! Until you ask Sinbad for confirmation. Then all bets are off.

From TWS Online: The Anti-Churchill, by Nile Gardner.

From the Washington Post: Olympic Fallacies, by Anne Applebaum.

From Commentary: Anatomy of the Surge, by Peter Feaver.

From the Prospect: Myth of a New Cold War, by Stephen Kotkin.

From Contentions: Obama’s Hollow Doctrine, by Noah Pollak.

The good news from Gallup.

Over at the Danger Room, David Axe writes of the British posture in southern Iraq:

With no forward bases, no intelligence apparatus in the city of Basra, less nimble equipment and no political will to suffer a single additional casualty in Iraq, the roughly 3,000 Brits remaining in the country can do little but wait out the current fighting.

To which Noah Shachtman adds:

So the Brits bail, and Basra is "essentially divided up among Shi'ite party mafias, each of which had its own form of extortion and corruption," as Anthony Cordesman puts it today. Isn't this an extremely bad omen for an American troop withdrawal, under a would-be President Obama or Clinton? How would a country-wide draw-down be different than this local one?

It's a good question. And there are other examples of what a unilateral withdrawal in the face of terror looks like: Southern Lebanon and Gaza. In each case, the Israelis withdrew under the assumption that it was their presence that was instigating violence. In each case, the results were disastrous, as terrorist groups (with Iranian support) rushed to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the IDF. Now we see the same thing playing out in Basra.

Even for the Democrats, an Iraq dominated by Iranian-backed terrorist groups is an intolerable outcome. And yet neither has offered a compelling case for why the American people should expect a different result.

It strikes me as a particularly bad idea, as we enter spring, to arm Berkeley students with axes and crowbars, yet that is precisely what the City of Berkeley is doing. In the best case scenario, we can all sit back and watch the Trotskyites take care of the Leninists, the Maoists take care of the International Socialist Organization, and the International Workers of the World kill off the Spartacus Youth League. But if it doesn’t work out that way, oh dear reader, you should know The Blog might soon be gone. I fear if the revolution does come, we will be the first to go.

National Journal takes a weekly poll of Democratic and Republican 'insiders,' to get their views on the question of the week. This week, they ask the Democrats when their nominating fight will be wrapped up. Fewer than 10 percent believe it will take until the convention, with more than 80 percent saying it will be decided sometime between June and August.

Interestingly, while almost all of the insiders seem to agree that the fight will be over before the convention, there appears to be little agreement on who the nominee will be, or by what criteria the nominee will be selected. Here are a few illustrative (and anonymous) quotes:

"Unfortunately, not until June, when the pledged-delegate count will unassailably affirm Obama’s victory in that category. Then, and only then, will Clinton concede and in effect let the uncommitted superdelegates go the way of the pledged delegates."

"By that time we will know the winner of the popular vote, who has the momentum with a majority of the late wins, and who is leading in the national polls—i.e., who is perceived as the most electable. I believe that the undecided superdelegates will coalesce around the candidate that is ahead on two of the three criteria listed above."

"Obama’s minister issue hurts him and may begin to convert superdelegates to Hillary or, at a minimum, will likely freeze them. On top of that, the rapidly tanking economy works well for Hillary. All of that would suggest that Hillary has the advantage..."

The NJ survey includes 87 Democratic leaders, strategists, and advisers. They include names such as Donna Brazile, Tony Coelho, Carter Eskew, Vic Fazio, Harold Ickes, and John Podesta. Reading the quotes gives you a sense as to the dread associated with a long battle, as well as the challenge of reconciling the strong and divergent views of party leaders.

If you're a Republican, the best thing to do is grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.

We have been among the many conservatives critical of the White House and its inexplicable aversion to making a fact-based case on Saddam Hussein's support for jihadist terror. But for years now, instead of arguments to that effect, George W. Bush simply repeats his assertion that Iraq is the central front in the War on Terror. That hasn't worked, of course, in part because other aspects of the Bush Administration's case for war in Iraq were deeply flawed, even if most Democrats made the same arguments.

Now things are different. We know what Saddam Hussein was up to in the decade before the war and we know it from the best source available -- the Iraqi regime itself. The debate is no longer whether the Iraqi regime would support jihadist terror. It did. It's a fact. That support included backing for members of the al Qaeda leadership and several affiliate groups. Again, that's a fact. And yet the White House still refused even to acknowledge any of this.

Until now. Mark Eichenlaub, who runs the excellent website, Regime of Terror, has an excellent article at National Review online. It's a very straightforward piece that explains in clear language what we have learned from the recently released Pentagon study on Iraq and terrorism. And remarkably, he has managed to coax a quote out of NSC spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe commented to me that the report confirms that Saddam “had ties to regional terrorism” and that in a region where there was “no lack of terrorist groups willing to attack the U.S.,” it was not surprising to see who Saddam had been supporting.

His claims are indisputable, of course, but it's still notable that someone from the Bush Administration other than Dick Cheney is willing to talk on the record about terrorism. (The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the new study when I contacted them two weeks ago for this piece.)

It's a good start. Next, someone should make sure that George W. Bush sees the IDA report on Iraq and terrorism. National Security Adviser Steve Hadley was supposed to have shown Bush the report before it was released publicly. But Hadley is cautious to a fault and believes that there is nothing to gain from revisiting the case for war in Iraq. And there are no indications that he shared the report with President Bush.

Bush would want to see it. Months ago, when we fought to have the Iraqi documents translated and released, Bush's White House staff kept him in the dark. Even after Bush told then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte that he wanted the documents out, the DNI slow-rolled the process and the White House staff argued against sharing the secrets of the Iraqi regime.

Those were mistakes and they have cost the president. But now we have enough of the regime's documents to know that Saddam Hussein support jihadist terror for years. And, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out Monday, it's clear that the CIA underestimated Iraqi support for terrorism. The White House should talk about it.

Jake Tapper is reporting that Hillary Clinton is ready to pull the "Tonya Harding Option":

It implies that Clinton is so set on ensuring that Obama doesn't get the nomination, not only is she willing to take extra-ruthless steps, but in the end neither she nor Obama win the gold.

Sure sounds plausible. Tonya, you might remember, was a white-trash, crisis-laden skater who kneecapped Nancy Kerrigan in order to have a clear shot at winning the 1994 Olympics. Both ultimately lost. Hillary, of course, is Harding, who tried her best to look innocent while her goons did the dirty work.

Contrarian that I am, however, I’d like to present what I call the Otis B. Driftwood Option, named after Groucho Marx’s character in A Night at the Opera. This is the movie where Driftwood, a fast-talking swindler, deliberately destroys a wonderful singer (Walter Woolf King) in order to further the career of another (Kitty Carlisle). Groucho does this with the aid of two henchmen, a mush-mouthed conman who makes less sense the more he speaks (Chico) and a mute (Harpo) who looks innocent but is the most vicious of the bunch.

In the Otis B. Driftwood Option, Bill Clinton is Groucho, Mark Penn is Chico, Hillary is Harpo and Obama is Walter Woolf King. John McCain is Kitty Carlisle. No one can tell me that isn’t a more interesting scenario.

(And I know Allan Jones triumphs over Walter Woolf King at the end, but Kitty Carlisle makes for a better punchline.)

How close is Obama's church, and his former Pastor of 20 years, to Minister Farrakhan? Well, just months before Oprah endorsed Obama, the Church saw fit to publish an open letter by Ali Baghdadi, Farrakhan's Middle East adviser, to America's richest woman in advance of her trip to Israel with Elie Wiesel:

I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the White Supremacists of South Africa. In fact, South Africa allowed Israel to test its nuclear weapons in the ocean off South Africa. The Israelis were given a blank check: they could test whenever they desired and did not even have to ask permission. Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs.

Arabs have always supported the dismantling of this racist government. In 1962, African-Arab Sudan granted Mandela a passport to travel with to gain international support in his struggle to free his people. Libya, among other Arab states, provided Mandela and other African liberation movements, political as well as material support. As a result, Libya was designated by the White House as a terrorist rogue state. What a great honor!

Earlier today Matthew Yglesias noted Obama's lackluster performance among Jewish Democratic primary voters, a bloc that favors Clinton by a margin of 5 points. This even though, as Yglesias says, Jews "mostly fit into the upscale "wine track" category of Democrats in which Obama is doing well and historically Jewish voters have supported reformist liberals of Obama's ilk." Of course, Yglesias draws precisely the wrong conclusion from this--that "the attacks on him over Israel and some of the smear campaigns have had some effect."

If one assumes that the 'typical Jewish person,' as Obama might put it, is in the upscale "wine track," then it follows that that person is likely to be well informed on the issues--even if he or she is, in the event, unable to properly operate a voting machine. There is no reason to think that they are ignorant, and more to the point, there is no reason to think that the questions about Obama's disposition towards Jews and Israel are part of some smear campaign. Look at the people he surrounds himself with. Gen. McPeak, despite being summarily cleared of anti-Semitism by Marc Ambinder, has said the type of things that may give pause to the Jewish voter, particularly those who have some attachment to Israel. And Obama spent nearly $30,000 in just two years to subsidize the distribution of this type of anti-Semitic garbage in his own church bulletin.

Obama has a Jewish problem, whether or not it's merely guilt by association is irrelevant. Politics is about perception, and the perception is that Obama's one step removed from the Nation of Islam. If he wants to get the anti-Semitic stench of Trinity United off his campaign, it's going to take more than the all-clear from Marc Ambinder and Marty Peretz.

A pilot’s gun discharged aboard a passenger plane last weekend. As the Washington Post reports:

A gun belonging to the pilot of a US Airways plane discharged as the aircraft was on approach to land in North Carolina over the weekend, the first time a weapon issued under a federal program to arm pilots was fired, authorities said Monday.

The “accidental discharge” Saturday aboard Flight 1536 from Denver to Charlotte did not endanger the aircraft or the 124 passengers, two pilots and three flight attendants aboard, said Greg Alter of the Federal Air Marshal Service.

“We know that there was never any danger to the aircraft or to the occupants on board,” Alter said.

Under a program created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, pilots and others are allowed to carry a firearm so that they can defend against any act of air piracy or criminal violence, he said.

Even though gun control is not quite as hot an issue as it was during the heyday of school shootings and the Million Mom March, I’m kind of shocked this story didn’t make the front-page. Which isn’t to say the coverage has all been fair. We can thank ABC for the incendiary headline, “Trigger-Happy Pilot?” What great journalism! Imply the pilot was a trigger-happy lunatic firing shots at random into the air, then inform the reader he was in fact just doing his job.

Here’s a better question: how long before the Democrats propose eliminating the program? After all, the risk of harmless, accidental discharges--one in six-and-a-half years--can’t possibly outweigh the possible benefits of averting a single terrorist attack.

National Journal looks at the candidates' views on gun control:

In New Hampshire last November, Obama told a gathering of rural voters that his wife worries about urban handgun violence but realized while driving in Iowa that she might want a gun for protection if she lived in a rural area. Insists the NRA's Cox: "They know gun control is a political loser."

Michelle worries about violent urban crime, but doesn't feel the need to own a handgun in the city. Rather, she'd want one if she lived in a rural area. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent crimes are 50 percent more likely in urban areas than in suburban or rural communities. You're clearly much safer--all things being equal--out in the country than you are in Chicago.

And of course, this is another instance where if the shoe were on the other foot--if Cindy McCain said she might want a gun for protection if she lived in Chicago--well, you know how that would look.

Needless to say, everyone should have a gun for protection no matter where they live.

The Wall Street Journal reports today on another surprising find on Raul Reyes' laptop: a suggestion that Congressman James McGovern (D-MA) may be more closely aligned with the terrorist FARC than with the government of our ally, Colombia:

Mr. Jones added that "a fundamental problem is that the FARC does not have, strategically, a spokesman that can communicate directly with persons of influence in my country like Mr. McGovern." Semana reports that in the documents Mr. Jones "rules himself out as the spokesman but offers himself as a 'bridge' of communication between the FARC and the congressman." Semana says when it spoke with Mr. Jones, he verified the letter and explained that "he made the offer because the guerrillas need interlocutors if they want to achieve peace and that it is a mistake to isolate them."

There's already quite a bit of finger-pointing over these documents. McGovern says that his communications with Jones were no more than an effort to secure the release of American hostages held by FARC for years. For better or for worse, McGovern made clear in January his willingness to meet with the terrorist leaders. So if McGovern is a 'FARC sympathizer,' at least he's been pretty above board about it. Further, an activist identified as the Democrats' 'lead political analyst' on Colombia says this is all bogus.

What the Wall Street Journal fails to mention is some of the other sensational material found in Reyes' laptop, and printed in Semana. One especially sensational item (my translation):

The Democrats of the USA, in Colombia, who were formerly in Venezuela, say they have a clear posture toward political negotiation with the FARC. [Gabriel] García Márquez is in charge of this mediation with the FARC on behalf of the U.S., and they want Panama to be the country through which they speak to the FARC. For that, García Márquez has already transferred that request to [Panamanian President Martin] Torrijos, and he accepted. Clinton told García Márquez in Cartagena, “I want a personal role. I want to help Colombia. There has to be an agreement with the FARC must be sought.” Senator McGovern [sic] told García Márquez that Bush wants to make Colombia what West Germany was against socialist Europe, and we have to stop him.

Clinton was in Cartagena with Marquez in 2007; it's not hard to imagine him offering some statement of support along the lines of what's included in Reyes' laptop. But has the government of Panama really been approached -- and agreed to help -- in negotiating between the U.S. government (or, is it just with the Democrats?) and the FARC? Given the cryptic mention of gringos backing Obama already noted on the laptop, this is an area that could use further investigation. Is this all in the imagination of terrorist stuck deep in the jungle, or is there substance here?

HT: Instapundit

Bloomberg:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and his wife Michelle gave $10,772 of the $1.2 million they earned from 2000 through 2004 to charities, or less than 1 percent, according to tax returns for those years released today by his campaign.

The couple earned more than $2.6 million in 2005 and 2006, combined, after the Illinois senator published a bestselling book in 2005. They donated $137,622 over those two years and made their church, Trinity United Church of Christ, one of the biggest beneficiaries of their philanthropy, donating $27,500. Obama is under scrutiny for his ties to the church because of comments made by its senior pastor.

Stingy. I don't give a lot to charity, but I'm pretty sure it's more than 1 percent--and I make a whole let less than the Obamas. And now that the Obamas are loaded, who benefits? Rev. Wright.

My question: how much money does Obama give to his racist grandmother?

Howard Dean is running some kind of operation over there. You've got a Democratic primary that's tearing the party apart because he can't get a handle on the superdelegates, you've got two key swing-states disenfranchised by a party that whines endlessly about disenfranchised voters, and now this:

Puerto Rico's original plan called for selecting delegates at caucuses June 7. However, after the DNC approved the plan in December, it was discovered that the date was typo and should have read June 1, DNC officials said.

So the territory is switching to a primary and moving the date back to June 1. Is it really possible that nobody noticed a typo on the primary calendar for three months? Why not.

I can't believe Hillary held out this long:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor made.

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."...

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus (who was fired from his radio and television shows after making racially insensitive remarks), saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that," Clinton said. "I just think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

Allah gives great snark, asking if this might be enough to push Hillary's own lies off the top fold. It will, but since Obama's off in the islands taking a well earned breather from our national conversation on race, he gets to stay silent, which is really his only option anyway.

And Hillary's attack here, like everything else she does, is calculated--a precision strike on the weakest elements of Obama's defense. She refocuses the debate on the fact that Obama never offered an explanation for why he sat in the pews of that church for 20 years without so much as a peep on all this--why he never spoke out, even within his own congregation, against the divisive, racist, and crackpot rhetoric of his preacher. And she focuses attention once again on Obama's ludicrous and insulting comparison of Wright to his own grandmother. Between his anti-Semitic preacher and his decision to throw grandma under the bus, Obama's gonna have problems in Florida.

Politico reports:

Though it’s not exactly an accurate representation of McCain’s views, Democratic strategists view the “100 years” remark as the linchpin of an effort to turn McCain's national security credentials against him by framing the Vietnam War hero as a warmonger who envisions an American presence in Iraq without end.

We've all known this was going to be a problem for a while now. On February 13, I wrote that "neutralizing this particular line of attack will be a top priority for the McCain camp." It only took them six weeks, but they are finally going to try and do just that when McCain gives a major speech on Iraq tomorrow. It was a foolish thing for McCain to have said, but it was also precisely the kind of straight talk that earns him so much affection--and it had the added benefit of being true. American forces, when they are victorious, set up permanent bases.

But here's the question. If we're going to "end the war in Iraq," the Democrats favorite euphemism for declaring defeat and going home, what about Afghanistan? Has anyone asked Barack or Hillary how long they plan to maintain U.S. forces in that country? If they really plan on fighting on to victory in the "good war," a straight answer would probably be something like 100 years. It would seem that any honest debate on this point would lead to a rather simple conclusion: victory takes 100 years, defeat takes 18 months. Give or take.

Update: JVL wrote a column on this for the Inquirer a few weeks ago. He runs down the countries that have based U.S. troops long after combat had come to an end, including Iceland. Well worth your time.

From David Brooks's column today:

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she's probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

Let's take a look at what she's going to put her party through for the sake of that 5 percent chance: The Democratic Party is probably going to have to endure another three months of daily sniping. For another three months, we'll have the Carvilles likening the Obamaites to Judas and former generals accusing Clintonites of McCarthyism. For three months, we’ll have the daily round of résumé padding and sulfurous conference calls. We'll have campaign aides blurting “blue dress” and only-because-he's-black references as they let slip their private contempt.

For three more months (maybe more!) the campaign will proceed along in its Verdun-like pattern. There will be a steady rifle fire of character assassination from the underlings, interrupted by the occasional firestorm of artillery when the contest touches upon race, gender or patriotism.

Admittedly, this all sounds delightful to me. But I dont subscribe to the theory that a tough primary fight necessarily wounds the eventual nominee. I hail from the alternative school, believing that the steeliest candidates emerge from the hottest fire. The most bruising primary fights create the most battle-ready nominees.

The fact that the Pastor Disaster came up now rather than in October is to Obama's great benefit. His initial handling of the affair was inept; even now, he hasn't found a way to convince swing voters that this matter shouldn't concern them. (Please note: Andrew Sullivan is not a swing voter.) Because of how fiercely contested the Democratic primary has been, Obama now has seven months to road test disingenuous explanations for his association with Wright. While the relationship will harm him, he'll surely come up with something better than he has to date.

While John McCain spends the next five months safely out of the media's firing range and cosseted by adoring sycophants telling him how wonderful he is, Barack Obama will be having his soft spots probed and learning where he has to improve. While this journey won’t alter Obama's fundamental weaknesses (a fondness for blather over action, past actions and inactions that don’t square with his rhetoric), Obama will be stronger for having been in the arena for such a long stretch of time.

That according to Jane’s Country Risk:

Mr Le Mière said that the US had fallen down the scale, although it still scored an average of 93 out of 100, partly because of the proliferation of small arms owned by Americans and the threat to the population posed by the flow of drugs from across the Mexican border.

Come on Mr Le Mière. Live a little. And it's not like people are risking their lives to emigrate to the apparently crime-free Vatican (ranked #1). Frankly, I was hoping for a more vigorous response from Reason, where editor Nick Gillespie writes up the story. Cheap guns and drugs...isn't that Reason's raison d'être?

From TWS Online: The Blathering Storm, by Dean Barnett.

From the New York Times: The Long Defeat, by David Brooks.

From the Wall Street Journal: How al Qaeda Will Perish, by Bret Stephens.

From the Los Angeles Times: A Race Conversation? by Jonah Goldberg.

From the National Post: Perhaps the Climate Models Are Wrong, by Yoni Goldstein.

In the wake of comments by Obama adviser Gen. Tony McPeak the other day, Robert Goldberg pulled some quotes out of the McPeak memory hole in a piece for the American Spectator:

In a 2003 interview with the Oregonian, McPeak complained of that the "lack of playbook for getting Israelis and Palestinians together at...something other than a peace process....We need to get it fixed and only we have the authority with both sides to move them towards that. Everybody knows that."

The interviewer asked McPeak: "So where's the problem? State? White House?"

McPeak replied: "New York City. Miami. We have a large vote -- vote, here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it."

McPeak also questions whether some aren't more concerned with "the security of Israel as opposed to a purely American self-interest." It's been a while since a presidential adviser flat-out questioned the loyalty of American Jews, and yet Obama seems to surround himself with people who have crackpot views of "the Israel Lobby."

Obama's got a pastor who draws a straight line between Zionism and racism--and he would no more disown him than he would his own grandmother. His pastor preaches that Israel is a "dirty word" and Obama denies that he attends a "crackpot church." And now he's got a military adviser who thinks America's Middle East policies are controlled by New York City and Miami voters (read Jews) with divided loyalties.

A McCainiac writes us in response to the Goldberg piece: “I guess if it weren’t for those pesky Jews in New York and Miami, those radical neo-cons and crazy Rapturist Christains, we could get on with a McPeak (Obama?) Middle East policy that promotes American interests by undermining Israel. Is this Obama’s view or is this another adviser whose views are different from those of the candidate?”

It's a fair question.

I’m coming late to the Ferraro/Obama dust-up, but a few thoughts...

If it’s true that, in her words, "In 1984, if my name were Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been chosen as the vice president," isn’t that a tacit admission that she was unqualified for the job? And wasn’t she theoretically putting the country at risk by not declining the offer? Surely, this is a prime example of the quota system run amuck.

Atempting to put out a fire with a can of Texaco Unleaded, Ferraro then reminded us that she said the same thing about Jesse Jackson in 1988. So why didn’t she go for the trifecta when Al Sharpton ran for president in 2004? I mean, if Sharpton is qualified to be taken seriously as a candidate, so is Fred Flintstone. They’re both big mouth characters (literally, in Mr. Flintstone’s case) with rigid hair and a tendency toward self-aggrandizement. The only difference: Mr. Flintstone has a real job.

If Sharpton wasn’t worth Ferraro’s scorn, it could mean only one thing: he wasn’t perceived as a threat to the Democratic establishment. He was, at best, a sideshow tolerated in order to frighten conservative Dems into giving money to the other guys onstage. Obama, on the other hand, is seen by an overwhelming number of Democrats--and many disgruntled Republicans and Independents--as not only a legitimate candidate, but the best of his generation. Therefore, the uppity Obama is a genuine threat to the establishment (to which Geraldine Ferraro belongs) and must be put in his place until it’s his turn; i.e., when the white Democratic leaders born before 1950 say it’s OK.

And speaking of qualifications, the only reason Ms. Ferraro is “qualified" to be a cable news pundit is that she was part of one of the biggest landslide presidential losses in American history. Or so it seems every time she has something newsworthy to say.

How can Democrats reduce the bloodshed that's accompanying their protracted nomination fight, and which seems likely to continue all the way to Denver? One idea that's emerged is to have the superdelegates caucus in advance of the convention -- perhaps in June -- to anoint a nominee and a runner up, and allow the general election preparations to continue. Craig Crawford has a pretty apt analogy for this -- a meeting of the College of Cardinals:

The Democrats are between a rock and a hard place, and there's no way to make the outcome pretty, but this might at least let them lance the boil early. Still, the idea has its share of problems -- in particular that the spectacle surrounding the meeting would convey the image that the primaries were largely meaningless, that a few hundred un-elected superdelegates were going to meet in a smoke-filled room to select the nominee. If the superdelegates wait until Denver on the other hand, their votes will at least seem more organic, and part of the process. Further, will enough superdelegates agree to abbreviate the process? There's no reason this meeting can't happen now -- but it hasn't. Once the primaries are over, there may be more support for a meeting, but if one candidate feels like a distinct underdog, he/she may well want to hold out until Denver.

That points up the biggest variable, regardless of when the nominee is chosen: how will the loser take the decision. Sure, either Obama or Clinton can be counted on to make a speech in support of the winner. But will supporters and campaign workers strongly and clearly close ranks, or will there be a great whispering campaign about the illegitimate process? Will donors sit on their hands, or support the winner? When the superdelegates make their choice, they'll be hoping the runner up takes the loss graciously.

With no apparent irony, the regional governor of Lenin’s hometown is pushing English to better market the city to foreign companies and tourists:

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, people would often make pilgrimages to Ulyanovsk, the city about 600 miles east of Moscow that birthed Lenin. These days, the Lenin museum struggles while the city tries to lure foreign investment with an unusual plan.

The Moscow Times reported that the regional governor, Sergey Morozov, has ordered all high level government officials to learn English so they can do a better job of selling the region to foreign companies. The officials will have to take an exam to show their proficiency. And keep taking it, until they pass….

The governor described the situation with an old Russian saying, “We are like dogs, we understand everything, but we can’t say anything.” According to an aide, the governor will share his subordinates’ pain and take lessons, because his English “is not so good.”

Is Lenin rolling over in his grave? Actually, the answer is no, because his mummified corpse has not yet been buried.

Ace: "And on the seventh day, Obama rested."

Are liberals wondering how they are supposed to have a magical conversation on race with Barack if he's off in the islands? Does it not seem a bit cynical for him to flee the country right after starting said conversation? The guy avoids race entirely for the first 13 months of his campaign, then uses it to get out from under the Pastor Disaster, and then takes off until the whole thing blows over. Very savvy.

If only we'd known sooner that Barack was going to stop for daiquiris on the path to a more perfect union...

Michael O'Hanlon at the Brookings Institution today on the men behind the surge (via Think Progress):

I want to call them the Lombardis of this war. … And in addition to Fred [Kagan] and Ken [Pollack] who have been two of the most important people. Andy Krepinevich is another important think tanker. Retired Gen. Jack Keane from the outside. A small group of people inside the administration, smaller than it should have been, but people like Meghan O’Sullivan. […]

These people did two things that I think would have made Vince Lombardi proud. One, they stuck with it, and they persevered through difficult times. And two, they stayed focused on fundamentals.

So what does that make Harry Reid? The Terrell Owens of the Iraq war?

I can't believe what I'm reading. In a rather ordinary and predictable piece, Arianna Huffington has accused John McCain of having only a "tenuous grasp on what is happening in the [Middle East] region." This because he declared that Iran is providing support to al Qaeda in Iraq (and, according to Petraeus, was behind yesterday's attack on the Green Zone). Fine, as the Center for American Progress's Brian Katulis told me the other day, the intelligence on this is in a "gray area," and a subject of debate within the intelligence community. Reasonable intelligence professionals can and do disagree. McCain subsequently released multiple statements that made the same point, if more diplomatically, than the statement he immediately clarified in Jordan. But in the midst of this attack, Arianna writes (and this is a screen capture, though I added the red circle using my Microsoft Paint skills):

Does running a blog for a bunch of Hollywood types not, in Arianna's words, "magically translate into foreign policy expertise and judgment"? Because Syria is most certainly a transit point and safe haven for al Qaeda fighters heading into Iraq. (As Petraeus says in an interview to which Huffington links in this piece, "The flow of foreign fighters and suicide bombers that help al Qaeda typically is through Syria.") Does Arianna not know the difference between Sunni and Shia, or Syria and Iran? Apparently not.

Earlier today Joscelyn noted the word games being played over Saddam's connection to terrorist groups, specifically Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which later merged with al Qaeda. In his latest book, Cheney, Steve Hayes recounted one such incidence:

In 2002, the vice president had been briefed on fresh intelligence that members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad had made their way to Iraq and had begun setting up safe houses in Baghdad. Cheney found the report interesting, but odd. He had understood that Egyptian Islamic Jihad had merged with al Qaeda several years earlier. Ayman al Zawahiri, the group’s longtime leader, was now Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy. Cheney wanted to know why the report did not simply conclude that al Qaeda was setting up safe houses in Baghdad.

He returned the report to the CIA with a question: Would it be accurate to substitute “al Qaeda” for every mention of “Egyptian Islamic Jihad?” The answer did not come immediately, but when it did, the CIA finally acknowledged that members of al Qaeda were operating in Baghdad.

To Cheney, the episode was one example of many that demonstrated the unwillingness of some CIA analysts to take an objective look at Iraq and its support for radical Islamic terrorists, al Qaeda in particular. In this case, analysts were so determined to avoid reporting the presence of al Qaeda members in Iraq that they presented Cheney with a less-than-accurate description of the situation in Baghdad.

Who was that CIA agent playing word games with Cheney anyway?

I haven't read Spencer Ackerman's piece on the Obama doctrine (I'm not a masochist), but Ambinder flags this graph:

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering "democracy promotion" agenda in favor of "dignity promotion," to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It's both and neither -- an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

Dignity promotion? Yeah, that doesn't sound like an empty slogan. And the idea that "misery" breeds anti-Americanism? Please. There's no anti-Americanism in the Congo, and you can't get much more miserable than that. Europe, on the other hand, is about as anti-American as you can get--it has nothing to do with poverty. And in fact the relationship between poverty and anti-Americanism appears to be just the opposite. All the 9/11 terrorists were from wealthy families. And look at Hollywood! Nobody hates America like the rich, because hating America is a luxury.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union West Coast local is set to strike:

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced a one-day strike against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, calling for a “No Peace No Work Holiday” to take place May 1. They are calling on the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win Coalition, and other unions to do the same. This is a major development for both the labor movement and antiwar movement in the U.S...

The strike will take place on an historic day. May 1, also known as May Day, is International Worker's Day. Unlike much of the rest of the world, mass demonstrations on this day have not been a tradition in the U.S., despite its origins in Chicago in the 1880s.

The United States doesn't commemorate International Worker's Day, preferring instead to salute the nation's workers on Labor Day. That's largely because of the close association between May 1 and international socialism. Strangely, International Worker's Day occurs on May 1 to pay tribute to 'the Chicago Martyrs' -- the labor organizers executed after the Haymarket Riot in 1886. Despite its American origin, May 1 is a day of celebration for communists -- not for most Americans.

So leaving aside the question of why the nation's dockhands are going to strike in support of America's' enemies in Iraq -- and even Afghanistan! -- why would they choose to do so on May 1? I mean, why would any union so clearly signal that it does not have America's interests at heart? Where are the Pinkertons when you need them?

If Venezuela's PDVSA is the goose that lays the golden eggs which enable Hugo Chavez to hold on to power, that goose may be on life support:

PDVSA is tight with financial information that other companies usually provide. But a study of official announcements, company figures and outside analyses suggests it is bleeding money and racking up huge debt, even as international oil prices are at record highs...

Figures from the International Energy Agency research center show an even bigger loss last year, $7.9 billion. The difference comes from widely divergent estimates of PDVSA's production: The IEA calculates that Venezuela produces about 2.4 million barrels of oil a day, about a quarter less than PDVSA says it is pumping out.

Most independent experts use IEA figures, which say production has dropped by 800,000 barrels a day since 1997. A continued fall means Chavez would have to cut back on social programs at home and on billions of dollars in charity to foreign governments.

If the United States designates Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism, a step now under consideration, it will reduce that nation's oil sales significantly, and quickly. And given the Chavez regime's ties to the FARC, such a designation would be well justified.

In the middle of a long and fascinating piece on his regrets about the Iraq War, former New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg, now with the Atlantic Monthly, discusses the new Institute for Defense Analyses report on Iraq and Terrorism. Unlike, virtually every other reporter, he appears to have read it. "Before the war," he writes, "I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorist groups."

The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported. But read the study for yourself; it's actually quite an achievement of translation and analysis.

As he indicates, Goldberg is not new to the subject. (It's telling that those who have written about Saddam Hussein's support for jihadist terror are encouraging people to read the actual report for themselves.) Before the war, he wrote two articles about Iraq and terrorism and the IDA study confirms several elements of his reporting.

In the first, Goldberg wrote that he learned about one al Qaeda connection “"while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad.”"

His name was Qassem Hussein Mohammed. He told Goldberg “that his involvement in Islamic radicalism began in 1992 in Baghdad, when he met Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Qassem said that he was one of seventeen bodyguards assigned to protect Zawahiri, who stayed at Baghdad's Al Rashid Hotel, but who, he said, moved around surreptitiously. The guards had no idea why Zawahiri was in Baghdad, but one day Qassem escorted him to one of Saddam's palaces for what he later learned was a meeting with Saddam himself.”

When Goldberg first reported this it drew skepticism from intelligence officials who had long believed that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would not work with Islamic radicals like Zawahiri, now Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy. We now know from a captured Iraqi regime document dated March 18, 1993, that Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad had been receiving support from Saddam for at least two years.

According to the study’s authors: “Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda -- such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri -- or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives.”

Goldberg also reported extensively on the links between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda affiliates in Kurdistan.

In discussing new government research, the New York Times focuses on the role of income inequality on life expectancy while neglecting the still larger gender-based disparity. Perhaps the fact that women live longer doesn’t even qualify as news. After all, everyone already knows that men live on average to about 74 while women live for a gazillion years. On the other hand, it is certainly surprising that the “most deprived” women generally live longer than the “least deprived” men.

Neither class or gender disparities have conspiratorial origins despite the suggestion of many politicians. The disparities in part arise from personal choices that the rich and poor, men and women make. Only at the very end of the article do we learn that the least affluent die earlier not just because they are less likely to have health insurance, but also because they are more likely to smoke and eat unhealthy foods. I would guess poor women live longer than affluent men because money alone doesn’t buy common sense, and men are far more likely to engage in risky activity.

Another angle overlooked by the Times is what these stats suggest about Social Security. It’s not necessarily a winning messaging strategy for personal retirement accounts, but the current system acts less as a social safety net than a mechanism to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich and from men to women.

Forward reports:

According to a new survey conducted by the Forward, a disproportionately large share of the Democratic party’s super-delegates are Jewish. Many of them have declared their support for Hillary Clinton, accounting for more than 15% of her current backers.

The break down: out of 246 superdelegates that have declared for Hillary, 36 are Jewish. For Obama, 12 Jews out of 200 total. That leaves 26 undeclared Jewish supers according to the paper's count. The story goes on:

Susan Turnbull, who became a vice chair of the DNC in 2005, told the Forward that she has begun organizing get-togethers for Jewish DNC members at the party’s national meetings in recent years, and occasionally communicates via e-mail on issues of mutual concern, as when, several years ago, she was helping to pass a DNC resolution against divestment from Israel.

Kind of makes you wonder what this group's reaction to the Pastor Disaster was. Wright has been a vocal advocate of divestment from Israel (which is itself a "dirty word" according to Wright). I'm not sure those comments are controversial enough for Obama to have skipped Church on the day they were uttered, but if Obama got the Rev's newsletter, he must have been aware of the campaign. Wright wrote in the newsletter's July 2005 issue:

Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.

It'll be interesting to see which way the rest of the Jews break.

Over the weekend Haaretz reported:

Saddam Hussein's intelligence service collected information on dozens of sites in Israel, including airports, other transportation centers, as well as scientific and religious centers that were thought to be potential targets for attacks....

This information emerged following the release of documents captured during the American invasion in 2003 and made available as part of a West Point program to evaluate the lessons of the war in Iraq.

In addition to the detailed collection of intelligence on potential Israeli targets, the documents also show that Saddam's intelligence was following closely the links between Iran and Hezbollah and the potential that such ties could provide Iran to operate in the territories and in North Africa.

One wonders what organizations, exactly, Saddam was planning to collaborate with in North Africa, since nearly all of them are affiliated to some degree with al Qaeda. Joscelyn has posted a lot of material on the connections that were developed. And then there's this:

A video recording of a meeting between Saddam and Yasser Arafat on April 19, 1990, showed Saddam threatening to assassinate then president George Bush. "We may not be able to reach Washington, but we could send someone with an explosives belt to Washington," Saddam told Arafat, three months before the invasion of Kuwait.

Apparently Saddam was hip to suicide vests long before they became the must-have Middle East fashion accessory, and he wanted to use them on American targets. Was Saddam all bluster? He did subsequently attempt to kill Bush 41. The report also notes that Saddam said he "possessed chemical weapons" and "would not hesitate" to use them against Israel.

The Times reports:

Public buildings, including job centres, schools and hospitals, are to be encouraged to fly the union jack and other national flags to boost national identity.

Ministers will this week announce the lifting of restrictions on flag flying that have been in force since 1924. They will allow public buildings to erect flagpoles and fly the union jack and national flags, including the cross of St George, the Saltire of Scotland and the red dragon of Wales every day.

At present, flying national flags from public buildings is restricted to 18 days a year, which include the Queen’s birthday and Remembrance Day.

If anyone can explain to me why the British restricted flag flying in 1924, I'd be curious to hear. The best quote of the story comes from Captain Malcolm Farrow, president of the British Flag Institute: “Any nation that doesn’t fly the national flag from its government buildings every day of the week needs its head examined.” But what about the BBC--the Union Jack or the Shahadah of Hamas?

HT: USS Neverdock

John Hinderaker at Power Line writes, "…our principal news media outlets have fabricated an alternative reality around the Iraq war by simply misreporting the facts." That’s true, especially with regards to Saddam’s terror ties. And, as Power Line has noted on a number of occasions, the media has gotten a lot of help from partisan members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (both current and former).

Take, for example, this recent column by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek concerning the Iraqi Perspectives Project’s recently released study of Saddam’s intelligence files. You would never know from Isikoff’s piece that the report contains documents linking Saddam’s regime to six terrorist groups that are all part of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist empire, including two groups that form the core of al Qaeda. Nor, would you know that Saddam’s regime cooperated with these groups at various times. Instead, all you’ll find is spin.

The spin is provided by Paul Pillar, a former high-ranking analyst at the CIA who has made his anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war inclinations known. Pillar has spun tale after tale about Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. He is heavily invested in the notion that Saddam’s "secular" regime did not work with the Islamists of al Qaeda. Pillar is, quite clearly, a man with an agenda. Here are the most relevant lines from Isikoff’s piece:

The report did find plenty of evidence that Saddam's regime had close ties to other (mainly Palestinian) terror groups and had maintained contacts with some radical Islamic movements-including, according to one 1993 document, Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Last week Vice President Dick Cheney said the document showed there was a "link between Iraq and Al Qaeda." But Pillar notes the Egyptian group-headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri-didn't merge with Al Qaeda until years later. "This is the same kind of word game they played before the war," Pillar says.

This is nonsense. Pillar is pretending that because Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad (the "EIJ") had not formally merged with bin Laden until 1998 or 2001 (depending on who you talk to) that a connection between Saddam and the EIJ doesn’t represent a link to al Qaeda. On the contrary, as I pointed out in a recent post over at Power Line, Zawahiri and the EIJ began to work closely with bin Laden in the mid-1980’s--long before their formal merger. Numerous sources, including Zawahiri’s lawyer in Egypt, Montasser al-Zayyat, have reported on the long-standing relationship. Lawrence Wright has also provided numerous details in his reporting for the New Yorker and in his book The Looming Tower.

A clear pattern emerges from the available evidence: Zawahiri and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad were major influences on Osama bin Laden early on, long before their formal merger. There were, of course, tactical differences from time to time, but this never stopped the two groups from working hand-in-glove. In fact, as Wright, al-Zayyat, and other sources have reported, it was Zawahiri and his EIJ lieutenants who steered bin Laden towards the absolute jihadist approach that defines al Qaeda. They were, in fact, always as much a part of al Qaeda as bin Laden himself. It is highly significant, therefore, that the IIS document Pillar and Isikoff refer to says that the IIS and the EIJ had an agreement in place to collude against Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. (Subsequent documents show that Saddam wanted the EIJ to focus on hunting Americans in Somalia. I’ll have more on this in the near future.)

The evidence is rather unambiguous in this regard. So, we are left with two options: (1) Pillar doesn’t know this, or (2) He is spinning this story to serve his own agenda. Either way, Isikoff’s blind reliance on Pillar to dismiss this important connection between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda does not inspire confidence. Of course, as Robert Novak has reported, Isikoff has relied heavily on Pillar in the past.

Barack Obama and his advisers once again happily step into the tar pit that Bill Clinton laid out for them. Consider the former president’s latest remarks given to a group of military veterans in North Carolina:

"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

For a moment, put aside, if you can, the irony of Bill "I Despise the Military" Clinton lecturing veterans on the virtues of patriotism. On paper, at least, there’s nothing at all controversial about his remarks. In fact, they’re quite commendable. Who wouldn’t want to see a noble presidential campaign devoid of mudslinging? Well, not me, but…

Anyway, instead of shouting "McCarthyism!", the better retort--if any--would have been something along the lines of, "If the former president is talking about Barack and Hillary, he’s absolutely correct. It’s a shame that a real discussion of the issues facing Americans are shoved aside in favor of the petty insults and whispering campaigns he’s been orchestrating. And if he means the two party’s ultimate candidates, well, Barack promises to continue his clean campaign this fall!"

Isn’t there a chance that, by bringing up the junior senator from Wisconsin, you give many on-the-fencers the opportunity to re-examine Clinton’s remarks in a new, nasty light, reigniting lingering doubts about Obama’s character--as I did? Or perhaps I’m just projecting my natural cynicism onto my fellow man.

And one more thing: McCarthy died 50 years ago. It’s about time the left trotted out a boogieman with a pulse and a job. Sheesh, where are the "Move On" cranks when you really need them?

Afghanistan has its own American Idol!! In fact, Afghan Star just crowned 19-year-old Rafi Naabzada the winner of its third season, and the whole country is going gah-gah for his hip new sound. Actually, his singing voice resembles the screams of a goat passing a kidney stone, but that didn’t stop a third of the Afghan population from tuning in for the season finale. Despite some controversy over a third-place finish by a colorfully, though modestly, dressed female contestant, hundreds of thousands of text message votes were sent. Yeah, apparently they have text messaging in Afghanistan too.

For all the talk about winning the hearts and minds of Afghans and Iraqis, stories about Western culture being successfully exported have been mostly overlooked. That a pop reality show can thrive in a nation ruled just seven years ago by fascist thugs who stoned people for singing and dancing is a cause for hope. And by hope, I am not merely referring to the prospect of a Middle Eastern edition of Flavor of Love. The fact is Afghan Star has almost as much to do with winning their hearts and minds as anything we do militarily.

Guns cannot penetrate the soul. However, popular entertainment combined with consumerism has the potential to refocus the attention of young, prospective terrorist recruits. A new consumer culture can even be used, as with products like Mecca Cola, to provide people a nonviolent means of channeling anti-Americanism. Muslims can maintain the pretense of hating the West even while they subconsciously affirm quintessentially American values like materialism and consumer choice.

From the New York Times: Let's Not and Say We Did, by the boss.

From the Washington Post: Democrats' Obama Dilemma, by Robert Novak.

From the Wall Street Journal: The Democrats Super Disaster, by John Yoo.

From the Wall Street Journal: After Putin, by Joe Biden.

From the Spectator: McPeak on Display, by Robert Goldberg.

The Wall Street Journal offers a particularly strong editorial this morning on Iraq's support for terrorism and links to al Qaeda.

The key conclusion, in my view, is this one: "The main Iraq intelligence failure was over WMD, but the report indicates that the CIA also underestimated Saddam's ties to global terror cartels." [Emphasis in the original.]

The editorial lashes the press corps, John McCain and the Bush Administration for the failure to let the public know about the study and its importance. The entire thing is worth reading -- here -- but I found the editorial's criticism of the Bush Administration particularly compelling.

A new Pentagon report suggests that Iraq's links to world-wide terror networks, including al Qaeda, were far more extensive than previously understood.

Naturally, it's getting little or no attention. Press accounts have been misleading or outright distortions, while the Bush Administration seems indifferent. Even John McCain has let the study's revelations float by. But that doesn't make the facts any less notable or true.

The editorial concludes:

All of these are inconvenient facts for those who want to assert that somehow Saddam could have been easily contained and presented no threat to the U.S. The Harmony files buttress the case that the decision to oust Saddam was the right one -- which makes it all the more puzzling that the Bush Administration is mum. It isn't the first time the White House has ceded the Iraq debate to its opponents.

We are, after all, in the middle of a global war on terror. The great debate over past six years has been about whether Iraq is a central front in that war or a distraction from it. You'd think a study on "Iraq and Terrorism" might be relevant, especially to an dministration that has struggled miserably to communicate on the war. Here is their case, and they're choosing to ignore it.

In the aftermath of the crackdown in Tibet, Chinese internet bulletin boards have become virtual hate sites.

In hundreds of thousands of postings, Han Chinese hurl obscenities against Tibetans, condemn foreign governments for "interfering in China’s internal affairs," and accuse the Western media of "twisting the facts." They express "resolute support" for the government’s action. Some even call for tougher measures to deal with the "splittists" in order to defend China’s territorial glory.

In the absence of a free press, what Chinese citizens know of the Tibet crackdown is filtered through the lens of the state propaganda machine, which defines, in report after report, "the truth" of the March 14 Lhasa Incident as "a serious violent crime involving beating, smashing, looting, and burning" that was orchestrated by the "Dalai clique" in cahoots with "hostile external elements."

Through its control of the media and the Internet, the Chinese government is, in effect, manipulating the nationalist sentiments of the Han, a group constituting more than 90 percent of the population. By professing to be the guardian of territorial integrity and national pride, it is reinforcing its claim to legitimacy.

The late Chinese dissident writer Liu Binyan once said:

Nationalism and Han chauvinism are now the only effective instruments in the ideological arsenal of the Chinese Communist Party. Any disruption in the relationship with foreign countries or among ethnic minorities can be used to stir "patriotic" sentiments of the people to support the communist authorities.

While Han chauvinism is a real factor, another important element is state censorship. The Chinese government’s ability to define the incident--in fact, any incident--to fit its agenda relies on its control of the media. It is thought control in its crudest form.

Many of those who have access to alternative channels of information, however, tend to have a different mindset. Regular listeners of Radio Free Asia, for example, have been voicing their opposition to the crackdown on Tibetans. Some have expressed suspicion about the official version of events. A Beijing listener who uses a proxy server to access foreign websites applies a completely different analytical model to the Tibet issue than do the vast majority of his fellow Han Chinese: "Using Free Gate, I was able to see on the Internet that, in Lhasa, protesting monks were dealt with in a very rough manner, and that even tanks were mobilized. I think it was too much."

Race and ethnic relations are complex issues. In the United States we are witnessing in the presidential primaries an intense debate surrounding how they should be tackled. Americans of all political stripes are, however, free to engage in this debate through media outlets of the right, center, and left. It would be an understatement to say such is not the case in the People’s Republic.

Ed Rendell and Bill Richardson showed up on Fox News Sunday yesterday to shill for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama respectively. The Pennsylvania governor struck at what he sees as the heart of the Obama campaign’s hypocrisy. "The Obama campaign tries to have it both ways," he said. "They say the campaign’s too negative, and they go out and turn an innocent remark--Bill Clinton was saying what a lot of us feel, we wish the issues of race and all of this other stuff would be pushed to the background so we could have a discussion about who’s got the most experience, who’s got the best healthcare plan, who’s got the best plan for the economy. And instead, they launch this all-out attack trying to take an inference out of President Clinton’s words that no fair person could take."

Peggy Noonan was on Meet the Press, and she discussed the importance of Richardson’s endorsement of Obama. "You know what I think the Richardson thing means?" she asked Tim Russert. "It means that this wonderful voodoo magic thing that the Clintons have, that they are always in control, that they run the Democratic party, that no matter what is happening on the ground or who's winning this race or the popular vote or getting the elected delegates, they're in charge, they're really secretly plugged in, they got secret wires that they're pulling, they will triumph. When a Bill Richardson comes forward, it just reminds you, the Clintons may not be in charge. They may not be pulling the wires in this race."

George Will also feels like the race is quickly slipping away from the Clinton machine. "I would much rather have had Obama’s week than Hillary’s week. She loses Michigan and Florida: that’s her only path to the nomination, electability. And she has to do that by passing him in the popular vote which she is not going to be able to do. We don’t know yet whether Bill Richardson is a pebble that presages an avalanche, but he might be. He’s a very important superdelegate. And finally, we have the release of her White House schedules, which raises the question: if being first lady like that qualifies you to run for president, why didn't Mimi Eisenhower run for president?"

Lindsey Graham took to Face the Nation to discuss just how much progress has been made in Iraq over the last year. "On the political front, we've had the de-Baathification law passed. . . . That means members of the Baath Party, who ruled the country under Saddam Hussein, are now allowed to get some of their jobs back. That means the Shias and the Kurds are saying to the Sunnis, 'come back in and help us run the country.' They passed a $48 billion budget where every group in Iraq gets to share the oil resources. There was an amnesty law telling the prisoners in Iraq that 'we're going to let some of you go; go back home, stop fighting, help build the new Iraq.' And most important of all, we're going to have provincial elections in October. The Sunnis boycotted the election in 2005, and everywhere I went in Anbar province the Sunnis are ready to vote and be part of democracy. So there's been major political breakthroughs."

In a bold challenge to the Chinese government's crackdown in Tibet, nearly 30 dissidents have circulated an open letter titled "Twelve Suggestions for Dealing with the Tibetan Situation." The dissidents' letter contrasts with the Communist government's arrest of hundreds of Tibetans and official propaganda to "resolutely crush" the protests that have since spread east beyond the Tibetan Autonomous Region, to western provinces where Tibetans also live.

In their letter, the dissidents call for a dialogue between Chinese officials and the Dalai Lama, an international investigation into the events, an end to "Cultural Revolution-like" propaganda against the Dalai Lama, freedom of religion and speech for Tibetans, and access to the region for journalists. (See the letter at Chinese Human Rights Defenders)

Among the letter's signers is Teng Biao, a lawyer and human rights activist who only a couple of weeks ago was picked up by Chinese authorities, held for a few days and, before being released, warned to keep quiet about human rights abuses. Teng is also the co-author with Hu Jia of another open letter, "The Real China and the Olympics," which criticizes abuses committed in preparation for the games. (See the letter at Human Rights Watch) Arrested at the end of 2007, Hu was tried on March 18 on subversion charges and currently awaits sentencing. Wang Lixiong, an outspoken Chinese critic of Beijing's Tibet policy, who is married to Tibetan blogger Woeser, also signed the letter. Others who signed: Ding Zilin, a leader of the Tiananmen Mothers organization, and her husband Jiang Peikun. The two have waged a long campaign for justice for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, who include their son.

The letter belies the idea, reinforced and spread by official propaganda and often accepted abroad, that Chinese opinion on Tibet reflects an innate and monolithic Chinese Han chauvinism. (So does a blog post by Lian Yue, criticizing official censorship for stoking the emotion on which ultra-nationalistic extremism is based.)

Nationalistic, territorial, and racist views about Tibet may be common and deep-seated, but it is not possible in China to accurately gauge public opinion. Nor are intellectuals and writers like Teng, Wang, and the others who signed this letter free to persuade their fellow citizens to adopt views contrary to the Communist party line.

Tibet is one of the most sensitive issues in China and these dissidents will no doubt face retaliation for openly challenging the party. According to reports, Wang and Woeser have been held under house arrest in Beijing since the protests first started.

When it won the honor of hosting this summer's Olympic games, the PRC made no binding commitments on human rights and the international community failed to extract any. Still, it is not too late for the international community, which grants legitimacy to Beijing by participating in the games, to give just as much legitimacy to the courageous Chinese dissidents who speak out now.

The Miami Herald reports:

Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ''used the services of high-priced call girls'' while in Florida.

And the legend continues.

For more on Stone see Matt Labash's profile from the November 5, 2007 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Happy Easter. Some thoughts on the Presidential race:

1) Obama is 90 percent likely to be the Democratic nominee, although the press seem to have continuing trouble with basic arithmetic and thereby doubt this. It's important to note that many of the superdelegates are DNC members which means many are not unfeeling calculators of general election odds who are likely to switch in a second but instead real live ideological activists. That helps Obama even more. HRC will be out in early May, after losing North Carolina.

2) General election polls now, like those before the actual primary contests began, are close to meaningless. Wait till after both nominees have given their convention speeches to take a real look.

3) Nonetheless, the Wright kerfuffle has hurt Obama in the long run. He is off his pedestal now. This tension between the inspiring idea of Obama's campaign and the reality of his pragmatic political climb through the hard corners of Chicago Democratic politics is a growing fault line inside the Obama candidacy.

4) Despite a generic political environment that is as awful as awful can be for Republicans, McCain still stands an excellent chance to win the general election but only if he commits to the one obvious and powerful strategy available to him.

5) McCain wins by being acceptable to the independents and white Democrats who will inevitably, over time, crumble off Obama's imperfect reality. He loses if he becomes caught in a partisan base versus base contest with the Democrats. The job for Team McCain is not to tear down Obama, it is to give those who will become increasingly disenchanted from him (Hillary voting blue-collars, Jews, moderates) a reason to see McCain as acceptable. This means McCain should return to his roots and run as the different kind of Republican he truly is. The GOP base will not enjoy this, but they--sorry AM radio crowd--will not control the outcome of this election. Ticket-splitters and swing voters will.

6) Does McCainland understand this? It's unclear. So far, the only strategic news out of the McCain campaign has been a half-baked scheme to fool around with regional offices and "decentralization." Such plumbing and wiring trivia misses the critical point: what McCain needs at once is a well-executed back to the center message strategy to enlarge his appeal beyond just national security issues and win this vital election.

Reuters reports:

The U.S. military said on Saturday it had hampered al Qaeda's ability to recruit new members in Iraq by capturing or killing many of the people who make slick videos used to attract disaffected young Muslims.

U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said that in the past year, 39 al Qaeda members in Iraq responsible for producing and disseminating videos and other material to thousands of Internet Web sites had been captured or killed....

Smith said there has been a steady decline in videos broadcast on 5,000 pro-al Qaeda Web sites since June 2007, roughly coinciding with falling levels of violence across Iraq.

I heard Gen. Wallace speak on this subject a little more than a year ago. At the time he said that al Qaeda had a "better information operations capability" than the U.S. military and that the group had benefited from the "sanctuary of cyberspace." It looks like killing the bad guys has had a salutary effect on the situation (surprise!). Last fall Roggio wrote about the hunt for AQI's propaganda cells, which have been a top priority of U.S. forces since last summer.

Obama aide Gen. Tony McPeak is in the news for comparing Bill Clinton to Joseph McCarthy, but it's a good opportunity to revisit some comments McPeak made just about five years ago today in an interview with the Oregonian (via Hot Air):

[Q:] Is Iraq the last country we confront in the Middle East?

[McPeak:] Who wants to volunteer to get cross-ways with us? We'll be there a century, hopefully. If it works right.

So the Obama advisers continue to cause trouble. Samantha Power insisted that Obama would "not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate" to get U.S. forces out of Iraq, Susan Rice insisted that Obama was not ready to answer that 3 am phone call, and Austan Goolsbee insisted Obama wouldn't really do anything about NAFTA. Now we see that Obama's military adviser understands perfectly well why McCain would keep U.S. troop in Iraq for so long. Oh, and there's that little story about Obama's "spiritual adviser."

Jack Kelly writes "in search of a true black uniter" and concludes:

The first black president of the United States is more likely to be someone like Allen West than Sen. Barack Obama....

You'll remember Allen West as the Lt. Col. in charge of an artillery unit of the 4th ID who, back in August 2003, was reprimanded for, as the Washington Post put it, "abusing a prisoner during an interrogation by firing his pistol near him." This "abuse" produced information about an impending attack on American troops and a raft of legal troubles for Lt. Col. West.

West has since left the military to work as a teacher in a Florida public school. He is also running for Congress in Florida's 22nd district (he's a Republican). Kelly quotes from an old interview with West, "The flag that will one day drape my casket is not a rag to be burned in some semblance of self-expression." Likewise, West probably wouldn't be a big fan of removing said flag from one's lapel in a self-indulgent flourish of "true patriotism." And I doubt he'd sit in the pews for 20 years as his pastor preached "God Damn America." Just a hunch.

Michael Rubin has a good write-up at the Corner. I covered this yesterday here, but what I didn't know until reading Rubin:

To support dismissing President Bush’s stated concerns, they cite Joseph Cirincione. Fair enough, but wouldn't basic integrity mandate that they mention that Cirincione is not a disinterested analyst, but rather is advising Barack Obama?

That would seem like useful information for the Post to include. Instead, Cirincione is identified merely as an "expert on Iran and nuclear proliferation." His expert opinion: Bush's comments were "as uninformed as [Sen. John] McCain's statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda." That sounds objective...

The BBC brings us the story of Noor Salman, a 16-year-old girl living in Baghdad whose father was murdered by militants in August of 2006. It's not a happy story, but the girl is happy about one thing:

Our city is not what it once was and studying is not easy. Walking to school became a dangerous journey, although recently things are better.

I wonder, how many school children in the world have to go to school fearing they may not make it home. That's what we had to do.

I'm so happy that things are better on that front - but we are all aware that they could easily change again.

Notice the use of the past tense when talking about the dangers of walking to school. Would her father be alive if the U.S. hadn't invaded Iraq? Probably. Would somebody else's father have been murdered by Saddam in that alternate universe? Probably. But that's a moot point and here's a young girl saying that things are better, that security has returned, and that she is happy. I'd be curious to know what the Democrats think this country owes a young Iraqi girl like Noor, if anything.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday on the situation in Fallujah: "War-ravaged Iraq city 'alive again.'" I don't think we owe anything to the people of Fallujah, but if we are to decisively defeat al Qaeda and its ilk in Iraq, bringing peace, security, and prosperity to Anbar is essential. Thankfully, it looks like things are better on that front as well.

Click to view the slideshow of the Spear Brigade in Western Mosul.

Some of the heaviest fighting in Mosul has occurred in the western neighborhoods of the city. Al Qaeda in Iraq and its terrorist allies fought pitched battles with Iraqi and U.S. forces there earlier this year in an attempt to prevent the security forces from establishing outposts in the city. Al Qaeda conducted suicide car and vest attacks as well as RPG and small arms attacks as the troops attempted to build these bases and checkpoints. The soldiers of the 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Iraqi Army division, led by Brigadier General Taha Askar, the Iraqi police, and the U.S. soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment fought through the attacks and have since established a foothold in the neighborhood.

Attacks are still up in Mosul, but the attacks are less effective than in the past. Catastrophic IED attacks are the exception, not the norm. Multiple clear and hold operations are being conducted as the Iraqi and U.S. security forces work to consolidate their gains, but reconstruction in the western part of the city is lagging. This slideshow looks at the Spear Brigade and their U.S. advisors in action in western Mosul.

Are liberals poised to deliver a knockout blow to conservatives? Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg and his colleagues seem to think so, based on this recently issued report. The Greenberg/Quinlin/Rosner (GQR) study demonstrates continued Republican brand weakness, increased demand for more governmental activism, and growing popularity of a liberal policy agenda, defined as Canadian-style health care and bold action on global warming. Many of their findings--appetizing political chum for left wingers--will come as no great surprise to those watching trends in party identification and attitudes about public policy over the past two years. Adding the word "Republican" to most policy ideas these days is like playing hoops with ankle weights.

Yet before conservatives think this is the political equivalent of UCLA’s first round drubbing of Mississippi Valley State in the tournament yesterday, a couple caveats deserve mention. First, the GQR numbers include some curious internal contradictions. For example, despite a host of findings pointing to demand for bigger government, their polling also shows a majority prefers less taxes--not exactly a page ripped from the Krugman economics text book.

Second, the GQR study points to growing support for a pro-government agenda (they find voters want aggressive action on climate change and "Canadian-style" health care), but also say respondents have negative views of the federal government overall and believe Washington is inefficient and wasteful.

Third, some of the numbers NOT included in the presentation--such as the approval rating of the Democratic Congress--suggest voters don’t have a lot of faith in the current majority party’s ability to quench their thirst for change.

Finally, even the GQR numbers show a larger percentage of Americans interested in cutting government spending than "investing" in education and health care. Having said that, these numbers do suggest a challenging landscape heading into the fall elections, particularly among weaker partisans and independents that soured on the GOP brand over the past few years.

I'd sort of forgotten about Richardson--it seems like so long ago that this campaign started. It was nice of him to endorse in the middle of the Pastor Disaster, assuming that this is the middle and Obama is actually able to bring this to a close in a week's time. But according to Memeorandum, the Richardson endorsement rates somewhat less interesting than the now bipartisan passportgate, the sudden, collective epiphany that Hillary has no path to the nomination, and the Reverend.

Obama is going to need a lot of help with the Hispanic vote, and now that I'm reminded of Richardson's existence, it strikes me that he may make more sense as a VP than Jim Webb (I'm thinking that Rev. Wright may have been all the crazy an Obama campaign can stomach). Still, Richardson has his own problems. Writing at the Current, Graeme Wood explains:

Few politicians are as accomplished as Richardson; even fewer are as accomplished while projecting his air of bumbling and incompetence. By many accounts this impression is just a lack of charisma, and he has "substance" to make up for it. But the endorsement, embraced publicly by Obama, should provoke private shudders: This man is hexed.

Wood adds that in the end, Richardson faired poorly among Hispanic voters, raising the question of whether electing one of their own is particularly important to that community. And to top it off, Ambinder posts Richardson's endorsement speech which the Obama campaign distributed:

I also felt a kinship with him because we both had one foreign-born parent and we both lived abroad as children. In part because of these experiences, Barack and I share a deep sense of our nation’s special responsibilities in the world.

[Turn toward Obama and smile]

Barack Obama, you are an extraordinary leader who has shown courage, sound judgment and wisdom throughout your career.

There are other explanations for stage directions besides bumbling and incompetence. For example, will Hillary require similar instruction when she is forced to make her own concession/endorsement speech? I'm thinking something like [Put down knife, turn toward Obama and smile]. And one of our readers adds that Richardson had an air of homelessness about him: "No one in the professional politics arena should have a goatee." Agreed.

So the Obama campaign is on record as having provided the photo of Rev. Wright shooting the shit with President Clinton at a prayer breakfast. This raises suspicions about where the Obama campaign itself got the photo. Having worked (briefly) at the White House, I can say the White House photo office often mails prints to private people they snap shaking hands with the president. So was this Wright’s copy of the photo, in which case Obama is still very much in cahoots with his beloved minister of 20-years? Or did the Obama campaign dig this photo up at Clinton’s presidential library?

CNN's Roland Martin brings the ridiculous:

One of the most controversial statements in this sermon was when [Reverend Wright] mentioned “chickens coming home to roost.” He was actually quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force, who was speaking on FOX News. That’s what he told the congregation.

This based on the fact that later in the sermon Wright added, "Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant." Here's the video of Wright talking about chickens coming home to roost, and Wright makes it clear where he draws that language from. Not sure why Martin would even try and push this ridiculous story, but given his self-righteous preening in the post about how his "job is to seek the truth, and not the partial truth," shouldn't he clarify his story?

HT: Confederate Yankee

Bush spoke directly to the Iranian people yesterday in an address broadcast over Radio Farda:

"[The Iranian government has] declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some in the Middle East. And that's unacceptable to the United States, and it's unacceptable to the world..."

For some reason the Washington Post's Robin Wright took exception to this statement:

But most striking was Bush's accusation that Iran has openly declared its nuclear weapons intentions, even though a National Intelligence Estimate concluded in December that Iran had stopped its weapons program in 2003, a major reversal in the long-standing U.S. assessment.

Robin Wright seems to have taken a break from this story for the last few months, since anybody who's been following it knows that it's not the president who has recast the NIE, but the intelligence community. In an interview with WTOP on February 26 of this year, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell explained:

As you know, there’s been confusion about what Iranian intentions are with regard to nuclear weapons. You know from our National Intelligence Estimate we released, we highlighted the fact that a specific portion of the program had been cancelled, and that was the technical design of the warhead.

What I’d just highlight for you is there are three parts to a nuclear-weapons program. First, you have to have fissile material. Second, you have a nuclear-weapons warhead design; and third, a means of delivery of that warhead, given that you had such a warhead. And what we highlighted that was cancelled was the specifics on the warhead design. They are still pursuing fissile material – which that is the most difficult challenge in a nuclear program. And they’re still doing the ballistic missile design and testing, which is probably the second-most difficult part.

It is an open question as to whether Iran has since restarted work on the warhead design. Regardless, given their progress in producing the fissile material, Iran could produce a workable nuclear device in "6 months to 12 months," according to testimony by McConnell to the House Intelligence Committee on February 7.

Also, in order to contradict the president's statement, Wright quotes Joseph Cirincione, a highly partisan "expert." Cirincione says "Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It's just not true." So Wright's attack boils down to little more than the fact that the Iranians themselves haven't fessed up (despite talk of wiping Israel off the map and the "accidental" discovery of blueprints for a nuclear warhead during an IAEA inspection of an Iranian facility). Of course Cirincione takes a rather laissez faire view of proliferation. Last fall, when the Israelis took out what was widely reported to be a North Korean nuclear facility inside Syria, Cirincione told Foreign Policy magazine that "if North Korea gave them [the Syrians] anything short of nuclear weapons it is of little consequence." Perhaps he thinks that, likewise, until the Iranians actually assemble the device, it is of little consequence.

Other experts take a different view. One such is Gary Samore, a top arms control official in the Clinton administration and a director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, who told the Los Angeles Times in December that "The halting of the weaponization program in 2003 is less important from a proliferation standpoint than resumption of the enrichment program in 2006." You wouldn't know it from Wright's piece, but this view represents something of a consensus within the intel community as demonstrated by McConnell's statements over the past few months. Bush was simply stating the obvious, even if Robin Wright, Joseph Cirincione, and Mahmoud Ammadinejad don't agree with the assessment.

Michael Barone parses a raft of state polls to tackle the question of whether Clinton or Obama is the more electable Democratic candidate. Barone's general conclusion:

But in any case, the numbers weaken the Obama campaign's argument to superdelegates that he would be a stronger general election candidate. He still has more upside potential than Clinton, who has long polarized the electorate. But the Wright tapes also show that he has more downside potential. Today's polls are not necessarily an indicator of who will be the stronger general election candidate. That requires a judgment about whether Obama will achieve his upside potential or suffer his downside potential, a judgment on which reasonable people can and do differ. It's a question the answer to which is unknowable, until and unless Obama is nominated.

Barone's comments echo what I wrote the other day -- that while Obama may have a higher ceiling as a candidate, he also has a lower floor. Read Barone's entire piece for more on how Obama and Clinton perform in different states.

Polls go up and down, but one thing has changed for good: many now realize that Obama may not be a strong candidate in the general election. In fact, he might not appeal to any more voters than Hillary does. If that is the case, the Democrats will be locked into a general election strategy of using negative advertising to try to destroy John McCain. They'll need to make sure that however unpopular their candidate may be, McCain looks worse. So if Obama can't recapture that old magic, prepare for an extremely nasty race.

And for your amusement, an interesting graphic from Intrade. It seems as if the market thinks Al Gore's chances of being the Democratic nominee have increased significantly in the last two weeks. It's still only trading at $3, but it looks like a stock on the rise.

Each presidential election cycle the media comes around to the idea that this is the year that voters are going to punish 'anti-environmental' candidates. In the past (the argument goes), the American people wanted a clean environment, but didn't consider it a high enough priority to decide an election. And like clockwork, we're being warned this year that global warming changes everything -- that a broad swath of voters is beginning to realize that life as we know it is at stake, and will vote accordingly. The only problem is these skunk-at-the-picnic polls that make it impossible to believe:

Forty-eight percent of Americans are unwilling to spend even a penny more in gasoline taxes to help reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new nationwide survey released today by the National Center for Public Policy Research.

The poll found just 18% of Americans are willing to pay 50 cents or more in additional taxes per gallon of gas to reduce greenhouse emissions. U.S. Representative John Dingell (D-MI), chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, has called for a 50 cent per gallon increase in the gas tax.

If half of all Americans are unwilling to pay anything more to combat global warming, and nearly 20 percent more are willing to spend only a small amount, how seriously do Americans view the problem? It seems that the appetite for a drastic tax increase continues to rest where it always has: with a relatively small activist minority.

HT: ShopFloor

Are you sick of Jeremiah Wright yet? Bloggers aren't--and it seems Obama, of all people, won't let the issue die. His "typical white person" comment blew up, and his campaign circulated a photo (right) of Wright shaking hands with President Bill Clinton at the White House in 1998. Now bloggers wonder: Who exactly does this photo hurt?

Kate Phillips at the NYT Caucus blog reported last night:

During one of the most difficult periods in the presidency of Bill Clinton, he addressed a group of clerics at an annual prayer breakfast in September 1998 just as the Starr report outlining his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky was about to be published.

Among those in attendance, was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., who is seen shaking hands with Mr. Clinton in a photograph provided today by the Obama campaign.

The report continues: "There is nothing in the picture or the note that addresses whether Mr. Clinton had met Mr. Wright prior to the White House meeting or whether he or Mrs. Clinton knew anything about Mr. Wright’s views."

Politico's Ben Smith reports that the campaigns got into a war of words over the photo, with Clinton's spokesman calling the stunt "pathetic" and Obama's spokesman responding that Clinton's response is "hypocrisy." And McCain is looking better by the minute.

Most bloggers agree that this actually hurts the Obama campaign. Real Clear Politics' Tom Bevan says, "The idea that a photo of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Wright at a White House breakfast is anywhere in the same ballpark with Obama's 20-year relationship with the controversial pastor is downright silly and insulting to voters' intelligence." Jake Tapper agrees and snarks, "I can't even believe anyone had the temerity to push the photo. The audacity of hope, I suppose."

Right-wing bloggers see that both campaign spokesmen were correct: Obama's campaign is pathetic, and the Clintons are, as expected, hypocritical. Jules Crittenden says, "I suppose they could say, fool me once, shame on you, fool me for 20 years, shame on you. No wonder Hill doesn’t want to tackle this directly." Come to think of it, we never heard a vociferous denunciation of Wright from Hillary, did we? Allahpundit adds, "Is Billy Jeff’s culpability in not thoroughly vetting his audience the same as Obama’s in patronizing a hate merchant for 20 years? Not remotely, but anything that makes the Clintons squirm is worth linking." Agreed. And Ace notes that they're all the same: "Isn't it funny that previous bad Democratic behavior is being used by the media to excuse current Democratic bad behavior?"

Allahpundit updated with another important point: Is Obama's circulating the photo "a tacit admission that associating with Wright is improper and scandal-worthy?" If Obama wouldn't denounce his pastor--and if Wright is no different than Obama's "typical white" grandmother--why even circulate the photo, hm?

From the Washington Post: The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud, by Charles Krauthammer.

From the Wall Street Journal: Democrats Are Still Weak on Security, by Karl Rove.

From the Australian: Saddam, the Terrorist's Friend, by Greg Sheridan.

From the Washington Times: Saddam Friendly to Terror Groups, by Rowan Scarborough.

From U.S. News: How the Dems Stack Up Against McCain, by Michael Barone.

As was noted here the other day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in India this week, meeting with the Dalai Lama to express support for human rights in Tibet. The Telegraph provides this video of Pelosi's appearance, in which she called for an independent investigation into allegations that the Dalai Lama is encouraging violence against China:

I've made much of the low approval ratings that this Congress has earned, but there's a healthy appetite in the U.S. for criticism of China's human rights violations. It seems to be an annual tradition for criticism of China to ramp up in the House during the summer, and this year Speaker Pelosi is likely to ensure that such criticism has a somewhat higher profile, particularly in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic games. We're all for it.

Republican New York Rep. Tom Reynolds announced yesterday that he would not be seeking reelection in the fall. This comes amidst a wave of Republican retirements from the House in a year when things were already looking grim down ticket. The Democrats are putting up an antiwar vet, Jonathan Powers, for that seat, with the support of MoveOn.org and the antiwar VoteVets.org. Now for the good news, K-Lo reports, and we can confirm, that Army SSG David Bellavia (Ret.) "is strongly considering a run for the Reynolds’ vacated congressional seat.'”

I had the chance to speak to Bellavia a while back for a piece I was working on about Iraq war veterans who might become tomorrow's political leaders. Of all the folks I spoke with, Bellavia was by far the most impressive, even though at the time he seemed to entertain no real interest in running for political office. Here's what I wrote about him a while back on The Blog:

Bellavia served in Iraq in 2004 before returning to co-found Vets for Freedom. He saw the worst of Iraq during his tour, describing his time there as 12 months of "gruesome, house-to-house combat." He was in Fallujah in November 2004, participating in the battle to retake that insurgent stronghold, when his unit walked into an ambush. The house they were clearing was filled with insurgents, but that only became apparent after several bursts of gunfire forced his comrades back onto the street, leaving him trapped in the house. Bellavia said of that day, "they started coming at me on at a time . . . it ended up in a hand-to-hand struggle." There were six terrorists in the house, and Bellavia lived to write the book. As for the bad guys, "72 virgins across the board," Bellavia said. He now sees himself as an "instigator and equalizer countering the doom and gloom" message of the antiwar crowd. "I pacified the jihadists . . . we carried the water, we did the worst of the fighting, and we're back with a positive message."

Bellavia killed the last bad guy with a pocket knife and was nominated for the Medal of Honor for his conduct that day. You can get a copy of Bellavia's book, House to House, here, and you'll want to keep an eye on this race. Two Iraq war veterans battling it out on the most important issue of the day--that has to be good for everybody, and there isn't a single guy back from that war with a more impressive story to tell than Bellavia.

Yesterday marked the 60th birthday of the greatest hockey player ever, Bobby Orr. If by some chance you think Wayne Gretzky was the best hockey player ever, then you were born too late. If by some chance you're unfamiliar with Bobby Orr, he's the guy wearing #4 in the YouTube above skating around the opposition like they're a bunch of mannequins.

The best way to put Bobby Orr's dominance in perspective is to think of him as that kid in youth sports who is too good to play with the kids his own age and has to be called up to play with the older kids. Another way would be to think of Orr as Michael Jordan on skates. And on stilts. While Jordan was more talented than all of his contemporaries by a significant margin, the difference between Orr and his peers was far more dramatic. For evidence, I refer you to the above video.

Orr was the best at everything – he was the best skater, the best passer, the best shooter, he had the best vision. He was even the best fighter because he was so strong on his skates. As elegant as Orr was, his competitive fire was also legendary.

If you drive around greater Boston today, you'll see a hockey rink every couple of miles or so. Virtually all those rinks date from the early 1970’s when Bobby Orr and his Boston Bruins absolutely owned the city. Hockey is now dead in most of the country, but not in Boston. Kids still use those rinks, and more than 30 years after Bobby Orr last skated for the Bruins, Boston remains a hockey town. If you watch the video above, you'll understand why.

Looking at yesterday's Rasmussen poll, Jamie Kirchick made a bold prediction:

An interesting snippet from today's Rasmussen poll is that Barack Obama leads John McCain by only 49% to 42% in Massachusetts, the bluest of blue states. McCain also has a (slightly) higher approval rating than Obama.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: with a moderate Republican nominee and Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate, there's an even chance that Massachusetts will go red.

I'm not sure I actually believe it, but as I watched the local news up here in Boston last night, it struck me that this was not an impossible scenario. The Pastor Disaster is getting all kinds of play, and in this particular segment from Channel 7 (see above), they even trot out the 'God Damn America' portion of Rev. Wright's sermons as seen in the now infamous video that got McCain staffer Soren Dayton suspended from the campaign.

Hillary Clinton couldn't have produced a more favorable segment. The report is bracketed by the passport story, but that just doesn't have the entertainment value of the Pastor Disaster. Anyone who thinks contract employees looking into Obama's files is going to rally Democrats should think again.

If this type of coverage keeps up for long, I'm inclined to think that a McCain win in Massachusetts is, if highly unlikely, at least within the realm of the possible.

One other thing that augurs poorly for Obama in the Bay State is his co-branding with Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Patrick's reign has featured one pratfall after another. His latest humiliation occurred just yesterday when the legislature overwhelmingly rejected what had pathetically become Patrick's signature issue--bringing state-sponsored casino gambling to Massachusetts. In his short time as Massachusetts' regent, Patrick has practically redefined ineffectiveness. And this in a state where Michael Dukakis remains a fresh memory! Obama's close association with Patrick could do him some serious harm as Patrick's approval ratings continue their inexorable march to George W. Bush levels.

Update: Geraghty notes a new poll from Survey USA showing McCain and Obama tied in Massachusetts.

Mosul, Iraq
The Military Transition Teams (MTTs) in Mosul are slated to receive the new MRAPs. While the MTT advisers are looking forward to receiving the new vehicles, one major issue is the shear size of the vehicles. The Iraqis run their electrical lines across the streets in hap-hazard fashion, and the lines are often no higher than 12 feet off of the ground. The new, taller MRAPs are about 15 to 20 feet in height, including the gunner’s turrets, and they will wreak havoc on the makeshift electrical lines in Mosul. The MRAPs pictured above are fitted with the antenna tie-downs, which are designed to allow the electrical lines to glide over the vehicles, however if there isn’t enough slack in the lines, they can be broken, causing bad relations with the locals in the city. The size of the MRAPs may limit the MTT’s ability to go into the neighborhood to accompany their Iraqi counterparts on missions.

Last night from Hugh Hewitt:

The EADS Tanker Can't Refuel The USMC Osprey?

Boeing's Mark McGraw just told me that on air. Doesn't it strike you as a pretty significant advantage for Boeing that its proposed tanker could refuel the new Marine Corps platform while the Airbus tanker can't? If there was a huge gap between the two tankers, that might not make a difference, but by every account, it was a dead heat, so this difference seems very significant on its face.

Word on the street is Boeing lost on four of five evaluation criteria; how that amounts to a dead heat, I don't know. Regarding the ability to refuel "new" Marine Corps platforms, the new MV-22 Osprey at present is not fitted for aerial refueling, but when it is, it, like other helos, will use the probe-and-drogue system shared by the rest of the Navy. At present, because of their low speed, helos do not refuel from jet tankers, but instead use KC-130 Hercules, which are more closely matched to them in speed. The Osprey, being capable of 300 knots, could, flying flat out, match speeds with a jet tanker, but it would be iffy. Assuming that this is a mission requirement, both the Boeing and Airbus tankers are dual-capable; i.e., they have both flying boom (used by the Air Force) and probe-and-drogue (used by the Navy) units, just like the existing KC-10.

The Boeing offering is smaller, has less range, less cargo capacity, and less fuel transfer capacity. On the bright side, Boeing says it is cheaper (we'll have to wait on that one), and can be operated from forward bases (why on earth would you want to do that?), which the company claims obviates the shorter range. But then Boeing ignores the vulnerability and strategic issues inherent in forward basing, as well as the additional cost of shipping fuel to forward bases, to say nothing of the O&M costs associated with creating forward base detachments for every tanker squadron in USAF.

All-in-all, sounds like McGraw is blowing smoke, but the Boeing objective at this point is to keep the protest alive through the election cycle in the hope that the new President and Congress will be more protectionist in outlook and will cancel the contract award (ideally, from his perspective, mandating a sole source award to Boeing).

Boeing was arrogant and ticked off its customer by ignoring mission requirements--in effect, telling the Air Force that it knew better than they did what the Air Force needed. This is never a good business strategy. They also assumed that USAF would never make a major award to a foreign manufacturer. Obviously, this was a faulty assumption. As to why the Airbus award constitutes a dire threat to U.S. national security, your guess is as good as mine. We buy a commercial airframe, half of which is built in the U.S., from Airbus, and we give it to Northrop to stuff with all the refueling, communications and other mission equipment, which is worth more than the value of the airframe. The Airbus deal will create as many new jobs in the U.S., albeit at the expense of some Boeing jobs--my guess is a net gain in U.S. employment. Security of supply is not an issue, given that France is a member of the LOI (Letter of Intent) Six, which all have memoranda of agreement in place with each other to ensure access to parts and services from each other. The Boeing protest, and its supporters, in short, are making a straightforward protectionist argument, which in the long run will come back to bite all U.S. defense manufacturers.

The Washington Post reports on the difficulties Western intelligence agencies face in infiltrating al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The piece notes that fresh recruits are often "highly disposable," employed mainly as suicide bombers and general cannon fodder, making it difficult for informants to penetrate the networks. It also notes that those informants who do work their way up risk being exposed by the civilian justice system:

In January, Spanish police arrested 14 men in Barcelona who they suspected were preparing to bomb subways in cities across Europe. Investigators disclosed in court documents that the arrests had been prompted by a Pakistani informant working for French intelligence.

The revelation infuriated French officials, who were forced to withdraw the informant -- a rare example of an agent who had successfully infiltrated training camps in Pakistan. Spanish authorities expressed regret but said they had no choice; after they failed to find bombs or much other evidence during the arrests, the case rested largely on the informant's word.

This is why terrorists can't necessarily be allowed to see all the evidence against them. But it is problematic. What if 14 foreign nationals were arrested on American soil under similar circumstances? Would the federal government jeopardize a highly placed informant inside al Qaeda--one who had demonstrated his worth by averting at least one attack--for the sake of meeting the same standards applied in prosecuting mobsters?

Iran isn't working with al Qaeda in Iraq? Tell that to some of al Qaeda's opposition. The NEFA Foundation has provided a transcript of an interview with a commander from "Hamas in Iraq," an insurgency group that was formerly a faction of the 1920 Revolution Brigades:

Q: "Is there any evidence of cooperation between the Al-Qaida network and Iran that you are aware of, since you are in a province bordering Iran?"

A: "We have irrefutable evidence of Iran supplying Al-Qaida with weaponry. This was exposed because of the weapons they used in the Diyala province several days ago - specifically on December 25, 2007. Our mujahideen from the Uthman bin Affan Brigade dismantled a car bomb in the Al-Onaq neighborhood in the region of al-Hadid [west of Baquba]. Hidden inside the car were three large rockets, three antitank mines, a quantity of TNT, 53 handgrenades, and a quantity of chlorine hidden inside the gas tank. [These items] were confiscated, and upon examining weapons, we discovered that they were Iranian-made. We also obtained confessions from some of those we have captured from [Al-Qaida] that they had transformed their wounded to border hospitals."

It is never safe to take these characters at their word. But he certainly does not have a pro-American bias. He refers to America as the "enemy" and says that his group will "never, ever cooperate" with American-led forces.

In addition, nothing he says about Iran's support for al Qaeda is all that surprising. As we have mentioned previously, the U.S. military and the new Iraqi intelligence service both confirm that Iran is hunting al Qaeda's enemies, not al Qaeda itself, inside Iraq. Iran is on al Qaeda's side in Iraq--not ours and not the Iraqi citizens. Some in the media seem to have trouble accepting this reality. As Steve Schippert explains, that includes the Boston Globe.

So for the duration of the campaign, Obama almost entirely avoided discussing race--which was part of his charm. It wasn't that Obama had found a new way to talk about race, or that he had moved beyond race - he just didn't touch it. And this created the perception that we had an African-American candidate running for office unencumbered by the extremely difficult and complex issues of race in America. But with the unfolding of the Pastor Disaster, Obama has been forced to engage on these issues. It turns out, he is no more comfortable speaking about them than the rest of us, and he is just as likely to put his foot in his mouth. Here is the clip, via Powerline, of Obama talking about his "throw grandma under the bus" moment in Tuesday's speech:

Grandma was a "typical white person." Which is to say she was a bigot, but generally decent--as apparently all white people are. The point here isn't that Obama is relying on stereotypes to make his point, though he is, but rather that this would be completely unacceptable rhetoric were it to come from a white candidate. One just can't say that an entire race has a "type." But mere mortals tend to make such generalizations.

Obama hasn't said anything particularly egregious here, but neither has he demonstrated some heretofore unknown ability to handle these issues in a way that doesn't sound...common. He isn't very good at talking about race. Despite the swooning among liberals over his race speech, the results are in and his poll numbers have tanked. These issues are too complicated and unpleasant to discuss on the campaign trail without suffering a backlash. If McCain had to talk about race for weeks on end it would be a disaster. But McCain didn't go to sermons every week where the pastor preached "God Damn America" and the "US of KKK." Obama made his bed, now he has to lie in it.

So Think Progress went batty when McCain, earlier this week, said that Iran was "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back." Today, they continue to pound away on this issue by quoting a statement made by Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno last summer:

We don’t see any evidence, significant evidence, that shows that [Iranian-controlled] groups that are funding and providing arms to Shi’a extremists are directly related to al Qaeda. Now, we all know that al Qaeda uses Iran and they do in some cases traffic some of their individuals through Iran to Iraq, but it’s a very small number of people and it’s mostly through the Kurdish regions up north, where you have the old Ansar al-Sunna connections. But beyond that, there is no specific connection between the Shi’a extremists — excuse me — the [Iranian] Quds Force operations and supporting the Shi’a extremists and that of al Qaeda, and supporting al Qaeda.

Am I missing something, or isn't that exactly what McCain said? And since no one is disputing that Iran has control over its borders, we are now talking about degrees of support, which is to say, Iran is supporting al Qaeda, we just don't know to what extent.

As Steve Hayes and I have previously discussed, the new IPP study documents the relationship between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad ("EIJ"). It is worth reproducing the language from the IPP study in this regard once again: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives."

Indeed, this is a very important fact. Zawahiri has worked closely with Osama bin Laden since the mid-1980’s, when both terror chieftains were organizing and directing recruits for the jihad in Afghanistan. Zawahiri and other Egyptian terrorists, in particular Sheikh Omar abd al-Rahman (aka the "Blind Sheikh"), played instrumental roles in al Qaeda’s evolution. Most likely, al Qaeda would not have become nearly as effective without them. Almost all of the key roles inside al Qaeda were filled by EIJ members early on, and the EIJ remains at the core of al Qaeda to this day. It is no exaggeration to say that Zawahiri is as much a part of al Qaeda as Osama bin Laden himself.

But there is more to the story of Saddam’s relationship with the EIJ. If you take a closer look at one of the documents the IPP study relies upon, you will find that Saddam agreed to work with not only Zawahiri’s EIJ, but also, more broadly, the so-called "Afghan Arabs"--the veterans of the Afghanistan jihad against the Soviets who made up almost the entire first generation of al Qaeda--in general. (Of course, the EIJ’s members were themselves "Arab Afghans.")

The key is the January 25, 1993 memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) to Saddam that I discussed in my first post in this series. Recall that just one week earlier, on January 18, Saddam had ordered his minions to use terrorists to "hunt" the Americans throughout the Muslim world, and especially in Somalia. One of the groups the IIS identified as capable of fulfilling this mission was Zawahiri’s EIJ.

According to the January 25 memo, Iraqi Intelligence had recently met with a leading figure in Sudan’s ruling National Islamic Front party, Sheikh Ali ‘Uthman Taha. It was Taha who negotiated a renewal of the relationship between Saddam’s Iraq, on the one hand, and Zawahiri and the Blind Sheikh’s sister organizations on the other. Sudan was then playing host to the Arab Afghans.

Eli Lake, whose been covering this issue for years, reports for the New York Sun:

Mr. McCain's national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, told The New York Sun, "There is ample documentation that Iran has provided many different forms of support to Sunni extremists, including Al Qaeda as well as Shi'ia extremists in Iraq. It would require a willing suspension of disbelief to deny Iran supports Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Responding to Mr. Scheunemann's remarks, a senior foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama, Susan Rice, yesterday told the Sun, "It's very bizarre." She noted that Mr. McCain had "made the same statement three times in as many days. Surely he must know, as Senator Lieberman reminded him, that Iran is not engaged with Al Qaeda in Iraq. I don't know if he is confused, or is he cynically trying to conflate Al Qaeda and Iran as Cheney and Bush did Al Qaeda and Iraq in 2002 and 2003?"

Ms. Rice stipulated in the interview that she was not saying Iran and Al Qaeda have never worked together, but that "there is no body of evidence to suggest Iran is aiding Al Qaeda in Iraq."

Rice echoes what Brian Katulis of the left-wing Center for American Progress said yesterday, calling the intelligence on this a "gray area." Likewise, Rice won't say that Iran and al Qaeda don't work together, so it's hard to see what all the fuss is about. And whatever relationship exists, Iran isn't going to advertise it. In this gray area, the Obama camp leans one way (assuming our enemies don't collaborate) and the McCain camp leans another (assuming they do). Fact of the matter is that what little evidence exists suggests they do work together--and of course when they don't work together there will be no evidence. If Obama makes it to the White House, he can raise the issue with Ahmadinejad during their summit at Camp David--I'm sure he'll get a straight answer (maybe there really is no al Qaeda, or homosexuality, in Iran).

Mark Murray writes at First Read:

When McCain made a foreign policy gaffe in Jordan on Tuesday, it was Sen. Joe Lieberman who quietly pointed out the mistake, giving McCain an opportunity to correct himself in front of the international press corps. In Israel yesterday, NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum reports, Lieberman once again intervened when McCain made an incorrect reference about the Jewish holiday Purim -- by calling the holiday "their version of Halloween here."

Yglesias describes this as "more ignorance" from John McCain. Not really. Having just returned from Israel, I can assure Murray and Yglesias that the sight of little kids running around in costumes is explained to Americans with a simple, "this is their Halloween." Are they actually engaging in some ancient Jewish form of trick or treat? No. And of course Lieberman is an observant Jew, so no big surprise that he didn't love the comparison. But this is a pretty desperate game of gotcha. And if you don't believe me, here's a recent post by an Israeli on the Purim holiday--it's titled "Our Halloween."

Update: John Podhoretz slams Yglesias with a 'get thee to shul and learn something.' Yglesias's commenters are giving it to him pretty good on this as well.

Yesterday, the Clinton Presidential Library released, to much fanfare, 11,000+ pages of Hillary's schedules from her time as First Lady. Journalists were eager to dig up dirt on the presidential candidate, hoping the schedules would reveal truths about Hillary's proclaimed executive and foreign policy experience. Unfortunately, it seems the "dirt" uncovered so far isn't particularly new or interesting.

Do the documents tell us whether or not Hillary has real foreign policy experience? According to the Politico, the schedules "offer only the skeleton of her life as first lady and neither confirm nor rebut her claims that her White House experience prepared her to one day hold the office of president." Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan points us to a Guardian report that Hillary was far from the White House during "key foreign policy moments": For example, Hillary was touring Egyptian ruins while the United States was bombing Serbia. But, as the WSJ Washington Wire blog reports, the documents don't settle the dispute between Hillary and Sinbad, who both "have offered differing accounts of what happened during a March 1996 trip to Bosnia -- a trip that Clinton has listed as part of her foreign-policy credentials in her bid for the Democratic nomination." Useless!

Other bloggers say we just get more of the same Hillary tactics. The American Spectator's Philip Klein agrees that she exaggerated her experience, at least from what he can see in the choppy schedules: "There is, of course, one thing Hillary gained a lot of experience in during the 1990s -- secrecy. So it should come as no surprise to anybody who has been following the Clintons that the much hyped release of her schedules as first lady have become a farce, omitting her private calendar, and deleting key parts that would have been of interest to journalists and historians." And the Swamp's Jim Tankersley reports Clinton campaign "talking points" about the schedules, noting that we see the expected Clinton Spin.

Other journalists and bloggers note the "non-stories" found in the schedules. The Washington Post reports that "after the collapse of her health-care plan in 1994, she largely retreated to a more traditional first lady's calendar of school visits, hospital tours, photo ops and speeches on a narrower set of issues." Hasn't that been reported before? Hot Air's Ed Morrissey points us to another non-story: a WSJ headline "Clinton's Calendar and Vince Foster," the former Clinton adviser who committed suicide. But Morrissey says, "I searched in vain for anything newsworthy in this post, but found absolutely nothing. There are no connections to Foster’s death. Hillary was not in town when he committed suicide, and hadn’t had a scheduled contact with Foster for over a month." Boring.

Some journalists went straight to the days of the Lewinsky scandal, discovering that Hillary was in the White House the day of the infamous "Blue Dress Incident." Glenn Greenwald is outraged by this reporting tactic, and TNR's Jason Zengerle says, "I don't blame Hillary for wanting to keep this stuff under lock and key if this is what investigative reporters are going to use it for." But as Mary Katharine Ham reminds us, this factoid just tells us that Bill is "even trashier than previously thought." No surprise, given his numerous affairs and his slimy campaigning for his wife.

Hotline's Jennifer Skalka calls this reporting a "lousy shameful shortcut. Why not take a closer look at her work in the Northern Ireland peace process, which she's claimed on the trail of late without much support. Or examine her work around the president's failed health care plan. She's said she was instrumental in crafting SCHIP? Yeah, well, prove it.” Given the uselessness of the schedules so far, it seems that Hillary will have to try a little harder to prove that she has the experience she claims.

The president signals his support for Georgia to join NATO:

President Bush indicated support yesterday for Georgia's aspirations to join NATO eventually, but left uncertain whether he will try to start the process at the alliance summit next month in Bucharest, Romania.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made clear he opposes the prospect of Ukraine and Georgia -- former satellites of the Soviet Union -- joining NATO, leaving some alliance countries leery about provoking a conflict with Russia.

After meeting with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in the Oval Office yesterday, Bush said he would like to see Georgia become a NATO member at some point. "I believe that NATO benefits with a Georgian membership. I believe Georgia benefits from being a part of NATO. And I told the president it's a message I'll be taking to Bucharest soon," Bush said.

Just another ally that will be unwilling to dirty its hands in Afghanistan? Or would the Georgians turn out to be shooters like the Poles? NATO also needs fresh troops to unscrew the mess that is Kosovo, but perhaps the alliance should focus on properly integrating the current force before they start bringing more newbies on board.

Still, I love the idea of Ukraine signing the charter. Putting NATO on a new eastern European border (Estonia and Latvia are already there) with the Russians gives me nostalgic Cold War warm fuzzies. And--if nothing else--it'd make the alliance somewhat less of an anachronism.

Roll Call reports that the House Appropriations Committee had its website crashed yesterday by a flood of requests for earmarks. As a result of the problem, they've been forced to extend the deadline to give Members more time to submit requests:

In a sure sign that earmarks remain as popular as ever, an overload of pork requests clogged the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site Wednesday, forcing an extension to the request deadline to next week.

The committee extended its deadline for earmark requests until 11:59 p.m. on March 24 after a “massive influx of requests” caused “unavoidable access and processing delays,” wrote Rob Nabors, staff director for the committee, in a memo to Member offices.

And thus the Democrats act to dramatically reduce the number and scope of earmarks.

A must-read from the Wall Street Journal by Dan Senor and Roman Martinez leads with this quote from Moqtada:

"I have failed to liberate Iraq, and transform its society into an Islamic society."

Senor and Martinez trace Sadr's ascent, and his decline:

In 2007, the U.S. military shifted approach, putting in place for the first time a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy backed by a surge of troops to support it. The new strategy paid large dividends against al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents, as attacks dropped to 2005 levels and Iraqi deaths due to ethno-sectarian violence declined 90% from June 2007 to March 2008. As Sunni attacks against Shiite civilians declined, so did the rationale for Sadr's authority.

As the International Crisis Group concluded, one "net effect" of the surge "was to leave the Sadrist movement increasingly exposed, more and more criticized and divided, and subject to arrest."

There are three major forces at play in Iraq: the surge, the Awakening, and the Sadr cease-fire. There is a lot of debate about which of these forces is dominant, i.e. which is most responsible for the turnaround in security. I think in the case of the Awakening, it's clear that the surge facilitated the progress in Anbar, but was not solely responsible for it. In fact, the Awakening may have reinforced the surge by freeing up units from that once-restive province to augment operations in the Baghdad belts. In any case, Senor and Martinez make a compelling case here that the surge has been critical to beating back the Sadrists in Baghdad.

This other quote from Sadr--"one hand cannot clap alone"--is offered without much context, but if Sadr required chaos in order to leverage support for his Islamist agenda, as Senor and Martinez suggest, then the surge has clearly chopped off that other hand.

Another day, another poll showing that Democrats are not in a mood to put aside their differences after the primaries are concluded and graciously support the eventual nominee:

If Obama is nominated, just 42% of Clinton supporters say they are even somewhat likely to vote for him against McCain. Eighteen percent (18%) of Clinton voters say that they are Not Very Likely to vote for Obama and 35% say they are Not at All Likely to vote for Obama.

On the other hand, if Clinton is nominated, 57% of Obama voters are at least somewhat likely to vote for the former First Lady.

The state is West Virginia, and these numbers should give McCain a leg-up in trying to push the state to the Republican column for the third straight election. Add these to the polls released yesterday showing similar problems in Florida and Ohio. It may ultimately be that an Obama/Clinton unity ticket is the only way to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again -- that or draft a popular Democrat who was not bloodied in the primaries.

From the Boston Globe: Patton and the 2008 Vote, by Jeff Jacoby.

From the Wall Street Journal: No Surrender, by Fouad Ajami.

From China Rises: Blogging from Tibet, by Tim Johnson.

From the Los Angeles Times: Obama Blew It, by Michael Meyers.

From Townhall: Obama's Squandered Chance at Post-Racialism, by Mary Katharine Ham.

Over at the Daily Kos, they're feeling the love for Barack Obama in a manner so demonstrative that even Andrew Sullivan would shudder at the thought of putting such hyperbole down on paper:

Barack Obama is not John Kennedy. He is not Robert Kennedy. He is not Martin Luther King. He is not the Democratic equivalent of Ronald Reagan. He is not simply the anti-thesis of George W. Bush or John McCain.

I hear you asking, “Well who is he then?” Allow the Kos Kid to enlighten you:

Barack Obama is nothing less than our era's Abraham Lincoln. I do not think this is an exaggeration. In his words, temperment (sic), and actions, there is no figure in American history that Barack Obama resembles more than Lincoln. We should have known this all along.

I find the nod to the similarities between Obama’s and Lincoln’s “actions” especially rich. The way Lincoln carried on through four years of war to save the Union and Obama relied on his political fixer friend to purchase his dream house? Hardly distinguishable!

By the way, the Los Angeles Times's Tim Rutten also reached for the Lincoln comparison. Hysterical hyperbole - its not just for the blogosphere anymore.

HT: LGF

A Reverend Wright induced political backlash is underway in at least two key swing states, Ohio and Missouri, and has driven Obama's numbers down even more dramatically in Kentucky, according to Survey USA polling released yesterday.

Last month, for example, Senator Obama led Senator McCain in Ohio by 10 points. But in the most recent survey conducted over the weekend--before the Illinois Senator’s big speech on race--McCain has surged to a 7-point lead in the Buckeye state.

The same pattern emerges in Missouri. Two and a half weeks ago, McCain led Obama by only 6 points. But the most recent polling shows McCain’s lead widening to 14 points.

The most dramatic shift has occurred in a state that should stay in the Republican column no matter what: Kentucky. Polling earlier in the month showed the Arizona Senator leading by 11 points. The most recent Survey USA results, however, give him a 36-point lead over Senator Obama.

All three presidential campaigns have put Ohio and Missouri at the center of their swing state strategy. Voter sentiment in these two key Midwestern battlegrounds deserves close watching. Kentucky is important as well. President Bush won the state in 2000 and 2004, but President Clinton edged out Bob Dole in 1996, proving the right candidate can make that red state competitive. So an Obama/McCain contest could potentially result in some good news for the GOP down ticket, as the party looks to make a comeback after losing a key congressional race in Louisville in 2006 (GOP Rep. Anne Northup) and then the gubernatorial contest in 2007.

Time to recant the Pastor of Disaster?

Rasmussen has conducted a poll measuring “the impact of Pastor Wright and THE SPEECH on Election '08:”

“Early data suggests that it has already had a negative impact on Obama's chances of winning the general election against John McCain. The good news for Obama is that his numbers have stopped falling since his speech on Tuesday. The bad news is that they haven't bounced back.”

For those of you who prefer your data in hard numbers rather than frilly prose, since THE SPEECH Obama's approval rating has soared from 47% (the lowest it had been at any point in the election season) to 48%. In other words, THE SPEECH stopped the bleeding. For now.

What's most striking about these figures is that even with the mainstream media collectively spluttering like a love-struck schoolgirl over Obama's wonderfulness, public opinion hasn't moved. Obama gave a speech that most people thought was great. Said speech momentarily distracted from the issue that was causing his approval rates to plummet. But said speech did not seriously attempt a full accounting of his relationship with Reverend Wright.

Thus, the fundamentals remain unchanged. While wheezing baby-boom nostalgists are experiencing a tingling frisson just thinking about Election '08 hinging on a defining issue of the 1960's like race relations, the rest of the country will make its voting decisions on more topical matters like the economy and foreign policy. And, as always, the candidates' character will have center stage.

Though the Ruskies still aren't happy about it:

Russia's foreign ministry said March 19 it was studying written proposals from the U.S. aimed at allaying Moscow's concerns over Washington's missile defense plans in Europe.

The proposals came after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates held talks in Moscow on Monday and Tuesday with outgoing President Vladimir Putin, president-elect Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials.

"We've literally just received the written proposals of the American side on missile defense and will proceed to study them," foreign ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin told Russian news agency Interfax.

Sounds like diplo-fluff to me. Quite frankly, I don't blame the Russians for throwing a fit over the proposed missile defense radar and interceptors. If they wanted to stand up similiar installations in Canada, we'd be reacting the exact same way. It's not that a few interceptors aimed at containing Iranian Shahabs would stop a full-out, over the pole ICBM lay down between the United States and Russia, but rather the simple fact that the boost-phase interceptors will jumble up Ivan's targeting equation something awful. I've heard stories about the condition of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces from U.S. START Treaty inspectors: launcher tubes filled with water, hatches that won't blow when the missile is released, rocket fuel leaks, etc. They need all of the working missiles that they've got just to cover the bare minimum of targets needed to maintain effective deterrence.

So I suspect that when Putin meets with NATO in April, the only benefit of Russia's analysis will be that their "no" comes with a polite smile.

Pete Wehner has a very interesting piece on the Obama speech today. He echoes the Jay Cost question from yesterday, but then goes further, pointing out that the entire episode, and the widely-praised speech, actually feed all of the major anti-Obama narratives: (1) That he's actually a conventional politician willing to bend the truth and flip-flop; (2) That he isn't tough enough for difficult confrontations (or 3:00 a.m. phone situations); and (3) That he's all speech and no action.

Key graph:

“The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around -- it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror. For the terrorists, Iraq was supposed to be the place where al Qaeda rallied Arab masses to drive America out. Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al Qaeda out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden, his grim ideology, and his murderous network. And the significance of this development cannot be overstated. The terrorist movement feeds on a sense of inevitability, and claims to rise on the tide of history. The accomplishments of the surge in Iraq are exposing this myth and discrediting the extremists. When Iraqi and American forces finish the job, the effects will reverberate far beyond Iraq's borders. Osama bin Laden once said: "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." By defeating al Qaeda in Iraq, we will show the world that al Qaeda is the weak horse.

It's true that the Awakening in Anbar represented the first time that Muslims violently rejected the totalitarian ideology of al Qaeda. One can debate endlessly whether the success of the surge created room for the Awakening or whether the success of the Awakening created room for the surge, but the result is the same. And we have routed al Qaeda from most of the country--the final blow is likely to come soon in Mosul.

The Israeli experience of the last few years offers a real lesson here. They pulled out of Lebanon--unilaterally and not out of military necessity--and Hezbollah claimed victory. More than that, Hezbollah became the vanguard of global jihad. Likewise in Gaza. The Israelis withdrew--unilaterally and not out of military necessity--and Hamas claimed victory. More than that, they overthrew Fatah and radicalized the Palestinian population (really, they are more radical).

If we pull out of Iraq, al Qaeda will claim victory--that much is certain. It will also grow stronger--who would stop it? This is an intolerable outcome. Five years after the initial invasion, nearly 4,000 U.S. troops have died, thousands more have been injured, and much work remains to be done. But it is foolish to think that things couldn't get worse if U.S. troops were to leave, and there is every reason to believe that U.S. troops are finally on the path to victory.

With the ongoing imbroglio over Senator McCain’s comments linking Iran and al Qaeda, it is worth reviewing what Saddam’s own files have to say about Iran’s support for al Qaeda. Not only do Saddam’s Intelligence files confirm that his regime had a significant relationship with al Qaeda, but they also provide more evidence of Iran’s hand in al Qaeda’s terror. Some may say this is impossible: How could two states that hated each other as much as Saddam’s Iraq and the mullah’s Iran support the same terrorist group(s)? However, such thinking is very narrow-minded.

The IPP study proposes that we think of our terrorist enemies as cartels. In this sense, each of these parties competes in some important ways, but they are also capable of collaborating when it suits their interests. The IPP’s paradigm for understanding terrorism is very similar to the one Michael Ledeen proposed in his book, The War Against the Terror Masters. Ledeen has proposed that our terrorist enemies are best compared to rival mafia families, who can bitterly fight one another only to band together when facing a common foe, like law enforcement agencies. James Woolsey, the former head of the CIA, has proposed a similar way of understanding modern Islamic terrorism as well. For Woolsey, terrorist organizations and their sponsors are capable of forming "joint ventures" to fulfill their common interests--e.g. attacking Americans.

Numerous examples of such collaboration can be found throughout the history of Middle Eastern and Islamic terrorism. For example, Yasser Arafat and his PLO allied with both Iraq and Iran at various points throughout Arafat’s terrorist career. Hamas, a terrorist group which is the ideological cousin of al Qaeda and likewise an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, has drawn support from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and previously Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Today, the Sunni Hamas is strongly allied with Iran. And the man who served as Osama bin Laden’s protector and mentor from 1991 through mid-1996, Hassan al-Turabi, was quite open about his relationships with both Saddam Hussein (who he called a "close" ally) and the Iranian Mullahs. Turabi turned his Sudan into a melting pot of terrorism, bringing together disparate groups under a common anti-Western, anti-American banner. (See here and here for my two part series on Turabi.) This does not mean that Saddam’s Iraq and Iran necessarily had to cooperate with each other (although they did when it came to illicit deals under the oil-for-food program), just that each was capable of supporting terrorist groups that shared their immediate interests.

The Times Caucus Blog reports:

As critical as she is about the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a relatively rare shout-out to the military’s top man in Baghdad, General David Petraeus, calling him “an extraordinary leader and a wonderful advocate for our military.”

That's rich. Not too long ago she was telling the general, literally to his face, that one would have to have a “willing suspension of disbelief” to buy into his testimony on the progress of the surge and dodging calls to categorically condemn the disgraceful Moveon.org ad that targeted Gen. Petraeus.

Jay Cost offers up what could be the most damaging question to be asked of Obama in reaction to his speech (in the context of the Democratic primary). He writes:

My concern with the speech is the following. I am not sure what I think about Obama's claim that he never heard Wright make incendiary comments. I think that hinges on the definition of "incendiary." More importantly, I have always thought this was a moot point. Incendiary comments make for great television--but the bigger concern, especially for somebody as smart as Obama, is the philosophy that undergirds them. . . . .

This philosophy is divisive, and Obama was aware of it even if he had not heard its most extreme articulations. At the same time, this philosophy is clearly not the core mission of Trinity United Church of Christ. Jeremiah Wright does not wake up every morning dedicated to dividing people. However, the antipode of this divisiveness is the core mission of Barack Obama. . . .

Accordingly, this inclines me to ask what Obama did about this profound philosophical error. . . . I must ask whether he worked to persuade Wright and the parishioners who applauded so jubilantly at his divisive words that they were wrong on a matter of existential importance. If he did, what was the consequence of those efforts? Did he succeed in bringing about change at Trinity?

With the afterglow of the speech's delivery fading, it seems to me that it created or fed at least as many problems for Obama as it put to bed. Cost's question is of a piece with one of Clinton's major lines of attack--that Obama is "just words."