Monthly Archives: May 2006

May 24, 2006 — Scott Johnson

Top secret, take 2

At Armavirumque, James Pierson has a thoughtful post on the possible prosecution of the New York Times: “Is the New York Times about to be indicted?” Pierson’s post contributes his own close reading of the Times to interpret the Times’s handling of its criminal jeopardy. I set out my own analysis of the legal issues in the Standard column “Exposure” and Gabriel Schoenfeld explored the issues at length in “Has »
May 24, 2006 — Scott Johnson

Waters dark and deep

John’s recent posts on the miserable Katrina coverage brought to mind Waters Dark and Deep: One New Orleans Family’s Rescue Amid the Devastation of Hurricane Katrina by Newsday reporter Katie Thomas. (See also the book’s site here.) If you’re at all interested in the part of the story most reporters missed — that is, how lots of people came together to help those in urgent need (one of the protagonists »
May 24, 2006 — Paul Mirengoff

A vote that shouldn’t be ducked

The Hill speculates, as I have, that Lindsey Graham is blocking the nomination of Jim Haynes to the Fourth Circuit, and that Graham’s good friend John McCain may also be involved. The notion is that McCain, who opposes Haynes because as General Counsel of Defense Department Haynes had a role with respect to the treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees, would rather not have to vote against Haynes. By preventing Haynes »
May 24, 2006 — Paul Mirengoff

News of the weird

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that a California school district’s use of role-playing in a world history class to teach middle school students about Islam did not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The plaintiffs claimed that 125 middle school students were asked to select a Muslim name, learn Islamic prayers, stage make-believe pilgrimages to Mecca, fast during lunch to simulate the fasting done »
May 24, 2006 — Paul Mirengoff

Prime Minister Olmert addresses Congress

This morning, I had the privilege of attending the address of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the Joint Session of Congress. I sat with journalists, and several other bloggers, at the invitation of the Israeli embassy. Olmert is an effective, forceful speaker and Congress received his speech well. Here’s an account by an AP reporter that appears on the Washington Post’s website. Olmert expressed his belief that the Palestinians »
May 24, 2006 — John Hinderaker

Podcasts Now Available on News Site

You can now access our most recent podcasts on Power Line News; check out the bottom left column. Links to our two most recent podcasts will show up there. So, if you missed our Northern Alliance podcasts over the weekend, you can download Hour One, where we discussed immigration, especially the fallout over President Bush’s speech, and the nomination of General Hayden as CIA director, and Hour Two, in which »
May 24, 2006 — John Hinderaker

Who’s Inept?

Following up on our post yesterday on the media malpractice that characterized Hurricane Katrina coverage, Jonah Goldberg has more. His NRO column is subtitled: “Katrina revealed ineptitude—of the press, that is.” As I’ve written before, virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn’s words, “bands of rapists, going block to block”? Not true. The tales of snipers firing on medevac »
May 24, 2006 — John Hinderaker

Who Are We to Judge?

Blog of the Week Fraters Libertas notes that the heirs of those who peddled moral equivalence during the Cold War are still at it, citing a column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by one Robert Jamieson. Jamieson defends one world leader who, he says, “admittedly…has invoked language that is tough, defiant and downright ugly at times.” Could have been Churchill, until we got to the “ugly” part. But no! It’s Iran’s »
May 24, 2006 — Scott Johnson

Will to win

Julia Gorin’s New York Observer column on Hillary Clinton makes the simple point that she is “someone who must be defeated because of who she is and not respected for who she pretends to be.” (Courtesy of RealClearPolitics.) »
May 24, 2006 — Scott Johnson

Will to believe

Does the amnesty component of President Bush’s “comprehensive immigration reform” have anything in common with the plan by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert to withdraw unilaterally from 95 percent of the West Bank? Both appear to acknowledge — but nevertheless repeat — some unhappy history with weak denials of the repetition. Perhaps some variety of Nietzschean eternal recurrence is at work, or some variety of the Jamesian will to believe. By »
May 23, 2006 — Paul Mirengoff

Jimmy Carter, call your office

Iran reportedly has followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent wacky letter to President Bush with explicit requests for direct talks with the U.S. about its nuclear program. The Bush administration apparently is not enthusiastic, but the Washington Post’s CIA sources are. One enthusiast is former CIA Middle East intelligence analyst (and my old college roommate and debate partner) Paul Pillar. Paul says: There is no question in my mind that there »
May 23, 2006 — Paul Mirengoff

Soft and softer

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is here in Washington trying to sell the U.S. on his plan to withdraw from much of the West Bank in exchange for nothing from the Palestinians. The Washington Post reports that the Bush administration is “uneasy” about this plan. And well it might be. The withdrawal enables Hamas to make the West Bank into “a Taliban-style safe-heaven for other terrorists” (to quote Frank Gaffney) »
May 23, 2006 — Scott Johnson

Those stinkin’ badges

Dr. Andrew Bostom follows up his earlier American Thinker column on “Badging infidels in Iran” with further thoughts on the tradition of Persian/Shi’te regulation of the clothing of non-Muslims: “The yellow badge of denial.” »
May 23, 2006 — Paul Mirengoff

One would hope

Sherman Frederick, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, predicts that “in 50-plus months, Nevada voters will march to the polls and replace Sen. Harry Reid, thus ending one of the longer, more powerful political runs in state history.” According to Frederick (a critic of Reid but whose paper has endorsed him in all of Senate races): “Landslide Harry” is used to close races. Races that can be decided by a »
May 23, 2006 — John Hinderaker

Hayden Cruises Through Intelligence Committee

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted in favor of General Michael Hayden’s nomination to head the CIA this afternoon, 12 to 3. As we predicted, notwithstanding Howard Dean’s denunciations of Gen. Hayden, very few Democrats wanted to be on the wrong side of the terrorist surveillance issue. The three Democrats who voted “No” were Feingold, Wyden and Bayh. Two of the three, Feingold and Wyden, are quoted in the CNN story »
May 23, 2006 — John Hinderaker

Katrina Media Malpractice: Worse than we Knew!

With another hurricane season approaching, Lou Dolinar’s analysis of the medial meltdown over Katrina in Real Clear Politics couldn’t be more timely. Dolinar shows that the media almost completely ignored an extraordinarily successful rescue effort, by the National Guard and others, that saved tens of thousands of lives in New Orleans. In their haste to broadcast lurid (albeit false) stories of chaos and mayhem, the press missed the real story: »
May 23, 2006 — John Hinderaker

Is the Glass Really Two-Thirds Empty?

Michael Barone writes, in U.S. News, that times are good; in some respects, remarkably good: [W]e are living not in the worst of times but in something much closer to the best. What do I mean? First, economic growth. In 2005, as in 2004, the world economy grew by about 5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, and the IMF projects similar growth for several years to come. This »