Monthly Archives: August 2006

Israel plans ahead

The Washington Times reports that Israel has appointed a top general as its commander for the “Iran front” in anticipation of a possible war with Iran. The general is Elyezar Shkedy, Israel’s air force chief and son of Holocaust survivors. According to the Times, his role for now is to coordinate intelligence gathered by Israel’s spy agency and military sources in order to draw up battle plans. In the event »

There’s no grandstanding like French grandstanding

Former British defense minister Michael Portillo has an excellent column on the French “grandstanding” once again on display in Lebanon. Portillo first applied that term — by which he means the habit of making impressive statements with no means to put them into effect — to the French when he dealt with them during peace-keeping efforts in Bosnia. As Portillo puts it The French believe that what they say is »

CAIRless love for Mearsheimer and Walt

Daniel Pipes notes: In an odd confluence, the mail brought two related items today. One was an announcement from the Council on American-Islamic Relations that it will host a panel on August 28 on “The Israel Lobby and the U.S. Response to the War in Lebanon” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., starring John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, co-authors of “The Israel Lobby” study. The other was the »

For Those Who Care

To the surprise of no one, Richard Armitage is now being identified as the original Valerie Plame “leaker.” Armitage’s mention of her to Robert Novak is described as inadvertent, unintentional or otherwise innocent. So far, no one is demanding that he be frog-marched out of the State Department, or wherever he now resides. There’s lots of discussion of this development by Byron York and Cliff May at The Corner; just »

Business as usual?

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has told Lebanese television that negotations are taking place to bring about a prisioner swap. And the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram has reported that, according to high-ranking Egyptian sources, an exchange is set to take place between Israel and Hezbollah within the next two or three weeks. An exchange of the usual type, two Israeli soldiers for hundreds of terrorists, is the exchange Israel could have had »

A Stone’s throw from an argument

Aaron Brenzel is a rising sophomore at the University of Chicago. This past February Aaron attended a debate symposium featuring Andrew McCarthy, Professor Geoffrey Stone and Judge Richard Posner on “Defending Democracy: Balancing the Fight for Civil Liberties with the Fight Against Terrorism.” The Chicago Maroon briefly reported on the debate here. Aaron forwarded his own eyewitness report in the context of our critical comments on Professor Stone’s Chicago Tribune »

Reuters Alleges Israeli Air Strike

Given Reuters’s coverage of the conflict in Lebanon, it would perhaps be understandable if the Israelis started firing on Reuters vehicles. Which is what Reuters now says they did: Israeli aircraft fired two missiles early Sunday at an armored car belonging to the Reuters news agency, wounding five people, including two cameramen, Palestinian witnesses and hospital officials said. The army said the troops were searching for explosives planted by Palestinian »

Fox Journalists Released

Good news from Gaza, where Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig have been released by their Palestinian kidnappers. The circumstances are still murky. I note, however, that the AP article linked to above says: [S]enior Palestinian security officials said Sunday the name was a front for local militants, and that Palestinian authorities had known the identity of the kidnappers from the start. If that’s true, one wonders »

State Fair Madness, and More

Posting was light to nonexistent yesterday, but this time it wasn’t due to slacking off. The day started at the Minnesota State Fair, where the Northern Alliance Radio Network is once again broadcasting live on the weekends. It was a beautiful day, and the Patriot booth was thronged with people. Chad the Elder and I did our usual 11 to 1 segment; Brian Ward was out of town, but Hugh »

No sunshine from the Sun

The other day, I noted that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons had endorsed Maryland Republican Michael Steele for the U.S. Senate, and that Simmons would be attending a Steele fundraiser in Baltimore. Simmons, as I pointed out, has a substantial political action committee and is said to have helped register hundreds of thousands of voters over the years, many of them African-American, for the Democratic party. And Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, »

A flying start

That’s what Everton is off to in the English Premier League. We opened by beating Watford at home. Next, we drew with a well-regarded Blackburn team at Blackburn on a late goal by Tim Cahill off the bench. And today, we defeated Tottenham Hotspur in London 2-0. This win was extraordinary for two reasons. First, we accomplished it playing with only 10 men most of the match. In fact, we »

A stone’s throw from lawlessness

Earlier this week the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed column by University of Chicago Professor Geoffrey Stone on the NSA decision by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor. In the column Professor Stone attempts to lend a veneer of respectability to Judge Taylor’s widely derided opinion; instead he makes himself a figure whom it is difficult to respect. In the NSA case the government raised issues that would and possibly should have »

An anti-Shariah program that seems to go too far

Diana West inks Part 2 of the speech she would like President Bush to give to the American people (Part 1 is here). The speech would announce two new policies around which to re-direct the war on terror: (1) a ban on further Islamic immigration, beginning with immigration from “Shariah states” — i.e., those whose governing traditions derive wholly or in some important from from the edicts of Islam and »

Dueling Headlines

The Washington Times and the New York Times both reported today on a Pew survey that tried to gauge Americans’ attitudes toward religion and politics. The Washington Times’s headline: “Few see Democrats as friendly to religion.” The New York Times’s headline: “In Poll, G.O.P. Slips as a Friend of Religion.” Does anyone sense an agenda here? As for which headline more fairly represents the poll’s results, the Pew survey found »

The Mitt begins to fit

W. James Antle III, at the American Spectator blog, argues that with George Allen’s standing diminished at least for now by his “macaca” comment, Mitt Romney plausibly can claim to be the most viable Republican presidential contender to the right of John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. That’s not a bad claim to be able to make. However, Romney is not necessarily secure in that position. For one thing, as Antle »

Who Won?

Amir Taheri argues in today’s Wall Street Journal that the perception that Hezbollah won the recent war in Lebanon is incorrect: Having lost more than 500 of its fighters, and with almost all of its medium-range missiles destroyed, Hezbollah may find it hard to sustain its claim of victory. “Hezbollah won the propaganda war because many in the West wanted it to win as a means of settling score with »

A House cliff-hanger?

Larry Sabato, the well-known election analyst at the University of Virginia, looks at the battle for control of the House. He seems to be somewhere between “too close to call” and “looking good for the Dems.” Sabato provides a chart with information on the 40 races he thinks are in-play. Here’s his overall take: 31 out of 40 are currently held by the GOP, which means Democrats would need only »