Monthly Archives: December 2006

Saddam to Die?

Iraq’s High Tribunal, its highest appellate court, has affirmed Saddam Hussein’s death sentence and ordered that it be carried out within thirty days. It is unclesr how this order relates to the second criminal trial that is now ongoing; if it is carried out, all further charges and proceedings will obviously be moot. As I’ve written before, I think it was a mistake to “try” Saddam in a court, as »

Able Danger Debunked?

We and many others have covered the curious story of Able Danger, the military data-mining project that allegedly turned up information about Mohammed Atta prior to September 11. If you search our site, you will find a number of links to stories about the project and about at least two of its former members, Naval Capt. Scott Philpott and Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who say that their efforts to get »

Blog Wars

Blog Wars, a documentary on the blogosphere’s role in Ned Lamont’s Senate campaign, will air on the Sundance Channel on Thursday evening, December 28. (Check your local cable listings for times.) British filmmaker James Rogan obtained remarkable access to both the leading liberal bloggers and (to the extent there was a difference) the Lamont campaign. The result is a fascinating, you-are-there look at contemporary politics, as lived on the web. »

Jimmy Carter under-explained

In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s inaccurate and unbalanced book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, several commentators have tried to identify the source of our worst ex-president’s virulent dislike of the Jewish state. A piece in the Weekly Standard (which I don’t think is available online) adopted an economic explanation, pointing out how Carter and his interests have been funded for decades by Arab sources. Today, Michael Oren provides a religious »

The friends of Keith Ellison

According to the invaluable report of the Chicago Tribune, the Muslim Brotherhood operates in the United States as the Muslim American Society. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’s “MAS’s Muslim Brotherood problem” expands on the meaning of MAS’s relationship to the Muslim Brotherood. Like the Muslim Brotherhood and the MAS, the Islamic Circle of North America promotes the establishment of the Islamic system of life. According to Steven Emerson, the ICNA also has close »

Out of sight

There can’t be many artists to have overcome more dire circumstances and become stars than James Brown, who died early this morning at age 73. “I remember him coming to school barefoot in the winter,” Brown’s elementary school classmate and road manager Henry Stallings told an interviewer in 1982. As Robert Palmer writes in his profile of Brown for the Rolling Stone Illustrated Guide to Rock & Roll: “Brown was »

Christmas in Christendom

“Christmas in Christendom” is the 1967 essay by the late University of Dallas professor Frederick Wilhelmsen with which William Buckley closed his anthology Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century. The essay was dropped from Keeping The Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought, the later, more focused edition of the anthology produced by Buckley and Charles Kesler in 1988. It struck me when I »

It May Be Christmas, But…

…our soldiers are still fighting in Iraq and around the world. And tonight, what could be an important development, high-ranking Iranians have been detained in raids in Iraq: The American military is holding at least four Iranians in Iraq, including men the Bush administration called senior military officials, who were seized in a pair of raids late last week aimed at people suspected of conducting attacks on Iraqi security forces, »

Merry Christmas!

…to all of our readers. We hope that you and your families are enjoying a blessed holiday season. »

Misreporting Polls

We’ve often criticized pollsters on various grounds. At least as big a problem as bad polls, however, is bad reporting on polls. Very often, when one reads a news story about a poll and then reads the actual poll results, the poll doesn’t support the story. It looks like a case in point is currently going around the web. On the Drudge Report is a link that says “POLL: Most »

With #217 you get eggroll

Reader Kurt Hoglund writes to comment on the issues John raised in the note he appended to “Pants, socks, trailer, trash: The OIG report” yesterday: From my time in the Defense Mapping Agency/National Imagery and Mapping Agency/National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, working for long years on a digital conversion project for the reprographic material (repromate) used to image printing plates, I also had to deal with the National Archives and their view »

Embracing defeat

Some wag at the Washington Post has given the subhead “the case for flip-flopping” to John Kerry’s op-ed column.” In a guest post at Hugh Hewitt, Josh Trevino calls his response to Kerry’s column “The sunshine patriots.” Jules Crittenden calls his response to Kerry’s column “Peace in our time” (the permalink isn’t working, scroll down to find it). To comment on Kerry’s article, Trevino’s or Crittenden’s posts, or just generally »

Ethiopia Enters Somalia Conflct

The situation in Somalia is very dire, with Islamic militants controlling Mogadishu and much of the country. Ehiopia has now joined the fighting: Fighting escalated in Somalia Sunday as Ethiopian planes and helicopter gun ships attacked Islamist targets in several central provinces. One area that came under heavy attack was the town of Baledweyn, 220 miles south of the capital Mogadishu… In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s information minister said his country »

Son of a gun

Emmylou Harris broke up the Hot Band that, in one form or another, had backed her between 1975 and 1989. Among the stars that emerged from the Hot Band were Ricky Skaggs and Rodney Crowell. By 1991 Emmylou had convened the Nash Ramblers to back her in a bluegrassy lineup that featured Sam Bush on mandolin and fiddle, Al Perkins on dobro, Jon Randall on lead guitar, the late Roy »

Music to an Evertonian’s ears

The English Premier League reached the half-way point today. Everton won at Reading 2-0 and moved into eighth place. Andy Johnson scored one goal and assisted on the other. It was Johnson’s seventh goal of the year (a respectable number at this juncture) but also his first since late September. Earlier in the week Everton and Johnson won a different kind of victory. They forced an apology from Chelsea coach »

Should we be careful of what we wish for in Iraq?

In the »

One war at a time in Iraq

Rueul Marc Gerecht says we should “fight one war at a time” in Iraq. The war Gerecht wants us to fight now is against the Sunni insurgency and its cousin the “holy war of foreign jihadists against the new Iraq.” Victory in this war would make it less likely that we will need to fight Shia militias, Gerecht maintains, since these groups have “become more militant owing to the tenacity »