Monthly Archives: September 2006

Twin Cities to Host GOP in ’08

Minneapolis and St. Paul apparently have won their bid to host the 2008 Republican convention, beating out New York, Cleveland and Tampa-St. Pete. The convention will be at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. Time to dust off the party hats and start blowing up balloons. It should be a fun time for those of us who live here. And, for those who are just visiting, don’t worry: there »

Too much faith in her man

Hillary Clinton has rallied to her husband’s defense, insisting that “if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled ‘Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States’ he would have taken it more seriously than. . .it was taken by our current president and his national security team.” As Tom Joscelyn points out, though, Hillary’s husband actually signed a classified document that said »

Bush and Karzai on the NIE

Yesterday, President Bush and Afghanistan’s President Karzai gave a press conference at which Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press demanded to know how Bush can say that the Iraq war has made us safer, when the partially-leaked National Intelligence Estimate says the war has fueled jihadism around the world. We quoted Bush’s answer, as well as Karzai’s contribution, yesterday, and video of Karzai was on Hot Air yesterday, too. But »

Welcome to Waziristan

Tony Blankley concludes that the Waziristan Accord between Pakistan and North Waziristan represents “a substantial defeat in the war against radical Islam.” Blankley credits Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’s Weekly Standard article — “Pakinstan surrenders” — and a few blogs for their reporting and commentary on this development. Blankley speculates and concludes: I don’t have any basis for this, but I can’t help wondering whether Musharraf is planning to retire. His announcement at »

Sabato’s sabotage

Yesterday I noted the mystifying comments of University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato on his personal knowledge of Senator Allen’s alleged use of a racial slur: “I’m simply going to stay with what I know is the case and the fact is he did use the n-word, whether he’s denying it or not.” I took Sabato’s reputation as a nonpartisan analyst and commentator at face value. With diligence suitable to »

What Clinton didn’t do

While watching Bill Clinton’s bloviations on FOX News Sunday during Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace, I thought of Richard Miniter, the journalist and author of Losing Bin Laden. Given that Chris Wallace was able to prompt that red-faced response with such an innocuous question, I wondered if a few minutes with Miniter might not send Clinton to intensive care. I thought, for example, that Miniter might ask Clinton a few »

The AP Goes Over the Top for the Democrats

The administration declassified and released the three-page “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate; we linked to it earlier today. The document, taken as a whole, shows that the leaks given to the New York Times and Washington Post were so incomplete and unrepresentative as to be wildly misleading, as were the stories those papers wrote based on the leaks. At this morning’s press conference, the AP’s Jennifer Loven, one »

Pajamas at the press club

This evening, I had the honor of appearing on a Pajamas Media panel at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The topic was “How Partisan is Too Partisan.” Glenn Reynolds served as the moderator. My co-panelists were Michael Barone, Tom Bevan, Mark “Mystery Pollster” Blumenthal, Jane Hall, Cliff May, and Claudia Rosett. Pajamas also introduced two major new additions to its editorial board — Washington editor Richard Miniter and »

Bush and Karzai Strike Back

This morning President Bush and President Karzai of Afghanistan had a brief press conference at the White House. After some introductory remarks, they opened the floor for questions. You can read the full transcript here. The first question came from our old friend old friend Jennifer Loven: Q Thank you, sir. Even after hearing that one of the major conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate in April was that the »

Bush Agrees: NIE to be Declassified!

President Bush lost no time in agreeing with suggestions from Senator Cornyn and others that the National Intelligence Estimate that was the basis for stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, claiming that the Iraq war has hurt our efforts in the war on terror, be declassified so the American people can judge for themselves: Bemoaning an election-year leak, President George W. Bush on Tuesday said he would »

Cornyn Calls for Release of NIE

We have criticized the New York Times and Washington Post for printing front-page stories about last spring’s National Intelligence Estimate, based on fragmentary, selective and probably illegal leaks from Democrats embedded in the bureaucracy. As we noted last night, there is good reason to think that the Times and Post stories do not fairly represent the report in its entirety. We, of course, haven’t read the report. But Senator John »

A word to Dartmouth alumni

As you can’t help knowing by now, the powers-that-be at Dartmouth College are engaged in a public relations blitz and major league turn-out-the-vote effort supporting passage of the proposed alumni constitution. We urge alumni to vote “Reject” on the proposed constitution and “Accept” on proposed amendments two through five. (Voting continues through October 31.) Today the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a press release (with many links) on »

The macaca offensive, take 2

University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato has “joined one of Sen. George Allen’s former college football teammates in claiming the senator used a racial slur to refer to blacks in the early 1970s[.]” The AP story reports: Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, would not tell The Associated Press how he knew Allen used the n-word. He told Chris Matthews on MSNBC that he did not »

Play it as it lies, take 2

The New York Post carries a reported editorial including comments from Secretary Rice on Bill Clinton’s bloviations with Chris Wallace on FOX News Sunday: The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there..is just flatly false,” the former national security adviser told The Post’s editorial board yesterday. “What we did in eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding [eight] »

The wrong stuff, take 2

In his Washington Times column yesterday, Joel Mowbray postulates that Minnesota Fifth District congressional candidate Keith Ellison raises the “Democrats’ dilemma.” Joel writes: Only learned recently and far more troubling [than Ellison’s history with the Nation of Islam] is Mr. Ellison’s seemingly tight connection with Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom he met almost two decades ago at the University of Minnesota. Mr. Ellison’s campaign »

Just wondering

From NRO’s Corner, we learn that the Mitt Romney operation has acquired the services and support of New Hampshire Republican insider Tom Rath. Kathryn Lopez describes Rath (Dartmouth ’67) as a “big get” for Romney, and I have no reason to doubt this claim. But wasn’t Rath instrumental in the process that caused the first President Bush to nominate David Souter for the Supreme Court? »

Podcasting the World’s Miscreants

Not all of them, of course. But it did seem that in Saturday’s radio show we were able to tee off on some pretty disreputable characters. Osama bin Laden, first of all: dead or alive? Next, Bill Clinton, whose Fox News appearance hadn’t yet aired, with the exception of a few clips on YouTube, by the time we were on the radio. So we had some lively conversation about Clinton’s »