Monthly Archives: March 2007

March 22, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Joel Mowbray reports: Hamas girl sings jihad

Joel Mowbray ([email protected]) reports on the new video that aired yesterday on Hamas’s TV station. In the video a four-year-old girl sings about the glories of her mother, the suicide bomber. Joel writes: As most of the Western world prepares to recognize the “new” Palestinian government and re-start foreign aid, Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV yesterday broadcast an eery music video, where a young girl sings to her mother, a suicide »
March 22, 2007 — Scott Johnson

The story so far

The American Enterprise Institute has posted Bernard Lewis’s 2007 Irving Kristol lecture. You don’t want to miss it. »
March 22, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Something’s happening here

Josh Gerstein’s New York Sun story this morning discusses a more important flurry of subpoenas than the ones in the national headlines. Gerstein reports that dozens of grand jury subpoenas have been issued in a terrorism financing investigation of Muslim charities in northern Virginia and that the subpoenas have spawned a largely secret legal battle before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. »
March 22, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Steyn alone

This morning we continue with our previews of the new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review of Books, which is hot off the press. The CRB is the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute and is my favorite magazine. The magazine has collected testimonials from a who’s who of stars in the conservative constellation including the late, great Milton Friedman: »
March 22, 2007 — Scott Johnson

The once and future king

Solomon Burke — “the King of rock ‘n soul” — remains one of the last great exponents of the pinnacle of Western civilization known as soul music. Solomon is the surprise hero of Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music and the subject of a brilliant chapter of that magnificent book. Yesterday was Solomon’s birthday. I dragged John to see Burke perform at a private fundraising concert at the Fine Line club »
March 22, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Obamanations

Barack Obama has denied any knowledge or connection to the previously unknown creator of the hugely enjoyable “1984” Hillary ad that John wrote about here yesterday. No sooner had John written about the ad than its creator was revealed as Philip de Vellis, the employee of an Internet consulting firm working for Senator Obama. De Vellis said he had created the ad on his own time at his apartment on »
March 21, 2007 — John Hinderaker

The Wheels of Justice Grind Slowly…

…but this time, at least, they ground pretty fine. I had forgotten the story of Amiri Baraka, the Poet Laureate of New Jersey–an absurd fact in itself–who wrote a poem called “Somebody Blew Up America” in which he alleged that the Jews had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks. We wrote about it at the time, but I lost track of what happened thereafter. It appears that the Governor »
March 21, 2007 — John Hinderaker

All News Is Bad News

The Associated Press reports that the Mahdi Army is splintering, with an unknown number of its members breaking off under the direction of Iran: The violent Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army is breaking into splinter groups, with up to 3,000 gunmen now financed directly by Iran and no longer loyal to the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr…. The AP story contains quite a bit of detail on the current »
March 21, 2007 — John Hinderaker

A Watershed Moment

There has been a lot of talk about the impact of YouTube on the 2008 election. We saw a preview of things to come, I think, in this video, which has now been viewed around 1 1/2 million times: The Associated Press talks about the video: While the video’s final image reads “BarackObama.com,” the campaign of the Illinois senator has denied being behind it. Its creator remained anonymous. But for »
March 21, 2007 — John Hinderaker

Live-Blogging: Let’s Have More!

Participants in the Forum have developed an innovation (for us, anyway)–live-blogging televised news events. It started last week with Valerie Plame’s Senate testimony. That thread now has more than 400 posts. Today, the same Forum participant (Rocketman, no relation) started a thread in which he and others are live-blogging Al Gore’s testimony on global warming. I think this is a great idea. Bloggers have been live-blogging for a long time, »
March 21, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Reich’s Blow-Up

Robert Reich, Dartmouth ’68, is a principled liberal with a sense of humor. As a Dartmouth undergrad, Reich distinguished himself academically, but he also contributed funny, self-deprecating cartoons to the humor magazine (I worked for the magazine my senior year and saw them in the magazine’s archives). His cartoons revolved around the subject of height; Reich stands 4’10”. See this Washington Post story about Reich’s height. I’ve admired him from »
March 21, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Representing John Doe

Audrey Hudson has an interesting page-one story in this morning’s Washington Times on attorneys offering to step forward and represent the “John Doe” defendants pro bono in the lawsuit brought by the flying imams. Hudson quotes Minneapolis attorneys Tom Malone and my friend and former partner Gerry Nolting. She also notes that these attorneys, if called on, might even get paid: “Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix-area physician and director »
March 21, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Drowning in gaps

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Kevin Helliker devoted a column (subscription required) to one of those economic and/or racial “gaps” beloved by liberals promoting the expansion of government: Perhaps no institution in America is less racially diverse than the swimming pool. The result: Black children drown at rates far above average. The problem has drawn little attention because drownings kill a fraction of the number of African-American children who die »
March 21, 2007 — Scott Johnson

Under Western Eyes

Our friends at the Claremont Institute and the Claremont Review of Books have once again afforded us the privilege of rolling out a few pieces from the new (Spring) issue, which has just been mailed out to subscribers. The CRB is the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute and is my favorite magazine. The mission of the CRB, consistent with the mission of the Claremont Institute itself, is to lay »
March 20, 2007 — John Hinderaker

They Don’t Impress ‘Em Much

How many times have you heard that President Bush’s approval ratings are low? Guess what: the Democratic Congress’s approval rating is lower. For some reason, this hasn’t been getting much press. But the low esteem in which voters held Congress prior to November’s election barely changed after the Democrats took power in January. Today, Gallup notes that the modest bounce Congress experienced in January and February is now gone: The »
March 20, 2007 — John Hinderaker

No Reason to Give an Inch

Kudos to President Bush for standing up to the Democrat bullies on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The last thing he should do is accord any credibility to their hyperpartisan “investigation” of the firings of a handful of U.S. Attorneys. To comment on this post, go here. »
March 20, 2007 — John Hinderaker

An Enemy So Evil…

It is hard, sometimes, to appreciate fully how evil our enemies in the war on terror are. This AFP story is a reminder: Insurgents in Iraq detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle with two children in the back seat after US soldiers let it through a Baghdad checkpoint over the weekend, a senior US military official said Tuesday. The vehicle was stopped at the checkpoint but was allowed through when soldiers saw »