Is it Tuesday already?
(Continuously updated throughout the day)
Contributed by Bill Faith
Feels like another Monday. Some days there just ain't enough coffee. I put a lot of time, and a lot of me, into those last two posts last night. Sitting here with Still in Saigon doing an endless loop in my mind while I worked on Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Viet Nam War, then still couldn't shut it down while I worked on My Love's In Arizona. Carol, consider the timestamp on that last one proof I really do care about those kids you're trying to help. Unless something a lot more exciting happens than has so far today, there are only two ways for the day to go; either the other Dogs are going to do several posts or My Love's In Arizona isn't going to scroll very far down the page. Either way's OK I guess. I may be up to collecting a "things you oughta read" list but that's going to be about it.
Some things you oughta read:
United Nations chief Kofi Annan was booed by a crowd chanting pro-Hezbollah slogans on Monday as he toured Beirut's southern suburbs devastated by Israel's war against the Shiite militant group. Dozens of men, women and children angrily waved pictures of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and shouted "Allah, Nasrallah and all of the suburbs" as the UN secretary general emerged from his car to survey the destruction in the heart of the Haret Hreik area, a Hezbollah stronghold. ...
Forced conversions in Islamic history are not exceptional—they have been the norm, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—for over 13 centuries. Orders for conversion were decreed under all the early Islamic dynasties—Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Mamluks. Additional extensive examples of forced conversion were recorded under both Seljuk and Ottoman Turkish rule (the latter until its collapse in the 20th century), the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar dynasties of Persia/Iran, and during the jihad ravages on the Indian subcontinent, beginning with the early 11th century campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, and recurring under the Delhi Sultanate, and Moghul dynasty until the collapse of Muslim suzerainty in the 18th century following the British conquest of India.
It's easy to add up all of the people who lost in the collapse of Valerie Plame leak case after Michael Isikoff and David Corn revealed that Richard Armitage originally gave the information to Robert Novak. Joe Wilson watched his carefully-constructed and mostly false version of events come apart at the seams. Novak lost his job at CNN (later catching on with Fox) and came under tremendous criticism for his refusal to act to free other journalists from legal action. Patrick Fitzgerald put a lot of tarnish on his previously sterling reputation for extending a criminal investigation for years after the culprit confessed five days into the Department of Justice probe. Judith Miller lost the respect of her peers because of a belief that she protected Bush administration officials and acted as a mouthpiece for them, an assessment that none of her colleagues bothered to revisit after the Isikoff/Corn story came out on Sunday.
The only man who appears to have emerged from the spectacle relatively unharmed and perhaps enhanced is Karl Rove. ...
"I think, you know, we need some fresh thinking. There's a tendency of civil libertarians to kind of repeat tired formulas. It's a kind of nostalgia for the old days. It's like the people who are misty-eyed about the New Deal and things like that or the labor union struggles of the 1920s, the Wobblies...civil libertarians are nostalgic for the McCarthy days. A simple enemy -- McCarthyism...Now, it seems to me, immensely more complex."
The Club For Growth has a new poll on the identity of the Secret Holder -- the Senator who placed an anonymous hold on S.2590, the federal budget database for public scrutiny sponsored by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama. The early voting has Ted "Bridge To Nowhere" Stevens, the man who demanded that his pork pass Congress or he would say "A-beeble-a-beeble-a That's All, Folks!", in the lead, but the Club has several other leading candidates as possibilities.
As the originator of the Red Cross Ambulance story, I would urge the elements of the blogosphere still running with the story to at least slow down, if not back up. They are increasingly looking like the very drive by media against which we so often rant, running the risk of being exploited by propagandists on another side of an issue. And no matter how much many of us may support that side, propagandists on both sides do exist. For the record, I'm guilty, too.
The fact is ZombieTime's post does not do what it claims, proving the ambulance attack demonstrably false. ...
Israeli video journalist Itai Anghel went into Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon with the Nahal Brigade and shot 25 minutes of riveting house-to-house combat footage with a night vision lens.
The Hezbollah fighters wore Israeli uniforms.
[Video link.]
Today, CNN’s Kyra Phillips got caught, well, with her skirt down. Someone in CNN left her mic open and on the air as she went to the loo in the middle of President Bush’s speech commemorating the Katrina anniversary. So instead of getting the president’s remarks, CNN’s audience got that and Phillips in some girl-chat.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease “a new type of fascism.” In unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from “moral or intellectual confusion” about what threatens the nation’s security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.
In remarks to several thousand veterans at the American Legion’s national convention, Rumsfeld recited what he called the lessons of history, including the failed efforts to appease the Adolf Hitler regime in the 1930s. “I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism,” he said.
- FEC Kills Political Speech During Elections
As expected, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act has forced the courts to issue a prior restraint against political speech during an election campaign. Mark Tapscott caught the story out of Washington, and laments the corrosive effect that the McCain-Feingold bill has had on freedom of speech:
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