Petraeus: Troops in Iraq help blunt Iran threat

WASHINGTON - Army Gen. David Petraeus, who is to assume control of U.S. forces in the Middle East, says that a continued U.S. presence in Iraq is more likely to blunt, rather than inflame, Iran's growing influence in the region. In a 46-page question-and-answer document submitted in advance of his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Petraeus says the U.S. must work on developing more leverage - primarily diplomatic or economic - to pressure Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. But, he notes, the U.S. must retain military strike options...

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Gates Again Asks Congress to Pass Emergency Funding Act

WASHINGTON, May 20, 2008 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates asked Congress today to act quickly to approve the president’s $102.5 billion fiscal 2008 supplemental war budget request.
Gates told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee that the delay in passing the emergency legislation means the department is now using fourth-quarter funds from the department’s base budget to cover current war costs.

If Congress doesn’t act soon, Gates said, two critical accounts will run dry, starting with Army military personnel.

“After June 15, we will run out of funds in this account to pay soldiers, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Gates said.

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From Detainee to Detonatee

"A Kuwaiti man released from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in 2005 has carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq, his cousin told Al Arabiya television on Thursday," Reuters reports from Dubai.[snip]

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, blogger and law professor Jonathan Adler makes a manful effort at evenhandedness: [snip]

According to Adler, both sides agree that the detainees at Guantanamo are terrorists, differing only over how they became terrorists. The real distinction is that one side favors keeping the terrorists at Guantanamo so as to prevent terrorism, whereas the other side wants to release the terrorists so that they can murder more Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere...

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Twofer...

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U.S. and UK say Hezbollah weaker after Beirut fighting

The United States and Britain said on Thursday they believed Hezbollah had been weakened by this month's fighting in Beirut despite the greater influence the militant group gained in Lebanon's Cabinet. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Secretary David Miliband rejected the view that the show of force by Hezbollah had increased its power. "Hezbollah lost something very important, which is any argument that it is somehow a resistance movement on behalf of the Lebanese people," Rice told reporters...

[their additional seats now allow them to veto any legislation they disagree with. So, are we going to act on their weakened state - while it lasts - to wipe them out? Of course not? Then they won.]

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Sharia law part of deal to stop attacks

Islamabad - A Pakistani Government deal to bring peace to the conflict-ravaged Swat valley will introduce Sharia law in return for an end to Taliban suicide bombings, attempts to stop girls going to school and attacks on barbers who shave beards. The peace deal was signed on Wednesday by the newly elected Government of North West Frontier Province and representatives of the cleric Maulvi Fazlullah, whose fighters battled the army last year.

[translation: they won]

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A Talk in Tehran

The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) reports that two organizations at Tehran University will host a May 26th conference on “Israel’s End” in order to coincide with “the sad 60th anniversary of Palestine’s occupation by the Zionists.” Here’s the IRNA:

The guests of the conference that would be attended by Iranian and foreign students of universities in Tehran will be intellectuals and university professors from Egypt, Venezuela, Morocco, Lebanon, Indonesia, the United States, Pakistan, Argentina, India, Iraq, Syria, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, France, Tunisia, and a number of other countries.

In March, the Justice-Seeking Student Movement, one of groups organizing the upcoming confab, offered a bounty of more than $1 million for the assassination of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Mossad director Meir Dagan, and military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin.

What kind of student activist group has a cool million laying around in a mercenary fund?

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The United States and U.N. Security Resolution 1325

The House Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight held a hearing last week to discuss House Resolution 146 which concerns the United States’ 'responsibility' regarding the United Nations Security Resolution 1325.

The introduction to the resolution states: “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the United States should take action to meet its obligations, and to ensure that all other member states of the United Nations meet their obligations, as agreed to in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325..." [snip]

The problem is that the United States has not agreed to the obligations of the UN Security Resolution 1325. That UN Resolution refers to numerous UN treaties. The United States has made no commitments to those treaties. For instance, we have withdrawn from the International Criminal Court to which it refers. [snip]

It is important to note exactly WHY the United States has chosen NOT to make these commitments.

The issue in regard to the U.N. treaties is a matter of national sovereignty, a matter of quotas and a matter of the specific provisions of the various treaties that would challenge the laws and culture of the United States...

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German universities bow to public pressure over GM crop

Scientists have decried the decision by two German universities to pull the plug on field trials of genetically modified (GM) crops, calling it a “disgraceful” interference with scientists' freedom to research. “Unfortunately, we were no longer able to deal with the massive opposition from politicians and the general public. The university has a reputation in the region that we cannot risk losing.”

[truly amazing: there's food riots erupting all over the planet, but because of the euro-enviro's long standing hysteria over genetically modified crops they're actually succeeding in banning the single most promising solution to world hunger. What's next, refusing to develop energy because the Earth has a fever?]

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Blessed are the sceptics

IN 1633 Galileo Galilei was hauled before the religious authorities of his day, the Inquisition, for daring to concur with Copernicus that the Earth was not the centre of the universe and also that it orbited the sun rather than the other way around.

For his pains, he was placed under house arrest and forced to recant. Giordano Bruno failed to recant and suffered a crueller fate.

Today we are faced with a newer religion known as environmental activism which has insinuated itself into some aspects of science. It shares some of the intolerance to new or challenging ideas with the old. Immolation at the stake is no longer fashionable but it has been replaced by pillory in the media.

The new faith makes it apostasy to question the proposition that our river systems are dying and that nothing like this has ever happened before. And it is the blackest heresy to suggest that the beatification of StAl and the Goronites may be a little premature.

The symbols and practices of the new and the old faiths are remarkably similar...

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Governor says Alaska will challenge polar bear listing

Anchorage, Alaska -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says the state will sue to challenge the listing of polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Palin on Wednesday said there is insufficient evidence to support the decision U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made last week. Palin says polar bears are well managed and that their numbers have dramatically increased over 30 years...

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To give America freedom

What do the following recent events have in common? c The president of the United States has prostrated himself for the second time in five months before the king of Saudi Arabia, pleading for more oil.

Despite George Bush's inducements — an array of advanced, offensive arms; the promise of nuclear technology with which the Saudis can expect (like the North Koreans, Iranians, Pakistanis, etc.) to acquire the ultimate weapons; and U.S. help securing Saudi Arabia's borders (something the president has declined to do at home) — the American plea was spurned. The contempt felt by the House of Saud was captured in its oil minister's quip, "If you want more oil, buy it." [snip]

• The Senate rejected, by a vote of 56-42, an initiative offered by Republicans that called for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska and some offshore waters now closed to exploration and exploitation of their substantial oil reserves.

• In addition, that chamber's appropriations committee refused by a similar party-line vote to lift its moratorium on oil-shale production in Colorado.

It seems that, if we want more oil, we will have to buy it at ever increasing prices from the Saudis and others even more unfriendly to this country's national security and economic interests — like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Russia's Vladimir Putin, perhaps even Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. [more, snip]

These actions — given soaring energy prices and the attendant hemorrhage of U.S. petrodollars to, among others, people who wish us ill — represent the sort of behavior in which only a nation utterly unserious about energy security could indulge.

In truth, no matter what we do, we will need oil for the foreseeable future. As a result, we should do our utmost to find and exploit it in places either under our control (for example, near where the Cubans and Chinese are getting it off the coast of Florida) or at least friendly to us (notably, Canada, Mexico and Brazil)...

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Appeals court rules state had no right to seize sect kids

SAN ANGELO — A state appellate court ruled today that child welfare officials had no right to seize more than 400 children living at a polygamist sect's ranch. The Third Court of Appeals in Austin ruled that the grounds for removing the children were "legally and factually insufficient" under Texas law...

[object lesson: let's see who gets fired over this {like the judge who allowed it}. My bet; no one - it's government]

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Kansas Voters Could Change the Way Judges Are Selected

Kansas will have a proposition on the November ballot that could send shock waves into the tenure of state court judges. The voters in Kansas' Johnson County will vote on the right to elect their 10th judicial district court judges instead of having them chosen by the lawyers.

We hear a lot in the media about bringing democracy to the world. Citizens in this suburban Kansas City county are asking for more democracy in the middle of the United States...

[We've activist judges (galore) because they're largely unaccountable to the American people. "Independent Judiciary" was meant to mean independent from the other branches of government only - never the people - we need remind the black robe society on who's sufferance their jobs rightly depend. Recommended > ]

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Preferences for Everybody!

Would white voters be more inclined to support so-called affirmative action if it discriminated only in favor of blacks, rather than, as it does now, in favor of women and all "persons of color"--which is to say, against white men? Maybe.

Then again, blacks-only racial preferences would have been untenable, for both political and legal reasons. Politically, it would have been difficult to sustain support for a program of discrimination that benefited only about an eighth of the population. But when you add in every minority under the sun plus a whole sex, you give a large majority of the population an interest in preserving the system...

[ironic that the only legal minority in the US is white men. Will we ever be honest enough to admit that AA is nothing more than state sponsored discrimination against them?]

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ACLU

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ACLU: Police Enforcing Immigration Laws 'Terrorize' America

State and local police who help enforce federal immigration laws are targeting Latinos and ''terrorizing'' people across the United States, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said at a briefing on Capitol Hill on Monday.

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ACLU's War On U.S. Immigration Law
Prof. Nicholas Stix

While President George W. Bush, ICE, and Congress act as if the U.S. had no immigration laws and no borders, some heroic local officials and private organizations have nevertheless sought, against all odds, to enforce and uphold immigration law. And every time they have done so, the ACLU has been there to fight them, on behalf of those who are flouting our laws.

A study of the tactics of local ACLU chapters across the country and the national ACLU reveals a distinct, coordinated strategy of six components...

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"The ACLU set a course to destroy America - her freedom and her values - right from the start."

~Jax Hawk

Little Annie to rescue, in a big way

LAKE OSWEGO -- Pam Fischer usually wags a finger and says "hush" when her little dachshund, Annie, starts barking. But now, she's glad her 91/2-pound friend has such a big mouth.

Around 1 a.m. Tuesday, police responded to a complaint about a barking dog waking residents in the Lake Grove neighborhood. Sgt. John Brent expected to find a giant, frothing canine. Instead, he was confronted by a very small, very agitated dachshund that was so aggressive it blocked Brent's patrol car.

At first Brent, who heads Lake Oswego's police canine unit, tried to catch Annie -- formally named Annabelle -- but that only made things worse. Not only did the dog keep barking with unwavering ferocity, she wouldn't let Brent pass and stopped him when he tried to leave in the other direction.

That's when the officer heard a faint cry for help...

[good doggie]

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