PrairiePundit

Donald Lambro: Sen. John McCain, who has consistently opposed President Bush's tax cuts, recently voted to extend some of them, a move conservatives say is a political flip-flop intended to further his White House ambitions. The Arizona Republican, who is the early front-runner for his party's presidential nomination in 2008, surprised tax-cut proponents last week when he voted to continue Mr. Bush's tax cuts on capital gains and dividends and other tax breaks in a $70 billion Tax Relief Extension Reconciliation Act. His vote was a sharp departure from his anti-tax-cut posture. However, he has been aggressively reaching out to the Republican Party's conservative base, particularly economic conservatives who fear that as president, he would oppose further tax reductions and might even roll back some of the Bush cuts to shrink budget deficits. While supply-side tax cutters say they welcomed his latest vote, they thought it was solely for political reasons. ...

Henry Kissinger: ... So far Hamas has left no ambiguity about its intentions, and it will clearly form the next government in the territories. A serious, comprehensive negotiation is therefore impossible unless Hamas crosses the same conceptual Rubicon Sharon did. And, as with Sharon, this may not happen until Hamas is convinced there is no alternative strategy -- a much harder task since the Sharon view is, in its essence, secular, while the Hamas view is fueled by religious conviction. ... Because Hamas' position is based on religion, it is incapableof compromise. Therefore the organization must be destroyed. That is the only way Palestinians can reach an agreement with Israel. The Palestinians have made this terrible choice because they have been subsidized as a begger entity for the last 50 years, rather than made to live with the consequences of losing their wars with Israel. All aid should be cut off to Palestinians who support the goals of Hamas.

Washington Post: Buzzing over this northern Iraqi city in her Kiowa scout helicopter, a .50-caliber machine gun and rockets at the ready, Capt. Sarah Piro has proved so skillful in combat missions to support U.S. ground troops that she's earned the nickname "Saint." In recent months of fighting in Tall Afar, Piro, 26, of El Dorado Hills, Calif., has quietly sleuthed out targets, laid down suppressive fire for GIs in battle and chased insurgents through the narrow alleys of this medieval city -- maneuvering all the while to avoid being shot out of the sky. In one incident, she limped back to base in a bullet-riddled helicopter, ran to another aircraft and returned to the fight 10 minutes later. "They call her 'Saint Piro' -- she's just that good," said her co-pilot, Chief Warrant Officer Todd Buckhouse, a 19-year Army veteran who has worked with Piro on two tours with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq. "There was no one I wanted to hear mo...

Washington Times: It has been a tough week for Essam al Tamimi. One of this Persian Gulf city's most pro-U.S. business leaders, he says he has been questioning his admiration for America since Dubai's bid to manage six U.S. ports ignited a firestorm in Washington. "What's happening in the United States is disappointing for people like me," said Mr. al Tamimi, founder and managing partner of the United Arab Emirates' largest law firm, Al Tamimi & Co. Businessmen, government officials and other residents of Dubai have experienced bewilderment and disbelief as they watched the U.S. reaction to the ports takeover by the state-owned company DP World, the Dubai-based ports operator. Their reaction reflectsthe city's decades-long search for an identity, inevitably influenced by its Middle East location and Muslim traditions, but also by ambitions to become a free-market economy that attracts the West's wealthiest investors. "I have a ...

NY Times : Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein's plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed on to American commanders a month before the invasion, according to a classified study by the United States military. In providing the Iraqi document, German intelligence officials offered more significant assistance to the United States than their government has publicly acknowledged. The plan gave the American military an extraordinary window into Iraq's top-level deliberations, including where and how Mr. Hussein planned to deploy his most loyal troops. The German role is not the only instance in which nations that publicly cautioned against the war privately facilitated it. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, provided more help than they have disclosed. Egypt gave access for refueling planes, while Saudi Arabia allowed American special operations forces to initiate attacks from its territory, United States military offi...

NY Times: Leaders of the main Sunni Arab political bloc have decided to return to suspended talks over the formation of a new government, the top Sunni negotiator said Sunday. The step could help defuse the sectarian tensions that threatened to spiral into open civil war last week after the bombing of a Shiite shrine and the killings of Sunnis in reprisal. ... While the Sunni bloc, the Iraqi Consensus Front, has not publicly announced its decision and could still reverse course, Iraqi officials say the talks may resume as early as this week, depending on the level of tension in the streets. Sectarian violence appeared to be ebbing across Iraq on Sunday, with more people venturing outside for the first time in days. Nonetheless, Shiite militiamen retained control of some Sunni mosques they had raided, and scattered mayhem left at least 14 people dead, including three American soldiers. At least 231 people have been killed since the shrine bombing. ... Thwarting again the desires of the ...

AP via NY Times: Saudi security forces on Monday shot dead five suspected terrorists believed to be involved in a foiled attack on the world's biggest oil processing complex, the Saudi Interior Ministry said. A sixth suspect was arrested. The shootings came after security forces raided two houses in the Saudi capital of Riyadh that had been under surveillance, said Lt. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, chief spokesman for the ministry. The suspects were killed during a shootout, the ministry said in a statement. ''We think all the men involved had something to do with Abqaiq attempt,'' al-Turki said, referring to Friday's attempt by suicide bombers to detonate car bombs inside the world's biggest oil stabilization plant. Earlier Monday, the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya television quoted Saudi security sources as saying the forces exchanged fire with the suspected terrorists for about two hours. Police said they confiscated weapons and ammunition from the house in the subur...

AP: Saudi Arabia said Sunday that two suicide bombers killed in a foiled attack on the world's biggest oil processing complex were on its list of most-wanted extremists. The Saudi Interior Ministry in a statement reported by the official Saudi Press Agency identified the two as Abdullah Abdul-Aziz al-Tweijri and Mohammed Saleh al-Gheith and said both were on a list of the 15 most-wanted terrorists the kingdom issued in June. The deaths of the two meant that only four remain at large of the list of 15. Ten have now died or been killed, and one was previously arrested. ... This confirms a point made below about al Qaeda attriting its forces. It has now lost over two thirds of its top operatives in Saudia Arabia. This has been the pattern in Afghanistan and Iraq also. The math is working against the terrorist.

Washington Post: J. Craig Venter, maverick biologist, wants to cure our addiction to oil. To do so, he proposes creating a designer microbe -- the heart of a biological engine -- from scratch, then adding genes culled from the sea to turn crops such as switch grass and cornstalks into ethanol. While he's at it, he'd like to modify or devise microorganisms to produce a steady stream of hydrogen. Either could prompt a major shift in the economics of the energy industry and in the process bring Venter to a secondary goal: showing the world he can be as successful running a company as he was at sequencing human DNA. "We are on a crusade as much as it is an economic goal," Venter said. "This is one of those crusades that only works if it becomes really profitable." Five years after antagonizing government scientists while racing them to map the human genome, Venter is back, making the typically bold statements that have long polarized opinion about him. Either he...

AP via NY Times: The FBI determined a powdery substance found in a roll of quarters at a University of Texas dormitory was not ricin after initial state tests had indicated it was the potentially deadly poison, a spokesman said Sunday. The FBI tests did not identify the substance, but they came back negative for the poison that is extracted from castor beans, said San Antonio FBI spokesman Rene Salinas. ''There were no proteins in there to indicate it was in fact ricin,'' Salinas said. He said was unlikely further testing would be done. Texas health officials did ''just a quick test and they don't check for the proteins in ricin,'' Salinas said. The mystery powder spilled onto Kelly Heinbaugh's hands as she unwrapped a roll of quarters in her dorm room on Thursday. She said she'd used five other rolls of quarters her mother had gotten from the same bank and none had powder in them. ... There is also this from the Austin American-Statesman .

Times: THE intelligence services are preparing to make a robust defence of the decisions they took in the months before the July 7 suicide bombings and the July 21 failed terrorist attack. A leaked “top secret” document published in The Sunday Times yesterday indicated that there was intelligence on one of the July 21 suspected bombers. One of them was reported to have been subjected to a short-term intelligence operation. It has already been admitted that MI5 had two of the July 7 bombers under surveillance a year before the suicide attacks in London that killed 52 people last year. Neither of the two, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, was judged to be a serious threat at that stage, and MI5 felt that it was unjustified to commit extensive resources to a lengthy surveillance operation. MI5 and MI6 have been giving evidence to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), which is investigating the secret material available in the lead-up to the July 7 bombings...

Washington Post: The federal government would have to obtain permission from a secret court to continue a controversial form of surveillance, which the National Security Agency now conducts without warrants, under a bill being proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). Specter's proposal would bring the four-year-old NSA program under the authority of the court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The act created a mechanism for obtaining warrants to wiretap domestic suspects. But President Bush, shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on communications without such warrants. The program was revealed in news reports two months ago. Specter's plan could put him at odds with the administration, which has praised a rival proposal that would exempt the NSA program from the surveillance law. Specter's proposal would also require the administration to give a handful of lawmakers more information a...

Mark Steyn: ... Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well: ''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.'' Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that's been going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media. What, in the end, are all these supposed...

Sweetness and Light has the rund down. Port of Houston is one that has Saudia terminal. Port hysteria seems to reflect typical Democrat disengeniousness compounded by Republican cowardice.

A BBC reporter gets the treatment at a European spa. A must read.

BBC: An uprising at Afghanistan's main high-security jail has spread to a second block, and now involves nearly 2,000 prisoners, the BBC has learned. Inmates took control of a wing of the jail, Kabul's Pul-e-Charkhi, overnight. Sources have told the BBC seven people have been killed, although top Afghan officials have denied any deaths. The violence apparently began as an escape attempt in a section holding Taleban and al-Qaeda militants as well as ordinary criminals. There has been frequent gunfire at the scene. At least 20 police cars and two ambulances have arrived at the jail, where hundreds of prisoners are barricaded inside a women's wing, the BBC's Bilal Sarwary reports from outside the prison. Afghan army rapid-reaction troops had arrived on the scene earlier, reinforcing Interior Ministry security forces. ... If nothing else the riot is some evidence that these are dangerous people that need to be off the streets.

Saturday al Qaeda claimed that it would continue attacking oil facilities in Saudia Arabia. There big problem is that they do not have the capacity to successfully attack them. The thwarted attack last week was less impressive than Patton's first ever "mechanized attack" during the punitive expedition in Mexico chasing Pancho Villia. Patton bootstrap the use of a couple of automobiles in an attack on a Mexican ranch into a career as a tank commander in World War I and later World War II. Of course none of al Qaeda's attackers survived the attack. Therein lies one of al Qaeda's problems. There are no experienced human bombs. They are a one shot weapon. But there bigger problem is that they do not have the heavy cavalry needed to penetrate the defenses of the oil facilities. Zarqawi tried to improvise around this deficit by using fire trucks and other heavy trucks in Iraq to act as a blast opening in the defenses of defended position in Iraq, but he too fai...

Sunday Times: MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism. To illustrate their concern, agents have leaked more topsecret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the “missed intelligence” leading up to the July attacks in London. They believe ministers have withheld information from the public about what the security services knew about the suspects before the bombing of July 7 and the abortive attacks of July 21. The documents include an admission by John Scarlett, head of SIS, the secret intelligence service (also known as MI6), that one of the July 21 suspects was tracked on a trip to Pakistan just months before the attempted bombings. Until now it was not known that any of the July 21 suspects, who are awaiting trial, were familiar to the intelligence services. It has been disclosed that MI5 had placed two of the July 7 bombers under surveillance before their atta...

Reuters via Washington Post: Three al Qaeda inmates who were part of a group that tunnelled out of a Yemeni jail this month have given themselves up to the authorities, President Ali Abdullah Saleh said in remarks published on Sunday. Saleh told al-Hayat Arabic-language newspaper that security forces were also in contact with other fugitives among the group of 23 militants that escaped from a Sanaa jail in February. ... "So far, three have given themselves up and we are in contact with the rest of them and they are for certain still inside the country," Saleh said in an interview. "They want to give themselves up and most of them have finished the majority of their sentence already." Some Saudi media had linked some of the escaped prisoners to a foiled attack on a major Saudi oil refinery on Friday. ...

CNN reports that Muslims continue to act out in Pakistan over cartoons in Denmark. It can be argued that these tantrums persuaded al Qaeda that blowing up the mosque in Samarra would result in similar acting out in Iraq that might scuttle the new Iraqi government. So far the government and clerics for both Shia and Sunnis have acted responsibly, which has to be a disappointment to al Qaeda. While leaders in Iraq have acted responsibly, there are still people who have not and violence continues in some areas, but it is not enough to be considered a general uprising, which is what al Qaeda was counting on. This AP story carried on Fox News web site indicates that the clerics have agreed to call for restraint and that the violence is receding. ... In an unusual round of telephone diplomacy, President Bush spoke with seven leaders of Shiite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political parties in a bid to defuse the sectarian crisis unleashed by the bombing of the Shiites' Askariya shrine in ...