An Iraqi boy stands next to US soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division and members of Iraq’s National Police patroling in Baghdad, 21 March 2007. Iraqi Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi called today for talks with the country’s insurgent groups, as the Pentagon claimed Al-Qaeda is using children as fodder in their brutal war in Iraq. (By Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)
Tom DeLay denies writing a sentence in his own book.
Forget rent-a-village. Why not rent a whole country?
A chav is unleashed at Number 10, Downing Street.
From the AP:
Six of the eight U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department ranked in the top third among their peers for the number of prosecutions filed last year, according to an analysis of federal records. In addition, five of the eight were among the government’s top performers in winning convictions.
Were they not pursuing Bush’s policies on immigration and drugs? Again:
Immigration cases — a top Bush administration priority, especially in states along the porous Southwest border — helped boost the total number of prosecutions for U.S. attorneys in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.
Four of the prosecutors also rated high in pursuing drug cases, according to Justice Department data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Only one of the eight received a better-than-average ranking in prosecuting weapons cases.
Was Rove trying to get pliant new U.S. attorneys to prosecute Democrats in battleground states before the next election? We don’t know yet.
More transparency from the new media. Can you imagine Dan Rather doing this? If he had, he might still be on the evening news.
David Kuo writes about Elizabeth Edwards – and how a tumor also changed his life.
Jonah Goldberg cannot resist the usual crack. Yes, I was led to believe by Politico that Elizabeth Edwards was in a serious medical state and that the campaign would therefore be suspended. That information turned out to be premature. We found out, as Edwards explained, that subsequent testing relieved many of their worst, earlier worries and so they were going to press on. I think the decision in both cases was admirable. If she was seriously sick, it was right to suspend the campaign. If she can carry on, I think it’s admirable to carry on as well. There is no self-contradiction in my views, just a change of facts. A blog reacts to facts as they arrive. When the facts change, a blog can change its mind. What else am I supposed to do? But, yes, I also think a lot of the Edwardses. I think they’re a class act. I’d have supported them in either decision. I actually believe them and trust them on these questions.
But here’s a comment worth noting:
I think I’ve been pretty good about not posting much about Andrew Sullivan.
What can this mean, except a petty sand-box approach to journalism? I disagree with many people at NRO but I always link and write and even praise when it occurs to me. In contrast, Jonah’s comment suggests an actual informal policy of blacklisting this blog and its arguments at NRO. Blacklisting others is not, I think, a sign of a movement’s intellectual health. It was done to Bruce Bartlett’s book as well. NRO spent much more ink on D’Souza’s excrescence than on the serious and increasingly salient critiques that Bartlett and I have made about the Bush administration. Again: the motivation, it seems to me, is pure group solidarity and the policing of movement orthodoxy. The more dangerous and accurate the critique – especially before an election when it might actually make a difference – the more it should be ignored; the more loopy and extreme the argument, the better an occasion for positioning. But one day I think most conservatives will realize that Bruce and I were right on key issues – on religious extremism, fiscal irreponsibility and civil liberties – and had the balls to say so when it mattered. The same, alas, cannot be said of Jonah "Liberal Fascism" Goldberg.
From the NYT:
According to statistics from the American Cancer Society, 26.1 percent of patients with stage four cancer live five years or more. By contrast, patients whose cancer is confined to the breast and has not spread to surrounding tissue or lymph nodes have a five-year survival rate of 98 percent.
The Clinton camp is trying to debunk the power of this YouTube independent ad by linking it to someone who had connections to the Obama campaign. Fine. That’s politics. So is the ad. It’s the best one yet in this new media world. I don’t think it "casts a cloud" over the Obama campaign, as the AP story has it. I think it reveals an underlying truth about Clinton’s. In solidarity with its message, I’m posting it again:
