March 1, 2005
Agence France-Presse reports this morning that Pakistani dictator General Pervez Musharraf has created a website to explore his "softer side" -- a professionally-produced site that combines a bit of tourist-baiting with an undeniable sense of a serious campaign effort: His favourite food is a spicy lentil dish, the best book he read recently was on Richard Nixon and he was nearly court martialed in 1965. Welcome to the world of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, via the Internet. Pakistani officials say a slick new website devoted to the general, which mixes moments of unusual frankness with a glowing, hagiographical tone, puts the country's people a mere mouse-click away from the "man behind the leader". But according to analysts, the aim is not so much to reveal the truth about Musharraf as to project a softer image of both the president and his country, after years of foreign media coverage focused on...
The New York Times editorial board must have experienced considerable pain when they opined today on the momentum building throughout Southwest Asia for democratization. After all, after deriding the Bush administration for two years over its "neocon" strategies designed to do exactly what we now see, the board had to publish this: Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. It misses the...
Turkmenistan's strange dictator Niyazov has ordered the closing of all hospitals and libraries throughout his country, the BBC reports, except for those in the capitol, Ashgabat. This order is only the latest in a string of increasingly weird actions by the self-styled Father of All Turkmens as he continues his main policy of self-aggrandizement at the expense of his oppressed subjects: Reports from Turkmenistan say President Niyazov has ordered the closure of all the hospitals in the country except those in the capital, Ashgabat. The order, announced by a government spokesman, is part of the president's radical health care policies. Thousands of medical workers have already been sacked under the plan. ... President Niyazov apparently took the decision to close the hospitals at a meeting with local officials on Monday. "Why do we need such hospitals?" he said. "If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat." After building numerous...
Michael Ledeen puts the dizzying series of events occuring in Southwest Asia into perspective in today's National Review. He points out that the current revolution towards democracy started in a European state that had stagnated under the last Western dictator, but only took flight when America elected a visionary leader to nurture its development: We are living in a revolutionary age, that started more than a quarter century ago in Spain after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. At that time, hardly anyone believed it possible to go from dictatorship to democracy without great violence, and most Spaniards feared that the terrible civil war of the 1930s — which ended when Franco seized power and installed a military dictatorship — would begin anew. Instead, thanks to a remarkable generation of political leaders, some savvy priests, and the grossly underrated King Juan Carlos, Spain passed smoothly and gracefully into democracy. It...
The Captain's cousin writes today that he traveled to England last week on a no-frills British Airways flight. When he says no-frills, he really means it. British Airways saved £100,000 on his flight by cutting back on such luxuries as engines and common sense: A BRITISH AIRWAYS jumbo jet carrying 351 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing after an 11-hour transatlantic flight with a failed engine. The fault occurred on take-off from Los Angeles but the pilot declined all opportunities to land in the US and instead continued on three engines for 5,000 miles to Britain. The incident happened three days after a European regulation came into force requiring airlines to compensate passengers for long delays or cancellations. Under the new rules, if the pilot had returned to Los Angeles, BA would have been facing a compensation bill of more than £100,000. So to save themselves £100,000, the...
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has told Time Magazine in an interview that the Syrian presence will be gone in "a few months," the AP reports: "It (withdrawal) should be very soon and maybe in the next few months. Not after that. I can't give you a technical answer. The point is the next few months," he told Time magazine. Joe Klein has the story for Time, and the blurb on their site has plenty of weasel room, but the commitment is explicit: TIME: Could you give me a timetable? ASSAD: It's a technical issue, not political. I could not say we could do it in two months because I have not had the meeting with the army people. They may say it will take six months. You need to prepare when you bring your army back to your country. You need to prepare where you will put the troops. Assad...
Hugh Hewitt notes that Ed Kilgore, filling in yesterday for Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo, scoffs at the notion that the Cedar Revolution this week in Lebanon has anything to do with the Bush administration: But it literally never crossed my mind that Bush's fans would credit him with for this positive event, as though his pro-democracy speeches exercise some sort of rhetorical enchantment. This is the kind of thinking, of course, that has convinced God knows how many people that Ronald Reagan personally won the Cold War. It's the old post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical fallacy. This is a president and an administration that chronically refuse to accept responsibility for the bad things that have happened on their watch--even things like the insurgency in Iraq that are directly attributable to its policies. Barring any specific evidence (provided, say, by Lebanese...
Despite the early report by NBC News, promoted by the Drudge Report, the Iraqi Special Tribunal judge assassinated today by terrorists was not Raid Juhi, the presiding judge. NBC has corrected its preliminary reporting with an update from the same reporter that originally reported it was Juhi: A judge working on the special tribunal established to try Saddam Hussein and other senior officials in his toppled regime was assassinated Tuesday in Baghdad, but U.S. officials told NBC News that initial reports that the victim was the presiding judge were erroneous. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the person killed by unidentified gunman was not Ra’id Juhi, the 35-year-old chief investigative judge of the special tribunal set up to try Saddam and senior officials, but was another judge working for the tribunal. The officials did not immediately identify the victim. None of this lets the ever-execrable Robert Fisk...
March 2, 2005
CQ reader Joe K brings me up to date on a story line that has gone quiet the past couple of weeks. The embattled head of elections for Milwaukee responsible for the fiasco of last year's presidential balloting has abruptly resigned after spending the last month on sick leave: Under a blitz of criticism over the city's handling of the Nov. 2 presidential election, Lisa Artison resigned Tuesday as executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission after four weeks off the job on sick time. Artison faxed a one-sentence note of resignation to the mayor's office Tuesday. She could not be reached for comment. In recent days, speculation grew that Artison would leave the post she held since July, when she faced sharp questions about her qualifications from aldermen at her confirmation hearing. Her mysterious resignation probably has to do with the independent investigation launched by a combination of the...
Yesterday, I wrote about the decision by British Airways to continue a flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow despite blowing an engine at takeoff from LAX. The flight almost ran out of fuel due to the lower altitude forced on it by the engine loss and had to make an emergency landing at Manchester. It turns out that BA forced the pilots to continue despite several attempts by American air controllers to get them to land simply to avoid cash penalties for flight delays which kick in at the five-hour mark. One of the passengers on that flight just happened to be my cousin, Mike Reger, who tipped me to the Times of London article on the flight. Mike followed up with a description of the flight: As a 50 year old seasoned traveler all seemed fine on this excursion at first ... We lifted off from LAX and all...
The Los Angeles Times reports today that the new Democratic Senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar, didn't take long to betray one of his "centrist" positions from his election campaign. After telling conservative Coloradans that he supported Bush's judicial nominees during his election, he now has sent a letter to Bush telling him to withdraw said nominees, including one Salazar pointedly said he would support: Hopes that the Senate could rapidly confirm some troubled judicial nominations ran into a roadblock Tuesday when one of the moderate Democrats expected to support a vote by the full Senate on the nominees instead called on President Bush to withdraw the 10 candidates he resubmitted last month. The move by Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.), a newcomer to the Senate, surprised both sides in the rancorous debate and came just hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee held a second testy hearing for one of those nominees...
Reuters reports that Ukrainian security personnel detained a man at Kiev's airport carrying 1.28 pounds of uranium-238 in his car: Ukraine's SBU security service arrested a man at Kiev's airport who had a case containing radioactive uranium-238 in his car, the Emergencies Ministry said Tuesday. It said the man was detained at Boryspil airport, Ukraine's main international gateway, with 582 grams of uranium. It did not say when the arrest took place or whether he had been attempting to leave the country. ... Depleted uranium, where uranium-238 is normally found, can theoretically be used to make nuclear "dirty bombs," but it is often used in gun ammunition and armor because of its high density. Ukraine still has a heavy reliance on nuclear power, even after the Chernobyl disaster, and depleted uranium doesn't necessarily make good material even for dirty bombs. Still, one has to wonder what the man intended to...
Senator Robert Byrd, defending the minority's right to filibuster on the Senate floor today, wound up his speech by comparing Republican efforts to eliminate the hijacking of the Senate on the Constitutional duty of confirming federal judges to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Not only did Byrd imply that the GOP equates to the worst mass murderers of the 20th century, he's so proud of doing so he's posted the speech to his own website: Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law....
Two Jewish groups have denounced Senator Robert Byrd for his equating Hitler and the GOP and have demanded an apology and a retraction, the AP reports today, in a development that may signal a crack in the media disinterest that has marked Byrd's antics up to now. The first group to criticize Byrd was the the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that Democrats could dismiss as partisan. However, the second group, the Anti-Defamation League, will not so easily be disregarded by Byrd's colleagues: Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that Byrd's remarks showed "a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler was" and that the senator should apologize to the American people. "It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party," Foxman said. The...
CNN jumped into the fray over Senator Robert Byrd's Nazi reference in its Inside Politics look at the blogs. Hugh Hewitt played the segment on his show tonight as Judy Woodruff, Jacki Schechner, and Abbi Tatton reviewed the Byrd scandal through CQ and Radioblogger: WOODRUFF: ... Time now to check what's going on in the blogosphere. And with me once again today to talk about what they are talking about, CNN political producer Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner. She's our blog reporter. So, Jacki, I bet it's not baseball. JACKI SCHECHNER, CNN BLOG REPORTER: No, it's more like Byrd. We've already heard what Senator Robert Byrd said on the floor of the Senate, comparing Republican tactics to Adolph Hitler's rise to power. Conservative blogs all over it. Over at Captain's Quarters, he's got plenty to say, including this comment: "Byrd, with his attempted filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of...
Last Friday I noted that nine UN peacekeepers were killed in an ambush in the Congo by rogue militia elements. After more than ten years of running from fights, I wrote that the UN would have to start fighting back if it wanted to retain any credibility. Apparently, someone at the UN has reached the same conclusion: United Nations peacekeepers have gone on the offensive against a militia group in Congo, deploying helicopters and killing nearly 60 people in the biggest battle fought by the world body in more than a decade. But criticism of the operation was mounting yesterday when it emerged that up to a third of the dead could have been civilians used as human shields by the group that was the attackers' intended target. The latest hostilities began when a battalion of Pakistani soldiers advanced on the militia base in the Ituri district, the scene of...
March 3, 2005
Bashar Assad's hope of holding onto some international political cover for his continued operation in Lebanon took a body blow this morning, as his normally reliable trading partner Russia told him that Syria should leave Lebanon as soon as possible: Russia has increased the pressure on its ally Syria by joining calls for Damascus to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said: "Syria should withdraw from Lebanon, but we all have to make sure that this withdrawal does not violate the very fragile balance which we still have in Lebanon, which is a very difficult country ethnically." America, supported by France, has led international pressure on Syria, particularly through a UN resolution demanding the removal of foreign forces from Lebanon. Russia has, of late, been somewhat of an apologist for the Syrians, openly questioning the identification of Damascus as a center for terrorists and of...
In another signal that exasperation with the Assad regime may run closer to Damascus than Assad would prefer, members of the Arab League have joined the chorus telling Syria to get out of Lebanon at the earliest possible moment: Arab leaders launched a flurry of diplomatic activity Thursday, including a trip by Syrian President Bashar Assad to Saudi Arabia, as they sought to control a political storm over Syria's role in neighboring Lebanon. ... Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Wednesday night after meeting with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal, that they had discussed how to "find a mechanism to implement" last year's U.N. Security Council resolution that called for all foreign forces to leave Lebanon. "Egypt is encouraging Syria to settle the situation surrounding Lebanon as soon possible," Aboul Gheit said. The League does not plan on putting the Cedar Revolution on its foreign-miniter agenda for this...
Signs keep appearing of widespread discontent from the Federal Air Marshal service. In today's Washington Times, sources within FAMS tell Audrey Hudson that FAMS management routinely pads numbers to demonstrate coverage mandated by Congress, sometimes doubling the actual number of protected flights -- and even the inflated numbers fall short of 10%: Flight reports by the Federal Air Marshal Service show that federal agents were on less than 10 percent of the nation's flights in December, a number several air marshals say was inflated to make it appear to Congress that commercial air travel is better protected than it is. "The numbers reported to headquarters come back higher than originally reported and are sometimes upwards of double the number of what is actually flown," an air marshal said. "Everyone knows they are padding the numbers." FAMS flight reports for December, obtained by The Washington Times, show air marshals were on...
Senator Robert Byrd's office issued a defense of his remarks comparing Republican attempts to bar filibusters on judicial nominations with Naziism in the Senate earlier this week. Unfortunately, it appears that Byrd's staff suffers from the same incoherence that afflicts their boss most of the time: Sen. Robert Byrd's description of Adolf Hitler's rise to power was meant as a warning to heed the past and not as a comparison to Republicans, a spokesman for the West Virginia Democrat says. ... "Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated," said Tom Gavin, spokesman for Byrd. "All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority." Put aside all of the historical inaccuracies that one has to swallow for that argument to work, such as the fact that the Enabling Law basically abdicated the Reichstag and made Hitler...
The recent impulse for democratization has surprised and delighted the West as oppressive regimes thought untouchable have suddenly rethought their strategies in the face of popular discontent. The most dramatic example would be Egypt and Lebanon, two countries which suffered under some of the most constraining dictatorships in Middle East after the departure of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. The two controlling regimes, Mubarak and Assad in Syria, have reacted in opposite directions, at least at first, but the movements have continued to pressure for democracy regardless. They join with the popular will of the Iraqis, the Afghanis, and even a watered-down impulse of the Palestinians. Even Saudi Arabia has a nascent democratization program, and Iran has had street demonstrations for the past two years or more demanding freedom. The wave of democratization promises to free the Muslim world from the grip of kleptocracies and mullahcracies, a welcome development all...
Bashar Assad must feel as though he's auditioning for a remake of The Lonely Guy this week, as his international political support has crumbled in a flash. The Egyptians earlier today alluded to Saudi expectations for a Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, and now the Saudis have spoken for themselves (via Instapundit): Saudi officials told Syrian President Bashar Assad on Thursday that he must fully withdraw troops from Lebanon and begin soon or face strains in Saudi-Syrian ties. Assad promised only to study the idea of a partial withdrawal by later this month. The kingdom took a tough line as Assad met with the Saudi leader, Crown Prince Abdullah, and other officials in Riyadh. So far, Damascus has resisted Arab pressure for a quick pullout from Lebanon. Saudi officials told Assad the kingdom insists on the full withdrawal of all Syrian military and intelligence forces from Lebanon and wants it to...
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I have long railed against the back-door First Amendment violations of the McCain-Feingold Act, which purports to reform campaign financing but in reality acts to criminalize political speech. Now Federal Election Commissioner Bradley Smith explains exactly how MFA could mean the end of political blogging, as we get intimidated by the massive legal requirements that MFA might impose on CQ and other sites: Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines. Smith should know. He's one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, which is beginning the perilous process of extending a controversial...
March 4, 2005
I recall the movie made by HBO about the late-night television war set off by Johnny Carson's Retirement, The Late Shift, in which Kathy Bates played Jay Leno's voracious and self-destructive agent/manager. One criticism of Leno -- one he later acknowledged as valid -- was that he made no mention of Carson or his support of Leno over the years on Leno's first broadcast as Carson's replacement. In the movie, Bates tells the head of NBC that she refuses to let Jay thank or even mention Johnny, telling him, "That's suck-up. Jay doesn't do suck-up." Well, now we know David Letterman does suck-up, and he sells out pretty easily too. Last night, Letterman hosted Dan Rather on Rather's farewell tour from the CBS Evening News, and tossed softball after softball to allow Rather to misrepresent the Memogate fiasco that cost four of Rather's colleagues their jobs. Les Moonves had to...
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, an opthalmologist by trade, keeps proving that he can't see his way around the worst political crisis of his career. According to Lebanese political sources at Reuters, Assad will announce a partial withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, according to the Taif Accords that have lain dormant for sixteen years: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is expected to announce on Saturday the pullout of some Syrian troops from Lebanon and the redeployment of the rest close to the border, a Lebanese political source said on Friday. Assad, who delivers a speech at Syria's parliament on Saturday, is expected to declare the move in line with the Taif Accord which ended Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, the source said. Taif stipulates Syrian forces redeploy to the eastern Bekaa Valley and then the Lebanese and Syrian governments agree on a timeline on how long these forces would stay. The problem...
Instapundit links to an expression of support for bloggers of all political stripes this morning from Dan Patrick of KSEV 700 AM and the blog Lone Star Times. Dan writes: LoneStarTimes.com is affiliated with KSEV 700 AM, an independently owned talk-radio station in Houston, TX. As such, we believe that we enjoy the "broadcast exemption" that prohibits the federal government from regulating our speech in the manner they are proposing for "mere" citizen bloggers. While we still need to talk to some sharp lawyers and nail down the details, if these restrictions come to pass, KSEV and LST are committed to working out a legally sound way in which individual bloggers– of every ideological persuasion and partisan affiliation– can somehow register with us and be credentialed as a press representative of KSEV and LST. Like Raoul Wallenberg handing out passports, we will start issuing press credentials to any blogger that...
The Orange Revolution, a bloodless exercise in people power which overthrew a proto-puppet government, has not gone as bloodless as thought. The reversal of Viktor Yanukovych's fraudulent electoral win and the subsequent victory of Viktor Yushchenko has removed the political protection for the highly-ranked allies of Yanukovych -- and they seem to all have the same exit strategy in mind: Ukraine's former interior minister has been found dead of an apparent suicide on the day he was to be questioned about the killing of an opposition-minded journalist, officials said. The Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, confirmed Friday that Yuri Kravchenko's body was found at his country house and that a preliminary investigation suggests he committed suicide, CNN's Jill Dougherty reported. Kravchenko was due to be questioned Friday by prosecutors in connection with the murder of investigative journalist Georhiy Gongadze. Some criticized the West for its insistence on free and...
CNN reports that British Airways has had another in-flight engine failure that they ignored to complete the flight on time. Remarkably, the plane involved is the same one that blew an engine on takeoff last week, ran out of fuel, and forced to make an emergency landing in Manchester -- and the engine that failed yesterday was the replacement for the first failure: British Airways jet that continued on an 11-hour flight from Los Angeles to London after one of its four engines lost power also flew on three engines on a later flight from Singapore to London, the airline said Friday. The Boeing 747 left Singapore on February 25 and landed at London's Heathrow Airport the next day, arriving only 15 minutes behind schedule, BA spokesman Jay Marritt said. Three hours into the 14-hour flight, an oil pressure indicator showed there was a problem with one of the engines,...
George Bush has kept the pressure on Syria by completely rejecting Bashar Assad's attempt to resurrect the long-dead Taif Accord as an excuse to take his time leaving Lebanon. Bush insisted that Syria had to completely withdraw from Lebanon in order to meet its international responsibilities under the controlling UNSC resultion: "There are no half-measures at all," Bush said during an event here on his Social Security proposals. "When the United States and France say withdraw, we mean complete withdrawal, no halfhearted measures." During a speech Saturday to his parliament, Syrian President Bashar Assad was expected to announce a troop pullback to eastern Lebanon near the Syrian border — but not a full withdrawal, according to Syrian and Lebanese officials. "We need to see action, not words," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said a day ahead of that speech. A fellow Arab nation, Saudi Arabia, has also called on Syria...
A number of Bush critics have watched the wave of popular demand for democratization sweep across the Middle East since the staging of the Iraqi elections on January 30th and have started to question their previous assumptions. The New York Times did this, with reservations, in its unsigned editorial last Tuesday. Today, the Christian Science Monitor published an opinion piece wondering if Bush has been right all along. Try to guess who wrote this: The movements for democratic change in Egypt and Lebanon have happened since the successful Iraqi election on Jan. 30. And one can speculate on whether Iraq has served as a beacon for democratic change in the Middle East. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that "a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region." He may have had it right. That conclusion came from the pen...
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has written a detailed rebuttal to Robert Byrd's argument on the Senate floor earlier this week, when (apart from the abhorrent Nazi analogies) the former Klan recruiter took on the mantle of the protector of minority rights. Cornyn demolishes Byrd's arguments that the GOP's attempt to change precedent on filibusters has any Hitlerian overtones by pointing out the specifics of when Byrd himself successfully did the same thing: Recall that it was Sen. Byrd who led the charge to establish new Senate precedents in 1977, 1979, 1980, and 1987 - including a number of precedents that were designed specifically to stop filibusters and other delay tactics that were previously authorized under Senate rules or prior precedents ... In 1980, Senator Byrd led the establishment of a new precedent to require an immediate vote, without debate, on any motion to go into executive session to consider a...
Democracy Project notes that the campaign-finance reformers have come out to meet the blogswarm forming around Bradley Smith's revelations about the FEC and their new drive to regulate Internet speech as part of their "reforms". They now claim that Smith overstated the issue, that he has partisan motivations, and that he has always opposed campaign-finance reform anyway. However, here's what they don't tell you about those who are leading this counterattack: Let's say you favor, either through conviction or employment demands, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, commonly known as McCain-Feingold. You're stunned by a blogswarm born of a candid interview one of the commissioners of the FEC grants to an Internet publication. What do you do? Send out a press release written by a man who served on Al Gore's legal team during the Florida recount controversy in 2000, perhaps? A man who's employed by a lobbying firm...
Following the example of CQ reader Erp, I wrote a letter to Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold, and copied all 98 other Senators to express my outrage over the direction that the FEC has been forced to take in regulating political speech on the Internet. I encourage you to get involved and do the same, in your own words, in order to serve notice that we will not allow them to silence us. To the honorable Senators McCain and Feingold, et al: I have read with considerable dismay the effect that your recent lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission, upheld by Judge Colleen Kollar-Ketelly, will have on political speech on the Internet. I write a political media-watchdog blog, Captain's Quarters, which enjoys a not-insubstantial daily readership. No one pays me to do this; I operate my site and write on topics purely from personal convictions and a deep desire...
Redstate has a transcript of FEC commissioner Bradley Smith's interview with Cam Edwards of NRA News. Smith explains why the ruling in their courtroom loss could mean bad news for bloggers: CS: Well, let me tell you some of the potential ramifications. I mean, some of the folks now, uh McCain and some of his allies, are out saying, “Well, this would only apply to paid ads.” That’s ju—the FEC already treats paid ads as subject to the act. But nothing in the judge’s decision limits it to paid advertising, and it, she says anything that’s coordinated, for sure we have to regulate. Now, what is coordinated under FEC regulations? Any republication of campaign material counts as a coordinated complication. That means, for a blogger, if you put up anything, or ah, from a campaign onto the blogsite, that’s going to be republication of campaign material. If you get an...
Chris Muir gets it, as usual: Even in silence, Chris speaks volumes....
March 5, 2005
Operating from new intelligence, the Pakistani Army attacked a suspected al-Qaeda hideout in North Waziristan, capturing eleven foreigners and killing two other suspected terrorists: Pakistani troops raided a hideout of suspected al-Qaida militants Saturday in a remote tribal area near Afghanistan, triggering a shootout that left two foreigners dead, an army spokesman said. Eleven people were arrested. The troops also seized a large number of weapons in the raid near Miran Shah, the main town in northwest Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, said Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan. Miran Shah is near the Afghan border, in a region known for its sympathies to the Islamists. The Pakistanis had recently come to terms with the tribal chiefs in the area and had quit attacking on a broad front in both North and South Waziristan. While they weren't satisfied that the al-Qaeda operatives in the area had all been rounded up, they promised...
CNN reports that the Lebanese Army has taken positions around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut, an ominous development in the Cedar Revolution: Lebanese army troops and armored vehicles took up positions Saturday around the Syrian intelligence headquarters in Beirut. The move comes ahead of an expected announcement from Syrian President Bashar Assad, within a few hours, that he will withdraw some troops from Lebanon and redeploy others within the country. ... Lebanon's defense minister Abdul-Rahim Murad said he expected Assad to announce a pullback of troops to the Bekaa region in eastern Lebanon, near the Syrian border, but not a full withdrawal from the country, The Associated Press reported. When asked whether the redeployment meant a full withdrawal, Murad answered, "No." This could mean one of two things. It could mean that the Lebanese Army plans on protecting Syrian intelligence assets as the Syrian Army pulls out, a scenario...