Nice, religious bigotry in action: While some evangelical Christians are defending the presidential candidacy of Mormon Mitt Romney from an attack by Al Sharpton, another prominent pastor is going further in his condemnation – saying a vote for the former Massachusetts governor is a vote for Satan. That’s the word from Bill Keller, host of the Florida-based Live Prayer TV program as well as LivePrayer.com. “If you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!” he writes...

General Petraeus wrote a letter in which he speaks out against torture. From the letter: Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate attacks, for...

The Times‘ David Aaronovitch and Matthew Parris go head to head on the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the Blair years. David starts off: it falls to me to make the first moves in this on-page wrestling bout to contest whether the Blair premiership has been a glorious success or ignominious failure. So let me emerge from the unfashionable left-of-centre corner clutching an updated copy of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in which Cyrano anticipates all the insulting epithets...

Patrick O’Hannigan wrote an interesting article about Barack Obama… back in March of this year; I am afraid that I missed it, thanks to reader Yonason I read it just now and found it so interesting that I thought you all might enjoy reading it as well; if for nothing else, then to function as a counterweight to all the positive media Obama receives. The title of the article: “The Linguistic Case Against Barack Obama.” Barack Obama may have frightened Democratic presidential...

Murray Waas writes for National Review: The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel’s office describing other...

Mick LaSalle published the 18th chapter of The Event at his website: go there now and read it – it’s promising to be a spectacular ending.

Andrew Sullivan has a good, albeit a little bit overly enthusiastic in my opinion, post up about Barack Obama: Obama’s speech yesterday is his most detailed yet on foreign affairs. Read it. It is emphatically not isolationist; it is emphatically not against the use of military force when necessary; it is emphatically pro-military in its call for many more troops. On the critical issue of Iraq, Obama has taken a stand – a clear one for withdrawal, with the possibility of a strike-force...

May 6, The Moderate Voice, Jeremy Dibbell: “No Way to Pick a President”. May 10, The Washington Post, David S. Broder: No Way to Choose a President. Funny, umh, coincidence isn’t it?

To Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org Executive Director: With more than 3 million members, MoveOn plays a vital role not only in shaping public policy, but in educating the American public about the most important political issues of the day. With this power comes a responsibility to engage with these issues in as forthright a manner as possible. Until now, MoveOn has declined to call for the impeachment of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, citing a purported lack of interest among its membership. But, as many...

“One was a shy, slender young woman who spoke no English when she was brought from Pakistan to enter an arranged marriage with a stranger in Virginia. The other was a self-confident professional, born in Turkey but raised in the United States, who thought she knew what she was doing when she married an educated Muslim man in Maryland.” Life in Maryland, however, proved to be horrible: “My husband beat. He show knife. I am scared for him, for all family,” said Shamim, 21, the...

I am very happy, no delighted, that the surge is working, for if it was not, we would see terrible things by now: daily, big, terrorist attacks would be carried out daily, Cheney would feel forced to pay al-Maliki a visit because the latter would do absolutely nothing to stop the violence and Christians, for instance, would flee from Baghdad out of fear of being murdered. Luckily, however, the surge is working. “Vice President Dick Cheney made an unannounced visit to Baghdad today, meeting...

Dennis Saunders on gays in the military, John McCain and Mark Bingham, who was a passenger aboard flight 93. Sexual orientation should, in my humble opinion, be considered completely irrelevant in the military. All that matters is whether they want to serve their country (and do it well). David Schraub quotes W.E.B. Du Bois: “‘Do you trust white people?’ You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation...

A great post by Jules Crittenden about the Internet, blogs and print media. The Internet is a thing of great and terrible beauty, the Gutenberg Revolution finally living up to its promise of free exchange of knowledge and information. A tremendous creative force that is also a destructive force. My own business is looking more like a shaky late stage Roman Empire, which was in its day the single stop for civilization, law and order, engineering and scientific knowledge, then torn apart by the barbarian...

H/t Holly Reuters reports: Dutch airline KLM will probably seek an independent investigation into whether it flew Nazi fugitives to Argentina after the Second World War, the national airline said on Tuesday. Questions over KLM’s past surfaced last week after a Dutch television documentary claimed to have discovered archive documents showing the airline played an active role in helping suspected war criminals flee Germany. A good decision by KLM. If the famous and big Dutch company helped Nazis...

Four interesting articles about France / the French elections: 1- Ditch the Accordion by Jules Crittenden, for Pajamas Media. 2- French Elections: Clash of civilizations. 3- France Warns of Multi-Polar Future by Richard Buchanan, and 4- The Only Good Cowboy is a French Cowboy by Jules Crittenden, at Forward Movement.

From the Financial Times: Let the finger-pointing begin. Ségolène Royal’s defeat on Sunday night left the French Socialist party in disarray and searching for someone to blame. There is hardly a shortage of scapegoats. It is the party’s third consecutive presidential defeat. The Socialists now face the question of whether they can ever regain power without ditching their anti-capitalist rhetoric, as the mainstream left has done across almost all of Europe. Ms Royal can argue that...

Pieter Dorsman wrote a great article about Dutch martyrs Theo van Gogh and especially Pim Fortuyn. Today, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is taking America by storm and many commentators are struggling to explain her instant success following the publication of her recent biography. As they do they reconstruct her creative partnership with Dutch moviemaker Theo van Gogh, something that directly caused the latter’s death and eventually forced Hirsi Ali to pursue a new career on this side of the ocean. Yet...

Today the Dutch, that’s me (among others=, celebrate our liberation. For five years we were ruled and oppressed by the Nazis. Many Dutch, Jews and non-Jews alike, were murdered by the Germans; those who dared to resist were often tortured until they ratted out other members of the resistance and, after that, they were killed, executed. In 1945 the suffering ended: the allied forces, especially the Canadians, the Brits and the Americans liberated the Netherlands, they came in with tanks, they...

A fascinating article at the NYT: As they gather Thursday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library for their first debate, the Republican presidential candidates are thrilled at the chance to associate themselves with Reagan. But they may not be able to escape the challenge created for them by the current president. As much as Iraq or health care or any other issue, the question of how to deal with President Bush is vexing the Republican field. Do they embrace him as a means of appealing to...

Pajamas Media reports that Iraqi authorities said that “the leader of al-Qaeda’s political front organization the Islamic State of Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, was killed in the Ghazaliya district in western Baghdad this morning.” The US army declined to comment thusfar, but U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver did say that ‘a news conference would be held later on Thursday to announce the “success” of an operation against al Qaeda. He...

Well, Fred Thompson succeeded in pissing the left-wing of the Democratic Party off by saying that MoveOn and Harry Reid are “adhering, to the extent they can, to the most left-wing element of their base.” Faiz and others can try to make themselves look like the mainstream all they can, but these people are even considered to be left-wing here, in the Netherlands. Even Daily Kos repeats the talking point: they are not far left, no, they are ‘mainstream’ and those who disagree...

I had to read the name of the newspaper that published this article twice: yes it is the New York Times and it has a positive article up about Iraq. It seems that the violence in the Sunni province of Anbar (many Baathists there) has decreased dramatically since the start of the surge. Sunnis are now working with the US to push Al Qaeda out of Anbar province. Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing...

Yes they do exist: Evening rush hour at the train station: men in suits, a woman carrying a cello, kids lugging snowboards. Markus Marschall, a university engineering student, walked through the bustle wearing an orange T-shirt, leather jacket and aviator sunglasses — and a Sturmgewehr 90 automatic assault rifle slung over his shoulder. “It’s perfectly normal,” said Marschall, 25, who carried the olive-green rifle, issued to him by the Swiss military, on a canvas strap as...

It seems that Saudi Arabia has learned one important lesson the last couple of years: money talks. The Saudi daily Al-Watan reported, citing an anonymous security source, that the Saudi interior ministry has spent over 115 million riyals over the last three years in financial aid for eligible prisoners and their families. The source stated that the aid given to the prisoners goes towards payment of debts, assisting family members in housing and health care, financing prisoners’ weddings, and...

It seems that Gordon Brown “is becoming a growing electoral liability to the Labor Party.” He is, in the polls, falling further and further behind David Cameron. The poll points to Labour’s worst local election performance in two decades, with the party poised to lose hundreds of seats in England and Wales. Labour is also facing a catastrophic loss of power to the nationalists in Scotland, opening up the prospect of a referendum on the end of the Union within four years. The Tory...