Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

With a new report from the US intelligence community suggesting that al-Qaeda has found a safe haven in tribal areas of Pakistan, there is increasing talk of war. The Washington Post, for example, suggested in an editorial today that we should bomb Pakistan in order to take out militant strongholds. But the Post is way off base. An examination of what’s going on in Afghanistan shows that bombing as a counter-terrorism technique has proven a significant failure. In Afghanistan, NATO’s...

Jeff Parker, Florida Today

Just got this email: MSNBC Breaking News: President Bush to have colonoscopy; Cheney to take temporary control

That favorite whipping boy of left and right, New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, turns 108 Friedman Units today.

Does the Bush administration’s astonishing assertion that Congress has no power to force a U.S. attorney to pursue contempt charges rise to the level of a constitutional crisis? The answer, I believe, is that this is just the latest chapter in an ongoing constitutional crisis involving a rogue president who continues to insist that when he invokes executive privilege, inks a signing statement, unilaterally suspends a bedrock principle of the American legal system or violates an international...

The “tabloidization” of American cable news has been hailed as an unfortunate, but necessary, step to maintain viewership. CNN, MSNBC, FOX and other channels have reduced air time for political and world news and supplemented it with stories about celebrity scandals, small town murder mysteries, and sports. But a recent show on ABC has shot a hole in the theory that Americans aren’t interested in hard-hitting international news. The program — a gritty, violent, in-depth look...

Do you think those little green men miss us?

From Pajamas Media: Turkish citizens go to the polls on Sunday for an important election. Will the vote reverse the course of Islamization or move it further down the road of becoming a more Islamic, socially conservative society and a foreign policy more attuned to Iran and Syria than to the United States? Barry Rubin, who is covering the elections for PJM, isn’t optimistic. Read it all.

Denmark has secretly airlifted about 200 translators and other Iraqi employees of its troops and their relatives ahead of its withdrawal from Iraq, and most are expected to seek asylum. The Nordic country will withdraw all of its 480 combat troops in August and replace them with a small helicopter unit of 55 soldiers. Bo Eric Weber, Danish ambassador to Iraq, said the operation followed the killing in December of an Iraqi who had worked with the Danes as an interpreter. Around 80 of those flown...

More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time, More Time . . .

John Darkow, Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

Although it helps, you don’t have to be black to be offended by the premise behind “Hot Ghetto Mess,” a new series on the Black Entertainment Television cable channel that is an orgy of stereotyping that mocks ghetto culture. Led by blogger Gina McCauley at What About Our Daughters?, a rather formidable coalition of religious and women’s groups is asking advertisers to pull their ads from the show, which debuts on July 25, and threatens a boycott of their products if they...

The independent thinking conservative writer Josh Trevino has some thoughts HERE.

Details at The All Spin Zone.

Mark July 19, 2007 down as the day when a Pentagon official crossed a line and veered not just into partisanship but a return to the mid-20th century form of political demonization and categorization known as “McCarthyism.” It was the day the news emerged that a Pentagon bigwig talked about a member of the opposition party — who also happens to be a United States Senator — in a partisan manner that wasn’t even done by Pentagon officials at the height of the Vietnam...

Once again the Bush administration is changing what has been the conventional wisdom. You must have thought that if Congress brings contempt charges against Bush administration officials for refusing to testify (or show up) because President George Bush invoked executive privilege that under our system of government the Justice Department had to prosecute. Not so, says the Bush administration which now effectively argues that the President’s word is The Law and Justice will do what he wants...

Mike Lane, Cagle Cartoons

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by outed spy Valerie Plame and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials. U.S. District Judge John Bates said the lawsuit raises “important questions relating to the propriety of actions undertaken by our highest government officials.” But in a 41-page decision, he found that Plame and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, failed to show the case belongs in federal court. More here.

This is so obvious, but, hey, at least Lee Hamilton came out and said it: U.S. forces should go into Pakistan to rout al Qaeda from the safe haven it has found in the mountains on the border with Afghanistan, a co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group said. Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who also served as the vice chairman of the 9/11 commission, says the Iraq war distracted the United States when it had al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on the run in the tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan… Declassified...

Will Dems hold on to the slimmest of margins? As of yesterday, there were exactly 475 days left until Election Day 2008. Since the Crystal Ball’s last Senate update, filed exactly 600 days before the election, there have been a number of interesting developments that merit mention. To begin with, there will now be a total of 34 seats on the ballot, instead of the 33 originally planned. This, of course, is a result of Wyoming Senator Craig Thomas’s passing. Per the Seventeenth Amendment...

It’s Scottsboro redux in Jena, Louisiana.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel talks to a sailor in fire protection clothing during a visit to a marine technology school. You can surely do better than that. What caption would you write for this photo?

What a doozy of a headline: Sex Ed for Kindergarteners ‘Right Thing to Do,’ Says Obama As it turns out — and of course this never, ever happens in the MSM — the headline is a gross misrepresentation both of the article below it and of Obama’s views. Well done, ABC. Right-wing nutjob Alan Keyes smeared Obama over this issue during their Senate race in Illinois in ’04. At least in its headline, ABC has resurrected that smear. The impression one gets is that Obama...

George Packer packs more punch into a single paragraph than most bloggers, myself included, do in a single week. Yes, the inestimable Packer, a longtime New Yorker writer, is blogging these days. He had this to say at his new Interesting Times blog: “Al Qaeda in Iraq has had an outsized strategic effect compared to its numbers. By slaughtering thousands of Shia civilians, it has plunged Iraq into civil war. Killing or capturing large numbers of Al Qaeda followers may be the main achievement...