The Thunder Run

A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.


In the News: (Registration may be required to read some stories)
The Case Against Bruce Ivins - THE CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence against Bruce E. Ivins appears overwhelming. Yesterday, the government identified the microbiologist, who took his own life last week, as the government's lone suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people and seriously sickened 17 others. (READ MORE)

Shoot First, Ask Later - THE DRUG raid by Prince George's County law officers on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo last week was a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish. (READ MORE)

Foreign Activists Manage to Pierce China's Broad Security Apparatus - BEIJING, Aug. 6 -- China's intense efforts to block any protest that would mar the Olympic Games were challenged Wednesday by foreign activists equally bent on diverting attention to issues as varied as Tibetan independence, the crisis in Darfur and religious freedom. (READ MORE)

Obama Hits Back, Too Softly For Some - Barack Obama released a television advertisement yesterday that questions John McCain's claims to be a "maverick," and he charged in a campaign appearance that the Republican displays independence only when it suits him politically. (READ MORE)

Hamdan Guilty of Terror Support - GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 6 -- A military jury on Wednesday found a former driver for Osama bin Laden guilty of supporting terrorism but not of conspiring in terrorist attacks, handing the Bush administration a partial victory in the first U.S. war crimes trial in a half a century. (READ MORE)

McCain takes lead on YouTube hits - Paris Hilton may think John McCain is just a “wrinkly white-haired guy,” but the Republican presidential candidate apparently has figured out the younger generation just fine. Over the past two weeks, his “celebrity” attacks have stomped Democratic presidential opponent Sen. Barack Obama in YouTube hits. (READ MORE)

China rejects Bush criticism of its affairs - BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) – China rejected President Bush's criticism Thursday of its human rights record and restrictions on religion, diplomatically telling him to stay out of its affairs even as he flew to Beijing to attend the Olympics. (READ MORE)

Bin Laden's driver convicted in first terror trial - A split decision Wednesday in the trial of Osama bin Laden's driver for a war crime eased some concerns about whether terrorism suspects would get fair trials in the military tribunals at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (READ MORE)

Anthrax suspect afflicted with paranoia - Army microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins was becoming increasingly paranoid and his work on an anthrax vaccine - which already had been blamed for causing the Gulf War syndrome - was failing when he mailed poison-laced letters to politicians and news organizations, confidential investigative documents unsealed Wednesday show. (READ MORE)

Rocket, missile shields in works in Israel - Menaced on three sides by enemies armed to the teeth with rockets and missiles, Israel is racing against the clock to develop two deterrent systems that will intercept incoming short- and medium-range projectiles before they can hit their civilian or military targets. (READ MORE)

Freddie way off target for quarter - NEW YORK Freddie Mac posted a second-quarter loss Wednesday that was more than three times larger than Wall Street expected as a huge number of borrowers with good credit fell behind on their risky mortgages. (READ MORE)

Favre saga over: QB traded to the Jets - Brett Favre's journey from retirement and back has finally ended -- in New York. The Green Bay Packers reached an agreement Wednesday night to trade their three-time MVP and Super Bowl-winning quarterback to the New York Jets, ending an emotionally grinding month of indecision over Favre's future. (READ MORE)

The McCain Veepstakes - The Beijing Olympics are about to begin, but in Washington the real games of August involve vetting the potential Presidential running mates. As a young, rookie candidate running on "change," Barack Obama can help himself by choosing a safe, seasoned politician like Evan Bayh or Joe Biden. As the trailing candidate from an unpopular party, John McCain has the harder decision... (READ MORE)

An al Qaeda Conviction - In a saner world, yesterday's partial acquittal of Salim Hamdan might persuade critics that military commissions aren't the Star Chambers of political caricature. It won't, of course. But for all the press corps innuendo about jurors "handpicked by the Pentagon," these supposed rubber-stamps exonerated an al Qaeda terrorist of some of the charges against him. (READ MORE)

FASB's Lawyer Bonanza - Truth in advertising: This is an editorial about the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Keep reading anyway, because as with so much else these days you could end up paying. FASB -- the rule-setter for green-eyeshades -- wants to require companies to account for the potential cost of ongoing litigation. (READ MORE)

Anwar's Summons - Malaysia's Election Commission set a date yesterday for a parliamentary by-election which opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is contesting. Also yesterday, the police summoned him to court to face charges in a highly questionable sodomy case. (READ MORE)

Ivins alone responsible for attacks, feds claim - Investigators are standing by the circumstantial evidence they used to build a case against Bruce Ivins, the FBI's sole suspect in the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people and injured 17 others. (READ MORE)

Documents reveal series of federal search warrants - The Frederick News-Post's staff reviewed documents unsealed Wednesday afternoon by a U.S. District Court judge in charge of the FBI's nearly seven-year investigation into the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five and left 17 injured. (READ MORE)



On the Web:
Brett M. Decker: Gloria's Terror Gambit - Southeast Asia is a key front in the global war against Islamist terrorism, and the region has seen some notable counterterror successes. The Philippines, however, is in danger of taking a big step backward. Witness the unprecedented autonomy agreement President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is trying to strike with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, the largest armed Islamist separatist group in Southeast Asia. Called the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, the deal would grant Muslims significant governing autonomy and the right to live under Shariah law in an expanded area of the archipelago's southern islands. The deal is designed to appease Muslims who want to break away from the Philippine nation and unify with other Muslims in the region. Under the agreement, 700 towns, many with sizable Christian populations, would be turned over to Islamic rule. (READ MORE)

Ellen Bork: Don't Forget About - In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China held out appeal for American intellectuals disillusioned with Soviet Communism. Journalists, academics, artists and religious leaders made the journey. Their admiring accounts reveal, as Paul Hollander described in his book "Political Pilgrims," that most of the visitors saw what they wanted to see, and in any case only as much as their Chinese hosts allowed. Visitors to China these days are not looking for a successful communist model. After all, no less a cold warrior than Ronald Reagan called China a "so-called communist country." In most foreign policy circles, dwelling on China's communist character is considered slightly gauche. Indeed, Western newspapers generally do not identify Hu Jintao as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, even though it is this post and not the state presidency from which he derives his authority and power. (READ MORE)

Karl Rove: What McCain Should Do Next - Notwithstanding the hype about Barack Obama, here is where the presidential race stands: John McCain was within an average of 1.9% of his Democratic opponent in last week's daily Gallup tracking poll. It shouldn't be this close. Sen. Obama should be way ahead. It's not that Sen. McCain has made up a lot of ground. Pollster.com shows that the Republican steadily declined from March through June as the Democratic contest dominated the news. Mr. McCain stabilized in July, and then ticked up slightly. But the most important political fact of July is that Mr. Obama has lost altitude. Gallup now projects that 23% of this year's electorate will be swing voters, more than twice the share in 2004. It seems that each candidate is underperforming with his base. Mr. Obama's problem is that only 74% of Democrats in the latest Fox Poll support him, while Mr. McCain gets 86% of Republicans. But Mr. McCain's support lacks the same intensity Mr. Obama receives. (READ MORE)

Paul Ingrassia: Can America's Auto Makers Survive? - The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan used the term "defining deviancy down" to describe the acceptance of behavior that was once deemed intolerable. Now Detroit's car companies are defining disaster down. In 1991, General Motors posted a then-amazing, full-year loss of $4.45 billion, and 10 months later CEO Robert Stempel was out. Last week, GM reported a $15.5 billion loss for just one quarter, and GM's board this week reaffirmed its support for CEO Rick Wagoner. GM's loss easily eclipsed the quarterly loss of $8.7 billion announced by Ford just a week earlier. As for Chrysler, pick a number. The company is owned by private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, and thus its results aren't public. Whether all, or even any, of the three companies can survive has become a legitimate question. In truth, no one knows for sure. But other questions can be addressed with more certainty: (READ MORE)

Mart Laar: Stalinism Was Just as Bad as Nazism - Last week Russia furiously attacked President Bush for his proclamation on Captive Nations Week (July 20-July 26), which was established to raise awareness of countries living under communist and other oppressive regimes. Mr. Bush said that, "In the 20th century, the evils of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism were defeated and freedom spread around the world as new democracies emerged." The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that treating Nazi fascism and Soviet communism as "a single evil" was an insult that "hurt the hearts" of World War II veterans in Russia and in allied countries, including the United States. "While condemning the abuse of power and unjustified severity of the Soviet regime's internal policies, we nevertheless can neither treat indifferently attempts to equate Communism and Nazism nor agree that they were inspired by the same ideas and aims," the ministry said in a statement. (READ MORE)

Jonathan Stevenson: We Need a New Think Tank - Shortly after 9/11, in an interview for a book I was writing on how to handle terrorism as a strategic threat, the pre-eminent nuclear strategist Thomas C. Schelling remarked: "What the government really ought to do is reverse-engineer the Rand Corporation of the fifties and sixties." During that crucial epoch, Rand helped draw a sharp distinction between first-strike and second-strike nuclear deterrence, and the dangerously offense-oriented "brinkmanship" of the 1950s gave way to the more stable defensive posture of "mutual assured destruction." Back then, Rand was situated exclusively in Santa Monica, Calif., far away from the churn of day-to-day government policy implementation. It had uniquely broad research and budgeting standards that freed analysts to think outside the box about strategic problems. (READ MORE)

George Will: Politics and a "Time Horizon" - SAN FRANCISCO -- California's former and perhaps future governor, Jerry Brown, says it took him 13 minutes to get here from Oakland, where he was mayor for eight years and now lives. He came on BART, the transit system launched by his father Pat, who was Democratic governor for two terms until beaten by Ronald Reagan in 1966, which ended a political career that began in 1928 when Pat ran unsuccessfully, as a Republican, for the state Assembly. For 80 years a Brown has been active in California politics, and if Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who will be 77 in 2010, does not run for governor, Jerry Brown, who is now attorney general, probably will, although he says being governor "is an impossible task and anyone will leave discredited." Then why try? Because, he says, he is, in the formulation of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, a pessimist of the intellect but an optimist of the will. (READ MORE)

Victor Davis Hanson: Hillary's Growing Shadow - Barack Obama and John McCain are running neck and neck. Impossible? It would seem so. Republican President Bush still has less than a 30 percent approval rating. Headlines blare that unemployment and inflation are up -- even if we aren't, technically, in a recession. Gas is around $4 a gallon. Housing prices have nosedived. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been indicted -- another in a line of congressional Republicans caught in financial or sexual scandal. Meanwhile, the GOP's presumptive candidate, John McCain, is 71 years old. The Republican base thinks he's lackluster and too liberal. So, everyone is puzzled why the Democratic candidate isn't at least 10 points ahead. It seems the more Americans get used to Barack Obama, the less they want him as president -- and the more Democrats will soon regret not nominating Hillary Clinton. (READ MORE)

Ann Coulter: Only His Hair Dresser Knows For Sure - The mainstream media's reaction to the National Enquirer's reports on John Edwards' "love child" scandal has been reminiscent of the Soviet press. Edwards' name has simply been completely whitewashed out of the news. Say, why isn't anyone talking about John Edwards for vice president anymore? No, seriously -- hey! Why are we going to a commercial break? I suspect that if I tried to look up coverage of the Democratic primaries in Nexis news archives, Edwards' name will have disappeared from the debates. By next week, Edwards won't have been John Kerry's running mate in 2004. Do you know what this means? At this precise moment in time, I could call Edwards a name that would send me to rehab, and the media wouldn't be able to report it! A Washington Post reporter defended the total blackout on the National Enquirer's John Edwards' love child story... (READ MORE)

Larry Elder: The Next Time You Say, 'Bush Lied, People Died' - Think - Listening to National Public Radio on the way home from work, I found the interview -- at least at first -- fun enough. NPR's Terry Gross interviewed comedian/actor Will Ferrell, actor John C. Reilly and writer/director Adam McKay -- to promote a new film. All yukked about their careers, and then the interviewer asked Adam McKay how he and Ferrell began their collaboration years ago on "Saturday Night Live." "We had several writers writing a lot of the political stuff," said McKay. "But yeah, I had written a couple pretty big ones with Will. We actually wrote a sketch right after (Bush) was elected where Dick Cheney came out and said, 'Now a message from the president of the United States,' and it was Dick Cheney. And he was telling everyone, 'If you make less than $250,000, turn the channel right now because this doesn't apply to you.' (READ MORE)

Michael Medved: Foreign Policy Lessons From Fighting Muslim Pirates - Most Americans remain utterly ignorant of this nation’s first foreign war but that exotic, long-ago struggle set the pattern for nearly all the many distant conflicts that followed. Refusal to confront the lessons of the First Barbary War (1801-1805) has led to some of the silliest arguments concerning Iraq and Afghanistan, and any effort to apply traditional American values to our future foreign policy requires an understanding of this all-but-forgotten episode from our past. The war against the Barbary States of North Africa (Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli—today’s Libya) involved commitment and sacrifice far from home and in no way involved a defense of our native soil. For centuries, the Islamic states at the southern rim of the Mediterranean relied upon piracy to feed the coffers of their corrupt rulers. (READ MORE)

Amanda Carpenter: Washington Post Blows Front Page Story - The Washington Post was forced to issue a substantive correction to a front page story that stated GOP presidential candidate John McCain received “unlikely” campaign contributions through an unscrupulous bundler after Townhall questioned the facts of the article. The lede of reporter Matthew Mosk’s A1 Wednesday story said: “The bundle of $2,300 and $4,600 checks that poured into Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign on March 12 came from an unlikely group of California donors: a mechanic from D&D Auto Repair in Whittier, the manager of Rite Aid Pharmacy No. 5727, the 30-something owners of the Twilight Hookah Lounge in Fullerton.” Mosk speculated a man named Harry Sargeant III, a former naval officer and oil-trading company executive, used his clout to persuade these Californians to give money to McCain, similar in the way newly-indicted Norman Hsu bundled donations for former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. (READ MORE)

John McCaslin: Martha's Jellies - If nobody else, Marc Morano, minority communications director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, got a chuckle out of the Massachusetts woman who is blaming her daughter's "nasty jellyfish sting" on global warming. Posted Tuesday on Huffington Post, and then redistributed by Mr. Morano on Capitol Hill, Laurie David writes that several days ago she "heard a blood-curdling scream from my twelve-year-old who was swimming twenty feet away from me in a large salt water tidal pond. What could possibly have happened?" After all, she goes on to observe, "seconds before she was laughing and splashing with her friend. Now she was crying with a huge red welt on her leg." Mrs. David draws attention to "hundreds" of red stinging jellyfish that "have just shown up around Martha's Vineyard and the Cape like never seen before." (READ MORE)

The Virtuous Republic: Undocumented Aliens, Real Crimes 8/06 - By now, you’ve heard that Texas defied the World Court and executed a double murderer yesterday. In all the stories about him, one thing isn’t touched upon to any great extent, if at all. Jose Medellin was an illegal immigrant from Mexico! His parents brought him illegally across the border when he was 6 years old. Had our government secured our borders, two American citizens more than likely would still be alive today. Instead, we had to witness the media circus over the involvement of the World Court, President Bush, and the Supreme Court, all over a man that surely deserves to die. (READ MORE)

The Duck of Minerva: Blog math: tire-pressure edition - Wander around the political blogsphere and chances are, at any given moment, you'll find partisans of all stripes bravely stripping away the deceit of their rivals. Indeed, despite the best efforts of the "MSM" to mislead us all, the bloggers will uncover the facts. In 2004 they poured over maps of the Mekong Delta to prove Kerry's falsehoods. They blustered about partisan weighting to prove that Bush was really behind in the polls. They continue their efforts in this cycle. Even as we speak (to take but one example), fearless keyboard detectives will reveal the frightening truth about Obama's ineligibility to run for President. Sure, sometimes bloggers get it right. News organizations (and governments) now use Photo-Shopped pictures at their peril. But, more often than not, the amateurs really do reveal themselves as such: (READ MORE)

abu muqawama: Dr. iRack is Back . . . But the Elections Aren't - Dr. iRack has been away for a few weeks, mostly traveling across Iraq. When he was in Baghdad last week, the word in the Green Zone was that the provincial powers law would finally pass. As readers will no doubt remember, an earlier version of the law passed in July, despite a walk-out by the Kurds. The presidency council then rejected the law after President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, criticized it. Kurdish opposition stemmed from a controversial clause that deferred elections in the contested oil-rich city of Kirkuk and, in the interim, created a three-way division of power in the city between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkomen that would have upset Kurdish dominance in the area. President Bush desperately wants a law now so that elections can be held before he leaves office. You see, there will be about a four-month-long logistical lag from the date of the law's passage to the date of the elections... (READ MORE)

Westhawk: Deterrence, Corporal Jones, and ‘the strong horse’ - Miscalculation is a constant companion to warfare. It is also very often the cause of wars, as statesmen fail to accurately predict the subsequent behavior of their prospective adversaries. Miscalculating decision-makers base their erroneous forecasts on the past patterns of adversary behavior to which they have become accustomed. When the pattern changes, a violent collision occurs. Adolph Hitler planned for war in 1942, not 1939; he assumed that Britain and France would respond to his gambit for the Danzig Corridor similarly to how they had handled the Sudetenland situation less than a year previously. And the Japanese leadership, in the wake of its December 1941 Pacific blitzkrieg, counted on the Americans to opt for negotiations instead of a war of annihilation. So, in 2001, did Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and the other al Qaeda followers count on the likes of Corporal Garrett Jones, USMC? (READ MORE)

Eugene Volokh: Religious Accommodations - My post on religious accommodations, and in particular the statement, "But requests from minority religious groups (including recent immigrant groups) for accommodation are a longstanding and respectable part of the American tradition of religious freedom," drew this response from a commenter: “Correction: It's not part of American tradition but part of a U.S. Supreme Court adventurism under the faulty disguise it has the power to dictate social religious preferences within states.” Actually: 1. None of the examples I gave are U.S.-Supreme-Court-mandated religious accommodations; all were done by the democratic process. 2. While from 1963 to 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court read the Constitution as mandating some sorts of religious accommodations, the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision almost entirely rejected that doctrine. The rule right now is that the Free Exercise Clause almost never mandates religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. (READ MORE)

The Sundries Shack: The Coming Democratic Show Trials - The term “nutroots” is used a lot by folks on the right to describe the most vocal and activist part of the Democratic Party, especially the part that is very active on the Internet. The term is usually used derisively and connotes a fringe group well out on the bleeding left edge. The biggest nutroots jamboree in the country is the yearly Netroots Nation convention, headed up by “Kos”, whose real name is Markos Moulitsas. It’s a pretty big deal for Democrats. It attracts sitting Senators and Representatives, Presidential candidates, and party bigwigs up and down the party power structure. I don’t use the term often because I believe it incorrectly marginalizes the people it describes. The people who attend the Netroots Nation convention aren’t fringe radicals trying to wheedle their way into the inner sanctum of Democratic power. They’re firmly there. (READ MORE)

Warner Todd Huston: AP Headline Asserts VP is ‘Unpopular Cheney’ - Well, the Associated Press is certainly living up to its new rules of being opinion editorialists instead of reporters if the following headline is any indication: “Obama links energy troubles to unpopular Cheney.” This was unleashed on the world by the AP on August 5. So, I ask you, does “unpopular Cheney” sound more like opinion than it does simple news reporting? In fact, the Cheney comment was not even the crux of Obama’s comments, but a throw away line meant to give red meat to the far left. Obama did not center his energy discussion on Cheney. Yet here we have the AP deciding to make that the focal point of the discussion by making it the headline? Even more ridiculously, the AP twice reported that throw away line in the same 10 paragraph story. This seems to reveal that it is the AP, rather than Obama, that wanted to focus on Cheney the most here. (READ MORE)

ROFASix: Hug a Peace-nik this week! - As this video shows, this is the week "they" start coming out of the woodwork expressing American "shame" for using atomic bombs against Japan. For a period of three days, sixty-three years ago, the US dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finally caused that terrible war to end. Modern American liberals never put the facts of the bombing into historical context to understand the decision. Nor do they grasp that the decision saved millions of lives. To do that, would interfere with the indoctrination of their children to be ashamed of their country. What the liberals should be teaching their children is that instead of shame, the atomic bombings of Japan should be celebrated as a courageous act that saved millions of lives. Millions lived because of those atomic bombs that otherwise would have perished during WWII. (READ MORE)

Dan Riehl: Steve Clemons: Obama Is Wrong ... Wrong ... Wrong - Am I reading this correctly? A chronicle of flip-flops, back steps and ... well, basically spineless-ness on the part of prospective Democratic nominee Barack Obama - posted at the Washington Note by Steve Clemmons? Even if he does get around to blaming Michelle Malkin and the rest of the Right-wing haters: anti-Muslimists, he calls us this time out. You knew that was coming. At the bottom you'll note Clemmons believes Obama is diluting himself purely due to pressure from the Right. I hope that doesn't cause a problem at communion time for the Left when the Obamessiah is finally crowned anointed elected. What I don't understand is how, really, there seems no room here to demand real accountability from Obama, or simply flat-out admit that he's a typical politician, perhaps even worse, given the expedient manner in which he seems to cast off positions, friends and advisers at the first sign of real trouble. (READ MORE)

Paul Mirengoff: Obama and the race card, a preemptive play - Why did Barack Obama decide last week to "play the race card," predicting that his political opponents would try to scare voters by pointing out that he doesn't look like the presidents on our paper money? Obama's move wasn't well calculated to help him. As a general rule, the first candidate to talk about race comes off the loser, and that seemed particularly likely here, where much of Obama's original appeal stemmed from the idea that he was "post-racial." Sure enough, it's widely agreed that Obama was the loser in this flap. So why did he do it? One theory is that he felt frustrated that the bounce he thought he would get from his trip abroad was already fading, and frustrated generally that he wasn't pulling decisively away from McCain. Another theory is that the "race card" is something Obama fears as a general matter, and that the fear simply bubbles up into in public utterances from time to time. (READ MORE)

Ed Morrissey: Obama: “America is no longer what it once was” - When presidential candidates answer questions from children about why they want the job, most will give an answer that uplifts the child and the candidate. Not Barack Obama. At a campaign stop in Elkhart, Indiana, a seven-year-old girl asked the Democrat why he wants to be President — and he told her that America has gone downhill: “America is …, uh, is no longer, uh … what it could be, what it once was. And I say to myself, I don’t want that future for my children.” Sound familiar? Michelle Obama sounded similar themes earlier in the campaign: “Sometimes it’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions. It makes you feel justified in your ignorance. That’s America.” (READ MORE)

Baron Bodissey: Cleaning Up Islam’s Image - Whenever the Democrats experience an electoral setback, after the fact there’s a ritual of woeful hand-wringing in the leftist media (I know, I know; that’s a redundancy). Liberals always feel compelled to explain away their losses. The cause is never to be found in the wrong-headedness or unpopularity of the left-wing statist doctrines themselves; the problem is rather a failure to communicate fully. Voters are ill-informed. If only the media hadn’t been so biased in favor of the Republicans… if only the campaign had done a better job of explaining itself… if only the Democrats had articulated their message more clearly… if only… if only… It seems never to enter their pretty little heads that the problem lies in the message itself, and that if the Democrats had communicated it fully they would have experienced an even greater setback. (READ MORE)

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