The London Times reports that not only democrats are looking forward to an American withdrawal from Iraq.

A radical plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn is causing alarm among US intelligence officials.

A power struggle has emerged between the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq, an organisation with ambitions to become a state which has been set up by Al-Qaeda, and more moderate Sunni groups. They are battling for the long-term control of central and western areas which they believe could break away from Kurdish and Shi’ite-dominated provinces once the coalition forces depart.

According to an analysis compiled by US intelligence agencies, the Islamic State has ambitions to create a terrorist enclave in the Iraqi provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salah al-Din, Nineveh and parts of Babil.

“Al-Qaeda are on the way to establish their first stronghold in the Middle East,” warned an American official. “If they succeed, it will be a catastrophe and an imminent danger to Saudi Arabia and Jordan.”

The US conviction that the Islamic State could seize power is based on its use of classic Al-Qaeda tactics and its adoption last October of a draft constitution. This was entitled Notifying Mankind of the Birth of the Islamic State and was posted on a website based in Britain. The group named 10 ministers under its emir, Abu Amer Al-Baghdadi. They included a war minister, Abu Hamza Al-Muhajer who is also known as Abu Ayub al-Masri and is Al-Qaeda’s commander in Iraq.

IntheNews:

Eight people have been killed and 25 wounded in Pakistan ahead of a protest over the recent sacking of the country’s top judge, according to reports.

Pakistani authorities have deployed 15,000 troops in the city of Karachi in a bid to stem violence between supporters of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and pro-government groups ahead of a rally to be held there by the ousted chief justice.

Today’s planned protest will be the latest in a series of rallies held across Pakistan by supporters of Mr Chaudhry, who was sacked by the nation’s president Pervez Musharraf in March amid allegations that he had abused his position.

However those backing the suspended head of Pakistan’s supreme court claim that army general Mr Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, is seeking to replace him with a less independent-minded judge ahead of potential legal challenges to his continued rule.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education story:

Tufts University has found a conservative student publication guilty of harassment and creating a hostile environment for publishing political satire. Despite explicitly promising to protect controversial and offensive expression in its policies, the Tufts Committee on Student Life decided yesterday to punish the student publication The Primary Source (TPS) for printing two articles that offended African-American and Muslim students on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has spearheaded the defense of TPS, is now launching a public campaign to oppose Tufts’ outrageous actions.

“We now know that Tufts’ promises of free expression are hollow,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “By punishing political expression—the type of expression at the very core of the right to free speech—Tufts has shown that, in spite of its promises, it has no regard for its students’ fundamental rights. Such hypocrisy must not go unchallenged.”

Last December, TPS published a satirical Christmas carol entitled “Oh Come All Ye Black Folk.” Although TPS runs a Christmas carol parody every year, December’s carol sparked controversy on campus because it harshly lampooned race-based admissions. Realizing that the carol offended large portions of the Tufts community, TPS published an apology on December 6, 2006. Four months later, however, a student filed charges alleging that the carol constituted “harassment” and created a “hostile environment.” Other students filed similar charges in response to TPS’ April 11, 2007 piece entitled “Islam—Arabic Translation: Submission,” a satirical advertisement that ridiculed Tufts’ “Islamic Awareness Week” by highlighting militant Islamic terrorism.

The two complaints were consolidated for a hearing before the university’s Committee on Student Life on April 30, 2007. Yesterday, the Committee issued a decision holding that TPS had violated the university’s harassment policy by publishing the two pieces. The Committee found that the carol “targeted [black students] on the basis of their race, subjected them to ridicule and embarrassment, intimidated them, and had a deleterious impact on their growth and well-being on campus.” The Committee also held that the parody of Islamic Awareness Week “targeted members of the Tufts Muslim community for harassment and embarrassment, and that Muslim students felt psychologically intimidated by the piece.”

CNN’s technical staff miscaptions this image of his successor Gordon Brown and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

What a typical piece of leftist infantilism! They can’t even think clearly enough to remember that if Bush resigned, Dick Cheney would become president, which they wouldn’t like one bit.

Greg Sheridan, in The Australian, describes how Al Qaeda is winning, not by battlefield success, but via propaganda.

the awesome power of what the boffins call al-Qa’ida’s “single narrative” for Muslims everywhere. The single narrative is the most powerful propaganda tool yet devised. It presents all of Muslim experience worldwide as a story of Western and Zionist persecution of Muslims. This embraces obvious cases such as Palestinians, Kashmiris and Bosnians, but also the experience of Muslims in the Middle East under corrupt governments, the experience of Muslims in India, the marginalised status of Muslims in western Europe, the conflict in Iraq and everything else. The beauty of the single narrative is that any grievance at all, real or imagined, whether based in fact or fantasy or conspiracy, can be fitted into it.

(Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer observes) “In terms of their PR, I give full marks to al-Qa’ida. They’ve been very successful.”

“Every time there’s a terrorist attack in Iraq there’s a Western reaction not of how horrible these people are but that we must pull out, we should give up. I give full credit to al-Qa’ida for their excellent public relations.”

Downer is right in this withering analysis. Al-Qa’ida in a sense wins whether it wins or loses. If it kills a large number of innocents, the chief reaction among most commentators is that this is somehow the fault of the US or its coalition allies.

The Western commentariat, not least in Australia, has embraced the pro-terrorist proposition that almost the only people not morally responsible for terrorism are the terrorists.

whole article

Bird Dog over at Maggie’s Farm is recommending a new magazine focussed on the Southern lifestyle.

This one looks good to me. I’m subscribing.

Former Harvard Crimson editor, now law professor at the University of Oregon, Garrett Epps demonstrates the classic form of the dementia afflicting members of the democrat nutroots in this spectacularly self-righteous and paranoid rant in Salon.

By evil chance, I spent the Saturday night before Election Day 2000 at a jolly dinner for high-level Republicans. Most of the talk over the entrees concerned why then-candidate George W. Bush had been too pusillanimous to tell the voters that Al Gore was not just a liberal, but a Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist. But as the desserts circulated, so too did a piece of comic relief — an anonymous leaflet explaining to voters that because of heavy voter registration, the rules had been changed: Republicans would vote on Tuesday, Democrats and independents on Wednesday.

I think of that dinner whenever I read about the widening scandal of the U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzo is probably the most endangered man since William Tell’s son Walter. The pattern behind the scandal, however, transcends Gonzales’ fate or that of his underlings.

At least part of the U.S. attorneys plot seems to derive from the “election fraud” hoax that Republicans are trying to perpetrate in order to gain control of the country’s voter lists. So nailing this inept crew of thugs won’t be good enough. We need laws protecting the right to vote from the kind of phony, partisan prosecutors that Gonzales, Rove and Co. were trying to put in place, and from the punitive, restrictive voter-ID laws that are a prominent part of the far-right political agenda.

Republicans do cherish their little practical jokes — the leaflets in African-American neighborhoods warning that voters must pay outstanding traffic tickets before voting; the calls in Virginia in 2006 from the mythical “Virginia Election Commission” warning voters they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls. The best way to steal an election is the old-fashioned way: control who shows up. It’s widely known that Republicans do better when the turnout is lighter, whiter, older and richer; minorities, young people and the poor are easy game for hoaxes and intimidation.

Mr. Epps does not even seem to realize that he is telling us in so many words that he is an enthusiastic partisan of the claim to power of a coalition in which people so gosh-darned stupid that they can be made to believe absolutely anything, and people actively fearful of arrest, are essential components.

Voting returns from urban areas characteristically featuring democrat percentages resembling the margins achieved by dictators in the mock elections conducted in one-party states would tend to suggest that democrats don’t really have any such problem. But, personally, I am quite prepared to argue that anyone successful at persuading the cluelessly stupid and the inveterately criminal elements of society to stay out of politics was doing the Lord’s work.

Leftists, like Professor Epps, have long since abandoned any pretence of desiring a democratic process consisting of a rational debate based on Constitutional principles. For them, democracy simply consists of getting together a large enough mob to overwhelm any opposition so it can get down to work looting the means and property of others.

There is no issue about the quality of judgement or the purity of motive of the democrat voter. Stupid is fine, and selfish and greedy is even better. From the viewpoint of the left, Society is just a collection of warring factions, all fighting for the largest possible share of the spoils. The left doesn’t care if its constituents are dishonest or dumb, it just wants them numerous, loud, and aggressive.

Living National Treasure Yoshindo Yoshihara demonstrates the complex process of creating the Japanese sword in the German-language 9:15 video.

Richard Miniter and a US Army explosives expert discuss weapons of Iranian origin captured in Iraq on a PJM-exclusive 12:15 video.

AP:

THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn.-
Mike Olson had been working under his dad’s deck for about 20 minutes when he realized he wasn’t alone. “I cocked my head back, and I saw those two eyes looking at me,” Olson said of the Monday encounter. “I got out real fast.”

Olson had seen what he thought was a gray wolf (Canis lupus -JDZ). “It was probably 6 feet away,” he said. “It was just laying down. It had its head up and was just looking at me.”

Olson and his dad, Erling, called the police, who responded expecting to find a large, wolf-like dog beneath the deck.

“They put their head under the deck, and sure enough, it was a wolf,” said Craig Mattson, deputy chief for the Thief River Falls Police Department.

Police and the city’s animal control officer were unable to put a noose around the wolf’s neck and capture it alive, Mattson said. He said the animal had been growling and appeared to have mange, a parasitic infestation of the skin. So, a section of planking was removed and an officer shot the 104-pound male wolf, Mattson said.

It’s the first time Mattson can remember a wolf in town.

As for Olson, he cautiously went back to work on the deck Tuesday.

“I’m going to look twice,” he said.

If you lived in Homer, Alaska, like Gary and Teri Lyon, you could get up on Sunday morning and find a Kodiak Bear (Ursus arctos middendorffi) killing a moose in your driveway, too.

AP

0:19 video 1

0:37 video 2

1:06 video 3

AP:

VILNIUS, Lithuania – Climbing into a giraffe’s cage at the local zoo seemed a good idea after a few drinks. But the prank went wrong when the 1.3 ton animal flew into a rage and attacked the three student trespassers at a zoo in Lithuania on Monday night.

Ruta Greiciute, a 22-year-old student at Kaunas Technology University, was hospitalized with a broken collar bone and nose after the nine-year-old male giraffe, named Solut, attacked her.

The other students survived the incident unscathed.

“This was a very silly thing they did. The scared giraffe could have stomped her to death,” Kaunas Zoo spokeswoman Angele Grebliauskaite said.

The zoo reported that many animals had been disturbed Monday night as students celebrated a festival in a nearby condominium.

Police have launched an investigation to find out how the intoxicated students entered the zoo at night and climbed the 10 foot high fence surrounding the giraffe cage.