09300903 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 3 – Hugh’s law hour begins with attorney Gary Wolensky on recalls, the Smart Guys on the Chicago gun case coming before the Supreme Court, and another view on whether tort reform should be part of the health care debate with plaintiff’s attorney James Sokolov.
09300902 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 2 – Hugh talks about the Iran missile crisis and Afghanistan decision with Council On Foreign Relations scholar Max Boot, the latest from the Senate’s mark-up of Obamacare with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, and the Toyota recall and other legal issues with attorney Gary Wolensky.
09300901 Hugh Hewitt: Hour 1 – Hugh talks Virgina politics with GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, health care reform and the growing Iran missile crisis with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and the future of the tea part movement with Rob Neppell and Ryan Hecker.
Hope, we’ll work on. The “change” part is apparently off the table, at least when it applies to facial expressions.
Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.
By 2012, we should have enough pictures for the entire song.
(via American Digest.)
The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus bring us a story this morning about the great success America is having against al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2009.
This would be great news, of course, and I hope it is true. But the timing of this sudden burst of optimism about our troops’ increased ability to suppress bin Laden’s fanatics is just too convenient for those urging the president to reject General McChyrstal’s recommendations concerning more troops for the Afghan theater.
If al Qaeda is truly on its back and unable to regroup, then the case for abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban gets easier for the president to make. If, on the other hand and as almost everyone prior to today has stated, the return of the Taliban to power in Kabul or even to unmolested authority in other areas of the country will increase the ability of al Qaeda to organize and launch attacks against the U.S., then the McChyrstal recommendations should be adopted and quickly.
We know the president has embraced appeasement in all but name vis-a-vis Iran and its nuclear ambitions. The New York Times’ John Burns worries that the U.S. policy in Iraq is leading to growing instability there, which is another example of the roll out of an appeasement policy towards any force hostile to the U.S. And now today’s WaPo story suggests others are pushing the president towards a three-front appeasement policy, which would mean the gradual abandonment of the battle for Afghanistan in addition to withdrawal from Iraq and surrender to Iran’s ambitions. Make that a four-front appeasement policy, given the president’s abandonment of missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic in an attempt to please Vladimir Putin.
Back to the ’90s’ “holiday from history,” which of course led to 9/11.