PrairiePundit

Independent: Backed by fighter jets and helicopter gunships, Pakistani troops dramatically expanded a military offensive against Taliban hideouts yesterday after fresh evidence emerged of the militants' determination to extend their reach beyond the Swat valley and towards the capital. Army chiefs said the operation in Buner, which followed swiftly on the heels of a military bombardment of Lower Dir, was expected to last a week. The aim was to "eliminate and expel" an estimated 500 militants scattered across the strategic valley, which lies just 70 miles north of Islamabad, officials said. The government of the President Asif Ali Zardari struck a controversial deal in February with the Swat militants, whereby he agreed to impose Sharia law in a vain bid to get the Taliban to lay down their weapons. The accord sparked concern in Washington and London and last week the militants appear to rip it up in any case. They rampaged beyond Swat and into Buner, kidnapping and kil...

Fox News: Veteran GOP Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania announced Tuesday he will switch political parties and run in the Democratic primary in 2010. Republican voters had sent him to the Senate five times. But faced with the prospect of a strong challenge from conservative Pat Toomey in the GOP primary and the state trending Democratic, Specter issued a statement that he was going to jump ship. "I deeply regret that I will be disappointing many friends and supporters," Specter said at a news conference on Tuesday. "I can understand their disappointment," he continued. "I am also disappointed that so many in the party I have worked for for more than four decades do not want me to be their candidate. It is very painful on both sides." The switch puts Democrats within one vote of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Democrats currently hold 56 seats in the Senate, and two independents typically vote with the p...

CNN: After a YouTube video showed panicked New Yorkers scrambling as a Boeing 747 flew frighteningly close to the lower Manhattan skyline, a former Homeland Security adviser questioned whether the man who approved the flyby should remain in his White House office. Fran Townsend, who advised President George W. Bush for more than three years, called the move "crass insensitivity" in the wake of 9/11. "I'd call this felony stupidity. This is probably not the right job for Mr. Caldera to be in if he didn't understand the likely reaction of New Yorkers, of the mayor," Townsend said Tuesday on CNN's "American Morning." Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office, quickly apologized for Monday's incident after the planes prompted workers and residents to evacuate buildings in New York and New Jersey. Watch Townsend slam Caldera » "Last week, I approved a mission over New York. I take responsibility for that decision,...

Mathew Vadum: The so-called Commission on Accountability which mysteriously appeared on the political scene a few days ago to push for show trials related to War on Terror interrogation policies is a PR hoax created by liberal philanthropist George Soros and political operatives sympathetic to the Obama administration. The push is part of a vindictive campaign to pay back the architects of the War on Terror for making a good faith effort to defend America To some the arrival of the Commission on Accountability, with its 19 member groups including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch, suggested a significant groundswell of support in the nonprofit activist community for the proposed creation of an independent, non-partisan commission to examine the treatment of captured suspected terrorists. These groups all want Bush administration officials investigated for doing their jobs. But the Napoleonic plotter Charles Maurice de Talleyrand's eternal...

BBC: Pakistan has launched air strikes against suspected Taleban hideouts in Buner district, less than 100km (67 miles) from the capital, Islamabad. The aerial attack in Buner comes as tens of thousands of people have fled their homes in Lower Dir, another area which is seeing heavy fighting. Hundreds of militants have moved into adjacent regions recently from the Swat Valley, an area they largely control. Western politicians have expressed concern over Taleban activity there. The air force's move into Buner marks a widening of the government's offensive against the Taleban. Military spokesman Athar Abbas said their mission in Buner was to "eliminate and expel" the Taleban from the district. Maj Gen Abbas said there were about 450 to 500 militants in Buner, in breach of a peace agreement between the government and the Taleban. Meanwhile, in Dir he said the military had killed about 70 militants and described the operation as a success. The BBC...

Scott Ott: With the federal government on full alert over the potential swine-flu pandemic, President Barack Obama said today that "Americans should not take this crisis as an opportunity to justify anti-swine attitudes or outright porcine abuse." "The vast majority of hogs are peace-loving, productive members of society," the president said. "The biggest threat to the United States at this point is not that we might be overrun by a swine-based virus that indiscriminately murders its victims, but rather that we would allow a few diseased pigs to poison our hearts against the rest." The president has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to draft Justice Department guidelines labeling violence against domesticated hogs has a "hate crime" punishable by 10-years-to-life in prison, on top of the customary sentence. Mr. Holder has also created a special investigative unit of the FBI to focus on anti-swine crime. ... "This pandemic will be ov...

Fox News: Afghan guards armed with AK-47s keep watch just outside as a village elder sits in a room with no electricity and tells a U.S. Marine: “The Taliban are recruiting young unemployed men to plant IEDs and fight the American military.” Cpl. Adam King sits down, sips some tea and listens attentively. What he says and what he hears could save the lives of his Marines. This is the scene in Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, where the 2nd Battalion 8th Marines — known as the 2/8 — have built a simulated Afghan village to prepare American troops for what they will face half a world away. Click here to see more photos of the Afghan Village. The 2/8 Marines will be traveling this summer, but they'll be going to a decidedly non-vacation spot: Afghanistan, where Taliban violence is high and the presence of any authority is low. ... “It’s a different type of training,” DTS representativ...

Tevi Troy: Swine flu has presented the Obama administration with its first major public-health crisis. Fortunately for the Obama team, the Bush administration developed new tools that will prove critical in meeting this challenge. Under President Bush, the federal government worked with manufacturers to accelerate vaccine development, stockpiled crucial antivirals like Tamiflu, war-gamed pandemic scenarios with senior officials, and increased the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) sample identification capabilities. These activities are bearing fruit today. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already deployed 12.5 million courses of antivirals -- out of a total of 50 million -- to states and local agencies. In addition, CDC's new capacities have allowed Mexican officials to send flu samples to CDC for quick identification, a capability that did not exist a few years ago. Collaboration between the government and the private sector on vaccines ...

Wesley Pruden: We were all supposed to be in the graveyard by now, done in by AIDS, SARS, bird flu, poisoned peanut butter, Hong Kong flu, killer tomatoes, global warming and strangulation by kudzu. But here we are, proof that there really is life after death. Now we learn that we might freeze before the pigs get us. (The chickens failed.) NASA scientists have observed that the solar wind is the weakest since we began keeping such records, that the magnetic axis of the sun is tilted to an unusual degree, and Ol' Sol is the quietest he has been in a century. A chill, say the solar scientists, may be on the way. (Or not.) Worse, says one of them, this could compel reappraisal of the science of global warning. Try as he might, poor old Al Gore just can't keep the cosmos in line. But this week Ol' Sol has been put in the shade by a new panic du jour. The cable-TV networks and the Internet are bubbling with sunspots, even if the sun isn't. Sample these latest headlines from...

Washington Post: Some of the nation's largest defense contractors, labor unions and trade groups are banding together to argue that the Obama administration is putting 100,000 or more jobs at risk by proposing deep cuts in weapons programs. The defense industry and its supporters argue that the proposals by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates will increase unemployment during a historic economic crisis. Why, they ask, would President Obama push hundreds of billions in stimulus spending to create jobs only to propose weapons cuts that would eliminate tens of thousands of them? "It doesn't make sense that our government is looking at trying to save or create jobs at the same time it's talking about cutting something like this," said Jeff Goen, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers chapter in Marietta, Ga., where Lockheed Martin does final assembly on the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, which is slated to be cut. Lockheed and othe...

Bret Stephens: Nancy Pelosi is "pushing back" against charges that she was aware of -- and acquiesced in -- the CIA's harsh interrogations of terrorist detainees nearly from the moment the practice began, reports the Politico Web site. Maybe she's suffering from amnesia. Maybe, for instance, the speaker doesn't remember that in September 2002, as ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, she was one of four members of Congress who were briefed by the CIA about the interrogation methods the agency was using on leading detainees. "For more than an hour," the Washington Post reported in 2007, "the bipartisan group . . . was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk. "Among the techniques described," the story continued, "was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Re...

NY Times: When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights. When President George W. Bush ordered new ways to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb last year, he approved a plan for an experimental covert program — its results still unclear — to bore into their computers and undermine the project. And the Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country’s power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets — in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons. Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapo...

Micheal Ramirez has the proper diagnosis. Click on the image for a larger view.

CBS: The recent release of detailed memos describing harsh interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists under the Bush administration has fueled calls for a Congressional investigation. But most Americans do not want an investigation, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll . According to the poll, sixty-two percent of Americans do not think Congress should hold hearings to investigate the administration’s treatment of detainees. Only a third of Americans thinks Congress should investigate. That's the same proportion as thought so in February. Republicans overwhelming oppose Congress holding such hearings, and sixty percent of independents agree. Democrats - much like Democratic representatives in Congress -- are more divided. Forty-six percent say Congress should hold hearings, while fifty-one percent say they are not necessary. ... If Democrats go forward with show trials and investigations it will backfire on them big time. The poll evidences some ambivalence a...

NY Times: In Pakistan, a flogger is known only as the Taliban ’s choice whip for beating those who defy their strict codes of Islam. But deep in the nation’s commercial capital, just next door to a mosque and the offices of a radical Islamic organization, in an unmarked house two Pakistani brothers have discovered a more liberal and lucrative use for the scourge: the $3 billion fetish and bondage industry in the West. Their mom-and-pop-style garment business, AQTH , earns more than $1 million a year manufacturing 2,000 fetish and bondage products, including the Mistress Flogger, and exporting them to the United States and Europe. The Qadeer brothers, Adnan, 34, and Rizwan, 32, have made the business into an improbable success story in a country where bars are illegal and the poor are often bound to a lifetime in poverty. If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been...

Guardian: A Mexican village whose inhabitants were overwhelmed by an outbreak of respiratory illness starting in February has emerged as a possible source of the swine flu outbreak which has now spread across the world. The state government of Veracruz in eastern Mexico has confirmed one case of swine flu in the village of La Gloria with the sufferer named locally as a four-year-old boy, Edgar Hernandez Hernandez. The federal government said tonight that he tested positive for the same strain of the virus which has claimed lives in Mexico. The boy's case earlier this month came amid an outbreak of respiratory illness in the area in which around 400 people requested medical help. The boy was treated in hospital and survived. But two babies from the same village died during the outbreak. Sufferers complained of symptoms including fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. "The symptoms were exactly like the ones they talk about now [with swine flu]," said a local r...

From the Telegraph: Memory pill being developed If you have ADHD, you probably must remember to take your medication for that first.

CNN: A White House official apologized Monday after a low-flying Boeing 747 spotted above the Manhattan skyline frightened workers and residents into evacuating buildings. The aircraft was a White House plane taking part in a classified, government-sanctioned photo shoot, the Federal Aviation Administration said. "Last week, I approved a mission over New York. I take responsibility for that decision," said Louis Caldera, director of the White House Military Office. "While federal authorities took the proper steps to notify state and local authorities in New York and New Jersey, it's clear that the mission created confusion and disruption." Witnesses reported seeing the plane circle over the Upper New York Bay near the Statue of Liberty before flying up the Hudson River. It was accompanied by two F-16s. Watch the plane fly over Manhattan » "I was here on 9/11," said iReporter Tom Kruk, who spotted the plane as he was getting coffee Monday morning a...

Jay Cost: This is from the President's remarks at the National Academy of Science: At such a difficult moment, there are those who say we cannot afford to invest in science. That support for research is somehow a luxury at a moment defined by necessities. I fundamentally disagree. Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been. Who the hell is saying we cannot afford to invest in science? Isn't the real argument about whether we can spend so much more (fully 3% of GDP) on science, and revitalize the economy, and save the banks, and save the Big Three, and spend more on education, and reform health care, and revolutionize the energy sector all at the same time? I have heard "there are those who say..." from this President quite a bit in the last three months. I think it's time he start naming names. Who are these people who hold such backward-looking, unacceptable...

Rasmussen Reports has the survey. The troubling thing I find about this finding is that 60% or so still favor Obama. That suggest they are really not paying attention to his control freak policies.