Today is the 60th Anniversery of D-Day. I doubt I can say anything to add to the multitude of voices expressing gratitude for the soldiers in Normandy that fateful day when the liberation of Europe from Nazi oppression began.

However, one of my favorite aspects of D-Day was the brilliantly audacious Operation Fortitude in which the Allies convinced the German High Command that the Normandy invasion was just a feint. It is probably the greatest work of deception ever committed in warfare and it made the difference in the success of the Normandy invasion. Without the hard work of the spies, generals, and soldiers in this operation, D-Day may well have been remembered as the day the Allies lost their gambit to win World War II. My hats off to them, as well.

"Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious. Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."
-- Sen. John Kerry

Gail Heriot has some good comments on the popular sport of "SAT-bashing" that is well worth the read. One good point she makes is this:

Moreover, insofar as the children of successful parents do score more highly, the test is measuring something real and not something that will disappear if the SAT is abolished. Such students, on the whole, don't just tend to get better scores, they tend to do better in college too. Ignoring SAT scores just because the children of high-achievers tend to do well would be like ignoring height in basketball players just because the children of tall people tend to be tall.

More to the point, a lot of the SAT bashers tend to ignore the purpose of the SAT: it is a predicitve evaluator of how likely a student is to perform in college. And all of the empirical studies have read suggest that the SAT is, in fact, a pretty good predictor of how well a student will do in college.

But facts are harsh, cruel things, and I'd never expect an education theorist to actually consider them...

This is great news.

The Saudi government yesterday outlined plans to dismantle all international charity organizations operating in the kingdom and place their holdings under a new commission in what officials said is an effort to stop the flow of funds to terrorist groups.

The charities to be dissolved include the al Haramain Islamic Foundation, one of the largest and most influential Saudi charities, whose chairman is the Saudi minister of Islamic affairs.

At a joint news conference with Saudi officials, the U.S. Treasury Department also announced that it had designated the longtime chief of al Haramain as a financier of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

This is a great big blow to al-Qaeda and similarly minded Islamist groups. As Stephen Green points out:

As all us chickenhawks have known for a couple years at least, international Saudi "charitable" groups have long been a source of terrordollars. If the Saudis are serious about cracking down on those organizations (which remains to be seen), then that's a victory on par with Libya's decision late last year to dismantle its WMD programs.

No arguments from me.

There are no doubt a number of reasons why the Saudis are changing their tune on this, but I would suggest three primary reasons:

1) The recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia have changed the House of Sauds minds on the wisdom of funding terrorists. After all, if they're attacking their financers, what's the point of protecting them or financing them?

2) Iraq and the withdrawal of US troops for Saudi Arabia have taught the House of Saud two lessons: 1) that the US keeps its word in the sense that we said we'd move out the troops, and we did. 2) that the US keeps its word in the sense that we said if Saddam wouldn't comply with UN resolutions, we'd attack. And we did.

3) The House of Saud's desire to join the WTO. Saudi Arabia is about 95% of the way there of being granted full membership in the WTO. The only thing keeping them out is us. I've no doubt that the Saudis hope that this step will help convince the US that WTO membership for Saudi Arabia is a good idea.

Zeyad, the indispensible Iraqi blogger, has a great post on Iraq's new President, the new Cabinet, and his hopes for the future. He concludes his post by saying:

So, perhaps I'm a bit optimistic today? Maybe. But Iraqis need to be optimistic at such a critical moment. There is no use in shrugging your shoulders and saying "I don't care.." anymore. You will be left behind along with the dark forces that insist on killing more Iraqis and disrupting the new changes. I'm confident that the Arab world is now watching Iraq with eyes wide open (or wide shut). Some Iraqis are saying the new government will be just a copy of the GC. It depends. Another problem is that I can already feel that the majority of Iraqis are expecting miracles from this new and young government. Unrealistic expectations tend to create endless problems and frustrations. Just like when the GC was formed, or when the Americans first entered Baghdad and people expected that their decades long problems would be fixed in a week.

I hope that the Iraqi people and their new government are going to work to solve the country's problems. They can't, by their very nature, be solved by Americans. As time goes on, only the Iraqis themselves are going to make things better.

We know John Kerry is a decorated Vietnam war hero, chiefly because he has the annoying habit of reminding us of it every chance he gets. We know he came home and spoke out against the war and maybe or maybe not threw his medals or ribbons or whatever over the White House fence. We know some of his compatriots thought he was a good guy and some thought he was a phony, and, and, and -- all of it ancient history. But after that -- what? In his nearly two decades as a United States Senator, John Kerry has not stood out as a leader on any key issue."
-- Cheri Jacobus

Andrew Leigh has a nice little profile of Roger Simon, who is easily one of the best bloggers, period. Anything that boosts Roger's standing in the world is good, in my opinion. I'm currently slogging my way through all of the Moses Wine novels, and I'd highly recommend that you do, too.

Looks like George Tenet has finally resigned. That's certainly good news. The bad news is that he wasn't fired 3 years ago. But I'll take what I can get.

This Onion article is pretty much the dead-on truth.

WASHINGTON, DC—According to Gallup Poll results released Monday, 6 percent of Americans are still undecided about whether to vote against President Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry in November's presidential election.

"At first, I was really leaning toward voting against Kerry, because the way he tried to hide his ambivalence about his military service made him seem like a political operator," poll participant and Trenton, NJ resident Amber Barthelme said. "But then, the Bush Administration's mishandling of the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal got me thinking that there's a lot to not like about the current administration. It's almost impossible to decide which side I don't want to be on."

According to the poll, 46 percent of the registered voters surveyed would vote against Bush if the election were held tomorrow, while 45 percent said they were ready to vote against Kerry. Factoring in the 2 percent margin of error, the two candidates are essentially deadlocked in the race to determine which candidate America doesn't support.

I sympathize. I'm not 100 percent certain who I want to vote against, either.

Dahlia Lithwick has a must-read article on the "evidence" obatained regarding Jose Padilla.

In his comments accompanying the release of the Padilla document, Deputy Assistant Attorney General James Comey offered the following weird little tribute to the joys of suspending the Constitution at will: Had the government charged Padilla criminally, he said, "He would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right. ... He would likely have ended up a free man." Comey's point seems to be that constitutional protections produce bad evidence, in which case we should probably get rid of the Constitution in every criminal case. What he was really saying was that if you permit them to perform unconstitutional interrogations, the administration can get the accused to say exactly what we all wanted to hear.

The evidence in this document was collected during a two-year detention, in which Padilla was in solitary confinement, never charged with a crime, and only given access to his attorney this spring. Certainly his confessions might still be reliable, along with the confessions of Abu Zubaydah and other confederates being interrogated in secret. Or they might not. Without a trial we can never know, and as Phil Carter recently observed, there can now be no trial on the strength of this evidence since it was obtained unconstitutionally.

Evidence obtained by confession has an extremely poor track record, even in cases where there was a lot less coercion than there was against Padilla. As Lithwick rightly notes, we'll probably never know the truth about Padilla, and that's largely because of the Administration's neglect of his civil rights.

I've no doubt that some people are going to make this out to be more than it is.

President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.

There was no indication that Bush is a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that in the event he needs an attorney's advice, "he would retain him," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.

This is the logical, reasonable course of action for anyone who might face legal trouble. Talking to a lawyer about something is hardly evidence of criminality.

There's a really good discussion going on in Cinescape's Comicscape column as to whether or not Superman is still relevant as an icon in modern times. Personally, I think he is. To me, Superman stands for an ideal--that even with extraordinary power, it's possible to act with duty, morality, and responsibility. One thing that is certainly true, however, is that Superman comics are frequently bad. To be sure, there are exceptions to this. Notably, Mark Waid in Kingdom Come, Jeph Loeb's Superman for All Seasons, Paul Dini's Superman: Peace on Earth and every time Alan Moore's ever written him. But overall, they're pretty mediocre at best.

If the writers really want to make Superman worth reading again, they ought to take a cue from the writer's of Smallville (which is, by the way, the best currently running show on television). As one commentator in the column puts it:

I think that the WB has done a great job in re-defining the character of Superman. SMALLVILLE shows that Clark Kent thinks and wants to act like the rest of us, but he knows that his abilities give him a greater responsibility to restrain himself. A healthy upbringing with loving parents has taught him a sense of fair play and using his abilities for revenge or out of anger goes against the morals he was taught. Seeing this portrayed on the screen really gives you a feel for how difficult it actually would be to be Superman. Superman is the ideal of what we hope and wish to be. He is a dream of morality and decency, but in SMALLVILLE he becomes more real to us because of the talented writers, actors, and directors of the show. I think that this could be translated to the comics with a little thought. We need to see what Kal-El is thinking to truly appreciate what he goes through on a day to day basis.

In my mind, Superman is best treated on a mythic level, and his stories should reflect that. That doesn't mean that he is a character that we can relate to, but rather that his legend should resonate with us and reflect the deeper asperations of our culture.

Click here to the rest of this post...

John Kerry had some good things to say about bioterrorism.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Wednesday that in spite of deadly anthrax attacks and warnings of further biological assaults on the United States, significant gaps remain in the nation's preparations for bioterrorism.

"You need to prepare your public health facilities. You need to prepare your hospitals and all the immediate first responders. Many of them will tell you right now that despite the talk over the course of the last years, there has not been that kind of preparation," Kerry said in an interview with Associated Press Radio.

"I think we need to do a better job of preparing our homeland security," he said. "I'm not trying to scare people, obviously. I think we're all trying to be reasonable in our approaches here. But what I'm talking about is having a conversation with public health officials and first responders so that we can respond effectively if it were to happen."

As usual, however, Kerry can talk the talk, but he can't walk the walk. It seems that when the Bush Administration developed a plan along the lines of what Kerry suggested, every member of the Senate voted for it.

Every member, that is, except John Kerry.

(link via Vodkapundit)

"Folks, it's the first mark of fanaticism when you assume all your opponents are either stupid or immoral."
-- Orson Scott Card

Andrew McCarthy has some solid collections of evidence regarding meetings between al-Qaeda members and the 9/11 hijackers with Iraqi officials. There's some interesting reporting linked here, and I'd suggest you check it out.

"The Olympic committee is telling American athletes not to wave the American flag at this years Olympics because it might be seen as boasting. Other countries can wave their flags, just not us. Which is ironic because without us a lot of these countries would be waving a flag different from what they are now."
-- Jay Leno