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The Republican Party convention in St. Paul gave us two American film narratives in an attempt to shift the national political debate away from issues and accountability to personalities and fluffy ideals. Former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan let the strategy slip in an unguarded open mike moment. Asked if Sarah Palin is the most […]

US ground troops conducted a raid into Pakistan’s tribal areas leaving an estimated 20 dead. The governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Owais Ahmed Ghani, said that the raid was ‘outrageous,” and the government charged that women and children were among the dead. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry called US ambassador Ann Patterson in for an […]

One thing is what conservative pundits are saying in public about the McCain-Palin ticket. Another thing is what they think in private. Thanks to an accidental open-mike moment, we know the latter with regard to Mike Murphy and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. It turns out that they really think the choice of Palin […]

Campbell Brown of CNN asks McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds some hard questions about Sarah Palin’s national security experience and refuses to let him get away with illogical and self-contradictory answers. John McCain was furious (and no one can be furious the way he can) and cancelled his planned interview on CNN in a fit of […]

Thousands of protesters rallied against the Iraq War at the Republican Convention on Monday. The thousands of protesters were almost all peaceful. I had US cable news on all day off and on, and never saw anything on it about the protests. Some teenager was pregnant, which is not their business or mine, but that […]

Robin M. Mills writes in an op-ed for IC A pernicious myth has recently re-emerged: that oil is ‘running out’, that global production will soon peak and enter inexorable decline. What is the proper response to ‘peak oil’ – to attempt energy self-sufficiency, or to take military control of oil producing regions before the Chinese […]

She could have insisted these male shock jocks be civil or defended another woman politician, Lyda Green, from being dismissed with an expletive. GOP VP pick Sarah Palin laughs at cancer surviving senator being called a “bitch” The Republican head of the Alaskan Senate, Green reacted this way to John McCain picking Palin as his […]

McCain on Katrina ‘ Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he [McCain] did; he finally got there in March 2006. He voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the Federal, State, and local responses to Katrina in med-September 2005. He repeated that vote in 2006. He voted against allowing […]

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Russian press proposing a strategic alliance between Russia and Iran. Pundit on Possible Russia-Iran Alliance To Counter ‘Unfriendly’ US MovesArticle by Radzhab Safarov, General Director of the Russian Center for Iranian Studies: “Iranian Trump Card. Russia Can Take Control of Persian Gulf”Vremya NovosteyFriday, August 29, […]