From CQPolitics.com:

GAO REPORT BOLSTERS CASE FOR PUSHING IRAQ TO PAY MORE RECONSTRUTION COSTS

Congressional demands that Iraq increasingly fund its own reconstruction will be a prime focus of the upcoming defense authorization debate next month, bolstered by new financial estimates provided by the Government Accountability Office.

No comment as yet from our old pal Abdul Basit,  the head of Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit, the body that oversees Iraqi government spending. He's the one who, back in May, in reaction to the very thought of oil-soake ...

Forty-one years after the debut of "Hair,"  New York's  Public Theater has revived--resucitated?--the hippie rock-sical that, as the New York Times reliably put it, "became the soundtrack of a generation enraged by the war in Vietnam...."

Was it really just the war in Vietnam that they were enraged by? Or was there also something else a little closer to the bone?  If we look back at the antiwar protestors-- "the moral conscience of our society," according to one (self)-satisfied, 65-year-old theater-goer who first saw "Hair" as  a Berkeley grad student--there is a terrible coincidence th ...

What ho, Jeeves--Al Qaeda is just like the Drones Club!

So say, in effect, a pair of academics the Washington Post saw fit to showcase in today's paper. It seems that there these two Poindexters have been pondering the big bad world from their particularly picturesqe ivory towers (Stanford and UC Santa Barbara, respectively) and An Idea has come to them (uh oh):

The generic problem is the question of why people having useful knowledge can't be bribed to reveal it," said David Laitin, a political scientist at Stanford University who has studied why terrorist groups that specialize in suicide attacks are so rarely undermined by defectors and turncoats.

Along wi ...

Today's column is on British reaction to best and brightest Muslim attitudes toward killing in the name of religion, sharia, the caliphate and more.

Meanwhile, over in Germany...

Haaretz today reports on Joseph Yousef, who is, amazingly enough, the Christian convert son of a popular Hamas leader. He now lives in exile in California.

"Send regards to Israel, I miss it. I respect Israel and admire it as a country," he says.

"You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death."

Is that the justification for the suicide attacks?

"More than that. An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In ...

Jonathan Spyer reports (via Andrew Bostom):

On Wednesday, the Israeli security cabinet held its first discussion ever on the issue of the global jihad.

Blink. Blink....

Given theat Israel stands on the front line of global jihad,  I guess it's--understatement of the milennium--about time.

Spyer writes:

One may assume that this discussion was n ...

Between Obama's Ego Explosion and Americans Wanting to Drill--69 percent!--John McCain suddenly looks more like a winner (despite himself).

The Washington Post reports: In his closed door meeting with House Democrats this evening, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama... concluded, "this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for."

The 200,000 souls who thronged to his speech in Berlin came not just for him, he told the enthralled audience of congressional representatives.

"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," he said.

Air sickness ...

...the top ten "public intellectuals" in the world are Muslims?

That's what Foreign Policy magazine determined, having turned its decision over to an Internet poll in which over 500,000 voters participated in just four weeks.

FP explains:

For example, a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites. Others issued press releases or gave interviews to local newspapers. Press coverage profiling these intellectuals appeared around the world, with stories running in Canada, India, Indonesia, Qatar, Spain, and elsewhere.

No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list. In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman ...

All in a day's work: The indefatigable Robert Spencer, far from shrinking from, or even just ignoring the personal attack--"Spencer hates Muslims"--transforms it into an inspirational object lesson on distractingly deceptive smear tactics.

From the ultimate point of Spencer's post:

3. In saying "Spencer hates Muslims," [Grover] Norquist does what he has done for years. [Frank] Gaffney says in his article that Norquist "made repeated ad hominem attacks on Fox TV and elsewhere against me and anyone else (including noted experts like Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson) who dared to warn about the dangers of Islamism. More often than not, he portrayed such warnings as bigoted, racist denunciations of all Muslims."

The bottom line on that, however, is that even if Pipes an ...