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 ...