Under Campaign for President, several writers are suggesting that winning in Iraq or that Obama's trip will be a plus for him in the election.

In the same topic, we have a story by Paulson talking about how big government is now and how intrusive it is in our pocketbooks. Sobering.

Then on the Democratic Candidates side, we have a couple stories, one by Gallagher, telling us about a liberal writer complaining about the scripted Obama trip to see the world. Another interesting story by Marcus who talks about the Berlin airlift and how our persistence was an important part of putting Germany on the road to success and democracy. Obama should take a lesson relative to Iraq.

On the Republican side, Parker has an informative story about Jindal as VP. I only wish it were a couple years later.

Under Taxes, the WSJ explains how you can't take much more from the rich. They already are the primary funders of government.

Sowell hits it on the head again with his article on Housing. Related under The Economy, Samuelson tells us how our dim view of the economy is in our minds, not in reality. How different is that from Gramms' whiny Americans?

The IBD has a fine article on Shale Oil. The rewards would be fantastic. And on a related subject, Wind Power, we have an article taking shots at T. Boone Pickens. Maybe he is not an unbiased observer. How much has he invested in wind power?

Have a great Wednesday.

Prager has an interesting analysis on whether the Israelis will attack Iran. Under Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, we have a couple good stories. Pipes asks whether the Israelis have the guts to do what they did in the last century. Maybe they are getting soft with their economic success.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of Buchanan but his analysis of the Campaign for President today was decent.

Lots of stories today on Obama's trip. Limbaugh is showing how he is weaseling his way to taking credit for US successes. Com'on America, you are smarter than that. Vennochi argues that his ego is getting in the way of the needed humility.

Thomas Sowell always has it right. He blames the housing mess on the government; and what do we get from politicians? More government. The wrong approach.

Joe Lieberman has an interesting article about DC schools (Educational ineptitude). Good management practices can make a difference.

Ed Feulner has a good article on The Constitution. He blames all three branches for the problems we face in government.

PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA (AP) – Thailand accused Cambodia of eyeing even more of its land and leaflets appeared in the Cambodian capital calling for a boycott of Thai goods, as a military standoff over disputed border territory entered a second week Wednesday.

TBILISI, Georgia –– President Mikhail Saakashvili praised a joint military training program involving more than 1,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers at a former Soviet base Monday, amid heightened tensions with Moscow.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA (AP) – An official from South Korea's spy agency says five South Koreans have been kidnapped in Mexico.

BEIJING | China and Russia signed an agreement Monday to end a long–running dispute over the demarcation of their eastern border, the scene of military clashes between the once–bitter Communist rivals.

NEW DELHI (AP) | A top Indian diplomat blamed Pakistan on Monday for the bombing of India's embassy in Afghanistan, saying the attack had put the rivals' peace process "under stress."

BEIJING –– Two public buses exploded during the Monday morning rush hour in the city of Kunming, killing at least two people and injuring 14 others in what the authorities described as deliberate attacks as China tightens security nationwide and warns of possible terrorist threats in advance of next month's Olympic Games.

After having begun a series of investigative stories criticizing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in May 2008, CNN reporter Drew Griffin reports being placed with more than a million other names on TSA’s swollen terrorism watch list. Although TSA insists Griffin’s name is not on the list and pooh–poohs any possibility of retaliation for Griffin’s negative reporting, the reporter has been hassled by various airlines on 11 flights since May. The airlines insist that Griffin’s name is on the list. Congress has asked TSA to look into the tribulations of this prominent passenger.

In a recent op–ed in the Washington Post, probably responding to the controversy over Griffin, Leonard Boyle, the director of the Terrorist Screening Center, defended the watch list, claiming that because terrorists have multiple aliases, the names on the list boiled down to only about 400,000 actual people. If there are 400,000 terrorists lying in wait to attack the United States, we are all in trouble.

But wait a minute. There has been no major terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11—almost seven years ago. Where are all these nefarious evildoers?

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN (AP) – An international rights group pressed Pakistan's new government on Wednesday to quickly investigate the disappearance of hundreds of people allegedly rounded up by security agencies as part of the anti–terror campaign.

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney but without the vice president's sense of humor.

In her important new book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney's main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration's legal strategy for the so–called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Addington: "No one stood to his right." Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Cheney, was reported to have summed up Addington as follows: "He doesn't believe in the Constitution."

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba –– A former driver for Osama bin Laden knew the target of the fourth hijacked plane on Sept. 11, a prosecutor said Tuesday as he sought to undercut defense arguments that the Guantanamo prisoner was a low–level employee of the terrorist leader.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA (AP) – The judge in the first American war crimes trial since World War II barred evidence that interrogators obtained from Osama bin Laden's driver, ruling he was subjected to "highly coercive" conditions in Afghanistan.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on Monday urged Congress to ensure a landmark Supreme Court case doesn't result in compromised intelligence and the release of suspected terrorists in the U.S.

Details of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic are fuzzy and conflicting, but his ability to elude capture for 13 years after indictment for his role in the slaughter of thousands is quite clear.

No one ever tried very hard to find him, including the international community, but especially other Serbs.

One account has the former Bosnian Serb president arrested Monday by Serbian secret police. Another has him snatched off a bus last Friday in Belgrade.

Before Saddam Hussein and his feared weapons of mass destruction, before the more recent high–stakes confrontations with Kim Jong Il and North Korea, before Mahmood Ahmedinejad of Iran became such a threat to stability in the Mideast and well beyond it, no list of the world’s bad guys was complete without the name Radovan Karadzic right at the top.

Just consider the offenses with which the leader of the self–declared Bosnian Serb Republic long had been charged but had eluded capture for more than a decade. There’s genocide, of course, for the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the besieged Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in 1995. Then there’s extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts and other crimes against humanity.

War turned life in the former Yugoslavia into a nightmare of death, torture and suffering that, for many survivors, continues today. The arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic offers hope of a new measure of justice.

Karadzic was president of a breakaway Serb regime during some of the fiercest fighting in the 1990s. He is accused of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among other things, prosecutors charge him with responsibility for the disastrous siege of the ex–Olympic city of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 at Srebrenica.

LAGOS, NIGERIA (AP) – Nigeria's main militant group on Wednesday threatened to destroy the nation's major oil pipelines within 30 days to counter allegations it had struck a $12 million deal with the government to protect them.

FOR all the loose talk about ending the war in Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama's repeated intention to move troops out of that country has more urgency and focus than all the other political chatter.

The Democratic presidential nominee's framework for ending the war should not devolve into a battle over removing troops within 16 months after January versus 17 or 18 months. This should not become a war of words over what Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al–Maliki said or didn't say to a German magazine. According to one version, al–Maliki said he supported Obama's timetable; later, he tried to take that statement back

It's not a "timetable" for extricating U.S troops from Iraq that George W. Bush is suddenly talking about, and heaven help anyone who accuses him of proposing a "timeline."

No, the Decider says he is now amenable to a "time horizon," which apparently is a whole different kind of time thing — not at all like the sensible course of action that Democrats and other critics of the Iraq occupation have been demanding.

If Bush were known for exquisite subtlety in his use of the language, I'd note that a horizon is, by definition, a line that can never be reached. But pigs will streak across the sky at Mach 2 before this president displays a diabolical mastery of semantics.

His new "time horizon" formulation is just smoke, intended to obfuscate and stall. In six months, Iraq becomes somebody else's problem.

We all think our jobs are hard. Even though I can pop out freely for school plays and doctor appointments, I go around thinking mine is a doozy. It's not, and neither are those of the loudly suffering hedge–fund managers, who work in climate–controlled offices on ergonomically correct chairs and get outsized rewards.

Any garbage man, meter maid or retiree flipping hamburgers would trade places.

I raise this because I discovered the two hardest jobs in the world over the July 4th weekend while lounging on the beach: First is the person who notifies NOK (next of kin) that a loved one has been lost in combat, immortalized in a new book, "Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives" by Jim Sheeler.

It is difficult to imagine Israel attacking Iran.

It is, however, more difficult to imagine Israel not attacking Iran.

Consider three questions:

First, does Iran mean what it says about destroying Israel? When its leaders repeatedly call for Israel's annihilation, after referring to it as a cancer and using other rhetoric not heard on a national level since the Nazi regime's depiction of Jews, is this just rhetorical flourish? Or do they really hope and plan to destroy Israel?

There was no breakthrough, but this dangerous summer got a little less so last week with the inclusion of Undersecretary of State William Burns in the Geneva meeting with Iran, alongside the other confronting powers, China, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Until now it has been a mano–a–mano season with Israel and the United States both in the running to be matador in the ring with Iran.

Threat and counterthreats have mounted, with Israel making practice bombing runs and Iran testing missiles that can reach Tel Aviv and U.S. battle groups at sea. There was even a certain symmetry with Tehran faking a photograph of missiles soaring skywards, just as the U.S. once airbrushed intelligence to attack Iraq. There was symmetry, too, in the hawkish rhetoric of both sides.

BAGHDAD –– Iraq's security has improved so much, even as U.S. troop levels have dropped, that President Bush seems likely to order thousands more soldiers home by year's end.

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) ––Irish Republican Army dissidents have threatened to attack civil servants who work with the Northern Ireland police force.

Fighting the so–called "Global War on Terror" has become the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Are we winning or losing this war?

To answer this question, we have to first try and understand what we mean by terrorism. Terrorism is an intensely contested, value–laden term. Despite several debates, the member states of the United Nations are still unable to agree on even a basic definition.

The public discourse in the United States has shown little hint of these contestations. As late as 2006, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that " ... any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere."

JERUSALEM (AP) – A Palestinian rammed a construction truck into three cars and a bus near the Jerusalem hotel where Barack Obama is supposed to stay Tuesday, injuring four people before an Israeli civilian shot and killed the attacker, police and witnesses said

Mideast: Lebanon honors a thug who likes to smash the skulls of 4–year–old children, Israel appeases the terrorist group it pledged to destroy and the heirs of Masada are now willing to trade live terrorists for dead Israelis.

Napoleon is credited with the line, "If you say you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna." Halfhearted or inept efforts to defeat your enemies will come back to bite you, as will attempts to appease those who would destroy you.

Israel has lived the past sixty years more intensively than any other country.

Its highs – the resurrection of a two–thousand year old state in 1948, history's most lopsided military victory in 1967, and the astonishing Entebbe hostage rescue in 1976 – have been triumphs of will and spirit that inspire the civilized world. Its lows have been self–imposed humiliations: unilateral retreat from Lebanon and evacuation of Joseph's Tomb, both in 2000; retreat from Gaza in 2005; defeat by Hizbullah in 2006; and the corpses–for–prisoners exchange with Hizbullah last week.

TIJUANA, Mexico –– It looks like any Southern California traffic jam –– except you can buy a cappuccino and a 4–foot statue of Jesus from your car while watching dogs sniff vehicles for drugs.

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) Rain started to fall along the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Dolly closed in on towns straddling the Texas–Mexico border, packing 85 mph winds that could strengthen when it hits land later Wednesday. The Category 1 hurricane was expected to dump up to 15 inches of rain, threatening flooding that could breach levees in the heavily populated Rio Grande valley

Eldorado, Texas (AP) ––Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs, already convicted in Utah of rape as an accomplice and awaiting trial in Arizona on other charges related to underage marriages, is now accused of assaulting a girl in Texas in January 2005.

WASHINGTON –– A federal appeals court Tuesday agreed with a lower court ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a 1998 law intended to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet.

MOYOCK, N.C. (AP) | Guns for hire are known the world over as "Blackwater guys" – and that's the reason Blackwater Worldwide wants to move beyond the business of private security contracting.

In a desolate public park in Columbus, Ohio, a man responded to the advances of a topless woman. She asked him to "show me yours." When he did, police officers arrested him. Columbus law says her being topless is OK; exposing his genitalia is not.

Why did cops hide in the shadows to arrest a man no one but they could see?

On last week's "20/20", Dr. Marty Klein pointed out that the police weren't protecting children.

"There were no children anywhere in sight. In fact, there were no adults anywhere in sight."

Klein says it's part of "America's War on Sex."

Every two minutes, someone is raped in the United States. Every year, more than 200,000 rape victims, mostly women, report their rapes to police. Most consent to the creation of a rape kit, an invasive process for collecting physical evidence (including DNA material) of the assault that can take up to six hours. What most victims don’t know is that in thousands of cases, that evidence sits untested in police evidence lockers.

Is it "About–turn" in Iraq, or "As you were"? Both British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Barack Obama, the favorite to be the next U.S. president, claim to be preparing a more purposeful exit strategy. Yet, in neither case does the adjustment mark a sharp break with existing U.S.–British policy.

Brown is generally assumed to have harbored doubts about the Iraq enterprise from the start, but has only ever been publicly supportive of the policy so identified with his predecessor.

His alleged doubts at the time are beside the point in any case; what matters now is his more obvious desire to distance himself from this part of the Bush–Blair legacy.

Who is the dominant figure in British politics today? His name was invoked by the prime minister in his news conference last. "I agree with him entirely," said Gordon Brown. He was praised as "brave" and "right" by David Cameron on Wednesday. Both hope to be photographed with him in London last

I speak of Barack Obama, a phenomenon of politics not just in America but across the English–speaking world and beyond. Plainly, he is an exceptional candidate, although, like the prophets, he is even more exceptional outside his own land. Opinion polls in the U.S. have him only four percentage points ahead of John McCain. Over here, on the other hand, a poll recently among people who can't vote for either man found Obama trouncing McCain by a five–to–one margin.

WASHINGTON –– Unaware he was being recorded, President Bush at a Houston fundraiser last week compared Wall Street to a drunk with a hangover and cracked jokes about the ailing housing market.

Here it is, President Bush’s big chance. He can distinguish himself from his predecessor in his final months in office — favorably so, for a very welcome change. All he has to do is resist all temptation, impulses and pressure to go on a Bill Clinton–style pardon binge.

The rogues, felons and infamous are lining up already, hoping to be this administration’s version of Marc Rich.

California: What has changed since Golden State voters ousted Gray Davis and cast their lot with Arnold Schwarzenegger's star power? Not much — except for $41 billion in new spending.

What's big, blue and red all over? The great, Democrat–dominated and profligate state government of California. At a point when most state lawmakers and chief executives have put their budgets to bed, neatly balanced, and taken off for some R&R, the Legislature and governor of California are still wrangling over a budget that is roughly $15 billion out of balance.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Strikingly large numbers of Chinese are happy with their nation's direction and booming economy, and yet are deeply worried about rising prices, pollution and the gap between the rich and poor, according to a poll released Tuesday.

Energy: Big Oil is easy to kick around — just ask any Democrat in Congress. But China's threats to Exxon Mobil are in another league. Its bid to use Exxon Mobil as a wedge against its rival Vietnam is a case in point.

What China's doing in the South China Sea these days is not trade, but blackmail to assert regional dominance. On Sunday, the South China Morning Post reported Chinese officials are threatening to exclude Exxon Mobil from doing business in China if it doesn't pull out of an exploration deal with Vietnam's state oil company, PetroVietnam.

Energy: Big Oil is easy to kick around — just ask any Democrat in Congress. But China's threats to Exxon Mobil are in another league. Its bid to use Exxon Mobil as a wedge against its rival Vietnam is a case in point.

What China's doing in the South China Sea these days is not trade, but blackmail to assert regional dominance. On Sunday, the South China Morning Post reported Chinese officials are threatening to exclude Exxon Mobil from doing business in China if it doesn't pull out of an exploration deal with Vietnam's state oil company, PetroVietnam.

WASHINGTON (AP) ––President Bush dropped his opposition Wednesday to a broad housing package aimed at bolstering the sagging economy, despite his objections to including $3.9 billion for neighborhoods hit hardest by foreclosures. The House was expected to vote on the bill Wednesday, and it could become law as early as this week.

What makes the newest United States Senator more powerful than a ten–term Representative? Every Senator has the power to stop consideration of any legislation until his concerns are addressed or sixty of his colleagues agree to override his objection.

That power, better know as the filibuster, is regularly asserted by Senators when they place a hold upon various bills. A hold is really a threat to filibuster. With up to six separate opportunities to filibuster any bill, a hold is a powerful tool to force the Senate to take due consideration of each and every Senator's concerns.

A group of politically conservative and centrist Hollywood figures organized by actor Gary Sinise and others has been meeting quietly in restaurants and private homes, forming a loose–knit network of entertainers who share common beliefs like supporting U.S. troops and traditional American values.

New York (AP) ––Federal prosecutors have decided not to seek criminal charges against the Rev. Al Sharpton over his chronic tax problems, his lawyers said Tuesday.

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM (AP) – The European Union proposed an import ban Wednesday on products derived from seals that are killed in a cruel way, a move that could hurt the annual seal hunt in Canada _ the largest in the world.

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) ––The European Union threatened Wednesday to hit American diplomats where it hurts — with new visa restrictions — if Washington doesn't stop dragging its feet on lifting visa requirements for 12 EU nations.

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (AP) – European Union foreign ministers have agreed to toughen sanctions against Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe to pressure him to share power with the opposition, diplomats said Tuesday ahead of the opening of talks between Zimbabwe's ruling and opposition parties in South Africa.