Free Republic

Beijing is ready to say good-bye to Google. Wang Chen, China’s State Council Information Office minister, has responded to Google’s principled threat to pull out of China: "Our country is at a crucial stage of reform and development, and this is a period of marked social conflicts … Properly guiding Internet opinion is a major measure for protecting Internet information security. Internet media must always make nurturing positive, progressive mainstream opinion an important duty. Currently, the Internet gives space for spreading rumours and issuing false information and other actions that diminish confidence, and this is causing serious damage to society...

Tony Harnden has an excellent column that appears in the Telegraph on the effort to smear Rush Limbaugh. Even for the Left, this is quite extraordinary. It’s not simply a matter of taking quotes out of context; it’s a matter of making up quotes out of whole cloth to cast Limbaugh as a racist — and then placing those quotes on Wikipedia, considered the gospel truth, and spreading them on the Internet and various television news outlets... READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM

Writing in the NYR Blog, Jonathan Freedland notes that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded by a committee of five liberal politicians from a country whose population is half the size of London, reflecting a “Norwegian consensus” that “favors multilateralism, yearns for nuclear disarmament, and believes in international institutions, revering the United Nations above all.” The speculation in Oslo is that what clinched the award for Obama was chairing a UN meeting and “using that body as the vehicle for his disarmament ambitions.” READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM

There is no better temperature gauge of the Left’s derangement syndrome — the object of the hatred is irrelevant — than the New York Times’s liberal op-ed columnists. So when Maureen Dowd goes into full-rant mode over Liz Cheney (and her political-consultant sister), you pretty much know the object of the next spasm of liberal venomous paranoia. And as it usually is, the rant is more revealing of the ranter than the intended victim... READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM

The terms counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have become common currency this decade in the wake of September 11, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq. To a layman’s ear, they can sound like synonyms, especially because of our habit of labeling all insurgents as terrorists. But to military professionals, they are two very different concepts. Counterterrorism refers to operations employing small numbers of Special Operations “door kickers” and high-tech weapons systems such as Predator drones and cruise missiles. Such operations are designed to capture or kill a small number of “high-value targets.” Counterinsurgency, known as COIN in military argot,...

According to the Washington Post, some White House foreign-policy hands may be willing to call it a day in Afghanistan if the U.S. military can beat the Taliban down into something that resembles Hezbollah. I suppose I can see why this appeals to those who know just enough about the Taliban to think it's possible, and just enough about Hezbollah to think it's desirable... READ THE REST AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM

What was the bottom line of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov? America’s punting on a request for sanctions on Iran, as the Washington Post reported (and Jennifer discussed)? Or was it instead a case of “Russia Resists U.S. on Iran Sanctions,” as the Associated Press reported? Of course, both amount to the same thing. Clinton’s statement that it wasn’t yet time for sanctions on Iran to pressure it to stop its nuclear program is merely an admission that the administration’s plan to gain international support for restraining Iran is dead in the water....

Jennifer refers to the New York Times lead article this morning on a brewing civil war among Congressional Democrats as they struggle to get a health-care reform bill through the legislative process. This, of course, is what happens when you promise, as President Obama has repeatedly, to put in place a new health-care system that covers more people, costs less money, provides more services, and allows all who like the status quo to continue with what they have...

All the diplomatic pillow talk about “cooperation” and “encouragement” is cover for Obama’s Russia gambit’s having gone down in flames. Smiling through failure is becoming the default occupation of the Obama State Department, and no one seems more enthused to be at the center of the wreckage than Hillary Clinton. She is pure spin, no success...

Precise details of what transpired in Washington during the first week of the Yom Kippur War, launched by Egypt and Syria on October 6, 1973, are hard to come by, in no small measure owing to conflicting accounts given by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger regarding their respective roles. What is clear, from the preponderance of information provided by those directly involved in the unfolding events, is that President Richard Nixon — overriding inter-administration objections and bureaucratic inertia — implemented a breathtaking transfer of arms, code-named Operation Nickel Grass, that over a four-week period...

A revealing article in yesterday’s New York Times about White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel offers a highly problematic view of the Illinois politician—and one, moreover, that he should be concerned about. It’s one of those breathless pieces so besotted with its subject and his power that it makes Emanuel sound less like the chief staffer in the White House and more like the president than the president himself. “The most powerful chief of staff in a quarter century,” the article calls Emanuel, insisting that he is the architect of the administration’s do-everything-all-at-once policy and that he is not...

At some point about five years ago, America became a “One-Party Country”—and the party in question was the GOP. Such, at least, was the conclusion of Los Angeles Times reporters Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten in the book they wrote under that title following the 2004 presidential election. Bizarre as their claim may sound today, it stood on solid ground. In November 2004, George W. Bush had won re-election with the largest number of votes up to that point in American history while racking up the seventh Republican win in the previous 10 races for the White House. Republicans, moreover,...

On July 23, Tawfiq Tirawi, security adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said on Palestinian television: I am saying these things so that we understand that words are ineffective. Action is effective. … Jerusalem needs thousands of martyrs. If we live to see the day, and you become the leaders of the future, mark my words: It is impossible for Jerusalem to be restored to us without thousands of martyrs.

The American administration is now wholly complicit in the brutal travesty that was June 12 in Iran: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “the elected leader” of the Islamic republic. Gibbs was asked Tuesday if the White House recognized Ahmadinejad as the country’s legitimate president. “He’s the elected leader,” Gibbs responded. Our elected leader, Barack Obama, vowed to “bear witness” to the Iranian regime’s violent — indeed, homicidal — snuffing out of the collective democratic spirit in Iran. But even that feat of cowardly indifference proved too great a burden in the age of smart...

Support for President Obama’s overhaul of the American health-care system is dropping because he’s not doing enough to “sell” the effort, according to a growing number of liberal voices. The public is deeply sympathetic to what Obama and Democrats want to do; the task for them is simply to instruct the unknowing masses on what is best for them (see Andrew Mitchell’s commentary here). In fact, the problem with Obama’s effort isn’t a failure to communicate; it is his inability to refute health-care facts and figures that, as they become more salient, are undermining his effort.

In 1847, David Pacifico, a Jew who had been born in British-held Gibraltar and was therefore a British subject, had his house burned down in Athens by an anti-Semitic mob. The Greek government refused to protect him or provide any restitution. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary, sent the Royal Navy to blockade Greece until it paid Pacifico’s demands. Critics charged that Palmerston was overreacting. The House of Lords even voted to censure him. But in the House of Commons, Palmerston carried the day with a magnificent five-hour oration in which he declared: “As the Roman, in days of old, held...

J.E. Dyer makes an excellent point about Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s very real efforts to develop ties with countries outside the immediate American sphere. It should be pointed out that Israel enjoys deep and extensive relations with governments around the globe — from Latin America to Africa to southern Asia — mostly but not exclusively of a military nature. According to recent reports, Israel surpasses the U.K. as the fourth-largest military exporter in the world (after the U.S., Russia, and France).

On the afternoon of July 24, Hillary Clinton arrived back in Washington on a flight from Asia, got off the plane, and headed straight to the State Department, where reporters were assembled to join her in a teleconference with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who was in Ramallah. It was late Friday evening Ramallah time. The teleconference was called to commemorate the transfer of $200 million to the Palestinian Authority — the largest single transfer in the P.A.’s history, a part of the $900 million pledge the Obama administration has made for 2009 (more than 62 percent higher than the...

Like Jennifer, I too found the Wall Street Journal’s story on latter-day federal penny-pinching fascinating. I have two comments: 1) Here is the perfect example of why the government should never run anything it doesn’t absolutely have to. Because corporations are wealth-creation machines and Benjamin Franklin was right (”A penny saved is a penny earned”), corporate management spends much of its time looking for ways to save money. The most famous example of this cost-scavenging attitude, perhaps, is the story of John D. Rockefeller and the drops of solder. He was at a Standard Oil factory where kerosene was being...

Are proponents of a robust American military seeing their worst nightmares come true? The military will need to come up with $60 billion in savings over the next five years to pay for new priorities to be set by the Defense secretary, a top Pentagon official said Tuesday. The order from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is based on an assumption that there will be no real growth in defense budgets over the next five years, a radical departure for a department whose budgets have increased more than 80 percent since 2001. […] One of the driving factors so far...