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February 10, 2008- Seattle, WashingtonNews Huckabee won't concede Washington state, cites 'legal issues' Story Updated: Feb 10, 2008 at 10:02 AM PST By KOMO Staff & News Services SEATTLE - Republican Mike Huckabee says he's not ready to concede Washington state, even though the state Republican Party has declared Arizona Sen. John McCain the winner of Saturday's caucuses. On NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday morning, the former Arkansas governor said his campaign is looking into some legal issues, without going into specifics. With 87 percent of GOP precincts reporting statewide, McCain leads the GOP field with 25.5 percent of delegates...

Better tread carefully here. I am starting to get a reputation as the wet blanket of NRO — the guy who believes we are doomed, doomed, and that the current war effort will fizzle out with nothing much accomplished but a change of government in Afghanistan. A change, that is to say, from a gang of cutthroats who thought America was the Great Satan to a gang of cutthroats who perceive us as being more of a Great ATM. My assertion last Thursday that "democracy is no match for terrorism" didn't help. Am I on board with this war, ...

ABCNEWS has learned that CIA (news - web sites) officials believe Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) escaped from Afghanistan (news - web sites), and most likely has fled the region altogether. What's the next move in the search for the suspected terror mastermind? An intelligence analysis sent to the CIA director last week concluded Osama bin Laden has escaped American efforts to find him in Afghanistan and that he most likely has fled the entire region by sea, ABCNEWS has learned. In a major setback to the war on terrorism, CIA analysts have concluded bin Laden escaped ...

The national Democratic party wants to start a national debate over the issue of who lost the budget surplus. The latest projections from the Office of Management and Budget foresee a deficit in each of the next 3 years. Democratic pollster Mark Penn told the Washington Post that the budget deficit is "Bush's mess and he's going to have to fix it." But if there's any single culprit for the return to deficit spending it is Mark Penn's boss, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Daschle's pro-spending and anti-tax-cut crusade over the past year has contributed mightily to the twin ...

There are only 17 University Professors among the 2,000-plus faculty members at Harvard, the greatest and richest university in the most powerful nation the world has ever known. They are the elite of the elites, and were awarded the extremely rare University Professor distinction in recognition of their talent and influence. It's easy to see why these scholars rate. Economist Robert C. Merton won the Nobel Prize. Literary critic Helen Vendler and Chinese-literature scholar Stephen Owen established themselves as among the leading experts in their highly demanding fields. Political scientist Samuel Huntington has written, among other volumes, The Clash ...

Harold Stassen ran for president — unsuccessfully as I hope you know — somewhere between three and four thousand times. He was so indefatigable that in the 1970s, my mom came up with a dish called "Chicken Harold Stassen" because "You just can't keep it down" (this shouldn't be confused with the Marion Barry shooter, which longtime readers know not to drink). Some people think history is a lot like Harold Stassen, you just can't keep it down. But I'm not sure they're right. In 1990, Francis Fukuyama wrote a brilliant essay for The National Interest (the best foreign-policy ...

On September 11, a colleague of mine rang Henry Kissinger to ask if he'd write something for the op-ed page of Sunday's paper. On the Thursday, my friend called him back just to be sure he was still doing the piece. "Ah," the good Doctor growled dryly, "so this story has not been superseded?" Kissinger makes a good point, though not just about the news media. The urge to (in the dread Clintonian phrase) "move on" is the natural condition of our culture. If anything, the news operations tend to be a little behind the curve. When so many ...

Paul Schell is a man of unquestioned intelligence, vision, compassion and idealism. But friends and critics alike say those qualities alone aren't enough to make a successful political leader, as he proved by apparently losing yesterday's primary election. What Seattle's one-term mayor needed but didn't have, they say, are the political skills to carry out his vision. "Despite his compassion and his vision, he lacked those political skills that you need to govern," said state Rep. Ed Murray, a Schell supporter and former City Council staffer. "You need political skills to get things done and to get people behind ...

You can understand why they're jumping up and down in the streets of Lebanon and Palestine, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action-thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. They have reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful presidential refugee, spending the day of infamy bounced to ...

Jeremy Lott, senior editor of Spintech Magazine. "I guess I'm a Democrat with my head screwed on straight," says three term Seattle city attorney and current mayoral candidate Mark Sidran. Asked to handicap this year's race, Sidran downplays the ideological differences between the candidates: "The real issue is going to be, Who's most likely to be able to deliver results?" But the "results" mantra is more practical than strictly true. Sidran takes a much more hard-bitten approach to politics than his very gummy Democratic opponents in this one-party town. Stump speeches and interviews are sprinkled with references to the ...

The Nuremberg Rally at Durban, South Africa, could hardly be more perfect, because it marvelously dramatizes the rot that has taken hold of the Western world. Back in the 80's, when the Lebanese Christians were under armed assault from their Muslim compatriots, their leader — whose name escapes me — stood up in his foxhole and said, "the Western world should either defend us, or change its name." It didn't defend them (indeed, in recent weeks the Syrians and their puppets in Beirut have been rounding up Christians in the latest round of religious purges), it didn't change its ...

The city long admired as a place that can do no wrong suddenly can't get things right. Somewhere along the way, Seattle got off course and now needs new directions. City Attorney Mark Sidran has the intellect and tenacity to get the city moving forward again. The strain of rapid growth and change are palpable throughout the city. Seattle's sense of well-being is eroding. The turmoil of the World Trade Organization meeting and mayhem of Mardi Gras drew the most attention, but there is deeper, underlying worry about a lack of leadership and competence at City Hall. The 50-year-old ...

The motion-picture industry is almost 100 years old. And in all that time, in almost a century, there has never been a film season as unrelievedly, unimaginably, irredeemably awful as Hollywood's Summer 2001. And Hollywood is crowing, because this most awful of summers has been the most profitable quarter in history. Or so they tell us. Actually, profit margins in the film business aren't all that great. What's more, ticket prices are increasing far more quickly than inflation, which means that fewer and fewer people are going to the movies. This is a far more significant fact than this ...

Forty-five years ago the British science-fiction writer John Wyndham published a story titled "Consider Her Ways." A woman of that time, Jane Waterleigh, volunteers to test a hallucinogenic drug. She wakes in the body of another woman some generations in the future. That future is a woman's world; all men were killed off by a rogue virus, which also prevented the birth of any more male babies. After a spell of disorder, the women got civilization going again, and erected a society modeled on those of the ants (hence the title, from Proverbs 6.vi). Bloated, obese "mothers" are dedicated ...

Chinese officials have launched a new coercive family-planning campaign taking direct aim at the poor rural regions of China. Recent results from China's 2000 census have been both

In the neverending search for alternatives to fossil fuels, some politicians persist in believing the future lies in ethanol, a corn-based substitute for gas. Just last month South Dakota Democratic senator Tim Johnson promoted a bill to require two percent of all transportation fuel by 2008 to come from ethanol. The requirement would rise in later years. Yet the evidence that this is a really bad idea keeps pouring in. A forthcoming study by Cornell University's David Pimentel says ethanol suffers from what people in his field call an "input-yield problem": "About 70 percent more energy is required to ...

More news from the annals of zero tolerance and the continuing campaign to make the culture ever more deranged: A New Jersey student made a baseball bat in shop class, then was expelled for refusing to hand it over to a teacher as a dangerous weapon. A National Merit scholar in Fort Myers, Fla., missed her graduation ceremony and was sent to jail after a kitchen knife was found on the floor of her car. She said the knife had fallen there when she moved some possessions over the weekend. At a Halifax, Nova Scotia, school, a ban against ...

The horrific, near-fatal shark attack on a boy off a Florida beach in July — followed just days ago by a similar mauling in the Bahamas — may be nothing more than blind bad luck, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a statistical improbability. At least, that's how we're expected to view such shocking encounters with nature. No one can be blamed, we're advised by "experts." A boy, doing what boys do, simply crossed paths with a shark doing what sharks do. Like themes are sounded whenever we read (as we do with ...

"The whites must pay." No this isn't the latest rap song burning up the charts (but we all know it could be). Rather it's what Muammar Gaddafi proposed as the solution to the thorny question of who precisely should pay reparations for slavery. Funnily enough, he offered this Solomonic tidbit while on a trip earlier this month to visit his friend Robert Mugabe, the president-for-eternity of Zimbabwe. It's funny because Mr. Mugabe is actually a policy trailblazer on making whites pay. He's declared war against white farmers in his own country as a way to distract the populace from ...

Try this thought experiment: Imagine that the anti-capitalist rioters who basically forced martial law to be declared in Genoa, fought police with firebombs, rocks and bottles, and who cost that city an estimated $45 million worth of damage, had undertaken their actions to push for an end to legalized abortion. Is there any doubt how the media would have portrayed the rioters? What right-thinking citizens would think of the destruction? Nearly everyone would be hailing Mario Placanica, the besieged paramilitary policeman who shot and killed urban terrorist Carlo Giuliani during a riot, as a hero. Owing perhaps to the ...