Items of Interest

Make sure you participate in the latest 2008 GOP Straw Poll.

"The World's Thinnest Books" are here.

Surprise, surprise: Russia, China oppose N. Korea sanctions. What else would we expect from Commies?

Former President Ford has been hospitalized for some tests. He's 93. Keep him in your prayers.

National Review Online is 10 this year! Read the symposium on how things have changed since NRO began.

Angel at Woman Honor Thyself has a post on violence against women around the world, but asks,

And the Institute for the Breathtakingly Obvious wants us to believe the U.N. cares?

Anna of A Rose By Any Other Name has Words to Live By.

Amy Proctor says, Don't Underestimate Iraq.

Rich Hollywood Celeb and UN Goodwill figurehead Angelina Jolie takes the West to task for not giving refugees everything they want. Perhaps she ought to do more by living on $50,000 a year and giving the rest of her exorbitant income to the refugees. I happen to believe that the government is not here to do much more than provide for the common defense. The US does more than enough for the world.

Over at Just Barely Inside the Beltway, my friend Nick has a great post up about Dem Mark Warner deciding not to run for President.

And, finally, Ann Coulter's latest column is about the Democrats and the North Koreans:

In 1994, the Clinton administration got a call from Jimmy Carter — probably collect — who was with the then-leader of North Korea, saying: "Hey, Kim Il Sung is a total stud, and I've worked out a terrific deal. I'll give you the details later."

Clinton promptly signed the deal, so he could forget about North Korea and get back to cheating on Hillary. Mission accomplished.

Under the terms of the "agreed framework," we gave North Korea all sorts of bribes — more than $5 billion worth of oil, two nuclear reactors and lots of high technology. In return, they took the bribes and kept building nukes. This wasn't difficult, inasmuch as the 1994 deal permitted the North Koreans to evade weapons inspectors for the next five years.

Yes, you read that right: North Korea promised not to develop nukes, and we showed how much we trusted them by agreeing to no weapons inspections for five years.
[. . .]
And then on Oct. 17, 2002 — under a new administration, you'll note — The New York Times reported on the front page, so you couldn't have missed it: "Confronted by new American intelligence, North Korea has admitted that it has been conducting a major clandestine nuclear weapons development program for the past several years."

So when it comes to North Korea, I believe the Democrats might want to maintain a discreet silence, lest anyone ask, "Hey, did you guys do anything with North Korea?"

But by Richardson's lights, the only reason Kim Jong Il is testing nukes is because Bush called him evil. He said, "When you call him axis of evil or a tyrant, you know, he just goes crazy." This is the sort of idiocy you expect to hear from an illiterate like Keith Olbermann, not someone who might know people who read newspapers.