The Administration, through Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, finally takes on illegal immigration:

"We have decided to stand back and take a look at how we address the problem and solve it once and for all," Chertoff said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. "The American public is rightly distressed about a situation in which they feel we do not have the proper control over our borders."

The unusually blunt assessment by the nation's top immigration official follows border-related emergency declarations by the governors of New Mexico and Arizona, who cited a surge in smuggling and violence associated with the flow of illegal immigrants.

Australian leader closes the door on enforcing Islamic Sharia law in Australia:

Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament, Treasurer Peter Costello told national television late Tuesday.

"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," said Costello, who is seen as heir-apparent to Prime Minister John Howard.

"I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false.

"There's only one law in Australia -- it's the law that's made by the parliament of Australia and enforced by our courts. There is no second law.

"If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practices it, perhaps, then, that's a better option," Costello said.

"E pluribus unum." One law for all.

One of those stories which are funny at first glance, but get worrisome when you think about them:

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan - He has outlawed opera and ballet and railed against long hair and gold teeth, but now Turkmen President Saparmurat Niyazov is determined to wipe out another perceived scourge: lip synching.

Niyazov has ordered a ban on lip synching performances across the tightly controlled Central Asian nation, citing "a negative effect on the development of singing and musical art," the president's office said Tuesday.

Sure, lip-synching is a scourge of modern life, but does it really need to be illegal?

Is it unreasonable to expect that our media might at some point actually report the entire text of the constitution the Iraqis are writing? Apparently so, given this AP story via the New York Times:

. . .
Article Seven

1. Any organization that follow a racist, terrorist, extremist, sectarian-cleaning ideology or circulates or justifies such beliefs is banned, especially Saddam's Baath Party in Iraq and its symbols under any name. And this should not be part of the political pluralism in Iraq.

2. The government is committed to fighting terrorism in all its forms, and works to protect Iraqi soil from being a center or passage for terrorist activities.

CHAPTER TWO

Article 35

-- a. Human freedom and dignity are guaranteed.
. . .

Either there are no numbers in Arabic for the range from 8 to 34, or there's been a bit of editing done. Aren't you curious as to what might be in those 27 missing Articles? I for one am very interested in what our blood and treasure have purchased for Iraq.

(Before you complain--yes, I excerpted their excerpt. My point is why are we only being given selected passages from the Iraqi draft constitution?)

Buried deep in a Christian Science Monitor story:

"We are not getting any impression that they are with this side or with that. We feel they are trying to help our side as much as the other side," said Iyad al-Sammarai, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni political group whose leaders have been arrested by American forces in the past. "I'm sure [the US] has a feeling that if a constitution is approved only by the Shiites and Kurds, they will not get what they want. What they want is stability."

Still, Mr. Sammarai says it's unclear how much US pressure can bring in this process, or if the desire for fast results will lead the US to eventually sign off on a constitution without Sunni backing.

"They're being helpful, but I can't tell if this is all they can do, or if they can do more,'' he says. "I feel Mr. Bush will say we're going ahead and meeting deadlines, so that's progress."

If you see a headline anything close to mine in the major media, please let me know. Otherwise, chalk it up as another example of anti-progress spin from our esteemed "professional" media who are too busy hyperventilating about the Iraqis missing the deadlines for their constitution.

Is Europe giving up on Iran nuke talks?

Despite calling off the August 31 talks, the European powers remained in contact with Iran, Mattei said.

"That does not mean there will be no contact with the Iranians," he said. "We have contact with the Iranians. The three European countries have embassies there."

Oh, well, that's OK then.

Faces from the Front returns to Iraq:

With camera in hand, I covered four rolling press conferences as the various Iraqi political factions paraded in front of the cameras.

I couldn't understand the words, but I understood what was going on. It felt like I was back working the Kansas legislature.

Men, women, Shieks, Imams, all standing at the podium in front of a dozen cameras and a bevy of print reporters, talking about the writing of Iraq's new constitution.

In the United States, it took 4 years to write and ratify our current constitution. That was after several years of the failed Articles of Confederation.
. . .
On a side note, one of the more popular books for the delegates to Iraq's constitutional convention and members of the National Assembly is an Arabic translation of the Federalist Papers.

Maybe one of the men and women I taped today will turn out to be Iraq's Madison or Hamilton.

Politics used to "stop at the water's edge." Now, the whole world is merely a plaything for spin-meisters and domestic political hacks, trying to score points and win the next election with no regard to the damage that they do. This is the true legacy of Vietnam:

My worry is that the objectives of Iraq -- as well as our strategy for the larger Middle East -- may not fall within a time horizon that can outlast the inflammation of public outcry due to Vietnam Syndrome. Tremendous political pressures reinforced by negative perceptions are building against the Administration. We should wonder whether these are the symptoms of a US public that receives a steady diet of colored information and news of dead soldiers; but gets less information about military and political gains. For example, the fruits of democratization are routinely downplayed. Good news is attenuated, or buried on page 15.

There are a few who oppose the Iraqi experiment out of conscience. I think that they are wrong, but I respect their stand. The great majority of the anti-war forces (including many in the media) are cynically manipulating the news cycle to produce the very "quagmire" that they decry. Those people do not care about Iraq, do not really care about America, either. All they care about is winning the next election for "their side."

Has the Bush Administration badly fumbled the public relations war? Absolutely. And history may yet judge them harshly for it. But if as I believe, the confrontation between militant Islam and western civilization is the next major world Crisis, then history will judge the anti-war forces even more harshly. That is, if western civilization manages to prevail. If militant Islam wins, then the anti-war people will simply get in line for the beheadings with the rest of us, and the world will plunge into a Dark Age the likes of which we have not seen since before the Romulus and Remus founded Rome.

Here's hoping that the Gaza withdrawal doesn't get uglier than it already is:

There are Israeli extremists who say that they haven't made a strong enough statement yet about the morality of uprooting settlements, and some are driven by a "Masada mentality" - the desire to do something so extreme as to make that message unforgettable.