#1: "'Since my son has actually seen significant combat in Fallujah and ar Ramadi, I have had to contemplate the unthinkable: what if he is killed? It is a horrible thought but one that cannot be avoided. This brings me to Moore's stupid question: 'Would you sacrifice your child for Fallujah?' The answer of course is, 'Hell no!' My first thought is to quote Patton, 'The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.' This is, of course, the main point, isn't it? "

Ron Reagan: But we didn't kill them. George W. Bush's war killed these ten thousand people. And if I'm a religious person, now I've just done something that results in the deaths of ten thousand innocent people, I'm going to be real apologetic about that.

John Podhoretz: Lincoln was a religious man and I'm unaware--I am unaware of, unless you are equating Christianity with ...

Ron Reagan: We're not talking about Abraham Lincoln.

John Podhoretz: No, unless you are equating Christianity with pacifism, which you obviously are, then... ...no Christian leader is permitted ever to go to war.

He was in Wisconsin the other day, pretending to be a regular guy, and was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. "I'd have to say deer," said the senator. "I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach... That's hunting."

"This is like running except I don't feel bad afterward," he said Monday after burning about 1,200 calories over an 18-mile ride that lasted an hour and 20 minutes.

"You can cover a lot more, and you can go very fast on a bike," Bush said. Most important, he gets his heart rate up. "At my age, you're more concerned about the cardiovascular" benefits of a workout, the 58-year-old president said.

Bush has only been riding the knobby-tired mountain bikes since February, yet he takes on dangerous sections that would give veterans pause. He keeps a cramp-inducing pace on long uphill sections, pouring it on to reach each peak, backing off a little to recover and then attacking the next hill.

He hasn't accomplished anything politically ... to speak at that convention. They are going to use him on this whole 'stem cell' thing he knows nothing about. I'm the only Reagan that sits on a board of directors of an Alzheimer's unit that deals with all this stuff on a regular basis. I did all the research -- he has no idea what he is talking about. And it is always the politics of feelings. But he is there because he has a great name. His name is Reagan.

With that background in mind, the reasoning employed by American policymakers in early 2002 as they planned the next step in the war on terrorism, comes into clearer focus. The U.S. had toppled the Taliban but had not caught bin Laden and some of his top aides. Without a friendly regime in Afghanistan to protect al Qaeda, where might bin Laden and his band of terrorists go next? One possibility — a quite reasonable possibility — would be a place that had offered them haven in the past: Iraq.

Republican commission member John Lehman blames Clarke's partisan testimony before the commission for the poisonous atmosphere of much of its public work. "We were mugged by Viacom," Lehman says of the company that owns the publisher of Clarke's book and CBS News, which gave Clarke's tome a huge send-off. "They edited his book to make it into an anti-Bush jihad."

The only motive I can imagine that would lead Berger to take the immense risk of stealing classified documents out of the National Archives is that they contain information that is extremely damaging to him and to the Clinton administration. While the timing is not entirely clear from press accounts, it appears that Berger purloined the documents last year. I haven't been able to pin down the exact timing of the Sept. 11 Commission's investigation, but it seems reasonable to conclude that Berger wanted to get the documents in question out of the Archives before the Commission discovered them. This would make sense only if they were extremely damaging not only to the Clinton administration, but to Berger personally. Of course, given Berger's role as National Security Advisor, any serious default in the Clinton administration's response to terrorist threats would have reflected badly on him. The millenium bomber is an obvious example, but the documents may have related to Clinton's decision not to capture Osama bin Laden, or many other matters.

This matter will drop, as the mainstream press will prefer not to pursue it. Berger's effort to frustrate the historical record will, I suspect, be successful. But he will pay a price: he will never be Secretary of State.

''Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?''

"This is why they say it's the woman's choice, because you think I could just carry triplets. That's easy for you to say, but I'd have to give up my life." ... [If I keep them] I'm going to have to move to Staten Island. I'll never leave my house because I'll have to care for these children. I'll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise. Even in my moments of thinking about having three, I don't think that deep down I was ever considering it.

smells no longer set me off and I no longer wanted to eat nothing but sour-apple gum. I went on to have a pretty seamless pregnancy. But I had a recurring feeling that this was going to come back and haunt me. Was I going to have a stillbirth or miscarry late in my pregnancy?

I had a boy, and everything is fine. But thinking about becoming pregnant again is terrifying. Am I going to have quintuplets? I would do the same thing if I had triplets again, but if I had twins, I would probably have twins. Then again, I don't know.

It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know.

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had taken from classified anti-terror documents he reviewed at the National Archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants. He also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio, they said.

This is an absolutely stunning account of a Northwest flight on which fourteen Arab men acted in a really, really strange and disturbing way. In reading it, it was clear that they either were practicing the assembly of a bomb on a plane or actually doing it and failing. It's a disturbing, scary thing to read.

But here's the kicker. It is still illegal to detain more than two Arab men at the same time! Apparently this is "discriminatory", and we can't have any of that, now can we! Unbelievable! Clearly the terrorists know this and are acting accordingly. Gather up fourteen of them, and twelve are sure to get through. Put a bomb in an orthopedic shoe, and we'll never touch the guy.

Good Lord, Mineta has to GO!

Update: There is some skepticism about this story, but Michell Malkin is on the case.

More: Here's Instapundit on the case.

Some folks are questioning why it takes fourteen terrorists to assemble a bomb. My take is that it doesn't, but that it does take 14 terrorist to assemble a bomb and fight off passengers trying to stop them. They know that passengers won't idly sit by (or maybe they don't, given what happened on this flight), and so a small army of guys will make a successful hijacking more likely.

What I wrote about a few weeks ago was my fear that the American people have grown or are growing tired of the heightened drama of the times.

When you are president and you are doing hard things in history like making war, and you are doing it in the jingle-jangle of the modern media environment, you have a kind of moral responsibility to make it clear that you hate war, really hate it, and love peace.

This is delicate. A leader cannot seem ambivalent about crucial actions and decisions, and he can't seem so weighed down by the facts and implications of those decisions that people begin to wonder if he's lost his fight. There's a reason people like a happy warrior. A happy warrior tends to be a winning warrior. And yet. In the world we live in a leader must seem almost palpably yearning for life and peace even as he makes tough decisions that will soon deny either or both to some.

So what if the social pathologies in the black community grew far worse after liberal doctrines became government policies in the 1960s? The vision is what matters to the left -- and the opportunities it presents for them to be clever with words.

.The foreign and defense policies of Ronald Reagan (search) resulted in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freeing of approximately 122 million people in Eastern Europe.

. The state of Israel would cease to exist if not for American protection, and about 5.5 million Jews would be in grave danger.

. Nearly 23 million Taiwanese would be denied freedom if not for American protection. More than 48 million South Koreans would be living under a dictatorship if not for American protection. USA action led to the removal of the Serbian dictator Milosevic (search), who was responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in the Balkans.

. The USA and Britain removed the Iraqi dictator Hussein, who was responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East. And we have also removed the terrorist Taliban government in Afghanistan.

. America is sending $15 billion to Africa to help victims of AIDS. We were unable to find out how much France contributes, if anything. To be fair, Canada sends $270 million, which is substantial.

. American action in Central America, Grenada, and Haiti has kept millions of people out of totalitarian regimes. Of course, all of this has cost every American taxpayer big. And thousands of American servicepeople have lost their lives protecting people overseas.

It is insulting and dishonest for Americans and Canadians and Europeans to condemn this country because they don't like certain policies. Dissent is good. Slander is unacceptable.

The truth is that the USA has freed more human beings in 230 years than the rest of the world combined. France has freed almost no one. Ditto Canada.

So, pardon me as I object to the Michael Moores of the world - and that man is too cowardly to come in here, all right? Pardon me as I object to the anti-American foreign press and bums like Chirac in France and Chretien in Canada.

America has a provable history of freeing oppressed people all over the world in fighting evil dictators. Canada should be ashamed that so many of its young people are flat out ignorant. And Americans should wise up and realize we are living in a changing world. Old friends are not necessarily true friends.

With the firm belief that faith and free market principles are key to curing poverty, Star Parker founded the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education (CURE) in 1995 to jump start national dialogue on issues of race and poverty.

Blacks know instinctively that the debate on gay marriage is the symptom and not the problem. The root problem is the implicit delegitimization and marginalization of traditional standards of right and wrong.

Blacks are indeed outraged and legitimately so. Expect to read more about press conferences by black clergy around the nation and in Washington. Our lives and communities are at stake here. We won't sit this one out.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed ...

Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.

• A foreign national who was actively engaged in killing US troops on foreign soil -- and who has not once set foot on sovereign US territory -- will successfully petition for his release in a US court.
  
• US soldiers will begin to have to justify to a US court the capture of foreigners actively engaged in killing them.
  
• Given the above, US soldiers will begin to kill enemy combatants that they might have otherwise captured.
  
• Terrorists will continue to view us as risable and weak. They will enlist willing leftist lawyers to further complicate and make difficult the already difficult task of killing terrorist.