Saturday link dump

[tangaroa]

• Britain's Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has released a Unified Policy Statement [PDF].
  • The Unified Policy Statement includes some positive items on civil rights.
• Very bad news from Afghanistan:
  • Farmers in Marjah province are being terrorized out of their homes by the Taliban because there are not enough U.S. ground forces to defend the people.
  • Afghanistan accuses the U.S. of involvement in the killing of Kandahar police chief Matiullah Qateh by a U.S.-trained militia.
  • The Taliban launched ground assaults on Kandahar and Bagram airfields, which shows their continuing strength, and assassinated several high-ranking U.S officers, which shows the quality of their intelligence operations.
  • The U.S.'s police training operations in Afghanistan are run by mercenaries, and run poorly.
• The Republican-controlled Texas school board approved plans to rewrite history books along party lines.
• 60 Minutes reports that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster was caused by a combination of damaged equipment and capitalist greed on the part of an unnamed British Petroleum manager. The meat of the story is on page 4.
  • See also: British Petroleum engineer Mike Mason accuses the company of routinely falsifying safety reports.
• The U.S. Supreme Court authorized the infinite detention of sex offenders past the time that they were sentenced to prison.
• Kurdish leaders have called a strike in Iran after five Kurds were hanged for terrorism. The New York Times presumes that the five were innocent.
• Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute reports that Islamic terrorism is driving Christians out of Iraq.
• The Daily Mail reports that a British attack on a Basra police compound in 2005 was against direct orders from London.
• Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks was attacked by a Muslim student group while giving a lecture on free speech at Uppsala University.
  • Upsala Nya Tidninq has a photograph of the protesters.
  • Later, two arsonists attacked the home of Vilks.
• A mosque in Jacksonville, Florida was bombed by an unknown attacker, causing minor damage.
• Ohio allows high school students to attend college for both college and high school credit.
• Greta Christina describes the reasons behind Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.
• A 67-year-old woman in Yuba City, California was shot and killed by police inside her own home for brandishing a shotgun after the police attacked her partner for answering the door at night with a gun in his hand. The same woman had earlier threatened a census worker with the shotgun, leading to the police visit.
• A 7-year-old girl in Detroit, Michigan was killed by police in a botched home-invasion raid.
• An example of how the same climate data can produce two very different graphs.
• U.S. Republican Party figure Newt Gingrich condemned Harvard University for accepting donations from Saudi Arabia, ironically saying this on Fox News which is partially owned by Saudi prince Al-waleed bin Talal.
• U.S. radio host Mark Williams has called for the U.S. to destroy Mecca.
• Charles Postel of Politico notes the similarities between the John Birch Society and the "Tea Party" movement.
  • Related: Tea Party favourite Sarah Palin was once photographed with a copy of a John Birch Society magazine.
• John Arquilla describes how U.S. military tactics are failing to adapt to new and potential opponent tactics.
• Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America's Future notes that the current debt crisis facing the U.S. was planned by Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
• Monica Duffy Toft of Harvard University finds that "civil wars ending in negotiated settlements are more likely to recur, no more likely to lead to democracy than other types of settlements, and do not deliver increased prospects for economic prosperity."
• U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, who recently joined the Democratic party after nearly 30 years in the Senate as a Republican, was denied renomination to the Senate by a Democratic voting public more supportive of challenger Jon Sestak, currently a Congressman.
• Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul condemned Barack Obama as "un-American" for wanting British Petroleum to pay for cleaning up its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Rusty Shackleford of the usually right-wing Jawa Report writes in support of the legal right of Muslims to build a mosque at the World Trade Center. Regardless our other political differences, he deserves positive recognition for distinguishing between the two concepts of "should be allowed to, under the law" and "ought to, in my opinion" in today's age when so many political commentators and politicians on all sides do not.
• Lance Mannion writes about how the U.S. economy has been failing for close to thirty years, and the political elites have only recently begun to notice.
• J.M. Berger of Intel Wire reports that that the U.S. Department of Labor has given $3.5 million to two Yemeni organizations with close links to al-Qaeda.
• Mike the Mad Biologist notes that the U.S. government's economic stimulus spending is not reaching local infrastructure and education needs.