Morning Linkdump

Real Clear Politics: University Presidents Battle for Honors in Spinelessness. It's time for this column to announce its Sheldon Award, given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus.

Townhall.com: Totalitarian chic. Nazi regalia may be strictly taboo, but communist emblems have never been trendier. Enter "hammer and sickle" into a shopping search engine, and up pop dozens of products adorned with the Marxist brand -- T-shirts and ski caps, bracelet charms and keychains, posters of Lenin and "Soviet Kremlin Stainless Steel Flasks.

Times UK: Media’s love of doom obscures the good news. THE normal nervousness of investors and market watchers has been converted into paranoia by the business media’s preference for bad news. This headline in The Wall Street Journal is typical: “Economy’s Surge Stirs Questions About When Slowdown May Come”

Morning Linkdump

Real Clear Politics: University Presidents Battle for Honors in Spinelessness. It's time for this column to announce its Sheldon Award, given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus.

morning linkdump

San Francisco Chronicle: The Truth About 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Rather than accept that Islamic terrorists flew planes into buildings and slaughtered innocents in the name of a fanatical ideology, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists believe the perpetrators included members of their own government -- that somehow the Bush administration, with the collusion of the Pentagon, was either behind the attacks or simply allowed them to happen in order to institute a quasi-police state.

Frontpage: Why Robespierre Chose Terror They are the characteristic scourges of humanity in modern times, but Robespierre has a good claim to being the first.

The Austalian: Mission to nowhere This is the pub where NASA's astronauts come to play after a hard day of mission training. It is therefore one of the few places where they can talk frankly and freely about what has gone right - and wrong - with America's space program.

SpaceRef: New Service Offers Payloads to Space for $99 Masten Space Systems' new "CanSats To Space" payload program will carry 350 gram, "soda can" sized payloads into space and back.


Washington Post: Tilting at Windmills The problem now, as one wind-power executive puts it, is BANANAism: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything."

morning linkdump

The New York Sun: Democrats Plan Race-Based Campaign Against Black Candidate in Maryland

Washington Post: Double Standard for Dictators

Mozilla 1.5.0.2 released

morning linkdump

National Review: Dead-end Debates

Real Clear Politics: On Immigration, Politicians Rise Above Principles

Real Clear Politics: The Road to Bankruptcy

San Diego Union-Tribune: Student fights write-up for showing U.S. flag

spain rolls up network

Guardian: 29 charged over Madrid bombings

The 29 charged include Jamal Zougam, a Moroccan who allegedly supplied cell phones used as detonators in the 10 backpack bombs that exploded on four crowded commuter trains.

Seven other suspects in the case - described as ringleaders who included the ideological mastermind of the attacks - blew themselves up in a suburban flat three weeks after the train blasts.

A policeman was also killed in the flat explosion, which happened when special forces who traced the men through cell phone traffic moved in to make arrests.

José Emilio Suarez Trashorras, a former miner who provided the bombers with plastic explosives, was charged with 192 counts of murder, including the death of the policeman.

morning linkdump

National Review: Good News From Iraq

American Thinker: Missing the Big Story: The CIA's War with the White House

National Journal: Real Or Fake?

Amid the digitized stream of compelling photographs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a few that are staged, fake or at least misleading. Photo editors struggle to filter them out.

Guardian: The French go marching into the past

Star Tribune: It's much too easy to vote illegally in Minnesota

morning linkdump

The Daily Telegraph: July 7 bombs were a 'demo' not terrorism, claims professor

The Daily Telegraph: There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998 That's unpossible!

via oraculations: £5bn Airbus bills made BAE sell up Big news is an understatement. The A380 is in serious trouble..