Ronald Kessler
Karl Rove's decision to leave the White House at the end of the month makes perfect sense.
Besides getting a huge advance in a book deal, Rove will be contributing to President Bush's legacy by writing a book that will be more widely read if it comes out when Bush is still president.
As part of shaping Bush's legacy, he is going to be one of the key planners of the Bush library, where he will have a prominent position. Rove is a brilliant student of American history, surpassing the most erudite history professors. He will relish comparing Bush with other presidents.
Rove will still be available whenever the president needs his advice. In the meantime, Ed Gillespie, as counselor to the president, has begun to provide political advice that Karl otherwise might give.
At Gillespie's urging, Bush has responded more aggressively to attacks by the Democrats on his war policies and has taken them on over excessive spending. Pushed by Gillespie, Bush has made more public appearances. The fact that Bush flew to the site of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis shows he has learned since Hurricane Katrina that for political reasons, a president must make such ...   more »

By Patrick Goodenough
An estimated 80,000 Islamists packed a sports stadium in the Indonesian capital Sunday to call for the re-establishment of a single Islamic state or caliphate, uniting Muslims around the world under Islamic law.
Video footage posted on the group's websites showed tens of thousands of people, men and women seated apart in the stadium in Jakarta, waving black and white flags and shouting "Allah is greater."
The event was organized by Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation), which called it the biggest event calling for the revival of a caliphate since the last time one existed in the 1920s.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is a transnational Sunni group that says it shuns violence, but it has been outlawed or restricted in Germany, Russia and parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. The British government said it planned to ban the group after the July 2005 London bombings, although it has not yet happened.
Muhammad Ismail Yusanto, the group's Indonesian spokesman, said on the sidelines of the meeting that the group rejects democracy, because sovereignty is in the hands of Allah, not the people.
In a statement, he called secularism "the mother of all destruction," and he called on ...   more »

  The euro on Thursday slid under 1.34 dollars for the first time in nearly two months and struck a five-month low against the yen as the US and Japanese currencies gained from their safe-haven status.
In early European trade, the euro dropped to 1.3386 dollars -- the lowest point since June 22 -- as investors continued to pile into the US unit amid fears of a global economic slowdown caused by the weak US housing sector.
The euro has lost 3.36 percent of its value since hitting a record high of 1.3852 dollars on July 24.
The European single currency later stood at 1.3433 dollars, which compared with 1.3444 late in New York on Wednesday.
"As long as the market is dominated by fears that the crisis -- which is increasingly considered to be a global problem -- will continue or even intensify, the dollar will give up its recent gains very slowly," Commerzbank economist Gavin Friend said.
"Further losses (for the euro) towards 1.3320 (dollars) are possible," said Friend.
Elsewhere on Thursday, the euro tumbled to 155.01 yen -- a level last seen on March 19. The single currency has fallen 8.3 percent in value since reaching an ...   more »

By Douglas MacKinnon
1.) Tragically, horrifyingly, but quite predictably, it’s going to happen. The only question being which American city or cities?
In a recent conversation with a former high level intelligence operative of our government, I raised the possibility of terrorists successfully detonating a nuclear weapon within the United States. His response was sobering in its hopelessness.
First, he stressed how grateful he was that he did not work in Washington, DC, and that his family lived far enough out to survive the coming nuclear blast. When I pressed him as to why he was so sure that Islamic terrorists – with or without the help of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez – would eventually hit DC or another American city with a nuclear weapon, his anger boiled out.
He pointed the finger squarely at our politicians and our politically correct, left-leaning media, who, in his opinion, have “sealed our fate.” He spoke of politicians from both sides of the aisle who consider border security nothing more than a cheap tool to be used for their reelection and enrichment. He despaired about a media that not only gleefully leaks our nation’s most trusted secrets for partisan gain, but then willingly ...   more »