First Lt. Pete Hegseth served as an infantry platoon leader and civil-military operations officer in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division.  He has an article today at the OpinionJournal asking for more troops for Iraq.  This supports my call for more troops in Bush Needs to Replace Rumsfeld.  But, he seems to disagree with my belief that the vast majority of Iraqis are not willing to cooperate with the American forces there.  He thinks that they will cooperate if they see the Americans as facilitating their security. I will go with his assessment.

I read earlier this week that the congressional pages and interns are high achieving high school and college students.  I just finished reading some of the e-mails on the Mark Foley scandal published at Stop Sex Predators that supposedly are from pages and interns.  There is another scandal lurking in the background:  These students write like fifth-graders!

The Associated Press reports that Dennis Hastert has again vowed not to resign over his office's handling of the Foley scandal.  They quote him as saying "I haven't done anything wrong."  Well, Dennis, what about all the right things you haven't done?

Although it's slanted a little leftward, as most all Newsweek articles are, Evan Thomas has written a comprehensive account of the Mark Foley scandal. What struck me about Thomas' article is how many gays are working as congressional staffers. About half of those mentioned are described as being gay. It could be, since the central figure is gay, that Thomas was biased towards seeking out known gays as his sources. Nevertheless, I got the impression that gays are over-represented on the congressional staff. Could this be the new magnet career for gays? Are the hairdressing, fashion design and interior design fields overstaffed, or losing their cachet?

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Stephen Browne has posted some very interesting observations on Arabs and Islam based on his living and working there for a year.  He describes how their thought process, work ethic, interpersonal relationships, etc. differ from ours.  I have no idea how accurate his observations are though.

Are you impressed when some gazillionaire gives a ton of money to some charitable foundation? I'm not. No, I'm not impressed when someone with twenty billion dollars gives away ten billion. There's the fact that they still have ten billion, so what kind of sacrifice is that? On the other hand, someone like Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams could probably make a convincing argument that a person capable of accumulating that much wealth would help society more by keeping the money and continuing to invest it. I am impressed when someone with only a thousand dollars gives five hundred of it to a person he or she believes needs it more than they do.