Via Instapundit, another report from returning soldier that things in Iraq aren't as they are portrayed in our medial. When are the American people going to wake up and stop supporting these propagandists of the left?

What this also tells me is that it's a BIG mistake to seek help from the U.N., which will do nothing but discourage democracy and self-reliance among the Iraqis. I you like the Palestinian refugee "camps," you'll love what the U.N. will do for Iraqi society.

Maybe we should ask them to contribute more chocolate to the rebuilding of Iraq.

No matter what you read, the Estrada nomination fight is not over. There are 10 Democrat-held Senate seats coming up for election, and they're taking Latinos for granted.

The following letter was in today's Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City:

Honor will of the people

The church/state argument would not go on if the courts read the Constitution without prejudice. It says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

The courts are using the first clause improperly to destroy the second one.

Did the government require the Ten Commandments to be placed in a government building? If not, then the will of the people who did it "shall not be infringed." The government cannot order its placement nor order its removal if it were put there by the people.

So, government, keep your secular hands off of the religious will of the people.

Robert W. English
Salt Lake City

I wonder if if occurred to anyone that the courts no longer seem this as a government by the people. I'm sure that the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington don't. At best they see Americans in an "us v. them" light. I don't know if it's possible to get over this, since democracy seems to create partisanship which is, it seems, the essence of politics.

This reminds me of a scene from Raising Arizona, where Nicholas Cage's character tries to hold up a convenience store and barely avoids being shot as he runs through a grocery store. I hope it doesn't reach that level in Knoxville.

A few comments from an interested observer of NASA upon reading the report of the commission looking into the Columbia disaster, "Sweat the small stuff." NASA, like most of us seems to grow inattentive when things are going well, but there are some things that you just cannot mess around with and two of them are rockets and nuclear reactors. When you're out on the edge of technology and the costs of failure are so high, you cannot treat things as routine. I've always thought that the reason nuclear power has not flourished in the U.S. was that it was treated as just another construction project, subject to union laxness and administrative hubris. I would say that not everybody, regardless of training and brains, should be allowed to work on shuttle missions or in the control room of a nuclear power plant. They should not be putting in overtime, and they should not be told to quit worrying. These are the kind of things you want people to worry about and check every detail, whether is seems to be an "acceptable risk" or not. Having things hit the leading edge of a shuttle's heat shield is one of those things. The U. S. Navy was the first to build nuclear powered submarines. They didn't have nuclear disasters because, I think, (1) the program was run by Admiral Rickover and (2) when you're in a sub, it's probably hard to forget all that water on the other side of the walls.