TRAILER PARK: A whole bunch of new movie trailers.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE on how the press is reporting on improvements in Iraq. By talking about problems in Afghanistan!

IN COLOMBIA, A MAJOR HOSTAGE RESCUE and another embarrassment for the FARC terrorists: “Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos has confirmed that former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, who was held captive by the FARC, was rescued during a military operation on Wednesday. Santos said no one had been hurt in the rescue.”

The Counterterrorism Blog says the operation was something right out of a spy thriller. More on the rescue here.

TOM MAGUIRE: “Larisa Alexandrovna tries her hand at rebutting Jonah Goldberg’s essay on Obama’s patriotism problem, and hilarity ensues.”

CULTURAL SUICIDE.

WINNING OVER the Felon-American community.

COLLEGES PUSHING PHONY DIVERSITY:

In September of 2000, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Idaho were both embarrassed when they were forced to admit that they had doctored promotional photographs to make their campuses look diverse. In both cases, non-white faces were added to real student photographs of all-white groups.

At the universities involved, officials insisted that they meant well, but just about everyone agreed that Photoshop diversity isn’t the real thing. But what if photos, even real photos of real live students, convey a false impression? . . .

The findings: Black students made up an average of 7.9 percent of students at the colleges studied, but 12.4 percent of those in viewbooks. Asian students are also more likely to be found in viewbooks than on campus, making up 3.3 percent of real students on average and 5.1 percent of portrayed students. . . . Looked at another way, he found that more than 75 percent of colleges appeared to overrepresent black students in viewbooks.

So why are black students more prevalent in viewbooks than on campus?

“Black equals diversity for many people. If you show African American students, people think that means your institution is diverse,” said Timothy D. Pippert, an assistant professor of sociology at Augsburg, who led the study. “They are defining diversity as that face.”

Read the whole thing.

IT’S A COFFEE TABLE! IT’S A WEIGHT BENCH! It’s both!

FOR WHEN WRETCHED EXCESS STILL ISN’T ENOUGH: The Krispy-Kreme Bacon Cheeseburger.

Or, if you’re on a diet, you can “go light” with grilled twinkies. Fatten up now, survive the famine later!

AN UPDATE ON THOSE CANADIAN “HUMAN RIGHTS” KANGAROO COURTS:

Free speech is a basic Canadian value. Indeed, it is one that’s key to any self-respecting, modern democracy.

That is why we welcome the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s dismissal last week of what we considered to be an unsupportable hate-speech complaint against Maclean’s magazine.

The ruling can be viewed as a small but significant victory in the battle against creeping totalitarianism. . . . However, freedom of speech remains under attack.

And the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has yet to rule on a similar complaint launched by the Canadian Islamic Congress over the same Steyn piece.

As former B.C. journalist Nigel Hannaford points out in a recent paper for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, free speech in Canada is now policed by two parallel justice systems.

One is the regular court system, which administers the anti-hate provisions of the Criminal Code.

The other consists of a number of federal and provincial human-rights commissions, set up in the ’60s and ’70s to deal swiftly with abuses in the areas of employment and accommodation.

Driven by political agendas, these increasingly quirky commissions have now taken on what is, in effect, a censor’s role.

Indeed they have, and they deserve to be treated as such, not as protectors of human rights, which they are not. Nice to see this issue getting so much play in the Canadian press. And here’s more from a prominent Canadian libel lawyer:

After four decades of suing or defending prominent authors, journalists and businessmen entangled in some of Canada’s most memorable libel cases, Mr. Porter warns that it is getting harder to defend reputations or preserve freedom of speech – rights honed over centuries of case law.

One culprit, he said, is quasi-judicial bodies such as human rights tribunals, which are operating far “beyond their jurisdiction.”

When these agencies investigate slander and defamation charges, he argues, they operate outside the bounds of civil court procedure. Defendants cannot rely on traditional libel defences such as truth, fair comment or good intent.

The resulting chilling effect is, of course, entirely intentional.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Standing up for free trade in Colombia.

SOME GOOD NEWS FROM CANADA, FOR A CHANGE: Asteroid-hunting satellite a world first. “Canada is building the world’s first space telescope designed to detect and track asteroids as well as satellites. Called NEOSSat (Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite), this spacecraft will provide a significant improvement in surveillance of asteroids that pose a collision hazard with Earth and innovative technologies for tracking satellites in orbit high above our planet.”

PETER ROBINSON INTERVIEWS PHILIP BOBBITT on law, war and terrorism. Bobbitt’s book is here.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Liberals, Conservatives, and Individual Rights.

ROGER SIMON: “Just as David Petraeus is making us feel good about our military, along comes Wes Clark to remind us that no institution is perfect. ”

Petraeus, however, hasn’t been booted from his command.

UPDATE: More on Clark from Slate, back in 2001. Among other things, we learn that in U.S. military circles “he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator.” And not much of a general, by all appearances.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More:

Get the politics out of the military? It’s Clark and Webb who are injecting all the politics into the military right now. Webb is pissing me off. I don’t know how McCain can resist taking the bait. Do the Obama people have someone who can be even more annoying than Webb on this subject? They seem to be wheeling out the military men one after the other. Clark didn’t do the trick, so up comes Webb. Can they top Webb?

Anyway, Dowd’s point is that Obama wants to get us out of Iraq, but he can’t even get us out of Vietnam.

To me, the most striking line in Dowd’s piece was this one:

“So, what’s going on, guys?” he asked on the tarmac at dusk. “What’s going on on Friday night? You’ll be back in time to have some fun.”

And what about you? a reporter asked the candidate. “I can’t have fun anymore,” Obama said, in a comment meant to be wry but sounding wistful. “It’s not allowed.”

It’ll only get worse if he’s elected. As noted in the past, it’s a job that no sane person could love for eight years. Obama’s sounding a bit sane, here.

MORE: From the comments:

This is playing out as if McCain has a mole inside the strategy sessions of the Democrats, guiding them to fight the campaign exactly where their candidate is weakest and their opponent is strongest.

Do they really want people, going into the 4th of July holiday, to be concentrating on the service and sacrifices of John McCain? Really?

Good point.

BACK WHEN I WAS AT THE CONSUMER ELECTRONIC SHOW, I noted a combination radar-detector/GPS that registers speed camera locations. Now here’s a review from Popular Mechanics. These things need to be Internet-connected so that when one finds a cop, it sends a warning to other units within a few miles.

IN THE MAIL: Stephen L. Carter’s new book, Palace Council. Perfect beach reading, and I’ll be going to the beach in a bit.

WASHINGTON POST: Obama Got Discount on Home Loan.

“The real question is: Were congressmen getting unique treatment that others weren’t getting?” associate law professor Adam J. Levitin, a credit specialist at Georgetown University Law Center, said about the Countrywide loans. “Do they do business like that for people who are not congressmen? If they don’t, that’s a problem.”

Yes, that’s the question.

UPDATE: Bob Owens: “Obama had no prior relationship with the lender, was taking out a $1.32 million loan below market rates, without paying the customary fees. So what? . . . Barack Obama did precisely what every other politician does, and nothing more. The only reason this story merits any attention is that Obama’s campaign has created a mythology around him that casts him as a reformer.”

Yeah, “Barack Obama: More of the Same” wouldn’t have been much of a slogan.

WELL, GOOD: Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS.

ROBERT MUGABE and his enablers.

BEWARE THE EVIL SEX PESTS.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS GETS WATERBOARDED. (Via TDC).

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “Hitchens concludes: ‘[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.’ But if Hitchens is willing to submit to it as an experiment, it can’t be the worst torture. We can easily think of many tortures that he would not have accepted for journalistic purposes and that no one friendly to him would have perpetrated.”

Yes, nobody has their toenails pulled out with red-hot pincers so they can write about it. But what, exactly, does that tell us?

I GUESS THEY’RE NOT WORRIED ABOUT THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE COMING BACK: A nine-figure re-signing bonus for Rush Limbaugh.

ERIC SCHEIE: “Frankly, the haircuts didn’t look especially gay to me, but I guess you have to be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to know what a gay haircut looks like.”