Wife On Your Back?

Then why weren't you in Finland for the races? The 11th annual wife carrying races, that is. It seems the Finns, who have entirely too much time on their hands by all indications, have been staging this event to commemorate a legendary robber. The mind boggles.

SONKAJARVI, Finland (Reuters) - Finishing upside down clinging to a man's back may not be the most graceful way of winning gold, but it sure helped Sandra Kullas and Margo Uusorg to the world wife-carrying crown on Saturday.

The Estonians were among 40 pairs from eight countries who competed in the annual event in Sonkajarvi, in central Finland.

They raced along a 250-meter track, complete with pools and hurdles, with the men running or walking and carrying the women on their backs.

The championship, being held for the 11th time, evokes the legend of robber Rosvo-Ronkainen who made people trying to join his gang run through a forest carrying heavy sacks.

Uusorg, 26, finished in 56.9 seconds, a world record, while Kullas, 19, clung to his back upside down with her legs around his neck. They beat Uusorg's bother Madis by 3 seconds.

Besides the bragging rights to a world championship, the lucky couple also won laptop computers and the real prize: the woman's weight in beer. Once word gets around about that prize, there should be even more contestants! Unless that is what your wife is on your back about in the first place, of course.

Shuttle Launch Scheduled

NASA will try to launch the Discovery today at 3:26 PM EDT. Fueling began at 5:30 AM this morning.

Electrically-charged clouds forced NASA to call off Saturday's launch of Discovery, delaying by a day the first space shuttle flight in a year. The weather forecast wasn't expected to improve for the launch set for 3:26 p.m. EDT Sunday.

"We knew we were going to get in a race against the weather," said launch director Michael Leinbach, adding that he expected the same for Sunday. "You can't control the weather and we have very strict rules."

Fueling began as expected just before 5:30 a.m.

The only technical problem that popped up during the countdown Saturday was a failed heater for one of Discovery's thrusters, needed to keep the fuel from freezing. Mission managers decided to proceed with the launch, since the thruster was not needed during liftoff, and the astronauts could work around the problem in orbit.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin approved launching the shuttle for the 12-day mission despite the concerns of two top agency managers who wanted additional foam repairs.

Bryan O'Connor, the top safety officer, and chief engineer Christopher Scolese recommended at a flight readiness review meeting two weeks ago that the shuttle remain grounded until design changes are made to 34 areas on the fuel tank known as ice-frost ramps. These wedge-shaped pieces of foam insulate brackets on the tank that hold long pressurization lines in place. The intent is to keep ice or frost from forming on these metal brackets once the tank is filled with super-cold fuel.

The problems with the foam really began when NASA stopped using non-CFC foam. Perhaps they should go back to that?

UPDATE: Weather may again cancel the launch. AP is reporting chance of cancellation is now at about 70%.

Kerry As Used Goods

The Associated Press paints a fairly grim picture about John "Hats! Anyone want Hats!" Kerry and his chances at running again. Historically, the Democrats do not renominate someone who has lost previously.

Kerry faces a challenge of major proportions, convincing Democratic activists that a candidate who just lost an election can still carry his party's White House hopes.

"I think the Democratic Party, unlike the Republican Party, has had a historic reluctance to give people a second chance," said Democratic activist Jerry Crawford, a Des Moines lawyer who was chairman of Kerry's 2004 campaign in Iowa.

It's rare when Democrats give the nomination to a candidate who just failed.

Adlai Stevenson got a second chance against President Eisenhower in 1956, but many suspect that Democrats were pessimistic about the odds of unseating a popular president. Their doubts were realized when Stevenson lost again.

Republicans, on the other hand, are more willing to give their nominees another try. Richard M. Nixon lost the presidency in 1960 and won the White House in 1968. Bob Dole sought his party's nomination in 1980 and 1988. He secured the GOP nod in 1996 but lost the general election to President Clinton.

Dole said the climb gets steeper on the next try.

"I think the advantage is the first time you are fresh and new to a lot of people and they haven't formed a judgment about you," the former Kansas senator said. "The second time around, some people might say he's had his chance, we need a new face."

Kerry's allies acknowledge the struggle but are unwilling to give up the cause.

"Historically, the Democratic Party has tended to shoot its wounded," said former New Hampshire Democratic Chairman Joe Keefe. "John Kerry has done everything within his power to rewrite that chapter."

The wild card here is that the activists do have disproportionate power during the early stages of the nomination process. Kerry's push to the far left may be enough to get him early support. Which does not ensure he's actually electable, of course.

Grim Assessment

Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writing in today's Washington Post, offers a fairly grim assessment of what al Qaeda has been up to. Unlike the recent Newsweek story that tries to pass off al Qaeda as a figment of the administration's imagination, this assessment says it is still powerful and dangerous.

A new narrative that purports to answer that question has emerged: Yes, al-Qaeda as an organization is severely impaired, but it has been replaced by a broader ideological movement made up of self-starting, homegrown terrorists who have few formal links to al-Qaeda but are motivated by a doctrine that can be called "Binladenism." Recent examples would include the militants in Madrid who bombed commuter trains in March 2004 and killed 191 people, or the seven terrorist wannabes recently arrested in Miami in connection with an alleged plot to blow up federal buildings. They had embraced al-Qaeda's doctrine of destruction, yet had no ties to the terrorist group.

….

Hekmat Karzai, an Afghan terrorism researcher at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore, points out that suicide bombings were rare in Afghanistan until 2005, when 21 such attacks took place. This year has already seen at least 16. In addition, Karzai reports that two of al-Qaeda's "most able" commanders — Khalid Habib, a Moroccan, and Abd al Hadi, an Iraqi — have been appointed to run its operations in southeastern and southwestern Afghanistan. These developments suggest that al-Qaeda is regrouping and strengthening along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

And, of course, bin Laden and Zawahiri remain at large in that border region, issuing a stream of tapes aimed at inflaming their supporters around the world. Zawahiri, for example, released a video last week urging further attacks on U.S. and other coalition forces in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, bin Laden's ongoing influence over al-Qaeda's affiliates was confirmed after the death last month of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq. Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, al-Qaeda's new leader in Iraq, quickly released a statement on a jihadist Web site pledging allegiance to bin Laden: "We are at your disposal, ready for your command." Muhajer has longstanding ties to Zawahiri; they have both been members of Egypt's ultra-violent Jihad Group for more than two decades. A U.S. intelligence official told me that the intelligence community's recognition of bin Laden and Zawahiri's continued importance to Islamist terrorists worldwide has led to a renewed push in the past two months to locate them.

Almost five years after the attacks on Washington and New York, al-Qaeda not only remains in business in its traditional stronghold on the Afghan-Pakistan border, but continues to project its ideology and terrorism abroad. So now we face a world of ideologically driven homegrown terrorists — free radicals unattached to any formal organization — in addition to formal networks such as al-Qaeda that have managed to survive despite the tremendous pressure brought to bear against them since 9/11. And even more grim, they now feed off and strengthen one another.

Which is the true picture of al Qaeda? Likely it lies somewhere in the middle of these two portraits. It is not a myth, but it is still quite dangerous. It is also getting hammered in Iraq right now, so much so that it appears that bin Laden wants fighters pulled out and sent to Sudan. Bergen's assessment indicates that this will be a long war, though.

Singing Hillary’s Praises

James Carville and Mark Penn write in today's Washington Post about Hillary Clinton's chances at being elected. This is the opening salvo, I suspect, against the extremists on the left wing who have been trashing Hillary for quite some time.

We've heard all this "Hillary can't win stuff" before. In fact, the quotes above aren't from recent weeks but from six years ago, when many pundits — and Democrats — said there was no way that Hillary could get elected to the Senate. She won by 12 percentage points.

We don't know if Hillary is going to run for president, but as advisers who have worked on the only two successful Democratic presidential campaigns in the past couple of decades, we know that if she does run, she can win that race, too.

Why? First, because strength matters. Our problems as a party are less ideological than anatomical: Our candidates have been made to look like they have no backbone. But the latest Post-ABC News poll shows that 68 percent of Americans describe Hillary Clinton as a strong leader. That comes after years of her being in the national crossfire. People know that Hillary has strong convictions, even if they don't always agree with her. They also know that she's tough enough to handle the viciousness of a national campaign and the challenges of the presidency itself.

The problem, of course, is how to secure the nomination if the left wing of the party rejects her. Iowa is notoriously skewed by the activists because of the caucus rules. Carville and Penn appear to be setting up the message they plan to run with to appeal to the more centrist members of the party. 

Certainly she could win the states John Kerry did. But with the pathbreaking possibility of this country's first female president, we could see an explosion of women voting — and voting Democratic. States that were close in the past, from Arkansas to Colorado to Florida to Ohio, could well move to the Democratic column. It takes only one more state to win.

Kerry's strategy is to get as far to the left as he can, courting the netroots and fringe elements. Hillary is staking her claim to the only strategy that has won the White House for the Democrats.

Warning Shot

Yesterday, there was quite a bit of buzz in the blogosphere over a report in the Australian that Israel had sent a letter to the Palestinians stating that the Palestinian PM would be killed if the kidnapped soldier was not released. No other media source I could find yesterday confirmed that. But last night the Israelis did fire a warning shot. A missile launched from a helicopter hit the empty office of the Palestinian PM.

The attack on Ismail Haniyeh's empty office came amid continued diplomatic efforts involving Egypt and other regional players to end the standoff, which have been under way since Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19, was seized a week ago in a cross-border raid.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz were to meet with security officials later Sunday to discuss whether to give diplomacy more time or to escalate the military operation. Late last week, Olmert called off plans to broaden the Israeli incursion from southern Gaza to the coastal strip's north in a nod to the diplomatic activity.

On Sunday, he hinted at possible escalation when he said his government had instructed the military to "do all it can" to return Shalit safely.

Palestinians said two missiles fired by attack helicopters set Haniyeh's office ablaze, but it was empty because of the late hour, witnesses said. One bystander was slightly injured.

Inspecting the wreckage, Haniyeh called the attack senseless. "They have targeted a symbol for the Palestinian people," he said.

The Israeli military said, however, it would "employ all means at its disposal … to secure the safe return" of Shalit. Roni Bar-On, an Israeli Cabinet minister, said the attack was also meant to "compromise the Hamas government's ability to rule."

"We will strike and will continue to strike at (Hamas') institutions," he said. "They have to understand that we will not continue to let them run amok."

The Jerusalem Post has additional details and some pictures. They quote IDF officials as saying:

The IDF confirmed the air strike, saying that it wanted to make clear to the most senior Hamas officials that it held the organization directly responsible for the kidnapping of IDF soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

Whether the article from the Australian was accurate about a letter, I think the message certainly got delivered this time.