Angelina wants to spend your money, Mark Steyn on defeaticrats, and today's articles from Maria

Angelina Jolie's in Forbes this week. Angelina, who makes $15 million per film, has pushed three bills in Congress "to protect children":

One would have the U.S. spend $500 million next year and $15 billion over ten years, to educate kids in the poorest regions. She plans to work with Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, who has proposed it. In April, to pique interest in the press, Jolie joined in a media conference call about education when she was eight months pregnant; it generated 243 stories.

A second bill would provide legal help to alien minors (she despises the term "alien") who are alone and pass through U.S. borders. The Senate passed it in December 2005, but it has languished in the House for six months. "It's caught up in the overall immigration debate," Jolie says, "but I just think it's un-American to refuse refugee children access to a lawyer." But in a private meeting, Representative F. John Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin scoffed at the cost of implementing such an idea, she says. "He didn't treat me gently--I left shaking in my heels." Her third bill, to aid 70 million "vulnerable" kids in the Third World, was signed by President Bush last November--but so far no funding has been okayed.

It's your tax money, folks. And it's great PR for Angelina.

At the blogs
Revolt at the ACLU.
ADD: The Mainstream Media Disease; and let's not forget Associated Press Deficit Disorder

Duquenal, Ozzie Guillen, the White Sox and the Chicago Tribune

Don't miss Hip Hop Republican's posts on Moorish Science Temple Cult and the Florida Cell, more here. Via Maria, Bizarre cult of Sears Tower ‘plotter’

24
I Am Jack Bauer. What 24 means for homeland security
Best line: "Jack Bauer, for example, could strangle you with a cordless phone".

Today's articles from Maria
Mark Steyn: U.S. can't 'redeploy' its way out of Iraq

The danger we face is not a Chinese superpower or an Islamist superpower: If it's a new boss, you learn the new rules and adjust as best you can. But the greater likelihood is of a world with no superpower at all in which unipolar geopolitics gives way to nonpolar geopolitics, a world without order in which pipsqueak thug states that can't feed their own people globalize their pathologies.

VDH: Despair and Hope: The short and long wars against radical Islam

Even more depressing for the Islamists is that their enemy is not the American or European West per se, but a far more insidious Westernism, something that has infected diverse peoples from South Korea and China to Central America and enclaves in the Middle East like Beirut and Dubai. Westernization — whether we define that as a C-SPAN televised gripe session on Palestinian rights at a Western university or navigating through 7,000 tunes on an iPod or flipping on the CD, air conditioning, and power seats in a Honda Accord or watching assorted bare navels on MTV — is insidiously seductive and ultimately subversive to the patriarchal world of the eighth century

A sign of the times

Memo to Bush: They were tortured!

U.S. firefighters in Mexico as American West burns

Revolutionary Hubble telescope stops working. I had a chance to see the unfinished Hubble several years ago before it was launched.

The Bishop of Rochester in the UK says Truth should be more important than unity

In the past, Anglican comprehensiveness has been grounded in acknowledging the supremacy of the Bible, the authority of what Christians have always and everywhere believed, and of the Anglican formularies, such as the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion and the Ordinal, which bear witness to this faith. Such foundations are more and more dispensable these days, and it is this which has produced our present crisis.

Mysteries of the Masons: THE SECRET SOCIETY RAISES $2 MILLION A DAY FOR CHARITY AND PREACHES BROTHERLY LOVE AND TOLERANCE - BUT WILL IT BE THE NEXT OPUS DEI? Nah, the Opus Dei doesn't have Shriner's conventions.

Foes of gulf drilling are losing ground

Identity- theft ring scored in Tucson

Because Jimmy is always bad news: Bin Laden family gave $1 million to Carter

Dirty great cloud hangs over Beijing Olympics. Pollution has put Yangtze on brink of catastrophe. I suggest that we ship Al Gore to China with his movie and a thousand Gorewarmers.