Unless we goose the UN on the matter of disarming Hezbollah, we lose Lebanon, says Krauthammer, because

Hezbollah is not just returning to being a “state within a state.” It is becoming the state, with the Siniora [Lebanese] government reduced to acting as its front.

A Dem hack hath spoke, as explained at Power Line:

Who’s afraid of Anna Diggs Taylor? Anyone who knows what legal analysis and legal argument look like — anyone who knows the requisites of legal reasoning — must look on the handiwork of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in the NSA case in amazement. It is a pathetic piece of work. If it had been submitted by a student in my second year legal writing class at the University of St. Thomas Law School, it would have earned a failing grade.

Etc.

Later, more, from WaPo:

The angry rhetoric of U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor will no doubt grab headlines. But as a piece of judicial work — that is, as a guide to what the law requires and how it either restrains or permits the NSA’s program — her opinion will not be helpful.

NYT doesn’t think so, however:

The New York Times editorial today, cheering on Judge Taylor’s lame and irresponsible decision striking down the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), is, like Taylor’s opinion, a joke.

It’s here.

Honest Abe was not the rail-splitter we thought, but a nicely situated landowner. Didn’t come up from poverty, therefore. What’s that about a log cabin?

Eric Zorn tells me what I did not know, that it’s a storefront church in which the illegal immigrant woman is taking sanctuary on Division Street.

She’s not a dangerous outlaw or a threat to anyone. But the media/activist vigil at Camp Elvira in Humboldt Park is a bad business all the way around. It’s generating lots of heat but shedding no light, whipping up ill will and retarding the cause of compassionate immigration reform.

Arellano, 31, is fighting deportation to Mexico by claiming sanctuary in a storefront church, defying the government to “send agents to a holy place” to arrest her.

He also explicates the illegality issue as well as can be done. Fish or cut bait, he advises: get her out of there now rather than later and in the broader matter, decide what’s good for the country:

The U.S. must have laws on immigration. Every nation must. And we can’t let sentiment or popularity or claims about what God would or wouldn’t want to happen inside a church cause us to ignore them.

In another Metro story, Chi Trib writer Art Barnum tells me far more and far more clearly than Sun-Times about legalities surrounding conviction of the drug-seller father to whom his 2 1/2–year-old in diaper and tee shirt led cops. She was watched over by a good-dog doberman who gave S-T cause for its “Doberman baby-sat 2-year-old; dad convicted” p-1 screamer. Not bad, if I do say so, but story got murky as to charges and convictions. S-T is going for the headless-corpse-in-topless-bar prize but has not quite made it.

Neither story goes into our draconian drug-law legalities, of course. The guy faces 12 to 50 years, for cryin’ out loud! Trib is good on his stated basis for appeal, however:

Assistant Public Defender Jeff York said Johnson . . . believes the police search was illegal because he . . . gave police permission [only] to check the apartment to ensure the child’s safety. [Judge] Thompson previously ruled the search was legal.

As for the kid,

[Chief of Police] Anderson said there were no signs that the child was physically abused.

She was returned to her mother, Johnson’s girlfriend, the night of her father’s arrest. The dog went with her. [Italics added]

NY Sun has a quite reasonable, telling commentary on the Wallace-Ahmadinejad interview, “a journalistic coup” that found Wallace not “up to the task . . . outfoxed, outwitted, and outflanked.” He was

hesitant in this interview, unwilling to press the wily Iranian president, and was thrown off stride by the tough, even snide, comebacks, including a threat to end the interview prematurely.

Moreover, Mr. Wallace seemed unexpectedly charmed, perhaps even won over, by the president, which also may have dulled his usually sharp instincts.

“It wasn’t even close,” said David Harris, of the American Jewish Committee.

Here was a chance to press the leader of a country that seeks nuclear weapons, actively supports Hezbollah, calls for Israel’s annihilation, engages in terrorist activity far from its borders, imprisons political reformers, protesting students, and independent journalists, subscribes to a disturbing theology, and suppresses the rights of the Baha’is, among others.

Oy veh.

Oh boy, if you were wondering about Mike Wallace whoring after audience share, you will find this at Power Line “interesting,” as the columnist says when he means disgusting. The PL man cites questions “Mike Wallace forgot to ask” sent by a reader, such as “Would Osama Bin Laden be a welcome guest in your country?” and “Should Muslims living in Western nations be allowed to apply sharia law within their communities, or must they follow the laws of their country?” adding this of his own:

[Wallace might have askee] perhaps immediately after []his attestation to the great honor of interviewing him:

Do you think that the United States has a legitimate bone to pick with you in connection with your leadership of the student group that took 66 Americans hostage in the American embassy in Tehran in 1979?

There once was a Mike Wallace who asked tough questions — his was a “no-holds-barred interviewing technique,” says CBS. It’s how he got his start or made his initial splash, in the early days of TV, with a “Confidential” show in which he got celebs to come on camera and then put embarrassing questions with patented Idon’tgiveashit look in his beady eyes. Now with a 4th– or 5th-generation Hitler, he plays softball.

For a good rundown on the interview, go here, where Media Research Center’s Tim Graham acknowledges “Some Tough Questions” in the Iran interview while citing “Some Apple-Polishing Interludes.”

OPPORTUNITIES KNOCKED: Daley’s on p. 1 of Chi Trib as genial fun-loving talk show personality. Why? He’s on hot seat, isn’t he? Why give him the foto-op for free? Or anyone else, including GW chopping wood, etc.

Why not? Because it encourages jerks like Gov Blago to lift up his 3–yr-old as hostage when he finds himself in war zone attacked by reporters. He picked her up after they began badgering him — when all he wanted was a foto-op, for crying out loud!

HEAD TRIP: Sun-Times had that item big on p-1, rightly so. But moving to its op-ed page, we ask, who is Ralph Martire, whose stuff reads like a memo to staff? We have an email address but no i-d for this producer of turgid prose. And where the heck is Tom Roeser, who used to fill us in on Illinois politics on that very page? Martire’s a lobbyist, which Roeser used to be but hasn’t been for several years, and besides, he had life for a long time as City Club rejuvenator and, yes, real-life talk-show host, which he still is, Sunday nights, WLS-AM. And besides with a flourish, Roeser knows how to write for THE PUBLIC — see his daily blog.

Martire’s organization is the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability — maybe for motherhood too, who knows? — where he is executive director, for crying out loud. He must know what he’s talking about, whatever it is. What he needs is a writer. Get the guy or gal who does Rev. Jesse’s boiler-plate leftism, also regularly in Sun-Times. (Oh, am I mad today. You’d never know I’m entertaining lovely grandchildren this week, would you?)

HERE COMES JUDGE: While in Sun-Times op-ed arena, see Judge Egan dismantle DePaul law prof so-&-so for his statute of limitations argument meant to show Egan up for his non-prosecutable verdict in the Burge torture business. In addition to substantive stuff, several times he notes the man’s “academic” aura as leaving him unsuited for solving this problem. He also notes that the two presumed good-doing lawyers who objected to his decision — Flint Taylor and Locke Bowman (no relation) — were asked during their investigation to show cause why the statute did not limit but didn’t. Good piece.

SO THERE: As for Ozzie Guillen, and you knew we’d get to him, didn’t you, he’s in his nasty-kid mood these days about shortstop Uribe, who has to come to Ozzie to say he wants to play: Ozzie is not going to him, no. Uribe has to come to “the boss,” you see. That’s how it’s done in the Land of Ozzie. None of which matters today, of course, Contreras that beautiful Cuban exile from Castro having blanked the first-place Tigers on three hits last night.

CONFESSION: Then there’s Gunter Grass, who after years as a professional Leftist Novelist, with a book of memoirs to sell, says he’s been “burdened” all these years knowing he served in the Waffen SS (storm troopers) and so now, finally, with book of memoirs to sell, tells us. Here’s it’s time for him to don sack cloth and pour ashes on himself and enter a monastery, and he’s got himself a book-selling point. It’s people like that who give Leftism a bad name. Among others.

DEATH OF A GOOD GUY: Finally, R.I.P. Al Kirk SJ, who was found dead in his room at Loyola U. at 72. For years he was head head-knocker at St. Ignatius High, Chicago — disciplinarian. I met him as an incoming novice at Milford OH in 1952 but my best memory is of him at Ignatius, where I showed up one day to interview a student for a series at the Daily News.

I bounced into his office on a lower-level floor as students were charging out at day’s end. He just walked out in the hall and collared one walking by, a Bridgeporter whose take-home books included a paperback copy of Royko’s Boss — assigned reading. The kid made a very good interview. Boss had gotten Sis Daley very mad; she had tried to get it removed from supermarket shelves in Bridgeport. Royko got wind of it and, what do you know, out went next day’s column on that very subject.

For the same DN series, I went to Gordon Tech at Addison & California on the NW Side, where the Resurrectionist principal led into my presence a hand-picked senior, an all-honors student heading for West Point. Good interview too, but my, the contrast with Al Kirk and the climate at Ignatius.