NEW YEAR’S EVE PLANS: Gawker has a list of suggestions. Some make me wish I still lived in New York. Others make me glad I don’t.

WILL VEHRS REVIEWS THE YEAR IN PUNDITRY. Don’t miss it.

I THINK THAT GWEILO DIARIES HAS THIS RIGHT:

The Saudis provided — at a minimum — money to al Qaeda. I know it. Kleiman knows it. Graham knows it. You know it. The administration knows it. The Saudis damn sure know it. Al Qaeda knows it. The families of the victims know it. I’ll lay odds that my Chinese taxi-driver on the way home tonight knows it. Yet its classified?!?

What’s this, the betrayal that dare not speak its name?

If the Bush administration’s plan does not ultimately include regime change in Saudi Arabia, it is destined for failure and the President is going to lose a lot of supporters very quickly. This had all better be part of a brilliant Machiavellian strategy to oust the House of Saud, while Poppy Bush lulls them into a false sense of security by groveling before them for donations to that sanctuary for the needy and oppressed, Andover Academy.

I can understand not pressing the Saudi issue at the moment, but the above is absolutely right.

THE HISPANOSPHERE: Jim Bennett writes on some changes in Latin America.

MORE ON THIMEROSAL: Mark Kleiman is pointing out a problem that Dr. Manhattan has also noted: the controversial amendment to the Homeland Security bill may not have been anonymous, since Dick Armey has admitted being behind it, but it is, ahem, screwed up. Here’s Kleiman’s email description, which is particularly clear, and which I think is right (email me if I’m wrong):

1. Frist offered a bill to get Eli Lilly off the hook on thimerosal in the Senate. No hearings were held.

2. That provision appeared in neither the House nor the Senate version of the Homeland Security bill as passed before the election, since it has nothing to do with homeland security.

3. After the election, a version was reported out by the conference committee, with lots of stuff, including the thimerosal language, that hadn’t been in either bill.

4. There’s no mystery about who put it in: Armey did. But Armey had no particular interest in the thimerosal stuff. The “mystery” is who asked him to put it in. Frist, the author, specifically says he didn’t. But no one will say who did. The natural suspect is Mitch Daniels; the early reports were that the pressure came from “the White House,” and Daniels is an ex-officer of Lilly and planning to go back to Indiana, where Lilly is based, to run for governor.

5. The Frist version had a necessary conforming amendment to the Internal Revenue Code. The Armey version, the one that passed, didn’t. As a result, the bill as passed blocks all lawsuits and directs the claims to VICP, but the VICP trust fund is still barred by law from paying any such claim.

6. All the thimerosal claims are time-barred by the terms of VICP. Neither the Frist version nor the Armey version deals with that.

So unless the thing gets undone, the families are out of luck. Not being a lawyer, I’m not sure why denying someone the right to press a damages claim isn’t the sort of “taking” that requires compensation.

Well, as for the last, the answer is that lots of things that ought to be considered “takings” that require compensation aren’t treated as such. (And don’t even get me started on “qualified immunity”). But this — unlike the bogus “anonymity” claims that have been raised earlier — seems like an actual issue, and one that deserves to be addressed.

And why wasn’t Bill Keller’s column on this, or Eleanor Clift’s, this clear and to the point? Were they so anxious to try to pin something on Frist that they missed the real story here? Maybe someone should just give Kleiman a bigshot oped slot.

SORRY FOR THE LIGHT POSTING: My mother had knee surgery and I had to pick her up and bring her here, where she’s staying for the night. She’s doing fine now.

Er, and a bit of advice: yes, if you do aerobics and go running while wearing heavy ankle weights, it will tone you very impressively. But there is a price. . . .

I’ve posted on this before, but via Ann Salisbury I notice that Kos’s Political State Report is still looking for correspondents. Drop by and sign up if you’re interested.

I also agree with Ann that we really need a good, sharp increase in defense spending to meet America’s global responsibilities. . . .

NOW THE UNITED STATES IS BEING CRITICIZED FOR EXCESSIVE MULTILATERALISM!

SEOUL (Reuters) – North Korea (news – web sites) said Tuesday it is only the United States that can solve the dispute of its nuclear weapons, warning Washington that internationalizing the issue would bring “uncontrollable catastrophe.”

“There is no need for the third party to meddle in the nuclear issue on the peninsula. The issue should be settled between the DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S., the parties responsible for it,” said the North’s ruling-party newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun.

“If the U.S. persistently tries to internationalize the pending issue between the DPRK and the U.S. in a bid to flee from its responsibility, it will push the situation to an uncontrollable catastrophe,” it said.

Those damned cowboy Americans, always trying to round up a posse and bring the whole community into dealing with wrongdoers, instead of doing things one-to-one like civilized people. . . .

I guess we just can’t win. Which, I suppose, is the whole idea.

FINANCIAL ISSUES at TomPaine.Com:

But liberals smelled a rat. Drug company Eli Lilly had long sought the clarification, and TomPaine.com, a left-wing Internet publication, promised $10,000 to whomever could conclusively document how the provision found its way into the bill. On December 12, TomPaine.com got its answer. “I did it,” House Majority Leader Dick Armey said on a CBS newscast. “I’m proud of it.”

Now Mr. Armey has asked TomPaine.com to send the reward to the Cornerstone Community School, a nonprofit private school in Washington for disadvantaged children. But the Web site is balking and has now issued a clarification. “What TomPaine.com is looking for is THE PERSON WHO *ASKED* ARMEY to ALLOW it to happen,” it says in characteristic feverishness, braying that “Public officials who work secret deals like this are cowards,” and that “democracy requires accountability.”

Since TomPaine.com brings up the subject of accountability, it’s worth noting that the organization has its own issues regarding ownership. According to its Web site and filings with the Internal Revenue Service, the publication is wholly bankrolled to the tune of $2 million by the Florence Fund, a tax-exempt organization whose purpose is “to invigorate public debate by helping public interest groups put their messages and work products before larger audiences or target audiences more deeply.” Of particular interest to the Florence Fund is “the role of money in politics.” But what’s the role of money in the organization itself?

In its initial tax filings with the IRS in 1999, the Florence Fund claimed over $6.25 million in pledged money.

Jeez, if I’d known they were that rich, I’d have claimed the ten grand for real! Though I guess Armey has a prior claim.

BROCK YATES reports that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle may turn out to be right.

PATTY MURRAY said that if we did more humanitarian work, like Osama bin Laden did, we’d see less terrorism. That was profoundly dumb on many levels, but here’s another example of why:

Three American humanitarian workers were shot and killed at a hospital in southern Yemen, by a man the authorities described as a fundamentalist extremist. They said that he went into the room where the workers were gathered at about 8:30 a.m. local time.

A fourth was wounded in another room in the attack, which took place at a missionary-run hospital in the town of Jibla, the officials said. This individual was later reported to be undergoing surgery.

The man, whom they said was a suspected Islamist militant, was subsequently arrested. He was believed to be a student at Yemen’s al-Iman university. . . .

The dead staff were identified as the hospital’s administrator, Bill Cane, 60; an obstetrician, Dr. Mersa Miers, and the storage department manager, whose full name was not immediately known.

According to the Yemen Times newspaper, the doctor had spent several years doing humanitarian work in the country.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a humanitarian: you’re still just a target to these people.

Meanwhile, the UPI story contains a bit of editorializing that proves that Patty Murray isn’t the only one who’s profoundly dumb:

Yemen has seen the widespread possession and use of weapons throughout the country, especially in rural areas.

Yeah. As the reader who sent this link notes, “If we could only take away their guns, then they’d have nothing but airliners with which to attack.”

JACKSON DIEHL WRITES that the conventional wisdom on American unilateralism is wrong. It ties in well with this post, below, and especially with this essay by John Hawkins.

STEPHANIE SIMON AT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES reports on the most segregated city in America — Milwaukee:

The furor over GOP Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott’s praise for a former segregationist candidate for president has focused attention on the long history of racial division in the South. These days, however, the gulf between white and black is widest in the North.

Interesting story.

KATE MALCOLM, at Kitchen Cabinet reports that U.N. inspectors seem to be bungling their interviews of Iraqi scientists. I’m shocked.

THIS KEEPS HAPPENING:

Police have arrested a baggage handler at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, after two automatic weapons, plastic explosives and a detonator were found in his car.

The man, who is reportedly of Algerian origin, was arrested late on Saturday after a tip-off from a member of the public who saw a weapon in a car boot at the airport. . . .

In total, nine arrests have been made since 16 December, when four people were arrested in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve.

All those arrested are said to be of Algerian or Moroccan origin.

The arrests stem from an investigation into possible connections between Islamic militants in Europe and Chechnya.

Keep your eye on this.

SUMAN PALIT has a bunch of interesting new posts. Read ’em, if you’re so inclined.

JOSH MARSHALL warns about U.S. unilateralism, and suggests that it would be nice if we shared this world-leadership thing a bit.

Porphyrogenitus agrees, and fantasizes about letting Europe take care of the whole North Korea problem:

Thinking further about this, perhaps it’s time to let our EU peers, who believe they should have a full share of leadership alongside the U.S., take the lead in this crisis. This is, after all, only reasonable since the reactor North Korea is using for its plutonium production, designed and built not for energy production but for weapons programs, was designed and built for North Korea by Europeans (Germany, to be exact).

37,000+ French, Italian, Dutch, German, et al troops can replace the American troops on the peninsula and be responsible for serving as a “tripwire” in case of North Korean attack. They can take the lead in deciding how to diffuse this one, and if they decide force is needed, they can bear the lion share of the burden – our troops are busy elsewhere, and our full partners should be able to handle this one while we handle the other. Oh, the U.S. won’t be out of the picture – like I said, it will be role reversal. The EU will be expected to “consult” with us at every turn, whatever moves they make will be subjected to un-constructive criticism, and if they make even the smallest of mistakes we’ll be quick with the finger of blame.

But, as he notes, Europe can’t do it, and wouldn’t do it if it could. Which is the problem. I don’t think many Americans — except maybe Bill Kristol — actually want America to be the world’s hyperpower. We’d love to see responsible and capable allies picking up the global-policeman duties. But Europe couldn’t even deal with the Balkans — a minor threat in its own backyard — without American help. And everyone else, aside from Britain and Australia, is worse.

It’s not leadership by our fault. It’s leadership by default.

Meanwhile Rantburg notes that the anti-Americanism seems pretty shallow — like Gerhard Schroder, Roh is trying to throttle it back now that he’s been elected and has to actually govern. Like Gerhard, though, he’ll discover that America doesn’t forget this stuff. Chris Lawrence makes a similar observation.

UPDATE: Juan Gato emails to remind me to link this essay by John Hawkins entitled “confessions of an isolationist wannabe,” from earlier this year. I had linked it when it was new, but Gato’s right — it belongs in this discussion. This post is worth reading, too.

TIM CAVANAUGH reports on something missing from this year’s poll of top religious stories. You’ll never guess what it is.

HISTORICAL ILLITERACY at the New York Times. They could at least have used Google.

THE FBI IS ASKING FOR YOUR HELP, but Kathy Kinsley is skeptical.

A WORRY about strong digital identification systems that’s worth reading.

“USEFUL IDIOTS” — Mark Steyn comments on the risible Archibishop of Canterbury and his fellow churchmen. Excerpt:

How naive do you have to be to swallow that baloney? The Wise Men were Herod’s patsies, his useful idiots. Now who does that sound like? Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? Or Dr Williams, Sean Penn and George Galloway, to name just three of the legions of “wise men” who insist that their appeasement of Saddam demonstrates their superior insight and intelligence?

Penn and Galloway are just following their America-is-always-wrong instincts. By contrast, in tortuously bending the Gospels to his political needs, Dr Williams distorts his faith at least as much as (according to “Muslim moderates”) al-Qa’eda does Islam. It’s hard not to conclude that the archbishop’s secular beliefs have seduced his spiritual ones. He was, of course, wrong on Afghanistan, and – speaking of the slaughter of innocents – utterly silent on this year’s vast mound of Christian corpses, culminating in the murder of three small girls in a Pakistani church on Christmas Day. That’s “moral surrender”.

Catching the eye of godless Britain is an unenviable task, but there’s no future for the Church playing catch-up with the Lib Dems. “Tony Blair’s – appointment of Rowan Williams as archbishop is his most exciting act of patronage so far,” gushed Simon Jenkins in The Times. “Mr Blair has dealt us a wild card, a risk.” Hardly. The archbishop offers only the certainty of decline, the final death-spiral into secular liberal irrelevance. No wonder Islam is Britain’s fastest-growing religion.

Indeed. And, speaking of the prolific Steyn, he’s also critical of Bush on the war, and even cites Bill Quick, in another column:

The endless postponement of the Iraqi D-Day, now as routinely rolled over as those Soviet five-year plans, is all part of some cunning Bush ”rope-a-dope” strategy. So is Colin Powell’s recent statement that the administration isn’t looking for regime change in Baghdad. So is the ongoing mantra of ”the Saudis are our friends, no matter how many of us they kill.”

It’s true that lulling the enemy into a false sense of security can be very cunning. But only if the sense of security does, indeed, turn out to be false. Otherwise, as the Internet commentator William Quick puts it, how much longer can Bush dine out on Afghanistan? And a lot of what the Bushies do barely falls into the lulling category. When Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudis’ Washington ambassador, was revealed to have funneled money, unwittingly or otherwise, to the 9/11 killers, why did Alma Powell and Barbara Bush rush to phone her to commiserate? The connection between Saudi ”charitable giving” and terrorism is well-known. The most benign explanation is that the princess is an idiot, and Americans are dead because of her idiocy. The wife of the secretary of state and the mother of the president have no business comforting a stooge of their country’s enemies.

Indeed, again.

TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY! Tim Blair reviews Bowling for Columbine for tomorrow’s Australian. Short excerpt: “It’s a kid flick for the adult anti-American market.”

Thanks, international date-line!

WAR AND CUTE BUNNY RABBITS: Anna has one weird blog, but I kind of like it!

ARMED LIBERAL SAYS THAT I’M IRREDEEMABLY WRONG about barbecue. Hmm. I haven’t tried any of the places he mentions. Guess I’ll have to do more “research.”

Hand me that big industrial-sized bottle of Zocor. . . .