STEVEN DEN BESTE looks at the wider implications of Saddam’s capture. His analysis is generally consistent with Austin Bay’s.

THIS IS SURELY some sort of trademark violation.

STEPHEN POLLARD: “This is the week I changed my mind about hanging.”

UPDATE: Here, by the way, is Pollard’s blog.

“CANADIANS MARVEL AT KABUL’S TRANSFORMATION:”

KABUL – As Afghanistan wrestles to adopt a new constitution, and the United Nations strengthens its call for more soldiers outside Kabul, Canadian soldiers are noticing dramatic changes in the security and economic well-being of the Afghan capital.

“You can see buildings that weren’t there a couple of months ago,” said Lt.-Col. Don Denne, the commanding officer at Camp Julien, the largest Canadian Forces base in Afghanistan, as he toured Kabul on Saturday.

“I’m beginning to see new shops everywhere. Some pretty nice houses too.”

Even some of Canada’s hockey greats, in Kabul to boost the morale of Canadian troops, have recognized the impact the soldiers have had on security in the capital.

“I just talked to my Afghan interpreter, and asked him ‘Do you want the Canadian soldiers here?’” Former NHL tough guy Dave (Tiger) Williams said Sunday.

“He said ‘They have to stay, they have to stay.’ Every day, he says, they’re saving thousands of lives.”

Can we offset those thousands against the millions that Chomsky predicted we’d kill?

WESLEY CLARK’S National Health Plan gets a bad review.

INTERESTING STRATFOR ANALYSIS:

The importance of Hussein’s capture is not only its symbolism — although that certainly should not be underestimated. Its importance is that it happened, that U.S. intelligence was able to turn a debacle into a success by identifying the core weakness of the enemy force and using it for the rapid penetration and exploitation of the guerrilla infrastructure.

The guerrillas understand precisely what happened to Hussein: Someone betrayed him for money. They also understand that even though attacks on U.S. troops can be purchased for dollars, the Americans have far more dollars than they do. That is why, in the week prior to Hussein’s capture, the guerrillas twice attacked banks: They desperately needed to replenish their cash reserves. In one case, they even went so far as to engage in a pitched battle with U.S. armor, a battle they couldn’t possibly win.

The threat to the guerrillas is snowballing betrayal. The guerrillas must be increasingly paranoid. At the prices the Americans are paying, the probability of betrayal is rising. As this probability rises, paranoia not only eats away at the guerrillas’ effectiveness, it also raises the temptation to betray. Better to betray than to be betrayed.

Read the whole thing. (Via Volokh).

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has an Iraqi bloggers roundup.

HOW MANY IRAQIS MUST DIE before the peace advocates are satisfied?

RALPH NADER IS THINKING OF RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT and he’s asking for your advice.

WILL BAUDE EXPLAINS why premarital sex is morally virtuous.

OSAMA BIN BOGUS — the latest tape, is, anyway:

Al-Arabiya gave no reason for pulling the tape, but a rival channel claimed it aired the tape two months ago. Al-Jazeera says it broadcast the same material in October.

Busted! And screw this audiotape business anyway. Where’s the video, Osama? What”s the matter, you don’t read InstaPundit for advice on doing inexpensive video for the web? All you need is this. Or even this. You can’t afford a lousy digital camera?

Loser.

SUBSTANCE, YES. Style, well. . . I’m not so sure.

JEFF JARVIS comments on New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent’s maiden column. Jeff’s commenters find it a far more disappointing effort than Jeff does.

I had the same experience with Okrent’s email, below, where my readers were harder on Okrent than I was. Interestingly, I think it’s because my expectations for Okrent are so low, while the readers’ are high. I want to see some sign of progress at the Times, while they want to see actual, honest and competent journalism, and they want to see Okrent take the Times to task the way a blogger would, when it fails to deliver.

I think the readers are right, and that I’ve been expecting too little.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING SURVEY of what Clinton thought about Iraq / Al Qaeda ties back in 1998. It’s a useful antidote to the “Bush lied” fantasies.

THE TERROR THREAT LEVEL is reportedly going to be raised this afternoon.

UPDATE: Here’s a story now. We’re at “high.”

TIM BLAIR SCOOPS TIME on the identity of Time Magazine’s “person of the year.”

Heh. Sure looks like he’s caught ‘em out.

YEAH, blogging started late today. It snowed last night (we nearly got stuck at the Metro Pulse Christmas party downtown, where the snow melted then refroze, producing major slickness — to the right you can see an intrepid partygoer making snowangels outside the club) and we went sledding this morning — then to the mall. Back later.

NEW YORK TIMES: “BUSH WAS RIGHT!”

Over the past five years, by turning over two suspects for trial, acknowledging its complicity in the Lockerbie bombing and paying compensation to victims’ families, Libya finally managed to persuade the United Nations Security Council to lift the international sanctions that had shadowed its economy and its international reputation for more than a decade. Those sanctions were lifted in September. This page recommended lifting American sanctions as well, but President Bush left them in place pending further steps, most notably Libya’s decision to end its unconventional weapons programs. It is now clear that he was right to do so. The added American pressure worked just as intended.

It’s another Festivus miracle!

Meanwhile Winds of Change looks at the contrasts between Bush and Dean on foreign policy.

And, though not really related, don’t miss their roundup of China news, either. And don’t miss Tim Blair’s roundup of gullible, plastic-turkey-swallowing journalists. Gobble, gobble.

UPDATE: Wow, here’s an Iranian connection to the Libyan WMD program — did I hear someone say “axis of evil?”

The team was made up of North Korean scientists, engineers and technicians, as well as some Iranian and Libyan nuclear scientists.

North Korea and Iran, originally dubbed by Bush as the axis of evil along with Iraq, avoided detection by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) inspectors by each member farming out vital sections of its projects to its fellow members.

Iran, which is now in the final stages of uranium enrichment for its program, is badly hit, having counted on fitting into place key parts of its WMD project made in Libya. North Korea may also be forced to scale back the production of nuclear devices as well as counting the loss of a lucrative source of income for its Scuds and nuclear technology.

Yeah, I thought so. And this seems to be quite the military/diplomatic success for the Administration, proving once again that you get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.

More on Libya here and here: “I guess a ‘spider hole’ didn’t sound all that good to Mr. Gadhafi.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: And here’s more:

Libya’s promise to surrender its weapons of mass destruction was forced by Britain and America’s seizure of physical evidence of Col Muammar Gaddafi’s illegal weapons programme, the Telegraph can reveal.

United States officials say that America’s hand was strengthened in negotiations with Col Gaddafi after a successful operation, previously undisclosed, to intercept transport suspected of carrying banned weapons. . . .

One Cabinet minister said: “It demonstrates that change can be brought about by standing tough. There is no question that this change of heart by Gaddafi was brought about by the fact that the US and Britain were seen to be standing up to and called Saddam Hussein’s bluff.”

Indeed.

UPDATE: Charles Paul Freund observes:

In that context, it may be worth recalling this story from earlier this year. It appeared in Britain’s Telegraph on April 9 (which, according to the reported timeline, is shortly after Gaddafi approached Britain) and quotes an Italian official on the Libyan leader’s response to the Iraq war.

“A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: ‘I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.’”

Indeed, again. Meanwhile this is interesting:

Saddam Hussein was personally directing the post-war insurgency inside Iraq, playing a far more active role than previously thought, American intelligence officers have concluded since his capture.

Despite the bewildered appearance of the deposed dictator when he was hauled from his hiding-hole last weekend, he is believed to have been issuing regular instructions on targets and tactics through five trusted lieutenants.

This conclusion could have serious implications for his status in United States custody. American officials have made clear that he will lose his rights as a prisoner of war if he was involved in the post-war violence.

Hmm. Stay tuned.

MORE: Colby Cosh has some observations, including this one: “Saddam is dragged out of a living grave and told that the president sends his regards, and within a week, Gadhafi, one of the most comparable figures in the World Atlas of Thuggery, is voluntarily installing red carpet for a weapons inspectorate. Talk about a wacky coincidence, eh?”

IRAQI BLOGGERS REPORT FROM BASRA, here and here. Both are worth reading.

(Via Jeff Jarvis).

THE VATICAN IS DISTANCING ITSELF FROM CARDINAL RENATO MARTINO’S DUMB COMMENTS. As well it might.

Of course, the Vatican shouldn’t have opposed the war to begin with, and it still has a lot to apologize for.

MORE ON LIBYA: Roger Simon observes that Libya got missiles from North Korea (hey, it’s almost like it’s part of an axis of evil or something), but that nobody’s saying where it got its centrifuges from. Meanwhile Prof. Bainbridge writes: “I’ve been a skeptic of the Iraq war on prudential grounds, but in light of the developments with Libya I have to admit that the war’s supporters were right to claim that attacking Iraq would deter other rogue states from pursuing WMDs.”

Heh. Indeed.

IN THE PAST, I’ve compared the blogosphere to the network of European coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries. Here’s an article from The Economist that does more or less the same thing with far more erudition. (Via Dave Winer).

AUSTIN BAY EMAILS that the Libya WMD announcement is more proof of the “cascading effects” of Saddam’s capture:

Qadaffi turns in his WMD — it’s a cascading effect of knocking off the Baath dictatorship, demonstrating terrorism doesn’t pay, and capturing Saddam. You linked to the cascading effects column. Knocking the strong man myth is a huge dividend. FWIW, I had a commentary on NPR this morning discussing how the “tongue depressor video” is an Oscar winner for video short promoting justice and the rule of law.

Here’s a link to Bay’s NPR piece. And here’s a link to the cascading effects piece that I mentioned earlier, in case you missed it.

VIRGINIA POSTREL WRITES on what Christmas lights tell us about the economy.

WIDENING RIPPLES:

Libya’s leader Colonel Gaddafi has tonight promised to dismantle his country’s secret weapons of mass destruction programme, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced.

I guess that whole “war will destabilize the region” stuff was, er, right. And a good thing, too!

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rick Horvath emails:

Have you noticed that Libya took its first steps nine months ago? That would place Qhadafi’s move around our initial attack on Iraq. Thus, it would seem like this is a victory for unilateralism. You think the Bush critics will acknowledge that?

Not likely.

Reportedly, the BBC is playing it as a victory for multilateral internationalism.

IF YOU SCREW UP, THEY WILL BYPASS YOU:

News executives of most Boston television stations are decidedly unenthusiastic about a Bush administration plan to transmit news footage from Iraq for local TV outlets in an attempt to supplement media coverage from that war-torn country.

The satellite link, dubbed “C-SPAN Baghdad,” is designed to put a more positive spin on events and circumvent the major networks by making it possible for press conferences, interviews with troops and dignitaries, and even footage from the field to be transmitted from Iraq for use by regional and local media outlets, according to news accounts.

“I’m kind of appalled by it. I think it’s very troubling,” said Charles Kravetz, vice president of news at the regional cable news outlet NECN. “I think the government has no business being in the news business.”

Tell it to the folks at NPR and PBS — and the BBC– Chuck! But, really, I’d be happy if the news business were in the news business, instead of letting itself be embarrassingly scooped by Iraqi dentists with digicams and blogs. After dropping that ball, it takes a lot of chutzpah to complain.

Reader Ian Sollars thinks the problem with the Pentagon’s approach is that it’s not going far enough:

The Pentagon should REALLY make this (a) available streamed live over the ‘Net (Quicktime for preference) and (b) archived on the Web (DivX or MPEG2, and they might as well use BitTorrent while they’re at it). Take the disintermediation the whole way. There are bloggers left and right who will troll the feeds for news and scoop big media time after time.

Sounds like a terrific idea to me. I wonder if that’s what Kravetz is worried about? (More here.) Hey, here’s another reason why this war isn’t Vietnam — this time around, it’s the news media who don’t want the real story to get out. . . .

UPDATE: Hey, just got this email from Daniel Okrent:

I’ve been in touch with the Times’s Baghdad bureau and the paper’s foreign desk, who attribute the failure to cover the story in detail (a three-column picture did appear in the paper) to two things: The organizers of the demonstration failed to alert the Times in advance. And, more crucially, the responsible parties at the Times dropped the ball. As you might imagine, life can be difficult and work terribly complicated for journalists in a war zone. Still, the story should have received more thorough coverage.

I am sending a copy of this explanation to newsroom management.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Okrent
Public Editor

Nice. Hope it’ll make Okrent’s column. I didn’t see the picture — I guess it was only in the print edition, which interestingly now has fewer readers than the Times on the Web.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I’m quite happy with Okrent’s letter, and agree with a reader who emails “maybe this paper can be saved after all.” On the other hand, reader Julie Berry is less impressed:

The Baghdad bureau of the New York Times didn’t know the demonstration was scheduled? I’m a suburban housewife sitting in Washington State, and I knew the demonstration was scheduled.

My eleven year-old comes up with *much* better excuses than that for failing to do his homework. Dropped the ball, indeed.

Well, a couple of times I’ve found out about events on my own campus from reading West Coast blogs. On the other hand, nobody’s, you know, paying me to cover the University of Tennessee. . . . Heather MacFarlane emails:

I live in the Yukon Canada, way up in Northern Canada, and I don’t work for a newspaper and I do not have broadband, etc., etc., AND I KNEW THERE WAS GOING TO BE A DEMONSTRATION IN BAGHDAD ON THE 10TH OF DECEMBER. Really. Those ‘reporters’ in Baghdad are losers.

Perhaps the Times should send them to the Yukon. . . .

MORE: Reader email is skeptical of the Baghdad Bureau’s story. John Schedler writes:

I’m just a poor country lawyer in semi-rural Washington State — and I saw it coming. I think the Baghdad bureau is putting a con-job on Okrent. Okrent buys this kind of garbage/spin? Is he that credulous?

Tom Brosz emails:

The demonstrations on the 10th had been telegraphed by bloggers from Iraq almost three weeks ahead of time, and had been discussed across the internet. Zeyad said there were “reporters from every station in the world” there.

This story was well and truly spiked by editors who thought we didn’t really need to know this, and they aren’t kidding anybody.

And Prof. Cori Dauber emails:

I notice the nyt public editor is still using the argument “but we published a photo of them.” aside from the fact that if they got someone there to take the picture, then they clearly had enough advance warning to, you know, GET PEOPLE THERE there’s a bit of difficulty with their hiding behind the argument that the picture provided adequate coverage.

She has more on her blog, where she observes:

How could I have missed a picture of the demonstrations?

I had to page through the paper twice to find it. There’s a picture alright (I don’t have the capacity to scan from hardcopy, so you will have to settle for my description.) There’s a reason I missed it. It’s a beautiful picture, very “arty,” but it hardly works to convey the information needed. . . .

This image could not be better crafted to not attract the eye, and it could not be better crafted to not tell the narrative story of a demonstration involving thousands of people.

But at least they’re responding. Maybe next we’ll hear something in response to reports of thuggish behavior by the security forces of the Times’ Baghdad bureau.

Finally, Jeff Jarvis comments:

Loveya, Dan, but I don’t buy it. And though I think your response is direct and candid, I also don’t buy that this is necessarily an ombudsman issue. It is an executive-editor issue of bad news judgment.

This is also an issue of the future vs. the past of journalism. . . .

I do not think it’s an issue of principles or bias. It’s simply an issue of competence. The Times muffed the story. Plain and simple

Read the whole thing. And read Roger Simon’s comments, too: “Okrent is doing his job, but the Times people in Baghdad have not given a satisfactory answer, certainly not remotely like one they would accept from a government spokesmen or politician without follow up.”

EUGENE VOLOKH IS UNIMPRESSED with Stephen Reinhardt’s opinion on the Guantanamo detainees: “What Judge Reinhardt is describing and condemning in the last sentence is the standard way that enemy detainees are treated. . . . Ah, Reinhardt says, but at least we acknowledged that they’re prisoners of war. But ‘prisoner of war’ status is given only to those enemy detainees who were fighting in accordance to the laws of war.”

I stand by my earlier statement that Reinhardt’s gasbaggery here will do more to undermine the positions he supports than John Ashcroft will.

BAGHDAD-BLOGGING RICH GALEN has another post up.

BIG LOSS FOR THE RIAA in the Verizon case, as the D.C. Circuit rules that ISPs don’t have to turn over subscriber information. Dodd Harris has comments. Here’s a link to the opinion, which is a svelte 16 pages long, perhaps because the Court characterizes the RIAA’s arguments as bordering on silly.

TYLER COWEN HAS APPARENTLY DIED AND GONE TO HELL: “I’ve been spending my last four days locked in a UNESCO room debating cultural diversity with a French diplomat and a Quebecois lawyer.”

But it’s not all bad: “Everyone has been very polite and the Frenchman gave me a useful book on the great number of French cheeses and how to recognize them.”

WELL, THIS KIND OF KILLS YESTERDAY’S STORY on the 9/11 Commission:

WASHINGTON Dec. 18 — The chairman of a federal commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said Thursday that mistakes over many years left the United States vulnerable to such an attack, but he resisted pinning blame on either of the last two presidential teams.

“We have no evidence that anybody high in the Clinton administration or the Bush administration did anything wrong,” chairman Thomas Kean said in an interview with ABC’s “Nightline” taped for airing Thursday night.

I still think that some people should have been fired, though.

In related news, authorities are reportedly looking for suicide bombers in New York City, and other major metropolitan areas. I hope that people will keep their eyes open, and not get complacent.

GOSH, IT’S LIKE THEY’RE PART OF SOME, I DON’T KNOW, AXIS OF EVIL or something:

Former FBI director Louis Freeh testified yesterday that he believed there was “overwhelming evidence” that senior Iranian government officials financed and directed the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.

Go figure.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, only this time it’s in Terry McAuliffe’s America, not John Ashcroft’s. . . .

FREDERICK TURNER writes on Bush-hatred, and change:

At this time in the world’s history a great turning point is imminent. And here we begin to see why there is this strange and unholy alliance between idealistic liberalism, the vestiges of the old socialist left, traditional third world authoritarians, and the unrelenting forces of Islamic totalitarianism, theocracy, and terror. However various their ideas of what is the good, all are united in their desire for an enforced law of the good. Even elements of the human rights movement, much of the anti-globalist community, and a large swatch of the philanthropic world — the so-called NGOs — still yearn for a government that, through sumptuary laws, high taxation, political correctness, and entitlements, would force to happen what people ought to, but do not make happen of their own free will. Much philanthropy has the stated goal of eliminating itself when through its advocacy and lobbying it has given government the power to compel what was once freely given; at which time the employees of the Foundations would presumably take over the powerful role of government civil servants. If the law of right is to become the only enforceable law of the human race, all these constituencies will have suffered what will feel to them to be a mortal setback. . . .

So when the protesters in London tore down Bush’s effigy they were, unconsciously, expressing not only the opposite of the destruction of Saddam’s statue — that is, a desire to reinstate him — but also the motivations behind the smashing of the statue of liberty erected by the students in Tiananmen Square. The symbolism of the Bush fragging was not, as many commentators believed, semiotically incompetent, but strikingly accurate. And the good, pacifist destroyers of the Bush statue were unconsciously leaguing themselves with the army tanks that massacred the Chinese students and trampled their poor plaster version of Lady Liberty — and declaring war on the students themselves. Like their colleagues on this side of the Atlantic, the anti-American protesters stood in solidarity with the Confucian enforcers of the good that gave the order to clear the square of Heavenly Peace, and with seekers after the role of moral enforcer everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

MATT RUSTLER has comments on the Democrats’ Second Amendment strategy, and a copy of what he says is a Democratic memo on the subject. I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but perhaps someone else will know if it’s genuine.

EUGENE VOLOKH COMMENTS on Padilla v. Rumsfeld. He expects a reversal.

AUSTIN BAY WRITES about the “cascade effects” stemming from Saddam’s capture.

Meanwhile, here’s an email from someone who participated.

SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS: But who would have guessed that one of them was Robert Fisk?

It’s easy, looking at these images of Saddam’s sadism, to have expected Iraqis to be grateful to us this week. We have captured Saddam. We have destroyed the beast. The nightmare years are over.

What’s this “we” sh*t, white man? (Emphasis added.)

Here’s a slightly different take.

UPDATE: And here’s something on Fisk’s fellow-travelers at the CBC.

QUESTION: If Jose Padilla were still known as Abdullah al-Muhajir, the name he was using when he was arrested, would the decision have come out the same way?

And if it had, would it be playing the same way in the press?

And who decided which name to use in the media coverage, anyway?

PEOPLE KEEP SENDING ME THE TARGET EMAIL that says they’re anti-veteran. It’s not true. Just so you know.

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TAKE IT A BIT EASY, as exhaustion was setting in, and in the spare time I’ve opened up I’ve been reading a complete collection of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy mysteries, compled and edited by Eric Flint.

I’m a fairly big fan of Flint as a science fiction writer, but he’s also done quite a service by lending his name and efforts to bringing back new editions of classic science fiction and fantasy. He’s also put together new releases of works by Murray Leinster, James Schmitz, and Keith Laumer. For an up-and-coming new writer like Flint to spend time bringing out this sort of thing seems to me like a real service, and I appreciate it.

The Lord Darcy stories — mysteries set in a world where the Plantagenets still rule Britain, and where magic works but electric lighting is a closely guarded state secret — are classics, and work quite well on many levels. If you’re into this sort of thing, and haven’t read them, you might want to check them out.

UPDATE: Reader Greg Dougherty emails:

If you’re going to include links to the books, you might want to also include links to Webscriptions, where you can get non-encrypted, non-copy-protected electronic versions of the books for at most $5 / book.

www.webscription.net/

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, though if you print them out instead of reading them on the computer, it might be cheaper just to buy the book.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE isn’t impressed with the Ninth Circuit’s opinion on Guantanamo prisoners.

Here’s a link to the 79-page Reinhardt opinion, which I have not read. Here, via Howard Bashman, is a link to a news story on the decision, which contains this unpromising bit:

The San Francisco appeals court, ruling Thursday on a petition from a relative of a Libyan the U.S. military captured in Afghanistan, said the Bush administration’s indefinite detention of the men runs contrary to American ideals.

“Even in times of national emergency – indeed, particularly in such times – it is the obligation of the Judicial Branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the Executive Branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the majority.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the holding — I think the government has been slippery with regard to jurisdictional issues here — but Reinhardt, is, to put it bluntly, a gasbag whose posturing hurts his cause far more than it helps it, and this certainly suggests that the opinion will be in line with his past history.

BLOGGER BABY PICS: Dawn Olsen has posted some.

THE 9/11 COMMISSION says that the attacks were preventable. Well, yes. In fact, they might have been prevented, had dropped balls at the FBI (which led to morbid speculation by field agents that Osama had a mole at headquarters) not frustrated the Moussaoui investigation. Note that no one was fired for that. Of course, had all the 9/11 terrorists been rounded up on 9/10, many of Bush’s critics would have argued that it was a racist effort to distract people from the economy, or some such. And worries about such charges — particularly the racism part — clearly got in the way. I wonder if the Commission will look at that.

For that matter, the attacks might have been prevented if the Clinton missile attacks on Osama, delayed just a bit too long because of Clinton’s fears of causing civilian casualties, had proceeded on time.

The story linked above is right to heap scorn on Condi Rice’s statement that the attacks were unimaginable before they happened. There was plenty of reason to imagine them before they happened. That in itself doesn’t mean that they could have, or even should have, been prevented — I can imagine a lot of things that I couldn’t prevent — but Rice’s statement has always struck me as absurd to the point of being insulting.

UPDATE: Quite a few readers think this is unfair to Condi Rice. Here’s what Dennis Beezley emails:

CBS wants to make it seem that Rice claimed no one thought of planes as missiles. That is not what she said. She said no one anticipated hijacked planes as guided missiles.

These people (government people) don’t think outside the box, they’re not paid to. The thinking was that planes would be loaded with explosives, so the planes would either have to be planes controlled by AQ, like an old jet, or little planes like the one the kid flew into a building in Florida. And I assume measures were taken to prevent such an occurrence.

I also assume the reason we didn’t fear a hijacked plane being used to just smack a building is that we didn’t think anybody could get control of an airliner without a gun, which we work hard to prevent. But they did, three anyway. And they used the jet fuel as a bomb.

Now it seems pretty easy for us to think they should have thought of this. I have some friends who perished because they didn’t. But because Rice should have thought of it, or nurtured an environment where someone else should have, doesn’t mean her statement is incredible.

Well, as I said, I don’t think that imagining it is the same as preventing it. But the statement is rather bizarre, when we had blocked a plot (via the Philippines) to hijack and crash planes, when the Columbine kids actually planned to crash planes into Manhattan, and when Tom Clancy wrote a novel on this theme. You might say that it wasn’t high on the threat ladder, for whatever reason. But that’s not what Condi said, and although I’m a big fan of hers in general, that statement has always grated on me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Boy, a lot of people think I’m too hard on Condi Rice above. But on the other hand, a couple sent links to this page noting that the specific hijack-an-airplane-and-crash-it-into-a-target scenario had already been attempted: “On April 7, 1994, we came dangerously close to finding out what a DC-10 full of jet fuel and a man with nothing to lose could do to a corporate campus in Memphis. That’s the day a disgruntled employee attacked the crew of FedEx Flight 705 with the intention of crashing the airplane into company headquarters.”

MORE: Reader Kenton Bennett emails:

Regarding the Condi Rice and 9-11 Commission statements and conclusions..I would like to remind people that the terrorist leaders imagined it…the Algerian terrorists who hijacked a French Airliner in the mid nineties and attempted to fly it (by forcing the pilot) into the Eiffel Tower imagined it…..a computer programmer for Microsoft imagined it as my eight year old grandson was flying airliners into the twin towers well before 9-11 using one of there across the counter flight simulator games. Of course Al Gore didn’t Imagine it with his committee to promote airline safety ( but of course he now has all the answers)….The problem is….. No one in the high levels of government has imagination and anyone at a lower level is ignored through a sea of jealousy and bureaucracy!!!….Read the book about Pearl Harbor by G.W. Prange and you will see the disastrous similarity of attitude and politics that are shared between these two momentous events.

Reader Catherine Johnson sends this link to an article from The New Yorker:

Bodansky and others have said that U.S. intelligence has long known that countries such as Iran and independent groups have made plans for “super-terrorism” and have trained people to carry out terrorist acts..

“We’ve known since the mid-eighties, for example, that Iran was training people to fly as kamikazes on commercial planes, as bombs, into civilian targets,” Bodansky said. “The question was whether the political leaders of the sponsoring states would give the order to actually do it. From the moment a country starts risking the wrath of the civilized world to start such a training program, it must be serious about it.” Bodansky explained that Iran’s principal “school” is in Wakilabad, in the northeast part of the country, and is an entity of Iranian intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard. The school, he said, has American-made commercial jets for training its students in techniques of hijacking, sabotage, and flying into civilian targets.

Not unimaginable at all.

ARNOLD KLING ARGUES that efforts to regulate biotechnology as Leon Kass desires would necessarily lead to a worldwide totalitarian dictatorship that would be far more dystopian than the future created by not engaging in such regulation.

So far, bad philosophy has killed a lot more people than biotechnology. Perhaps we should regulate it. . . .

I GUESS IT’S NOT 1984 YET: The Second Circuit has ordered the release of Jose Padilla. Here’s a link to the opinion, but I can’t get it to open — the server seems to be saturated at the moment. Judging by the Reuters story, the court put emphasis on Padilla’s American citizenship, and on the fact that he was on American soil — both appropriate considerations in my opinion.

UPDATE: Okay, it’s opening now. Those do appear to be the considerations, based largely on lack of Congressional authorization for detention of Americans as enemy combatants on American soil. The court goes out of its way to emphasize that the government has “ample cause” to believe that Padilla was implicated in a “terrorist plot,” making clear that this decision is about the law, not the facts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I’ve skimmed the opinion very quickly. Based on both Constitutional analysis (the Third Amendment is even cited, a rarity) and on statute (the Non-Detention Act, 18 U.S.C. sec. 4001(a)), the President lacks inherent authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants when seized on American soil outside a zone of actual combat. For those of you studying for Con. Law exams, the President is placed thoroughly in Jackson Category Three. The Quirin case, involving Nazi saboteurs, is distinguished.

This seems right to me, based on my rather quick read of the opinion. I think that the real danger in Presidential authority to detain terrorists comes when it’s applied to American citizens in America, since that’s where the risk of politically motivated abuse is highest. Whether Congress has the power to authorize such detention isn’t addressed in the opinion, but I would incline toward the position that it does not.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the dissent, which argues that the President does have such inherent authority, and that it is not defeated by the Non-Detention Act.

And, by the way, they don’t have to let Padilla go — just release him from military custody. They can transfer him to civilian custody for further prosecution, and the majority, in the conclusion to the opinion also notes that he can be held as a material witness in connection with other civilian prosecutions.

MICHAEL SILENCE has an article on Iraqi bloggers that’s worth reading.

ROGER SIMON IS BACK FROM PARIS and blogging again:

[P]erhaps it was because I was there in the midst of the capture of Saddam… but the storied anti-Americanism now seemed almost the pathetic gesture of a failed state. To see the downcast newscaster on TV3 searching for something reassuringly cynical to say about the arrest of the Iraqi mass murderer was comical (she implied Saddam had been—unfairly?—impoverished and his capture didn’t mean much because he “only” had $750,000 in cash in the hole with him).

Bloggers Merde in France and the Dissident Frogman are correct (Yes, I met them and they are real—great guys!). France is in bad shape. Strange as this sounds, it reminded me in a way of some of my visits to the Soviet Union in the late eighties.

Read the whole thing.

“WITHOUT THEM, I WOULDN’T BE ALIVE:” Another pack-not-a-herd moment:

Debbie Shultz’s class had just finished a Spanish II final exam Wednesday morning when the door to their trailer burst open with a bang.

Shultz’s estranged husband stood wild-eyed in the doorway, teeth gritted, pausing almost for dramatic effect, she recalled. Then he rushed toward her, she said, raising a large knife toward her chest.

That’s when Shultz’s students, 16- and 17-year-old kids, went to her rescue. Several of the youngsters tackled the man, pinning him to the floor and wresting the knife from his hand.

Bravo. “Leaving it to the professionals” wouldn’t have been an option here, as it often isn’t. And here’s the right attitude:

Nimesh Patel, 17, was taking a nap after finishing his final when he heard screaming and the scampering of fleeing students. He saw his teacher trying to fend off her assailant.

“I froze there for a second. Me and a couple of other guys grabbed him and threw him to the ground and basically sat on him until the cops came,” he said.

Several other students helped Patel subdue the attacker. They included Austin Hutchinson, 16; John Bailey, 16; Andy Anderson, 17; Matt Battaglia, 17; and Scott Wigington, 17.

As Hutchinson saw the man pull the knife, “I thought I could run like the rest of the people or I could help,” the student said. “It’s just not right leaving her there.”

Again, bravo.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Aubrey emails:

The kids are okay, as we used to say, when it meant The Kids (aka SDS). Our current educational system–without much in the way of a reasonable alternative–keeps kids in a state of extended adolescence, which doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of being adult when the time comes.

This also happened in Washington, at Thurston High School, when that kid came in and started shooting. Some folks theorized that the heroes of that incident got short media shrift after it was disclosed that several of them were NRA members.

I don’t know, myself, but the view of the elites that the rest of us are and should remain victims isn’t exactly hidden.

I hadn’t heard that last, but I can’t say it would surprise me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Correction — Aubrey was talking about the Springfield, Oregon school shooting, by Kip Kinkel. I didn’t catch that because he said Washington, and I didn’t recognize the name of the high school. Reader David Radulski sends a link to this story about the heroic actions of Jake Ryker, who stopped Kinkel. Key passage:

Ryker sprang into action – after being shot through the chest – and emerged a local hero in a tragedy that has captured national attention.

Seconds after the shooting started, Ryker and three other boys – altogether, two sets of brothers – tackled the suspect, Kipland Phillip Kinkel, knocked the rifle out of his hands, kept him from using two pistols and held him on the floor until teachers arrived. . . .

Officials said the boys’ courageous action kept Kinkel from reloading his rifle and probably saved many lives.

“That’s important to understand, that this shooter was under control by the time the emergency personnel began arriving at the scene,” Springfield Fire Chief Dennis Murphy said.

Given the deeply unimpressive performance of the emergency personnel at Columbine, that may be just as well. At any rate, in situations like these the police will likely arrive too late. And the NRA angle appears to be true.

LEE HARRIS OFFERS thoughts on compassion and war.

MIXED FEELINGS: The Insta-Wife’s book on violent kids is out of print, but a used copy is selling on Amazon for $99.95. She’s both pleased and appalled.

JAMES LILEKS ON HOWARD DEAN:

Dean, talking to Diane Rehm — the Mother Teresa of Beltway radio — excoriated Bush for undue privacy in the Sept. 11 investigation. It produced some “interesting” theories, Dean said, such as the idea that the Saudis warned Bush of the imminent attack. Very clever, this; it allowed Dean to move the charge from the fever swamps of Internet forums to the national spotlight. Did he believe it? Oh, no — but it’s interesting, he said, and can’t be disproved. OK, then: Dr. Dean sealed his gubernatorial records, and this makes some suspect he was an abortionist who sold the sundered remains to Satanists for Black Mass rituals. Hey, it’s an interesting theory. Until we see the records, who knows?

Ouch. But it’s not just Lileks on the case now: Howard Dean is starting to suffer damage from several of his rather improvident remarks, and according to this article from the Washington Post people are starting to question his viability. I guess the Teflon is, er, flaking.

That could lead to Bush facing the candidate he fears the most in November. . . .

UPDATE: SpinSanity has more on Howard Dean and what it calls his “not-so-straight talk on Bush and the war.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL has sensible thoughts on the morning-after pill, and on birth control in general.

ANOTHER “UGLY, JAYSON BLAIR-LIKE SCANDAL” for The New York Times, according to Michelle Malkin. Another Howell Raines protege is involved, too. Malkin asks, “how many other Jayson Blairs remain nestled in the Gray Lady’s bosom?”

NEWSWEEK: “A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001 is probably a fabrication.” Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus, who I scooped by over a minute on this story, has more.

JEFF JARVIS points to this New York Times story on the role of small, portable video cameras in letting the U.S. military bypass media operations to get its stories out. The story reads like a commercial for the Sony PD 150 camera, which is unfortunate for Sony as I think it’s been discontinued.

I think that the trend it describes is likely to continue, and I hope that more bloggers use video for newsgathering. People keep writing and asking me for advice on this, and I’m not sure that I’m any great expert. But for web video, quality isn’t an overriding concern. That’s good, because cameras like the Canon GL-2 — which I own, and which produces really beautiful video — are expensive. (And I was just doing some side-by-side comparisions with my perfectly-respectable Sony Digital 8 camera, and the difference is quite astounding — but then the Canon costs three times as much, and has a terrific fluorite lens).

But if I were doing web video, I’d prefer the Sony. It’s smaller, and lighter, and cheaper — which means less worry about it getting stolen or broken — and it actually has a lot of web-useful features. It will, like most Sonys, record MPEG video to a memory stick, so you don’t have to do fancy firewire video capture; you can just import it into a computer via USB. It also has rudimentary built-in editing and titling features. I’ve never used them, and probably never will, but if I were somewhere out of the way, I could edit a video down, save it to MPEG, and import it into pretty much any computer using USB, then upload it to the web without even compressing it further. Rough and ready, but it would work.

There are smaller video cameras, though you pay for their smallness. I think that this is the one Doc Searls uses, and it’s a pretty good still camera, too. But it’s harder to hold these small cameras steady, and at $1500 a pop it’s kind of expensive.

I encourage people who are interested in mobile videoblogging for the web to just try to pick a digital still camera that does video with sound. The camera that Zeyad uses will do that. So will the Toshiba that I use. They only cost a few hundred bucks, and work fine for the web.

Within a year or so, of course, cellphones will do all of this stuff, and pretty well. The real business opportunity will be for someone who can knit all this stuff together and produce an interesting news operation that integrates video reportage from all sorts of distributed sources everywhere. I don’t know who will pull that off, but I predict that they’ll get a huge leg-up on their competitors.

In the meantime, if you’re close to news, try to get some video. If it’s good, I’ll host it and save you the bandwidth charges. This stuff is just plain cool, and it’s fun to be part of it. Here’s an earlier post on the subject, too. I’m hoping that Zeyad will shoot some video interviews in Baghdad or Basra, and that we can make them available. Since the Big Media folks won’t cover these things, we’ll just have to do the best we can. And it’s already working out pretty well.

And yes, I’m evangelizing here.

YESTERDAY I LINKED a column critical of FCC Chair Michael Powell. Now here’s one by Arnold Kling defending him.

WRIGHT BROTHERS ANNIVERSARY: Rand Simberg has a trifecta, with columns here (TCS), here (NRO), and here (Fox). I was going to put up a post of my own, but I think I’ll just send you to read these.

SO I SAW THE RETURN OF THE KING this afternoon. I don’t want to spoil it, but I liked it a lot: more than The Two Towers, though perhaps not quite as much as The Fellowship of the Ring. As with The Two Towers, there were some plot liberties taken that didn’t seem to advance the story, and if fictional characters could sue for libel, Denethor would have a case.

There were technical glitches, including some audio dubbing problems (minor, but I sure noticed), that surprised me. There were also way too many trailers including a commercial for a reality TV series featuring Donald Trump that looks, er, unpromising to me — which probably means it will be a huge hit.

On the other hand, while Viggo Mortensen may be a twit in real life, he sure can act. And the trailer for his next film, Hidalgo, shows him playing a very different character very convincingly. (You can stream previews at the link above and see for yourself; the one I saw is “trailer two.”).

The film was very long, but it didn’t seem that way, it seemed too short. I suppose that’s high enough praise right there.

UPDATE: Captain Ed loved it, while Occam’s toothbrush says “get an editor.” Lots more reviews at BlogCritics.

At THE MALL, I stopped in the Verizon store and test-drove a computer using this wireless service, which they called AirEdge. I got an honest 256Kbps, and pages seemed to load quite snappily. The price is reasonable, too.

Anybody out there have any experience with it? And does it coexist smoothly with wi-fi on the same computer?

RX-8 UPDATE: Reader Fraser Cutten sends this link to a review of the RX-8 from TopGear. (WMV video stream).

TERRY MCAULIFFE, ONE-MAN DISASTER:

PORTSMOUTH — Several city officials are furious over the Democratic National Committee chairman’s recent visit to Portsmouth High School, who they feel turned a social studies lesson into a one-sided bashing of President Bush. . . .

“He comes into the school and just says what he wants,” City Councilor Bill St. Laurent said. “At what point does he stop his politicking to the point of scare tactics? Saying that the draft may come back, and kids can’t find jobs, those are scare tactics. He is out trying to get votes. This is taxpayers money, excuse me, but this is my tax dollar and I don’t want to use my tax dollar for his pulpit.”

Talk to some kids who mostly can’t vote. Generate bad press for the Democrats nationwide among those who can. Brilliant. (Via Remove All Doubt).

UPDATE: Darren Kaplan writes: “Aside from the fact that scaring children for political gain is beyond the pale even for McAuliffe, he’s lying through his teeth.”

I’m amazed that the Dems have hung onto McAuliffe for so long.

THE BLOGS OF FREEDOM: Good story on Iraqi bloggers and the blogosphere in general, in the Seattle Times.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT IS BACKPEDALING from her dumb remark about Osama bin Laden and an “October surprise.”

Even if you believe her claims, which witnesses contradict, that her remarks were tongue-in-cheek she just demonstrated — again — her utter unsuitability for diplomacy.

HURRAY FOR GIMLI! Yes, he gets it. Meanwhile, Viggo Mortensen is dismissed: “Poor guy. Cute, but dumb as a post.”

UPDATE: Reader Keith Waldrop emails:

I just read the whole Rhys-Davies Interview. Neither you nor Sullivan give it the proper “read the whole thing” justice it deserves.

How in the world can the same industry/culture that created (insert inane Hollwood activist name here) create a man who says such grounded, worldly, and couragous things as John Rhys-Davies?

Hey Hollywood! I’ll go see Return of the King twice just because it has Rhys-Davies in it.

You should.

TIM BLAIR: “Saddam’s only been in custody a few days, and already the French and Germans have become oddly compliant.”

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has more thoughts on this.

IT’S AN IMPROVEMENT OVER WHAT HAPPENED TO GALILEO, ANYWAY:

Six hundred years ago, the world was warm. Or maybe it wasn’t. What’s the truth? Beware. This question has recently been elevated from a mere scientific quandary to one of the hot (or cold) issues of modern politics. Argue in favor of the wrong answer and you risk being branded a liberal alarmist or a conservative Neanderthal. Or you might lose your job.

Six editors recently resigned from the journal Climate Research because of this issue. Their crime: publishing the article “Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1,000 Years,” by W. Soon and S. Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Without passing judgment on this particular paper, I can still point out that our journals are full of poor papers. If editors were dismissed every time they published one, they would all be out of work within a month or two. What made the Soon and Baliunas situation different is that their paper attracted enormous attention. And that’s because it threw doubt on the hockey stick.

Read the whole thing.

In a related development, Bjorn Lomborg has been vindicated by the Danish Ministry of Science, after what Ron Bailey calls a “smear campaign” against him.

UPDATE: Iain Murray has more on Lomborg.

PREEMPTIVE EXPLAINING-AWAY: Janet Daley advises anti-war folks on how to respond to success in the future.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn has related observations.

EUGENE VOLOKH OFFERS ADVICE TO FOREIGN WRITERS — and works in a subtle reference to The Fearless Vampire Killers too:

Oy, have you got the wrong Wolverine. . . . We realize that the complexities of America’s multi-layered semiotics (especially at the polyvalent intersectionality of military modalities and civilian cinematic / graphic novelistic signifiers) may be difficult to grasp for people who come from, shall we say, less sophisticated cultural traditions — but if you only acknowledge our superiority, I see no reason why such minor embarrassments should interfere with our amicable cross-Atlantic relationship.

Heh.

TACITUS offers a rather devastating critique of those opposing an Iraqi trial for Saddam Hussein. “It’s a meme meant to snatch the judgment of Saddam Hussein from his victims and hand it over to those same institutions whose counsel would have left him in power today.”

I think that the UN, and the human rights community, are guilty of neocolonialism here. And the groups who propped up Saddam have more of a conflict of interest — and certainly a far more culpable one — than do his victims.

I also think that the end result of all of this will be a free Iraq that is close to the United States, and deeply suspicious of the United Nations, the human rights community, and the European Union. Once again, Bush’s enemies are playing into his hands.

MICHAEL NOVAK has more on Cardinal Martino, whose excessive sympathy for Saddam garnered so much criticism here and elsewhere:

When I was in Rome last February, Cardinal Martino was already under heavy fire for his intemperate and irrepressible anti- Americanism. Even those who before the war leaned more to the French/German position than to the American were dismayed by his uncalled-for comments. . . .

The immense relief experienced by the Catholic community in Iraq since the fall of Saddam has not gone unappreciated at the Vatican. In general, now that the American-led coalition has acted firmly and with far better results than predicted last February by various spokesmen in the Vatican (they did not all speak with one voice), the Vatican has tried to help with the transition to a more just, peaceful, tolerant, and democratic Iraq.

As someone said earlier, victory is the best propaganda. But as Novak continues:

As for Cardinal Martino, he has made clear on many occasions how bitterly he feels toward the United States on many fronts, not only in the case of Iraq.

It’s true, of course, that the Church is made of human beings, as Novak also notes. It’s just unfortunate that so many of the ones we hear from seem to resemble Cardinal Martino, and the Church — like any other institution made up of human beings — will pay a price for filling its ranks with the bitter, the self-important, and the morally obtuse. It is paying such a price now. And what’s more, it deserves to.

UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge responds and draws a distinction between matters secular and spiritual.

I certainly agree that Cardinal Martino’s idiocy has no particular theological ramifications. Having been raised Protestant, I’m always slightly bemused by how strenuously many Catholics feel they have to make this point, which seems obvious to me. Martino’s idiocy isn’t a reason to abandon your faith. It is, I think, the latest of many demonstrations that the Church has no particular ability to recruit people who are better, or even more morally discerning, than the run of humanity, and that the opinions of Church leaders on these sorts of matters are not only not worthy of any special respect, but are — when weighed against the track record — worthy of more than usual skepticism.

And because many churchmen attempt to blur the line, infusing their frequently idiotic statements on matters secular with a wholly undeserved patina of moral seriousness, it’s important to point that out.

UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson emails:

At church this Sunday, right before Mass started, a parishioner walked up to our priest and said something to the effect of wasn’t this good news that we had gotten Saddam. His response? “No, not really, because this war was never about Saddam Hussein. It was about imposing our will on the Iraqi people.” Later, during Mass, the other priest started talking about Father Bill O’Donnell’s death, quoted Martin Sheen, and joked that the people who always had the most reason to be concerned about Father Bill were those who worked at Lawrence Livermore Labs.

I live in the Bay Area, but this is ridiculous. My church is led by two guys who still think it’s the 1960s.

Yes, it is ridiculous.

FROM NEMO TO NANO: My TechCentralStation column, reporting from the EPA Science Advisory Board meeting last week, is up.

MORE TROOPS? Jim Dunnigan says it’s an election-year gesture that will probably hurt actual readiness.

JUST THINK — if Saddam hadn’t been watching the BBC he might have given up months ago:

Saddam Hussein is being shown videotapes of anti-Saddam protests in Iraq . . . two U.S. officials who are receiving reports on his interrogation said Tuesday.

Or maybe he was reading the New York Times.

ALL DAY YESTERDAY, people kept sending me links to a rather dodgy secondhand report that Saddam’s No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, had been caught. I was rather skeptical, given the sourcing and given that we’d heard that story before, only to have it turn out to be wrong. But now here’s another report. Let’s hope it’s true.

IMPRISONED IRANIAN BLOGGER SINA MOTALLEBI is is now free, has escaped Iran, and is in Europe with his wife and child. And he’s blogging again!

MICKEY KAUS is speculating on a Howard Dean third-party run, should Dean not get the nomination. I can easily imagine Dean doing something like that.

Meanwhile Jay Rosen offers nine new storylines for covering the campaign, to replace the tired and outdated ones that the press generally uses. Very much worth reading. One of them is “donated talent,” and I want to repeat the prediction that I made at Bloggercon, that the 21st century will belong to whoever is best at getting people to volunteer their efforts.

THE POLITBURO finds Tim Noah silly.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GOOD SENSE, THE CONSTITUTION, AND LIMITED GOVERNMENT: Randy Barnett has won his medical cannabis case, and on Commerce Clause grounds. “It is supremely ironic that the Ninth Circuit is the court of appeals that is taking the Supreme Court’s new Commerce Clause jurisprudence the most seriously.”

He has a link to the opinion, which I — just home from the elementary school Christmas program — haven’t read yet.

CNN IS BUSTED for differential coverage of demonstrations in Iraq. Tom Perry has proof.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis posts excerpts from Iraqi bloggers’ critiques of Western media.

PUNCH THE BAG notes an odd defense of Saddam.

“IRAQI MINISTER TELLS U.N. TO STOP SNIPING, START HELPING:” Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Julie Meehan notes that the same story plays rather differently at the BBC:

It’s titled “UN Chief demands clear role for Iraq”

The BBC story makes no mention whatsoever of the Iraqi foreign minister’s comments that the UN “failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years” or that “One year ago, the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable”.

It’s a horrible piece of reporting by an increasingly horrible media service. Thank god we’ve got you! :-)

And no license fee required! Meanwhile, though the New York Times must not have gotten the BBC’s memo, as its coverage does not omit the criticism of the UN, and adds some additional material that seems to contradict the BBC’s Kofi-boosting coverage:

Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, accused the United Nations Security Council today of having failed to help rescue his country from Saddam Hussein, and he chided member states for bickering over his beleaguered country’s future. . . .

Taking a harsh view of the inability of quarreling members of the Security Council to endorse military action in Iraq, Mr. Zebari said, “One year ago, the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable.

“The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.”

He declared, “The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again.”

It was not immediately clear how the accusatory tone of Mr. Zebari’s speech affected the closed-door discussion over the United Nations’ role in Iraq that followed, but Secretary General Kofi Annan, the first to emerge from the hall, appeared taken aback.

“Now is not the time to pin blame and point fingers,” he told reporters.

By which he meant, Now is not the time to pin blame on me! The BBC’s characterization of this meeting seems quite at odds with the other two stories, and will only serve to confirm the BBC’s image as increasingly shoddy, biased and out of touch. And, apparently, still unaware just how easy it is to notice this sort of thing, thanks to that newfangled Internet.

A “JACQUES RUBY INCIDENT” FOR SADDAM? Read this by Damian Penny in The Globe and Mail.

ORSON SCOTT CARD is savaging his fellow Democrats on the war.

MULTICULTURALISM FINDS ITS LIMITS. I should have guessed this would do the trick.

STUART BENJAMIN ON STROM THURMOND:

Which one was he — hypocrite or liar?

I think the answer is actually “both.”

MORE LACK OF MORAL SERIOUSNESS FROM THE VATICAN: Robert Tagorda is more respectful of this stuff than I would be. I’ll just note that they’re showing more concern for Saddam Hussein than they probably would for Joanne Webb.

UPDATE: The World Wide Rant is also unimpressed with the Vatican’s take on this issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Outright — and dead-on-target — mockery here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge calls this pretty appalling, and Justin Katz observes:

The world is not all dignity and affronts to dignity. There are sin and repercussions, too.

Unfortunately, for some people, the world is all about dignity and its affronts. By all appearances, Cardinal Martino is one of those people.

I thought that Lauryn Hill’s remarks were grandstanding when she made them. But now I think she can claim a bit of vindication.

MORE: Damian Penny: “I should apologize to my Catholic readers for saying this, but compared to the way the Vatican has coddled the criminals within its ranks, then yes, I must admit Saddam is being treated pretty roughly.”

STILL MORE: Reader Bill Reece emails:

As a Catholic who is rather disenchanted with the Church, I am probably not the most “objective” person to comment on the good Cardinal’s statements, but I am truly appalled by his solicitous concerns for a monster like Hussein. Perhaps if the Church were as acutely aware of the affront to dignity that many of its priests have inflicted on the innocent young children who are under its care, then the good Cardinal’s comments might be taken a little more seriously. Sadly, the Church is far more solicitous in its concerns for the likes of Saddam Hussein (and for that matter, Francis Geoghann) than it is for innocent children.

It does seem that way at times, doesn’t it?

APPARENTLY, THERE’S A SHORTAGE OF ACTUAL CRIMINALS IN CLEBURNE, TEXAS:

A Texas housewife is in big trouble with the law for selling a vibrator to a pair of undercover cops. . . . Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid.

I recommend laying off half the police force, and three-fourths of the prosecuting attorneys. The good people of Cleburne are obviously overtaxed, and overpoliced.

UPDATE: Andrew Lloyd emails: “I see that Texas finally has smaller government. So small, in fact, that it will fit inside your bedroom.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Texas reader sends this extract from a Texas judicial opinion of some years back:

CURTISS BROWN, Justice, concurring.
Here we go raising the price of dildos again. Since this appears to be the law in Texas I must concur.

Regalado v. State, 872 S.W.2d 7 (1994). Meanwhile, reader David Radulski emails:

After a first cut analysis, your hypothesis that the City of Cleburne may be overpoliced appears correct.

City of Cleburne Police Department website says their police department has 47 officers and 16 civilian employees. Link

Given Cleburne’s population of 25,356, that equals 2.5 law enforcement employees per 1,000 population.

The FBI’s 2002 ‘Uniform Crime Reports: Law Enforcement Personnel’ (Link) state that Cleburne had 60 full time law enforcement employees in 2002. Perhaps Cleburne has hired 3 more people since then or some of the 63 mentioned on the City of Cleburne Police Department web site are part-time employees. Using the FBI’s more conservative number, it means that Cleburne has 2.4 law enforcement employees per 1,000 population.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports further state that cities comparable to Cleburne (Group IV cities in the West with populations between 25,000 and 49,999) average 2.0 law enforcement employees per 1,000 population. That extra 0.4 law enforcement employees per 1,000 population suggests that Cleburne has ten more law enforcement employees than other cities of its size.

Sounds like a round of layoffs is in order.

MORE: Eugene Volokh asks:

Seriously, folks, isn’t it kind of silly not just to have such a law on the books, but to actually spend money, time, and effort enforcing it?

Why yes, it is.

STILL MORE: Long after this item was posted, I received this email:

Dear Mr. Reynolds,

I am a Police Officer for the City of Cleburne and I recently reviewed your article dated December 16th, regarding the incident about the young lady arrested for having too many sexual toys. If I may correct you, this incident did not happen in Cleburne, it actually happened in Burleson, Texas, which is about 10 miles north of Cleburne, and the Burleson Police, in connection with our Drug Task Force, arrested and charged the lady for possession too many sexual devices. I would also like to correct you on your point of view that the city of Cleburne has too many officers. We currently have an unofficial poputlion of about 35,000 poeple, counting the illegal aliens who have overwhlemed our small town. Our department is too overwhelmed with calls for help to even worry about sexual toys being sold. Although, possessing too many sexual devices is still against the law in the state of Texas and the Burleson Police Department has every right to enforce that law, should it deem necessary. Thank you for your time and please correct the article in regards to the Cleburne Police Department.

Brandon Arriola

Why, exactly, it makes Cleburne look better is beyond me. What was the Cleburne Drug Task Force doing staging “stings” over sex toys ten miles from Cleburne? Especially when the department is “overwhelmed” with calls at home? Sorry, but this looks like a case of bad priorities no matter how you spin it.

IF YOU LOOK UP “SOUTH PARK REPUBLICAN” IN THE DICTIONARY, you’ll probably see a picture of Dennis Miller, who observes:

I’m left on a lot of things. If two gay guys want to get married, I could care less. If a nut case from overseas wants to blow up their wedding, that’s when I’m right. (Sept. 11) was a big thing for me. I was saying to liberal America, “Well, what are you offering?” And they said, “Well, we’re not going to protect you, and we want some more money.” That didn’t interest me.

Indeed.

A WHILE BACK, I challenged FCC Chair Michael Powell to get the FCC to stand up for a free and open Internet. Judging by this piece by FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, it’s not happening:

This Internet may be dying. At the behest of powerful interests, the FCC is buying into a warped vision that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that the FCC should excuse broadband providers from longstanding non-discrimination requirements. . . .

The FCC is rushing toward breathtaking change in regulatory policy. Whether it’s the giant media companies or telecom’s gatekeepers, we are closing networks, undermining competition, stifling entrepreneurship and threatening consumer choice. At this rate, it won’t be long until we look back, shake our heads and wonder whatever happened to that open and dynamic high speed Internet that might have been.

Well, that will suit some people just fine.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW with Iranian blog-guru Hossein Derakshan.

FOR SOME REASON, a bunch of the thank-you emails I sent to people who donated have bounced. I’ll try to figure out what the problem was, but for those who donated, please accept my thanks this way in the meantime.

THE MOST INCRIMINATING SADDAM PHOTO YET. He’ll never get a fair trial now.

RACHEL CUNLIFFE has a blog design showcase up. She’s soliciting further nominations.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Homicidal maniac?

WOW. Just looked at the counter and saw that InstaPundit had over 180,000 pageviews yesterday. That’s rather a lot.

JOHN HAWKINS ON THE LIES ABOUT WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: He says that there are lies, all right, but that they come from Bush’s critics:

So we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hussein once had and used weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, at the time of the invasion, Saddam either had WMD or planned to acquire them. So all this quibbling over WMD is in a very important sense, irrelevant. Worst case scenario, it’s like we stopped a serial killer before he could kill again as opposed to actually catching him with a body in the basement. In any case, sensible people who are concerned about what an anti-American tyrant like Saddam might have done with his WMD should be happy that the Butcher of Baghdad is now permanently out of business.

And we are!

JOSH CHAFETZ rounds up links to reviews of The Return of the King. It’s supposed to be good!

“HE FELT SAFER WITH THE AMERICANS.” Amazing quote about Saddam

ORDERED THE INSTA-DAUGHTER the Digital Blue kids’ video camera. Frankly, I would rather have spent more and gotten her a real one, but this is what she’s been on about for weeks. The good news is that it’s not terribly expensive (by the standards of today’s kids’ toys) so when she outgrows it it won’t be a total loss.

It’s a far cry from this kids’ toy from an earlier age, isn’t it? But the Johnny Astro was a great toy, actually. (Three cheers for the Bernoulli effect!) Er, and a lot cheaper, even allowing for inflation.

I MEANT TO LINK TO THIS MICHAEL CRICHTON SPEECH on the environment over the weekend but was distracted by events. Derek Lowe emailed me the link again (I’m absent-minded, but there are lots of people to prod me!) and it’s well worth reading.