KAUS is on a roll.

AN IRAQI BLOGGER WRITES AN OPEN LETTER TO HOWARD DEAN: He’s responding to Dean’s claim that Iraqis’ standard of living is “a whole lot worse now” than before the war, and his response is quite tart. It’s a must-read.

GREG DJEREJIAN reports that the BBC’s defenders are unrepentant, and continue to blame Blair. I agree with Jeff Jarvis’s assessment: “pathetic.”

THE MARKET AND ITS ENEMIES: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts, and a question for Charles Schumer.

She also accuses me of “coyly feeding” the outsourcing frenzy. Um, is that what I’m doing? Virginia doesn’t link to any posts, so it’s hard to be sure what she objects to in particular, but I thought I was just pointing to a phenomenon with major political ramifications, one that — at least until recently – wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Surely Virginia isn’t suggesting that I shouldn’t do that, simply because the issue might be misused by “demagogic politicians.” If I only wrote about subjects that were not subject to such misuse, I’d have nothing but posts about techno. (And even that might not be safe.) And I don’t think that my views on the subject differ much from Dan Pink’s, whose article she praises. But if a reader as generally careful as Virginia thinks otherwise, perhaps I should repeat what I’ve said before: I don’t think that a legislative or political response to outsourcing as such is a good idea.

However, I do think that it’s likely to be a political issue, and I thought that I was doing something useful by pointing that out, and talking a bit about the ramifications. I’m a bit surprised that Virginia thinks otherwise.

DON’T ASK DON’T TELL: LT Smash comes out of the closet.

YOU’VE HEARD THIS in the Blogosphere before, but apparently the idea is going mainstream:

The Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble called human rights organisations a “great curse” yesterday and accused them of complicity in terrorist killings.

“One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry,” he told the Associated Press news agency at an international conference of terrorism victims in Madrid.

“They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims.”

His words drew an angry reaction from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the world’s biggest human rights groups, with about 200,000 members in Britain and more than a million worldwide.

Steve Crawshaw, director of the London office of Human Rights Watch, said:”It is extraordinarily regrettable and disappointing that, above all, a man like that says something like this.”

What’s really regrettable and disappointing is that he has to say something like this. The good news is that he had some impact:

The Madrid conference ended with a declaration which went some way to supporting Mr Trimble.

It said: “We call on NGOs and other civil organisations that stand for the defence of human rights to make a commitment to defend victims of terrorism and to identify terrorist acts for what they are, regardless of their cause or pretext and without striking balances or blurring the distinction between victims and executioners.”

That would be nice.

MORE ON THE EURO-SCANDALS:

The European Commission has overseen an “intolerable” breakdown of EU financial control while subjecting whistleblowers to vindictive treatment, Euro-MPs said yesterday.

The European Parliament’s annual report on the EU’s £70 billion budget expressed “extreme alarm” over failures in the commission’s accounting system, finding that the books did not add up and large sums of money could not be traced.

As they say, “which corruption scandal?”

PLAME UPDATE: Well, it’s more of a further thought than an update. But the weakest part of the Plame “scandal” has always been the idea that someone in the White House, like, say, Karl Rove, would try to get back at Joseph Wilson by outing his wife as an intelligence agent. Even if they knew that she was a covert agent (and if she were really secret, they shouldn’t have), deliberately outing a spy for trivial political payback purposes would just be too unimaginably stupid.

But, then, this is unimaginably stupid, too. So who knows?

JOHN STOSSEL’S NEW BOOK arrived from Amazon. The Insta-Wife promptly took custody (yes, this happens a lot). She keeps laughing out loud as she reads it, which I’m pretty sure is a good sign. She did report that Eugene Volokh is mentioned.

“IRAQI GOVT. PAPERS: SADDAM BRIBED CHIRAC” — Hmm. First the BBC, now this:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 28 (UPI) — Documents from Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.. . . .

Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac sought to couch his opposition to the invasion on a moral high ground.

Gee, do you think?

UPDATE: More here. Can this be true? We’ll have to wait and see.

Gustave La Joie: “Corruption scandal? Which corruption scandal?”

HOWARD DEAN HAS REPLACED JOE TRIPPI, the genius behind his Internet strategy, with Roy Neel. I know Roy Neel from back when I worked on Gore’s campaign in 1988. He’s a good guy, but this kind of shakeup suggests that Josh Marshall was right yesterday when he called the Dean campaign “desperate.”

UPDATE: The Scrum reports that the Neel selection isn’t going over very well. And Wonkette opines:

Dean is replacing him with Gore’s advisors. Because, uhm, yeah, they did such a great job for Gore. To review: Joe Trippi helped bring Dean from being an obscure governor of a tiny state to a national front-runner. Al Gore’s advisers managed to fumble one of the surest bets in campaign history.

Okay, so it’s not exactly “a tradition of victory.”

MORE: Mickey Kaus: “There is less of a reformist impulse in the current Democratic campaign than at any time in the modern history of the country! ”

STILL MORE: Dave Weinberger: “For all we know, Dean would still be in single digits as the ex-Governor of the Maple Sugar state if the online connection hadn’t happened.”

James Lileks: “It’s not the e-mail. It’s not the blog. It’s not the Web sites. It’s the computers, and the people behind them, connected like never before. They won’t control the buzz this year. But in 2008? Count on it.”

Josh Marshall: (Blogging from the train) “This has to be one of the most bizarre turns of events I’ve seen in Dem politics in a very long time.”

This turn of events suggests, yet again, that Dean’s big problem isn’t the Internet. It’s Dean.

ONE MORE: Best headline so far, from Jeff Taylor: “Dean Swaps Broadband for Dial-Up.”

BETTY ONG, American hero.

BRANCH OUT IN YOUR BLOG READING with the Carnival of the Vanities, a collection of posts from all sorts of different blogs.

HAMMORABI, the Iraqi blog, seems to have some interesting posts on the Saddam oil-bribery issue. If his information is correct (about which we’ll just have to wait and see), Saddam had people around the world on his political payroll. Which would explain a lot. Perhaps some intrepid reporters in Baghdad will look into this further — surely they don’t want to be scooped by an Iraqi blogger again. Note that what he calls a “milliard” is a billion in American usage — which is enough to tell you the scale involved. . . .

EUGENE VOLOKH ADMINISTERS A RIGHTEOUS FISKING to Paul Craig Roberts, whose views are, well, in need of just that.

JONAH GOLDBERG:

The emphasis on WMDs was largely the result of lawyers at the State Dept. thinking that was the only “legal” reason we could go to war. Perle didn’t reference it directly, but remember the whole kerfuffle about Paul Wolfowitz’s interview with Sam Tanenhaus in which he divulged that the emphasis on WMD above all else was largely due to “bureaucratic” pressures from inside the US government. This, predictably, was distorted into proof that neocon ideologues were lying about the real reasons for the war. But that wasn’t what he was saying at all.

Anyway, my point is this: to the extent the post-Iraq failure to find WMDs is a disaster for the United States in terms of its credibility, its relationships with allies etc. one could argue that the fault lies in the fact that George W. Bush listened too much to Colin Powell and the State Department instead of the hawks, since it was the Wolfowitz crowd which wanted to emphasize freedom, democracy, stability and the war on terror. Now that no WMDs have been found that rhetoric seems self-serving when in fact those were co-equal priorities all along. If George Bush had talked before the war about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq as eloquently as he did afterwards, he would be in a lot better shape politically and in the history books.

The irony is that Bush — who’s been hammered for paying too little attention to the U.N. — is, in this view, in trouble for paying too much attention to the U.N.

BREWING REBELLION in Saudi Arabia? Maybe.

BBC CHAIRMAN GAVYN DAVIES TO RESIGN: That’s the story on the wires, though I can’t find it on the web just yet. (Thanks to the journalist readers who sent it!). I told you they should have listened to the bloggers. . . .

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the BBC’s report. And here are what appear to be real-time reactions from BBC reporters via the BBC’s own reporter blog. Excerpt: “I don’t think anyone expected this report to be quite this damning.”

Another: “It will be interesting to see if the BBC brand can recover from this.” Maybe not. As I suggested a while back, the BBC’s political tin ear has caught up with it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan: “[A]n absolute vindication for Tony Blair and a catastrophe for the BBC.”

Tim Blair: “Some people predicted this outcome as far back as last July. Advantage: Jarvis. Also, advantage Chavetz.”

And here, via Tim, is a link to the full text of the report, now available on the Web.

OVER AT MY MSNBC SITE, GlennReynolds.com, I’ve got a post on the Spelling Bee documentary Spellbound. In the next installment, I’ll tie it to the outsourcing debate. No, really!

WYETH RUTHVEN and Jeff Quinton offer South Carolina primary roundups. New Hampshire? That’s so yesterday.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP OF BAD PRESS FOR THE BBC, whose management is described as “almost in meltdown.” They could have saved themselves a lot of grief by listening to bloggers!

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has multiple posts on this. And here, via Jarvis, is a link to Tony Blair’s statement on the issue, which is dignified, but very much of a put-down to his critics:

The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this House or deliberately misled the country by falsifying intelligence on WMD is itself the real lie. And I simply ask that those that made it and those who have repeated it over all these months, now withdraw it, fully, openly and clearly.

Will that happen?

A SPRING OFFENSIVE — in Pakistan?

UPDATE: Blackfive thinks that if this is true, the Chicago Tribune shouldn’t be reporting it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Darren Kaplan has more on this. If it’s right, then Blackfive is right, too.

A GROWING — AND SURPRISING — BATTLE OVER NANOTECHNOLOGY: My TechCentralStation column is up.

UPDATE: Mark Modzelewski of the NanoBusiness Alliance, responding to an earlier post on this topic here at InstaPundit, puts down “bloggers, Drexlerians, pseudo-pundits, panderers and other denizens of their mom’s basements.”

Hmm. I’m going to nominate Modzelewski for the newly-created Purpuro Award for needless put-downs to potentially valuable constituencies. It’s not as if I’m not a nanotech booster, and I actually thought that the post he’s complaining about was pretty mild, under the circumstances. . . . But this just underscores the point in my TCS column: For shortsighted political reasons, the nanotech business community is going out of its way to try to marginalize people it will surely need as allies later. That’s just dumb.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Day by Day cartoonist Chris Muir, who did the Purpuro cartoon linked below, was so taken by the idea of a “Purpuro Award” that he sent the graphic now adorning the right side of this post. Thanks, Chris! It’ll probably see regular use. . . .

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Modzelewski sends this, which I find rather astonishing:

Clearly being educated man, I can hardly even fathom how you take Drexler’s fantasies and turn them into reality in your head. As far as our “pr strategy” as you call it-its not so much pr strategy as a “reality strategy.” I don’t promote nor spend much time worrying about science fiction and frankly don’t even view the zettatechnology/molecular manufacturing/Foresight folks thinking as on the table in the environmental debate. I am clearly not between two poles, as your misguided views on the subject frankly don’t constitute a pole in the landscape as far as I see it. I would say my skills as a long time political damage control specialist leave me -all ego aside – a little better skilled then Howard Lovy or yourself at these type of things. So just the same, I will actually be the one with a degree of sympathy here.

Keep fighting the -strange-if not good fight for your lost cause.

I’m not sure what he means by “lost cause.” (For that matter, I’m not sure what “zettatechnology” is). I’ve been calling — as have quite a few others — for serious discussion of nanotechnology’s implications, so as to prevent the nanotechnology industry from facing the sort of problems that have crippled the GMO food industry. (Here’s my about-to-be-published Harvard Journal of Law and Technology article on that, and here’s a more recent column from TechCentralStation. Here’s another TCS column on the subject.) I certainly hope that cause isn’t lost, and — speaking as someone who’s quite thorougly pro-nanotechnology — I don’t see why Modzelewski would want it to be.

I don’t think that Modzelewski’s public name-calling, or his email, is evidence of good political damage-control, either. But then, I’m not a professional damage-control expert, though I don’t live in my mom’s basement, either. . . .

DAN PINK has a lengthy piece on outsourcing that’s worth reading. He comments via email that:

my inbox has been filling for the last 24 hours but, perhaps surprisingly, I’m getting slightly more positive mail than angry screeds — though one fellow did accuse me of hosting an “asshat convention.”

I do think that this will be an election issue.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Colby Cosh is exploring contrasts in coverage.