HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

CHECK OUT THE IRAQ-AMERICA FREEDOM ALLIANCE: Fitting for Independence Day.

BLOG HUMOR: David Adesnik replies to a critic.

OUCH: I linked to Marine Corps reservist Eric Johnson’s critique of Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekharan earlier, but now it’s been reprinted in the New York Post. You seldom see major correspondents criticized by name this way.

DARFUR UPDATE: I don’t actually trust them to do this, but I suppose it’s still progress of a sort:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan pledged Saturday to disarm Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, who have driven more than one million Africans from their homes in west Sudan’s Darfur region and to accept human rights monitors in the area. . . .

Long conflict between nomadic Arab tribes and African farmers over scarce resources in Darfur intensified when a revolt broke out last year. Rebels accuse Khartoum of arming the Arab Janjaweed, a charge the government denies.

The United States raised the possibility Friday of sanctions against Sudan if the government did not stop the militia attacks in Darfur.

You get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. . . .

UPDATE: James Moore observes the (necessary?) hypocrisy involved in diplomacy:

Now here is the irony. The Sudanese government has argued all along that it is not guilty of driving the atrocities and that it has no direct control over the janjaweeds. But if the Sudanese government’s claims are true, this same government will not be able to reign in the raiders and comply with its deal with Powell.

Powell most certainly believes that the Sudanese government does control the militias and is driving the genocide. And this assumption, in turn, is central to his current strategy—even while the same assumption is disavowed in his public statements.

Indeed.

QUEST FOR FIREWORKS: When I was a kid, I read a book (already old by then) called Henry Reed’s Journey. Reed is a boy who, on a cross-country drive, is trying to buy fireworks, but they turn out to be illegal almost everywhere he goes. As I noted back when InstaPundit was new, it’s a sort of metaphor for creeping nanny-statism in America, and Reed’s wry commentary now seems prophetic.

That seems to be changing, though. Fireworks have always been a booming business around here, but there are more and bigger stores, catering largely to tourists passing through from less-enlightened regions. And my sense is that there’s a bit less hostility to the idea of fireworks in general. I hope so. Yeah, fireworks can be dangerous. But so can lots of things. A bit of danger is part of life, as is learning how to handle dangerous things without being hurt. If you celebrate the Fourth with fireworks, I hope you do so safely. But also loudly.

Celebrating with one of these, however, would be amusing:

Some Americans this Fourth of July plan to get a bang out of blowing Osama bin Laden’s head off. The bin Laden Noggin, a cone-shaped pyrotechnic device with a cartoon of bin Laden’s face, has been a hot seller at some fireworks stores around the country. When lit, the bin Laden cone erupts in blood-red flames and screeches for 60 seconds. Two shots blow his head off.

It is part of an Exploding Terrorists Heads four-pack that also includes Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Moammar Gadhafi.

Of course, not everyone is happy:

Lisa Myer of Papillion was appalled when she heard about the fireworks while shopping for smoke bombs and sparklers for her son.

“What are we trying to teach our children?” she asked.

I’ll bet Henry Reed could answer that question.

UPDATE: Yep, I did this, too. But we wore shop goggles for safety. Meanwhile, Michael Ubaldi is unconcerned about creeping nannyism:

If Nanny is wrapping her arms around the 4th on paper, she’s accomplished nothing in practical terms. Fireworks are strictly regulated in Ohio but every Independence Day evening, as long as I’ve lived, I’ve heard and seen the incendiary stuff going off in every direction.

People have been testing their kits out around here for weeks. Given the day in question, I kind of like the irony.

Yes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: SKBubba, proud owner of a Nikon D70, offers fireworks photos taken at the Alcoa, TN duck pond last night. Very nice!

MORE: Dean Peters is collecting fireworks related blog posts. And reader Bradley Ems emails with these thoughts in response to the photograph above:

How much have I dropped in your state at the Tennessee-Alabama fireworks stands on I-24 outside of Chattanooga on our pilgrimages to Atlanta and Florida? I shudder to think. Best damn fireworks stores in the US.

Tennessee — exporting liberty!

UNSCAM UPDATE: Paul Bremer is denying charges that he slow-footed the oil-for-food investigation: “It became clear to me that the investigation should be conducted by a nonpolitical body and the Governing Council was clearly thinking in terms of a political investigation . . . The idea that I somehow stood in the way of this is utter and complete nonsense.”

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS COLUMNIST LINDA SEEBACH has a column on an interesting Yale study on media bias:

Two researchers have combined these two disparate ideas to come up with a measure of media bias that doesn’t depend on journalists’ own perceptions of where they fit on the political spectrum, or on subjective judgments about the philosophical orientation of think tanks. Tim Groseclose, of UCLA and Stanford, and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago used data comparing which think tanks various politicians liked to quote and which think tanks various media outlets liked to quote in their news stories to estimate two ADA scores for each media outlet in the study, one based on the number of times a think tank was cited, and the other on the length of the citation.

The authors say they expected to find that the mainstream media leaned to the left, but they were “astounded by the degree.” So when people say, for example, that The New York Times may be tilted left, but people can compensate for that by watching Fox News, they don’t take into account that the Times is much further from the center than Fox. “To gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading The New York Times.” . . .

The predominance of liberals (however identified) in major media is well-documented, but there remains a great deal of controversy over how much that fact influences news reporting (this analysis looks only at news reports, not editorials, reviews or letters to the editor). Most journalists I know say they work hard to keep their personal views out of their news reporting (again, excepting people like me who are supposed to be expressing opinions). And most of them, I’m sure, sincerely believe they succeed. This is evidence that what they succeed best at is sounding like Democrats.

Here’s a link to the study she writes about.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER spent the night away, so the Instawife and I rented a movie. It was Love, Actually, a Hugh Grant / Liam Neeson vehicle that I thought was pretty weak. The Instawife (who had picked it, natch) liked it better, but she was underwhelmed, too. (Though it got pretty good Amazon reviews, except for the guy who said it was “like poo.”) Oh, well; a good time was nonetheless had by all. Sometimes you care more about the company than the flick.

“THEY CRAVED PARADISE, but blew up a parking lot.”

I’M PRETTY SURE that the proposed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment isn’t going anywhere, which is fine because it’s a dumb idea. But if you want to do your part to bury it, you might want to go here. (Yeah, these are the folks with the blogad on the right. I don’t generally offer what the magazine world calls “editorial support” to advertisers, but I’m sufficiently against this dumb amendment proposal to give its opposition a bit of a boost).

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer is savaging me on this issue. I do not, however, share his discomfort with homosexuality. As for the ad, well, it’s a typical political ad and some of his criticisms are valid, though others are rather forced. It’s true that the Constitution has been amended to do other things besides expand rights, for example, but the only contraction of rights — Prohibition — was swiftly repealed. Other amendments have either been on unrelated topics, or have expanded rights.

On the other hand, I’m not sure but I think Andrew Sullivan may be including me among those who are “complacent” about the amendment’s likelihood of passage. Maybe so, but I don’t think it has much chance. The goal, I think, is to make Kerry squirm — because he opposes gay marriage but will have trouble saying that before the Convention — and then have it die quietly. That’s no reason not to write your representatives and make your opposition known, though.

MORE: Spoons is anti-anti-gay marriage, but doesn’t like the campaign against the amendment. Or something like that. Read his post.

STILL MORE: Andrew Olmsted: “While I do not support the amendment, and in fact would vote in favor of legal gay marriage were it a ballot option, I think Spoons is in the right in this disagreement. . . . Shoot down the FMA because it’s a bad amendment. But don’t pretend that it’s bad simply because it is an amendment.” Fair enough, though amending the Constitution is like brain surgery — risky and permanent enough that proponents of the operation bear a heavy burden of proof that it’s really needed.

JEFF JARVIS: “Back in my day, we volunteered for campaigns because we cared, not because we were paid.”

You’re still big, Jeff. It’s the campaigns that got small.

MICKEY KAUS has a new Gearbox column posted, in which he reviews an “electrogothic cab of death!”

I like Electrogoth.

IF YOU CARE ABOUT FREEDOM FOR IRAN, you ought to read this.

UPDATE: Read this about Hong Kong, too.

RALPH NADER is charging that he’s the victim of “dirty tricks” on the part of the Establishment.

SPINSANITY WRITES on The temperature at which Michael Moore’s pants burn.

LAURA CLEVERLY writes that her 7-year-old son is going blind. She doesn’t want money, but she does want you to help organizations that are working on a cure. She sends this link to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, and this link to her son’s webpage.

JAMES LILEKS comments on the Hardy & Clarke book on Michael Moore:

I want to get back to reading the “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man” book. (Note: 89 pages into the book, the title remains the sole ad hominem remark. And even so it’s a winking reference to Moore’s own work, as well as Al Franken’s deathless tome on Limbaugh. I’ll say this for the Moore book: it’s brisk and deft, and avoids screedy polemics for one-on-one factual refutations of what the authors identify as Moore’s more egregious fictitions. I was piqued by the theory that Moore manipulated his confrontation with Mr. Heston in “Columbine” – the scene where he showed Heston a photo of a murdered girl and asked for comments. If the authors are correct, what Moore did was the same thing William Hurt’s character did in “Broadcast News” – manipulating a one-camera shot to make it seem as if it was a two-camera shot, and editing post-interview footage to make it look as if it was all one contiguous event.) Full review on Monday.

I look forward to reading the full review.

UPDATE: Read this post on Moore, too.

HELP A JOURNALIST! Mark Miller emails:

I’m a researcher for People magazine and I’m trying to track down anyone who has had a blog entry backfire on him or her either professionally or personally. Any help you can be is totally appreciated.

He asks that you email him here: [email protected]

EUGENE VOLOKH remains critical of Slate’s “Kerryism” feature. I now ignore both the “Kerryism” and “Bushism” items, but for those who are interested, Eugene’s critique is worth reading.

THE WHEELS OF JUSTICE: For quite a few months now I’ve been harping on a story of U.S. troop misconduct originally broken by Iraqi blogger Zeyad. (Most recent roundup, with links to earlier accounts, here; original post here). And now we see something is happening:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Army has charged four soldiers, three of them with manslaughter, over the drowning of an Iraqi prisoner while a new report criticized U.S. military detention policies, officials said on Friday.

Newspaper reports in Colorado, where the soldiers were based, said they were accused of forcing two Iraqis to jump off a bridge in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, on January 3. The men had been picked up for violating a curfew.

One of the Iraqis swam to the river bank but the other drowned, according to the reports.

For a while it looked as if there might be a coverup. I’m glad that turned out not to be the case. I don’t know whether this case would have come to the attention of the authorities without Zeyad’s blog, but I certainly think that it’s helped to keep the pressure on. So far, Zeyad hasn’t posted anything about it on his blog, but I imagine that he will.

UPDATE: Read this.

TERRY TEACHOUT HAS THOUGHTS on Marlon Brando.

A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE FAILURE: Understandable, but it makes you wonder what else they’re getting wrong.

MATT WELCH: Striking fear into Bill O’Reilly!

A MAJOR U.S. SHOW OF FORCE in the Pacific. The Gweilo Diaries thinks that the Chinese will be unhappy, but not unimpressed.

UPDATE: The Straits Times story linked above seems to have misunderstood — it’s 7 carrier groups, but in 5 different theaters, not all off the coast of China. Reader Owen Tredennick wonders if this is a mistake, or Chinese propaganda spin:

Sina.com may be setting up a “US bullying with 7 carriers, China responds, US backs down, sends one or two” story line.

Or they may just have blown it. Another reader suggests that we’ll be applying a double-squeeze to North Korea and Iran. Beats me. Stay tuned.

ON THIS ANNIVERSARY, Dave Kopel remembers a hero of Gettysburg.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

When the head of the U.N.’s Oil-for- Food program got a copy of a letter in October 2002 suggesting that a bribe had been paid to Saddam Hussein’s cronies as part of the program, what do you think was the first thing he did?

If you guessed “informed the authorities, particularly his employers at the Security Council” — guess again.

According to a report Monday on Fox News Channel (a Post sister company), the program’s director, Benon Sevan, took the letter and went directly to . . . Saddam.

But of course.

WHAT WOULD BUGS BUNNY DO? Something like this, perhaps:

Toy stores around Baghdad are doing a quick trade in dancing Saddam dolls — foot-high battery-powered puppets of the former president, kitted out in full insurgent regalia, who swing their hips to cheesy pop music at the flick of a switch.

Decked out with hand-grenades, daggers, a walkie-talkie, binoculars and an AK-47, Saddam dances to the “Hippy Hippy Shake” when turned on. . . .

At first it was the hip-shaking Osamas that sold best, but slowly Iraqis grew less fearful of ridiculing their deposed president and started buying the Saddam ones too.

Heh.

KEN SILBER WRITES that Arthurian legend still matters.

DAVID ADESNIK CRITIQUES THE ONION: “In the final analysis, the skewered vision of American politics presented by The Onion may be clever, but instead of educating its audience, it reinforces misleading stereotypes that embittered elitists use to justify their pessimism about America’s thriving democracy.”

I just wish they were funnier.

UPDATE: Ed Cone calls Adesnik “humourless,” but does not attempt to argue that The Onion is especially funny anymore. I mean, they still get a chuckle now and then, but they’re no Scrappleface. Heck, they’re not even Jeff Goldstein.

Well, maybe occasionally.

WANT TO FIND SOME NEW BLOGS? Visit the new blog showcase!

THIS SEEMS LIKE A POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT:

LONDON (Reuters) – Jordan said Thursday it was willing to send troops to Iraq, becoming the first Arab state to do so, if Baghdad’s new interim government requested it.

King Abdullah, whose country would also be the first of Iraq’s neighbors to send troops, was speaking in a television interview with Britain’s BBC Newsnight program. He said he had not yet discussed the issue with Iraqis.

Abdullah’s comments, welcomed by U.S. officials, reflect a major shift in his country’s views on the international military presence in Iraq now that Washington has handed power to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s interim government.

Stay tuned.

“A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE, A CONFUSING DAY FOR THE MEDIA:” Arthur Chrenkoff looks at how Saddam’s trial is being spun.

Hey, he may be a murderous ex-dictator, but at least he’s anti-Bush! Of course, there’s a risk of blowback.

Meanwhile, Jeff Soyer at Alphecca wants your help in imagining how today’s media would have covered D-Day.

HUGH HEWITT:

Why is John Kerry stonewalling the release of his wife’s tax returns? . . .

John Kerry is stonewalling because his fortune in benefiting from his wife’s fortune surely contains the facts of a hundred hypocrisies. The media’s indifference to this cover-up is number 101.

It seems like a mistake to me. Like Howard Dean’s sealed gubernatorial records, this seems likely to hurt Kerry.

SEVERAL INTERESTING POSTS at Asymmetrical Information. “Dreck’s Law” seems about right.

THE COMFY-CHAIR REVOLUTION claims another victim.

This is a scene from my local mall, earlier today.

They say that revolutions eat their young, but I’m not sure that’s what’s going on here. Whatever it is, he doesn’t look all that unhappy about it.

And the chair does look rather comfy, doesn’t it?

HOLLYWOOD IS GETTING BEHIND THE WAR EFFORT, according to this report. Well, sort of.

“LET FREEDOM REIGN” — inspired by Nelson Mandela?

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH looks at the rage of the Arab Street, July, 2004 version.

BLACKFIVE would like you to help protect the troops.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: In Montana. (Via TaxProf).

Eugene Volokh has thoughts on this case.

DARFUR UPDATE: Jefferson Morley rounds up world opinion.

HERE’S AN ANALYSIS of the charges against Saddam.

KERRY’S “STEALTH STRATEGY” is looking smarter. Back to Nantucket!

UPDATE: A commenter at Pejman’s says that the story linked above is wrong.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Rosenberg responds to Oliver Willis.

MORE ON UNSCAM: Claudia Rosett says follow the money, and offers the story of one oil-for-food bribe.

EUGENE VOLOKH WANTS YOUR THOUGHTS on sex with teenagers.

Here’s something I wrote on the subject (well, a related subject, anyway) a couple of years ago, which got me some flak from the right side of the blogosphere. (And here’s the blog post it was based on).

UPDATE: Not everybody hated it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an interesting, semi-related essay, featuring this observation: “I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. . . . Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. . . . Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.”

Read the whole thing.

MORE: Kimberly Swygert has thoughts on the essay quoted above.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Some thoughts about what to do regarding the oil-for-food corruption scandal:

The Oil-for-Food fraud is potentially the biggest scandal in the history of the United Nations and one of the greatest financial scandals of modern times.1 Set up in the mid-1990s as a means of providing humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people, the U.N.-run Oil-for-Food program was subverted and manipulated by Saddam Hussein’s regime–allegedly with the complicity of U.N. officials–to help prop up the Iraqi dictator.

Saddam’s dictatorship was able to siphon off an estimated $10 billion from the program through oil smuggling and systematic thievery, by demanding illegal payments from companies buying Iraqi oil, and through kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq–all under the noses of U.N. bureaucrats.

Members of the U.N. staff that administered the program have been accused of gross incompetence, mismanagement, and possible complicity with the Iraqi regime. . . .

The most effective way to ensure that the United Nations fully cooperates with its own commission of inquiry, and with investigators in Washington and Baghdad, is to threaten to reduce U.S. funding for the U.N., specifically the United States’ assessed contribution. In particular, the U.S. should target funds going to the U.N. Secretariat, the political arm of the U.N. system, that had responsibility for overseeing the Oil-for-Food program.

That might get their attention.

KNOW A BLOGGER WHO DESERVES MORE ATTENTION? That’s what the celebrating the underblog approach is all about.

NORM GERAS notes that another anti-war pundit has admitted she hoped for failure in Iraq, regardless of the cost to Iraqis. (“I am ashamed to admit that there have been times when I wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson. On Monday I found myself again hoping that this handover proves a failure because it has been orchestrated by the Americans.”) But at least Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has the grace to be ashamed.

Fortunately, Iraqis — even Iraqis interviewed by the BBC — seem to think it has all been worth it. Even Iraqi communists are praising Paul Bremer. Will Western pundits follow this lead? . . .

UPDATE: Interesting observations from the pro-liberation lefties at Harry’s Place: “There really isn’t any kind of sensible response to barely-contained nihilism like this. So I’ll tiptoe away and leave Ms. Alibhai-Brown to struggle with her anti-American demons, once again shaking my head at what her segment of the Left has come to represent.”

It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to see these folks wishing to see the other side taught a lesson now and then?

MORE: More discussion here.

RALF GOERGENS emailed me, upset that I hadn’t responded to an earlier email of his. I had just missed it. Sorry — even a year ago I was kind of keeping afloat, but I’m getting more and more email and now if I’m offline for even a few hours I get hopelessly behind. Usually when people email me angrily about missed emails I just refer ’em to what I say in the FAQs (if I reply at all) but Ralf was actually pointing to a post saying that an item I linked to on German media was way overblown. Anyway, there’s an interesting discussion there in the comments between Ralf and Medienkritik’s David Kaspar, so go read it.

In general, to help minimize this problem, if you’re correcting a factual error, please put something in the subject line — like ERROR CORRECTION — to make that clear. Note that opinions with which you disagree do not constitute factual errors. . . .

DEREK LOWE TAKES ON physician payola in the pharmaceutical industry. This seems quite sleazy to me.

DARFUR UPDATE: James Moore has a roundup on Colin Powell’s visit to the Sudan.

JACQUES CHIRAC’S SOPHISTICATED DIPLOMACY:

Britain has concluded that its three-nation alliance with France and Germany is in effect over after a series of rows between Tony Blair and the French President, Jacques Chirac.

Ministers believe President Chirac has become impossible to work with, and one government source described him as a “rogue elephant”. The strategy of “trilateralism” has now given way to limited ad hoc co-operation on specific issues. . . .

The UK believes M. Chirac is lashing out from a position of weakness and is playing to a domestic audience.

The Government sees the appointment of Mr Barroso as an important turning point because it proved the French and Germans could not push through their choice of Commission president. The end of trilateralism will come as a relief to many smaller European nations, which feared the three most powerful countries in the EU would set up a directoire.

It seems that arrogant unilateralism isn’t paying off for Chirac. Perhaps he should have worked harder to build a coalition with Britain and smaller European nations — like George W. Bush did on Iraq!

MICKEY KAUS on this bizarre election:

In the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, “just 57 percent of the respondents say they know a lot or a fair amount about Kerry,” reports NBC’s Mark Murray. That’s “a real drop from 68 percent in the NBC/Journal March survey.” The voters actually know less about Kerry the more the campaign progresses. It’s working! At this impressive rate of memory loss, most of the electorate won’t even recognize Kerry’s name on the Nov. 2 ballot.

Kaus thinks this is Kerry’s strategy. Hey, it just might work!

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Jeff Jarvis.

If this strategy does work, I think it will be terrible for the Democrats long-term. As I’ve written before, if Kerry’s elected solely on an anti-Bush vote, he’ll have no mandate, and no base of support. He be Carterized and weak. Jimmy Carter’s Presidency begat Ronald Reagan’s, and politics haven’t been the same for the Democrats since. Would the Dems have been better off losing in 1976? Quite possibly. Or at least electing someone who stood for something, and had the force of character to govern effectively. The country would have been better off, too — and we can’t afford a Carterized presidency right now. Kerry needs to get out and campaign for something, not hide out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Reece has further thoughts:

By allowing the media and the radical fringe elements of the left to act as his proxies, Kerry has done two things: he has surrendered control over his message (something Clinton would never have done), and he has set George Bush up to claim a mandate should he win re-election. The reason Bush can claim a mandate is fairly simple: his is the only coherent, and wide-ranging “worldview” which is being articulated in this campaign. Everything else is a reaction to and a criticism of that worldview. Should Bush win, even by a relatively narrow margin, I think he can claim that it is vindication of his policies, especially in light of all of the incredibly negative media treatment he has received in the past year. This is dangerous for the Democrats because it leaves them marginalized in the marketplace of ideas (a place with which they should be all too familiar) and politically, and it is less than healthy for the country because Bush’s policies need to be challenged and debated on the merits. I happen to agree with many of Bush’s policies, but a challenge and debate of those policies and how they have been implemented is sorely needed given the times which we face. Sadly, the “hate Bush” campaign of Kerry and the Democrats cannot and will not give us such a debate.

I think that’s right.

And I think it’s risky when your strategy involves echoing Saddam by saying “the real villain is Bush.”

DAVID BROOKS makes Michael Moore look terrible through the simple expedient of quoting him. “The standards of socially acceptable liberal opinion have shifted. We’re a long way from John Dewey.” Heck, as Andrew Ferguson notes, they’ve changed since the Clinton years.

Meanwhile, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball do some more Michael Moore fact-checking.

And filmmaker Michael Wilson is experiencing a “bidding war” for his film responding to Moore.

UPDATE: On the other hand, in a spot of good news for Moore, the Hardy & Clarke book has fallen to number four on Amazon.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Holding steady at #4! Meanwhile, Blogcritics has a roundup of reviews good and bad. But the Fahrenheit 9/11 review from Ellen Goodman is pretty negative:

Not even this alto believes that the Iraq war was brought to us courtesy of the Bush-Saudi oil-money connection. Not even the rosiest pair of my retro-spectacles sees prewar Iraq as a happy valley where little children flew kites.

Read the whole thing.

MORE: Daniel Drezner observes that Moore has hired Chris Lehane, and predicts disaster. Meanwhile Dave Kopel lists “Fifty-six Deceits” in Moore’s movie.

STILL MORE: Several readers remind me of this remark from Kos: “Lehane is an asshole.”

LORD OF THE RINGS: The Cassini spacecraft is now in orbit around Saturn:

The first images from Cassini’s close encounter with the rings were expected sometime Thursday morning, along with data on the spacecraft’s performance.

Putting the first spacecraft into orbit around Saturn marked another major success this year for NASA, which has had two rovers operating on Mars since January and has a spacecraft heading home with samples from a comet encounter.

And NASA needs a good year.

ABSOLUTELY MY LAST POST FOR A WHILE ON AGING: Over at GlennReynolds.com.

PEACE THROUGH S.U.V.’s: Well, it’s a bold approach. . .

ALLAWI 1, BROKAW 0: Why, oh, why, can’t we have decent news media?

HARDY AND CLARKE’S BOOK ON MICHAEL MOORE is now up to number three on Amazon.

BEATS ME: Reader Michael Greenspan emails:

What I find most interesting about the column by John Keegan is its contrast with Michael Rubin’s piece on NRO a few days ago. Keegan writes that “the American occupiers should not have dissolved the Iraqi army or police or civil administration, whatever the number of Ba’ath Party members they contain.” Rubin writes that “[t]he failure of the Fallujah experiment undercuts the conventional wisdom that Bremer erred with his decision to dissolve the Iraqi military.” I’ve long felt vaguely that I should have an opinion on this sort of issue, but I don’t. Plain disagreement between two smart, experienced supporters reassures me that I’m right to keep out of it. If an expert can be undeniably wrong — and either Rubin or Keegan must be — how can I possibly know what should be done?

Yes. It’s hard to know about that sort of thing — especially when, as we’ve seen, the information that we get out of Iraq is fragmentary and often unreliable. In this regard, William Safire’s column on the dangers of certitude is well worth reading. We can be certain about principles; about tactics, and even strategies, we have to make our best guess.

THIS WEEK’S Carnival of the Vanities is up. Don’t miss it.

MORE ON DARFUR:

The US and other international actors have called on Sudan to rein in the Arab “Janjaweed” militias responsible and to provide security for the displaced. This is the political equivalent of imploring the fox to guard the henhouse. The Sudanese government has been directly involved in the killings. And it has a long history of sponsoring local militias to destabilize regions of the country and, for that matter, neighboring African countries, with which it is at odds. This “outsourcing” of military operations provides the government a low-cost and plausibly deniable device for advancing its political aims. Counting on the government to ensure the security of a population it wants to exterminate is reminiscent of recent government-sponsored pogroms in Kosovo, Kurdish northern Iraq after the Gulf War, and East Timor.

The upshot: by the predatory and abusive violation of its citizens, the dictatorial government of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, like those of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, has relinquished its claims of sovereignty in Darfur.

Read the whole thing. (Via Passion of the Present).

UPDATE: Then there’s this report:

Arab militiamen in Sudan use rape as weapon
‘We want to make a light baby,’ woman says fighter told her

“They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, ‘Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,’ ” said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from a where a whip struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. “They said, ‘You get out of this area and leave the child when it’s made.’ ” . . .

In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child’s ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.

Strange that Kofi Annan is unwilling to call this genocide.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Moore has satellite images “consistent with ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide.”

HILLARY AS VP? I’m hearing that again, though I’m skeptical. Personally, I’d rather see her at the top of the ticket. I told you that the war on terror is my number one issue, and I think she’d be tougher than Kerry. She certainly has been so far.

UPDATE: Hmm. She’s certainly photographing well these days!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some people are less enthusiastic than me regarding a Hillary candidacy.

THE HARDY/CLARKE BOOK on Michael Moore is now up to #5 on Amazon.

Bill Clinton’s book is still #1 though — but maybe he should be getting nervous. . . .

WILL BAUDE writes on Scalia and Thomas, in The New Republic.

IN THE MAIL: Two interesting books. One (nicely inscribed) is Joe Trippi’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, The Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, and the other, coincidentally, is L. Brent Bozell’s Weapons of Mass Distortion : The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media. Though there are differences (they come from — obviously — different political directions) in a way they’re talking about the same thing, which is how information gatekeepers are losing their hold, and how that’s good for democracy.

I think they’re right, and I think that trying to force the changes brought by the communications revolution into an old-fashioned left/right mode, though understandable in an election year, makes little sense. To quote from BT (who thinks the revolution will be televised):

The revolution will be fought in all forms of media

The revolution will be fought on phone lines and cable modems and cellphones

The revolution will be a war of attrition, against the great dumbing down of our people.

Attrition, indeed. I suspect that Bozell and Trippi agree on that, and — based on a quick look at the books — a lot of other things. (I can’t find this song online, but it’s on this collection that I was just listening to in the car the other day). Left/Right, Democrat/Republican — that stuff’s important (sometimes) in the short run, but the overall changes are much bigger than that.

CLAUDIA ROSETT:

“Let freedom reign,” wrote President Bush as Iraq regained sovereignty Monday.

“Today, the secretary-general welcomes the state of Iraq back into the family of independent and sovereign nations,” said a United Nations statement.

In the gap between those two statements, you can see the world of difference that lies between the U.S. and the U.N. in approaching the worst troubles of our time. For America, and Mr. Bush, the struggles now upon us are basically about freedom, and rule of, by and for the people. For the U.N., and Mr. Annan, it is all about paternalism, consensus, family. And I’m sorry to say that the family that springs first to mind has a lot less to do with Gramps, Grandma and the kids than with the Mafia clan of TV fiction fame, the Sopranos.

Close, but no cigar. Actually, I think it’s more like this family:

The former underboss of the Bonanno crime family yesterday detailed the murders of three capos — allegedly orchestrated by his brother-in-law and boss, Joseph Massino — that called for him and a team of masked hit men to burst from a closet in a social club, armed with of pistols and a machine gun, to carry out the slayings.

But turncoat Salvatore “Good Looking Sal” Vitale admitted his job was marginalized to simply “guarding the door” with his tommy gun after he goofed up and hit the trigger as the thugs were setting up, spraying a wall with gunfire.

Criminal, and dangerous in a way, but not terribly competent.

UPDATE: Yes, it’s the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. “Five years after international armed intervention and UN administration, Kosovo doesn’t even have an effective police force, and no one wants to speculate on its ‘final status.’ This past March, as ethnic violence flared up again and Albanians attacked Serb homes, businesses and churches (a reversal of 1999’s violence), UN ‘peacekeeping’ forces essentially stood by and allowed mobs to continue their destruction. ”

NEOCONS PLAN IRAQ INVASION BEFORE 9/11! Reader Thad McArthur points to an interesting bit from the John Keegan article I linked earlier:

The plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom began to be drawn up as early as 1995, when Saddam’s combination of deviousness and intransigence persuaded Washington that it might not be possible to avoid a military confrontation if his determination to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction were to be quashed.

The Clinton Administration: Just another set of marionettes for the Evil Neocon Puppetmasters!

ANDREW SULLIVAN: “Sometimes you don’t need Michael Moore connecting the dots, do you?”

TOM MAGUIRE has interesting stuff. Just keep scrolling.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up. Enjoy the business- and econo-blogging from all sorts of folks.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has lots of interesting stuff, including a hot new publicity photo.

DAVID HARDY AND JASON CLARKE’S NEW BOOK ON MICHAEL MOORE is now up to #8 on Amazon.

UPDATE: Blogosphereans may be interested to know that it features chapters by Tim Blair and Andrew Sullivan.

DARFUR UPDATE: I’m not all that surprised to read this:

EL FASHER, Sudan (Reuters) – The Sudanese government has disappointed Secretary of State Colin Powell in talks on the crisis in the troubled western region of Darfur, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.

Powell, on the second day of a visit to Sudan, arrived in Darfur Wednesday for a first-hand look at some of the million people displaced by marauding Arab militias in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. . . .

“They are in a state of denial. They are in a state of avoidance. They are trying to obfuscate and avoid any consequences,” said the official, who asked not to be named.

More here:

Human rights campaigners accuse Sudan’s pro-government Arab militia of carrying out genocide against black African residents of the Darfur region.
They are accused of forcing some one million people from their homes and killing at least 10,000.

Many thousands more are at risk of starving due to a lack of food in the camps where they have fled.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has refused to use the term genocide, which would carry a legal obligation to act.

But of course.

UPDATE: Stephen Manning emails that there’s a double standard here:

Imagine, if you will, that Sudan is actually a Catholic country and marauding Catholic militia were raiding, say, Muslim blacks in the region, murdering and reducing them to slavery. It might be imagineable a couple hundred years ago, but now it would be unthinkable. And the uproar would make the planet deaf. Islam is the Religion of Peace. Yeah.

And where are the fatwa’s against this behavior? If people don’t think the war on terror is not about a serious structural problem with the religion of Islam, they are living in PC paradise, where only white males can be bad.

Well, sort of. In fact, both the victims and the perpetrators here are Muslim. And the perpetrators are white (Arabs) while the victims are black. I suspect that the real reason for the world’s disinterest is that nobody’s figured out a way to blame the United States, or Israel.

Some people, however, are noting the hypocrisy.

More thoughts here.

THOUGHTS ON THE WAR, over at GlennReynolds.com. Where the John Kerry campaign is advertising!

BLACKFIVE WRITES that journalists are making fools of themselves via their ignorance of things military:

The military is not calling back discharged and retired individual soldiers. They are dipping into the Individual Ready Reserve. There is a big difference between calling up IRR soldiers and recalling retired or discharged soldiers.

When you sign a contract to enlist or get a commission, it is generally for EIGHT years. You perform four years of Active Duy, then you have four left in the Reserves or National Guard.

He dissects a number of stories that get it wrong. You know, this kind of thing might have been excusable before, but we’ve been at war for going on three years. You’d think somebody would have bothered to learn this stuff.

UPDATE: Here’s a related post from SgtStryker.com.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rob Matteo emails:

Kudos for your post from Blackfive and Sgt. Stryker. I am a retired Army Officer and the minute I started hearing the reports of a “backdoor draft” etc. I knew that once again, the press has no clue on all things military. Any soldier would know there is a huge difference.

How is it possible that there is no editor or writer who has ever served in the miltary? Not very representative of our society I’d say.

They’ve got a diversity problem.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Shaun Evans emails:

It is bad that no journalists have served in the military. But it is
inexecusable to go to press with a story that could have been corrected
with a 15 second google search (including typing the query): Link

Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), a manpower pool in the Ready Reserve,
primarily consists of: Individuals who have had training, have served
previously in the Active component or the Selected Reserve, and have
some period of a military obligation remaining. IRR members are in an
active status, but do not perform regularly scheduled training.

Indeed. It’s almost like they want to get it wrong. Meanwhile Dan Williams emails that the confusion is widespread:

It’s not just the media getting it wrong. Teachers and parents are taking in the info and passing it to teens. I’m a scout master and deal with a lot of teen boys. Many seem to be convinced that the draft is coming back and the Bush admin is going to draft them all into the military.

I try to explain the politics to them when I get the chance, but it’s far more complex than they expect politics to be.

Charles Rangel with his Draft bill ain’t a Bushie.

And everybody’s happy about that, at least . . . .

THE LAST IN MY series of TechCentralStation columns on aging is up.

THE HATRED JUST GETS WORSE. (Via Petrelis, via Sullivan).

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DISCOVERS Iraq’s Greg Packer. Or something like that, though this is probably unfair to Greg Packer.

ADDED SOME NEW PHOTOS over at the Exposure Manager site — both new stuff in the Tennessee Backroads gallery, and an entire new gallery of thematic stuff. I’m still way behind in reviewing and processing (via PhotoShop) images I’ve already taken.

Not all the photos are as pretty as some I’ve posted before, but they’re more in accordance with the Walker Evansish style that characterized my work some years ago.

And for those who wonder, I remain very happy with the Nikon D70. It’s hard to get a bad picture with that camera, though I’ve risen to the challenge from time to time. . .

EVAN COYNE MALONEY has a new video online. As always, it’s worth watching.

MY COLLEAGUE TOM PLANK emails this link to an article by John Keegan and comments: “I served with D Co., 1st Bn, 7th Marines, 1 MarDiv, in Vietnam. I was proud to read this. If I were a 21-yr old college grad (now and earlier with Afghanistan), I would sign up again.”

AMBER TAYLOR is trying to get International Kissing Day to take off in the United States.

It’s next Tuesday, so start warming up those lips.

UPDATE: I like this observation, from Amber’s comments:

Y’know, if we can get a national “Talk Like A Pirate Day”, we should be able to get a Kissing Day. It would be really amusing if we could get one of the two days to rotate in such a fashion that every once in a while they would overlap. Then again, “Kiss me, you scurvy wench!” might be a deal breaker for many a young lady…

Some, on the other hand, might like it.

KERRY CROSSES A PICKET LINE? Northwestern Univ. Law Professor James Lindgren sends this email:

As the New York Times reported yesterday, John Kerry refused to cross a picket line on Monday in Boston to speak to the National Conference of Mayors. He was quoted as saying on Sunday night: “‘I don’t cross picket lines,’ he said. ‘I never have.'”

Yet this morning (Tuesday) in Chicago Kerry spoke at the annual meeting of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, which was being very actively picketed by a labor group, Voices of Morality (VOM). VOM is leading a labor discrimination protest against Daimler-Chrysler (the signs that the picketers were holding looked very much like ones in pictures on the VOM website). Jackson and the PUSH conference were being targeted because, according to a local Chicago ABC TV news report, Jackson has ties to Daimler-Chrysler. The reporter referred to the PUSH coalition conference as one on “labor,” but neither the official text of the Kerry speech nor the PUSH website lists that as the topic of the conference, though of course PUSH is best known nationally for its labor activities–picketing corporations and negotiating financial deals with them.

I just watched the 11:30am ABC-Channel 7 (Chicago) coverage of Kerry’s speech and the protest. The pickets were obvious and clear and were mentioned more than once in the report, but there was no specific mention in the report how Kerry entered the hotel where the conference was being held, whether pickets were present when he entered the hotel, or whether he or his staff knew of the labor picketing going on.

I hope that the NY Times and the rest of the press following Kerry will sort out the facts of this tantalizing story. Perhaps they might determine whether:

1. Kerry changed his mind since Sunday night and now does cross picket lines if the stakes are high enough (which would let mayors understand where they rate).

OR

2. Kerry always believed in crossing some picket lines (treating some sorts of labor picketing as different from others, a defensible position but one that would be inconsistent with his Sunday statement that he doesn’t cross picket lines).

OR

3. Neither Kerry nor his staff was aware of the labor protest and picketing (either because it appeared after they arrived at the hotel or some other reason), in which case Kerry should answer whether he made an understandable and regrettable mistake in appearing at a conference being picketed over labor issues.

LINKS:

Kerry speaking at PUSH:
Link 1
Link 2

PUSH website:
Link

VOM website:
Link

I hope someone in Chicago will look into this. It sounds like news.

UPDATE: Nothing in this story about the picket line, but it was a panderthon!

ANOTHER UPDATE: More questions. Greg Sanders emails about Boston:

Just a question, but what happens when the Democrats hold their Convention in Boston if the picket line is still there? Does Kerry cross it then and not support the labor side of the dispute? Do they move the convention so he does not have to cross a picket line? Do they (Democrats) convince the strikers to come to a temp agreement till the convention is over so that he does not have to cross a picket line? Or they (Democrats) just do not recognize it as a picket line but view them as a show of support from labor and well wishers at the convention (anyone can believe what they want)? Just thought I would ask.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I may have an answer via this email from reader Gerald Dearing:

For what it’s worth: Spent Monday in Boston. The buzz on the radio was that quite a few in the party were miffed that Kerry had “stiffed” the mayors. This was accompanied by speculation that there was a deal in place where the union would agree not to picket the Dem’s Convention if Kerry supported their stand now. No links, no proof. But it’s an interesting point: will Kerry refuse to cross a picket line if it means he fails to accept his own nomination?

Last I heard from Gerald he was stranded in Missoula with a blown supercharger, so I’m glad to get a report from Boston. This sounds interesting, anyway. And finally, reader Dave Farrell thinks he’s got the formula figured out:

I guess even John Kerry would find it difficult to straddle a picket line, although this is a stout effort. I think it works like scissors, paper, rock: picket line beats mayors, Jesse Jackson (“rainbow vote”) trumps picket line. Alas, how shameless politics is.

Indeed!

MICKEY KAUS busts the New York Times’ horserace coverage: “But the Times coverage isn’t really that bad. It’s worse!”

UPDATE: Brendan Loy responds to Kaus on Dem Panic. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to lose. Not because Bush is unbeatable — because we have a crappy candidate who can do no better than tying Bush when he’s at his absolute low-point. This is all Iowa’s fault.”

BACK FROM IRAQ, a Marine reservist comments on the press coverage.

HILLARY CLINTON: “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Hmm. Next she’ll be showing up on James Lileks’ doorstep.

UPDATE: A “gift” to Karl Rove? The Clinton conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this. . . .

AXIS OF EVIL:

UNITED NATIONS June 29, 2004 — The U.S. government has expelled two Iranian security guards working at Iran’s U.N. mission, citing activities “incompatible with their stated duties” diplomatic language for spying.

The guards were taking photos of infrastructure, modes of transportation and New York City landmarks, a U.S. official said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. They were the third set of Iranian guards caught taking pictures.

If anything happens in New York, we’ll know who to look at.

DARFUR UPDATE: Here’s a link-rich post on Colin Powell’s visit to the Sudan today, and on the Sudanese government’s effort to keep the lid on the ongoing Darfur genocide.

YOUR DONATIONS AT WORK: I’m sending this Pentax digital camera to Iraq along with my secretary, a Marine combat-engineer reservist who’s headed over there next week. It looks good for the duty: compact, waterproof (which I hope means dust-resistant), uses AA batteries and shoots video with sound. (The PayPal donation balance just about covered it.) He’s a bit of a photo/video geek, so I’m hoping he’ll send back some good stuff. If I get any, I’ll post it.

DAVID HARDY AND JASON CLARKE’S new book about Michael Moore went on sale today, and it’s already at #20 on Amazon. I got an advance copy last week, but the InstaWife immediately stole it. (She’s bad about that).

Just for the record, though, I don’t think that Moore is stupid.

CHIRAC, TURKEY, AND THE E.U.: Some interesting observations from George Miller.

UPDATE: EurSoc observes:

It is hard to believe that once upon a time, French was the language of diplomacy. . . . Bush, having seen Chirac explode when New European nations disagreed with him over the Iraq war (“they missed a good chance to shut up”) will not take it personally. When Chirac is in a corner, as he is so often these days, he lashes out. It is a sign he is beaten.

Ouch.

SPOONS THINKS I was too easy on Judge Guido Calabresi’s comparison of Bush to Mussolini and Hitler. It’s just that the statement was so out of character for him that it’s easy for me to believe he didn’t mean for it to come out that way. Of course, as Joel Engel notes, the Mussolini comparison would better fit someone besides Bush:

Mussolini stood on street corners and shouted that Italy’s war with Turkey and its 1911 invasion of Libya were an imperial grab meant to distract the people from their hunger. He organized and led protests, some of them violent, and was jailed. That made him a martyr and, when he was released, a hero of the left. As a reward, Avanti, the newspaper of Italy’s socialist party, named him editor. This was where he earned a national reputation, for his nasty editorials against the government. He was a socialist, not an anarchist, but he also showed contempt for democracy, believing that most people were too stupid to know what was in their own best interests and that they were anyway too ignorant to choose their own best leaders.

Hmm. That doesn’t sound much like Bush.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has posted the text of Calabresi’s apology letter.

NEWS FROM SYRIA: “After four years of Bashar al-Assad’s presidency in Syria, his promises of economic and political reform have not materialised. The system he inherited from his father, including a feared security service, looks very much the same.” Someone tell the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Oh, wait. . .

DAN KENNEDY: “Get ready for the next John Kerry media feeding frenzy. Following the court-ordered release of Illinois Republican Senate candidate (make that former candidate) Jack Ryan’s seamy divorce papers, anti-Kerry forces are now demanding the same treatment for Kerry and his first wife, Julia Thorne.”

I agree with Kennedy’s take on this: “If Ryan and his ex-wife wanted their sealed records to remain sealed, that should have been respected. Voters should have been trusted to make what they would of the Ryans’ refusal to go public. Same with Kerry and Thorne.”

I’m also pretty sure it won’t work out that way.

JOHN KEEGAN ON THE IRAQ WAR:

But, however many witnesses to disaster Jon Snow succeeds in finding, witnesses willing to denounce their government and armed forces, he cannot alter the record. The war was conceived and conducted in the honest belief that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was legally justified by United Nations Security Council Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441. It was, moreover, as a military operation, astonishingly successful, probably the most successful war ever fought between a democracy and a dictatorship.

He’s somewhat less positive on the reconstruction.

BLOG CENSORSHIP IN SOUTH KOREA: Go here and keep scrolling. Unless you’re in South Korea, where it’s blocked. More here, and especially here.

If you’d like to register polite objections, go here.

COLIN POWELL is travelling to Darfur.

Human Rights Watch seems to want military action.

UPDATE: Here’s a report that the Sudanese government is trying to keep things quiet:

The Sudanese government dispatched 500 men last week to this sweltering camp of 40,000 near El Fashir, capital of North Darfur state, the refugees and aid workers said. The men, some dressed in civilian clothes, others in military uniforms, warned the refugees to keep quiet about their experiences when Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan visit the region this week.

Darfur has been the scene of more than 16 months of conflict between residents of the region and Arab militiamen backed by the government. Aid workers say 30,000 people have been killed by the militia and more than 1.2 million forced to flee their homes.

I guess it’s not working very well.

THERE ARE NOW 254 READER REVIEWS of Bill Clinton’s book. Skimming them is like rerunning the 1990s.