STUCK ON STUPID in East Timor.

BILL ROGGIO has made it to Afghanistan, and sends this report:

The good news is I’ve safely landed in Kabul. The somewhat bad news is the UN flight to Kandahar is booked, so I will head down there on Monday. But there is plenty to do in Kabul, and I’ve already dug around a little bit about the violence in the city yesterday after a US vehicle killed 1 to 3 Afghans during a traffic accident. The consensus among the folks I spoke to is the protests after the accident were staged by groups waiting for such an event to happen. I made the comparison to the reaction by some Islamist groups in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) after the Muhammad Cartoon riots, where the “spontaneous protests” were anything but. there was agreement on this point. I will likely post about this tonight or tomorrow.

I drove through the city twice today, and it is an interesting place. The city is scarred from decades of combat, however you can see people are working to rebuild. Shops are open, people and traffic are on the streets, and there are signs of new construction and rebuilding/repair projects. I saw several “land/title offices,” as well as signs for rooms for rent. Security is tight, and it seemed as if police were on every corner, no doubt a reaction to yesterday’s events. Unfortunately my camera was packed away, but I’ll get some shots tomorrow.

Stay tuned.

MORE TURMOIL IN IRAN: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

THE AUTOMATED DORM ROOM: Via Slashdot.

HARRY REID EMBARRASSED: “Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid accepted free ringside tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission to three professional boxing matches while that state agency was trying to influence him on federal regulation of boxing.”

This seems like small potatoes to me — you’d have to pay me to go to one of those things, though Reid feels differently (“I love the fights anyways, so it wasn’t like being punished”) — but it won’t help that “culture of corruption” offensive.

OWEN WEST FROM VETS FOR FREEDOM calls for an end to squabbling about the war in the New York Times. Read the whole thing. (Via Ann Althouse).

BLOGGING A TOBY KEITH CONCERT in Iraq.

UPDATE: And here’s another blog report from the same show.

LOADS OF EMAIL on the Google / Ask / Dogpile post below. Lots of people like Ask.com and Dogpile.com as Google alternatives. I should note that Ask has a sort-of competitor to Google News, too.

I still miss Jeeves, though.

UPDATE: And a couple of recommendations for Clusty.com, a search engine I’d never heard of before.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Google-vs-Ask comparison, here.

THE JAVA EARTHQUAKE NEWS just gets worse:

Homeless earthquake survivors living in rice fields and makeshift shacks begged for food and water under a blazing sun Monday as Indonesia’s death toll rose to over 5,000.

Soldiers began delivering bags of rice to village chiefs in the mountainous quake zone on the island of Java, but survivors called the aid meager and slow. The United Nations planned a global appeal, saying relief money was running low.

“We have 300 families in this village and have only gotten two sacks of rice,” said Lastri, 27, holding a 5-month-old. “It’s not enough.”

Indonesia’s Social Affairs Ministry raised the death toll to 5,137, saying some 800 bodies that were buried in mass graves immediately after the quake had just been counted. . . . The country also is battling a bird flu crisis and a spate of terror attacks by al-Qaida-linked Islamic militants.

Here’s a list of charities if you’d like to help.

IT’S A BEST AMERICAN NOVEL POLL over at Power Line.

BLAMING BLACK MAGIC for bird flu: “As their neighbors started dying, confusion and mistrust prompted villagers to stop cooperating with officials. Many refused to give blood samples, fearing they would later fall ill and suffer the fate of their neighbors. The case has been a powerful lesson for WHO officials in understanding the importance of early communication and education.”

MY POST YESTERDAY on Amazon’s new Bill Maher vehicle got a lot of negative email. I agree that Maher was a somewhat pedestrian choice, but I imagine the platform will broaden considerably in short order.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: “Since all efforts at commemoration are bound to fall short, one must be on guard against any attempt at overstatement. In particular, one must resist efforts to ventriloquize the dead. To me, Cindy Sheehan’s posthumous conscription of her son is as objectionable as Billy Graham’s claim, at the National Cathedral, that all the dead of Sept. 11, 2001 were now in paradise. In the first instance, we have no reason to believe that young Casey Sheehan would ever have supported MoveOn.org, and in the second instance we cannot be expected to believe that almost 3,000 New Yorkers all died in a state of grace. Nothing is more tasteless, when set against the reality of death, than the hollow note of demagogy and false sentiment. These things are also subject to unintended consequences. When Dalton Trumbo wrote his leftist antiwar classic ‘Johnnie Got His Gun,’ he little expected that it would be used as a propaganda tool by pro-fascist isolationists in the late 1930s, and that he would be protesting in vain that this was not what he had really meant.”

JONAH GOLDBERG ON GOOGLE: “It’s kind of sad. They change their homepage logo for all sorts of holidays and occasions. Just last week they paid tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday. But Memorial Day doesn’t seem to rate anything at all.”

UPDATE: A reader points out that one of Google’s competitors remembered:

ANOTHER UPDATE: DogPile gets a good review, too, from reader Rich Willis: “I switched to Dogpile.com as my search portal about a year ago. They let you use several search engines at once to grab searches from a variety of sources. After the last bit of ‘Googliganisms’ I removed google from my search tools in Dogpile. Thankfully, I read your blog daily, or I would have missed that Google today showed an unsurprising lack of respect for our armed forces, and for those of us who DO honor and respect them.”

It’s not a huge deal, but judging from my email it seems to be the last straw for a lot of people, coming after the China censorship deal, etc. As I warned earlier, Google seems to be engaged in a Dell-like squandering of its goodwill, which strikes me as very unwise given that goodwill is its biggest asset, really.

SOME MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHTS from Ben Stein.

UPDATE: See also this post from Phil Carter.

OVER AT CHICAGOBOYZ, something you can do in observance of Memorial Day. I just donated $100 myself.

HERE’S AN ASSOCIATED PRESS STORY on imprisoned Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel-Fattah:

The 24-year-old Abdel-Fattah’s blog, which he does with his wife Manal Hassan, has become one of the most popular pro-democracy voices in Egypt. He has continued writing despite being arrested in early May during a street demonstration in Cairo — part of a crackdown on reform activists by Egyptian security forces.

“We covered the walls of our cell with graffiti of our names and slogans and Web site addresses,” Abdel-Fattah wrote one time, referring to himself and fellow imprisoned activists. “We chanted and sang and the mood was great.” . . .

The duo call their blog Manalaa, a combination of their first names. Young, secular and anti-authoritarian, they link the blogosphere with a democracy movement demanding reform from President Hosni Mubarak, who has been in power longer than they have been alive.

Their blog, launched two years ago and written in a mixture of English and Arabic, is an Internet rallying point for activists in a nation where state-run media predominate and give little voice to reformers.

It posts announcements of planned demonstrations, political commentary, even photos — with names — of plainclothes security agents notorious for beating protesters. In March, the couple used their blog to organize a sit-in, where more than 100 protesters slept in a downtown Cairo square.

Read the whole thing, which suggests that the effort to silence Alaa has backfired. I’ve written more on the topic here, too. And Extreme Mortman has further thoughts on the freedom-blogging phenomenon:

On this Memorial Day, it’s thrilling and heartening to see the battle for democracy being fought on the Internet, not on bloody battlefields. Cheers to all blogging on the front lines.

Indeed.

SENSENBRENNER OPPOSES the “path to citizenship.”

I’VE HAD GOOD LUCK WITH MY DELLS. Doug Weinstein, not so much.

But he’s had worse trouble with Adaptec.