HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

CHALLENGING TIME to get its facts straight.

UPDATE: More: “Poor Mark Kukis, Time writer in Baghdad.”

REBECCA AGUILAR UPDATE: Writing in today’s Dallas Morning News, Aguilar supporter Mark Davis argues that suspension is enough punishment, and that dismissal is unwarranted. Read the whole thing.

LEARNING TO love the prosperous.

SCENT OF A FUHRER.

IN THE MAIL: S.M. Stirling’s Ice, Iron, and Gold.

THE ANBAR AWAKENING spreads to Taji.

UPDATE: Contagious cooperation.

FLYING THE CROWDED SKIES: “In the United States, airlines are making money despite delays and horrible service.” All I want is a JumpJet membership.

ERIC SCHEIE on last night’s debate. “I was a little surprised at Hillary’s lackluster performance.”

MEN AND MARRIAGE: It’s a new Ask Dr. Helen column!

VLADIMIR PUTIN: Dictator Doolittle.

NEXT WEEK I’LL BE SPEAKING at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, and it’s not too late to sign up.

Yeah, I know I said to remind me to avoid air travel, but I had already agreed to do this. Hope the flights are better this time . . . .

J.D. JOHANNES:

When was the last time you read in the newspaper or saw on TV the story of a successful mission?

Well, you are about to watch one now.

Video at the link.

OOPS:

Why is Rudy doing so well? People in the know used to think the rubes just didn’t realize Rudy has dressed in drag and once lived with 2 gay guys; they just remembered him as the star of that 9/11 show they saw on TV that one time.

But now it’s dawning on the pundits that Americans probably know all that stuff by now, so why isn’t Rudy sunk? They’re shuffling around for explanations.

Shuffling, indeed.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “Maintaining civilian control of the military is a two way street.”

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste senses a double bind here:

We’ve been told incessantly that we can’t advocate war unless we as individuals are willing to join the military and personally fight that same war. Otherwise we’re chickenhawks.

And now we’re told that members of the military are not permitted to express opinions in favor of the war. (Soldiers against the war like Scott Beauchamp, of course, are lauded even when it’s shown that they’re liars.)

Seems awfully . . . convenient.

THE NEW YORK TIMES figures out that we don’t have troops in Iran.

DEAN BARNETT: The Plucky Smart Kid With The Fatal Disease.

EARTHQUAKE BLOGGING from Ed Driscoll.

ALI ETERAZ: “The future of Islamic reform lies with post-Islamism – a recognition that politics rather than religion provides for welfare in this life.”

ROGER KIMBALL on the limits of openness. “The moral burden of the campaign (as distinct from its aim of benefiting its client) is not to encourage us to think more carefully about what it means to be a leader or follower, to be good or bad, to be trendy or traditional, but rather to blur the distinction between those contraries altogether. The aim is to short-circuit, not refine, our powers of discrimination. And the goal of that disruption is always at the expense of one side of the equation.”

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY: Intergalactic Hardball.

UPDATE: Ron Silver on Chris Matthews.

AT LEAST this bogus rape report won’t lead to the kind of problems that we saw at Duke.

OUCH: “Isn’t it sort of disappointing that one has to spend this much time telling journalists, and journalists’ most ardent supporters, why it is important that journalists don’t lie?”

CJR: What was CBS thinking? “I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be if some big-name blogger had done something like this. It would have been open season on the blogosphere, with lamentations over the amateurish, rule-free environment that blogs inhabit, with the mainstream media gleefully tisk-tisking over their misguided young cousins.”

ADVICE TO PROSPECTIVE LAW PROFESSORS: How to ace the job talk.