June 02, 2004

THOUGHTS ON AL QAEDA STRATEGY, or lack thereof, from Donald Sensing and The Belmont Club.

SOME INTERESTING STATS on the National Spelling Bee contestants. This one caught my eye:

Most spellers attend traditional public schools (179). The rest attend home schools (35), private schools (27), parochial (20) or charter schools (four).

That seems like a wildly disproportionate number in home schools. (And, if it isn't, well, that's news too.)

Speaking of the Spelling Bee, both Mr. Sun and Ed Cone have thoughts. And they're both big fans of Spellbound, the Spelling Bee documentary that I've mentioned before. (Here's a Brian Micklethwait post on the film.)

INSTAPUNDIT: The blog women love! But of course.

JESSE WALKER HAS more on low-power radio, including this: "college radio is coming to Afghanistan. Could zines and 7-inch indie labels be far behind?"

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

"Right now, our biggest problem is finding qualified people," said Larson, plant manager at Milwaukee N/C Machining in Fredonia.

On Tuesday, the Institute for Supply Management reported that its manufacturing employment index advanced in May for the seventh consecutive month with a 61.9 reading, the highest mark in 31 years.

Economists say the report from the Arizona-based group shows that the economy is rebounding - especially for the battered manufacturing sector.

I suppose there will be some people who will be disappointed, though.

JOANNE JACOBS: "Rosie the Riveter has trumped Patton."

SO NOW AMAZON IS SELLING industrial supplies and medical supplies? And, only somewhat less surprisingly, shoes. Soon there won't be anything that you can't buy from Amazon. Er, except for Heinz ketchup. Is that a political statement?

UNSCAM UPDATE: The finger-pointing begins:

The former head of the United Nations' oil-for-food program in Iraq says the Security Council prevented him from effectively administering the multibillion-dollar-a-year program that is now the focus of several inquiries into allegations of corruption and mismanagement. . . .

Mr. Sevan did not explain in his e-mail message how the Security Council had hampered him from effectively administering the sprawling program. But diplomats and United Nations officials said it was what one called "common knowledge" that member states were ignoring the widespread complaints about kickbacks and payoffs by Saddam Hussein's government so that their companies could continue being part of the lucrative program.

Read the whole thing. He also slams unnamed "pundits" for giving him a hard time.

UPDATE: Roger Simon is deeply unimpressed. "Now let me get this straight. Because Chalabi is probably guilty of various shenanigans, Mr. Sevan and his cronies at the UN did nothing wrong. Grade in logic: F. Blame Canada?.... No, blame Chalabi!"

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW IMPINGES ON THE CAMPAIGN:

In Tuesday's "cease and desist" letter, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth called on Kerry's campaign to stop what it said was the unauthorized use of the images of some of them in a 60-second biographical spot titled "Lifetime." The ad began running nationwide in early May.

Hmm. I don't think I like this.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has posted a legal analysis.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is writing in The New Republic:

The misplaced restraint of the past year is not true morality, but a sort of weird immorality that seeks to avoid ethical censure in the short term--the ever-present, 24-hour pulpit of global television that inflates a half-dozen inadvertent civilian casualties into Dresden and Hiroshima. But, in the long term, such complacency has left more moderate Iraqis to be targeted by ever more emboldened murderers.

He favors a more aggressive approach.

HERE'S A BLOG with cool embedded video of the Rolling thunder parade in Washington that I mentioned earlier.

STRATEGYPAGE offers a frontline report from Iraq.

MIKE RAPPAPORT is looking on the bright side.

UPDATE: Reader Elizabeth Mauro points to this passage ("American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of 'them' — a reference to an American — had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American was drunk.") and adds "I'm thinking Ted Kennedy."

Plausible, but far from certain. On a more serious note, the one thing I'm sure of is that we're not getting the whole story here, for good or for ill.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Patrick Belton has more questions on Chalabi.

HOW TO THINK about neuroethics: My TechCentralStation column is up.

ANOTHER U.N. SCANDAL: U.N. ambulances used by terrorists. "According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, senior UNRWA employee Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah confessed to using his official U.N. vehicle to bypass security and smuggle arms, explosives and terrorists to and from attacks. . . . Moreover, according to Rep. Smith, a UNRWA school hosted a Hamas rally by a key Hamas leader in July 2001 and another UNRWA employee praised homicide bombers, proclaiming: 'The road to Palestine passes through the blood of the fallen, and these fallen have written history with parts of their flesh and their bodies.'" There's a link to the video.

SUDAN UPDATE: Carroll Morse has more background on the horrific events there.

ROD DREHER in the Dallas Morning News:

We decided to search photo wire service archives for the past month, looking for images of U.S. soldiers engaged in helping Iraqis instead of shooting at them. We were startled to discover that the photo accompanying this text was the only image of its kind that moved on the wires in recent weeks. This newspaper's photo department told me that if news photographers aren't shooting those pictures, it's because media back home aren't interested in those stories.

Which justifies the reader complaints we've been hearing, does it not?

Jay Rosen is mentioned.

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT already, check out this interview with Matt Welch by Norm Geras.

SEAN HACKBARTH RESPONDS to my criticism of the Kerry / Ketchup business, below. He also comments in email:

Oh by far, Heinz is the best. Even if John Kerry were running Heinz
personally and pumping the company's profits into his campaign, I'd still
buy the stuff.

It's a classic American sauce. And full of healthy Lycopene!

UPDATE: But it gets no respect from Amazon! But as far as I'm concerned, it's a "gourmet food."

THIS IS KIND OF SAD: A gallery of photos you can't take in New York City anymore.

WONKETTE:

If being a single dork who's into policy means someone in D.C. is gay, it's a wonder that the orgy at the Washington Monthly stops long enough for them to get a magazine out.

Ouch.

UPDATE: Reader Frank Banecker emails: "Wonkette? Doesn't she strike you as a September 10th kind of babe?" Ouch, again.

June 01, 2004

HOWELL RAINES says that John Kerry must do better.

Ed Morrissey says that "Raines thinks that Americans are just too stupid to understand Kerry."

UPDATE: Reader Terry Notus thinks Raines has it backward:

In that Raines article in the Guardian you linked, he writes "As America's FIRST WAR-HERO candidate since John F Kennedy, he ought to be leading the national
discussion on what went wrong in Iraq."

You would think Howell Raines would have heard of George McGovern or at least George H.W. Bush, right?

You'd think.

OPENING THE GOLF GREENS IN KABUL: Cool story.

HERE'S AN INTERESTING PHOTO GALLERY BY A FEMALE SOLDIER IN IRAQ: It's worth a look. (Via Bill Hobbs.)

Sissy Willis has comments.

PROF. BAINBRIDGE has a very interesting post on the relationship between martial virtues and civic virtues.

BUSY TODAY doing yardwork for the InstaMom. Cleaned gutters, caulked, cut down several trees (a couple were big enough to merit an axe -- well, they merited a chainsaw, but what I had was an axe, but at least I felt manly while swinging it), etc. Back later.

IT'S AN ARTICLE OF FAITH among many war critics that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. I'd be interested in hearing what those people have to say about Stephen Hayes' new book, The Connection : How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. He's doing some of that dot-connecting that people are, in other contexts, so enthusiastic about.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's one response, but I don't find it dreadfully persuasive due to the high straw-man quotient. The United States abandoned the war on Al Qaeda?

SPIRIT OF AMERICA is trying to upgrade its activities. Jeff Jarvis has some thoughts on how, and why, you should help.

You should also read this column by Dan Gillmor, who's antiwar but pro-Spirit of America, and here's an announcement that Armed Liberal (Marc Danziger) has forsaken anonymity to take a job as Spirit of America's Chief Operating Officer.

NOAM SCHEIBER IS WITTY AND ENTHUSIASTIC, and expects to be properly rewarded.

Mickey Kaus, however, thinks he's expecting too much.

OSAMA'S WORST NIGHTMARE, via Pseudopsalms.

He wouldn't like this, either. (Second link NSFW).

FRIDA GHITIS writes on Amnesty International in The New Republic: "In fact, it could be argued that one of the most serious emerging threats to human rights today is Amnesty's decision to spend a disproportionate share of its limited resources attacking the United States--at the opportunity cost of focusing attention on governments that are slaughtering, enslaving, torturing, and imprisoning millions of people around the world."

Perhaps they should address a bit more effort to this situation.

"EVERY WAR WITH FASCISM IS OUR BUSINESS:" An interesting interview with the sole survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. "Those who say that you don't have to fight for freedom, don't understand what fascism is. I do." Read the whole thing.

I USUALLY LEAVE TENNESSEE POLITICS to Bill Hobbs and others who make it their specialty. But via Doug "InstaLawyer" Weinstein, here's a report on how Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen has angered the Trial Lawyers with a new Workers' Compensation bill. He had a lot of support from them last time around, but it looks like they'll be less enthusiastic next time.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ:

THE GENEVA Conventions are so outdated and are written so broadly that they have become a sword used by terrorists to kill civilians, rather than a shield to protect civilians from terrorists. These international laws have become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

I think that a rethinking of the laws of war is probably in order. The Geneva Conventions have acquired a quasi-mystical status in the minds of some (most of whom haven't actually read them), but they're merely another set of international agreements, and the world has changed rather a lot since they were adopted. In addition, I don't believe that the United States has fought a single war since World War II in which our enemy was honoring the Conventions.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I wonder how many Americans are like me in learning everything we know about the 'Geneva conventions' from the TV show, Hogan's Heroes. Do you remember how Col. Hogan could reduce the camp commander Col. Klink to a quivering mess by threatening to report him for 'violations to the Geneva conventions?' In retrospect, I doubt they had that much power. Anyhow, I'm wondering if Hogan's Heroes has a great part in the seemingly mystical understanding lots of people have about them?

Good point.

A SAD CONCLUSION to the Eurofighter debacle.

May 31, 2004

GERARD HENDERSON: On the anniversary of D-Day, the French have "much to be humble about."

SEAN HACKBARTH'S THE AMERICAN MIND is a good weblog, and its regular Kerry feature is okay. But -- and I don't mean to single out Sean in this -- I'm tired of the ketchup stuff.

Yes, Kerry's married to the Heinz heiress. And some people think it's funny to associate him with a condiment. But Heinz Ketchup is an American treasure. Kerry should be proud to be associated with it, and Kerry's critics aren't diminishing him by making that association.

Oh, Hunt's is OK, and Del Monte has its charms. The off-brand Paramount "Oyster Hot" is really good. But Heinz is the Ketchup Reference Standard. It's the uber-Ketchup. So please stop dissing it in a lame attempt to make Kerry look bad.

VARIOUS READERS HAVE REQUESTED MORE CATBLOGGING: I took this picture of Nicholas on Friday, but didn't want to get into the Kevin Drum groove. But, since people insist. . . .

He and my 9-month-old nephew, who went back home with his dad today, were playing a game. Nicholas would sit in the grass until the baby achieved contact, then move a few feet away, staying well within crawling range, and wait, repeating the move as needed. Both seemed to enjoy the process.

UPDATE: More catblogging here.

MARK STEYN'S MEMORIAL DAY COLUMN: "They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. . . . Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America."

READER JED KANE sends this update from Washington, along with a couple of photos:

I went to the Rolling Thunder Memorial Day 2004 ride in DC Sunday. The group is made up of mostly Vietnam vets, and the ride is to raise awareness of the POW/MIA issue, as well as to honor vets. The group's leader's paid a visit to President Bush via Harley and presented him with a Rolling Thunder tee-shirt. This group has endorsed Bush over Kerry, a significant action given their membership.

Here's a link to the Washington Post article (registration required).

Note paragraphs 9 through 11.

While the bike adornments were mostly apolitical, I shot these examples of how these folks view John Kerry.

Kane is certainly right that there's a lot of anti-Kerry sentiment mentioned in the Post article, entirely consistent with these photographs. And this suggests -- as I've mentioned before -- that Kerry has been mistaken to play up the Vietnam angle so much.

UPDATE: Well, this explains it. Look who was attending.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Chong-Ren Chien emails:

Hey, saw your story on Rolling Thunder and I figure I would contribute a couple of pictures your way. Hope you like them.

The first picture was shot while I was pulling up to the stop light in Alexandria, VA. The slogans on the truck were priceless so I pulled out my digital camera and took a shot.

The second one is with me with a couple of Vietnam vets. They were hanging out at the WWII memorial when I noticed them. I decided to approach them and ask for a picture and they obliged.

Thanks Chong! Here they are.

WILLIAM SAFIRE'S Memorial Day column is worth reading.

RADLEY BALKO IS taking on the food bluenoses in Time. "If you aren't responsible for what you put into your mouth, chew and swallow, what's left that you are responsible for?"

DEAN DATA UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla reports that the Dean user data weren't sold -- they were just given away. "I had assumed that Deanlink data was indeed private, and when I registered there was no indication in their privacy statement that I was putting myself on an open database accessible by unprotected feeds. At the very least, DFA had a duty to share the details of how Deanlink operated with more transparency."

CAPT. ED says that the new Libertarian Party presidential nominee is a disaster who thinks Congress works for the President. But Al Barger likes him: "Badnarik's not much of a politician- but I don't care, and don't think it'll hurt us."

UPDATE: More thoughts at Catallarchy.

BLOGS' IMPACT ON BIG MEDIA: An interesting column by Mark Glaser in the Online Journalism Review. And here's a lengthier article on the same topic by Rachel Smolkin in the American Journalism Review.

But am I really a "moody maestro?" I think I'm pretty even-tempered. At least by Internet standards!

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has survey data on which blogs are read by Big Media folks. And Jeff Jarvis has some related stuff. And this John Leo column relates to a hypothesis offered by Drezner.

ALPHECCA has a Memorial Day photo essay up.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen has Memorial Day thoughts. More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Quinton rounds up Memorial Day posts from around the blogosphere.

And here's a comprehensive guide on how to support the troops -- from all the Coalition countries, not just America -- presented by Winds of Change.

MORE: Gerard van der Leun has a moving post on the name on the stone.

CAPITALISTS DON'T TAKE HOLIDAYS: Or, at least, this week's Carnival of the Capitalists is up, despite the holiday.

UPDATE: A reader from Sullivan & Cromwell emails (from the office, natch) that capitalists don't take holidays -- and neither do their lawyers! How well I remember. . . .

THIS WEEK'S IRAQI BLOG ROUNDUP, The Carnival of the Liberated is up. As always, it's well worth reading. Read this, too.

MORE NEWS FROM THE SUDAN:

Arab militia use 'rape camps' for ethnic cleansing of Sudan

In Darfur, Sudan's western-most region, the people remain untouched by last week's peace agreement signed between the country's Islamic government and Christian rebels. Sudanese soldiers and the government-backed Janjaweed militia still terrorise, and at the centre of their campaign of "ethnic cleansing" is a policy of systematic rape designed to drive civilians from their settlements.

And yet Sudan is on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and nobody seems to care much about what's happening in Darfur. Can't we send these people guns, or something?

UPDATE: Tacitus has thoughts on what's going on, and what should be done.

ROGER SIMON ON TOM FRIEDMAN: An interesting post.

SOME MEMORIAL DAY PHOTOGRAPHY: Here's a gallery of photos from the World War II Memorial in Washington. Here's a gallery -- and here's another -- from two different photographers at the Moffett Field Air Show. And here's a collection of Fleet Week images.

Lileks has one, too.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: "Personally, I owe my own life to the Army and the smell of coffee, but to be more like my mother, I shouldn't tell it as a personal story: There was a war. People did what had to be done."

Mudville Gazette has a collection of milblog Memorial Day links. Check 'em out.

And go read this Memorial Day request from CPT Patti. If you can help, do.

May 30, 2004

INSTAPUNDIT'S AFGHANISTAN PHOTO-CORRESPONDENT, Major John Tammes, sends this photo and reports:

I have attached a photo of one of our staff here at Bagram. Squadron Leader Richard Langley of the RAF Regiment (how non-unilateral of us, yes?). It is people like him that are helping make this unfortunate land a better place.

He also sends this:

I never thought in the course of my military career I would hear myself asking any of the following questions: "Hand-bombs? You mean grenades? OK, where did you put them?" or "Did the FBI come by and ask you about toilets yet?"

The first set of questions was to an employee (of East European extraction) of a contractor who told me he had found three "hand bombs" under a sandbag. I asked him where he put them, and after a merry little chase that led to three different people, I found them. The EOD (bomb squad) cleared that little mess up...

The second question was me asking a manager of the same contractor if some FBI agents based here had manage to get in touch with him about a little plumbing support. As soon as I uttered those words, and realized how odd they sounded, both the manager and I were laughing.

Sometimes I just shake my head in wonder here.....

Thanks, Major. And happy Memorial Day.

WAS IT ALL A SET-UP? Surely not. On the other hand, SayUncle is suspicious, too.

OUTSTANDING DEVELOPMENT in Europe!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse thinks that these figures are inflated.

U.S. NEWS: "Having overestimated his support, radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr backs down." Read the whole thing, especially the final paragraph.

I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GO TO BURNING MAN, and my brother and I even talked about it a few years ago. But the closest I'll ever get is probably Brian Doherty's new book, This is Burning Man, which tells the interesting story of how the festival came about and what lessons have been learned. (One is that pure anarchism only takes you so far.)

If, like me, you're not likely to make it out there this year, you might like this book (which for some reason also showed up in my mail a while back): Drama in the Desert, a photo essay, with accompanying DVD, from Burning Man. I watched the DVD; it's pretty cool.

SGT. STRYKER thinks that the political conventions should be more like science fiction conventions. I agree.

DAVID ADESNIK LOOKS AT a new poll from Iraq and pronounces it good news. Iraqis don't like the CPA much, and they'd like to end the occupation, but they think that things are getting better and want democracy.

MARK STEYN:

It is already worth it for Iraq. There are more than 8,000 towns and villages in the country. If the much predicted civil war had erupted in any of 'em, you'd see it. Not from the Western press corps holed up with its Ba'ath Party translators at the Palestine Hotel, but from Arab television networks eager to show the country going to hell. They cannot show it you because it isn't happening. The Sunni Triangle is a little under-policed, but even that's not aflame. Moqtada al-Sadr, the Khomeini-Of-The-Week in mid-April, is al-Sadr al-Wiser these days, down to his last two 12-year-old insurgents and unable even to get to the mosque on Friday to deliver his weekly widely-ignored call to arms.

Meanwhile, more and more towns are holding elections and voting in "secular independents and representatives of non-religious parties". I have been trying to persuade my Washington pals to look on Iraq as an exercise in British-style asymmetrical federalism: the Kurdish areas are Scotland, the Shia south is Wales, the Sunni Triangle is Northern Ireland. No need to let the stragglers in one area slow down progress elsewhere. Iraq won't be perfect, but it will be okay - and in much better shape than most of its neighbours.

So I've moved on. I am already looking for new regimes to topple. . . .

In other words, don't make the mistake of assuming that Bush's poll numbers on Iraq have fallen because people want him to be more multilateralist and accommodating. On my anecdotal evidence, they want him to be more robust and incendiary.

And evidently John Kerry's internal polling is telling him the same thing. Hence, his speech in Seattle on Friday.

It's not just anecdotal, and it's not just internal -- just look at this poll:

30. When you hear about the continuing violent attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq, are you more likely to think the United States should be pulling troops our of Iraq or that the United States should be using more force to help stop the attacks by Iraqi insurgents?

1. Pull troops out 32%
2. Use more force 52
3. (Neither) 9
4. (Not sure) 7

Several other questions in the poll are consistent. This suggests that among those who disapprove of Bush's handling of the war there may be as many who think he's too soft as too harsh. And I agree that Kerry's new stance (noted here earlier) suggests that Kerry sees a market for toughness, or at least the appearance thereof.

Steyn thinks that Kerry is just being a weathervane, and that may be true. But you can learn things from watching weathervanes. Tim Blair, meanwhile, is hosting an interesting discussion.

May 29, 2004

MY SISTER SAW THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW today, and summarizes it thusly: "The world's better off without people, with lots of special effects." Julian Sanchez, meanwhile, says that the film isn't likely to hurt the Bush Administration, as some have speculated: "George Bush should be buying people tickets to this movie. It's preposterous from start to finish." It seems clear that the film is nowhere near as good as The Poseidon Adventure, and with no better scientific grounding. Daniel Drezner has more reactions of a similar nature. And David Edelstein observes:

The sad part is that Emmerich really thinks he's making a political statement, and he and his producers and actors are making the rounds blabbing about the movie's message to the world. . . . Meanwhile, global-warming experts I know are already girding themselves for a major PR setback, as everyone involved in this catastrophe becomes a laughingstock. Is it possible that The Day After Tomorrow is a plot to make environmental activists look as wacko as antienvironmentalists always claim they are? Al Gore stepped right into this one, didn't he?

Once again, the Gore endorsement looks like the kiss of death.

MICKEY KAUS: Kerry's not a flip-flopper -- he's a straddler. A vital distinction!

UPDATE: Ed Holston thinks I'm shortchanging Kaus's analysis, and has further thoughts.

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