I’M NOT GOING SKIING like Jeff from Alphecca, but I will be offline for most of the day. I’m driving my grandmother (who at 88 is too old to drive herself such distances, she says) home to Birmingham and then returning. The bad news: 10 hours in the car, minimum. The good news: I get to catch up with her on the way down, and catch up with some CDs I’ve been wanting to listen to on the way back.

THERE’S AN INTERESTING INTRA-LEFT BLOG DEBATE on civil rights going on. Here’s the latest installment in TAPPED.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Geitner Simmons is refereeing another blog debate on affirmative action.

THE HART JUGGERNAUT ROLLS ON, with Democrat Bill Peschel saying that he’d (reluctantly) vote for Bush over many Democratic candidates because of the war on terror, but that he would support Hart, whose national security credentials are stronger than those of most Democratic candidates. And, as I have said before, after Clinton, the Donna Rice thing seems almost quaint by comparison.

I think that it’s easy to underestimate how much of Bush’s support comes from people like Bill. If Bush wimps out like his father (not likely, pace the repeated worries of Bill Quick) he’s doomed. One reason why I don’t hold with Quick’s theory is that I think Bush knows this very well. Americans either want to wage war with an eye toward winning, or they want to cut their losses and get out of the game. As long as Bush looks serious about winning, he’s in a very strong position. If he stops looking serious, he’s toast.

JULIUS CAESAR ONCE SAID: “Beware the politicians and talking heads who bang the drums of Caesarism. I’m Caesar, and believe me, George W. Bush is no Caesar.”

Well, okay, he never actually said that — though he gets quoted for a lot of things he never said. . . . Sam Tanenhaus does say it, though.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is already lining up its candidates for an expected Supreme Court vacancy. Let’s hope they’re vetting candidates a bit more closely than they vetted Henry Kissinger before naming him to head the 9/11 investigative committee.

Sadly, there’s no mention in this article of Eugene Volokh’s obvious fitness for the Court. An oversight, no doubt.

THE NEW SMARTERHARPER’SINDEX IS UP!

IS THERE A PATTY MURRAY WHITEWASH? Best of the Web says so. A reader suggests that’s not really the case:

1. She starts out as something of a media darling (remember the “Mom in Tennis Shoes”/”Year of the Woman” stuff from the 1992 campaign). I think the mainstream media will be very reluctant to go after her with as much intensity as they went after Lott. (Even recognizing they were late to that party.)

2. I really don’t see her as an idiotarian in the mold of Fisk, Chomsky, McDermott, Bonior, etc., She’s just a regular, garden-variety idiot. In other words, she says things like “Bin Laden is popular because he builds daycares” because she’s dumb, not because she has a political philosophy that sees the US as the prime source of evil in the world.

As result of #2, I think negative coverage of these remarks and others like them have a good chance of seeming ungentlemanly and/or downright cruel. Again, I believe the mainstream media will be inclined to back off in those circumstances.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about this. Murray certainly has no business being a US Senator. I just don’t see her getting the full media treatment as Lott eventually did. I also agree that since McDermott and Bonior got a pass, there’s not the slightest chance she’ll ever get pushed out by her own party.

Yeah. In a way, there’s actually something to what Murray said — though given her line about Osama building day-care centers this probably falls into the broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day category. But one thing I hear from people who’ve spent a lot of time in countries where there’s a substantial Islamic population is that the Saudi money is there year in and year out. The U.S. may come in and do things for a few years, but we get distracted and our interest dries up. The Saudis’ interest doesn’t. They build mosques, they build schools, they provide a lot of medium-influential folks with a secure livelihood and some money to spread around that lets them build up local patronage webs of their own.

We could learn from that. Not only should we work to formulate a reputation for steadfastness instead of flightiness (which we’ll have to do, over time, by actually being steadfast instead of flighty) but we should also seek to make the Saudi money less reliable by interdicting it — either at the source, or somewhere along the line.

I don’t really think that this was what Patty Murray had in mind, though.

NOTE: If you want me to blog about something, an email is sufficient. A link with the email is nice. Sending me an email that’s copied to lots of other people, and claiming that if I don’t immediately jump on your story it’s proof of my intellectual dishonesty, is a poor approach. Especially when you don’t have a link to the original story, and when I can’t find the story when I go to the websites that ought to have it, and can’t confirm it anywhere else.

Just a bit of advice.

JUSTIN KATZ has a VIDEO BLOG ENTRY saying that I’m too optimistic about the future of video blogging. Heh. Maybe — but the number of video bloggers has doubled in a week. Project that one forward a couple of years and, well, my IPO is next week, and — oops, wrong psychology! It’s not 1997 anymore.

HERE’S A CLAIM that a human clone has been born. True? Who knows?

YOU HEAR A LOT ABOUT “CAT BLOGS,” but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually linked to one before. So here. Great domain.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is at Ravenwood this week. Check it out.

GAME THEORY AND SADDAM HUSSEIN: An analysis that doesn’t suggest he’ll be nice, even if he’s rational.

MORE:

Four more alleged Islamic militants have been arrested near Paris, on suspicion of planning a series of terror attacks. The arrests were made on Tuesday in the northern suburb of Romainville, the authorities say.

Last week, four other people of North African origin were detained the nearby suburb of La Courneuve.

During last week’s raids, police say they found bomb-making equipment.

Police say the four men arrested in Romainville are of Algerian origin, and that one is the brother of Mourad Ben Chelali, a French national being held at the US base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The French news agency AFP quotes unnamed officials as saying the same explosive substance was found during both raids.

“Alleged militants?” Aren’t they alleged terrorists?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

The various news articles in English were virtually identical so I went digging and found the original AFP release in French. This makes it clear why the difficulties. The articles are all nearly verbatim translations of the French news release.

The French statement identified the four men arrested as “islamists”. They did not say militants, terrorists, etc. They used a word that has more meaning in current French usage than it does in English. But it spans more than terrorist in French usage. It includes advocates, sympathizers and supporters as well as active terrorists.

This leads to the newspaper translators facing the issue of how best to translate this. Militant is a reasonable English translation of what the French sources said.

The French sources may simply be being cautious about criminal accusations. It is fairly trivial to prove that these people are militants. They may have some evidenciary problems proving that they are terrorists. This is like being careful to distinguish between a murderer and a person who attempted murder. They may end up convicting them of illegal weapons possession rather than terrorism simply because they were caught before they did anything.

My French is weak enough that I can’t say — it’s a tossup whether I can do a better job than Google. (Actually, Google has the edge). But there you are, for what it’s worth.

NEXT YEAR IN ORBIT: Rand Simberg offers a summary of the year in space, and some advice for next year. This piece is a must-read for space enthusiasts, and especially for NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe, and those people in Congress and the White House who deal with him.

RADLEY BALKO names his civil rights man of the year. And I have to say, he’s found someone who is inspiring millions.

THE GARY HART JUGGERNAUT just keeps rolling on!

UPDATE: Here’s more evidence!

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE: NOT ALWAYS WRONG! At least, suggestions here that Christmas shopping seemed light are echoed by this story declaring that the Christmas shopping season was the “worst holiday season in 30 years.”

On the other hand, a closer reading of the story indicates that what’s “worst” is the increase in sales. That’s right, sales were bigger than last year, just not by as much as usual:

In a weekly report on Tuesday, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishiand UBS Warburg forecast holiday sales in November and December would be up an anemic 1.5 percent over last year, the smallest gain since the banks began tracking weekly sales in 1970.

That makes the headline and the lede, which are pretty alarmist, seem less so. (It’s a Reuters story). But things may be bad. Walmart is reporting weak sales growth consistent with the story quoted above, and an actual drop in sales at Sam’s Club. Meanwhile, I was at Target this morning and the aisles were clogged (literally!) with deeply discounted clearance merchandise, but not with shoppers. I was in and out in a trice, but this suggest to me that (1) they didn’t sell all that stuff before Christmas; and (2) they still aren’t selling it now. This — plus the fact that everyone we know seems to have a lot of stuff, and complain more about lack of closet spacee than about lack of possessions — suggests to me that consumers are bought-out. There just isn’t new stuff to buy that people want enough to spend the money.

Am I right? We’ll know soon.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs offers this perspective:

Let’s get this straight: 1999 was the best year in history for retailers. But then came 2000 and it was 4 percent better. And then came 2001 and it was 2.3 percent better than 2000. And this year is expected to be one percent better than 2001. So 2002 is now the best year in history for retailers – despite the sluggish economy.

Yet, the retail industry is poor-mouthing it like sales were down. They weren’t. Sales were up.

Good point. And so is this one on Internet sales taxes.

UPDATE: Here’s more bad news, suggesting that sales may actually be down from last year when all is said and done.

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT TAXES: Donald Luskin is fact-checking Paul Krugman.

BEST OF THE WEB says that there’s a Patty Murray whitewash going on:

Murray’s comments are helping feed enemy propaganda. Taliban Online, a pro-jihadi Web site, excerpts a WorldNetDaily report on Murray’s comments. “Pak Taliban,” who posted the article to the Taliban site, appends his own commentary: “The rest of the story trie’s [sic] to put down Osama with the same old rubbish and a thought, is this why the Kuffar [disbelievers] in Afghanistan are trying to set bases of the so called reconstruction phase, thinking if they look like helping the Afghan’s [sic] that they might start to like them or something? No doubt the Russians did the same thing. What would please us is when you pack and go.”

In Murray’s home state, the Seattle Times published a disdainful Christmas Eve editorial titled “Those Silly Attacks on Patty Murray.” But the Vancouver Columbian, the paper that broke the story, rightly blasts Murray. “She . . . had every obligation as a U.S. senator and high-level representative of this country and this state to present the United States in a far more accurate light. That she didn’t is something voters can consider when she is up for re-election.”

Given that there was no discipline where Bonior and McDermott were concerned, I doubt much will come of this. But the Democrats’ silence will, whether fairly or not, continue to fuel doubts about the Democrats’ patriotism, just as the Republicans’ failure to remove Trent Lott has continued to fuel doubts about the GOP’s commitment to racial equality and — oh, wait. . . .

MORE VIDEO-BLOGGING: Jeff Jarvis is at it again. This is pretty cool.

UPDATE: Here’s a direct link that should work.

BLOGS AND TRENT LOTT: The Boston Globe has a good story, giving the blogosphere credit for keeping the story alive, but also avoiding too much blogospheric triumphalism. I think the concluding observation by Walter Shapiro is especially on-point. I also think that Atrios deserves more credit than he gets here, and in some other stories, but I guess when you’re anonymous that goes with the territory.

IT WAS A GREAT CHRISTMAS HERE. Not that much happened at Stately InstaPundit Manor. We often have a multi-family Christmas here, but we didn’t do that this year. We had Christmas Eve at my ex-stepmother’s house (my dad was there — the two of them are like poster-children for the benefits of divorce, getting along better than they ever did when they were married). That’s the InstaDad over on the right.

My daughter opened presents here in the morning — the digital cameral was her favorite, followed by Cameron the Bratz Boy, who is supposed to be a boyfriend for the Bratz girls, but whose “passion for fashion” and overly-accessorized look makes me wonder if there’s any future in that. Then to my wife’s sister’s, then to my mom’s.

Then we watched Monty Python on DVD, followed by some (also on a DVD collection) episodes of “Are You Being Served?” It was an all-British-humor evening, though to make it more multicultural we drank Japanese and German beer.

And if you don’t know about the Bratz, well, it just means that you’re in the wrong demographic. Relax, you’re not missing much.

LILY MALCOLM, who reports that she had a great Christmas, points out this article in the New York Times on low fertility rates in Europe, quoting an expert who says that current trends are “unsustainable, from a cultural and even psychological point of view.”

Back when I was practicing law, one of my clients — the president of the American subsidiary of a European company, a Pole who had lived through World War Two under circumstances that would make a good thriller/tearjerker movie — said that he thought Europe was suffering massive psychological trauma from the world wars, and that it would take a century for it to recover, if it ever did.

That seemed overly pessimistic at the time, but it seems more and more accurate as time goes by.

HAPPY BOXING DAY!