SUMAN PALIT has a bunch of interesting new posts. Read ’em, if you’re so inclined.

JOSH MARSHALL warns about U.S. unilateralism, and suggests that it would be nice if we shared this world-leadership thing a bit.

Porphyrogenitus agrees, and fantasizes about letting Europe take care of the whole North Korea problem:

Thinking further about this, perhaps it’s time to let our EU peers, who believe they should have a full share of leadership alongside the U.S., take the lead in this crisis. This is, after all, only reasonable since the reactor North Korea is using for its plutonium production, designed and built not for energy production but for weapons programs, was designed and built for North Korea by Europeans (Germany, to be exact).

37,000+ French, Italian, Dutch, German, et al troops can replace the American troops on the peninsula and be responsible for serving as a “tripwire” in case of North Korean attack. They can take the lead in deciding how to diffuse this one, and if they decide force is needed, they can bear the lion share of the burden – our troops are busy elsewhere, and our full partners should be able to handle this one while we handle the other. Oh, the U.S. won’t be out of the picture – like I said, it will be role reversal. The EU will be expected to “consult” with us at every turn, whatever moves they make will be subjected to un-constructive criticism, and if they make even the smallest of mistakes we’ll be quick with the finger of blame.

But, as he notes, Europe can’t do it, and wouldn’t do it if it could. Which is the problem. I don’t think many Americans — except maybe Bill Kristol — actually want America to be the world’s hyperpower. We’d love to see responsible and capable allies picking up the global-policeman duties. But Europe couldn’t even deal with the Balkans — a minor threat in its own backyard — without American help. And everyone else, aside from Britain and Australia, is worse.

It’s not leadership by our fault. It’s leadership by default.

Meanwhile Rantburg notes that the anti-Americanism seems pretty shallow — like Gerhard Schroder, Roh is trying to throttle it back now that he’s been elected and has to actually govern. Like Gerhard, though, he’ll discover that America doesn’t forget this stuff. Chris Lawrence makes a similar observation.

UPDATE: Juan Gato emails to remind me to link this essay by John Hawkins entitled “confessions of an isolationist wannabe,” from earlier this year. I had linked it when it was new, but Gato’s right — it belongs in this discussion. This post is worth reading, too.

TIM CAVANAUGH reports on something missing from this year’s poll of top religious stories. You’ll never guess what it is.

HISTORICAL ILLITERACY at the New York Times. They could at least have used Google.

THE FBI IS ASKING FOR YOUR HELP, but Kathy Kinsley is skeptical.

A WORRY about strong digital identification systems that’s worth reading.

“USEFUL IDIOTS” — Mark Steyn comments on the risible Archibishop of Canterbury and his fellow churchmen. Excerpt:

How naive do you have to be to swallow that baloney? The Wise Men were Herod’s patsies, his useful idiots. Now who does that sound like? Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? Or Dr Williams, Sean Penn and George Galloway, to name just three of the legions of “wise men” who insist that their appeasement of Saddam demonstrates their superior insight and intelligence?

Penn and Galloway are just following their America-is-always-wrong instincts. By contrast, in tortuously bending the Gospels to his political needs, Dr Williams distorts his faith at least as much as (according to “Muslim moderates”) al-Qa’eda does Islam. It’s hard not to conclude that the archbishop’s secular beliefs have seduced his spiritual ones. He was, of course, wrong on Afghanistan, and – speaking of the slaughter of innocents – utterly silent on this year’s vast mound of Christian corpses, culminating in the murder of three small girls in a Pakistani church on Christmas Day. That’s “moral surrender”.

Catching the eye of godless Britain is an unenviable task, but there’s no future for the Church playing catch-up with the Lib Dems. “Tony Blair’s – appointment of Rowan Williams as archbishop is his most exciting act of patronage so far,” gushed Simon Jenkins in The Times. “Mr Blair has dealt us a wild card, a risk.” Hardly. The archbishop offers only the certainty of decline, the final death-spiral into secular liberal irrelevance. No wonder Islam is Britain’s fastest-growing religion.

Indeed. And, speaking of the prolific Steyn, he’s also critical of Bush on the war, and even cites Bill Quick, in another column:

The endless postponement of the Iraqi D-Day, now as routinely rolled over as those Soviet five-year plans, is all part of some cunning Bush ”rope-a-dope” strategy. So is Colin Powell’s recent statement that the administration isn’t looking for regime change in Baghdad. So is the ongoing mantra of ”the Saudis are our friends, no matter how many of us they kill.”

It’s true that lulling the enemy into a false sense of security can be very cunning. But only if the sense of security does, indeed, turn out to be false. Otherwise, as the Internet commentator William Quick puts it, how much longer can Bush dine out on Afghanistan? And a lot of what the Bushies do barely falls into the lulling category. When Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudis’ Washington ambassador, was revealed to have funneled money, unwittingly or otherwise, to the 9/11 killers, why did Alma Powell and Barbara Bush rush to phone her to commiserate? The connection between Saudi ”charitable giving” and terrorism is well-known. The most benign explanation is that the princess is an idiot, and Americans are dead because of her idiocy. The wife of the secretary of state and the mother of the president have no business comforting a stooge of their country’s enemies.

Indeed, again.

TOMORROW’S NEWS TODAY! Tim Blair reviews Bowling for Columbine for tomorrow’s Australian. Short excerpt: “It’s a kid flick for the adult anti-American market.”

Thanks, international date-line!

WAR AND CUTE BUNNY RABBITS: Anna has one weird blog, but I kind of like it!

ARMED LIBERAL SAYS THAT I’M IRREDEEMABLY WRONG about barbecue. Hmm. I haven’t tried any of the places he mentions. Guess I’ll have to do more “research.”

Hand me that big industrial-sized bottle of Zocor. . . .

PUNDITWATCH IS UP!

AL FRANKEN had a good observation on This Week: We live in an America where the number one rapper is white, and the number one golfer is black.

UPDATE: Okay, okay. A bunch of people have emailed to say that Charles Barkley said this already. It’s still good.

Meanwhile Josh Kraushaar points out that there’s nothing new about this sort of thing:

In 1956, long before the civil rights movement, one of the top baseball players (Jackie Robinson) was black while the top R&B singer (Elvis Presley) was white.

Well, it wasn’t really “long before the civil rights movement,” but good point. And reader John Tuttle writes that Tiger Woods isn’t black — just ask him. Finally, reader James Cooper says that the quote’s originally from Chris Rock (but doesn’t provide a link) and suggests Rock should be the designated comedian on This Week, not Franken as he’s both funnier and smarter. From your keyboard to George Stephanopoulos’ ears, James.

Rand Simberg agrees that Tiger’s not black, and adds: “one of the refreshing things about him is his refusal to play the race game.” Okay.

UPDATE: One more, from reader John Briggs:

Back in 1967 after the Six-Days War someone noted how much the world had changed — the best businessmen were the Germans and the best soldiers were the Jews.

Heh.

“MASSIVE STREET DEMONSTRATIONS” in Venezuela. There’s also this observation from El Sur:

Whether he wins or loses in the end, President Hugo Chávez is learning one very important lesson from Venezuela’s nationwide work stoppage. That is: it is difficult, if not impossible, to run a modern industry (let alone a country) by force. Chávez has fired oil workers and ordered the military to take over struck facilities owned by state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA). So far, nothing’s worked.

I’m going to be writing more about that point later.

SOME WESTERN ACTIVISTS are going to Iraq to serve as “human shields.” I tend to think of this as evolution in action, but Tim Blair has a lengthy response.

JOEL ROSENBERG and Jerry Pournelle have been debating war and the mideast by email. The exchange is posted on Joel’s weblog.

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON SMALLPOX PREPAREDNESS:

The other thing we can do is to prepare for the worst-case scenario — simultaneous releases of aerosolized smallpox virus at major airports or sports stadiums, for instance. The success of the smallpox eradication campaign has made the public-health community confident that it could quickly contain and stop several, even dozens of, smallpox outbreaks if the virus were introduced here. The real question is: Could we meet the challenge if we had thousands or tens of thousands of primary cases? Not with the current plan. It is important to reassure the public by providing a plan to vaccinate the entire country within days if such an outbreak occurred. Many feel that is impossible. Yet it is no more impossible than having the entire country vote in one day.

There is no part of the vaccination process that is so complicated that it would preclude reaching everyone in the United States within three days if the risk of contagion is high. It does mean getting needed supplies in place and training volunteers, National Guard and public health workers how to vaccinate with bifurcated needles, a simple procedure that can be quickly learned. It also means strengthening the public health infrastructure throughout the country, decentralizing the job to every county, shipping vaccine nationwide overnight if the threat proves real and holding clinics in every high school. And it is critical that this be done. A plan to vaccinate the population over a matter of weeks is simply inadequate.

He’s more optimistic about “ring vaccination” than this excerpt makes it sound, though he admits doubts about whether it could work in mass-exposure cases. And he’s certainly right that many problems would be solved if we could develop a safer vaccine. To that I would add the prospect of antiviral drugs: if smallpox could be treated with something that would prevent most deaths, it would be nearly as good as vaccination.

GOOD NEWS in Kenya.

BILL FRIST: Lackey of Eli Lilly? Or of Rosalynn Carter? I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this pseudo-scandal (there’s an earlier post here, with links to still earlier ones) and have found, via the magic of Westlaw, a long Senate floor speech by Frist in favor of the liability limits. Follow the link to read it — it’s posted over at InstaPundit EXTRA! because it’s just too damned long to post here. Frist, as you’ll see, is quoting “Every Child By Two,” the Rosalynn Carter – Betty Bumpers campaign for vaccination, in support of the language, and in debunking a New York Times article on thimerosal that misquoted important sources. (He quotes the sources, too, who say that the Times was woefully deficient in fact-checking.)

Also, any readers familiar with the history of this, please let me know if I’m right about the timeline here. I believe that Armey put the language in the bill originally (er, because he said so, on CNN) and that the bill passed the House, with that language in it, and then went to the Senate, where the actual question was over an attempt by Joe Lieberman to take the House language out.

Am I right about this? Because if I am, then what Bill Keller and Eleanor Clift are accusing Frist of — putting the language in the bill — is not only contradicted by Dick Armey’s statement, but was also impossible because the Senate action was about removing language that was already there, not about putting the language in in the first place. I don’t swear that I’m right about this, as the history is awfully complex, but that’s how it looks.

But at the very least, claims that Frist was acting secretly in support of the language are contradicted by the speech — on the Senate floor — supporting the language. And claims that this was some sort of sleazy corporate bailout would seem to be contradicted by the words from the Rosalynn Carter – Betty Bumpers Campaign. Unless the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has gotten really, really vast.

Here’s a link to an oped by Carter and Bumpers denouncing what they call “Internet scare campaigns” about vaccines. And here is a link to a newsletter at the Carter / Bumpers campaign page that says the language originated in the House, and is intended to keep trial lawyers from end-running laws already in existence:

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was enacted by Congress as a no-fault alternative to the tort system for resolving claims resulting from adverse reactions to mandated childhood vaccines. Claimants have the option to file vaccine injury lawsuits against physicians who administer vaccines and vaccine manufacturers only after their claim is adjudicated under the VICP and the judgment is rejected by the claimants. Recent lawsuits have gone directly to the tort system by claiming that thimerosal was an additive to the vaccine and therefore not applicable to the VICP. If the Senate passes this bill, parents will be required to file thimerosal claims first through the VICP. The unfortunate consequence of this provision has been the inadvertent fueling of fears, by several Senators and the press, that vaccines cause autism.

Follow the link to read Frist’s speech and I think you’ll see that he’s on the same page as the Carter-Bumpers Campaign. (The “several Senators” are opponents of the language, one of whom Frist quotes, and “the press” appears to refer to the New York Times’ flawed account). Which I think makes this an even more pathetic — if slightly more successful — effort at pseudo-scandal than the pencil incident.

What penance will Bill Keller assign himself?

UPDATE: Talkleft emails a link to this story from the Washington Post dated December 20 that says Frist wrote the thimerosal provision. I’m confused, though, because the article doesn’t mention Armey at all (again!) and the Tom Paine reward offer (re-weaseled to avoid crediting Dick Armey — or paying the reward to me!) is still up, with no mention of Frist on the page. Nor is there any context about the purpose of the amendment, or who else supported it. But there must be a pony here somewhere, right?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Nora Cannon emails in response to the Post story:

Yuck: “Frist wrote a provision, enacted into law, that restricted the ability of plaintiffs to sue the company for injuries resulting from Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines against childhood diseases. The Lilly provision was quietly woven into the legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security.”

Some technical truth to that as worded, but intentionally misleading. Frist wrote a free standing bill; here’s a column he wrote on it: Link

Here is the summary from Thomas:

S.2053

Sponsor: Sen Frist, Bill(introduced 3/21/2002)

Latest Major Action: 3/21/2002 Referred to Senate committee.

Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Title: A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to improve immunization rates by increasing the distribution of vaccines and improving and clarifying the vaccine injury compensation program, and for other purposes. (search bill number here: http://thomas.loc.gov )

The particular provision is:

Section 2133(5) of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 300aa-33(5)) is amended by adding at the end the following: `For purposes of the preceding sentence, an adulterant or contaminant shall not include any component or ingredient listed in a vaccine’s product license application or product label.’.

And that, of course, addresses the concern pointed out by the Carter – Bumpers campaign above — that trial lawyers were using the “adulterant” claim regarding thimerosal to end-run existing law.

All evidence seems to indicate that this is a bogus issue from top to bottom. TomPaine.Com should be ashamed for trying to make so much of it (not to mention for welshing on their prize award, which would have put me that much closer to a 350Z!) and Bill Keller and Eleanor Clift should be ashamed of being suckered this way.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Dahlgren writes: “Call me paranoid but doesn’t it seem that TomPaine.com, Bill Kellor and Eleanor Clift are all working from the same memo? Maybe a DNC memo? This whole non-event-event sure seems very Blumethal-esque.” Hmm. Maybe someone will investigate that.

I emailed Bill Keller about this yesterday, but I haven’t heard back. It is the weekend, though, a time when only unpaid bloggers answer their email.

COLBY COSH SAYS that Patty Murray and I are both wrong. Well, sort of. (My response: “Fwee Muwway!”)

He also points readers to the blog of Sarah Eve Kelly, which is indeed worth reading.

DROP BY MISSY’S and wish her happy birthday!

WELL, I CAN POST ABOUT war, disease, and cheap political tricks — but what generates the most email? Barbecue! Here’s one I can’t argue with, though, from Ft. Collins, Colorado reader Gary Rosenlieb:

Well, you are correct that you can get into an honest, and sometimes violent, debate on who serves the best barbeque. I have never had the pleasure of eating at Ollie’s, but for my money I think you have one of the best in the country right there in Knoxville in the form of Calhoun’s. I have had occasion to travel through there on business about twice a year, and I always make it a point to stop at Calhoun’s for a full slab of ribs.

Breakfast, lunch or dinner, it doesn’t matter. Always bring back two or three bottles of their sauce too.

Yep. And their microbrewery doesn’t suck, either. We’re also fortunate to have a branch of Corky’s, a Memphis operation here, as well as a local chain called Buddy’s that’s pretty good. It’s a wonder I don’t weigh 300 pounds. But as John Tower once said, I am a man of no small self-control.

FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS ASSISTED 9/11 HIJACKERS: That’s what Senator Bob Graham reports, in a statement that I had missed. Excerpt:

I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing — although that was part of it — by a sovereign foreign government and that we have been derelict in our duty to track that down.

The Memory Hole (link above) has more excerpts. Here’s a link to the full transcript. Funny that the Democrats aren’t all over this issue.

FOOLED! Bill Keller falls for the bogus “Eli Lilly Bandit” story in today’s New York Times.

In the twilight of the Congressional session, some legislator anonymously arranged for a provision to be slipped into the Homeland Security bill protecting vaccine makers (mainly Eli Lilly) from lawsuits filed by the parents of autistic children. Hundreds of parents are pressing a claim that the mercury in a measles vaccine contributed to their children’s disorder. For all I know, the suit may be baseless, but surely that’s for a court to decide. This is a glaring example of legislative malfeasance. And strong evidence points to Dr. Frist as its author. He is cozy with Lilly and he drafted identical legislative language earlier. But he refuses to own up to it.

Penance, anyone?

Maybe Frist refuses to own up to it because, you know, Keller is wrong. Sorry, but there’s no mystery here — except maybe one manufactured by interest groups to fool the gullible. As I reported here, Dick Armey admits it was him. (This was no great scoop on my part, since Armey admitted it live on CNN! “ARMEY: I put it in.”) And — in the process of trying to weasel out of paying the promised reward — TomPaine.Com, the spreader-in-chief of the “Eli Lilly Bandit” story, seems to have accepted that it was Armey too.

So why is Bill Keller repeating this already-exploded story of a “mystery?” Worse yet, despite Armey’s public statement, now several weeks old, Keller suggests that the “anonymous” legislator was Bill Frist. If Keller knew that Armey had admitted this, surely his comments would reflect Armey’s admission — it’s quite different to say “Dick Armey admits it, but I don’t believe him” than to say what Keller says above. Since Keller makes no mention of it, I can only conclude that he somehow missed out on the story.

Obviously, he doesn’t read enough blogs. Or, at least, enough InstaPundit!

What penance will Keller offer? I’d say an apology in his next column would be sufficient. And, perhaps, a promise to do better in the future, by diligently reading more weblogs. . . .

UPDATE: Eleanor Clift falls for it, too:

The liberal Web site TomPaine.com offered a $10,000 reward for “the Eli Lilly bandit.”

The Lott imbroglio diverted attention from the mystery, but not for long. As reporters delved into the legislative background of the man who would replace Lott, the trail led to none other than Frist as the anonymous author. In retrospect, Frist should have been easy to finger. He had written similar language and tried to attach it to legislation once before, and he had praised the provision’s intent in congressional debate.

Once again, no mention whatsoever of Dick Armey’s statement. Why is it that when another guy confesses, it gets the Central Park Five off the hook, but here nobody’s paying attention? And lame efforts to claim that the “real question” isn’t what TomPaine said it was at first, but what TomPaine says it is now, just illustrate what’s going on here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Healey writes:

In another paragraph, she cites tompaine.com’s reward, but not does not mention that the site seems to have accepted that Rep. Armey was the bandit.

It’s surprising that Clift accuses Frist so flatly. Based on the limited information she provides about Frist’s history on the issue, he has been open about his support for the provision in the past. Why would that make him more likely to be anonymous about it now?

Also, is the very similar ending to Bill Keller’s NYT column today a coincidence or more evidence that many of the big paper columnists read the same messages from the same e-flacks, consistent with Mickey Kaus’s theory about Sidney Blumenthal and Lott’s Thurmond speech?

Finally, Keller admits to knowing nothing about whether the rider was a good idea, but being concerned that this was an improper way to legislate. And although she says it was a ‘blatant’ payback from Frist to Lilly, Clift doesn’t talk about the merits of the rider either. Somehow I doubt that either of them has ever hounded Democrats for anonymous riders based simply on ‘open government’ principles.

Yes, and — as I said earlier — this whole thing seems bogus to me. It’s a demand to uncover a “secret” that was revealed on CNN, about a (common) legislative maneuver that was designed to protect a company from being groundlessly sued for doing something that, as far as I can tell, wasn’t wrong.

UPDATE: It’s looking even more bogus with further research.

GARY HART UPDATE: The Hart trial balloon floats skyward in The New Republic.

Just remember where you heard it first!

WHENEVER I SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, and especially its police department, I get angry email accusing me of “D.C.-bashing,” and saying that my impressions are out of date. Only I keep reading things like this:

The nexus between corruption and the vast areas of moral wasteland within the D.C. government is a topic that should come up next week when Mayor Anthony Williams delivers his second inaugural address.

It won’t. . . .

The speech will have everything but a candid assessment of the District’s dirty open secret: Despite Marion Barry’s four-year official absence, a culture of corruption is still present in the city.

Calendar year 2002 saw a steady stream of high-profile scandals, including improper fundraising activities in the mayor’s office, the Democratic primary petition fraud, the bankruptcy of Greater Southeast Community Hospital due to financial shenanigans by its owners, and now the unfolding story of the alleged embezzlement of millions of dollars in Washington Teachers’ Union funds. A constant throughout all of these improprieties is, of course, Anthony Williams’s association with most of the scandals’ major actors.

All this within one year. Why? . . .

Because a pervasive climate of impunity prevails in the city. It thrives in a culture where explicit, measurable job performance standards don’t exist, where favoritism and nepotism carry the day, and where sanctions and firings are reserved for people without connections. And when the person at the top of the government wins elections but, through years of actions and inaction, compromises and squanders his moral authority, what should you expect from the people at the bottom?

So is Colbert King out of touch with the District, too? And what about this?

UPDATE: Nikita Demosthenes has some observations.