MORE ON UGANDA: Austin Bay writes:

As Amin’s dictatorship collapsed in the spring of 1979, a gang of his thugs left the north Ugandan town of Arua and marched for the town of Nebbi, 60 kilometers south.

The Nebbi area had escaped the worst of Amin’s depredations, in part because it is relatively isolated and off the usual track. Though bitterly poor by Western standards, in the thugs’ eyes Nebbi was rich, with plenty of food, women and plunder. Besides, their rogue force was predominantly Muslim, and Nebbi is a Christian area.

The 200 or so thugs, armed with automatic rifles and grenade launchers, didn’t expect resistance. However, just north of Nebbi, in the savannah bush, a hastily organized local force ambushed the gang. Several Nebbi men had acquired weapons. They fought a steady delaying action, sniping at the gang, then withdrawing along the rutted, red dirt road that links Arua and Nebbi.

“Quite simply,” a Nebbi leader told me, “Amin’s men quit. They would shoot the unarmed, steal and burn, but not if it cost their lives. We resisted. That’s as close as the chaos came. Around us, for 40 years there has been war. But not here. That was when it brushed us.”

No surprise. But it’s more evidence of why the U.N.’s program to disarm civilians is a bad idea.

JOSH MARSHALL says it’s a harmonic convergence of sorts.

YALE LAW PROFESSOR PETER SCHUCK writes about what’s wrong with the reparations movement.

KEN LAYNE on Trent Lott:

The current administration, whether you love it or hate it, is arguably the most diverse administration in White House history. There are blacks, whites, Jews, Asians, Texans, Latinos, women, men, even an Afghan leading policy in Afghanistan. And we’re not talking about junior staffers. We’ve finally entered an era in which you can’t dismiss someone’s fiscal/political politics by calling them a racist … save for those hippies who call everything and everyone racist. They’re beyond help.

Lott is an ugly reminder of mid-20th Century American history, when a person’s state/party affiliation told you if they believed black people were subhuman. That he’s scheduled to lead the U.S. Senate in 2003 is an outrage. He’s never done anything but graft federal money to Mississippi and embrace these old-timey racists. He’s an Old South unreconstructed supremacist in a New South world. Get rid of him. He’s an ugly distraction.

Think he’ll last through the weekend?

THE COMMONWEAL INSTITUTE aims to be the “Heritage Foundation of the Left.” They’re also soliciting comments on their website design.

UPDATE: Will Wilkinson visited the site, and has some comments.

JAY MANIFOLD REPORTS bad economic news for Canada.

IT JUST GETS WORSE FOR LOTT. Worse and worse.

JUST HEARD AN NPR ITEM on American Muslims taking control of Muslim charities to keep them from being used to support terror. You’ve read about it here already, but the NPR story was a good one, and provided some evidence that the sentiment is widespread. Bravo.

HAROLD PINTER IS DOING AN ADMIRABLE JOB of executing his instructions to terrify the enemy:

[T]he American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.

I just heard on NPR that Iraqi officials are scared and hopeless. Obviously, they’ve been reading The Telegraph, which informs them that the Administration is fierce and deadly, and that the peace movement that Saddam has been counting on is “helpless.” So of course they’re scared and hopeless. All according to the plan. . . . Thanks, Harold!

SALAM THE BAGHDAD BLOGGER is missing in action. I’m kind of worried about him.

“YEAH, BUT ALL 13% ARE MARINES” — Stephen Green is right — this is funny.

MICHELLE COTTLE WRITES:

When’s the last time a man spontaneously checked to see if the house was low on toilet paper or Saran Wrap?

About five minutes ago. I cook, too. Get your head out of 1957, woman.

UPDATE: Reader Michelle Dulak emails: “Two words for Ms. Cottle: Read Lileks.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Single dad Mitch Berg replies:

Here was my day today, Ms. Cottle: Up at 5:45. One load in the wash, fold the load from the dryer. Wake the kids. Take a bath. Wake the kids again. Get ’em dressed, and out to the bus. Oops, son’s been suspended from the bus – drive him to school. Drive to work (30 miles). Work. Get call that ex can’t pick up son from school – race back through rush-hour to get son. Home. Cook dinner. Homework. Basketball practices for both kids. Home, baths, bedtime stories, to bed – and then maybe an hour for me.

And that routine is not that much different than when I was married, maam.

I’m not here to whine about life as a single dad. I love it. But men today – married or not – are every bit as harried as Ms. Cottle’s benighted broads. If Warren Farrell, author of Myth of Male Power is to be believed, harried to death. The whole book is worth a read.

But thanks for reminding me – I gotta get toilet paper and Saran Wrap.

I know a lot of guys like this. I’m surprised that Michelle Cottle doesn’t.

ERIC ALTERMAN SAYS DASCHLE SHOULD GO, TOO: Hey, I’m okay with that! In support of his contention, he reproduces this set of statements suggesting that Daschle is Lott’s sock puppet, originally from The Note:

Round #1: Lott: “It meant nothing.” Daschle: “Yes, it meant nothing.”

Round #2: Lott: “It was a poor choice of words.” Daschle: “Yes, it was a poor choice of words.”

Round #3: Lott: “I am sooo sorry.” Daschle: “You should be.”

Well, I won’t miss either of them.

BLOGS 1, REINHARDT 0: Pejman Yousefzadeh rounds up all the Blogospheric fact-checking directed at the Ninth Circuit’s Second Amendment decision of last week.

UPDATE: Stuart Buck has more.

HANK WILLIAMS DIED in or near Knoxville on New Year’s Eve 50 years ago. There will be a memorial concert here, and the link takes you to a long article on the mysteries of his demise.

THE MIDWEST CONSERVATIVE JOURNAL WRITES:

It would seem that the President has caught up with many of us here on the right and also won’t shed a tear if Trent Lott is no longer Majority Leader next year. All that is left now is for another Republican senator to step up to challenge him. As for the Democrats, this may be another case of be careful what you wish for. The next Majority Leader may be a much more ferocious Republican than Lott ever was. And much less of a political hack.

And we on the right, who have driven the anti-Lott sentiment, can at least brag about this. The left was willing to go to any length to keep a president in office who had committed felonies. We conservatives, though, have much higher standards for our leaders. We are eager to dispense with a mere congressional leader for a careless and tone-deaf opinion.

I’m still saying Friday afternoon. But I could be wrong.

FLOOD THE ZONE! Best of the Web is all over the Trent Lott affair. And none of it is very complimentary to Lott.

I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan, by the way, that Josh Marshall owns this story. His page was where I first heard about it.

A SLICE OF LIFE: Well, it’s a pretty thin slice. But here’s a page of photos from around the UT Law School, put on the webpage to give prospective students some sense of what life’s like around here. Follow the link if you’re interested.

CARDINAL LAW HAS offered his resignation. He is under subpoena, along with a number of other bishops.

“OFFENSIVE AND WRONG:”

President Bush sharply rebuked incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott for comments that some have called racist, saying any suggestion that segregation was acceptable is “offensive and it is wrong.”

Bush’s comments, delivered to an audience of charities in Philadelphia, came one day after Lott, a Mississippi Republican, said he would not give up his leadership post, despite the furor over his remarks.

“Recent comments by Sen. Lott do not reflect the spirit of our country,” Bush said. “He has apologized and rightly so. Every day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our founding ideals.”

Hmm. Maybe Karl Rove was reading Dan Drezner’s memos.

UPDATE: Will Wilkinson has some comments. And Freeside thinks Lott is toast.

LOOKS LIKE EVIDENCE OF A SADDAM CONNECTION HERE, TO ME, ANYWAY:

The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. They said government analysts suspect that the transaction involved the nerve agent VX and that a courier managed to smuggle it overland through Turkey.

If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by al Qaeda or a member of its network. It also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al Qaeda terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq. If advanced publicly by the White House, the report could be used to rebut Iraq’s assertion in a 12,000-page declaration Saturday that it had destroyed its entire stock of chemical weapons.

Hmm. “If advanced publicly?” As opposed to giving the story to the Washington Post, that is.

UPDATE: By the way, here’s a story from The Weekly Standard from last July on the Saddam al-Qaeda connection.

BILL HERBERT ON TRENT LOTT’S LATEST explanation, that he was really supporting Strom Thurmond’s commitment to defense and limited government: “Sorry, not buying it.” Herbert goes on to note:

This might be believable if Thurmond had actually run on those issues — or any other issues besides “segregation forever,” for that matter. . . .

What I find particularly galling about his statement is that the Dixiecrats were hardly conservative about anything but race. They were Big Government Liberals who happened to also be racist, in the William Jennings Bryan tradition. Thus, someone who calls himself a Conservative should find the Strom Thurmond of 1948 far more abhorrent than other racists, and certainly less palatable than other Democrats of the time.

There’s more.

UPDATE: Reader Chip Taylor emails this response to Lott:

So THAT’S why the Dixiecrats split from the Dems. The man who dropped the bomb on Japan wasn’t hawkish enough.

I’m glad Sen. Lott cleared that up; I thought it was something else.

Heh. Charles Krauthammer is brutal in the Post:

What is so appalling about Lott’s remarks is not the bigotry but the blindness. One should be very hesitant about ascribing bigotry. It is hard to discern what someone feels in his heart of hearts. It is less hard to discern what someone sees, particularly if he tells you. Lott sees the civil rights movement and “all these problems over all these years.” He missed the whole story.

Backbenchers might be permitted such a lack of vision. Leaders are not. Lott must step down.

I think we’ve passed the tipping point. I’d say we’re likely to hear an announcement that Lott won’t run for Majority Leader sometime tomorrow afternoon. For the GOP’s sake, I’d better be right.

UPDATE: My mistake — he’s already been elected for the next term. I somehow had the idea that it was just a straw vote, with the real one coming later. He still needs to go.

THE SADDAM / AL QAEDA LINK: Why are so many anxious to deny it? Perhaps because having missed it for so long would be embarrassing:

As I reveal in Vanity Fair, earlier this year the Pentagon established a special intelligence unit to re-examine evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. After initially fighting the proposal, the CIA agreed to supply this unit with copies of its own reports going back 10 years. I have spoken to three senior officials who have seen its conclusions, which are striking.

“In the Cold War, says one of them, “often you’d draw firm conclusions and make policy on the basis of just four or five reports. Here there are almost 100 separate examples of Iraq-al Qaeda co-operation going back to 1992.

All these reports, says the official, were given the CIA’s highest credibility rating – defined as information from a source which had proven reliable in the past. . . .

Iraq must have been more intensely spied upon than any other country throughout the 1990s. If the agencies missed a Saddam-al Qaeda connection, it might reasonably be argued, then many heads should roll.

Yes, they should. The article’s conclusion:

Ignoring Iraq’s support for terror is a seductive proposition, which fits pleasingly with democracies’ natural reluctance to wage war. But if we are serious about winning the war on terror, self-delusion is not an option.

An attempt to achieve regime change in Iraq would not be a distraction, but an integral part of the struggle.

I’m inclined to agree, which is yet another reason why I think that the “go after Al Qaeda, not Saddam” line is a red herring.

UPDATE: This is interesting, too.

ARNOLD KLING WRITES ON “EDGE POWER” — which sounds like a consultant’s buzzword but makes for an interesting article. Excerpt:

The Internet lowers the cost of the tools of communication and creativity, making them affordable to individuals and small businesses. This phenomenon might be called Edge Power, because it increases power around the “edges” of the network, in contrast with broadcast media, where power is centralized.

There is a striking generation gap between media empires that were built before the Internet and those that grew up as Web businesses. Companies that were formed on the Internet treat Edge Power as a feature. Traditional media companies treat Edge Power as a bug.

I think the Blogosphere is all edge.

MORE ON CANADA’S GUN-REGISTRATION DEBACLE:

Canada’s gun-control laws are in a state of crisis, threatening the political future of many Liberal party politicians. Introduced in 1995 with a promised net cost of $2 million dollars (Canadian), the nation’s gun registry is going to cost over a billion dollars, according to a new report from the auditor general. The report details pervasive malfeasance by the Liberal administration. Now, many Canadians who have no personal interest in gun ownership are turning against the deceit and self-dealing of the Liberals.

Will American politicians learn from this? Probably not.