THE TEHRAN TIMES IS REPORTING that Egypt now says it will support a strike on Iraq. Very interesting.

WELL, I’LL BET THEY WON’T DO THIS AGAIN:

Three medical students of Middle Eastern descent who were stopped as suspected terrorists on Alligator Alley early Friday morning remained detained after they were overheard in a Georgia restaurant vowing to make America “cry on 9/13.”

Federal sources involved in the investigation said they believe the three men – all U.S. citizens – were playing a stupid joke on another restaurant patron who gave them a suspicious look.

All three were on their way from Illinois to take medical training in Miami.

Federal sources said the men could be released as early as today with a ticket for blowing the I-75 toll booth near Naples.

The sad thing is it was entirely credible. If Mohammed Atta, et al., could spill their guts to lap dancers, this kind of talk seemed to fit. I just hope this won’t stop someone who encounters something similar in the future from calling it in.

JOE KATZMAN liked Bush’s speech. So, interestingly, did Jeff Cooper, though I’m not sure they’re on the same page as to why. And reader Chris Durnell observes:

However, there is also a bigger story – the UN as it is conceived right now is dysfunctional as is the entire international system. The phrase “post-1945 international system” is the big clue. Is the world anything like it was sixty years ago? No, it’s not, but all the world bodies are designed as if it were. It’s like the big idea after World War II was to preserve the system established by the Congress of Berlin in 1884.

A new international system is needed that reflects the world power structure of 2002, not 1945. Diplomats are a notoriously conservative bunch unable to react to changes in world events especially if they happen slowly over time. The US as “world hegemon” took a decade to develop, and now the world needs to deal with it, the crisis of failed states across Africa and Asia, and the rise of non-state powers. Not only is the post-WWII system irrelevant, the basic assumptions of international law since the Treaty of Westphalia are beginning to become questioned. How can the current system handle this? It can’t.

I agree with a lot of this. One problem with the post-1945 system is that it created a transnational bureaucracy, and a lot of NGOs that feed off of it, and that creates great resistance to change that might cost people their phony-baloney jobs.

UPDATE: Jeff Cooper writes that there’s not all that much difference between his position and Katzman’s.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus comments.

SOME THOUGHTS on what the alleged terrorists in Florida may have been after.

SPEAKING OF VODKAPUNDITS, the original article has an account of Hanan Ashrawi’s speech at Colorado College, which was notable mostly for not being shut down by screaming racist mobs of the sort associated with places like SFSU and Concordia College. Matt Traylor was also there, and has these words for Colorado College: “I hope you didn’t pay much for that speech.” (This meshes with what Stephen Green said: “a complete waste of time.”) Traylor has helpful advice for Hanan Ashrawi, too.

TED BARLOW TAKES ISSUE with my post on Alex Beam and the relative degrees of fun-ness on the left and right. I was certainly having fun with Beam, who seems to exist mostly for my amusement, and that of quite a few other bloggers.

But Barlow claims that Beam — and I — overstate the case. I think that’s a matter of perspective. I don’t know what Ted does for a living, but I’m pretty sure he’s not an academic. If you live in the academic world, the influence of the hair-shirt left is pretty damned obvious. It’s true that the priggish anti-sex wing of feminism has lost its lustre, and its credibility, in the wake of the Clinton / Lewinsky affair. It’s just impossible to take that sexual-harassment stuff very seriously after you’ve seen Susan Estrich, et al., saying that a blowjob between a boss and an employee is a purely private matter. (Human Resources offices still take it seriously, of course, but they’re required to take all sorts of stuff seriously). But serious or not, it’s still alive, in Human Resource offices and feminist studies anyway, and those still wield more power in my world than their moral or intellectual accomplishments would warrant.

Ted says that no one on the left defends Andrea Dworkin anymore, and produces an extensive list of blogosphere citations to prove it — only to be brought up short by Dworkin defenders in his comments section. (Another commenter, displaying the sort of rollicking good humor I’ve come to associate with certain segments of the left, says that I’m an “idiot.”)

But okay, I think it’s fair to say that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon don’t enjoy a lot of support from lefty bloggers. So what? Ted notes, correctly, that “The Right isn’t just a bunch of fun-loving VodkaPundits; it’s also where Jerry Falwell, Bill Bennett, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson etc. live.” Well, true enough — but we need more fun-loving VodkaPundits and fewer of the others, and as best I can tell that’s where the right is these days — at least if you include the libertarian-inclined right, which you have to if you want to count me and Stephen Green as “right” bloggers. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson don’t enjoy a lot of support from righty bloggers — in fact, I explicitly mentioned them in the post that led Charles Johnson to coin the term “idiotarian.” My question is this: we know about the lefty Falwells — that would be Dworkin and MacKinnon, among many others. But where are the lefty Vodkapundits? And try as he may, Eric Alterman doesn’t count.

UPDATE: I’d count Welch and Layne as lefty VodkaPundits — but I don’t think that Ted, or most of the self-described lefty blogosphere, consider them lefties at all. Which, to my mind, helps to illustrate my point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an argument that Alterman is the VodkaPundit Of The Left. Well, the real VP would have been smoother, but then he’s been aging in the oaken barrels of the blogosphere for longer than Alterman. . . .

LAST UPDATE: Dave Shiflett has the last word:

More to the point is a larger question: Do any pundits really have fun? And, if so, what does this tell us about the pundit? . . . The saving grace for most pundits is that they are easily amused.

I think he might be onto something. Jim Treacher emails that he’s not a lefty VodkaPundit, but he might be a “moderate GinWonk.” Could be. Though his comments on Moby don’t sound all that “moderate.”

CHRETIEN UPDATE: Here’s a column from the Toronto Sun:

Why on earth would Prime Minister Jean Chretien blame America for terrorist attacks on not only the U.S., but Western civilization in a CBC-TV interview scheduled to run on or around Sept. 11 — a day of remembrance and dedication.

And make no mistake — it was America he was slamming, using the euphemism of blaming “arrogant, self-satisfied, greedy” western countries for “humiliation” that provokes others to resort to terror. . . .

That Chretien resents America and President Bush may well be because they make him look weak and petty.

Chretien can’t inspire others, except those who depend on him for favours. He has disarmed Canada, made us utterly dependent on America for security, and resents it.

Increasingly, Canadians want Chretien gone. The longer he sticks around, the greater the likelihood that the Liberal party will suffer. Chretien has become a national embarrassment.

Americans and Canadians should be equally upset at his boorishness.

No prime minister in our history would have been so crass as to snipe at America the way Chretien has on such a poignant date in its history. It will encourage many Americans to resent Canada and wonder what warrants such hatred from a Canadian PM.

“Weak and petty” seems about right. Until the other day, my attitude on Chretien was Bogartesque — I probably would have despised him, if I had given him any thought. Then he made sure that I gave him thought.

(Via Max Jacobs).

EUGENE VOLOKH has weighed in on the Scott Rosenberg / Damian Penny feud.

IAIN MURRAY REVIEWS some new polls and says:

The distinction between the solid, working/middle class, Euroskeptic, Anglospheric core and the flighty, upper/nouveau class, Europhile, anti-American literati is shown to be real by the polling data. Two nations. Blair has to pick which one he’s for. More by the luck than judgment, I think he’s making the right choice.

I think it’s more than luck.

MATTHEW HOY says that he’s hit the Trifecta with the New York Times op-ed page today: not one, not two, but three dumb op-eds. In response, Hoy attempts a difficult triple-Fisking of Kristof, Krugman, and Albright.

Well, okay, not that difficult — I mean, look who we’re talking about here. But you usually only see contestants attempt a “triple-Fisking” in the Olympic finals. It’s gutsy of Hoy to do it in a mere exhibition event.

WIMPS: The Gop is backing away from Social Security privatization. The notion that a market slump means that social security privatization is a bad idea is indescribably stupid. Markets go up and down. Big deal. Congress has already cut my social security benefits, by raising my retirement age, and it’ll do it again. Somehow that political risk is discounted in all the discussions of privatization, but it shouldn’t be — markets always go up again, but Congress seldom un-screws people once it’s screwed them.

A TANK CAR FULL OF AMMONIA has exploded in Texas, with a boom that was heard 50 miles away. Not much more information at the moment.

NICK KRISTOF compares the current situation with the Cuban Missile Crisis. That earns this response from reader Brannon Denning:

God this is so lame, even by Kristof’s standards. Uh, the reason Kennedy didn’t want to press on Cuba is because there was a FRIGGIN COLD WAR ON!!!! What, are we worried that if we attack Baghdad, the Russians will invade Berlin? Jeez. Oh, and can’t we, for the love of God, give the whole macho JFK thing a rest for once?

There’s been a shortage of macho Democrats since JFK — with the exception of LBJ, and people don’t like to bring him up.

BREAKING NEWS ON the antiterror front. Here’s the CNN story:

Authorities closed a 20-mile stretch of “Alligator Alley,” south Florida’s primary cross-state connector, and detonated a package early Friday after stopping three suspects who they believe may have been plotting a terror attack in Miami. . . .

Florida law enforcement officials issued an alert Thursday night after a Georgia woman said she overheard a conversation among three men in a Calhoun, Georgia, restaurant. Calhoun is about 70 miles northwest of Atlanta on I-75, which runs north-south until it reaches Naples.

She said the conversation indicated they were planning a September 13 terror attack on Miami, according to a report by Miami’s WSVN-TV.

This puts that whole TIPS thing in a better light. Well, maybe.

UPDATE: Here’s the latest as of 11:30. I hope they’re checking for more than just explosives. One report said that “medical equipment” was found.

HEY, the headlines for Bush’s speech should have read “Descendant of Muhammad condemns Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda.”

LILEKS RULES, as usual:

I’ve been reading reactions to the President’s UN speech, and I’m amused at how people don’t seem to get it. Oh, now he’s being a multilateralist? Now he believes in the UN? No. That speech was the equivalent of that fabled kung-fu move that removes your opponent’s heart and shows it to you, just before you crumple. It’s of a piece with the administration’s behavior since 9/11: Let all the carpers and obstructionists gather on the tip of the thinnest branch, then show up with a saw and announce they have five minutes to come hug the trunk, which incidentally is covered with sap and stinging ants. It was sheer malicious brilliance to cast the entire case in terms of UN resolutions, because it mean the UN had to chose: either those resolutions mean something, or the UN means nothing. Why, it’s almost as if the UN painted itself into a corner – and woke up to find this rude simple cowboy holding the brush. How the hell did he do that?

Those damned cowboys. As Neal Stephenson’s fictional Yamamoto observed, crude and stupid is tolerable. Crude and smart is absolutely, positively unfair.

SCORE ONE FOR ROPE-A-DOPE:

President George W. Bush yesterday proved himself a master of the art of turning the tables on his critics, by choosing to make his case for an urgent showdown with Iraq in terms of the very diplomatic multilateralism they hold so dear.

In doing so, he delivered a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that was, by some way, the most powerful indictment of Saddam Hussein that has been heard from the administration since the drumbeat towards war began six months ago.

It not only offered a strong rationale for coercive measures against Iraq. It also presented, for the first time, a possible framework for diplomatic and, if necessary, military action that could broaden the support for regime change in Baghdad beyond the current narrow coalition of the US and the UK.

Above all, the speech cleverly emphasised that what is at stake is the post-1945 international system itself. The challenge to that system comes not from the administration in Washington, but from Iraq.

Glad to see someone’s finally paying attention.

STEPHEN F. HAYES ASKS “Someone remind me why George Tenet still has a job.” The occasion: the CIA’s inability to match the performance of reporters for The New Yorker and — even more embarrassingly — PBS.

LARRY SABATO’S CRYSTAL BALL has a lot of predictions and information regarding this fall’s elections. He says it’s “More accurate and user-friendly than Florida voting machines!”

HENRY COPELAND has a novel and interesting theory about weblogs and traffic. Er, I mean, “Ah, yes, exactly as I planned all along. . . .”

TONY PIERCE offers some undiplomatic criticism of today’s L.A. Times article on weblogs. Matt Welch is more diplomatic, but equally critical.

ANDREA SEE has now gone 97 days without smoking. Hurrah!

I THINK that it’s really an alien spaceship. Just in case you were wondering.

JOHN TABIN says he witnessed late night TV’s first Fisking, courtesy of actor James Woods. I didn’t see it, but his account is a good one.

THE SHOW WAS A GOOD ONE. Timed it perfectly: saw the last song of the second warmup band, a pretty good Lenny-Kravitz-influenced outfit out of Atlanta called Jade. Copper was set up and playing in admirably short time. Good music, scantily clad women, cold beer. They played an hour and a half and I was home, just ahead of the traffic, in 20 minutes. Woohoo!