HERE’S A REASON why Barbra Streisand should read InstaPundit!

DAVE KOPEL HAS AN ANALYSIS of New Jersey election law as it applies to the Torricelli succession.

Hmm. That sounds like a Robert Ludlum title, doesn’t it? The Torricelli Succession.

NEW YORK SAYS THAT BUDDY HACKETT NEEDS A GUN to protect himself, but you don’t. Er, unless “you” are one of a list of celebrities and politicoes with the juice to get a special privilege denied to ordinary people:

“Bobby De Niro went down there, got fingerprinted, and the next day picked up his license,” Chambers said. “Celebrity status makes it much easier.”

Richter disputed this. Movie stars – like De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Steven Seagal – and millionaires – like Donald Trump and Winthrop Rockefeller – have to meet the same requirements as anyone else, he said.

“We’ve had a number of celebrities apply who don’t get it,” he said.

Well, there you are, then. Look at the list (it’s at the end of the story) and see if you think this is based on “need.”

THIS LETTER IN TODAY’S NEW YORK TIMES is almost a parody of soccer-mom-themed opposition to the war:

The American people do not want war. They want a loving home, healthy children and good jobs with a minimum wage you can live on. They want good, safe public or private schools. They want a happy vacation time with family and friends.

They do not want war. They do not want fear.

Yeah, not like December 8, 1941, when they wanted nothing but blood, toil, tears and sacrifice. Back then, nobody wanted “happy vacation time” anyway. Jeez.

Wanting war is one thing. Seeing it as necessary is another. People who can’t tell the difference — well, they belong on the editorial page of The New York Times, apparently.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford sends this quote from The Lord of the Rings, which he hopes Peter Jackson has left in the movie:

“It takes but one to make a war, not two, and those who do not have swords may still die upon them.” — Eowyn

Yes, I’ve quoted that one before. Apt, isn’t it?

TOO LITTLE COMPETITION produces fat, happy execs and a lousy product. It’s true for radio, according to this article by Todd Spencer in Salon.

“EVERYONE SHOULD QUOTE NEAL STEPHENSON,” says a certain techno musician in a recent Web interview. Eugene Volokh is following that advice.

TAEGAN GODDARD writes that the maneuvering over the New Jersey elections is not such a big deal:

The Democrats seem to have a pretty safe alternative if the courts do not allow them to replace Torricelli on the ballot. Under New Jersey law, if Torricelli resigns before his seat before Monday, Gov. James McGreevey can call a special election on November 5. Doug Forrester would then run against the person McGreevy names to fill Torricelli’s seat for the remaining two months of his term.

Yeah, but that’s if you can get the Torch to resign. Is he that loyal?

HOWARD KURTZ HAS THE DEFINITIVE TORRICELLI POSTMORTEM WRAPUP.

As I ran around Lakeshore park this morning (lovely with the sun rising across the river and the mist rising from the water) I listened to NPR on the issue. The story by Mara Liasson was quite fair, which made me realize that NPR seems to be much more balanced lately. Maybe the criticism has had some effect.

LILEKS IS DISSING JESSE VENTURA AGAIN:

He said, in effect, that we trade with China, and they’re full of dictators, so what’s the big deal about Cuba.

It is not possible to be a world leader and avoid engagement with China.

It is possible to be the governor of a small Midwestern state and not deal with Cuba.

Jesse wanted to go to Cuba because he thought it would just plain ROCK to meet Castro – not because he loved him or admired him, but because few people got to do so, and Jesse is drawn to those things that set him apart from lesser mortals. This doesn’t make him different from other politicians – sometimes it’s refreshing that the naked self-interest is presented, nakedly. But his egotism, thin-skinnedness and mulish belief that his critics are motivated by envy and party politics made him a tiresome figure in the end. As I’ve said before, I was in his corner when he started. I knew he was a canny man. You could throw any issue at him and you’d get a fresh take presented without spin, without an eye to the polls. I disagreed with him on a few issues, but I knew that he held those views out of conviction, not because his party required him to salaam before their chosen altars. But the qualities that got him elected were not the qualities that helped him govern, and he made an ass of himself over and over and over again.

Yeah. Not that my governor is any prize, either. But that’s another post.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT THE BONIOR/MCDERMOTT STORY was going to be eclipsed by the shenanigans in New Jersey, George Will hits them again:

Hitler found “Lord Haw Haw” — William Joyce, who broadcast German propaganda to Britain during the Second World War — in the dregs of British extremism. But Saddam Hussein finds American collaborators among senior congressional Democrats.

Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC’s “This Week” from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word but should not take President Bush at his. . . .

Bonior, until recently second-ranking in the House Democratic leadership, said sources no less reliable than Hussein’s minions told them that inspectors would have an “unrestricted ability to go where they want.” McDermott said: “I think you have to take the Iraqis on their value — at their face value.” And: “I think the president would mislead the American people.”

McDermott and Bonior are two specimens of what Lenin, referring to Westerners who denied the existence of Lenin’s police-state terror, called “useful idiots.”

Yes. And in their idiocy, as useful to the Republican Party as to the Republican Guard.

UPDATE: Michael Crowley thinks the same thing:

You can be sure some Democratic Party leaders were choking on their coffee this morning. At a time when Democrats are trying to raise questions about a war with Iraq without appearing unpatriotic or pacifistic, ABC’s “This Week” featured an interview with two liberal congressmen who probably convinced plenty of viewers they are both. . . .

Both Bonior and McDermott seem genuinely moved by the human toll of economic sanctions against the Iraqi people, and there’s nothing wrong with their efforts to remind us about the real human suffering in that country. But trusting Saddam Hussein to be a nice guy is not the way to end it. And so when the conservative Republican Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma later suggested that Bonior and McDermott had sounded “somewhat like spokespersons for the Iraqi government,” he wasn’t entirely out of line. And chances are, some surely dismayed senior Democrats would privately agree.

Privately, yes. But I was hoping for a bit more public repudiation from the Democrats. They may just be hoping that this issue will go away, but by not speaking out they’re making it easier — and fairer — for Republicans to paint the entire Party as matching Bonior and McDermott.

NICK DENTON SAYS FORGET NATION-BUILDING IN IRAQ: Try “unbundling” instead:

Like some of the overblown conglomerates of US capitalism, Iraq needs to be unbundled. Nation-unbundling, not nation-building. Support a separate Shiite state in southern Iraq, which would at least be legitimate. And let the Sunni ruling class discover the price of defiance is not merely a readjustment in the clan hierarchy, but the dismemberment of their local empire, and the alienation of their oil revenues. Now that at least would be a salutary warning to the Saudi regime, which also contends with a Shiite population on top of its oil fields.

As for lighting the beacon of Arab democracy, a fine goal in and of itself, try somewhere else, like Tunisia, Jordan or Qatar — some place that hasn’t been lobotomized by vicious dictatorship.

I don’t think I agree with this, but it’s an interesting angle.

QUITE A FEW OF MY READERS believe that Torricelli’s withdrawal — delightful as they find it in itself — represents an underhanded Democratic strategy to win a seat they’ve done everything, up to now, to lose. Some of these theories are a bit elaborate, but now Orrin Judd says he smells a rat:

New Jersey’s Democrats knew full well what they had in Mr. Torricelli when they just recently nominated him to run for re-election to the U.S. Senate that he’d disgraced. The Senator’s unethical behavior was well known when he won the nomination and there’s been no material change in his circumstances. The only thing that we know now that we didn’t know then is that the voters of NJ seem to care more about the Senator’s character than did the Democrat voters who nominated him. But, if those Democrats didn’t care about the brazen choice they were making then, why is it our duty to get them off the hook now? Just because they made a mistake?

I don’t think this argument will fly at the New York Times.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan seems to agree:

Above all, Torricelli’s exit unfairly denies the voters a chance to punish him. Such votes are a critical part of the political system. They help cleanse the electoral palette, they allow the body politic to make a formal statement about what matters, and they drive the point home by humiliating the ethically challenged. Torricelli’s final, cynical move is of a piece with his entire career. It’s a scam and a duck. This time, surely New Jersey’s courts shouldn’t let him get away with it.

And Mickey Kaus observes:

Where does it say New Jersey voters have a right, not just to a choice of candidates, but to “a competitive race” — a right so important it must override trivial concerns like state laws about when names can be removed from a ballot? Is an election like a basketball game that has to be kept close in order to keep it exciting? The NYT editorial board seems to think so. … (It’s way too cheap and obvious to note that if it were the Republicans who had nominated a sleazeball headed for defeat, then ensuring a “competititve” race might not be the highest Times priority. So I won’t make that point. But others will!)

Sounds like another brisk day of Times-bashing in the Blogosphere. They do kind of bring it on themselves, though.

RUSSELL WARDLOW CONFESSES that he’s just too demanding of his fellow netizens.

HARKIN SCANDAL UPDATE: David Hogberg has an article on the Iowa Senate race at The American Prowler.

SUMAN PALIT IS UP IN ARMS about Kofi Annan’s international gun-control agenda.

UPDATE: Rachel Lucas tells Kofi that he’ll get her gun when he pries it from her cold, dead fingers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clayton Cramer says this isn’t the first time this approach has been tried.

APPARENTLY, TED BARLOW IS TAKING the long way home. Come back, Ted — we miss you!

Maybe he’s just having a beer with Edward Boyd and Ginger Stampley.

TNR’S BLOG BIDS a not-so-fond adieu to Robert Torricelli: “Rarely is there ever more cause for public glee than when a scoundrel gets his due. In Trenton this afternoon, the Senate’s most loathsome character got his.”

UPDATE: Rich Galen won’t miss him either: “Bob Torricelli’s career is over. It came to an abrupt and undignified end, which is fitting. Bob Torricelli is an abrupt and undignified person.”

Excerpts from The Torch’s undignified, but sadly not abrupt, farewell speech are here.

A NON-WAR PLAN to bring down Saddam. Donald Sensing offers one, which is more than most war critics have done.

NICE ARTICLE ON ROBOTS and humanity, on Alternet. Personally, I say, “Do not rage against the machine — embrace the machine!” (Okay, actually it’s Ngozi Uti who says that.)

Or as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots says: “Robots are people too! Or at least they will be, someday.”

AN UNSYMPATHETIC ACCOUNT of this weekend’s protests in Washington, from a blog run by students at GWU and elsewhere.

COLLIN MAY, who works in Geneva for a big NGO, explains his view of the EU mindset.

“IF NEW JERSEY HAD BETTER BEACHES, it would almost be Florida.” Jeez. If the first time was farce, what will it be this time?

HASHEMITE UPDATE: Here’s more on a Hashemite role in Iraq. Sounds like the idea is being taken quite seriously in some circles.

I can imagine a role for a transitional monarchy (think Juan Carlos) in Iraq, though I don’t see a Hashemite Restoration as a long-term option there. Besides, the Hashemites will be busy enough in Saudi Arabia. Though the Saudis sure have gotten more cooperative lately. It’s almost as if they were worried about something along those lines . . . .

READER ABHIJIT JAIN SENDS this link to an “unbelievably xenophobic” article from the Arab News denouncing guest workers, who now have the temerity to actually bargain for wages:

As if it were not enough for them to drain the resources of this country by sending millions of riyals annually to their home countries while spending very little locally, foreign workers have now learned the technique of bargaining. They bargain in order to satisfy their strong desire for wealth. In doing so, they outsmart even the most talented and able managers.

This doesn’t say much for Saudi managers, that they can invariably be outsmarted. But those “greedy expatriates” are all looking for work, and they want to be paid. The horror. Yeah, it’s xenophobic, but it’s mostly just clueless.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS WAS INTERVIEWED FOR A SALON PIECE, but he’s not very happy about the way it turned out.