KIM DU TOIT has a candidate for political asylum identified.

JAMES LILEKS:

Well, it seems Gerhard Schroeder has won election in Germany.

Of course, Hitler did the same thing.

It’s insufferably rude to compare a world leader to. . . oh, wait. Never mind.

STEPHEN GREEN is administering remedial instruction in ethics. Again.

STEVEN DEN BESTE looks at German-American relations and concludes that it’s going to be harder for Gerhard Schroder to kiss and make up than Schroder probably thinks. (Via Cato the Youngest).

UPDATE: I don’t think it was a coincidence that Donald Rumsfeld chose Poland as the place to criticize Schroder’s actions. You can expect to see the United States reaching out to Central European countries much more in the next month or two — and, for that matter, probably in the next several years — as a means of counteracting Franco-German anti-Americanism.

LYNN SISLO AND MISHA speak the final words on the “Tumbling Woman” controversy.

“THE FOG OF PEACE” — DAVID BROOKS SAYS THE ANTI-WAR LEFT IS UNSERIOUS:

If you are a writer setting out to evaluate the Bush foreign policy team and its longstanding worries about Saddam, it would seem reasonable to measure whether or not those fears are justified or exaggerated. This is Journalism, or Scholarship, 101. But this is the question FitzGerald cannot ask, because that would require her to enter the forbidden territory of Saddam himself. FitzGerald raises the possibility that war against Saddam might lead to a Palestinian revolt in Jordan, oil shortages, and terrorist attacks. She mentions the daunting cost and scope of an American occupation of Iraq. She approvingly quotes Brent Scowcroft’s warning that taking action against Saddam would inflame the Arab world and destroy the coalition that we need to wage war on al Qaeda. But what of the risks of doing nothing? This issue she does not touch. This is the issue that must remain shrouded in the fog of peace.

Reviewing Noam Chomsky, legal scholar Richard Falk, a member of the editorial board of the Nation, observes that while he agrees with much of what Chomsky writes, he is troubled by the fact that Chomsky is “so preoccupied with the evils of U.S. imperialism that it completely occupies all the political and moral space.”

That is exactly what you see in the writings of the peace camp generally–not only in Chomsky’s work but also in the writings of people who are actually tethered to reality. Their supposed demons–Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company–occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. For the peace camp, all foreign affairs is local; contempt for and opposition to Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, et al. is the driving passion. When they write about these figures it is with a burning zeal. But on the rare occasions when they write about Saddam, suddenly all passion drains away. Saddam is boring, but Wolfowitz tears at their soul.

That seems about right.

EVERYBODY IS INTERESTED IN THE MOON all of a sudden, reports Leonard David. My TechCentralStation column on Wednesday will be about the political influences involved in this phenomenon. Well, sort of.

THE, ER, SINISTER faces of blogosphere conspiracism, revealed.

A READER WRITES: “If this had happened the other way around, how long before we would see Palestinian propaganda about Jews killing Palestinians for organs?” About as long as it takes to find a working photocopier, I’d imagine.

THE “COUNTRYSIDE MARCH” in London yesterday looks to have been quite an event. According to this report:

A LANDOWNER spoke for the 400,000 countryside marchers yesterday as he declared: “The reason I’m here can be summed up in one word — freedom.”

Andrew Duff Gordon said: “There is a huge strength of feeling because everyone in the countryside is being ignored.”

DodgeBlog, Freedom & Whisky, and Lionel Mandrake have comments.

UPDATE: Oh, and this Samizdata account is worth reading.

THE ADMINISTRATION’S NEW SMALLPOX VACCINATION POLICY IS OUT, and it’s getting rather mixed reviews from MedPundit and The Bloviator, two medico-bloggers whose stuff is always worth reading.

Here, from MedPundit, is a great story lead for investigative journalists — how local health departments are spending their bioterrorism money:

This reliance on local health departments to carry out the plan is more than a little worrisome. Not all public health departments are created equally, and many of them are little more than well child and sexually transmitted disease clinics. Last week, I got an inkling of what ours is probably doing with their bioterrorism money. I received a slick package on preventing falls in the elderly. It came in a nice folder with nice, glossy handouts and reminder cards for patients. Normally our health department provides handouts on xeroxed sheets, and it never presents them in a package like this. I could be wrong, but I have to wonder where they suddenly got the money for public relations.

Pork: seek, and ye shall find. The Knox County Health Department seems to be spending its bioterrorism money on bioterrorism, though — and to prove it, they’ve hired my secretary (who just got her degree in public health) away. Two of the remaining secretaries in our pool (out of four) are at risk, too. One’s a reservist Combat Engineer, and the other a military intelligence reservist. In the event of war, my photocopying might not get done.

I don’t think that’s an especially major cost, but I have to note that the usually-more-sensible American Library Association is upset that Palestinian photocopiers have been destroyed, and has adopted a resolution decrying that, and other war-related interruptions of Palestinian library service. I was unable, however, to find a resolution denouncing Palestinian terrorism, which has presumably impacted the degree of service at libraries in Israel.

UPDATE: A librarian reader says the ALA is no longer a sensible organization, and sends this link to an even more biased resolution. Another librarian sent me the same thing, with the same sentiments, and says that the ALA’s public-policy apparatus has been captured by the loony left.

I guess I’ll have to keep this kind of thing in mind when I evaluate the ALA’s public statements on the Patriot Act, etc.

HOWARD KURTZ has an interesting nugget about online corrections mentioning Eugene Volokh. (Scroll to the bottom). But I’m deliberately burying the lede (or, for the nonpretentious, the lead) here. Can you guess what the real newsworthy item in that paragraph is?

JOANNE JACOBS writes that a new Roll Call article makes the Congressional Democrats look self-serving and spineless on the war. Maybe I’m just in the mood to see the glass as half-full this week, but to me the big news is that even Jerrod Nadler has figured out that the Democrats have a big image problem.

The next step, of course, will be for someone to figure out that to address the image problem, they’ll have to address the substance problem.

UPDATE: David Broder agrees with Joanne about the Democrats:

But there is something deeper — and less justifiable — at work. The Democratic leaders in Congress, in both the House and Senate, largely have abandoned principle and long-term strategy for the short-term tactics they think will help them in this November’s election.

What’s more, Broder says this problem extends beyond the war, encompassing the similar decision to carp at, but not to challenge, Bush’s tax cut: “The Democrats’ refusal to face up to that fundamental issue leaves them without credibility for their entire critique of Bush’s economic policy.”

This seems right to me. (Broder article via Andrew Sullivan).

DAVID HOGBERG has a moving obituary on his site.

WHY THEY HATE US: Apparently, they hate pretty much everybody:

“I want to eliminate these pigs, these swine,” Ben Soltane said. He told Es Sayed that he despised everything about Italy: “I hate the people, I hate the documents …. I want to go anywhere else.”

In countless hours of wiretaps over two years, members of the Milan cell schemed, threatened and told war stories, their voices full of hate and despair. Many were extremists from North African countries who fled to Italy to escape prosecution. But they were alienated in their adopted land as well; they sounded like men who felt permanently and dangerously adrift. . . .

The young men saw themselves as warrior-monks assailed by the temptations of a prosperous, fun-loving society.

The way other men might watch pornography, they sat in a seedy apartment chortling at videos of moujahedeen slaughtering Russian soldiers in the snows of Chechnya.

“Look, look how they cut his throat,” a suspect named Khaled exclaimed, according to the transcript of an intercept March 22, 2001, in an apartment in suburban Gallarate.

“Why’s the other one alive?” a man named Farid said as gunfire from the television echoed in the background. . . .

The anger trapped them in a doomed existence, although they had alternatives, judging from another exchange in the Citroen.

“You don’t like this nice life? You want to die?” Es Sayed asked Ben Soltane.

“Listen, sheik, if I liked this life, I would go to my cousin who is in Germany and wants to marry me,” Ben Soltane answered. “In five years, I would have a German passport and live in peace.”

Sorry, these guys are just scum. And ungrateful scum at that.

JOURNALISTS WITH WEBLOGS: The New York Times looks at the pluses and minuses.