BREATHING DOWN SADDAM’S NECK: This report is encouraging, if true.

MESSY, if likely ineffectual, doings in the Phillipines. We Americans don’t always realize just how unusually well-off we are to have a professional, and honorable, military. It’s very much the exception, around the world.

Of course, so is having an effectual military. I think there’s a connection.

TODAY IS “CUBAN LIBERATION DAY,” but the “liberation,” unfortunately, never actually took place.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW with Christopher Hitchens, who’s just back from Iraq.

TACITUS POINTS OUT THAT scholars of Islam are facing death threats.

THIS CARTOON isn’t subtle, but it’s pretty much on the mark.

And speaking of cartoons, Day by Day will return on Monday.

UPDATE: A lightbulb joke I hadn’t heard.

SOME (PRETTY) GOOD NEWS from Sao Tome, over at Oxblog.

A FEW DAYS AGO I noted the Berkeley study that suggests that conservatism is a sort of mental disorder. Jonah Goldberg is busily making fun of it now. Meanwhile, Prof. James Lindgren suggests that the Berkeley data are likely to be unsound.

What’s most amazing to me is that the Berkeley PR office thought that trumpeting this study to the nationwide media would be a good idea, and that doing so would somehow enhance the school’s reputation.

UPDATE: Brian Carnell has some interesting information on some other theorizing by one of the study authors.

CHEMIST DEREK LOWE speculates about what Philip Larkin would have been like on Ritalin.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has some thoughts. And I like his fitness-blog posts.

MORE SHENANIGANS from the Nevada Supreme Court. This seems rather unjudicious to me.

HEY, I’VE GOT AN UNSTOPPABLE POLITICAL JUGGERNAUT rolling, and I didn’t even know about it until today!

I must say, I’m proud to share the ticket with Rachel Lucas. And I guess this Blogosphere political movement makes two things I have in common with Howard Dean, now. Or, come to think of it, three!

UPDATE: Heck, people have even got the cabinet mostly picked out for me.

Government-via-blogosphere? Why not? I mean, how much worse could it be? And it would figure that the whole thing was started by a self-described gay gun nut, wouldn’t it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Gary Leff is angling for the Secretary of Transportation slot. Hey, he’d have to be better than “Underperformin’ Norman” Mineta!

ACCORDING TO THIS REPORT, Howard Dean can expect a massive wave of attacks from bloggers.

Personally, I doubt it. Who would resort to lame attacks just to boost traffic?

UPDATE: ScrappleFace forces life to imitate ScrappleFace.

MORE CONCERNS ABOUT ELECTRONIC VOTING: Here’s a column by Dan Gillmor on security problems with electronic voting systems. SKBubba, who knows rather a lot about computers and security, has a roundup of links including one to a study by Johns Hopkins calling the Diebold system fatally flawed.

It’s easy for such critiques to shade over into paranoia — but on the other hand, a voting system that inspires paranoia is a bad thing in itself, even if it never produces widespread fraud. But experience suggests that a system that can be hacked will be, sooner or later, when so much is at stake.

And the solution is so easy that it’s criminal not to address the problem.

THIS STUFF JUST KEEPS COMING:

WASHINGTON – The congressional staff investigating the Sept. 11 attacks found information in the files of the CIA and FBI “suggesting specific sources of foreign support” for some of the 19 hijackers – information that the agencies were not pursuing, staff director Eleanor Hill said Friday.

The staff’s massive report, released Thursday, reveals that even FBI Director Robert Mueller in October was unaware of cables and reports that the joint inquiry staff found in FBI files indicating that some hijackers received money from people associated with the government of Saudi Arabia. . . .

Almost all the information about a possible Saudi connection was classified at the insistence of the Bush administration and not made public.

I agree with Steven Den Beste that the Bush Administration’s continuing solicitude for the Saudis is, to put it mildly, troubling. As I said back in December, I’m surprised that the Democrats haven’t made more out of this.

UPDATE: Bush is getting hit from the right on this, anyway, as Rich Lowry notes:

Saddam Hussein never got it. He didn’t realize that personal schmoozing in Washington and spreading lots of money around to former and soon-to-be U.S. government officials were the keys to realizing his geopolitical ambitions. He, in short, never learned the Saudi lesson.

How else to explain the differing treatments of the Iraqi and Saudi governments?

The Bush administration included a line in this year’s State of the Union address about Saddam’s alleged efforts to acquire uranium in Africa that was defensible, but hardly bulletproof — prompting an (overblown) national scandal. Now the administration is withholding from a congressional report sections dealing with Saudi support and financing for terrorism — which should prompt a (long-overdue) national scandal. . . .

The only apparent reason to keep the Saudi section under wraps is that it will embarrass Riyadh. If so, President Bush should have, at the outset, announced an important codicil to the Bush Doctrine that foreign governments have to choose between supporting us or supporting the terrorists — unless it discomfits the Saudi royal family.

Ouch.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Owens thinks he knows why the Dems aren’t making more out of this.

MORE NEWS FROM INSTAPUNDIT’S AFGHANISTAN CORRESPONDENT, Boston University Professor John Robert Kelly:

IN KABUL: FOX, BBC AND THE HUSSEIN CORPSES.

In hotels, cafes, restaurants and the necklace of NGO guest houses ringing the city there is a burgeoning battle for viewers on the satellite television system that has finally brought the outside world into Kabul. Thousands of expatriate couch commanders jockey for control of the remote; the Euros inevitably vie for the ‘unbiased’ coverage of BBC World while the majority of Americans steadfastly tune to the homespun comfort of Fox News. The good news for Rupert is that Fox is number one, or more precisely, it occupies the first channel on the dial. Fox is not in any sense international, it simply rebroadcasts the full American slate of its daily programming—from Fox and Friends to Brit, Bill, Sean, Alan and Greta. The BBC is a true world service; that is, there is not a region of the planet where the BBC is without a fierce opinion about how things are and should be. The British may have been drummed unceremoniously out of Afghanistan and the colonies in other centuries, but they are returned with a vengeance and an attitude no less condescending or patronizing.

While the morose and fretful hand-wringing of the BBC seems to add some cheer to the lives of the UN community, that news channel finds little purchase among the younger English speaking Afghans fascinated by the extraordinary soap opera quality of American culture as presented by Fox. This is hardly surprising, since their Dari parents are long addicted to the extremely stylized and dramatically overblown programming channeled in from India, even though they understand not a word of its dialogue. Escapism into the personal travails of celebrities and stars is far more engaging than watching the dry drones of global doom on the BBC—the Afghans have experienced enough of that firsthand, thank you very much. Fox offers instead an endless but intoxicating glimpse into the many mysteries of American misbehavior. Currently among the young, Kobe is number one with a bullet. One is persistently petitioned to explain the mores of American marital fidelity, the sexual privileges of the celebrated and the minutiae of our judicial system.

It’s not all questions; often the Afghans offer surprisingly astute observations and advice to the Americans on its handling of the war on terror. “The naked bodies of Uday and Qusay should never have been shown by the U.S. It gives them a bad reputation in the Islamic world,” says one as we scrutinize the mortician’s indecorously draped version of the corpses. His friends concur. Indeed, the televising of the Husseins remains is not only widely unpopular here; it’s considered a terrible tactical blunder, even among the most pro-American Afghans. These miscalculated media moments can have broad and unforeseen repercussions, exacerbating tensions in a city still reeling from a rash of recent bombing attempts credited to an increasingly impulsive Taliban and Al Qa’eda. Since the extermination of the brothers, the U.S. Embassy has placed its personnel on ‘Charlie’ alert; no travel except in armed convoys with ‘one in the chamber.’ The U.N. is in full lockdown mode; personnel are still ferried to work in chauffeured Land Cruisers, but otherwise are restricted to their villas. As far as these young Afghans in the television room are concerned, this public relations blunder could have easily been avoided. “The Americans were very foolish. They should have given the film to Al Jazeera. They would have broadcast it for certain and the Americans would have been completely without blame in the Islamic world.”

(Professor) John Robert Kelly

Interesting suggestion. I hope the appropriate parties keep it in mind. And you can read Kelly’s earlier report here.

DANIEL DREZNER HAS POSTS here and here on war and reconstruction, both of which are very much worth reading.

JESSE WALKER WRITES that the BBC is “neither David nor Goliath: it’s more like Methuselah with a trust fund.”

IT’S THE BLOGATHON again, and again it’s for a good cause.

JAMES MORROW WRITES:

But this Vietnam analogy, recently taken up by the global media after months of bleating by the anti-war, anti-Bush Left, starts to fall apart very quickly under scrutiny. The news that Saddam Hussein’s two sons, the much-loathed Uday and Qusay, were killed in a firefight yesterday with US forces only further shows the bankruptcy of this already shoddy argument. Indeed, with 34 of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis dead or in US custody, the US can be said to be slowly but surely winning the mop-up phase of the war in Iraq.

Those who continue to try to play the quagmire card should look at, and recall, the facts. US involvement in Vietnam lasted a decade and cost more than 50,000 US lives. So far, it has been barely four months since US troops first crossed into Iraq, and since the end of major combat on May 2, just 33 US soldiers have been killed by the so-called “Iraqi resistance”.

While every soldier’s death is tragic (and it is touching to see so many on the Left suddenly concerned about the welfare of American men and women in uniform), it doesn’t take a Stephen Hawking to figure out that these losses are nothing like those inflicted by the Vietcong.

Indeed.

The “Quagmire Index” seems to be rising. Er, or would that be “falling?”

THIS PIECE BY COLBY COSH on the Congressional 9/11 report is worth reading in its entirety. But here’s an excerpt:

I am a bit disappointed that the report of the congressional Joint Inquiry into September 11 takes claims that the “intelligence community” was overworked and underfunded so seriously. The claims may, one supposes, be factually correct, but tell me this: can you name any bureaucracy, in any government department, in any state, on any planet, whose members do not unanimously claim to suffer from a lack of “resources”? In the case of 9/11 the claim has been made indisputable, apparently, by how badly the intelligence services fucked up. They failed–there must have been a budgetary reason.

And yet, on the other hand, there’s this weird post facto expectation of outright perfection in intelligence-gathering. The lessons of Pearl Harbor about signal-to-noise ratio seem to have been poorly absorbed. And Congress appears rueful that a “wall” was built in the 1960s and 1970s between domestic policing of the American republic and the gathering of foreign intelligence, because it prevented the relevant agencies from coordinating their data and making the connections (INS-CIA-FBI-NSA) that might have saved the World Trade Center. Well, the people who built that “wall” were perfectly aware that it would have the effect of decreasing the efficiency with which the citizenry was protected. They built it because the power to protect is also the power to detect, persecute, and destroy. The wall serves to prevent a police state being created in America. That’s important: not lip-service important, but future-of-the-human-species important. If getting rid of Saddam Hussein was worth American lives, the continued existence of the wall unarguably is. But something there is that does not love a wall–and it’s Congress, whose job description formerly included the task of checking and supervising executive power within the United States government.

Read the whole thing, as they say. I’m not buying the “overworked and overfunded” argument much, though, in light of this story about FBI translators — after September 11 — being told to slow down their work so as to justify higher budgets. I’d like to see Congress investigating that.

And somebody should hire him to write stuff like this for a magazine. You know, for money.

UPDATE: This post by Phil Carter is worth reading, too.

JOHN HAWKINS INTERVIEWS HUGH HEWITT: Who, unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh, seems to really understand the blogosphere, though he requires editorial correction on professional wrestling. Here’s an interesting bit:

The smarter the host, the better the show, the greater the audience. Knucklehead radio is going to go away and in its place…if I were a thirty year old like you, I’d find a radio show to match with my blog because the synergy is overwhelming.

Good advice.

UPDATE: A couple of readers email that I’m unfairly smearing Limbaugh — they say he’s been citing blogs a lot lately. That’s news to me, but I’m not a regular listener (as much blogging as I do, talk radio isn’t much of a distraction, and I only listen to radio in the car anyway). I heard him describe what a blog was once a while back, and the description didn’t give the impression that he was very familiar with them, but that’s been a while.

Other readers suggest that Neal Boortz’s program notes page should get a mention. Yeah — if he just linked to all his items, he’d have a true blog.

MILITARY RECRUITING IDIOCY: Read this and be amazed.

IF THE WEAPONS HAVEN’T BEEN FOUND BY NOW, THEY WERE CLEARLY NEVER THERE — I don’t care what this report says:

AN AIRPORT used by hundreds of thousands of tourists and business travellers each year could be sitting on top of thousands of live bombs.

Papers among thousands of files captured from the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, claim tons of live Second World War munitions were buried in concrete bunkers beneath the runways of Schoenefeld airport in East Berlin. It is now the main destination for discount airlines, such as Ryanair, and numerous charter companies.

Not only did the commissars intern munitions beneath the runways, but also entire Nazi fighter planes, all fuelled and fully bombed-up, according to the Stasi.

The captured files of Interflug, the former East German government airline and the airport authority of the DDR, are now being examined to see if the Stasi claim is true. . . .

A spokesman for the airport said: “We became aware of the bunkers in 1993, four years after the fall of the [Berlin] Wall. A check was undertaken then and everything was determined to be safe.”

But he conceded that he was astounded at the claims that fully-fuelled and bombed-up aircraft lie beneath the runways and said new tests about the safety of the structures will be carried out.

He added: “We had no idea that so much ordnance is supposedly under there.”

Frank Henkel, the Conservative interior ministry spokesman, said: “This must be investigated thoroughly and immediately and the runways strengthened if necessary.”

Berlin, with its sandy, dry soil, was perfect for the bunker-building of the Third Reich. Hundreds of thousands of them were constructed during the 12-year lifespan of the Nazi government: for every one metre of building above ground in modern-day Berlin, there are three metres below ground.

Bunkers are being discovered every day and a group called Underground Berlin has turned several of them into tourist attractions.

Fascinating story, actually.

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ ADDITION OF DAVID BROOKS as a columnist suggests that I was right to hope that Howell Raines’ replacement with Bill Keller indicated a broader effort to restore the Times’ credibility and add some balance, though some people seemed skeptical at the time. As Virginia Postrel notes: “It may be noteworthy that opinion editor Gail Collins, a Raines protege, reports not to Bill Keller but to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The new regime may extend beyond the newsroom.” That was my hope, and there’s at least some evidence that it’s happening.

The real test, though, will be whether the Times management will be stricter on misrepresentations and falsehoods by existing oped columnists like Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and Nick Kristof. The jury’s still out on that one, but I have my hopes there, too.

JONATHAN FOREMAN WRITES that American troops aren’t spoiled, trigger-happy yokels after all:

Whether the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were self-inflicted or not, the military operation to capture them was immaculate. There were no American deaths, 10 minutes of warnings were given over loudspeakers, and it was the Iraqis who opened fire. So sensitive was the American approach, they even rang the bell of the house before entering.

The neat operation fits squarely with the tenor of the whole American campaign, contrary to the popular negative depiction of its armed forces: that they are spoilt, well-equipped, steroid-pumped, crudely patriotic yokels who are trigger-happy yet cowardly in their application of overwhelming force.

And, unlike our chaps, none of them is supposed to have the slightest clue about Northern Ireland-style “peacekeeping”: never leaving their vehicles to go on foot patrols, never attempting to win hearts and minds by engaging with local communities and, of course, never removing their helmets, sunglasses and body armour to appear more human.

As a British journalist working for an American newspaper, who was embedded with American troops before, during and after the conquest of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I know this is all way off the mark; a collection of myths coloured by prejudice, fed by Hollywood’s tendentious depictions of Vietnam (fought by a very different US Army to today’s) and by memories of the Second World War.

The American soldiers I met were disciplined professionals. Many of them had extensive experience of peacekeeping in Kosovo and Bosnia and had worked alongside (or even been trained by) British troops. Thoughtful, mature for their years, and astonishingly racially integrated, they bore little resemblance to the disgruntled draftees in Platoon or Apocalypse Now.

Go figure. What’s sad is that this is news for most foreign readers, who are being fed a steady diet of, well, lies by a press corps that doesn’t even bother trying to hide its anti-Americanism, at least until someone points it out.