CALL ME CRAZY, but I’m suspicious about this: “United Nations nuclear inspectors have reportedly found traces of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium at a second site in Iran.”

HERE’S A REPORT from the World Congress of Philosophy, which was in Turkey this year.

EDWARD SAID IS DEAD. Here’s some commentary on his work, by Adil Farooq. And here’s more from Charles Paul Freund.

UPDATE: Here’s more.

VIRGINIA POSTREL offers an excellent suggestion in support of Chief Wiggles’ toys for Iraqi children initiative. She suggests that you order them from Toys RUs on Amazon and have them shipped directly to the Chief. Here’s his address:

Chief Wiggles
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO AE 09335

I suspect that he’ll get a lot of mail. Be sure to follow the link to his site to see the kinds of things that he’s looking for, and the kinds of things he doesn’t want you to send. Of course, as I suggested earlier, he should definitely get at least one of these.

Her suggestion that the Chief set up a wishlist is a good one, too. If he does, I’ll post a link.

PAUL BOUTIN has beaten me to the punch with a review of Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Quicksilver. Of course, the publisher probably sent him an advance copy. Publishers send me books, too, but they’re mostly policy-geek stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), not cool novels.

HUGH HEWITT contrasts editors who aren’t needed with editors who are.

MORE FIRSTHAND REPORTING FROM IRAQ, via Bergen to Baghdad. Follow the links on the right — lots of photos, too.

BEN DOMENECH is angry at how long it’s taking PEPCO to get power restored. But don’t get carried away, Ben!

UPDATE: Gregg Easterbrook has a lot more on this, and slams the Post for not taking the story seriously:

Right now the biggest populist story in a generation is playing out in Washington. The Washington Times and WTOP Newsradio, which care about Washington, are hitting the story with everything they’ve got. The Washington Post, which holds Washington and especially its suburbs in contempt, is fumbling the populist story in its backyard.

Ouch.

THE PROMISED LENGTHY POST on the death penalty, and Scott Turow’s new nonfiction book thereon, is now up over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Talkleft comments.

WINDS OF CHANGE has an Iraq roundup as well as a more general war news roundup, both chock-full of links to stories you’d be likely to miss otherwise.

UPDATE: And Jim Miller has an interesting WMD item.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s another war roundup that’s worth a look. And read this post on intelligence failures.

GEITNER SIMMONS has some thoughts on the whole “northern secession” issue.

Meanwhile, this John Tabin column examines the phenomenon of “South Park Republicans.” Is Arnold one?

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus notes the West Virginia problem that might result from secession.

RED TED has a nice post on the essence of the Iraq question, from a responsible anti-war perspective:

Lets take the Bush team at their implied pre-war word. Lets assume that the long-term goal of the war is indeed to create a vibrant democracy on the banks of the Euphrates. Lets pass on the questions of international law, wrap ourselves in the UN resolutions, and deny our political goals even as we work to fulfil them. How then should we judge policy in Iraq and how then should we suggest alternatives.

For the record, I said pre-war and I say again now, that this is a high-risk strategy, that if it works it will work wonderfully, and that I hope that it does work. I do believe in the contagion of liberty, it has worked in the past and it will work in the future. The long term goals are positive despite the cynical way that they were implemented.

But are the policies currently being pursued on the ground in Iraq working to further and achieve those democratic goals? There I just do not know the answer. The news I see is fragmented and politicized. I have seen a number of accounts of Iraqis welcoming American troops, of setting up new local institutions, there are now hundreds of newspapers where once there were only a few state-run newspapers. So some of the infrastructure of a democratic society is beginning to appear. Iraq was one of the more secular states in the Middle East and it was also one of the more entrepreneurial. There are a few early signs that Iraq might well become a powerhouse.

There is also bad news – not just the continuing guerilla attacks in the middle of the country. Those are bound to continue as long as a few people are willing to organize them and the bulk of the Iraqi people is not willing to shame and condemn them. Beyond that, it appears that the war planning staff forgot to plan for peace – a damning indictment of the whole idea that the subtext of the war was building a democratic society. . . .

If I were giving advice to Democratic strategists, it would be to focus on the implementation of the post-war policy in Iraq. Argue from administrative competence, argue against good-ole-boy contracting, argue against people who over commit the nation without a plan, and make SURE that you have a plan yourself.

Read the whole thing. I’d like to see more along these lines. So far, it looks as if Howard Dean is taking this tack.

SYLVAIN GALINEAU has a post on the anti-anti-Americans in France.

DONALD WALTER, the federal judge whose piece on Iraq I posted here last week, now has an oped on the same topic in the New York Post. Nice to see that this stuff is making it into the mainstream media. Then there’s this piece by Jack Kelly:

Last week, I covered the return to Pittsburgh from Iraq of a Marine reserve military police company. These Marines made the march of Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division, and spent the bulk of the postwar period escorting convoys between Basra and Najaf. Each of the seven Marines I interviewed said that more than 90 percent of the Iraqis they encountered were friendly.

The accounts of these Marines square with those of most other servicemen returned from Iraq, and with my own experiences as a reporter embedded with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq, and with the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad. But it’s a story you hardly ever hear on the evening news.

Iraq is a dangerous place. Saddam Hussein is still at large, as are thousands of his diehard supporters. They’ve been joined by hundreds, perhaps thousands of foreign terrorists. Though these “insurgents” cannot challenge the U.S. military for control of any part of the country, they’ll be able to conduct remote ambushes and terror bombings for months to come.

But viewed in historical perspective, things in Iraq are pretty good, and getting better. The insurgents are a tiny — and dwindling — minority. Most of the country is at peace. Nobody is starving. Signs of reviving economic activity are everywhere. In no country in the Arab world are Americans as popular as they are in Iraq.

Some more of those returning-soldier accounts that David Adesnik was asking for. And they do all seem consistent with the reports of other non-media observers, and even those of some returning reporters now. Nice to see a little perspective starting to appear.

UPDATE: Reader John MacDonald emails:

Dan Rather was on 60 minutes II yesterday from Baghdad.The scene of traffic moving behind him was revealing in its normalcy.If the media persists in focusing mostly on the negatives they are going to lose their credibility.The great unwashed aren’t total idiots.

Indeed. Meanwhile Howard Veit emails that Bush is the idiot:

Bush is committing political suicide by not countering the media assault on the Iraq War. All he’d have to do is read aloud one letter per day from a soldier over there. He won’t do it or hasn’t the moxie to do it. Those of us who looked at the last election as one between two mediocre men are fearful that we were right. It is too stupid for words to allow a Left Wing Media to destroy this presidency but it is happening before our eyes. Bush is doing nothing to stop it. And all he’d have to do is read one letter per day from the web. You tell me, is that stupid or not?

Yeah, the vaunted White House spin machine seems to have been stuck between cycles on this one.

SPOONS THINKS that General Shelton should back up his charges against Wesley Clark:

I think it’s pretty clear that Shelton either said far too much, or far too little. If he wanted to be discreet, he could easily have brushed off the question. If, on the other hand, he wanted to tell why he thinks Clark is a bad guy, he could have backed up his statement with details and facts. Instead, he made a vague, ambiguous allegation that Clark lacked integrity and character.

I think, though, that Spoons is wrong to connect this with John Burns’ statements about Iraq. Shelton made an unspecified charge against a named person in the context of a converstation about that person. Burns made a specific charge against an unnamed person, in the context of a more general discussion of the media and Iraq. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think he should name the offender — I do — but it’s not the same thing. Shelton might be accused of character assassination, but Burns, not having named the person, can’t be.

RICHARD MINITER offers a lengthy summary of evidence for an Iraq / Al Qaeda connection.

HERE’S AN INTERVIEW WITH REP. JIM MARSHALL (D-GA), about media coverage of Iraq:

MARSHALL: Right. It’s Vietnam (search) deja vu. I was a recon sergeant in Vietnam and went through this process of trying to deal with a guerrilla war. It is a very difficult thing to do and could be that things weren’t going well.

Well, I came away with the impression that things are going well. Certainly a good bit better than seems to me, the overall American seems to thinks.

And the important thing is for Americans to understand that the news media tends to dwell on the negative. It happens in your own hometown, the typical TV show, the typical newspaper article focuses on murders and rapes. And that’s what you’re seeing right now. What you don’t see is the progress. . . .

MARSHALL: Well, it is a guerrilla war. And if we don’t appear to have resolve, then Iraqis are going to be a lot less likely to cooperate with us, a lot less likely to be willingly in the Army and willingly out there, going after the guerrillas.

We can’t force freedom on the Iraqis. The Iraqis have to take it for themselves. They can distinguish one from another. We can’t do that. We can’t read the street signs. We don’t know the language. They do. They can go in there and deal with this guerrilla situation.

It’s not like Vietnam. In Vietnam, you had the Chinese and Russians…

HUME: Right. Behind them.

MARSHALL: Behind them. You don’t have anything like that here. We can take care of this as long as the Iraqis step forward. They’re less likely to step forward if we’re pessimistic. We’re more likely to be pessimistic if we’re getting a lot of negative news coverage. And that’s the connection.

I’d be interested in hearing more details about how the CPA is doing. And I’d like to know what ever happened to the Oil Trust idea.

Meanwhile here’s a roundup of other commentary on the negative slant from Iraq.

THE GUANTANAMO ESPIONAGE PROBE has expanded to encompass a third suspect. This is very troubling, and makes you wonder who’s doing security clearances.

Hey, but at least they’re making sure there are no openly-gay people in the military!

I DIDN’T WATCH THE CALIFORNIA DEBATE, but there’s lots of information on how it went at PrestoPundit, Kausfiles, and Bee serial-edited-Web-columnist and former blogger Daniel Weintraub.

Meanwhile, Republicans are figuring out something I’ve been saying all along: Bush is vulnerable in 2004.

UPDATE: Here’s Howard Kurtz’s take on the debate. And yes, I was reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel instead. I’m up to page 112, and so far it’s great although he’s still warming up.

“WILL SADDAM’S BIGGEST SUCK-UP please come forward?” I agree with Andrew Sullivan and Jack Shafer on this.

NO, I’M NOT DYING of some dreadful disease. My “stop and smell the flowers” advice stems from a couple of things. One is that, sadly, I know some people who are — and even beyond that, quite a few friends and family have had various surgeries lately, putting such things on my mind. The other is my sense that the Blogosphere — like the journalistic and political worlds generally — is too het up. (See this Roger Simon post for more.) And I realized after the second anniversary of September 11 that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and pacing is required.

IT REALLY WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, so I took the laptop to the patio at the Downtown Grill and Brewery (free wireless Internet!) and sat outside and drank coffee while I wrote a massive post for the MSNBC site tomorrow, on the death penalty and Scott Turow’s new book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty.

Regular InstaPundit readers won’t be surprised to learn that I’m not upset with the morality of the death penalty per se, but rather regard it as another big government program that doesn’t work very well. I have a few comments on social context, crime-fighting in general, and more, but you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow to read them.

In the meantime, I suggest that you seize the opportunity to enjoy life. If you’re reading this, you’re probably not in prison, or on Death Row. If you were either of those things, your everyday life would seem pretty damn great. Keep that in mind. I will — I’ll be reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, which came today. Woohoo!

And, hey, at least I don’t have this guy’s problems! But that’s because I don’t have a butler. And I drink Sumatra Mandheling. Otherwise, there’s a shocking similarity.

CHRIS MOONEY has a new blog! Check it out.

BRIAN CARNELL ASKS: Who is lying — Michael Moore, or Wesley Clark?

My money’s on Moore, for obvious reasons, but you never know.

UPDATE: Then again, Clark has issues too, apparently. Maybe we shouldn’t believe either of them?

FIGHT OVARIAN CANCER: I’m willing to do my part to prevent this scourge. (Via GruntDoc).