ALTERNATE HISTORY: Donald Sensing says that Parisian taxicabs wrecked the world, and Geitner Simmons collects some reactions. And scroll around on both blogs for lots of other interesting posts.

THIS SPEECH BY BILL GATES on Longhorn, Microsoft’s in-design operating system, indicates that they’re thinking about blogs, at least a little:

But what’s interesting about this is a couple of things. First, it actually built in these common parts that show information, notification, services, that a user might really be interested in seeing when they’re working on their main application, without popping up a window that covers it. For example, the time or their buddy list or a slide show, which, of course, you can add and remove these tiles here — or even an RSS-feed built right into the sidebar. (Applause.) And you want to hear blogging or about to blog when they get — who is going to be the first person after the keynote to go and post on their blog. Scobel, OK. Well, we’ll see. It’s going to be a race. But the best part about this is not that we have this functionality built into Windows. The best part, like everything I’m going to show you today, is that this is part of the platform. This is part of the SDK that you guys are going to get, you guys can write to it, and we think you can do great, great things with this.

Make of it what you will.

[CORRECTION: It’s a Gates speech, but these comments are actually by Hillel Cooperman. I missed the transition as I was scrolling. Sorry]

UPDATE: This blog aims to get people to like Microsoft more, and talk about Longhorn. On the other hand, firing bloggers for blogging is probably a bad move, if the goal is acceptance in the blog community.

“THIS ISN’T JUST MISPLACED HUMOR, IT’S PLAIN BAD JOURNALISM:” Eugene Volokh delivers a spanking to Slate’s “Bushism of the Day,” which does appear to have engaged in outright misrepresentation this time.

Guys, if there aren’t enough genuine Bush gaffes to support that feature, how about retiring it? It’s embarrassing you more often than Bush, these days.

DIGITAL FREEDOM UPDATE: Bill Hobbs posts a long report on Tennessee’s new TiVo-and-modem-licensing law. And, yes, that’s really what it is.

ROBOTS ARE PEOPLE, TOO — or at least they will be, someday! My TechCentralStation column is up.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING AND BALANCED report from Baghdad by Tish Durkin, in The New York Observer:

My piece was about the total disconnect between what matters to most of the people in Iraq and what seems to matter to most of the people elsewhere who are upset about Iraq. Or, as a young Iraqi friend said to me right after I arrived at the end of August: “Everybody in the world is so obsessed with weapons of mass destruction. Nobody in Iraq gives a shit.”

Most of the people outside Iraq seem to be obsessed with giving the Bush administration what they think it deserves. Most of the people inside Iraq—i.e., the Iraqis—are fixated on getting what they think they deserve. For all too many champions as well as critics of U.S. policy, this is all about American vindication versus American mortification, and Iraq is a car to be stripped down for its rhetorical parts. Some parts make the Americans look good, so the White House and company take those and wave them around. Other parts make the Americans look bad, so the antiwar crowd takes those and waves them around. Still other parts—most of the car, of course—are harder to classify, or are subject to change from one week to the next. These pretty much get junked.

For the Iraqis, who tend to view this as a place and themselves as people, both sets of analysts are transparent opportunists. Nonetheless, from here, it is disturbing to note the momentum that seems to be gathering behind those who are back home chanting for the U.S. to get out now. It is scarcely less disturbing to contemplate the belief of some leading American politicians that they can go halfsies: keep funding Iraqi reconstruction, for instance, but put the funding in the form of a loan. (Whoever thought of that probably had a cash bar at his wedding.) This is not because the occupation is some sort of triumph. But if this is about the Iraqis, it simply doesn’t matter whether it is in the context of American glory, American gloom or something in between that these people finally get a decent shot at a decent life. It only matters that they do get it, and the only question is how.

Read it all, and compare it to this lame Newsweek report by Rod Nordland, which goes out of its way to dis Chief Wiggles:

There’s even a blog from inside the Green Zone, put out by someone who says he’s a military intelligence soldier using the psuedonym Chief Wiggles (http://chiefwiggles.blogspot.com). Lately the boosterish Chief Wiggles has been using his blog to find donors to give him bicycles so soldiers can pedal around the zone giving out toys to children.

Calling Chief Wiggles “boosterish” indicates, to me at least, that Nordland can’t possibly have been reading his blog, which makes clear that the Chief is working hard to make a difference, and often suffering in the process. No doubt he would be more appealing to journalists if he were exuding existential despair, and smoking a Gaulois, but I’m kind of glad that he’s the way he is, and kind of unhappy that Newsweek has sent a reporter who can’t tell the difference between boosterism and a sense of responsibility.

Meanwhile, the Newsweek article’s headline, “The World’s Most Dangerous Place,” indicates that whoever wrote it hasn’t been to, well, a lot of other places in the world. (And don’t these people have editors? It’s “pseudonym,” not “psuedonym.”) Quite an embarrassing performance, overall, but sadly it’s on a par with Newsweek’s war coverage in general.

UPDATE: Via email, Bill Hobbs piles on the criticism of the Nordland article:

Even worse, he used Chief Wiggles’ old blogspot URL.

Wiggles’s blog is now at http://chiefwiggles.blog-city.com/

And he implied Wiggles might not really be who he says he is, although the DoD has issued a press release identifying Wiggles: Link and Link

Pretty embarrassing, I’d say.

MORE: Reader David Henry emails:

Glenn, the Chief was on Scarborough Country on MSNBC just a few nights ago. Nordland ought to have his face slapped for such a sorry article. Very poor job of journalism. I could do better and I’m just a meatcutter.

Hey, meatcutting takes training!

STILL MORE: Major Richard Cleveland emails:

Screw Rod Nordland. After 18 years in the US Army, and too many many deployments away from my family, I still love what I do. It’s because I get to meet, every single damn day, guys like Chief Wiggles. They are real, and there are a bunch of them in the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force.

That’s been my experience, too.

CONFIRMING MY SUSPICIONS, StrategyPage reports:

Western and Arab intelligence sources claim that Al-Qaeda is building secret bases in Mali’s Sahara desert (especially in the north, and the area near the Algerian border) with the help of Algerian extremists. Regional intelligence spotted an influx of Islamic extremists from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, concluding that Algerian extremist groups were helping them relocate to the Sahara.

The Sahara, stretching between Mauritania and southern Libya, is only loosely patrolled by the forces of Algeria, Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.

There seems to be a lot going on out there.

BUSH/RICE 2004: Well, there’s a website now. . . .

IF YOU HAVEN’T BEEN CHECKING OUT Rantburg, Winds of Change, and The Command Post lately, well, you should. They’re doing an awful lot of war-blogging, and other news-blogging, that’s well worth your time and attention. Don’t miss SgtStryker.com, either, including this special Iraq section.

I’ve been busy and distracted lately, and these guys have more than covered the slack. Remember: the blogosphere is a big place, and this is just one tiny part of it.

U.S. OUT OF EUROPE, NOW: Eugene Volokh responds to Gregg Easterbrook on Iraq.

UPDATE: Eric Kolchinsky writes that the key to victory is at home. Likewise, the key to defeat. Meanwhile reader Jim Ryan emails:

Why are we even having this discussion? Leaving Iraq right now is not even a remotely plausible option. Tens of thousands of innocents would die in the ensuing years of civil war, and Iraq would descend again into the hands of madmen. And terrorists would judge us to be weak – rightly.

Yes, and I think that the American people know that. We’re reaping the result of decades of weakness — starting in Tehran, and continuing through Beirut, Mogadishu, etc. The terrorists are counting on pulling off another Mogadishu.

Gautam Mukunda also thinks that Easterbrook has this one wrong:

Indeed, it is removing ourselves from Iraq and allowing it to collapse into anarchy – whatever the initial reasons for our action – that would be dishonorable.

Indeed.

Read this, too, by Jay Bryant — who I heard on NPR the other day. Not quite a blogger on TV, but close. (Here’s the link to his blog.)

MORE: Read this excellent post by Michael Totten, too: “If we faced a genuinely popular insurgency in Iraq, we’d have one hell of a serious problem. But this crowd is the absolute scum of the earth, and most Iraqis know it. If we don’t run away, they are not going to win.”

STILL MORE: From Winds of Change: “I’ve said in the past that the two keys to winning this war are an iron butt – the simple willingness to sit it out – and the adaptability to learn from our mistakes and the opponent’s tactics. We may be showing both.”

HOW COPY PROTECTION ROBS THE FUTURE: Dan Bricklin offers a concrete example.

CAN THIS ANTIWAR MOVEMENT BE SAVED? Michelle Goldberg asks the question.

I HAVEN’T READ NAOMI WOLF’S LATEST ESSAY on pornography, but the porn bloggers sure are Fisking it something fierce.

UPDATE: More here. And from a non-porn blogger.

WHY AREN’T MORE European women online? Beats me.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON RACISM IN THE SENATE:

George Bush is going to nominate conservative judges because George Bush is a conservative. If you have said that no conservative minorities (or fewer conservative minorities) will be allowed on the courts, then you are effectively saying that you will not allow minorities to make the high court for as long as George Bush is president.

Anti-discrimination suits supported by those same Democrats have made it difficult for companies even facially neutral employment tests that have disparate impact on minorities. Should Democratic senators hold themselves to a lower standard than they hold private enterprise?

Hmm. Could this be a campaign commercial, do you think? It’s certainly engendering skepticism in the comments section, but I’m not sure that matters for campaign-commercial material. You’d almost think that Bush was making high-profile nominations with that in mind. . . .

THE MOST GENEROUS NATION IN THE WORLD — guess who. (Hint: Not Sweden.)

I HAVEN’T PAID ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THE SAN DIEGO FIRES (according to some of you) but it’s all over the news and I don’t have any very profound thoughts on the subject.

But here are some more astounding firsthand photos sent by a reader.

UPDATE: And here’s a very cool satellite photo. The photo’s cool. The fires suck.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a bigger picture.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

BLOGGERS ON TV: Virginia Postrel will be on MSNBC at 6 p.m. Eastern today.

Is it officially a phenomenon yet?

UPDATE: I didn’t see Virginia. They did have Terry Gross of Fresh Air, who looked nothing like I imagined and — even more weirdly — sounded nothing like she sounds on the air. The difference between the tiny lapel mike they use for TV and the big honking broadcast-condenser mike they use for radio, I guess. It’s all in the proximity effect.

Advice to Terry: Guard that microphone with your life!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Virginia reports that the segment didn’t air, and she doesn’t know why.

POLITICALWIRE ASKS: Is Howard Dean more like George McGovern, or Jimmy Carter? Carter, I think, but I could be wrong.

Meanwhile, is Wesley Clark endorsing pre-emptive war?

If elected, Clark said he would repair relations with other nations and use force as a last resort. He said he would be willing to launch a pre-emeptive strike against threats to the United States, and promised to seek a legal definition of terrorism from the United Nations to bring offenders to justice under international law.

Hmm. The reader who sent this thinks so, and I can see why, but it’s all a paraphrase. No doubt he’ll clarify things later.

UPDATE: Reader Jorge del Rio has these comments:

Actually, the key point in that article that stuck out to me was the last line: “…and promised to seek a legal definition of terrorism from the United Nations to bring offenders to justice under international law.”

Two points. First, the UN General Assembly is the last place I would look to for a legal definition, especially for something like terrorism. I can just see this long list of activities that would be terrorism with the caveat, unless done against Israelis. Second, this is approach seems to me to try and make terrorism into a police matter. It is not. This was the same approach used on the first WTC attack as well as the attacks on the USS Cole and the US embassies in Africa. National security matters are NOT police matters.

Thinking like this should preclude anyone for even thinking about running for the presidency.

Yes, it’s a discredited approach.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This James Lileks column on Dean is worth reading. And why doesn’t Lileks put links to his columns alongside The Bleat?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: PoliPundit says that Dean is no Carter.

I’VE GOT MORE THOUGHTS ON ANTI-AMERICANISM, over at GlennReynolds.com.

TET 2003: Belmont Club offers a fascinating side-by-side comparison of media coverage from now, and from 35 years ago. It’s pretty clear that the terrorists, at least, are operating from the Tet playbook.

UPDATE: Reader James Ingram emails:

Lets not get carried away with the Tet analogy. There are important differences:

1. The scale of battle is much smaller. Note the reference in the blog you cite to the engagement of 35 battalions. I think the total number engaged was much higher. We’re talking tens of thousands on NLF and NVA main force troops, not a handful of suicide bombers. Ambushes of this scale were almost daily occurrences in Viet Nam for five years.

2. The scope of the losses was also much different. There have been some 400 American combat deaths in more than six months of war; deaths are running a few a week (too many to be sure). During Tet and after, deaths ran to hundreds a week. In 1968, the year of Tet and the bloodiest year of the war, deaths averaged over 300 per week; during Tet and the counter-offensive that followed they were much higher. They had been averaging over 200 a week for over a year, and they would return to that level through 1969 and some of 1970.

3. The scope of civilian destruction is also much different. These bombers have blown up a few buildings. Tet leveled the city of Hue. The physical destruction of civilian infrastructure during Viet Nam was unimaginable today.

4. Perhaps most importantly, Tet followed a period in which the US government had confidently assured us the enemy was bled white, on its last legs, etc etc. The shock of Tet was that an enemy that supposedly had no forces left was suddenly mounting a major offensive. We realized then that our government had been misleading us on a scale that was hard for people raised in the 40’s and 50’s, when we trusted our leaders, to understand. Whatever his faults, Bush has not lied on the LBJ scale. Tet was an immense moral setback for the US government. This is a setback to be sure, and a propaganda coup, but scarcely the kind of shock created by Tet.

Well, the press seems to want to play it that way. Daniel Drezner has some useful observations.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: In the mail today was a copy of Walter Shapiro’s new book, One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In — which, as the title indicates, is a report of time he spent with the candidates back before anyone was paying attention. I’ve just flipped through it so far, and it looks quite interesting, but I’ll try to provide a longer report later when I’ve had a chance to actually read it. But here’s an interesting bit:

Even in late May, when I spoke with Schriock about Internet fund-raising, she projected the slightly nervous tone of a 1920s aviatrix about to attempt a cross-country flight. “Someday just like direct mail, it’s going to be a science,” she said. But right now, she admitted, there was just too little of an on-line track record to hazard a realistic second-quarter projection. . . . They were all like high-school science students who had thrown a bunch of volatile chemicals into a beaker and had no idea if they were going to spark a chain reaction. As the evocatively named Zephyr Teachout, a former death-penalty lawyer who now oversees Internet organizing for Dean, put it, “The learning curve for all this is extraordinary.”

Not nearly as extraordinary as the results.

More on this, later.

OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY has a collection of links to photos of female bloggers.

What struck me — aside from the beauty and erudition of those involved, of course — was how many of these blogs I’d never seen before. The Blogosphere has become a very big place.

BARKING MOONBAT ALERT: The anti-Americanism of groups like A.N.S.W.E.R. comes in for lots of criticism, as it should. But as more proof that there’s less and less difference between the far left and the far right, check out this photo I’m pretty sure that these are the kids of “Pastor” Fred Phelps, though this story doesn’t say. The signs read: “God Blew Up the Shuttle,” “God Hates America,” and “God Hates Fag Enablers.”

I caught the tail end of a segment on this on my local talk-radio show. Most of the callers were extremely negative on the subject, though the host was engaged in a Socratic dialogue with one who thought that America was evil because it was tolerating homosexuality, and that tolerance would inspire God to come down in his wrath upon us all.

Yeah: No-show for the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or what’s going on in North Korea, but he’s going to come down from the clouds and hurl lightning bolts if two guys get married.

Unless God is a barking moonbat — which some early Christians believed — I’m not convinced that these guys have it right.

UPDATE: Yep, it was Fred. Those might be his grandkids, though. I don’t think that he has any “parishioners” who aren’t members of his family.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Grandkids, indeed. Michele Catalano is all over this guy.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I guess God’s wrath is about to rain down on Taiwan.

THE VENTURA COUNTY STAR is running reader-submitted fire photos. Some are excellent.