OKAY, I’M NOT SURE WHAT THIS MEANS:

Bush administration officials confirmed today that Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who is the top civil administrator in Iraq, would leave here within a week or two and that other senior officials here will also be replaced.

American officials said Barbara K. Bodine, who has been in charge of reconstruction for the Baghdad region, was abruptly given notice and will be leaving within the next day or two. Ms. Bodine, a former ambassador to Yemen, will take a senior post at the State.

A bunch of other people are leaving too, which makes it look like the result of bureaucratic faction-fighting rather than demonstrated failures by one or another. Most of the reasoning presented sounds like spin of various varieties.

So is this good or bad? I don’t know. It suggests a certain amount of “disarray,” but on the other hand it also suggests decisive action. Maybe someone at the White House has been reading Salam Pax’s accounts and has decided to shake things up. . .

DANIEL DREZNER SAYS TODAY WAS A “DREAM SUNDAY” for the Bush Administration.

NOW THIS SHOULD BE INTERESTING:

An African American civil rights group is planning a Saturday protest against Greenpeace, alleging that the environmental group has committed “eco-manslaughter” through its support of international policies limiting development and the expansion of technology to the developing world’s poor.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) will conduct a counter demonstration at Greenpeace USA’s “Run for Your Life” 5K road race at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. The Greenpeace event itself will be a protest, meant to “raise awareness of the serious threats posed by chemical plants to New York and New Jersey residents and workers.”

CORE is using the event as an opportunity to confront Greenpeace activists about their opposition to infrastructure development projects in the developing world, opposition to genetically modified foods and the group’s opposition to the use of the chemical DDT to kill malaria-ridden mosquitoes, particularly in Africa.

“To serve its own ideological agenda, [Greenpeace] wants to keep the Third World permanently mired in Third World poverty, disease and death. So far, it has succeeded,” said Niger Innis, national spokesperson for CORE.

Read this, too.

DANG. The Klingon Interpreter story is, well, not exactly bogus — but there’s a bit less to it than meets the eye.

“NEW YORK TIMES AND WEEKLY WORLD NEWS TO MERGE:” Boy, people are really twisting the knife on this one.

ENTER STAGE RIGHT has an interview with Mark Steyn, the “one-man global content provider.” Excerpt:

9/11 was a great clarifying moment, it exposed the world of September 10th as a fiction, a collection of soft-focus illusions, and what’s happened in the period since is that the world has divided into those who recognized that and those who are still trying to patch up the Humpty Dumpty world of September 10th and prop it back in place – as the French are trying to do, and the UN, and much of the US Federal bureaucracy.

And there’s this shocking revelation: “I’m actually a —” No, never mind, you’ll just have to read it there.

PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY IS MAKING A MOTHER’S DAY ASSAULT on women in combat. But this makes no sense:

She contended that the women caught in the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company in Iraq — Jessica Lynch, who was rescued by commandos, and single mothers Lori Piestewa, who was killed, and Shoshana Johnson, who was wounded — did not volunteer for the Army with the ambition of serving in combat.

A soldier is a soldier. You don’t join the Army and then decide not to fight. Doesn’t Schlafly know that? She also says: ” there is no evidence in history for the proposition that the assignment of women to military combat jobs is the way to advance women’s rights, promote national security, improve combat readiness, or win wars.”

No evidence? Not even the stunning and swift victory we just won?

MICKEY KAUS IS ACCUSING THE NEW YORK TIMES of “Nixonian” hypocrisy in its explanations of the Jayson Blair affair. And Andrew Sullivan is promising “flood-the-zone” coverage tomorrow.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis isn’t buying the affirmative action argument.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bryan Preston, on the other hand, thinks there’s a Chief Moose connection. It’s interesting tea-leaf reading, but I have to say that other people seem to find this whole affair more fascinating than I do. Kind of like the Bill Bennett thing.

EUGENE VOLOKH has more on the Case Western shooter. Apparently, he was not only anti-war, but anti-gun.

Er, and hypocritical, too.

DAVID CARR WRITES that environmentalists are responsible for the deaths of millions of Third World people. And Nick Cohen basically agrees:

GM also upset the interests of the setters of style and taste. Marie Antoinette and her courtiers dressed up as peasants and shepherds. They invented a phoney authenticity and pretended to live the simple life while the real French peasantry was close to starvation. . . .

When it comes to the Third World, however, resistance to GM may be malign. The opponents of biotech emphasise that the industry isn’t interested in feeding the hungry any more than the pharmaceutical companies are interested in treating malaria. The developed world is where the profits are.

But there are inventions such as the ‘golden rice’, created by Dr Ingo Potrykus of Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich, which aim to relieve suffering. Dr Potrykus modified rice to help the 200 million or so children who risk death or blindness from vitamin A deficiency. If it works, and if it is taken up in Asia – two big ifs – children will live who would otherwise die.

Dr Potrykus isn’t a pawn of Monsanto, yet he is vilified. He has been told that he has been used by the biotech companies and that people will have to eat impossibly large amounts of his rice to get a minimal benefit. He denies both allegations. When he learned that Greenpeace had reserved the right to take direct action against golden rice tests plots, he said it would be guilty of a ‘crime against humanity’ if it did.

Historians are likely to write more in anger than amused bewilderment if the GM phobia turns out to have been a European mania which was fatal for non-Europeans.

Some of us are angry already.

MORE MATRIX-RELATED QUESTIONS: Mike Silverman asks:

If the capital of the free humans in The Matrix is Zion, does that mean that Neo and friends are Zionists? And will CAIR put out a statement denouncing the movie for being anti-Islamic because of this?

There’s a great fake press release waiting to be written by a talented satirist out there…

Indeed there is.

MORE ON THE ELF SCANDAL:

It is France’s largest-ever fraud scandal with tentacles stretching around the globe. But now the trail of corruption in the Elf-Aquitaine affair has led to the heart of the Dublin’s financial establishment and the Georgian grandeur of Fitzwilliam Square.

The Elf scandal has already dragged in senior French politicians. Now officials in Ireland will be scratching their heads as to how massive kickbacks paid by Elf were syphoned through Irish companies.

Over the past three weeks, Elf executives giving evidence in the latest trial in Paris have painted a picture of the multi-million franc kickbacks and bribes on deals from the early 1990s.

Last week, the court heard the extraordinary tale of the Spanish oil refinery, the Iraqi billionaire and the kickback payments that found their way into the accounts of an Irish haulage company.

I wonder where else those tentacles reach?

OBVIOUSLY, THE U.S. MARINES SHOULD HAVE POSTED GUARDS:

A work of art that has been described as “the Mona Lisa of sculptures” has been stolen from Vienna’s art history museum.

The 16th Century solid gold sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini was worth at least 50m euros ($57m, £36m), museum director Wilfried Seipel said. . . .

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this might turn out to be an inside job, too.

HEY, IT IS A RACIST WAR AFTER ALL:

THREE of the Bali bombers whose attack on a nightclub last October killed 202 people have boasted of the crime, dismissing their victims — including 26 from Britain — as sinners. . . .

The club was chosen because the bombers thought it would be full of Americans, they said. In the event, seven Americans died while 89 victims were Australian. “Australians, Americans, whatever — they are all white people,” Ali said.

I’m proud to be on the non-racist side, anyway.

I WONDER IF THIS WILL MAKE THE BBC:

DOHA, Qatar (AP) – A small crowd of Iraqis harassed an Al-Jazeera television crew Saturday, accusing the journalists of supporting former President Saddam Hussein, the satellite channel reported.

Dozens of Iraqis surrounded the crew’s van and harassed the journalists, the channel’s newscaster said in the evening news bulletin.

“The angry locals accused the station of complicity with the previous regime (of Saddam) against the interests of the Iraqi people,” the newscaster said.

No one was hurt and the crew managed to withdraw after community leaders intervened, the newscaster added.

Heh.

HERE’S AN ANGRY IRANIAN BLOGGER who’s keeping a list of mullah-banned Iranian blogs.

(Via Jeff Jarvis, who has become Iranian Weblog Central.)

IF YOU LOOK TO THE UPPER LEFT, you’ll see that I’ve taken down the quote from Pravda about InstaPundit being “The New York Times of the bloggers.” It just didn’t feel right, anymore.

PEOPLE — INCLUDING SOME DEDICATED, SELF-ORGANIZED IRAQIS — ARE FINDING OUT MORE about what Jacques Chirac’s buddy Saddam was up to:

“My brother disappeared in 1981. My mother and father kept asking at State Security for his body and one day they disappeared, too. They told us don’t come here asking again.” Amin Hashem Amin raises both hands, displays eight fingers, thrusting them forward until he’s recognized. “Four first cousins and four good neighbors I lost,” he says. “We found the body of only one of them. Then they took our houses and our farm.” His face crumples, the other men look away politely, and Amin weeps. Some of these people are just looking; others, like Amin, have found their loved ones’ names on the lists. “I have 16 dead of my friends,” the next man to raise his hand says. “They gave us back two bodies, both without their eyes.”

And so it goes now at the offices of the Committee, hour after hour, day after day. Anyone who doubts the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime need only spend a little time here, at the epicenter of efforts to unravel what happened, account for the dead and missing, locate the bodies in the mass graves that are daily being discovered throughout the country.

The Committee’s view is that Saddam Hussein’s regime slaughtered 8 million people; in a country of 25 million that’s a pretty extreme estimate. “Hitler was a minor student in the school of Saddam, and not a very good student by comparison,” Idrisi said. “Just in my small family, my cousin was in prison, my father, brother, and five or six other cousins disappeared,” he said. Saleh agreed. “No family in Iraq is without its missing. My brother, too. Still I haven’t reached his grave, but I saw the file.”

Challenging such over-the-top figures provokes annoyance among the Committee members. “How can we have 8 million? I’ll show you.” Saleh produces an armful of fat file folders. “Look at this one. Look at the file number.” It’s stamped TOP SECRET, labeled Department of General Security, Branch 45, File No. 12584. Branch 45 specialized in the banned Shiite group Al Dawa. This is a case file concerning one Satter Jaber Meslain, an investigation that lasted from 1981-1983. As the result of his confession and other investigative leads that his interrogation produced, 55 persons are implicated; all are listed here as condemned to death on one page, and then, on a paper dated hours later, confirmed “hanged by a rope until dead.” On the front of the file folio is a strip of computer stickers, the kind used to track inventory, bearing the number 507989493; they seem to be file locators. “Look how big that number is. It was indescribable what they did. There are millions of files, millions.”

However many there are, it’s a lot. The guy who runs the copy shop that my wife uses is an Iraqi exile — something he didn’t talk about until after the war. He told my wife the other day that when he was still living in Iraq in 1991, the family next door in Baghdad was killed by Saddam’s thugs one night, and he decided to leave the country the next day. He was quite harsh to a UT professor who tried to show “support” by saying that he had opposed the war.

TIM BLAIR — COMMUNIST? These photos don’t lie. But he can’t be “boring from within,” because whatever else Blair is, he’s not boring.

I THINK THAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE RELIEVED that this story is purest fiction.

LOOTING UPDATE:

Matthew Campbell, Baghdad
THE furore over the looting of Iraq’s national museum took an unexpected turn yesterday when workers accused their director of conniving in the theft of priceless antiquities during the chaotic collapse of the regime in Baghdad.

Fifty museum employees staged a protest in which they waved placards under the noses of American investigators proclaiming that Jabir Khalil, chairman of the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, was a “dictator” and a “thief”. . . .

The investigators, too, have expressed suspicions that the plunder was facilitated by museum employees. Objects had vanished from a storage vault outside the museum to which museum officials had access. “It may turn out to be an inside job,” said one investigator. “Whoever did this seemed to know exactly what they were looking for.”

A full account of what is missing has yet to be given. Even so, officials concede that the losses may be less severe than at first thought, when talk of looters carting off thousands of ancient carvings and crushing pottery underfoot prompted international outrage at America’s failure to intervene.

Since then, indignation has been fuelled by suggestions that some of the thieves were directed by professional collectors abroad. Museums around the world have pledged not to trade in items that may have been stolen in Baghdad.

Suspicions about the involvement of staff with knowledge of the underground vaults are growing.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Roger Simon was ahead of the curve on this story!

MORE WEB DETECTIVE WORK regarding the Case Western shooter, over at The Volokh Conspiracy. Fascinating.

SELL YOUR ARBY’S STOCK: Mike Hendrix is Fisking the new “Homestyle Pot Roast sandwich:”

“Reminiscent.” Yeah, right. I suppose you could say it’s “reminscent” in the sense that it is in fact made from some sort of meat or meat product. I’m mildly surprised that my mom hasn’t called me in tears yet after seeing this commercial, begging for reassurance that her pot roast was never like this. I know pot roast. I’ve cooked pot roast. You, sir, are no pot roast.

Read the rest.

A READER IS UNHAPPY ABOUT THIS:

PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) — Position Available: Interpreter, must be fluent in Klingon.

The language created for the “Star Trek” TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County. . . .

“There are some cases where we’ve had mental health patients where this was all they would speak,” said the county’s purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway.

County officials said that obligates them to respond with a Klingon-English interpreter, putting the language of starship Enterprise officer Worf and other Klingon characters on a par with common languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, and less common tongues including Dari and Tongan.

I just think it’s cool. But will they get a Neo chaplain next? He can share an office with the Jedi.

FREQUENT INSTAPUNDIT CORRESPONDENT DAVID BERNSTEIN has started a blog. So has not-quite-so-frequent correspondent Greg Burch.

Be warned (er, or enticed!) — they’re both lawyers. Well, Bernstein’s a law professor, but close enough.