BILL HERBERT HAS A MEACHER 9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORY ROUNDUP.

Is Meacher a CIA plant to discredit anti-Americanism? Or is their talent pool that thin?

WATCHED BUSH’S SPEECH: It was an outright challenge to the neo-McGovernites, and even more of a challenge to those wafflers (and several are beginning to appear) among the Democratic presidential candidates, specifically mentioning Somalia and Beirut (bipartisan bugout history there), and noting that lessening our commitment would be a disaster, and play into the terrorists’ hands. (“They want to shake the will of the civilized world.”) Not bad, but the Administration will have to keep on the ball. The best point was his direct reference to what he said after 9/11, to the effect that this would be a long and multifaceted war. This isn’t a time to go wobbly, and Bush made that clear. If he sticks to it, we’ll win, and so will he.

UPDATE: Here’s the text of the speech.

WORLD WAR FOUR: An interesting story on the less-reported part of the war on terror, from the Globe and Mail. I’m glad that folks at the CIA are paying attention to Mauritania, which is in a part of the world that I think deserves some attention (hence my repeated stories on the missing tourists). I’m also happy that they’re calling it “World War IV” among themselves, for that is a more accurate description, in some ways, than “war on terror.”

The article also contains some useful cautionary notes about unsavory and untrustworthy allies, though, of course, one always has those in war. In World War Two, you know, we had De Gaulle.

IT’S THE SEX ISSUE over at Legal Affairs, with articles by Jeff Rosen, Heidi Fleiss, and others with expertise to offer.

MORE EVIDENCE THAT BUSH IS LOSING HIS BASE, as Jonah Goldberg writes:

I have a big wait-and-see attitude toward the President’s comments tonight. But I must say that if it weren’t for the war on terrorism, I’d be a bit at a loss these days to say something nice about him given his performance of the last six months. Yes, yes, tax cuts: good. And a few other things: Good. But, I’m really fighting this feeling that when he said earlier this week that whenever someone’s “hurting,” the “government has to move”, he essentially jumped the shark.

I keep seeing more comments along these lines from staunch Republicans.

UPDATE: Reader Jared Phillips emails:

What I find most striking in my group of friends who all voted for bush (10) is that many are rapidly becoming disillusioned with the results. Most specifically, the out of control spending increases.

So if you combine a possible disaster among gun-rights supporters extending ‘assault weapon’ ban) and the fiscal conservatives, who supports Bush?

As for the Rove outlook “where will you go?” – at this point to anyone else, because I am no longer going to punch the party line.

It pains me to say it but things were better when the GOP jammed up Clinton in the 90’s.

Like I say, I keep hearing this.

I MISSED THE GRAY DAVIS IMMIGRANT-BASHING STORY, but So Cal Lawblog has it. Put that together with the Bustamante / MEChA story, and it seems that there’s a real problem with prejudice among California politicians, at least those associated with Gray Davis.

UPDATE: Robert Tagorda has much more on this, and wonders if Bill Lockyer will keep his word.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus points out more pro-MEChA disingenuousness. They’re not radicals, they just don’t recognize national borders!

THIS is interesting:

It’s now nightime in Iraq on Sunday, September 7. If no US soldier is killed in Iraq today, this will mark the longest stretch of Operation Iraqi Freedom without a US military death – five days – since the war began in March. Based on the chronolgical listing at Faces of Valor, previously the longest period without a US military death was April 18-21. (The death on April 17 occurred in Kuwait, but like other casualties in Kuwait, it is included in the numbers we hear for the Iraq war.) I’ll be interested to see whether the news outlets that have kept up the daily drumbeat of war deaths will take note of this milestone.

I haven’t followed these numbers myself, but I wonder if we’ll hear people point this out in the coverage of President Bush’s speech. I rather doubt that day-to-day or week-to-week casualty figures are much of a metric, but certainly war opponents have tried to make them that.

UPDATE: Michael Ubaldi emails “The press will wait until the pause, inevitably, is over, and frame it as a failure of – of something.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Thomas Nicholson emails:

Just heard a NPR new report about an attack in Baghdad that wounded a couple of U.S. soldiers. The report noted that there hadn’t been such a bold attack in Baghdad for a while, but then went out of its way to note that out in the countryside there were an average of 10 or 11 attacks on US troops a day, and then quoted some important-sounding officer as saying the average had gone up recently to 12 or 13.

No mention there hadn’t been any deaths for almost a week now, for the first time since the war began. Nor any word on exactly what these countryside “attacks” amount to. Accentuating the negative? A reporter? Nah!!

Say it ain’t so.

ANDREW SULLIVAN WRITES that the flypaper strategy is working.

UPDATE: Read this for links to more discussion, pro and con.

JEFF JARVIS WRITES on the new holocaust deniers in Europe.

UPDATE: Tom Paine, meanwhile, says that Michael Meacher is a provable liar. On the other hand, it’s possible that Meacher’s grip on reality is sufficiently tenuous that he believes what he’s saying even though the evidence he refers to actually shows the contrary.

Such is the character, and intellect, of the anti-American crowd in Europe these days. Well, not just these days.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Ralph Luker notes that a new edition of Arming America, the discredited work of former Emory historian Michael Bellesiles, will soon be published by an outfit called Soft Skull Press. And no, I’m not making that up.

It would be nice, of course, if this second edition rigorously addressed the systematic errors of its predecessor (some of which are spelled out at length in this Yale Law Journal article by James Lindgren) but I suspect that such hopes are in vain. Were this book an answer to Bellesiles’ critics, and the charges of fraud that ultimately led to Bellesiles’ dismissal and the withdrawal of his book from the market, I suspect that his original publisher, Knopf, would have been happy to bring it out.

UPDATE: Several readers sent me more information on Soft Skull Press, which apparently has some experience with discredited authors.

WHY DOES THE EUROPEAN UNION HATE THE WORLD’S POOR SO MUCH? Samizdata summarizes the latest report on what E.U. trade policy does to poor nations:

6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour.

In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world – mainly in Africa – because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks.

If Africa could increase its share of world trade by just one per cent, it would earn an additional £49 billion a year. This would be enough to lift 128 million people out of extreme poverty. The EU’s trade barriers are directly responsible for Africa’s inability to increase its trade and thus for keeping Africa in poverty.

If the poorest countries as a whole could increase their share of world exports by five per cent, that would generate £248 billion or $350 billion, raising millions more out of extreme poverty.

I’m surprised that you don’t hear more about this.

UPDATE: Was a previous post along these lines “overreaching?” Daniel Drezner says no, but not everyone agrees. Now there’s a shock! But I’m not afraid of the flak — I’m standing shoulder-to-shoulder with The Guardian on this protectionism thing.

BIDEN LIED, FREEDOM DIED: A study relied on by proponents of Joe Biden’s dumb “RAVE Act” has been retracted under circumstances that look a bit dodgy to me:

A leading scientific journal yesterday retracted a paper it published last year saying that one night’s typical dose of the drug Ecstasy might cause permanent brain damage.

The monkeys and baboons in the study were not injected with Ecstasy but with a powerful amphetamine, said the journal, Science magazine.

The retraction was submitted by the team at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that did the study.

A medical school spokesman called the mistake “unfortunate” but said that Dr. George A. Ricaurte, the researcher who made it, was “still a faculty member in good standing whose research is solid and respected.”

The study, released last Sept. 27, concluded that a dose of Ecstasy a partygoer would take in a single night could lead to symptoms resembling Parkinson’s disease.

Sheesh. I’ll really trust what these guys report in the future. There’s more on the story here.

UPDATE: Andrew Stuttaford writes:

Fair enough, mistakes can be made – and one negative finding is not enough to call a drug safe – but can we now expect the drug warriors to publicize the fact that this particular risk has been massively overstated – or would that be expecting too much?

I suspect it would. Perhaps we should run a commercial showing people injecting monkeys with the wrong substance, and featuring the caption: “This is what it looks like when you have drugs on the brain.”

MAX BOOT REPORTS FROM IRAQ:

Every U.S. officer I talked to said that the 150,000 soldiers we have in Iraq now are sufficient. What’s required is not more troops, they said, but better policing methods. Both the 101st Airborne and the Marines are disdainful of some of the heavy-handed tactics, such as large-scale “cordon and search” operations, employed by Army units in Baghdad and the surrounding areas. They argue that the focus should be on getting better intelligence and training Iraqi security forces to police their own country. That process is now underway, but it will take time to create a new army and police force.

The biggest problem I saw in Iraq was not with the U.S. military but with the civilian arm of the occupation — the Coalition Provisional Authority run by L. Paul Bremer III. One well-intentioned CPA project, to hire agricultural laborers to clear canals, caused a riot in the southern city of Diwaniyah when the ditch diggers weren’t paid for three weeks. More often, the CPA is guilty of sins of omission. Its television station, the Iraqi Media Network, is not received in the north, thus ceding the information war to anti-American satellite channels like Al Jazeera.

The problem is that the CPA lacks both personnel and money. In the north, the 101st Airborne deploys 21,000 soldiers; the CPA has no more than a couple dozen employees there. And what few people the CPA has don’t last long. Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief, arrived in Iraq at the beginning of the summer to run the Justice Ministry, and already he’s going home.

Instead of sending more troops, the administration needs to beef up the CPA and decentralize its operations. Congress needs to provide more funding because, as Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, told me, “Money is ammunition.” But neither the CPA’s woes nor the well-publicized terror attacks should distract us from the substantial progress that’s been made in the four months since the war ended. As long as we keep our nerve, we will prevail.

Read the whole thing.

MICKEY KAUS notes that the Cruz Bustamante / MEChA story has depth, links to this piece on Bustamante by Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times, and asks:

Rutten notes that other California Latino pols (Xavier Becerra, Antonio Villaraigosa) have no problem renouncing MEChA’s offensive slogans. Why can’t Bustamante?

Meanwhile, Rutten observes:

There are few rules in life that admit no exceptions. Here is one: The pursuit of identity politics ends in an intellectual swamp that inevitably drains into a moral sewer.

That’s why Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is wrong not to speak more clearly to the issues raised by his one-time membership in a Chicano student organization whose founding credo is a mind-numbing amalgam of quaint revolutionary rhetoric and pseudo-mystical racialism. It’s also why the mainstream media’s off-handed treatment of this issue is one of the avoidable shortcomings in their coverage of the recall campaign. . . .

Ideas matter, and words have consequences. No matter how inclusive California’s political vocabulary becomes, it should not accommodate the language of identity politics.

I agree. And I think it’s odd — and embarrassing — that so many people in Bustamante’s media camp have chosen to deny the problem, or to try to explain it away in fashions that they would heap scorn on if employed by the defenders of a Pat Buchanan or a David Duke.

UPDATE: Brian Linse still says that the MEChA slogan is badly translated (and via email notes that it got a minor, but misleading, revision in Rutten’s column). I took several years of Spanish, but I’m far too rusty, even if I did serve as Faculty Advisor to the Hispanic Law Students Association on campus some years ago. If MEChA is harmless, though, then why are these other Latino politicians — some, I think, to the left of Bustamante — so willing to renounce it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Thomas Williams emails:

Mr Linse is just wrong. ‘Por’ and ‘para’ are both translated often translated ‘for’, and indeed one of the standard lessons for English-speakers learning Spanish is when to translate ‘for’ with ‘para’ and when with ‘por’. ‘Fuera de’ is perfectly good Spanish for the preposition ‘outside’; ‘afuera de’ is a Latin American variant. The standard translation being given in the media is in fact the correct one, as a look at any decent Spanish dictionary would show.

Beats me — it’s been too long since I did that stuff. My Spanish is now as bad as my French, both of which are worse than my Latin, which itself would get me caned and sent to stand in the corner wearing a “dunce” cap if I presumed to speak it in Dr. Weevil’s presence.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more from Roger Simon.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: And now we’re seeing Hispanic counterorganizing. Or something like that.

SOONER OR LATER, EVERYONE COMES TO KNOXVILLE. Louis Napoleon, Jean Paul Sartre, Mickey Kaus, and now it’s LT SMASH, with whom we had a lovely dinner, and who is currently making use of the wireless facilities here at Stately InstaPundit Manor to update his blog.

UPDATE: For some reason the Sartre link was wrong earlier. Fixed now — though you’ll have to scroll down a bit in the linked item.

CHECK OUT THIS WEEK’S BLOG MELA!

DAVE KOPEL REVIEWS THE NEW YORK TIMES’ REPORTING ON GUNS and finds it riddled with amateurish errors and apparent deception:

Interestingly, the Times, and its lead reporter on gun issues, Fox Butterfield, were recently acquitted of libel in a case involving a story having nothing to do with guns, the Sam Sheppard murder case. According to the May 23 AP report, Butterfield and the Times won despite the jury’s finding that the article he wrote was “not substantially true” and involved false and defamatory statements. His victory was based on a finding that there was “no malicious intent.” Supporting the jury’s finding that there was no malice was the Times’s prompt publication of a correction, once the paper learned about the error in Butterfield’s story.

Regarding firearms coverage, the case for actual malice and reckless disregard of the truth by the Times is much stronger.

And it’s not just Fox Butterfield who’s at fault. And Kopel has plenty of examples.

UPDATE: Tim Lambert emails to point out that this Kopel article contains an error that was corrected in “The Corner,” but never in the text of the article itself. I’ve noticed in the past that NRO seems to have problems correcting articles once they’re published online, something that all Big Media folks seem to be worse at than bloggers. Notably, however, Lambert doesn’t try to defend Fox Butterfield.

IBN WARRAQ offers an interesting debunking of Edward Said’s work over at SecularIslam.org. Excerpt:

And yet, ironically , what makes self-examination for Arabs and Muslims , and particularly criticism of Islam in the West very difficult is the totally pernicious influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism [2]. The latter work taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity – “ were it not for the wicked imperialists , racists and Zionists , we would be great once more ”- encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist generation of the 1980s , and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam , and even stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslims sensibilities , and who dared not risk being labelled “orientalist ”.

Read the whole thing.

MORE FROM IRAQ: The North Coast Journal has another firsthand report from a returning soldier. Excerpt:

THE QUESTIONS I GET FROM A LOT OF PEOPLE HERE ARE, “What’s going on over there? Why is there so much fighting? Why do the Iraqi people hate us so much?” When I first heard that, that’s when I realized that the news was not proportionate to what was going on in the country.

I was in eight or nine cities in Iraq. Starting from Kuwait, we saw pretty much every city along the river on the way to Baghdad. People absolutely loved us everywhere we went. There were big parades. We’d just roll down the streets, or sometimes be on foot patrol, and kids would run out of their houses just to wave at us, just to get a wave back from us. People would give us flowers; they’d give us flowers and gifts and Pepsi — all kinds of stuff.

I’d have people come up to me and say, “What took you so long? You should have done this in ’91!” Especially when we were in Baghdad. We were in this huge building, with a huge fence around it. I’d have a lot of people — especially the elderly guys — telling me, “I was tortured under this building for 12 or 14 years,” or, “There’s torture chambers under here.” So we went down and checked it out, and sure enough, there were torture chambers under there — basically an entire block, underground, with cells and everything else.

The stories we’re hearing from the troops seem quite consistent — and quite inconsistent with the day-to-day coverage in mainstream media. I wonder why that is?

At any rate, this story represents a commendable evenhandedness on the part of the North Coast Journal, which was rather thoroughly negative on the war back in March. (Thanks to reader Chris Sherman for the link).

HOWARD OWENS HAS A LOT OF LINKS TO GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ that isn’t getting much attention, and some thoughts on what it means.

And read this:

Cristea has blood and guts war stories from his six months in Iraq and Kuwait, but he says the last thing he wants to do is to tell them. Instead, the Marine prefers Americans see beyond the fighting and dying in Iraq and know the good he and his comrades-in-arms have brought to that country.

“What’s important to me is that my country knows the good we did for (Iraq). You see stuff every day on TV. What they don’t hear is the progress we’ve made over there.”

That progress, according to the 1999 Valparaiso High School graduate, includes bringing law and order, government services and freedom.

“We did so much for those people.”

Cristea, who returned to his base at Camp Pendleton in California in mid-August, is on leave, visiting his parents in Kouts for several weeks.

“We’re thankful, thankful, thankful he’s home,” his mother, Debi, said,

Cristea wants to counter the prevailing media view of the reception U.S. troops have received in Iraq.

“All you hear is negativity. Ninety-five percent of the population in Iraq, in my experience with the locals — they had nothing but good to say about us.

“A lot of them would come to us with information, a lot would come to thank us.”

Kids jumped up and down when they saw his convoy, Cristea said. In Baghdad, Iraqis would crowd the barbed wire perimeter of his unit’s compound and call out “USA! USA! Bush! Bush!”

“Whenever we drove anyplace, it was like we were in a parade,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

HERE’S A VERY NICE POST ON WEALTH AND POVERTY by Donald Sensing, who addresses both the micro and macro levels with insight and sensitivity.

THE BROTHERS JUDD have moved to a fancy new website that’s worth a look.

BLOG BRAND IDENTITIES. Hmm.

VIRGINIA POSTREL WONDERS why nobody — even “Tennessee-based InstaPundit” — noticed the Memphis blackout. Beats me. I noticed it — when I changed planes on the way back from vacation, the pilot noted that parts of Memphis were blacked out — but I thought it was a short-term thing and didn’t realize how bad it had been. (Of course, Memphis is only about 50 miles closer to me than it is to chez Postrel; Tennessee is a big state). But I don’t know why it got so little attention. Here’s an oped about that, which Virginia points out.

DEFENSETECH REPORTS PROBLEMS WITH THE MILITARY SPACE PROGRAM that are, according to the Defense Science Board, as severe as the problems with the civilian space program.