I HAVEN’T BLOGGED MUCH, and a lot of other people have been taking it easy this weekend. But not these professors of communications studies from UNC and Northwestern, who have found much to critique, at the New York Times, CNN, and elsewhere. And here’s an interesting item regarding Tony Snow and Jay Rockefeller.

WHY I DON’T HAVE OPEN COMMENTS: Another reason.

UPDATE: D’oh! I had an open comment thread from over a year ago that I had neglected to close, and it started filling up with Russian porn spam. How did they find it?

MATT WELCH has a roundup of California recall postmortems, along with a whole column on the subject in the National Post.

SASHA VOLOKH has some questions about what’s mainstream, and what’s not?

THE PLAME AFFAIR just gets more complicated, (imagine!) with steadily more evidence suggesting that the leak came from within the CIA.

Meanwhile Lincoln Plawg says it’s still not complicated enough. It’s complicated enough for me.

SORRY FOR THE SLOW START TODAY: I hung out with the InstaDaughter this morning and watched The Princess Bride on DVD, which I can report is an excellent movie to watch with your 8-year-old daughter.

Heck, it’s a great film to watch period. I loved it when it first came out, and it was, if anything, better than I remembered. It’s one of those rare items that succeeds at two levels — one for adults, another for kids. I also appreciated Peter Falk’s performance a lot more now than I did when I first saw the movie, many years ago and before I had read so many stories out loud myself.

Then I went running around Lakeshore Park, and then drove into the office, via Cherokee Boulevard. Lakeshore was nice, though the sun was just coming out. Cherokee, as if to mock me, was beautiful, as the sun has come out and made it a perfect early-fall day.

Now, despite superb weather outside, I’m hard at work, having read a bunch of resumes for the Appointments Committee, caught up on office-related email and snailmail, and am actually working on a writing project.

I’d rather be outdoors. Heck, I’d rather be indoors and blogging. But that’s life. Back later.

ASSORTED GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ, via various military bloggers, is rounded up here by Citizen Smash. Note that Chief Wiggles’ generals have finally been released.

WHY THEY HATE US: Here’s an amusing item:

The straight-talking Hollywood action star’s election win in California has had an electrifying impact on Germany, leading to calls Friday for top politicians to voice clear ideas in simple language or be swept away at the polls. . . .

Celebrities, columnists, ordinary citizens and even some politicians have joined the chorus of calls for less talk and more action to get Germany moving again after years of economic stagnation and political standstill.

And it’s not just Germany.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn:

In the EU, that “strong but unpopular action that governments have to take” apparently extends to deciding on your behalf what constitutional entity you’ll belong to. If you want the very opposite of the raw responsiveness of Californian democracy, it’s the debate on the European Constitution. As noted over the page this week, the Brussels correspondent of the BBC worries that letting the voters express a view on their constitution risks undoing “two years of painstaking work by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing”. Can’t have that, can we? . . .

California’s problem was that it was beginning to take on the characteristics of an EU state, not just in its fiscal incoherence but in its assumption that politics was a private dialogue between a lifelong political class and a like-minded media. It would be too much to expect Le Monde and the BBC to stop being condescending about American electorates. But they might draw a lesson and cease being such snots about their own.

Read the whole thing.

WESLEY CLARK’S CAMPAIGN has miffed the grassroots folks who started the Draft Clark Internet campaign. But this may be a reflection of the candidate’s character, not just his consultants. At least, this Guardian story on his military experience sounds that way:

Retired Gen. Dennis Reimer, a former Army chief of staff, describes Clark as an intelligent, “hardworking, ambitious individual who really applies himself hard.”

But, Reimer said, “Some of us were concerned about the fact that he was focused too much upward and not down on the soldiers. I’ve always believed you ought to be looking down toward your soldiers and not up at how to please your boss. … I just didn’t see enough of that in Wes.” . . .

Ret. Army Brig. Gen. David Grange, the U.S. commander in Bosnia at that time, says Clark was so focused on succeeding that “he would maybe not be cognizant of some of the feelings or concerns of some of the people around him.”

Interesting. Can Clark fix this problem?

ARTHUR SILBER points to another reason why the powers-that-be hated the recall — it proved that voters could handle a ballot with lots of candidates, proving that ballot-barrier laws are unjustified.

BOGUS LETTERS FROM IRAQ? I’d like to know who’s behind this. (Parachuting from jumbo jets? Does anybody do that?) With so much good news coming firsthand from Iraq, there’s no need to fake it. Unless, perhaps, you’re either (1) incredibly stupid; or (2) trying to discredit the real thing. And sending the same letter to the same paper under two different names means you’d have to be incredibly stupid.

Whoever’s behind this should be appropriately punished, either way.

UPDATE: My mistake — it seems that the letter isn’t bogus after all. Michael Ubaldi emails:

The article needs about five reads. What seems to have happened is that somebody wrote a letter and asked his buddies to sign it; most of them did. Note that every soldier agrees with the depiction – they should, they signed onto it – and only one guy doesn’t remember giving his permission.

All other soldiers quoted as knowing nothing about it are brass – which means little. The only other relevant information is that one of the authorized letters was sent to the wrong place – and that’s only according to his anti-war stepmother.

There’s a slightly different version of the story in Tulare, which lacks the northwest mixup: Link.

This stinks of nonstory dolled up into anti-war hit.

Sounds like I fell for it. My apologies. Reader Steve Koch emails:

My nephew is in the unit that the form (not bogus) letters were sent from. (I have no reason to believe that he was involved in any way.) They did, in fact parachute from jumbo jets (c-17s). Google “c-17 173rd” and you can read all you want about it and see photos.

You really did them (and us all) a disservice when you concluded:

> Whoever’s behind this should be appropriately punished, either way.

The article that you linked to made it pretty clear that it was a form letter that soldiers were being encouraged to send to counter the negative portrayals in the media. They are understandably frustrated that the progess they are making is being ignored. Of course, the wisdom of their approach is questionable, and nobody should have sent a letter with somebody else’s name on it.

Nobody, obviously, should be punished for sending non-bogus letters, and that’s what this appears to be. Sorry I was fooled by the article in The Olympian — I should have been more skeptical. (And I never thought of a C-17 as “jumbo jet,” but here’s a story that backs up the claim. And Donald Sensing has comments, too.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Spoons says I’ll never make a professional journalist. Good thing I’ve got a day job!

MORE: I should note that if these are manufactured by PR people, it’s dumb — though if the soldiers agree to sign on, and think that the letters are accurate, which appears to be the case, it’s not deceptive. But any campaign like this is sure to be tarred by anti-war and anti-Bush people as bogus even if it’s not deceptive. Just give the troops the addresses, and let ’em write their own letters — it’s more honest, and more effective. Sort of like blogging as compared to Big Media!

It would be nice, of course, if newspapers gave as much space to genuine good reports from troops in Iraq as they do to addressing claims that some of them are bogus, but that’s probably asking too much.

STILL MORE: CBS has picked up the story. Once again, the troops say they agree with the sentiments, but the big story is that it’s not in their words.

Hey — maybe they’ll start applying that kind of criticism to the things that news anchors read off the TelePrompters. . . .

CLAYTON CRAMER NOTES a rather dramatic firsthand blog report of shooting a burglar in self-defense.

I have no reason to doubt the report, though I don’t know the blogger. And I regard shooting a burglar as a virtuous — not merely a permissible — act. But my advice to anyone else in that situation is to think long and hard before blogging something like that, at least until you’ve spoken to a lawyer and the dust has cleared. In my part of the country, even a dubious shooting of a burglar probably wouldn’t bring prosecution — grand juries won’t indict, and juries won’t convict, under those circumstances. It’s not that way everywhere, by any means, and the authorities can be astonishing in their willingness to expend far more energy prosecuting someone who defends his home against criminals than they are willing to spend on the criminals themselves.

UPDATE: The author says he’s quit blogging in response to hatemail. Some people are wondering if the story’s true. I have no way of knowing, of course. You can visit his blog and scroll down to see the various developments.

Meanwhile, Kim du Toit is collecting these stories.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In the comments section at Spoons’ place, Mrs. du Toit says she thinks it’s bogus.

GERARD VAN DER LEUN writes on the meaning of the California recall:

What it is is that there are a lot of people here in 21st century America who are fed up with a political structure built in 19th century America. Worse than that, much worse than that, they are bored with it. Bored, numb, disbelieving, untrusting, unenchanted and retroactively neither amused nor entertained. They know in their bones, and have known since September 11, 2001, that joke time is over.

Read the whole thing.

ANDREW SULLIVAN is all over Frontline for dishonesty about the war — and rightly so. (Here, too.)

Bush-hatred is causing these guys to destroy their own credibility.

UPDATE: Jim Treacher demolishes another example of the same phenomenon, in this case an article blaming George Bush for low-hanging pants on women. Like the song says, you don’t mess around with Jim:

Yeah, that must be it! It couldn’t be that guys like girls’ asses, and there are more girls with fantastic butt cleavage than with the booblial variety. No, wearing your pants down around your beaver is a fucking political statment, isn’t it. It’s George W. Bush’s fault, just like everything else!

“Fault?” Note to fashion writers: If you want to see Bush cement his hold on the male vote, just keep “blaming” him for skimpy women’s fashions.

THE MARSH ARABS are making a comeback in Iraq:

A dozen years after Saddam Hussein ordered the vast marshes of southeastern Iraq drained, transforming idyllic wetlands into a barren moonscape to eliminate a hiding place for Shiite Muslim political opponents, Iraqi engineers have turned on the spigot again.

The flow is not what it once was — new dams have weakened the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers that feed the marshes — but the impact has been profound. As the blanket of water gradually expands, it is quickly nourishing plants, animals and a way of life for Marsh Arabs that Hussein had tried so assiduously to extinguish. . . .

“Everyone is so happy,” Kerkush said as he watched his son stand in a mashoof and steer it like a gondolier with a long wooden pole. “We are starting to live like we used to, not the way Saddam wanted us to live.”

Well, that’s the point.

WELL, I wasn’t looking for another job. But then comes this suggestion.

CLAYTON CRAMER IS COLLECTING STORIES of defensive gun uses. Meanwhile Eugene Volokh has thoughts, here and here, on why it’s a good idea to protect the gun industry from legal assaults that are intended to serve as end-runs around a losing political argument.

PHIL CARTER COMMENTS on FedEx’s antiterrorism operations. He approves.

BLOGS: Bigtime brokers of buzz! Beautiful.

ANDREW BOLT NOTES the media’s strange uniformity in reporting on Iraq. (Via Tim Blair, who also has helpful advice on becoming a millionaire.)

THIS IS A LOT BETTER THAN THE ARAFAT THING:

OSLO, Oct 10 – Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi became the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize Friday for a fearless defense of human rights in an award designed to spur wider democracy in the Islamic world. . . .

Ebadi had often defended controversial causes. In 2000, she was given a suspended sentence after a court convicted her and another human rights lawyer of producing a video tape alleging that prominent conservatives supported activities of violent vigilantes.

“This prize gives me the energy to continue my fight,” Ebadi told a news conference in Paris without the head scarf required under Islamic law. She said she would go to Oslo to receive the $1.3 million prize at the Dec. 10 ceremony.

Good.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Your link to the Ebadi story reminds me of what the WaPo, NYT and the AP did after the fall in the Soviet Union. All of a sudden the most hard-line communists became, miraculously, “conservatives.” Now, in Iran, the WaPo uses “conservative” to refer to the mullahs, with the implication that “conservatives” are against freedom. Used out of an American context and left undefined this leaves the reader unaware that American conservatives were/are in the vanguard in supporting freedoms for people in the Soviet Union and in Iran.

Yes, and far too many “liberals” were astonishingly comfortable with the Soviet Union, just as too many seem to regard Fidel Castro as admirable even today.

BELLESILES UPDATE: The Emory Wheel remains on the case.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP ON THE WESLEY CLARK CAMPAIGN VS. THE BLOGOSPHERE dustup, for those who are interested.

HERE’S MORE ON THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA CENSORSHIP SCANDAL that I mentioned below.

The Alabama administration should be ashamed. Like Roy Moore, it has helped to convince many people that stereotypes about Alabama narrow-mindedness retain their validity.

UPDATE: Some readers object that this is a case of political correctness, not religious narrow-mindedness.

I don’t see much distinction, though. It’s just narrowmindedness in support of the new established religion, instead of the old one.

SOME NOT VERY IMPRESSIVE NEWS about homeland security:

New York airport baggage screeners were fed answers to written tests and were not asked to identify bombs, guns or other dangerous objects in carry-on luggage, a homeland security official said yesterday.

Clark Kent Ervin, the acting inspector general for the Homeland Security Department, said a review of the Transportation Security Administration’s testing procedures found that on a recent final exam given to new screeners at LaGuardia Airport, 22 of the 25 questions were used during the practice quiz, and testing protocol “maximized the likelihood that students would pass.”

Sheesh.