CENSORWARE: Slashdot reports that Symantec’s Internet Security 2004 is blocking pro-gun sites across the board. I’ve used Internet Security in the past, but I guess I’ll be looking elsewhere. Pathetic. And here’s a good point from the Slashdot post:

My rather informal test still raises the spectre that a large corporate entity may be clandestinely trying to sway you or your child’s political views by censoring content from one side of a political debate. This is indeed chilling, especially considering that such software is required to be used in libraries to protect children.

Indeed.

KEVIN DEENIHAN has thoughts on bloggers as journalists.

CERP UPDATE: Major Sean Bannion has a comment posted that suggests the holdup is only temporary. I hope that’s right — though even a temporary stop seems like a bad idea.

UPDATE: Lynxx Pherrett has more information suggesting that the program will be funded again once the new budget clears. I hope this is right — and if it is, somebody should tell the troops in Iraq, who seem rather upset at the prospect of it dying.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up: lots of business- and economic-related blog posts for your delectation.

CHIEF WIGGLES’ BLOG now has video of his MSNBC interview up, in QuickTime format. Maybe Newsweek’s Rod Nordland should watch it. . . .

Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard notes that the Chief doesn’t deserve to be dissed:

In a story in last week’s Newsweek online about Iraqi reconstruction, there was a glancing mention of an important grassroots effort to reach out to Iraqi children. The article talks about safety improvements in parts of Baghdad: “There are motor pools, and Internet cafes, cafeterias and video lounges.” And in an almost dismissive manner, it continues: “There’s even a blog from inside the Green Zone, put out by someone who says he’s a military intelligence soldier using the pseudonym Chief Wiggles (http://chiefwiggles.blog-city.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.”

Boosterish? We understand the writer probably bears no malice towards the chief, but this operation is no ordinary “toys for tots” program. Wiggles’s effort to make life a little easier for the children of Iraq is on a scale with Gail Halvorsen, the celebrated “candy bomber” who dropped chocolates down to German children during the 1948 Berlin airlift. And despite doubts expressed in the Newsweek piece about Wiggles’s identity (“someone who says he’s a military intelligence soldier”), the man is authentic. The Chief (whose real name is classified for security reasons) serves in Utah’s 141st military intelligence battalion (National Guard) and is currently working as an interrogator and debriefer at a palace in Baghdad. But on one occasion, he witnessed a poor girl crying and was so moved he wanted to gather up some toys for her. He then made mention of this idea of giving even more toys to more children on his blog, and thousands of people from around the world responded, all wanting to know how they could help.

To date, the Chief’s “Operation Give,” a newly set-up nonprofit organization, and “Share Joys Through Toys” effort has yielded more than 800 packages from overseas. Even Federal Express has gotten involved by shipping some of the packages from the United States free of charge. . . .

Wiggles humbly describes himself as “one individual trying to make a difference” and believes that “one person’s seemingly insignificant positive actions can exponentially initiate a rippling of positive energy.” Call him benevolent, noble, or selfless. Just don’t call him boosterish.

No, don’t.

SUPPORTING THE TROOPS: Here’s a heartwarming story that almost makes me feel good about the airlines.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA. . . . Note the lynching-noose in the background.

He can’t be a Dean voter, though, because the flag on the pickup in the background isn’t Confederate. . . .

UPDATE: Reader Gary Vincent emails:

Yeah, also note the tying of the word “sniper” to our rural, pickup-driving, NRA-supporting caucasian friend — i.e., the Angry White Male ™. Just how crestfallen is the Left that the D.C. sniper turned out to be a black Muslim?

Crestfallen enough to basically ignore the fact.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, The Bitch Girls show what real NRA members do.

SCRAPPLEFACE wrote:

(2003-10-31) — The latest figures on decreased jobless claims and a huge increase in third-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) signal a continuation of the Clinton-Gore economic boom, according to an expert.

“After a brief two year ‘hiccup’ the wisdom of Clinton-Gore still shines through,” said one unnamed itinerant professor who has taught at the University of California Los Angeles, Columbia University, Fisk University and Middle Tennessee State University. “Any time economic indicators are this good, you can take it as an article of faith that it’s the legacy of the two best men ever elected President — Bill Clinton and Al Gore.”

That was parody. Or was it?

As much as the economy weakened in the last three years, it was coming off such a high that it remains stronger by most measures than in the early 1990’s. That high was reached on Mr. Clinton’s watch, but it could help Mr. Bush next year.

Say, maybe they read ScrappleFace at The New York Times!

Or maybe they just, you know, live it. . . .

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “The more you race ’em, the less you trust — the less you drive ’em, the more they rust.” The motorhead variation on “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

A TOUGH WEEK in Iraq. I don’t blog much on day-to-day events there, because other people are doing that better anyway, and because I prefer to focus on issues — like the CERP issue — that have more long-term importance. But, even if this is nothing on the scale of Vietnam, Korea, or World War II, it’s real enough. Which is why I admire and respect the people who are over there working to make Iraq a success, and don’t want to see their efforts, and sacrifices, wasted.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has good thoughts:

Saddam always relied on the Somalia strategy. He believed – and probably still does – that the U.S. does not have the guts to stick this out and wear down the Sunni dead-enders now combined with Islamist terrorists. He planned on this kind of war of attrition from the minute he knew he was militarily finished. That makes our endurance all the more necessary. The slow collapse of American credibility in the 1990s will take time to reverse. And moments like yesterday are classic attempts to test our determination. Saddam and what he still represents must fail in full view of the world. And we have an irreplaceable opportunity to see it happen.

Yes.

MAUREEN DOWD IS LYING AGAIN: Think that’s too strong? Read what Greg Djerejian says — and follow his links — and see what you think.

I think that there must be a lot of people who could do a better job on the Times oped page than Maureen Dowd, whose name has already become synonymous with op-ed dishonesty.

According to Dowd: “It’s hard to protect yourself from the big lie.” Especially, it seems, when it comes via The New York Times.

UPDATE: There’s more on Dowd from Cori Dauber, over at The Volokh Conspiracy, who finds Dowd’s accusations of “airbrushing” ironic — at best. And read this, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz’s comments would probably wound Dowd more deeply than anything I’ve written: “Not only is Dowd foolish and wrong, but she’s slow. The Dover ceremony controversy is so last week.” And here’s proof — Katz blogged it, last week. Ouch.

JUST ANOTHER SOLDIER (“A journal of a National Guardsman’s deployment to Iraq”) is a military blog that’s starting to develop a following, to judge by my email.

POLITICAL TROUBLE BREWING IN BRITAIN? David Carr writes:

For reasons I cannot even begin to adequately explain, the gatherings of the increasingly angry and militant pro-hunt movement conjours up ‘spaghetti western’ images in my head; the brooding silence, the tumbleweed, the flinty, menacing stares and the ‘man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do’ atmosphere of grim resolve. . . .

Alright, it’s actually the middle of the verdant English countryside, but you get the gist.

Having failed in their appeals to reason, common sense and principle, the hunters are still threatened with a government prohibition that will eradicate a centuries-old tradition and the way of rural life that has grown up around it. They are being ‘run out of town’ for no better reason than that they are perceived as an easy target for a government that wants to score cultural ‘brownie points’ with the metropolitan elite.

So the hunters have decided that they are not going to be such an easy target after all. I don’t see what else they can do. It’s fight or die and they have chosen the former.

The British tradition of “out of doors political activity” (as Gordon Wood terms it) may come to the fore again.

I’VE HAD DAYS when I could have used these.

EMBARRASSING DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: First, David Kay writes to say that the Post’s reporter, Barton Gellman, misrepresented his findings:

The Oct. 26 front-page article “Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat” is wildly off the mark. Your reporter, Barton Gellman, bases much of his analysis on what he says was told to him by an Australian brigadier, Stephen D. Meekin. Gellman describes Meekin as someone “who commands the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to [David] Kay.”

Meekin does not report, nor has he ever reported, to me in any individual capacity or as commander of the exploitation center. The work of the center did not form a part of my first interim report, which was delivered last month, nor do I direct what Meekin’s organization does. The center’s mission has never involved weapons of mass destruction, nor does it have any WMD expertise. . . .

We have much work left to do before any conclusions can be reached on the state of possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program efforts. Your story gives the false impression that conclusions can already be drawn.

Then (scroll down), Meekin writes to say that Gellman misquoted him.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ calls for Iraqi debt relief. Tyler Cowen has more on this.

I think that it would be a good thing if extensions of credit to dictators were regarded as risky propositions.

MORE ON CERP FUNDS IN IRAQ, from a celebrated expert:

I am a Marine Reserve Lt.Col. and was the Provincial Military Governor for Wasit Province in Iraq until early September. In fact, you blogged a story about me. (Link)

We had funds that were seized from Saddam and used them for all manner of reconstruction projects. Additionally we had US funds allocated for our discretionary use (well, there were some restrictions, I couldn’t use it to benefit US personnel). It was essential to our success when I was there. We didn’t lose one Marine to enemy fire after the war combat was over. As funding and the discretion to spend money where and when it is needed become bogged down in government red tape, it will create problems for the guys who are still there. No doubt. Politicians don’t appreciate the needs of guys on the front lines and what we need to do to get things done. It’t the small things that build in importance with immediate impact. We also got help for things we needed from folks back home. I asked a group called Spirit of America for red, white and blue soccer jerseys for local kids and adults to help build goodwill since soccer is the game there. They wrote up the story at: Link

They helped another Marine with dental supplies and they’re helping Army guys there now. The main thing is that there is help from the private sector and people in the U.S. can help. You guys should know about that because it’s even more important now that the seized funds we used are drying up.

I’m back home at work now but let me know if I can tell you more about this or put you in touch with the guys who helped us.

LtCol David Couvillon, USMCR

I don’t think that bloggers and blog-readers can replace this money, but maybe there’s something we can do to help. In the meantime, I think that Washington needs to look hard at giving local commanders the kind of freedom they enjoyed under the CERP program.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE: We’ve already seen the 1946 Life Magazine coverage noted by Jessica’s Well. Now reader Jack Callahan sends this picture from the Saturday Evening Post, and comments:

After reading the headline of the cover story of tomorrow’s (11/2/03) New York Times Magazine (“Who Botched the Occupation”) I happened to spot the attached Jan 26, 1946 Cover Page of the Saturday Evening Post (it was on the wall of a local barber shop).

Note the upper right hand corner (assuming the image makes it to you) – a feature story is entitled “How we botched the German Occupation”.

My brief search did not locate the contents of the article, but I though you might find the cover amusing.

Indeed I do. Anybody have the article?

UPDATE: No copies yet. But reader Duffy Burdick has an interesting observation:

RE: The Saturday Evening Post cover—Note that it is a collective ‘We’ that “botched” the Occupation, not President Truman nor by extension, President Roosevelt. It suggests that there was still a sense that ‘We’ as a nation had been attacked and ‘We’ as a nation had responded.

Today, the media faults President Bush, e.g. , “Bush’s War” , “Bush’s Failure” , or his Administration without the slightest hint that we may all be in this together, regardless of our domestic partisan proclivities. Sad, really.

Yes, it is.

UPDATE: Reader Kathy Nelson has actually gotten the article and typed in the whole thing. I’ve read it and put some representative excerpts below (click “MORE”). I’d like to to put the whole thing up, but that’s probably beyond fair use.

(more…)

THE POWER OF GIZMODO: I’ve been looking for a small digital camera that also takes web-quality video with sound, and is cheap enough to take places where it might get damaged. This morning I saw this Gateway camera on Gizmodo, for $199. Went to the nearby Gateway store, tried it, bought it, and it’s up to expectations. (And plumb easy to use; the controls are very intuitive.)

But what was really interesting was that everybody at the Gateway store knew about Gizmodo, and several said that they bought a lot of stuff in response to items there. I don’t have any idea how much traffic Gizmodo is getting these days, but it’s clearly reaching its target market.

UPDATE: Well, the camera wasn’t that great — and didn’t sync reliably to my laptop — so I returned it. The Gateway folks were very good about taking it back, after deciding that they couldn’t figure out what the problem could be (MPEG4 devices tend to be hinky, apparently). I bought a Toshiba still camera that also records video in .avi instead.

“MANLY, YES. But women like it, too!” And we’re not talking Irish Spring, here.

MORE ON THE CAN-DO SPIRIT IN IRAQ:

This is not the army of your favourite army sitcom. The officers of the 101st Airborne are sophisticated, entrepreneurial, very dedicated, and very, very smart. They didn’t wait for someone to send them money to get started. Instead they’re using Saddam’s money. They found piles of it in his palaces, and figured this is a good way to return it to the people.

They didn’t wait for Bechtel to show up. They’re finding their own contractors.

Capt. Burns’s tiny outfit, based in Makhmur, has spent $440,000 so far. They’re having water pipes put in, and they’ve built a big park with swings and slides. They’ve refurbished the police station and the mayor’s office.

Yeah. Too bad it looks like they’re going to be stopped. If this CERP story is as it appears, this is the major dropped ball of the Iraq operation so far. I hope that people are looking into it.

RUMSFELD’S MEMO, REVISITED: Reader David Campbell points to this article in Slate, and observes:

If you read this then Rumsfield’s memo makes even more sense. It is the mentality of the senior brass of the Army that he is trying to overcome. If he can change the way the army is approaching this problem then we may expect some success in the war on terror in places like Iraq.

Yes. Fred Kaplan’s spin is typically negative, but the piece illustrates an important point. It’s possible to disagree with the specifics of Rumsfeld’s campaign to shake up the Army brass, but I think the need for such a shakeup is pretty plain, as is the unfortunate tendency of the brass to resist critiques of their performance.

GOOD COLUMN BY JULIE BURCHILL IN THE GUARDIAN: Worth reading.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has comments.

LUSKIN / ATRIOS UPDATE: Well, I was hors de combat as the story reverberated around the blogosphere yesterday, but it’s bad for Luskin. Even folks like Misha and Bill Quick are all over Luskin, with Quick even promising to donate to an Atrios Defense Fund if it’s required. (I would, too, though I doubt it’ll come to that.)

I agree with Tom Maguire that a “delink Luskin” campaign in response is over-reach (and I find de-linking campaigns rather silly in general) but Luskin has blown it here, and badly. I don’t believe that free speech always trumps libel claims, even in the blogosphere, but I think the threshold is awfully high, and I don’t think that Luskin has met it with regard to Atrios, much less Atrios’s commenters, for whose comments I don’t think it’s really fair to hold Atrios responsible.

But there are some lessons here. One is that threats of lawsuits almost always backfire in the blogosphere, even more than they do in general. There’s no way to keep them quiet, and once disclosed they make the threatener look thuggish unless the case is quite strong. Another is that anonymity in the blogosphere is thinner than many people think: Atrios’s email is known, and it’s a major-ISP address, meaning that he’s a subpoena away from losing anonymity. And that’s true for a lot of other people who think they’re anonymous. Anonymity is convenient, and it may prevent untoward consequences, but it’s not really secure if anyone really wants to pierce it.

Another is that bloggers tend to stick together, and to value free speech very highly, despite rather intense disagreements. That’s probably a good thing.

And, finally, while comments are nice, they do pose a problem. When you have a lot of comments, it’s very difficult to police them. I loved The Fray at Slate, — but it had Moira Redmond riding herd on it full time. What blogger can do that? And the real enemy of a blogger isn’t trolls who disagree, but the commenters on “your side” who go over-the-top. And comments sections tend to breed that sort of extreme commentary, it seems. That’s not a reason why people shouldn’t have comments, necessarily, but it’s a downside.

UPDATE: Roger Simon thanks his readers.

CALL ME CRAZY, but this sounds like an embarrassment for the Edwards campaign:

WASHINGTON (AP) – While a member of Congress’ investigation into U.S. and Saudi intelligence failures, presidential hopeful John Edwards agreed to sell his home for $3.52 million to the public relations expert hired by Saudi Arabia to counter charges it was soft on terrorism.

Edwards, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Friday he learned sometime during the course of the 2002 transaction – months after the initial offer was signed but before the deal fell apart – that Michael Petruzzello worked for Saudi Arabia.

Though the sale broke off nearly a year ago, Edwards hasn’t returned or publicly disclosed Petruzzello’s $100,000 deposit, which remains in a real estate escrow account as the senator decides what to do with it. Edwards recently sold the house to another buyer for a half-million dollars less than Petruzzello’s offer.

Probably not as bad as it sounds at first blush, but not good.