IT’S NOT 1968: Here’s a bit of graffiti that I noticed while walking around campus earlier today (click the image for a larger version, or click here for a close-up). Despite all the Vietnam-era nostalgia, things just aren’t the same now as they were then. (Maybe the graffitist had been reading Mark Steyn: “Islamic terrorism is a beast that has to be killed, not patted and fed.”)

I guess the Campus Issues Committee probably wasn’t behind this, but apparently The People will find alternative ways of getting their message across, despite The Man’s best efforts.

Oh, wait, it’s not 1968, is it? Or if it is, it’s a topsy-turvy version. . . .

UPDATE: Adam Groves: “only geek bloggers carry a digital camera on them at all times.”

Guilty as charged, your honor.

ANTI-REGIME PROTESTS IN IRAN:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Around 1,000 pro-reform students rallied in the Iranian capital Sunday calling for freedom of speech and the release of political prisoners, witnesses said.

The protesters in Tehran chanted “Free all political prisoners” and “Death to despotism.”

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER WELL-ARMED WOMAN:

International opera star Dame Kiri Te Kanawa turned up at a hotel and asked where she could store her guns.

The singer is understood to have arrived at the Holiday Inn in West Nile Street, Glasgow, with several double-barrelled shotguns.

But the Maori, who had brought the weapons with her for a shooting holiday, was told the hotel had nowhere safe to store them.

Shame on the Holiday Inn! They couldn’t afford one of these? (Via Cronaca).

U.N. PEACEKEEPERS: MISERABLE FAILURES. Yes, the record isn’t very impressive.

THE ROCKY TOP BRIGADE makes the news, and SKBubba is interviewed.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING WASHINGTON POST PIECE on how things are going in Iraq, consisting of email from commanders there. In general, they seem to think that things are going pretty well, but here’s one problem that needs attending to, fast:

During July and August, we were able to out-spend the FRL [former regime loyalists] and foreigners in most of the theater — more particularly in the 101st AO [area of operation]. It was simply more economical to work with and for the Americans because we were disbursing more money into the local economy than Saddam had ever done, and the FRL could not keep up. Additionally, the benefit of the money was all local in the form of infrastructure rebuilt, schools and clinics back into operation or upgraded. The benefits from U.S. occupation during those two months were tangible to the average Iraqi. Why risk getting killed by shooting at Americans when you can work for them or with them and get paid more in the long run? . . .

As the money getting directly into the hands of the commanders dried up in September, the FRL/foreigners were then able to fill that gap with their money and we have witnessed a sharp increase in attacks ever since. . . . Although more money has been approved for Iraq, we have seen none of it out here yet, and the result is increasing disenchantment or indifference with our presence on the part of the average Iraqi. If we are not able to improve their daily existence as we were back in July and August, then we have become an occupation force. The money that is available is kept in Baghdad; [there is] a Byzantine process which commanders must navigate to get the funds; and there are all sorts of strings and bureaucracy attached.

It is virtually impossible for me to have the same overwhelming effect I had on the area back in JUL/AUG.

(I think this means that the CERP money hasn’t returned as promised. More on this issue here and here.)

Someone in Washington needs to fix this. Now. Who do we write?

UPDATE: Read this piece from StrategyPage on “lessons identified” versus “lessons learned.” (“It’s easier to identify a lesson than to get an organization to act on it and implement a useful solution.”)

And here’s a firsthand report of Bush’s visit to Iraq, and here’s another firsthand report from one of the engineer units in Iraq.

Also don’t miss these reports of support for the troops on the home front. Bravo.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more from Rich Galen, who’s blogging from Iraq now. He had a bit of a hiatus in posting, and I lost the habit of checking, but he’s got quite a few interesting posts, with photos, now.

And, really, how dangerous can it be if a guy can dress like this and not have his lunch money stolen? . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a report from a 75-year-old woman who visited Iraq to see her daughter, who’s serving in the military there. Best line: “I had better luck with the men in Iraq than I have at home.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ new public editor, Daniel Okrent, introduces himself. It’s a nice piece, but the proof, as always, will be in what he does, not what he says. There are some promising signs of a cleanup at the Times, but we’ll just have to wait and see how they turn out.

And I still think that Okrent should have a blog.

JOSH MARSHALL says that there’s an op-ed payola scandal (to use Jeff Jarvis’s term).

I guess this ought to be a scandal, but it’s not as if this kind of thing — or worse — doesn’t happen all the time. I personally have had offers — declined, I should note — to pay me to write opeds for undisclosed third parties under my name, and if people are making these kinds of offers to me, that probably means there’s a lot more of it going on out there. Josh, on the other hand, also talks about opeds that are “ghost-written,” which seems to me a lesser scandal. (In fact, if you were to read my ethics book — the relevant chapter of which is available free online here — you’d see just how common that kind of thing is; scroll down to the section headed “motes and beams.” As Charles Krauthammer wrote: “If lying about authorship is now a hanging offense, there are not enough lampposts in Washington to handle the volume.”) Ghostwritten opeds, in which the person whose name appears on the byline agrees with their reasoning and conclusion, seem to me to be rather minor items of scandal indeed compared to what else is out there.

ANOTHER SATISFIED READER:

Just a note to thank you for hipping me to B.T. In the spirit of a digital music marketplace, “Emotional Technology” was the first full-length album I bought from Apple iTunes. It’s great. I don’t know diddly-squat about electronica (I’m basically an old hippie) but I dig this.

Yeah, I like Emotional Technology too. The actuality-break in Superfabulous is a little less cool after the first couple of dozen listens, because it kills the momentum just as the song really peaks, but that’s my only real criticism. On long-term listening, I think it’s as good as Movement in Still Life, which is high praise indeed.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL CHEAT: Yep, it’s a law of human nature, all right.

UPDATE: Laurence Simon has an idea on how to run these contests:

It ought to be done with PayPal boxes. Most cash wins. Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.

Hey, maybe I should give that a try.

JOHN KERRY: I may be a loser, but I’m making sure that I’m a loser you won’t forget!

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner has observations. And I think we’ll be hearing a lot of this kind of thing, too.

FORGET FRED PHELPS: ANTI-GAY MADNESS has infected Australia.

VIA THE GUARDIAN, HERE’S MORE FROM IRAQ:

MAHAWEEL, Iraq (AP) – The killers kept bankers’ hours. They showed up for work at the barley field at 9 a.m., trailed by backhoes and three buses filled with blindfolded men, women and children as young as 1.

Every day, witnesses say, the routine was the same: The backhoes dug a trench. Fifty people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt, then dug another hole for the next group.

At 5 p.m., the killers – officials of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party – went home to rest up for another day of slaughter.

In this wind-swept field in the central town of Mahaweel, witnesses say, this went on without a break for 35 days in March and April of 1991, during a crackdown on a Shiite Muslim uprising that followed the first Gulf War.

“I watched this with my own eyes,” said Sayed Abbas Muhsen, 35, whose family farm was appropriated by Saddam’s government for use as a killing field. “But we couldn’t tell anyone. We didn’t dare.”

The mass grave at Mahaweel, with more than 3,100 sets of remains, is the largest of some 270 such sites across Iraq. They hold upward of 300,000 bodies; some Iraqi political parties estimate there are more than 1 million.

It’s worth keeping this sort of thing in mind, among the turkey-related quibbles.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe some people are keeping it in mind:

BAGHDAD — Up to 1,000 Iraqis, including children orphaned by the war that ousted Saddam Hussein, marched through Baghdad yesterday to denounce guerrilla attacks and show support for U.S.-led occupation forces. . . .

Carrying banners blaming Saddam loyalists for terrorism, the demonstrators marched down one of Baghdad’s busiest streets before gathering in Firdos Square, where a statue of Saddam was famously pulled down as U.S. troops drove into the heart of the capital in April.

“We organized this demonstration because the terrorists now kill a lot of people,” said Abdul Aziz Al-Yassiri, coordinator of the Iraqi Democratic Trend, a recently formed social group.

“They kill the children, kill women, kill the people, kill the police. They want to stop our plan for a democratic system.”

Think this will get one-tenth the attention that the turkey got?

HERE’S STILL MORE on the problems with the New York Times’ Baghdad Bureau’s security operation.

U.S. NEWS IS SPOTLIGHTING THE SAUDI TERROR CONNECTION:

For months, members scoured every piece of data the U.S. intelligence community had on al Qaeda’s cash. The team soon realized that its most basic assumptions about the source of bin Laden’s money–his personal fortune and businesses in Sudan–were wrong. Dead wrong. Al Qaeda, says William Wechsler, the task force director, was “a constant fundraising machine.” And where did it raise most of those funds? The evidence was indisputable: Saudi Arabia. . . .

Examining the Saudi role in terrorism, a senior intelligence analyst says, was “virtually taboo.” Even after the embassy bombings in Africa, moves by counterterrorism officials to act against the Saudis were repeatedly rebuffed by senior staff at the State Department and elsewhere who felt that other foreign policy interests outweighed fighting terrorism.

Personally, I’d take a close look at those senior staffers:

Saudi largess encouraged U.S. officials to look the other way, some veteran intelligence officers say. Billions of dollars in contracts, grants, and salaries have gone to a broad range of former U.S. officials who had dealt with the Saudis: ambassadors, CIA station chiefs, even cabinet secretaries.

Hmm. A real close look.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

There are more than a few (somewhat veiled) references to this sort of thing during the British colonial era. A suspiciously large number of British colonial officials retired on substantial pensions paid for by various Sultans and Emirs. I’m most familiar with this from the Sudan, but have seen references to it in the Middle East, too. My point is that the above quote doesn’t represent anything new in the tradition of (dare I say it) Anglosphere political interaction in the Dar al-Islam.

Audit these guys. It’s interesting to me that Democrats and journalists don’t make more of the Bush connection to the Saudis, and how easy the Administration has been on them (though that does seem to be changing a bit now). But I fear that the reason is that a lot of Democrats and journalists have been at the Saudi trough as well.

INTERESTING STORY on WMD and the 45-minute claim.

UPDATE: It’s worth reading this thread, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

WE (BLOGGERS) GET RESULTS: The New York Times is correcting altered quotations.

Maureen Dowd, take note.

HOW CONFIDENT IS THE PUBLIC in the news media’s patriotism? Not very. This may be unfair, but it’s not surprising.

THERE ARE SOME SECTIONS OF TENNESSEE, REVEREND, that I would not advise you to invade:

GREENEVILLE, Tenn. – Greene County is the latest target of a Kansas church that wants to establish monuments condemning a gay man who was murdered in Wyoming in 1998.

County officials vow to fight the attempt by Fred Phelps, pastor of the Topeka, Kan., church, to put a 6-foot granite monument in the Greeneville courthouse. Phelps said if officials do not comply, his group will picket the county.

The response, basically, is “Bring ’em on!”

“If they want to come down here and picket, come on,” Greene County Mayor Roger Jones said.

They probably will. I mean, it’s not like they’ve got jobs or anything. Or maybe they do, as this story provides more evidence for my theory, expressed elsewhere, that Fred Phelps is acting suspiciously like a paid provocateur for the ACLU:

The pastor wants the monuments displayed by local governments across the country, said the church’s attorney, Shirley Phelps-Roper. She claims a 2002 court ruling requires any government entity that displays the Ten Commandments on public property to also display monuments of other religious groups.

In addition to displaying the Ten Commandments, Greene County government leaders voted recently to recognize a resolution recognizing “God as the foundation of our national heritage.” Jones sent copies of the legislation to Tennessee’s other 94 county leaders for consideration.

Hmm. If the ACLU isn’t funding him, it might as well be!

UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall emails:

I’m from Kansas, where the Phelps family is a fairly well known commodity. Their gig is this — they attempt to get a harsh reaction. That’s why they have kids holding some of the most outrageous signs.

Apart from the deomonstration they have video people to film any interaction with the public or authorities, and they have ‘tailers’ to follow people back to their car so they can get a name and address. Then they sue. For intimidation, for pain and suffering, for threatening the kids, for anything they can think of.

It’s how the Phelps family gets their money.

Ask the attorneys for any church around here. I can put you in touch with ours.

Fred may discover that he’s not in Kansas anymore. . . . .

JOHN KERRY ACCUSES BUSH OF CATERING, but WhoKnew observes: “I have a few concerns that there may be a conflict of interest here, given Kerry’s position with respect to the condiment industry.”

Call the Ethics Police!

I THINK I LIKE THIS UNIVERSE better than these alternate ones.

Paul Krugman may disagree.

CHOMSKY SAYS THAT ANTISEMITISM ISN’T A PROBLEM in the West.

Not to him, it isn’t.

JOHN RAY SAYS HE HAS CORROBORATION of the story about thuggish behavior by the New York Times’ “security” people in Baghdad.

In response to an earlier post on this topic, a journalist asked me if I thought the NYT shouldn’t have bodyguards. No, I just think that they shouldn’t act as thugs, as it seems they have. I also think it’s funny that stories like this get no attention, except from bloggers. Journalists deal with a lot of unsavory characters in situations like this, where it’s not unusual to hire local gunmen as “security,” and they distance themselves from their behavior in ways that they would never allow government or military officials to do. Then they black out reporting on these stories, because it’s in their professional interest to do so. I don’t think that will work as well now that there are alternative channels of communication to the outside world.

SEN. EVAN BAYH (D-IN) on Iraq and Al Qaeda:

“Even if there’s only a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would cooperate, the question is whether that’s an acceptable level of risk,” Bayh told me. “My answer to that would be an unequivocal ‘no.’ We need to be much more pro-active on eliminating threats before they’re imminent.”

Asked about the growing evidence of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, Bayh said: “The relationship seemed to have its roots in mutual exploitation. Saddam Hussein used terrorism for his own ends, and Osama bin Laden used a nation-state for the things that only a nation-state can provide. Some of the intelligence is strong, and some of it is murky. But that’s the nature of intelligence on a relationship like this–lots of it is going to be speculation and conjecture. Following 9/11, we await certainty at our peril.”

Read the whole thing.

SUSANNA CORNETT IS BLOGGING THE EAST COAST SNOWSTORM — with photos.