COLBY COSH: “How many Fortune 500 heads do you suppose sit down with an actual, physical newspaper every morning? My bet is that the answer wouldn’t be above 200.”

I wonder how many read blogs?

ALL SORTS OF INTERESTING QUESTIONS regarding MoveOn.org, over at The Argus.

JACOB T. LEVY: “It is a foul political season for those of us with sympathies for the New Democratic agenda. . . . But the good news is that, accidental or not, some of the most important New Democratic policy triumphs of the ’90s are more or less locked into place.”

A BALKAN QUAGMIRE?

In a bitter blow for the politicians who toppled Slobodan Milosevic as Yugoslav president in 2000, the ultra-nationalist Radicals of former paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj became by far the biggest party with almost 28 percent of the vote.

Their strong showing revealed just how disappointed many Serbs in the impoverished Balkan state are with three years of Western-style economic and political change, plagued by bitter feuding among former reform allies and corruption allegations. . . .

The outcome was also a setback for Western capitals hoping Serbia had turned its back on aggressive nationalism after a decade of wars under Milosevic, like Seselj facing war crimes charges at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague.

Obviously, the Clinton Administration failed to plan sufficiently for the postwar environment.

The real question here — and it’s a serious one — is whether you can turn a dictatorship into a democracy without jailing, exiling, or executing the top few thousand members of the dictatorship’s apparat.

UPDATE: Franco Aleman emails from Spain that, well, Spain is the example of doing just that:

You certainly can. It’s not easy, no one really knows whether the process has ended 100% -though it looks like-, and it’s impossible to determine if it was really the product of a plan or the fruit of several coincidences and specific factors simultaneously happening -which would make a quite unique result and might be difficult to translate to other countries-, but I think Spain can be considered an example that the transition can be successfully made…

True enough. But I think that Franco, Fascist dictator though he was, actually tried to facilitate that change (didn’t he provide for the return of the King in his will?). You can’t say that about Slobo or Saddam.

SEX IN SPACE: If you’ve got the money, they’ve got the location.

HOWARD DEAN’S PROFESSION OF RELIGIOUS FAITH is getting a bad review from the formerly Dean-friendly Julian Sanchez.

This strikes me as bizarre. It’d be one thing to have just done it. But it seems potentially counterproductive for someone who’s already on record as saying he doesn’t go to church much and doesn’t let his religion influence his politics to, in essence, announce that he’s made a strategic decision to pull out the God-talk for the rubes below the Mason-Dixon (while, presumably, abstaining up North). If his secularism is offputting to religious voters, isn’t this kind of calculated, condescending pandering likely to be even more so?

Sounds like it to me.

THE UNITED STATES HAS DELIVERED 120,000 POUNDS OF RELIEF SUPPLIES TO IRAN: That’s a fraction of what’s needed, I imagine, but still a big deal.

UPDATE: Anne Cunningham has an observation involving (really!) a “non-insane” point by Robert Fisk.

MOLLY IVINS: Busted for joke theft. Again.

THE HARTFORD COURANT SUCKS LIKE A BILGE PUMP: At least, its online registration does. After asking for all sorts of personal information, it rejected me several times for reasons that weren’t clear. Sorry guys — you just wrote yourselves out of my media universe. And I doubt I’m the only one.

UPDATE: For some thoughts on registration, read this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis weighs in: “But like Glenn, when faced with the need to give blood type and sexual history and SAT scores and with the even more troubling need to try my feeble memory with another damned user name and password for a site I may visit once a year via a link, I often turn and run. Not worth it.”

Nope, it’s not. And I was looking to link to a business article in the Courant for my TCS column this week. That link would have sent many thousands of interested readers to the Courant, which you’d think that the Courant would like. But I knew that most of them wouldn’t bother to work through the onerous registration process, so I found a similar story somewhere else and linked to that one, instead. Yeah, there are workarounds — Jeff mentions some — but while I use them sometimes, I can’t expect people who read a column to know them. So I just put in a link to a publication that actually wants readers.

The Web’s a big place, and I can usually do that. But the sheer stupidity of these schemes irritates me. What are these people thinking? I think that they’re thinking like local-monopoly newspaperists, that’s what. And that won’t work on the Web.

Heck, judging by newspaper circulation figures, it doesn’t even work in print.

IT’S PLEDGE WEEK at the staggeringly popular Wikipedia. In fact, popularity is part of their problem, alas! And here’s their entry on weblogs.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT? Er, not really. Ten Ads Americans Won’t See.

HERE, VIA DOC SEARLS, is a list of ways to help victims of the Iranian earthquake. And here are some rather horrifying before-and-after photos from Bam, via Persian Blogger Chronicles. The folks at Blog Iran have a gallery, too.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten offers some perspective on the death toll: “That’s two thirds the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.”

MORE CLERICAL RISIBILITY: “Bp. Chane has opened up a new and exciting area for exploring ecumenism/syncretism. Now, the Episcopalians of Washington can have a gay wedding in the church, and push a wall over on the two grooms at the reception.”

BILL QUICK announces a moblogging breakthrough:

This is my current vision for the latest iteration of Daily Pundit. Breaking news and pictures posted here instantly, from anywhere in the world. Instant syndication of that news and those pictures all over the blogosphere, complete with inline links to everybody in the blogosphere who picks up and comments on that news, so readers can track down and read what others are saying about the posts here. And open, easily accessable comments right here from me and everybody else about that news and those pictures and the inbound links that follow therefrom.

Jeff Jarvis is praised.

BLOGGERS DON’T NEED EDITORS OR PUBLISHERS: Strangely, this leads Editor and Publisher to dub bloggers “self-important.”

Self-important, self-sufficient. Whatever.

UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky emails: “I’d add ‘self-correcting’, with the emphasis on ‘correcting’. Can you recall the last time any newspaper issued a correction for factual errors on the editorial page? I can’t.”

Meanwhile Trudy Schuett observes:

I’m surprised that E&P hasn’t progressed any in its thinking since last spring/summer. . . . the reality is that newspapers have already begun to change they way they do journalism on the Web, and everywhere else.

Indeed. And I think that things like this will only increase the pressure. As Schuett continues: ” I can see why many traditionalists would hope we (the bloggers) go away soon.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Read this, too.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF is fact-checked in this letter to the Times:

In his Dec. 20 column (“The China Threat?”), Nicholas D. Kristof dismissed China’s estimate of 300,000 deaths in the Rape of Nanjing in 1937 and 1938 as “hyperbole,” implying that the People’s Republic of China had deliberately inflated the number to create “a new national glue to hold the country together.”

However, the 300,000 death-toll figure for Nanjing was cited by Chinese and American investigators long before the People’s Republic of China came into existence. . . .

In 1946, the chief prosecutor of the Nanjing District Court concluded that 260,000 Chinese had died from the massacre, while a summary report prepared by the head procurator of the same district court placed the number at more than 300,000.

Ouch.

THE LAW OF WAR: Phil Carter responds to an article in Foreign Affairs by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch regarding the war on terrorism. Excerpt:

Mr. Roth’s false dichotomy infects the rest of his argument. His basic argument is that America is not at war, therefore, we should apply the rules of peacetime law enforcement to the conflict. That doesn’t pass the common sense test, let alone the intellectual rigor that I would expect from an article in Foreign Affairs.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

SHOCKING UNPROFESSIONALISM: The OmbudsGod indicts Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff and Palm Beach Post ombudsman C.B. Hanif for making bogus rape accusations.

You know, this is just sloppiness. But it would be bad enough in a pundit. Ombudsmen aren’t supposed to be opiners — they’re supposed to be the guardians of fairness and accuracy.

“Supposed to be” is the operative phrase here, I’d say.

AUSTIN BAY SAYS that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to coalition forces:

Frankly, the grand accolade U.S. GIs have earned is the Nobel Peace Prize.

Peaceniks perish the thought? It’s high time, actually. Pacifists didn’t liberate Nazi concentration camps, American GIs and British Tommies did. This past year, U.S. Central Command and crack line units like the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division did far more to promote and secure real peace and justice on this broken and brutalized planet Earth than decades of posturing peace marches and thousands of toothless U.N. declarations deploring dictators and genocide.

In the raw mathematics called body count, dropping Saddam’s fascist death machine saved 50,000 to 60,000 Iraqi lives — the innocents his henchmen would have slain during 2003 while the United Nations fiddled and France burned with anti-American ressentiment.

Hmm. Hey, one of the few perks of being a law professor is that I can nominate people for the Nobel Peace Prize. This sounds pretty good. . . .

RALPH PETERS WRITES that we’re shafting the Poles.

That’s terrible, if true. The United States has had a reputation for appeasing its enemies and screwing its allies. I thought we were getting over that.

HERE’S A REPORT of serious procurement problems in Iraq — and, worse yet, of Pentagon bureaucrats getting in the way of local commanders’ efforts to fix things. Someone should look into this.

NOW THIS IS INTERESTING:

VATICAN CITY A top cardinal said in an interview published Sunday that anti-Semitism was on the rise in Europe, and he urged constant vigilance to avoid setting out on “the path to Auschwitz.”

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, a Frenchman who has carried out several sensitive diplomatic missions as a personal envoy of the pope, said that despite strong Church condemnation of anti-Semitism, European mentalities were too slow to change.

“The path that leads to Auschwitz is always in front of us and it starts with ‘small’ deficiencies,” Etchegaray said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa.

“There is a return of anti-Semitism in our Europe,” he added. “Not to recognize it, not to call it by its name is an unwitting way of accepting it.”

Jewish groups in Europe and the United States say that a “new anti-Semitism” has emerged among Muslim youths who threaten or attack their Jewish neighbors out of solidarity with Palestinians battling the Israeli military.

But Etchegaray said resurgent anti-Semitism could not be blamed entirely on the fallout from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, noting that the phenomenon had developed in Europe over centuries.

Very interesting, given Etchegaray’s history. Perhaps the Vatican is waking up, at last?

Perhaps so, as you can read if you go here, and scroll down to the discussion of the “editing controversy” regarding Pope John Paul II’s “message for the World Day of Peace.” (But don’t miss the bit on Cardinal Martino just above it). Excerpt:

The message bears the title “An Ever Timely Commitment: Teaching Peace.” Yet back on July 17, 2003, when the theme of the message was announced in a Vatican news release, it was titled “International Law: The Path to Peace.” That news release can be found here: http://www.vatican.va/news_services

Most observers felt that theme had been chosen, at least in part, as an implied criticism of the United States for waging war in Iraq without explicit authorization from the United Nations. Indeed, the Vatican news release made the connection: “The recent war in Iraq,” it read, “manifested all the fragility of international law, in particular regarding the functioning of the United Nations.”

The shift in the document’s title was interpreted by some as a softening of tone towards America and the Bush administration. In combination with other recent developments — such as Cardinal Camillo Ruini’s comment at the funeral for 19 Italians killed in Iraq that terrorism must be confronted “with all our courage,” and the reassignment of Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, architect of the Vatican’s anti-war stance — the shift was taken as additional confirmation of a more “realistic” Vatican stance.

Cardinal Martino is quoted as minimizing the significance of the change, but then he would, wouldn’t he?

Italian politics is given as one of the main reasons for the softening tone, but is it possible — perhaps — that the Vatican is actually waking up to the moral dimension of this struggle, and the lack of moral standing on the part of the EU and the UN? One can hope, anyway.

UPDATE: Reader Karl Bock wonders if this may have had something to do with the attitude-shift at the Vatican:

ROME — Terrorists planned to attack the Vatican with a hijacked plane on Christmas Day, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi said in a newspaper interview published Saturday.

Berlusconi told Milan’s Libero newspaper of a “precise and verified news of an attack on Rome on Christmas Day.” . . .

The Vatican refused Saturday to respond to questions about a possible Christmas threat.

Hmm.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Double-Hmm. Here’s a report that Berlusconi denies the above quotes.

CHRISTMAS was big in China this year, according to Andrea See.

PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP: The folks at Democratic Underground are wondering if the Iran earthquake was triggered by Bush.

Yep. And Karl Rove is personally making sure that your skateboarding magazines get lost in the mail. (And scroll down to the post noting that Kucinich opposes such weapons — that guy doesn’t miss a thing!)

UPDATE: Look at the photos!

Meanwhile, here’s more on Kucinich’s, er, farsightedness.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, Bush caused the Mad Cow scare, too! At least, that’s what posters over at Howard Dean’s message board seem to think. They’re calling it “Beefiburton!”

As a Dean supporter on that board notes: “I have to mentally separate the candidate from the supporters (the handful of nuts, anyway) in my mind more often than I like .”

MORE: Hmm. Looks as if the initial post, at least, was by a troll.

WELL SAID: “The worst human rights abuses in the world – including government engineered famines – are unfolding in North Korea today. Since the US isn’t involved, the Chomskyites aren’t interested. But the pro-intervention left – if we are serious about human rights – cannot take the same morally blank position.”

Some of the commenters, however, clearly do not share his seriousness.