AN OSAMA DEAL? I’m deeply skeptical, but here’s the link.

JAMES LILEKS is offering some, er, creative approaches to North Korea.

UPDATE: Here are more Korea links, and don’t miss the Free North Korea blog. And, of course, if you’re interested in Korean goings-on, the Marmot is a must-visit.

MICKEY KAUS, who’s all over the California recall, has a lot of interesting stuff. And he agrees with RealClearPolitics that Davis’s goose isn’t quite cooked yet. I guess Mickey feels he has to do a good job covering this topic to make up for missing the real scoop of the year.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Cathy Seipp captures a delightful example:

Still, the murmurs of pretty much blanket disapproval I’d been hearing from colleagues about Chetwynd’s doing the movie did come to a head during one truly absurd exchange:

Question: “You did contribute to [Bush’s] campaign?”

Chetwynd: “Yeah, the limit was $1,000…Would it make a better film if I’d given $1,000 to Gore?”

Question: “Yes.”

“Chetwynd: “Why?”

“Question: “Because it would show less potential bias.”

The questioner was absolutely serious. If you donate money to Bush, you’re biased towards Bush, but if you’d donated money to Gore you wouldn’t be biased AGAINST Bush. Supporting Gore is just the normal default position, as everyone knows. Chaw! I actually think that sometimes the liberal-media-baiters can be a little obsessive. This wasn’t one of those times.

Heh. I guess not.

JEFF JARVIS SAYS that people should expect wi-fi at the Republican and Democratic conventions!

I agree. It’s either that, or admit that our political parties aren’t even up to fast food standards.

BUSTAMANTE WON’T RENOUNCE MECHA: Hey, Strom Thurmond’s dead, and Trent Lott apologized, but we’ve still got at least one public official who’s not afraid to associate with racist groups!

IT’S KIND OF LATE FOR THIS INVESTIGATION:

WASHINGTON (AP) – The FBI internal affairs office is investigating the crime lab’s chief of scientific analysis about his conduct in the Oklahoma City bombing case, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The Associated Press reported last spring that a transcript of a Justice Department interview showed that FBI scientific analysis unit chief Steven Burmeister initially had alleged in 1995 that his lab colleagues performed shoddy work in Timothy McVeigh’s case, but then retracted several statements before appearing as a prosecution witness at the trial. . . .

The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates allegations against agents, recently opened an internal investigation into Burmeister’s conduct in the McVeigh case, including his recantation, according to persons familiar with the investigation.

One of Burmeister’s former colleagues said the FBI internal affairs office had contacted him in the past month.

Stay tuned.

JOE USER wonders if we should want the world to like us. He says it’s worked out badly in the past. . . .

RAND SIMBERG HAS AN ARTICLE in National Review Online on the post-Columbia space program.

UPDATE: And he’s got more on the subject over at FoxNews.com. Both pieces are must-reads if you’re interested in the subject. Or even if you’re not!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Burch has some thoughts, too.

“ONE MORE DESPERATE SALVO:” There’s more on Bjorn Lomborg.

RX-8 UPDATE: Just got the same letter mentioned below, offering to repurchase the car, or to give me $500 plus free scheduled maintenance for 48 months/50,000 miles, in satisfaction for overstating the horsepower.

That’s a very handsome offer. I’m quite happy with the car, so I don’t think I’ll go for the repurchase.

I FIRST SAW THE STORY ON SAMIZDATA, but there are now news reports of a blackout in London.

NOW THAT’S, ER, CHUTZPAH: Christopher Hitchens is Fisking the Ten Commandments.

THE BBC’S CORPORATE CULTURE:

Why is the BBC so reviled at the moment then? It is all simply a matter of envy? No. Everyone knows someone richer than themselves but if that person is polite, friendly or agreeable, it doesn’t bother you.

The problem is that the BBC of today is an incredibly arrogant organisation – and that gets people’s backs up. As the BBC has grown more and more out of touch with the world around it, it has desperately clung to its culture. And that refusal to change has seen it faced with frustration and anger, which in turn has seen it tighten up in indignation.

The National Union of Journalists recently revealed that the BBC was the worst media organisation in the UK for bullying. Numerous examples of blame culture have emerged in recent years. People from outside the organisation have been appalled by the politics and cliques within the BBC. Tales abound of petulant, unpleasant, even sadistic, producers and middle-managers lashing out to disguise their all-too-real fear of discovery.

Comic of the moment Ricky Gervais said on his radio show recently that he was amazed at the number of hopeless executives within the BBC that are highly paid but don’t appear to do anything. “It makes you want to wander up to them and say ‘What do you actually do?’,” he said.

The arrogance extends throughout the organisation. . . . Unfortunately, this has led in many cases to disparate news arms of the BBC using precisely the same contacts each time. The fact that the entirety of the BBC appeared to have only source regarding the Iraq war dossiers is testament to this self-defeating approach.

Not surprising. Read the whole thing, which offers a lot of interesting background on the UK media wars.

UPDATE: This is interesting.

JAMES MILLER IDENTIFIES a case of environmental market failure, and calls for government action.

ARNOLD AND IRAQ: Roger Simon finds similarities in the media coverage of both subjects:

So we were, in essence, lied to by a nebulous, self-serving consortium of media types anxious to have us read their papers and watch their TV shows. No surprise there either—and harmless enough. In fact, they seem to have done Arnold a favor—it was so easy to prove them wrong. Not that he appears to need this. His campaign seemed like a winner from the outset and still does.

But what is far more serious is the media lying on Iraq, which is similar in its need to sell newspapers but has other reasons and consequences, which are considerably graver. These profound geo-political thinkers pretend to be shocked that a Middle Eastern country, which, as we know and have been told repeatedly, was not really a country to begin with, and which spent thirty years under the most brutal of dictators, has not been turned into the Netherlands in four months. If the issues weren’t so important, this could be the source of a great opening sketch for Saturday Night Live. (In fact it should be the opening sketch for Saturday Night Live – “Gay Marriage in Baghdad!”)

Now I know the media were aided and abetted by the President’s junior high school triumphalism on that aircraft carrier, but still this approach appears almost deliberately misleading. The endless body counts we are subject to (horrible as they may be) are scarcely shocking and miniscule by comparison to almost any wartime situation (and, yes, this is still a wartime situation and likely to be for sometime to come). In fact, if you parse those statistics you find that a great number of the deaths were accidental and not from enemy fire.

Judging by this Gallup poll, support on Iraq remains strong:

Americans are increasingly likely to say things are not going well for the United States in Iraq, but the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds no decline in the past month in public support for the U.S. presence there or in public approval of the way President Bush is handling the situation. Bush’s overall job approval rating — at 59% — is also little changed across the four Gallup Polls conducted since mid-July.

Interesting. It’s as if people weren’t paying attention to the tone of the media coverage, or something. . . .

UPDATE: Matt Welch says that the latest Schwarzenegger developments just prove that journalism was better in the seventies!

NEAL BOORTZ’S NOTES PAGE is looking more like a blog these days. I’m calling him a blogger.

THIS STORY ABOUT A CANADIAN AL QAEDA CELL hasn’t gotten as much attention as I’d expect:

TORONTO – Suspected members of a Canadian al-Qaeda sleeper cell who may have tested explosives and plotted attacks were told yesterday they will have to remain in custody for at least another month.

Immigration judges ruled there were sufficient grounds to hold the Pakistani men while counter-terrorism investigators examine 25 boxes of documents and 30 computers seized during recent raids. . . .

Members of the group were caught at the Pickering Nuclear Power plant at night, while another flew over the reactor while training at a flight school in Durham. Other members were linked to the theft of radioactive material and one had ties to a fundraising front for al-Qaeda.

Documents seized from their apartments suggested they may have been scouting Canadian landmarks such as Toronto’s CN Tower and law courts, as well as buildings in the United States.

It’s especially interesting in light of this information:

TORONTO — Several of the 19 men being probed as a possible al-Qaeda sleeper cell moved between Ontario and the United States — a fact not lost on U.S. investigators. . . .

At a detention hearing last Wednesday, a government lawyer went so far as to note that some of the men were on American soil at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., according to a hearing transcript.

Of course, about 300 million other people were in the United States on September 11. But these guys appear to have Al Qaeda connections. This would seem like bigger news to me.

UPDATE: Reader Brian Brophey sends this story, which casts some (though it’s not clear just how much) doubt on what is going on.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, this editorial from the National Post suggests that Canada still isn’t taking terrorism seriously enough.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Bruce Rolston of Flit thinks this is overblown.

MERDE IN FRANCE REPORTS:

The sad part is that while the neoleftists are worshipping symbols, McDonalds is taking care of Paris’ poor. Many French retirees and low income workers go to McDonalds to buy a coffee or just a bottle of water because it is so much less expensive and they can drink it sitting down.

Hmm. Would more Paris McDonalds restaurants mean fewer heat deaths? If it saves just one life, it’s worth it!

BEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT? Hard to say. But we sure enjoyed the Simpsons’ Third Season DVD last night. Not that the Frank J. rug doesn’t have its charms.

THE SAUDIS ARE THE PROBLEM:

In a fresh setback to Kremlin policy in the troubled Caucasus region, a top official in Dagestan known as an opponent of radical Islamic ideology was assassinated Wednesday, authorities said. . . .

Ali Temirbekov, a spokesman for the Dagestani prosecutor’s office, said in a telephone interview that Wahhabism was being actively exported to the region from Saudi Arabia.

“Unfortunately there are many rich people there with radical ideas and more money than they know what proper use to put it to,” he said. “So they try with their money to build a base for radical Islam in the Caucasus. Gusayev was their ideological enemy No. 1 in Dagestan, and they must have been waiting only for a suitable moment to settle their score with him.”

Aslambek Aslakhanov, an ethnic Chechen member of Russia’s lower house of parliament and a candidate in a Kremlin-sponsored Chechen presidential election in October, described the assassination as “apparently the vengeance of the Wahhabis.”

Iraq is just the first step in addressing the export of Islamic terror from Saudi Arabia.

AUSTIN BAY WRITES THAT WE’RE WINNING:

Iraq’s success has frightened autocrats throughout the Middle East. Autocrats in Taliban caves, in Iran, in Syria, fear Iraqi democracy. Coalition success in Iraq is forcing the House of Saud to choose between democratic evolution and fatal revolution.

Defeatist hotheads who natter about “root causes of terror” must understand the taproot of terror is tyranny. Theft and brutality by local dictators are the leading causes of Third World poverty. UC-Berkeley faculty resolutions don’t stop gangsters. Cutting the taproot usually requires the explicit presence and sometimes the precious lives of Western soldiers.

August has been a hot and horrid month in Baghdad. Fascist and Islamo-fascist thugs are testing the collective will of America, the Iraqi people, Britain, and their coalition allies.

There will be more wretched months. It’s war.

It’s also a war we are winning.

Meanwhile, John Hughes writes in The Christian Science Monitor that Iraq isn’t Vietnam, even though domestic critics — and Al Qaeda thugs — would like it to be.

But we knew that.

UPDATE: Read Phil Carter on body count journalism:

I do not think that death makes a good metric of success in war — or nation building — for at least three reasons. First, focusing on death as your metric of success gears every effort towards producing death, or avoiding it. That strategy is not necessarily consistent with our goals in Iraq, especially today. On the inflicting side, we do not want to inflict maximum casualties on a population that we are trying to win over. On the avoiding side, too much emphasis on casualty avoidance and force protection can frustrate a commander who is trying to accomplish his/her mission.

Too many journalists, pundits, and politicians are still stuck in the Vietnam era.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Shelton emails:

I’ve been getting tired of the lame body counts, like: now MORE have died since Bush declared….as did during actual fighting.

Well, is it just me, or before the war didn’t at least a couple of those ex-generals on CNN with some kind of ax to grind with Rumsfeld make body count predictions of between 3,000 and 5,000? And that was with no mention of “occupation” or guerilla war.

Chicken-little generals lied, many fewer died.

Yes, the number is more a reflection of the astonishingly low death toll during “major combat” than of any especially high death toll during occupation.

MORE: Reader David Hurwitz emails:

Obviously, we all hate to see any Americans killed in war. But the media has focused intensely on the ‘post-war’ bodycount exceeding the bodycount during the war. But the media are missing two important points: 1) how is the bodycount compared to what was predicted before the hostilities began? Certainly as compared to the predictions of thousands to tens of thousands of American deaths, the military operations have been executed superbly. Amid all the criticism the administration and Rumsfeld are receiving, the original benchmark seems to have been lost. 2) Since the operations were executed so well, the number of American deaths during the war were extremely low. This very success has set a benchmark for post-war hostilities that is impossible to beat. Imagine a prediction that among 150,000+ peacekeepers safeguarding a previously hostile region, surrounded by currently hostile regimes, that deaths would total less than 200.

Yes. A prediction of actual casualties to date, made in February, would no doubt have been denounced as absurdly optimistic. But the goalposts keep being moved.

STILL MORE: Kamil Zogby offers some perspective on the numbers:

While I too am concerned about the welfare of every US soldier, I think the way US casualties in Iraq are being reported has to be put in the proper perspective. 140 deaths since the end of major combat operations is roughly 10% of those “1,350 violent, non-combat related deaths (that) occurred each year in the armed services.”

Indeed.

LOOKS LIKE EARLIER REPORTS ARE TRUE:

The RX-8 officially went on sale in early July and customers who already have taken delivery or who ordered the car prior to August 26 will be offered free scheduled maintenance for the new car’s entire warranty period – worth an estimated $US1,200 – and be given a $500 debit card, WardsAuto.com said. If owners still believe they’ve been irrevocably wronged, Mazda will buy back the car for the original purchase price, the report added.

Apparently, some people have already gotten letters.

TODAY’S MY BIRTHDAY, the InstaWife has various activities planned, and blogging will be limited at best.

But my TechCentralStation column is up, and it’s about disaster preparedness.

I’ve got more on the same subject over at GlennReynolds.com, too, where I’m also soliciting suggestions for improvements. Have a nice day — I’ll be back later. (And visit Virginia Postrel, who’s blogging up a storm.)

UPDATE: I’m still gone — but don’t miss all the swell blog posts collected at this week’s Carnival of the Vanities. If you’re looking to broaden your blog-reading horizons, this is a good place to start.

ANOTHER UPDATE: What presents did I get? Quite a few, including this lovely rug. Then there’s the visit from Mars, of course.

DAVID WARREN:

The question on my mind is thus, will the Americans funk out? And the only thing I can say for sure, is that if they do, it will be an unparalleled disaster. For 9/11 itself was the payback for the last U.S. funk-out from its responsibilities as a superpower.

Yes. The good news is that even anti-war candidate Howard Dean seems to have figured that out:

We have no choice. It’s a matter of national security. If we leave and we don’t get a democracy in Iraq, the result is very significant danger to the United States. . . . bringing democracy to Iraq is not a two-year proposition.

Howard Dean is right. And he’s the leading Democratic candidate at the moment. And that’s bad news for the terrorists, whose only hope is that we’ll fool ourselves into thinking otherwise, and give up before the job is done.

UPDATE: Tyler Cowen says 5 years is the necessary interval, citing RAND data. Advantage: Dean!

And read this, too. Reconstruction is expensive and dangerous. . . . Meanwhile here’s praise for the anti-war movement.