I DON’T HAVE A LINK, but AP is reporting that the 9th Circuit will review the recall decision en banc.

SEVERAL READERS SAY I WAS WRONG to link Gregg Easterbrook below regarding media hype and Isabel — but only Pyrojection did it while observing Talk Like a Pirate Day, a date that I have sadly neglected. [Well, it’s not Blog Like a Pirate Day, now is it? — Ed. Yeah, that’s my excuse. . . .] And it’s true that lots of people are without power, etc., and some people have died. But it’s not as if Isabel wasn’t a hurricane — it’s just that, once again, it was overhyped.

UPDATE: Okay, maybe I’m wrong. The Smarter Cop points out that hurricanes are unpredictable, and often strengthen or veer at the last minute. But I have to say, the sight of all those correspondents standing on the beach, yammering, makes me wish — as Dave Barry pointed out — for a tidal wave or something.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hurricane losses may be less than thought. Which doesn’t mean there weren’t losses, of course. It just wasn’t the Mother of Storms that the coverage suggested. Rich Galen has some unflattering observations on the coverage.

MEDIA LIES, AND THE LYING MEDIA LIARS WHO TELL THEM: I’ve got a lengthy post on media distortions regarding Iraq, over at GlennReynolds.com.

THE LATEST BLOG MELA IS UP! Branch out your blog-reading and check out the various blogs listed.

JIM LINDGREN HAS COMMENTS ON THE JOHN LOTT ISSUE that are quoted over at Tim Lambert’s site:

I fairly quickly returned to being highly uncertain whether Lott ever did the survey he claimed to have done in 1997. I have told the couple of reporters who called me since February 1 (including a few weeks ago, Chris Mooney for a forthcoming story) that I still have substantial doubts whether John Lott ever did the supposed 1997 study.

I also agree with almost every point in Ayres and Donohue’s two critiques of Lott’s work in the Stanford Law Review, which I find absolutely devastating to the primary thesis of John Lott’s work. The findings of Ayres and Donohue tend to support the conclusion that more open gun laws either have no effect or lead to slightly higher rates for some crimes, a result that I find plausible even beyond the high quality of their work in that exchange.

As I wrote a while back, Lott has been the subject of so many bogus attacks that I’ve been skeptical of this one. But I trust Jim Lindgren as a neutral arbiter with expertise in the area, and it seems to me that this time Lott’s critics have him dead to rights, and he’s failed to mount a convincing response.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh, while noting that Lambert’s site is basically dedicated to criticism of Lott, comments: “Lindgren is a very smart guy who knows a lot about quantative scholarship, and who to my knowledge has no axe to grind on this; remember that he was the most prominent critic of Michael Bellesiles.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here are some posts by John Lott, responding to criticisms. And here is his main website.

Now I’m getting email from Lott supporters, complaining that I’m picking on him. I guess you can’t please everyone. What I’d like is to see an authoritative look at this by a disinterested party. I’m not qualified to provide that. I’d like to see someone who is come forward and sort all of this out.

RAND SIMBERG WRITES on why satellites are so expensive.

He also had his own Virginia Postrel moment, although unlike mine it involved lingerie and two women aged 19 and 20.

But then, that’s Rand.

PEOPLE KEEP ASKING WHAT I THINK OF WESLEY CLARK: I don’t know. People I know who were associated with operations in Bosnia tend not to like him, for reasons expressed rather pungently here. On the other hand, his aggressive response to the Russians — which some characterize, unfairly, as “nearly starting World War III” — at least bespeaks a degree of, well, aggressiveness otherwise lacking in the Democratic field.

John Ellis states the general view that Clark’s candidacy is just an effort by the Clinton/McAuliffe forces to stop the Dean insurgency. Noah Shachtman, on the other hand, says that Clark is responsible for much of today’s high-tech approach to combat.

I find myself actually sort of liking Dean, though at lunch with a (way to the left of me) colleague earlier this week we found ourselves agreeing that it’s surprising that John Edwards hasn’t gotten much traction. We both had heard him on NPR, and thought he sounded like a guy who ought to be doing better. And, of course, anything could happen between now and next summer — I don’t think Clinton had even announced his candidacy at this point in the 1992 election cycle.

THE HYPING OF ISABEL: Okay, on a preparedness basis, I believe in treating all incoming hurricanes as serious. Better safe than sorry, ounce of prevention, and all that. But when it comes to media coverage, I think Gregg Easterbrook has it right: “CATEGORY 2 STORM, CATEGORY 5 HYPE.” And as he notes, lots of bogus, inflated statistics about property damage, etc., will appear in an effort to make it sound worse than it was. Meanwhile, a reader in DC who would rather remain anonymous emails that the closing of the Metro system, etc., has drastically expanded the economic impact of what was, basically, a rainstorm with 40-mile-an-hour winds, and suggests that it’s the result of having too many underemployed disaster-agency bureaucrats around. Worth looking at, if you’re assigned to do an Isabel restrospective story.

DAVISISM OF THE DAY:

“My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth,” he said.

Perhaps Slate will start a feature devoted to these.

IRAQI EXILES RETURNED TO IRAQ are reporting good things, and say that the biggest fear is that Americans will leave too soon.

JOSH CHAFETZ says that things look even worse for the BBC as more information comes out.

ANOTHER REPORT FROM IRAQ sounding a common theme:

Both men said they are glad to be home visiting their families – and feel honored and grateful for all the support they received from the community while they were in the Middle East. Both of them also said things are going well for the U.S. troops in Iraq.

“Ninety-nine percent of what is going on over there is a good story,” said Callanan.

“There were a lot of reporters over there who overlooked the good stories, which may have been the only frustrating part of being there,” he said. “From media reports, it may not seem as though things are going well there but they are. There are a lot of changes taking place which will eventually pay big dividends.”

Cheung agreed that the media reports he read while in Iraq seemed so much different from what he was seeing for himself. One of the things he read that goaded him the most was that the Iraqis did not want the troops over there.

“I talked to so many Iraqis – adults and children – and they thanked me, invited me to their house, asked if they can cook a meal for me and offered me everything they have,” he said. “Because we were there, they have the freedom we enjoy in this country every day. They waved to us and a lot of times they worked with us.”

The discrepancy between what the media reports say, and what reports like this say, is starting to look like a scandal.

UPDATE: Chief Wiggles is unhappy with media bias too. And a reader notes that it’s funny how once the embedded reporters left, and we once again got our news through the usual media filters, the reports turned negative.

IS RUSSIA REGRESSING TO A “KGB STATE?” I hope not, but I’ve worried.

CHINABLOGGING: Here’s a list of China blogs, most of them unfamiliar to me.

And for more posts from an exotic region, the Volunteer Tailgate Party is up!

LILEKS:

In short: the same people who chide America for its short-attention span think we should have stopped military operations after the Taliban was routed. (And they quite probably opposed that, for the usual reasons.) The people who think it’s all about oil like to snark that we should go after Saudi Arabia. The people who complain that the current administration is unable to act with nuance and diplomacy cannot admit that we have completely different approaches for Iraq, for Iran, for North Korea. The same people who insist we need the UN deride the Administration when it gives the UN a chance to do something other than throw rotten fruit.

The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.

Read the whole thing.

OVER AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM, I’m calling for people to appreciate the power workers who’ll be out fixing the storm damage before the storm has even passed.

Tobacco Road Fogey is blogging from the hurricane zone, at least as long as he has power and Internet access.

IT’S 1798 ALL OVER AGAIN: Tom Friedman writes that we’re at war with France. I’ve used the term “Proxy War” to describe the French strategy, and a lot of the blogosphere has been saying the same thing. It’s interesting to see it break onto the oped page of the New York Times, though.

Friedman takes the mild tone that the French should recognize that it’s not in their interest to have America do badly in the Middle East:

What is so amazing to me about the French campaign — “Operation America Must Fail” — is that France seems to have given no thought as to how this would affect France. Let me spell it out in simple English: if America is defeated in Iraq by a coalition of Saddamists and Islamists, radical Muslim groups — from Baghdad to the Muslim slums of Paris — will all be energized, and the forces of modernism and tolerance within these Muslim communities will be on the run. To think that France, with its large Muslim minority, where radicals are already gaining strength, would not see its own social fabric affected by this is fanciful.

That’s true, of course, and the French political class is in the grips of something between neurosis and psychosis to think otherwise, as some French intellectuals have been noting. But the French need to think beyond this point. Sooner or later, the United States will decide that “you’re for us or against us” applies to France, too. Proxy war can go both ways, and the French have more enemies, and fewer resources, than we do.

For a start, we should start encouraging pro-democracy movements in Francophone Africa. And arming them. But that’s just a start.

UPDATE: Sylvain Galineau writes:

France wants to get back to business as usual. For TotalFinaElf, Alcatel and the scores of French companies who coined money working for the Hussein regime for decades. As long as Paul Bremer is in charge, it won’t happen. France needs someone it can bribe and sign dodgy deals with. The UN can deliver that. The US won’t.

Read the whole thing. And then wonder why CNN, et al., have been ignoring this aspect.

I’M NOT A KRUGMANBLOGGER, but Ambit has an interesting comparison of things that Krugman said in the Kevin Drum interview I mentioned below with things said about Krugman in an Economist article that he excerpts. Meanwhile Krugman bete noire Donald Luskin reports that Krugman’s publisher misquotes him in a misleading way.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING FIRSTHAND REPORT FROM SYRIA and surrounding regions via a musician friend of Eric Olsen’s who’s touring there. Excerpt:

Another thing that she said is that ALL the Iraqis are done with the idea of Arab Unity. They hate all the other states except for Syria. They believe Saddam gave so much money to these other states, and none of them offered any support. They are particularly hateful now to the Palestinians; ordinary Iraqis were sometimes moved out of their own homes to house them, and they got jobs and pensions– and she said that the new Arabic graffiti on the walls of Baghdad University is “Palestinians go home. The free ride is over.”

In any case, this tour was a lovefest compared to the last one, so god only knows what the reporters are all going on about. Another thing I heard is that 90% of all the attacks have happened in the Sunni Triangle, which if you look on a map represents all of about 1/8 of Iraq maybe (Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad– I don’t have a good map to do the math with), so you have a country 7/8 calm. This guy’s Iraqi mom (from Mosul) also said that the power is now on regularly in Baghdad but no one is reporting that.

If CNN hasn’t gotten it, it appears that Assad in Syria has. The cabinet change was a big thing even though many hoped/expected that Assad would choose a non-Baathist over Otri. Still, they think a few of the new guys will be non-Baathists which would have been unthinkable before.

They sure need it– the country is a beautiful basket case full of intelligent, kind people who could do something good if given a chance. On a more superficial, but probably important level as well, the kids military uniforms we saw last year are all gone, and a lot of the militarization you used to see in posters and monuments, etc. seems to have been toned down. The Lebanese paper, The Star, attributes this directly albeit grudgingly to the US being right next door.

Read the whole thing. And wonder, once again, why the firsthand reports we’re getting are so much more positive than those from the likes of Christiane Amanpour. But it’s been that way for a while.

COURTBLOGGING: Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog has a firsthand report on Prof. Randy Barnett’s oral argument before the Ninth Circuit in the medical-marijuana case. And here’s a blog entry by Barnett on the subject.

Meanwhile, both Howard Bashman and Eugene Volokh have blog entries that are cited in briefs to the Ninth Circuit on the recall case. Volokh observes: “Hope the judges don’t figure out just how little authority blog posts ought to have.”

METRO PULSE HAS A STORY on Tennesseans in Iraq. And follow the links for stories on Knoxville firms central to the war on terror: cleaning up the WTC site, and clearing oilfields of explosives.

But Knoxvillians have a special stake in the war against Islamic fundamentalists. If those guys ever get in charge, they’ll outlaw the Pigburger!

WIZBANG has some pretty good advice on how to get your blog noticed by higher-traffic bloggers. I try hard to find new and interesting blogs, but there are now far more than I can read. I do the best I can. I can’t read all my email, and sometimes people will send me an interesting link, but it doesn’t fit with the flow at the time. My advice is keep blogging, get noticed by other bloggers at varying traffic levels, and you’ll build an audience. The vaunted “Instalanche” looks impressive on your counter for a day, but most of those readers won’t stick around. Readers you build on your own will.

UPDATE: Here’s more that’s worth reading.

MICKEY KAUS notes that the Paper Ballots idea has legs!

MORE BAD NEWS FOR THE BBC: They’ve left Gilligan out in the cold. Meanwhile, The Independent compares Gilligan’s original story with what we know now in fairly devastating fashion.

On this side of The Pond, Justin Katz writes that the “Bush lied” claim is looking about as weak as the “Blair lied” claim has turned out to be. Is it a case of “lies about lying, and the lying liars who tell them?”

UPDATE: Read this, too:

The current complaint is that Bush is a deceiver, misleading the country into a war, after which there turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction. But it is hard to credit the deception charge when every intelligence agency on the planet thought Iraq had these weapons and, indeed, when the weapons there still remain unaccounted for. Moreover, this is a post-facto rationale. Sure, the aftermath of the Iraq war has made it easier to frontally attack Bush. But the loathing long predates it.

In that regard, it’s like the Right’s self-defeating Clinton hatred, of course.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom Grey sees (possibly constructive) irony in all the Bush-lied talk.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis observes:

In the meantime, Kelly is dead. The government has been weakened. The BBC’s credibility has been permanently damaged. I said the blood was on the BBC’s hands.

Indeed.

STILL MORE: The Iraq looting story has turned out to be an embarrassment for Big Media, too. Not that they are embarrassed, of course.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, so I took the day off and went to the mountains. I can be there in 30 minutes from my door, but I do it less often than I should. I’m trying to do better that way, and not just because of Andrew Sullivan’s call for an intervention by Bloggers Anonymous.

I took the RX-8 of course, and had a great time. Had lunch at The Burning Bush in Gatlinburg (no revelation appeared, but the chicken club sandwich was good), went up to Clingman’s Dome and Newfound Gap, and just drove around and had fun.

The park was less empty than I expected — a mix of senior citizens and foreign tourists (mostly German and English, judging by the accents I overheard). The weather was perfect, 80 and sunny at the park entrance, 50 and mostly foggy at the top of Clingman’s Dome, but that was the only place not drenched in sunshine.

I should do this sort of thing more often. Maybe I will!

UPDATE: Some people wondered about the dead trees in the top photo. I’ve heard various things blamed for the large number of dead Fraser firs up on Clingman’s dome — ozone pollution, acid rain, even the horrific coldsnap of 1984, where it was 24 below in Knoxville and probably 50 below up on Clingman’s dome. But the actual culprit, according to the Forest Service, is an imported insect called the wooly adelgid. They’ve contained the infestation, more or less, by spraying a soap solution that kills them, but it wiped out a bunch of trees some years ago, and the skeletons are still standing. I think they’re also using biological predators to try to control them.

All part of nature’s cycle, I suppose, and it does improve the view — in the old days, that photo would have shown nothing but up-close trees. On the other hand, I liked the feel of the trail to the summit better back when there were big tall fir trees all around.