DONALD SENSING WRITES: “Al Qaeda’s primary war is against other Muslims.”

RECIPEBLOGGING: Some other bloggers are always posting recipes. Here’s one that I like because it’s quick, and good. It’s sort of a default option around here in the winter:

Pasta with Tomato, Basil and Chevre sauce

1 lb. pasta, any kind; 1 or 2 large ripe tomatoes; 1/4 cup (good) extra-virgin olive oil; fresh basil leaves (dried will work, but it’s not as good); 2 cloves garlic, minced (dried will work, but it’s not as good); 4-5 ounces fresh chevre cheese; sea salt and fresh ground black pepper.

Put the pasta in to boil (I told you this was quick). Then chop the tomatoes into small bits. Combine in the bowl with the other ingredients. Use lots of pepper. The chevre cheese will melt and combine with the ingredients into a wonderful creamy sauce when you add the hot, drained pasta to the bowl. Just toss it a bit and serve. You can substitute or add a lot of ingredients — I often add some crumbled Feta, for example, and you can use mushrooms or peppers in place of the tomatoes — and it’ll still come out good. The chevre and the basil are the key.

This is from a great cook book called While The Pasta Cooks, which is full of quick and easy pasta recipes that are awfully good. I’ve changed their recipe just a bit, but it works fine the way they have it, too.

Coming soon: my recipe for Thanksgiving Leg of Lamb.

UPDATE: Where do I get ripe tomatoes in winter, someone asks. At the store! The Fresh Market gets ’em flown in from Chile, I think. The beauty of globalization. . . .

GREG DJEREJIAN says that the problem with London is that there aren’t enough protests.

NEWS FLASH: BRITISH VIEWERS think British media should take pro-British stance in war.

JEFF JARVIS has been blogging about the WTC memorial plans. Just scroll, and scroll some more.

BUT TRUMAN SAID MAJOR COMBAT WAS OVER:

A TEAM of negotiators and former soldiers from Tokyo has been sent to the jungles of the Philippines to try to bring home soldiers of Japan’s Imperial Army who are still fighting the Second World War.

The team is to investigate reports of former soldiers living in the mountains and jungles of Luzon nearly 60 years after the war ended.

Three negotiators from Japan’s health and welfare ministry and two veterans, who themselves opted to stay behind in the Philippines after it fell in 1945 rather than face the shame of surrender, travelled to Manila yesterday.

It’s a quagmire.

[Anachronism corrected. D’oh!]

RIOTS IN KOREA — not getting the kind of news coverage that Michael Jackson is, but there’s blog-coverage, with photos and analysis, here.

UPDATE: And be sure to see this post with photos, too. Is South Korea unravelling?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Things look bad in Georgia too. That has considerable war-on-terror implications. Unlike Michael Jackson.

“SO DEEPLY WRONG:” KEN LAYNE COMMENTS on my songwriting skills.

WHAT YEAR IS IT? Ed Cone suggests not 1943, or 1946, but 1815. Let’s hope.

JAMES LILEKS IS SLAMMING SALAM PAX for his snarky comments in The Guardian, which thanked Bush for toppling Saddam but complained about poor service afterward:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Indeed he does. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Daniel Drezner says that Lileks is wrong. I don’t think he is, though I do think Bush I was wrong to leave Saddam in power in 1991, and I would add on my own part that Salam showed real courage in his blogging, if not the kind of courage that would (directly) overthrow the tyrant. But I just think that Salam has lost a bit of perspective hanging out with Guardian types in London. And so, I think, does Salam’s friend G, back in Baghdad, who writes to Salam:

tell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam.
And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?

(Emphasis in original). I agree with G.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon agrees with Lileks. Robert Tagorda agrees with Drezner. For what it’s worth, what I think Lileks objects to about Salam Pax’s letter is not that it’s criticizing the reconstruction, but its snarkish, Dowdesque tone. One Fine Jay observes: “It is understood, that we — all of us living in this nation — freed him and his ilk from Saddam, but we do not demand praise, adulation, nor a hive mind from Iraqis. . . . Maybe we as a nation can ask for a little bit of class, certainly a bit more than what Salam Pax has shown so far.” The Fat Guy agrees, and John Weidner responds to Salam’s point about Bush cleaning up the mess: “What we are doing is not “cleaning up the mess.” It’s more like getting you into good enough shape to start cleaning up your own nasty mess. Sort of like taking in hand someone who’s been on a drunken binge. Get ’em a shower, clean clothes, pep-talk, a lot of coffee…so that maybe they can make it into work and not get fired. What you would call ‘cleaned-up’ is just a starting-point for what we call a clean-up. The best day Iraq ever had is still squalor by our standards.”

Call it “tough love.”

MORE: Useful Fools has an, er, useful roundup of Iraqi bloggers who aren’t Salam Pax.

STILL MORE: Bryan Preston is saying “I told you so.”

Bo Cowgill weighs in with this observation: “James Lileks was unrealistic to expect Pax to take up arms against Saddam as American soldiers did. But that doesn’t mean that Salam Pax’s screed was praiseworthy in the slightest. It was disrespectful and self-promoting. Stop defending Salam Pax on this one.”

THE U.N.’S “OIL FOR FOOD” PROGRAM in Iraq (memorably named the “Oil For Palaces progam” by Tommy Franks) is officially ending.

Let’s find out where the money went, now.

POLIPUNDIT says that the Al Qaeda attacks in Turkey are reinforcing Bush’s message that there’s no real neutrality in this war.

A READER WHO IS NEW TO THE BLOGOSPHERE WRITES:

I must have missed the incident that caused the term “fisking” to be coined. I’m sure it was an approach to “analysis” of something news, policy, etc. performed by Mr. Fisk–whose first name escapes me–who was (a lawyer?) in the Clinton administration. Your help would be appreciated.

Wrong Fisk. I like this definition:

fisking: n.
[blogosphere; very common] A point-by-point refutation of a blog entry or (especially) news story. A really stylish fisking is witty, logical, sarcastic and ruthlessly factual; flaming or handwaving is considered poor form. Named after Robert Fisk, a British journalist who was a frequent (and deserving) early target of such treatment. See also MiSTing, anti-idiotarianism.

There’s also this one:

Fisk
verb. To deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner. Derived from the name of journalist Robert Fisk, a frequent target of such critical articles in the blogosphere (qv).

So there you are. A recent article in The Spectator misused the term, suggesting that “Fisking” is something that Robert Fisk does. That’s not the standard usage, though.

A CONFUSED ENEMY IS A VULNERABLE ENEMY: Actually, I think there’s something to this. . . .

EVAN COYNE MALONEY reflects on character assassination by email.

Believe me, I know all about that kind of stuff.

100,000 PEOPLE MARCHED — against Gerhard Schroeder. How come this got ignored?

MARSHALL LIED — people died.

UPDATE: An irony-impaired reader thinks I’m “slandering” George Marshall here. Uh, no. You see, the point is that Marshall was wrong about the extent of the German nuclear weapons system, but he didn’t lie. The anti-Bush meme now turns any error into a “lie.” Hence the value of this historical example.

MORE PATENT OVERREACH — this time from AT&T, which claims to have invented, well, pretty much everything.

IAIN MURRAY HAS A PROTEST ROUNDUP — he says he was wrong about the turnout, which was in line with predictions. So was I. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Iraqi blogger The Mesopotamian has his own comments:

Today, the terrorists in Istanbul answered the “peace” demonstrators in London. Those who have eyes can see, and those who have ears can hear, but there are those whom “God has sealed their hearts for them with a mask, so that they are deaf, dumb and blind and thus can hardly comprehend anything” (Verses to this effect recur frequently in the Holy Quran ) .

These London demonstrations, I know too well, Oh! Youth, and the Pint of Bitter later in the nearest Pub. All you peace lovers and humanitarians of trendy London town, spare a thought or two for the coalition soldier out there in the dark and wilderness guarding our hospitals, primary schools and orphanages from the bombers and assassins, and the Iraqi Police reporting everyday for duty under constant danger of death and mutilation with their poor equipment and meager $50 or so a month pay package. They number almost 100 000 by now and if enlistment is really opened up they would quadruple in number immediately. Why do you think they come? Saddamists pay anybody ten thousand dollars per explosion, and they are going around trying to recruit, and this is a fact that all people in Baghdad know. So why do they come, you think? But only those who have eyes can see, and ears can hear. Why do you think the crackle of celebratory gunfire ululated till dawn, on that sultry Baghdad summer night when the death of Uday and Qusay the monster brats of the tyrant was announced? This, the media did not dwell upon, although quite newsworthy and dramatic. That was the real Opinion Poll of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Baghdad.

I hope they read this in London.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some historical perspective, from Powerline.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: William Sjostrom has a roundup, too — he’s less charitable, and notes: “Do you notice something about the arithmetic? 70,000 show up, but the last march they say was over a million. This is a growing political movement?” Or a moving target of hype, anyway. . . .

If you want to watch the march via webcam, go here and click “24 hr. archive,” then page forward hour by hour.

RON BAILEY IS NO ETHANOL FAN. Well, neither am I.

CATHY SEIPP ASKS: “Has capitalism failed — or have you?”

TIM BLAIR is back and blogging up a storm.

DAVID BERNSTEIN has an oped on the Solomon Amendment and freedom of association in the Harvard Law Record.

DAVID CARR OFFERS FIRSTHAND REPORTING from the anti-Bush protests in London — with photos! — and observes:

Some literary wag (and I think it was Gore Vidal but I am sure I will corrected in short order if it wasn’t) once quipped that politics is showbusiness for ugly people. Regardless of the provenance of the quote, I am quite sure that it must have been coined in honour of the Stop the War Coalition. Never in all my days have I cast my gaze upon such a motley collection of bedraggled, unsightly, grotseque and snaggle-toothed specimens as gathered today in Central London.

And he’s got the pictures to prove it.

UPDATE: And don’t miss this photo of a sympathizer flashing the peace sign!

ANOTHER UPDATE: More photo-reaction.

BILL HOBBS IS RENDERING ME IRRELEVANT — and not a moment too soon.