JAMES LILEKS ON HOWARD DEAN:

Dean, talking to Diane Rehm — the Mother Teresa of Beltway radio — excoriated Bush for undue privacy in the Sept. 11 investigation. It produced some “interesting” theories, Dean said, such as the idea that the Saudis warned Bush of the imminent attack. Very clever, this; it allowed Dean to move the charge from the fever swamps of Internet forums to the national spotlight. Did he believe it? Oh, no — but it’s interesting, he said, and can’t be disproved. OK, then: Dr. Dean sealed his gubernatorial records, and this makes some suspect he was an abortionist who sold the sundered remains to Satanists for Black Mass rituals. Hey, it’s an interesting theory. Until we see the records, who knows?

Ouch. But it’s not just Lileks on the case now: Howard Dean is starting to suffer damage from several of his rather improvident remarks, and according to this article from the Washington Post people are starting to question his viability. I guess the Teflon is, er, flaking.

That could lead to Bush facing the candidate he fears the most in November. . . .

UPDATE: SpinSanity has more on Howard Dean and what it calls his “not-so-straight talk on Bush and the war.”

VIRGINIA POSTREL has sensible thoughts on the morning-after pill, and on birth control in general.

ANOTHER “UGLY, JAYSON BLAIR-LIKE SCANDAL” for The New York Times, according to Michelle Malkin. Another Howell Raines protege is involved, too. Malkin asks, “how many other Jayson Blairs remain nestled in the Gray Lady’s bosom?”

NEWSWEEK: “A widely publicized Iraqi document that purports to show that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta visited Baghdad in the summer of 2001 is probably a fabrication.” Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus, who I scooped by over a minute on this story, has more.

JEFF JARVIS points to this New York Times story on the role of small, portable video cameras in letting the U.S. military bypass media operations to get its stories out. The story reads like a commercial for the Sony PD 150 camera, which is unfortunate for Sony as I think it’s been discontinued.

I think that the trend it describes is likely to continue, and I hope that more bloggers use video for newsgathering. People keep writing and asking me for advice on this, and I’m not sure that I’m any great expert. But for web video, quality isn’t an overriding concern. That’s good, because cameras like the Canon GL-2 — which I own, and which produces really beautiful video — are expensive. (And I was just doing some side-by-side comparisions with my perfectly-respectable Sony Digital 8 camera, and the difference is quite astounding — but then the Canon costs three times as much, and has a terrific fluorite lens).

But if I were doing web video, I’d prefer the Sony. It’s smaller, and lighter, and cheaper — which means less worry about it getting stolen or broken — and it actually has a lot of web-useful features. It will, like most Sonys, record MPEG video to a memory stick, so you don’t have to do fancy firewire video capture; you can just import it into a computer via USB. It also has rudimentary built-in editing and titling features. I’ve never used them, and probably never will, but if I were somewhere out of the way, I could edit a video down, save it to MPEG, and import it into pretty much any computer using USB, then upload it to the web without even compressing it further. Rough and ready, but it would work.

There are smaller video cameras, though you pay for their smallness. I think that this is the one Doc Searls uses, and it’s a pretty good still camera, too. But it’s harder to hold these small cameras steady, and at $1500 a pop it’s kind of expensive.

I encourage people who are interested in mobile videoblogging for the web to just try to pick a digital still camera that does video with sound. The camera that Zeyad uses will do that. So will the Toshiba that I use. They only cost a few hundred bucks, and work fine for the web.

Within a year or so, of course, cellphones will do all of this stuff, and pretty well. The real business opportunity will be for someone who can knit all this stuff together and produce an interesting news operation that integrates video reportage from all sorts of distributed sources everywhere. I don’t know who will pull that off, but I predict that they’ll get a huge leg-up on their competitors.

In the meantime, if you’re close to news, try to get some video. If it’s good, I’ll host it and save you the bandwidth charges. This stuff is just plain cool, and it’s fun to be part of it. Here’s an earlier post on the subject, too. I’m hoping that Zeyad will shoot some video interviews in Baghdad or Basra, and that we can make them available. Since the Big Media folks won’t cover these things, we’ll just have to do the best we can. And it’s already working out pretty well.

And yes, I’m evangelizing here.

YESTERDAY I LINKED a column critical of FCC Chair Michael Powell. Now here’s one by Arnold Kling defending him.

WRIGHT BROTHERS ANNIVERSARY: Rand Simberg has a trifecta, with columns here (TCS), here (NRO), and here (Fox). I was going to put up a post of my own, but I think I’ll just send you to read these.

SO I SAW THE RETURN OF THE KING this afternoon. I don’t want to spoil it, but I liked it a lot: more than The Two Towers, though perhaps not quite as much as The Fellowship of the Ring. As with The Two Towers, there were some plot liberties taken that didn’t seem to advance the story, and if fictional characters could sue for libel, Denethor would have a case.

There were technical glitches, including some audio dubbing problems (minor, but I sure noticed), that surprised me. There were also way too many trailers including a commercial for a reality TV series featuring Donald Trump that looks, er, unpromising to me — which probably means it will be a huge hit.

On the other hand, while Viggo Mortensen may be a twit in real life, he sure can act. And the trailer for his next film, Hidalgo, shows him playing a very different character very convincingly. (You can stream previews at the link above and see for yourself; the one I saw is “trailer two.”).

The film was very long, but it didn’t seem that way, it seemed too short. I suppose that’s high enough praise right there.

UPDATE: Captain Ed loved it, while Occam’s toothbrush says “get an editor.” Lots more reviews at BlogCritics.

At THE MALL, I stopped in the Verizon store and test-drove a computer using this wireless service, which they called AirEdge. I got an honest 256Kbps, and pages seemed to load quite snappily. The price is reasonable, too.

Anybody out there have any experience with it? And does it coexist smoothly with wi-fi on the same computer?

RX-8 UPDATE: Reader Fraser Cutten sends this link to a review of the RX-8 from TopGear. (WMV video stream).

TERRY MCAULIFFE, ONE-MAN DISASTER:

PORTSMOUTH — Several city officials are furious over the Democratic National Committee chairman’s recent visit to Portsmouth High School, who they feel turned a social studies lesson into a one-sided bashing of President Bush. . . .

“He comes into the school and just says what he wants,” City Councilor Bill St. Laurent said. “At what point does he stop his politicking to the point of scare tactics? Saying that the draft may come back, and kids can’t find jobs, those are scare tactics. He is out trying to get votes. This is taxpayers money, excuse me, but this is my tax dollar and I don’t want to use my tax dollar for his pulpit.”

Talk to some kids who mostly can’t vote. Generate bad press for the Democrats nationwide among those who can. Brilliant. (Via Remove All Doubt).

UPDATE: Darren Kaplan writes: “Aside from the fact that scaring children for political gain is beyond the pale even for McAuliffe, he’s lying through his teeth.”

I’m amazed that the Dems have hung onto McAuliffe for so long.

THE BLOGS OF FREEDOM: Good story on Iraqi bloggers and the blogosphere in general, in the Seattle Times.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT IS BACKPEDALING from her dumb remark about Osama bin Laden and an “October surprise.”

Even if you believe her claims, which witnesses contradict, that her remarks were tongue-in-cheek she just demonstrated — again — her utter unsuitability for diplomacy.

HURRAY FOR GIMLI! Yes, he gets it. Meanwhile, Viggo Mortensen is dismissed: “Poor guy. Cute, but dumb as a post.”

UPDATE: Reader Keith Waldrop emails:

I just read the whole Rhys-Davies Interview. Neither you nor Sullivan give it the proper “read the whole thing” justice it deserves.

How in the world can the same industry/culture that created (insert inane Hollwood activist name here) create a man who says such grounded, worldly, and couragous things as John Rhys-Davies?

Hey Hollywood! I’ll go see Return of the King twice just because it has Rhys-Davies in it.

You should.

TIM BLAIR: “Saddam’s only been in custody a few days, and already the French and Germans have become oddly compliant.”

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has more thoughts on this.

IT’S AN IMPROVEMENT OVER WHAT HAPPENED TO GALILEO, ANYWAY:

Six hundred years ago, the world was warm. Or maybe it wasn’t. What’s the truth? Beware. This question has recently been elevated from a mere scientific quandary to one of the hot (or cold) issues of modern politics. Argue in favor of the wrong answer and you risk being branded a liberal alarmist or a conservative Neanderthal. Or you might lose your job.

Six editors recently resigned from the journal Climate Research because of this issue. Their crime: publishing the article “Proxy Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1,000 Years,” by W. Soon and S. Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Without passing judgment on this particular paper, I can still point out that our journals are full of poor papers. If editors were dismissed every time they published one, they would all be out of work within a month or two. What made the Soon and Baliunas situation different is that their paper attracted enormous attention. And that’s because it threw doubt on the hockey stick.

Read the whole thing.

In a related development, Bjorn Lomborg has been vindicated by the Danish Ministry of Science, after what Ron Bailey calls a “smear campaign” against him.

UPDATE: Iain Murray has more on Lomborg.

PREEMPTIVE EXPLAINING-AWAY: Janet Daley advises anti-war folks on how to respond to success in the future.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn has related observations.

EUGENE VOLOKH OFFERS ADVICE TO FOREIGN WRITERS — and works in a subtle reference to The Fearless Vampire Killers too:

Oy, have you got the wrong Wolverine. . . . We realize that the complexities of America’s multi-layered semiotics (especially at the polyvalent intersectionality of military modalities and civilian cinematic / graphic novelistic signifiers) may be difficult to grasp for people who come from, shall we say, less sophisticated cultural traditions — but if you only acknowledge our superiority, I see no reason why such minor embarrassments should interfere with our amicable cross-Atlantic relationship.

Heh.

TACITUS offers a rather devastating critique of those opposing an Iraqi trial for Saddam Hussein. “It’s a meme meant to snatch the judgment of Saddam Hussein from his victims and hand it over to those same institutions whose counsel would have left him in power today.”

I think that the UN, and the human rights community, are guilty of neocolonialism here. And the groups who propped up Saddam have more of a conflict of interest — and certainly a far more culpable one — than do his victims.

I also think that the end result of all of this will be a free Iraq that is close to the United States, and deeply suspicious of the United Nations, the human rights community, and the European Union. Once again, Bush’s enemies are playing into his hands.

MICHAEL NOVAK has more on Cardinal Martino, whose excessive sympathy for Saddam garnered so much criticism here and elsewhere:

When I was in Rome last February, Cardinal Martino was already under heavy fire for his intemperate and irrepressible anti- Americanism. Even those who before the war leaned more to the French/German position than to the American were dismayed by his uncalled-for comments. . . .

The immense relief experienced by the Catholic community in Iraq since the fall of Saddam has not gone unappreciated at the Vatican. In general, now that the American-led coalition has acted firmly and with far better results than predicted last February by various spokesmen in the Vatican (they did not all speak with one voice), the Vatican has tried to help with the transition to a more just, peaceful, tolerant, and democratic Iraq.

As someone said earlier, victory is the best propaganda. But as Novak continues:

As for Cardinal Martino, he has made clear on many occasions how bitterly he feels toward the United States on many fronts, not only in the case of Iraq.

It’s true, of course, that the Church is made of human beings, as Novak also notes. It’s just unfortunate that so many of the ones we hear from seem to resemble Cardinal Martino, and the Church — like any other institution made up of human beings — will pay a price for filling its ranks with the bitter, the self-important, and the morally obtuse. It is paying such a price now. And what’s more, it deserves to.

UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge responds and draws a distinction between matters secular and spiritual.

I certainly agree that Cardinal Martino’s idiocy has no particular theological ramifications. Having been raised Protestant, I’m always slightly bemused by how strenuously many Catholics feel they have to make this point, which seems obvious to me. Martino’s idiocy isn’t a reason to abandon your faith. It is, I think, the latest of many demonstrations that the Church has no particular ability to recruit people who are better, or even more morally discerning, than the run of humanity, and that the opinions of Church leaders on these sorts of matters are not only not worthy of any special respect, but are — when weighed against the track record — worthy of more than usual skepticism.

And because many churchmen attempt to blur the line, infusing their frequently idiotic statements on matters secular with a wholly undeserved patina of moral seriousness, it’s important to point that out.

UPDATE: Reader Julie Carlson emails:

At church this Sunday, right before Mass started, a parishioner walked up to our priest and said something to the effect of wasn’t this good news that we had gotten Saddam. His response? “No, not really, because this war was never about Saddam Hussein. It was about imposing our will on the Iraqi people.” Later, during Mass, the other priest started talking about Father Bill O’Donnell’s death, quoted Martin Sheen, and joked that the people who always had the most reason to be concerned about Father Bill were those who worked at Lawrence Livermore Labs.

I live in the Bay Area, but this is ridiculous. My church is led by two guys who still think it’s the 1960s.

Yes, it is ridiculous.

FROM NEMO TO NANO: My TechCentralStation column, reporting from the EPA Science Advisory Board meeting last week, is up.

MORE TROOPS? Jim Dunnigan says it’s an election-year gesture that will probably hurt actual readiness.

JUST THINK — if Saddam hadn’t been watching the BBC he might have given up months ago:

Saddam Hussein is being shown videotapes of anti-Saddam protests in Iraq . . . two U.S. officials who are receiving reports on his interrogation said Tuesday.

Or maybe he was reading the New York Times.

ALL DAY YESTERDAY, people kept sending me links to a rather dodgy secondhand report that Saddam’s No. 2, Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, had been caught. I was rather skeptical, given the sourcing and given that we’d heard that story before, only to have it turn out to be wrong. But now here’s another report. Let’s hope it’s true.

IMPRISONED IRANIAN BLOGGER SINA MOTALLEBI is is now free, has escaped Iran, and is in Europe with his wife and child. And he’s blogging again!