CHEAP HOSTING FOR BLOGSPOT REFUGEES — at Kathy Kinsley’s Home For Wayward Blogs.

JUST SAW ORIN KERR ON O’REILLY talking about Internet issues and the Hatch “destroy your computer” proposal. Kerr was good, but that’s no surprise. O’Reilly was unusually humble, admitting that he’s “an idiot where computers are concerned” and asking a lot of questions that he actually let the guests answer. It was a rather good segment.

RACHEL BELTON ON THE NEXT PHASE of the war on terror:

What we must do is help enable the war of ideas. Our strategy should not be for the West to win hearts and minds–but for an Arab alternative to pan-Arabism and Islamism to arise and win the hearts of their own people.

After World War II, the U.S. engaged in such a strategy quite effectively. We provided assistance in the hot wars Greece and Turkey fought against Communism, while donating funds for local governments to develop. But we also provided a viable alternative, through the covert funding of pro-Europe parties who eventually brought about the Treaty of Rome and the growth of the EU. Such an intelligent strategy for winning hearts and minds has not yet begun. Until it does, we have not yet begun to fight.

Interesting. Of course, the EU thing is producing a little blowback. . . .

THE LOVELY AND TALENTED SHANTI MANGALA is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Vanities. Check it out, and follow the links for some bloggers you might not have read before, but might want to read again.

SLATE has a roundup of news about Iran. Here’s an interesting bit about the raids on Iranian opposition forces:

French daily Aujord’hui en France offered two conflicting explanations: It quoted the former head of France’s national anti-terrorist division as saying the raid was a move to please Iranian authorities so as to maintain French influence in the Middle East. On the same page, another expert said the crackdown is a sign that France is realigning its Middle East policy to be more in line with Washington’s.

Take your pick! One reader suggests that (1) Washington expects the mullahs’ government to fall; and (2) this roundup is designed to keep thousands of Islamist opposition figures from converging in Tehran in the aftermath. I hope that’s right, but it seems a bit too pat for me. And given French behavior in the past, “maintaining French influence in the Middle East” seems the safer bet.

This article from Le Monde is also a bit coy about what’s going on, saying that both Washington and Tehran are pleased.

UPDATE: Reader Thomas Briggs emails:

Today’s evening news on French TV station TF1 explained that France indeed does hope to have it both ways, as you say. www.tf1.fr (streaming video at “News” page, and there’s a text article there, too). France has shown the US that it is its most reliable anti-terrorism ally; France has shown Iran that it is willing to crack down on those troublesome exiled dissidents; and now France has positioned itself to play a “mediator” role. The piece also emphasized that the operation, ostensibly a security operation conducted by the French equivalent of the FBI, had actually been cleared at the highest levels of French diplomacy. France can’t lose. But all this was ruined by the story’s lead-in: live, close-up footage of three separate human self-immolations, and one of the women concerned may die. I’m horrified, truly.

I don’t like to watch people burn to death.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH WONDERS why Western media are paying so little attention to the demonstrations in Iran, when those demonstrations might topple the mullahs and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Bush Administration’s strategy in . . . Oh, hell, never mind. Some questions answer themselves.

UPDATE: From the comments to Pejman’s article:

The reason for the lack of press coverage is simple, if you remember back to CNN and Iraq: covering these protests would mean making the mullahs mad, and the press would then lose their access to Iran. It’s more important to have access than to have the story.

It’s the Eason Jordan effect!

AUSTIN BAY offers this interesting observation:

There’s a case to be made — by no means totally facile — that the War on Terror is a Saudi civil war diverted to the rest of the globe. The Saud regime’s petro-princes were always an Al Qaeda target, but as long as Al Qaeda was off in Afghanistan with the Taliban or in East Africa blowing up American embassies, the princes could pretend the Islamists were no threat to them.

He also thinks that the mullahs in Iran are in trouble:

Don’t underestimate the strategic effects on Iran of Saddam’s demise. Saddam presented Iran with a long-term threat, one the ayatollahs could use to legitimate a degree of internal militarization. Now, the Butcher of Baghdad’s gone. Iranians have seen Iraqis dancing in the streets. Is it time for the Theocrats of Tehran to take a hike? In the past two weeks, street demonstrations have spread to every major city. Demonstrators no longer call for the political reform of the mullah’s regime, they demand replacement.

Will Iran slide into all-out civil war or follow the 1989 path of Eastern Europe’s decayed communist dictatorships? We may know that answer by July.

He suggests, in fact, that much of the middle east is really engaged in civil war.

MORE ON IRAN: David Warren says the mullahs’ days are numbered.

IT LOOKS AS IF Ohio is going to get a liberalized concealed-carry law:

The bill would allow Ohioans who are at least 21 years old, complete 12 hours of firearm training, and pass criminal and mental-health background checks to receive four-year permits to carry handguns on themselves or in their cars.

The issue has crossed party lines and has instead divided lawmakers along urban and suburban-rural lines.

The measure is supported by the Buckeye State Sheriffs Association, whose members would process permit applications. The highway patrol and Fraternal Order of Police have adopted positions of neutrality. The Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police remains opposed.

The bill seems to retain some dumb minor restrictions, but I expect those will be removed in future years, when the (inevitable, and inevitably wrong) predictions of a bloodbath made by anti-rights forces don’t play out.

LAURENCE SIMON HAS LOOKED AT ORRIN HATCH’S WEBSITE and says that the Senator appears to be violating copyright law regarding some unlicensed code thereon. Laurence has notified both the software author, and Senator Hatch, of the violation. Somebody pull the plug!

ANOTHER BOGUS GUN STUDY fools The New York Times. Not that the Times puts up much resistance where bogus gun studies are concerned, so long as they reach the desired result.

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY MEDIA GUN-BIAS CHART IS UP — now with improved graphics!

In an utterly unrelated post — er, except that it has fancy graphics, too — Jason Kottke offers a rumination on leadership, love and war.

SOUNDS LIKE THE DUMB DICTATORS CLUB had another initiation ceremony:

Two US radio DJs who fooled the president of Venezuela into speaking to them by pretending to be Fidel Castro have reversed the prank.

This time, Miami radio hosts Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero got Castro on the line by pretending to be Hugo Chavez.

Heh. I hope it really was Castro.

TRENT TELENKO WONDERS if France is setting itself up as the ally of tyranny everywhere. Well, he doesn’t exactly wonder.

UPDATE: Yes, I’ve been picking on the French a bit today. But it is the anniversary of Waterloo.

JOHN PILGER said that we were killing the children of Iraq via sanctions. Now that the war is over, the evidence suggests that he was a liar or a fool. And so were a lot of others:

And intellectuals here — too eager as always to believe the worst of us — believed this, too.

The sanctions caused “the deaths of children on a scale far exceeding that caused by any military weapon in history,” wrote Malcolm Fraser in a letter co-signed by Chris Sidoti and Peter Garrett — people happy to think we’re so evil that we also stole Aboriginal children, keep refugees in “concentration camps” and rape Mother Earth.

And the prominent Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, a regular ABC guest, not only claimed perhaps “a million” Iraqi children were dying from our “madness”, but said “mass funerals for babies — 70 in one cortege on the last count — made their way through Baghdad”.

B UT now for the truth — because the peddlers of such corrosive hate-speech must be exposed and shamed, if not into silence then into moderation.

Iraqi doctors now say what our intellectuals and our reporters should have felt in their bones. Iraq’s children were dying not because of us, but because of Saddam. And even the parades of dead children were part of a monstrous hoax.

Dr Amer Abdul a-Jalil, the deputy resident at Baghdad’s Ibn al-Baladi Hospital, has told the London Telegraph that “sanctions did not kill these children — Saddam killed them”.

Why does anyone listen to these people? Well, increasingly, we don’t.

UPDATE: Reader Dick Aubrey raises some interesting moral issues:

I am not surprised, although the idea of keeping some babies on ice for use as exhibits for the peace-freak trade did not occur to me.

I once observed, while in Central America with such a bunch, that if dead civilians were necessary to discredit US policy, dead civilians would be provided. Part–I speak as one with some formal training in hearts-and-minds–of the lefty war manuals deal with how to deke the government into killing their own people. The lefties always knew that if they killed civilians, all would be forgiven, if it were even noticed.

I have made a similar observation to my own church (PCUSA), modifying it to, “If dead babies are useful to Saddaam, dead babies will be provided.” The point is that the folks who made such a big deal about the sanctions are directly responsible for making dead babies so valuable to Saddaam. Blood is on their hands. The blood of innocents.

Yes, if you’re a useful idiot, people will find way to take advantage of that, even if it requires innocents to die.

MICHAEL COSTELLO SUGGESTS that since nobody can find the missing 727, it obviously never existed in the first place. But of course!

THIS LOOKS LIKE A PHONY EFFORT BY ORRIN HATCH to back away from his inflammatory remarks about destroying people’s computers — only without actually doing so. I’m unimpressed. Meanwhile Arthur Silber is reading the tea leaves in various statements and wonders if we’ll see attempts at Internet censorship in the name of homeland security.

Probably. And Hatch’s comments make clear that even if that’s the justification that’s offered, it will really be Big Media companies calling the shots.

UPDATE: Ed Cone has some reporting on Congressional responses to Hatch’s statement.

SHAMEFUL DEALS:

Protesters chanted slogans against the detentions, accusing the French authorities of a “shameful deal with the mullahs”.

Tehran has been pressing the French authorities to take action against the group.

Demonstrators believe those being held include Maryam Rajavi, wife of the People’s Mujahideen leader, Massoud Rajavi.

Well over $3m in cash as well as computers and communications equipment were also seized in the raids.

I don’t think this group is one that we should shed tears for, necessarily, but it seems pretty likely that the French are doing this largely to suck up to the mullahs.

JAMES LILEKS ON FRANCE — in his syndicated column:

To woo Americans back, the French government decided to hire a celeb to speak on France’s behalf. Did they get Arnold Schwarzenegger? (“Ahl be bach — for de crepes!”) Did they get Paula Abdul? (“I don’t care what Simon says, France is incredibly talented.”)

No, they got Woody Allen. Most Americans regard Woody as a wrinkly creep who makes movies you no longer regret missing. Even on video. “I don’t want to have to freedom-kiss my wife,” Allen says in the ads, “when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.”

Eewww. You might recall that Allen is 391 years older than his wife, and that his wife was his previous girlfriend’s adopted daughter. Why him? Roman Polanski wasn’t available?

They also got George Plimpton to appear in an ad, making it official: French understanding of American culture is taken entirely from a 1968 issue of Playboy.

Hmm. I wonder if it was August, 1968. My 7th-grade biology teacher was in that one. Lileks continues:

If France pulls through, it’ll be important again. And if it doesn’t, which seems increasingly likely, it will tear itself apart with strikes. Its economy will be consumed by the rapacious demands of its welfare state. Its restive, unassimilated Muslim population might demand a parallel legal system based on Sharia law. These possibilities should please no one.

We wish the French the best. But their days as the moral avatar, the champion of humanity, are long gone. That reputation — unearned for decades — will die in the Congo, where French troops are behaving as effectively as, well, French troops. The painful fact is that no one expects much of them anymore beyond good food, bribery and honeyed hypocrisy.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Speaking of teachers posing nude, there’s a nude calendar featuring British high school teachers. It’s selling well.

HERE’S MORE ON SABINE HEROLD, who’s leading popular resistance to French strikers:

Shouting into a microphone to loud applause, Ms Herold delivered a stirring message to the tens of thousands of followers who gathered in the Place du Chatelet in the centre of Paris at the weekend, to hear her speak on behalf of her association, Liberté, j’écris ton nom.

“How numerous we are today. More than I would ever have dared hope for just a month ago, when the strike was all around us,” she said.

“We have put a full stop to decades of silent submission. This time, for the first time, we have told them no,” she added, referring to the strikers she calls “reactionary egotists”.

France, she said lacks dynamism – and needs a good dose of Margaret Thatcher.

“France needs someone capable who would mobilise people and smash the unions. Well, I don’t know if we can put it like that, but someone who could give a reforming spirit. I think the French at the moment are lacking in desire, they don’t have a ‘French dream’ like the American dream,” she said.

She is unimpressed with the president, Jacques Chirac, part of what she calls the “spineless centre” of French politics.

Spineless, but, ahem, well-compensated.

STEPHEN GREEN ON WHY HE ISN’T A REPUBLICAN: Orrin Hatch.

Orrin Hatch isn’t a stupid politician, in the sense that he rarely (never, to my recollection) speaks extemporaneously. He’s no Clinton, thinking aloud in front of the nation then relying on his spinmeisters to clean up the mess. Hatch is as carefully measured as a soufflé.

And now he wants to explore giving the government — or is it the record companies? — the power to destroy or damage your computer.

Be wary of any politician who would give to the government (or favored businesses) powers he would deny to you and me. . . .

Indeed, Hatch has given this issue quite some thought. So here we have the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee eager to have (or give away) the power to destroy personal property without due process. Unless, that is, you consider a couple of emails or IM popups to be due process. . . .

I’m a copyright owner — look down there on my blogroll somewhere and you’ll see the All-Powerful ©. Does this mean I should have the legal power to send someone a couple IMs, then destroy their computer because they lifted some of my prose?

No. Just Big Media — -you know, the Bill O’Reilly-approved kind. Here’s a roundup of the extremely negative Blogosphere reaction.

Have the Republicans sold out to Big Media? Rumor has it that Mary Bono is the candidate to take over the RIAA’s lobbying operation.

FRENCH TOURISM IS SUFFERING, and the French are worried that Americans are staying away because we’re mad at them. Yeah, who could have seen that coming?

PEOPLE ARE STILL UNHAPPY WITH BILL O’REILLY: Is it free speech for Big Media only? Sounds like it to me. And Jeremy Lott is pretty hard on O’Reilly in The American Prowler:

It had been some time since I last checked in on O’Reilly, so this was a bit of a letdown. He at least used to be an interesting crank. For people who actually take the time to gain a working knowledge of the Internet, these charges are so easily rebutted that I fear bloggers and other tech savvy types won’t realize how many people who listened to this screed were nodding their heads in agreement.

This is especially dangerous because some of these people write laws. The Council of Europe is putting the final screws on a proposal recommending that countries pass legislation to mandate a “right of reply,” which would force all “online media” (including bloggers) to give equal time to those people whom they criticize. In the U.S. broadcast media, this was known by the Orwellian moniker the Fairness Doctrine. If employed today, it would put half of the cable news channels out of business, but, hey, as long as it’s not O’Reilly’s ox being gored …

It’s too bad non-sentient networks can’t sue for defamation, because the Internet would have a pretty strong case.

I love that last line.

THE MISSING-727 STORY, covered here and on StrategyPage for the last couple of weeks, has now made the Washington Post:

But losing a 153-foot, 200,000-pound aircraft is no common occurrence.

“I haven’t come across this before in 22 years in this business,” said Chris Yates, a civil aviation security analyst for the private Jane’s Aviation service. “It is not a stretch to think this plane could end up in the hands of terrorists. A number of companies involved in gun running [and other crimes] in Africa have indirect ties to various terrorist groups.”

On the bright side, the plane’s history is checkered enough that there are plenty of plausible non-terror scenarios, too.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BLOGLY: The editors at TechCentralStation asked me to write a bit about what makes a good blog. This column is the result.