THIS SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA TO ME:

The Pentagon has barred French, German and Russian companies from competing for $18.6 billion in contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq, saying the step “is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States.”

The directive, which was issued by the deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, represents perhaps the most substantive retaliation to date by the Bush administration against American allies who opposed its decision to go to war in Iraq.

The next question is whether Iraq will repudiate its odious debts contracted under Saddam. I’m guessing that it will. Check out this statement from President Bush, on James Baker’s appointment to deal with this matter:

The future of the Iraqi people should not be mortgaged to the enormous burden of debt incurred to enrich Saddam Hussein’s regime. This debt endangers Iraq’s long-term prospects for political health and economic prosperity. The issue of Iraq debt must be resolved in a manner that is fair and that does not unjustly burden a struggling nation at its moment of hope and promise.

Call me crazy, but I think that French, Russian and German holders of Iraqi paper should be more than a little worried.

WILL VEHRS WRITES on bloggers writing about David Brooks writing about Howard Dean.

ANOTHER SUICIDE BOMBING: It’s obviously a quagmire– in Moscow.

Maybe it’s because the Russians decided not to ratify Kyoto. . . .

OLIVER WILLIS has a new business blog called BoomNation. Check it out — though I still think he belongs on TV!

CHIEF WIGGLES WANTS HELP. People are offering money, but I think what he really wants is advice and connections.

UPDATE: Here’s an article on the Chief and his family from the Deseret News.

HUGH HEWITT, BLESS HIM, is interviewing Frank Gaffney about the Grover Norquist / Wahhabi connection article mentioned below. It’ll start in about 15 minutes, and you can stream it live from his site.

UPDATE: Listening to it now. Norquist and Gaffney are both on. Norquist says he’s only supporting Arab democracy and that Gaffney is engaging in guilt-by-association. Gaffney says that’s B.S., and says that Norquist’s closeness to terror-linked Islamists is undeniable and emblematic of a much larger problem of Washington political types being too close to Arab money. I hope that other journalists will look into this problem further.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Phil Bowermaster emails that he listened to the show and thinks it’s much ado about nothing. I’d like for it to be, but. . . .

THERE WILL BE ANTI-TERROR DEMONSTRATIONS IN IRAQ TOMORROW: Zeyad, who now has a digital camera sent to him by Jeff Jarvis, will be covering them.

BUT WILL THEY PAY ATTENTION IN GENEVA? Scores of Iranians give firsthand accounts of web censorship in Iran. Many are quite moving.

FROM THE EDITOR OF THE ARAB TIMES: “They are living in the past and they can see only the history of the United States. They think America is the same country that withdrew from regions where it incurred heavy casualties, such as Vietnam, Beirut in 1982, and Somalia. They refuse to see the recent history of the US in Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and in the war to liberate Kuwait. Americans weren’t fazed by suicide bombings. . . . The United States is not going to quit. Instead, it will convert poles of Jihadi flags into arrows to pierce the hearts of terrorists – who ultimately will be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now.

GOOD NEWS? Looks like it. Reader Colin Grabow points out that the Wall Street Journal has an article (you’ll need to be a paid subscriber to read it, though) on the return of CERP money to commanders in Iraq. Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — To jump-start reconstruction projects in Iraq, the Pentagon is funneling about $300 million to senior military commanders in the country, more than double the amount they got in fiscal 2003, defense officials said.

Officials say they believe the cash infusion now will give a boost to reconstruction projects and help build momentum going into next year when the vast majority of U.S. troops will rotate out of the country and be replenished by fresh troops. Spending more money to get unemployed Iraqis onto U.S. payrolls for low-tech building and security projects, rather than having them join enemy ranks, is critical to U.S. success in Iraq, these officials said. Senior Pentagon officials are especially concerned that Iraqi insurgents will increase attacks early next year to take advantage of the new, less experienced troops arriving in the country.

“We’re giving commanders this money because we realize that when the only tools you have are guns and bullets it is hard to win counterinsurgency wars,” said one defense official familiar with the decision.

The $300 million, which has been described by Pentagon officials as “commanders’ walking-around money,” is also designed to keep a large array of smaller projects churning until a wave of money begins to pour into Iraq next summer and autumn.

This seems enormously important to me. In fact, I wonder if $300 million is enough.

JOHN ELLIS: “Gore vs. Clinton 2008 began on December 9th, 2003. It has been the subtext of the 2004 campaign to date. Now it’s out in the open for all to see.”

“A TROUBLING INFLUENCE:” Frank Gaffney is all over Grover Norquist for connections with radical Islamists. If all of this is true, it’s more than just “troubling.”

UPDATE: Winds of Change has a link-filled post on Norquist and the Islamists that suggests Gaffney’s piece is solid.

Why aren’t Democrats all over this? Is it because they’re in the Saudis’ pockets, too? Or just showing their usual instinct for the capillary?

HERE’S SOME ADVICE FROM DOC SEARLS on combination digital / video cameras. It’s good advice, and I looked at the tiny Sony video-still combination camera that Doc uses. It’s great, but it was $1200 when I looked at it. I’ve seen it discounted to $995 since.

If you’re a blogger, and you’re looking for a web-journalism tool, it’s overkill. Plus, to me an essential characteristic of a web-journalism tool is extreme mobility. That’s why I bought this Toshiba, which costs about one-fourth as much — which not only cuts the up-front cost, but makes you less worried about losing it, or getting it damaged, and hence more likely to take it with you. It shoots 3-Meg stills (overkill for the web, but you can select a lower-resolution format) and records video at 320 x 240 (entirely adequate for the web). You can see samples of both here. (I also recorded this commercial with the Toshiba. Jeff Jarvis panned it, but not for technical quality — and it took five minutes, start to finish, including copying it to the computer.) And — most importantly — it runs off AA batteries, which you can get anywhere, rather than some proprietary battery that has to be recharged.

A few other pointers from my perspective: Video formats that are easy to import into any computer are important. My experience with MPEG4 suggests that, well, it sucks. Cameras that store video as MPEG-1 or -2 or AVI are good; QuickTime won’t import directly into Windows Movie Maker, which means that if wide computer compatibility is important it’s a poor choice, unless you find yourself constantly surrounded by Apple machines. (Sure, you can put the appropriate software on your own computer, but what if it’s not handy?) Make sure it records with sound, too! Many cameras with “movie mode” don’t, and they’re often a bit coy about that. Newer cameras will usually record video clips whose length is limited only by the available memory; older ones tend to store only short clips.

A good optical zoom is nice, too. If you’re taking pictures of news, you may find your own mobility limited, so being able to zoom in or out is useful. My main complaint about most digicam lenses is that the maximum wide-angle setting isn’t really wide enough.

Likewise, the Toshiba has some rudimentary built-in editing capabilities — it can resize still photos, and lighten or darken them, prior to exporting them to a computer. That means you can use any computer with USB and web access, even if it doesn’t have photo editing software.

Most of the time this stuff won’t matter. But if you’re buying a digital camera with blog-journalism in mind, you might as well get something that’s really suited for the task.

Ideally, I’d like to see all of these features integrated with a mobile communications device that I could also blog from. The Handspring Treo 600, which Jeff Jarvis is always praising, comes close but isn’t there yet.

And remember — any camera that you have with you is better than one that’s left at home. My older Olympus camera, which to my surprise is still on the market, rides in my backpack or briefcase all the time. Its video performance is pretty weak — QuickTime clips of up to 15 seconds with no sound (here’s an example) — but the stills are great, and it’s small, rugged, and cheap. And it uses AA batteries.

I love the profusion of digital still and video cameras throughout the blogosphere and — as you may have guessed — part of the point of this post is to encourage their proliferation. I love it when bloggers are on hand to record events firsthand, and the technology for doing that just gets better.

UPDATE: Michael Ubaldi emails that he found this article helpful in sorting out nomenclature and technical issues on digital camerals.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eric Scheie notes that you can get the Olympus for a dirt-cheap $159 here, though I don’t know this site and can’t vouch for it personally. I like to link to Amazon because they provide customer reviews and all sorts of other information, but there’s usually some other place with a lower price if you want to poke around the web, or use things like Froogle.

Also the 2MP version of the Toshiba is a mere $269 at TigerDirect, and as best I can tell from the description is otherwise about the same. I’ve bought a few things from TigerDirect and had no problems, though nowhere near as many as I’ve bought from Amazon, of course.

MORE: Fritz Schranck has more observations on photoblogging. And reader Will Scovill has comments on MPEG4:

I have to chime in with my 2 cents on the MPEG4. I think it is one of the greatest things to happen to digital media. Right now Windows media is getting bigger in both audio and video and I can’t stand it more. As an Apple user they only work half the time and only in Windows Media Player which for Apple sucks. You cannot do anything with the video except watch it. The same goes for audio, you cannot burn it to a CD. The thing with MPEG4 video and its audio counterpart the AAC is that the compression makes the file both smaller and cleaner than that of an MP3, WMA, WMV, AVI, MPEG1, or even MPEG2. Also, for people uploading to the web, it can create a file small enough to fit on a floppy disc but good enough quality to still sit through. Apple helped develop this new codec and then released it to the world for free, but for some reason the world has yet to pick up on it the way it has with Windows Media which is much more restrictive especially when crossing platforms.

I don’t much like Windows Media either; I think that QuickTime seems to produce better quality most of the time. I like the idea of MPEG4, but in practice it seems to be hinky, and I’ve never seen an MPEG4 video that I thought was good — even the allegedly high quality ones seem to have a lot of artifact and distortion. Possibly I’m underrating it.

SOUR BOB is back, with some observations on mental health:

Did I mention I’ve almost entirely stopped drinking? It’s true. I have an occasional bourbon and water these days, but rarely more than one, and most days I only drink club soda.

Hard to say entirely why I made this change, but as much as anything it was because a dear friend pointed out the obvious: if a fella is tired of being broke and depressed, perhaps he ought to stop spending hundreds of dollars a month on depressants. And you know what? I really do feel much better.

He wasn’t able to shake that blogging addiction, though. . . .

POLITE RUGBY FANS swarm over London. No, really.

GORE AND DEAN: Mickey Kaus says that Gore’s endorsement of Dean is a tribute to web-power. Tim Cavanaugh says that Gore’s “extending his jinx.” Jonah Goldberg observes:

More important, it underscores how unserious Al Gore has become on the war on terrorism. Will Gore say that he should have picked Dean to be his runningmate in 2000? Al Gore claimed that Joe Lieberman would be the best possible stand-in for Al Gore should the need arise. He said that Lieberman’s qualifications were perfect to be president. Now, that was before the War on Terrorism. In the time since then, Joe Lieberman has been at the forefront of the War on Terrorism in the Senate. . . .

In other words, Al Gore not only thinks Howard Dean is more qualified to be president of the United States than Joe Lieberman was or is, he thinks that is especially the case now after 9/11. If you really let that sink in for a second, you can see what an amazingly mercenary and damn close to dishonorable position that is.

Ouch. Well, Gore wasn’t trying to win over Goldberg anyway. . .

It is rather a slam at Lieberman, but politics is politics and Lieberman’s candidacy is going nowhere. Dean’s, on the other hand, is looking unstoppable through the primaries.

At any rate, I’m not sure that Dean, if elected, would be as bad for the war on terror as Goldberg’s post, sort of, implies, or that Dean’s primacy in fact reflects a policy of surrender on the part of Democratic voters. Here’s Dean’s secret weapon in the general election: He’s an angry jerk. Okay, he’s not always a jerk, but he has his angry, jerky side. And that poses risks to his campaign that have been analyzed elsewhere.

But in the current climate (heck, probably in most political climates) an angry jerk is a lot better than a wimp, and Dean doesn’t come across as a wimp. Voters may conclude, and they may be right, that a President Dean would get angry at terrorists and respond appropriately, rather than rolling over and being a wimp. This, at any rate, is one reason why I’m not so sure the Dean / McGovern parallel that some people are drawing works.

UPDATE: Robert Crawford emails:

Your point about an angry jerk being better than a wimp misses something important: the jerk should be angry at the right things. I haven’t seen much evidence that Dean is really upset with the state of the Arab world, the conditions and traditions that have created the Islamist movements. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that Dean is angry at Bush for trying to do something about it.

Yeah, he’s playing to his base. That doesn’t make me feel any better about it, though.

Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has interesting observations regarding both Howard Dean and David Brooks — and on what the Internet means for both. Roger Simon has thoughts, too, while Steven Antler has an economic angle.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: QandO says that for Dean, Bush is the real enemy, not Islamist terror. But I’m not sure he’s paying enough attention to context, here.

And Daniel Drezner has a roundup of reactions from within and without the blogosphere. Meanwhile, I’m predicting that it will ultimately be a Dean/Edwards ticket for the Dems.

Finally, Obsidian Wings wonders if Dean is tough enough.

MORE: Bill Kristol thinks Dean can win.

WINDS OF CHANGE HAS ITS KOREA REGIONAL BRIEFING up and online. Not especially good news, but there’s lots of it.

JEFF JARVIS:

Instead of worrying about America and the Internet — since we made it happen, after all — maybe the U.N. should worry instead about Iran censoring the Internet. No, instead, while they were ejecting a representative of an American company, the U.N. invited in a huge delegation of officials from Iran — the same officials who are censoring the Internet.

Yes, the U.N. would be a fine organization to run the technology future of the world.

No f’ing way! They should pry the Internet out of our dead American hands.

They’d probably like that.

WILL BAUDE WRITES:

I am, on the other hand, completely blown away by the Tennessee Constitution, which seems to forbid atheists (and many other religious minorities) from holding any civil office in the state.

I would have thought that the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of Free Exercise of Religion (as incorporated against the states) included the right to reject it.

[Article IX also forbids Ministers of the Gospels from holding seats in the legislature and duelists from “the right to hold any office of honor or profit.”]

Can such a ban really be defended?

Well, the dueling ban wouldn’t seem to violate any constitutional rights, and as far as I know it’s still good law. The ban on ministers of the gospel holding office was struck down in McDaniel v. Paty, a case argued by my (since retired) colleague Frederick S. LeClercq. By implication, the ban on atheists is assumed to be invalid, too. (Here’s a link to the Tennessee Constitution in pdf form. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the Tennessee Constitution — note, in particular, Article XI sec. 16).

THE DEAN SEALED-RECORD STORY: Robert Tagorda has more information on Dean’s record-sealing:

But even newspapers in Dean’s own state had to fight for a peek. In January 2002, the Rutland Herald and the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus sued the governor for holding back on the disclosure of his daily schedule. They had wanted to find out how his presidential campaign planning might be affecting matters of the state. A half-year later, after a third newspaper joined the suit, the Washington Superior Court ruled against Dean.

Here, via Tagorda, is a link to the opinion of the Vermont Supreme Court in this case. Tagorda has another post on this topic here.

I don’t understand what Dean’s campaign is thinking. If there’s embarrassing stuff in these files, this only calls attention to it, and it will surely come out. If there’s not anything embarrassing, it just makes him look like he’s got something to hide.

TOMORROW’S NEW YORK TIMES has a story on the Drexler / Smalley nanotechnology debate, but the story seems to treat the debate as being solely about nanobots, which I think is an overly narrow conception. You can have molecular manufacturing without nanobots, and you can have nanobots without them doing molecular manufacturing, but it’s the molecular manufacturing that’s the biggest deal.

In addition, there’s not a lot of context here. Two key items are (1) the new legislation aiming a lot of fundng at nanotechnology on the strength of the capabilities that molecular manufacturing, not just better transistors or materials, can offer; and (2) the rather obvious efforts by the nanotech business people to try to avoid the safety debate by insisting that all the really spooky stuff is impossible, anyway.

IRANIAN WEBLOGGERS ARE FIGHTING INTERNET CENSORSHIP in Geneva.

DAMIAN PENNY IS CATCHING NOAM CHOMSKY IN A LIE, as Chomsky attempts to deny his (utterly, completely, totally wrong) “silent genocide” prediction. No great achievement, in a way, but as Damian notes: “If the Chomsky cultists were capable of thinking on their own instead of unquestioningly accepting everything their hero says, they’d be disappointed.”

THE USE OF THE PHRASE “I FEEL” as a substitute for “I think” has always bothered me. Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s bothered by it.

HATE CRIMES IN EUROPE:

The hardest part of the day for the 230 boys at the Merkaz Hatorah Jewish high school in Gagny, a middle-class suburb of Paris, had always been getting there. During the train ride from home, the boys replaced their yarmulkes with baseball caps but were still regularly hassled by other French teenagers, usually of Arab or North African descent, who called them “sales juifs” (“dirty Jews”). Once the boys made it to the school, a bright steel-and-glass building surrounded by trees and tidy homes, they felt safe. No longer.

About 3 a.m. on Saturday Nov. 15, the school’s brand-new building — due to open Jan. 5 — went up in flames. There are no suspects. Police believe the fire was likely started at two separate points. The blaze licked 8 m into the air, the searing heat blew out windows and warped girders. At least 60 firemen managed to save the old school building next door, but from the synagogue where the boys still gather every morning, they now look out over 3,000 sq m of charred debris. “We were in a very calm place here, a privileged place,” says math teacher Michaël Mimoun. “Now we know there is no privileged place.”

Read the whole thing.