PAUL BREMER offers Iraq’s path to sovereignty, in a Washington Post oped. No mention of the “oil trust” idea, sadly.

THOUGHTS ON EMPLOYMENT, SELF-EMPLOYMENT, AND AIRBAGS: All over at GlennReynolds.com.

KATE WRITES:

Living in one of the most “progressive” Islamic countries, Jordanian women who hope for the right to divorce their husbands have another wait ahead of them, as the country’s parliament held off voting on the bill for yet more debate. The likely outcome of that debate can be inferred from today’s decision by parliament to forgo harsher punishments for men who kill women as a matter of upholding their “honor.”

Why can’t we interest the UN Human Rights Commission in this stuff. . . .?

PROTESTS IN SEATTLE? Yawn. Anti-tax protests in Seattle? Hmm. Now that’s not a snoozer — especially since it’s a coffee tax. . . .

TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR — THAT’S INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM! German mediablogger David Kaspar emails with this bit about the Associated Press’s coverage of reactions to Bush’s speech:

AP distributed a release of US citizens reactions to the “Address of the President to the Nation” of Sunday night.

The US version of AP’s release is presented by Fox News. AP quotes five US citizens with positive reactions to President Bush’s speech, and four with negative reactions.

The same release is distributed by AP in a German version. In this version, some quotes of the US version are omitted, others were added. Result: two US citizens are quoted with positive reactions to President Bush’s speech, and five with negative reactions.

Title of the US version: “Americans React to Bush Speech”

Title of the German version: “Hurra-Rede statt Substanz” (“Hurray-Speech Instead of Substance”)

I can hardly blame my fellow German citizens for their antiamerican feelings -they are nurtured by the distortions of international news agencies.

And it’s not even Reuters! (Here’s the original post, in German.)

CANADA — SANCTUARY FOR TERRORISTS? Sixty Minutes thinks so.

JEFF JARVIS responds to Jonathan Alter with a post on what the “new patriotism” means to him:

: Alter misses the point by a century.

Patriotism is much bigger than politics. And the definition of patriotism is no longer in the hands of the politicians and pundits. After 9.11, it is in our hands, for we are all Americans and we are all targets on this new battlefield. We know what it means to be patriotic and it has very little to do with partisanship or politics. We know the price of patriotism.

Patriotism means defending the principles of America over politics. Patriotism means being willing to protect those principles where and when its necessary. Patriotism means defending your children and your neighbors against those who would attack us because we are American. Patriotism means being willing to go it alone even when your former friends (read: Europeans) snipe at you. Try that on as a new definition.

Read the whole thing. Especially if your name is Jonathan Alter!

STEPHEN MOORE warns that Howard Dean may be a bigger threat to Bush than most Republicans realize. I think he’s right.

I’ve said all along that Bush is vulnerable — and there’s new evidence that he’s losing his base.

UPDATE: Lileks thinks that this doesn’t matter:

I think that’s overrated, and also somewhat irrelevant; what are they going to do in 04, write in “Tom McClintock”? Yes, they could stay home, but I have a hard time imagining large numbers of GOPers thinking “I trust him more on national security than that Dean fellow, but I just can’t vote for a guy who co-authored an education bill with Ted Kennedy.”

The question is who has a better sense of the rationality of the Republican base. Stay tuned. Lileks also notes:

As for the Iraq situation? I’m stunned that a country whose face was held mouth-down in the mud for 30 years hasn’t spontaneously produced a civil society in six months. I don’t think they’ve even started thinking about a new national anthem. Let’s give it all to the French.

He’s obviously been reading Dowd again.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Miller figures the odds on Bush’s reelection at about 60/40. Meanwhile John Edwards has declared for Vice President according to QandO. I actually think that Edwards’ prospects are better than most people are allowing for at the moment.

HE’S RESTING NOW, MAY IT BE IN PEACE. Warren Zevon died yesterday. BlogCritics has a link-rich roundup post focusing more on his life than his death, as is appropriate.

TECHCENTRALSTATION JOINS THE GUARDIAN in putting up a special site relating to the Cancun trade talks.

IT’S FROM LAST WEEK, but this UPI report on terrorists and Venezuela is worth noting:

Intelligence agencies are investigating links between Islamic terrorist networks and the Venezuelan government. While U.S. counter terrorist efforts in Latin America have until now tended to concentrate on the “tri border area” of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, it’s believed that al-Qaida suicide bombers could also be hiding in Venezuela.

Investigators name two Venezuelan based al-Qaida suspects: Hakim Mamad Al Diab Fatah who was deported from the U.S. on suspicion of involvement with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and Rahaman Hazil Mohammed Alan who is jailed in the U.K. for smuggling an explosive device onto a British Airways flight. American and British officials complain that their investigations are stymied because the government of President Hugo Chavez has dismantled U.S.-trained intelligence units which tracked terrorist connections among the half-million strong Venezuelan Arab community.

Chavez has instead brought in Cuban and Libyan advisors to run his security services according to American, British and other European diplomatic officials in Caracas.

That’s comforting.

CARLOS BALL has more on Cancun, trade liberalization, and State Department fecklessness. Though, to be fair, the State Department isn’t the biggest problem here.

SHELL OFFERS A SUGGESTION FOR WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS:

The irony is that when Western men accepted that rape isn’t the victim’s fault, women started covering themselves less, and men got nicer things to look at. When Western men allowed women to own their own sexuality, they started getting more and better sex from enthusiastic partners. This is win-win here. Does anyone really want to return to the days when women were supposed to lie back and think of England and men hadn’t heard of the clitoris?

Sex is what is going to free the Arab world, the men as well as the women. And if the men really knew what life is like on this side, they might help the women come out from under the hijab.

Sadly, I’m not sure this is true. It’s certainly not true for the fanatics, though I don’t know what would win them over. Then again, maybe they’re just afraid of the work involved.

I DON’T KNOW HOW ACCURATE IT IS, but here’s a warning that SoBig’s latest version will be worse. It’s a bit alarmist, and I don’t know much about the site where it appears, but it’s largely consistent with this:

The “F” in the latest Sobig worm’s name indicates that it is the sixth version of the virus since Sobig.A appeared in January, and its creator is refining it with each new version. Sobig.F is set to expire Sept. 10, and security experts say they expect a Sobig.G to show up soon thereafter.

“The author seems to be experimenting,” Sunner said. “He’s introducing the worm on different days of the week, seeding the virus in different locations. He’s looking for the ideal conditions for release.” . . .

“A superworm is definitely possible,” said Joe Stewart, senior security researcher at Lurhq Corp., a computer-security company. “Unfortunately, it’s not even necessary right now. With the current level of user education out there, it’s just as easy to write something pretty dumb that still works great.”

Just freaking great.

UPDATE: A reader says that this is “utter nonsense,” but offers no details. Hope he’s right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Patrick McKenzie emails:

A couple of points :

a) The likelihood that there is one SoBig author approaches zero. Internet viruses are usually copycat affairs that link unique payloads (which are easy to write) to infection vectors (which are harder — that is why everyone bandwagons on to the hot exploit of the minute).

b) The threat of a new and improved SoBig is less than that of a new exploit tied to a nasty payload. SoBig had two really nice features from the security point of view — it hit almost everyone and did almost no permanent damage. This means that the majority of machines have been patched to avoid the buffer overrun that enabled the bug. My university immunized over 8,000 computers, for example.

c) The “wormnet” idea is beyond fantastic. For starters, any worm with a sufficiently robust protocol for communicating with itself would, umm, have a protocol for communicating with itself. Every corporate firewall and ISP would key in on the sequence in a matter of hours and shut it down. “Random viral mutations” are a sci-fi idea that have NEVER been used to effectively keep a worm from having a fixed character sequence to search against — its impossible to write code to reliably disguise the signature of the polymorphing code itself. This behavior is also nigh-upon unknown in legitimate software, which means that writing a polymorphic worm is a big “hit me! I’m over here!” sign to virus scanners.

So, in short, your less verbose reader earlier was completely right.

Thanks.

THE GUARDIAN’S SUBSIDY BLOG is deeply pessimistic:

Even before the talks have got underway plans are in place for another unscheduled ministerial meeting early next year. If this is a meeting to build on what is agreed at Cancun no one would argue. But if, as reporter Nick Mathiason suggests it is because ministers have already accepted that agreement won’t be reached this week then it is absolutely shameful. . . .

The progress of the negotiations hasn’t been helped by the astonishing remarks last week of Franz Fischler, the EU agriculture commissioner who dismissed calls by developing countries for big cuts in subsidies as cheap propaganda and said that Brussels would strongly defend its farmers. Isn’t there anyone out there big enough to rescue these talks from the trough into which they are falling?

I don’t think it will be Bush, who — partly because folks like The Guardian have been demanding it — is likely to have to give the French et al., something (like continued agricultural protection) in order to get a UN imprimatur for the rebuilding of Iraq whose chief value is to impress people who listen to The Guardian about such things.