DANIEL DREZNER OFFERS A JOHN EDWARDS TRIBUTE and roundup. He thinks the Democrats are “prematurely slighting” Edwards’ candidacy. Plus, the surprising similarity between Salma Hayek and Jacques Chirac.

AMERICA, CANADA, AND IRAN: Tim Blair compares and contrasts.

MICKEY KAUS HAS MORE on the continuing embarrassment of the Sacramento Bee:

It turns out that Weintraub wasn’t saddled with a minder to placate PC forces in the state legislature enraged by his “Bustmont” crack, because he’d already been saddled with a minder to placate PC forces within the Bee’s own newsroom enraged by his “Bustmont” crack! Weintruab is an editorial page employee, not a news employee. Apparently the news side of the Bee has never liked his blog, for some obvious reasons (e.g. he’s been beating the pants off them). His provocative anti-Bustamante comments were enough to trigger a newsroom-led bureaucratic Thermidor. I mean, it was as if he was criticizing affirmative action! Can’t have that.

Certainly not! And, as usual, complaints about journalistic ethics turn out to involve protecting somebody from competition.

MERYL YOURISH GIVES A LOUSY GRADE to disaster recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Isabel.

WHY THEY HATE US: Blog gets shoddy reporter fired. And at the Bee no less. Say, you don’t think. . . .

AMIR TAHERI WRITES that the lack of a coherent policy toward Iraq is causing economic woes and serious foreign relations problems for the French.

BRYAN PRESTON SURVIVED ISABEL and is continuing to blog even without power.

MY LATEST MSNBC POST on Big Media reporting on Iraq is up. In particular, I recommend the appearance by Pamela Hess on C-SPAN that’s mentioned (and linked) there. Something that I found striking, but didn’t mention, was that after Hess (a UPI reporter who just got back from Iraq) said that things weren’t as bad in Iraq as the Big Media coverage makes them seem, she got a lot of truly nasty emails and phone calls from war critics who called her a “whore” and a “mouthpiece for the Administration.” (One also called Bush a “monkey in a man suit.”)

But now even Dan Rather is admitting that the TV news is making things look worse in Iraq than they really are. Perhaps that’s a sign that the tide is turning.

MEDIA BIAS ON IRAQ: I’ve got a followup to last week’s post on media bias and Iraq, which will be up at GlennReynolds.com later. But a reader just sent me this link to a piece by Democratic Congressman Jim Marshall, who recently visited Iraq and who says that media bias is “killing our troops,” and who also notes:

I’m afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded, the Blumbergs. Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with “the rest of the story,” the progress made daily, the good news. The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy.

During the conventional part of this conflict, embedded journalists reported the good, the bad and the ugly. Where are the embeds now that we are in the difficult part of the war, now that fair and balanced reporting is critically important to our chances of success? At the height of the conventional conflict, Fox News alone had 27 journalists embedded with U.S. troops (out of a total of 774 from all Western media). Today there are only 27 embedded journalists from all media combined.

Throughout Iraq, American soldiers with their typical “can do” attitude and ingenuity are engaging in thousands upon thousands of small reconstruction projects, working with Iraqi contractors and citizens. Through decentralized decision-making by unit commanders, the 101st Airborne Division alone has spent nearly $23 million in just the past few months. This sum goes a very long way in Iraq. Hundreds upon hundreds of schools are being renovated, repainted, replumbed and reroofed. Imagine the effect that has on children and their parents.

People are catching on. If Rumsfeld accused the media of killing our troops, people would say he was browbeating and bullying them. Maybe they’ll listen, when it comes from a Democrat.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

THOMAS PEARSON writes that the anti-globalization movement is in decline. I certainly hope so. The bits about Bureaucrash’s anti-protester pranks are amusing, too.

IS IT PRE-EMPTIVE, OR NOT? Bill Hobbs says that Bush’s critics are lying about the Administration’s position on Saddam in order to make it look as if Bush lied. I remember the Bush Administration being careful — overly so, in some cases — to make clear that it wasn’t charging Saddam with complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

The charge now, though, is that the Administration “gave the impression” that Saddam was behind the attacks, which is suitably vague and allows the chargers to point to polls showing that most Americans think so. It’s also possible, of course, that people have made up their own minds, isn’t it? Of course, to some, I suspect that’s an even more frightening thought.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz looks at poll data showing that Americans’ belief in Saddam’s complicity has actually declined over the past two years — despite what people claim are Bush’s efforts to give that impression — and accuses Bush’s critics of an outright lie. He also links to this post and this one from John Cole, on lies, misimpressions, and anti-Bush dishonesty.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Kennedy, meanwhile, has gotten carried away with the Bush-bashing.

Will the lefties be calling him a liar over his unsubstantiated — and apparently untrue — statements?

ISABEL POWER OUTAGES CONTINUE, and this useful chart shows where and how many. (It omits the crucial information that one of them is David Bernstein, though.)

I realize that underground power lines are more expensive to install, maintain, etc. But I wonder whether they’re really more expensive in a global sense if you factor in the costs imposed on consumers by the more-frequent power outages associated with overhead lines. (Not to mention the aesthetic costs of overhead lines, which are high.) This would be an interesting and useful topic for news coverage, though once their Mother of Storms hype ends they seem largely uninterested in this sort of thing. Here’s a roundup of hurricane-recovery efforts, and here’s a good article from the Post on electrical systems, resilience, and recovery that mentions underground lines — but that also says that community restrictions on tree-trimming are a big source of problems.

I had some related thoughts in this column a few weeks ago. The big problem is that people want reliability, but don’t want to pay for it. But when you don’t pay for reliability, you wind up paying for un reliability, and I’m not sure that’s cheaper in the end.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting article from the Post on how wi-fi, high-speed Internet, and other technologies mitigated the economic effect of the hurricane. (Via Bill Hobbs).

LEE HARRIS writes on war and wishful thinking.

START MAKING SENSE: The Boston Globe is comparing Larry Summers to James Bryant Conant, a legend among Harvard Presidents who remade the institution in the face of changing times, despite faculty resistance.

(Via Hub Blog).

1996, YOU SAY?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told American interrogators that he first discussed the plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that the original plan called for hijacking five commercial jets on each U.S. coast before it was modified several times, according to interrogation reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

I guess we can’t blame it on failure to ratify Kyoto, then.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I guess we can’t blame it the failure of the Oslo Agreement, or Netanyahu, or Barak, or Sharon either.

Huh. You think they just hate us because we threaten their 12th century view of politics and gender relations?

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader suggests that it should be “7th century,” not 12th century. Fair enough. And some folks recommend Losing Bin Laden by Richard Miniter for more on the 90s activities of Al Qaeda. I haven’t read the book — the publisher sent me a copy, but it was immediately seized by the InstaWife — but it seemed, for the brief instant that it was actually in my possession, as if it might be interesting.

LOTS OF INTERESTING STUFF ABOUT RWANDA, and French / NGO misconduct, over at Winds of Change.

MAYBE THERE’S HOPE: Peace protesters are catching hell even in The Observer:

Next weekend, the far Left will once again seek to con tens of thousands of Irish people. Earlier this year, the unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists, under the banner of pacifism, brought the masses on to the streets of Dublin, Derry and Belfast. The M-Lers even managed to fool respected, usually erudite, commentators, writers and artists into believing in the justness of their ’cause’.
But their ’cause’ was, in truth, a carefully produced masquerade, a ruse to dragoon legions of genuinely concerned citizens on this island into their campaign against ‘imperialism’ and for that, of course, please read ‘anti-Americanism’. . . .

Marching for ‘peace’ back in January objectively (a word often used by the M-Lers) entailed support for the retention of the Baath. Now that all the apocalyptic predictions of the Irish peace movement have proved to be wrong, the anti-American Left is now seizing on every grenade attack, shooting and roadside bomb directed at allied forces and, yes, the United Nations, in Iraq. Some of the Irish ultra-Left groups are even abusing language and truth by describing those behind these sorties as the ‘resistance to occupation’. . . .

Suddenly, the Irish extreme Left portrays the Baath loyalists and the fedayeen (an alliance of Islamic fanatics and Saddam sympathisers) as the Vietcong of the twenty-first century, a libellous slur against the heroic people of Vietnam who really did have a just cause to fight for.

What this alliance of Baathists and Islamists fear more than anything (a fear shared by the Arab dictatorships) is the threat of a good example. If Iraq evolves from a one-party gangster state into a pluralist democracy, a process well underway in the northern Kurdish region with its free press and multi-party system, then it will become a beacon of hope for other oppressed people in the region.

Which would be horrible.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: I meant to link this article on Colorado bloggers from The Rocky Mountain News last week, but it got lost in the shuffle. It’s good — but where’s Stephen Green?

UPDATE: Oh, he’s in the sidebar. Sorry.