AL QAEDA’S STRATEGY: Andrew Sullivan and Donald Sensing both think that things are going poorly for the terrorists.

MICKEY KAUS announces the winners of his “Krugman Gotcha Contest.” My favorite remark: “Time horizons get short when your intellectual marketing strategy is conspicuously dependent on disaster.”

I’LL CLOSE OUT TODAY with a link to Donald Sensing’s Veteran’s Day post. See you tomorrow.

WELL, HE’S DONE IT: Clayton Cramer has set up a new blog devoted to news reports of civilians using guns to defend themselves.

REPORTEDLY, the United Nations would like to take over the Internet. I’ll bet it would.

UPDATE: Lawguy is unimpressed. Me too.

IS SHEVARDNADZE going down? Could be.

ERIC S. RAYMOND has moved off Blogspot. Drop by and check out the new digs.

DAVID GELERNTER ON LESSONS FROM VIETNAM:

We put them in those rowboats — we antiwar demonstrators, we sophisticated, smart guys. The war was nearly over when I graduated from high school. But high school students were old enough to demonstrate. They were old enough to feel superior to the fools who were running the government. And they were old enough to have known better. They were old enough to have understood what communist regimes had cost the world in suffering, from the prisons of Havana to the death camps of Siberia.

Today we are haunted, in thinking about Iraq, by the fact that a noisy, self-important, narcissistic minority talked the United States into betraying its allies. (Loyalty didn’t mean a lot to antiwar demonstrators; honor didn’t mean a lot.) We betrayed our allies and hurried home, to introspect. They stayed on, to suffer. We were eager to make love, not war, but the South Vietnamese weren’t offered that option. Their alternatives were to knuckle under or die.

It was my fault, mine personally; I was part of the antiwar crowd and I’m sorry. But my apology is too late for the South Vietnamese dead. All I can do is join the chorus in shouting, “No more Vietnams!” No more shrugging off tyranny; no more deserting our friends; no more going back on our duties as the strongest nation on Earth.

Read the whole thing.

AN IMPORTANT ASPECT of diplomacy is rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.

Matt Welch notes that we’re not doing a very good job of rewarding our friends. Meanwhile, Rich Lowry notes that we’re not doing a good enough job of punishing our enemies.

Both need to change, pronto.

IT’S A SPIRITUAL TIME for Tim Blair.

I’M BUSY, but there’s lots of good stuff over at The Volokh Conspiracy. And Winds of Change has a lot, too. Also, don’t miss Alphecca’s weekly media gun-bias roundup. For Indian blog goodness, check out Blog Mela. And The Carnival of the Capitalists is up, with lots of business and economic posts.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the Marines!

LYNN KEISLING summarizes her Wall Street Journal piece on California and energy pricing.

BARBARA AMIEL REPORTS an interesting conversation in The Telegraph:

It was left to the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, to get to the key point.

Mr Ailes was taken with Mr Prodi’s declaration that the EU would not give any money to the reconstruction of Iraq. “Did the Europeans realise,” he asked, “that American taxpayers spent billions reconstructing Europe?” “They did,” replied Mr Prodi expansively, “but friends could differ.”

“Did the Europeans realise,” continued Ailes, unabashed, “that their position in supporting the elimination of sanctions against Saddam when he was in power and refusing to aid rebuilding Iraq when he was gone, appeared ‘odd’?”

Mr Prodi’s English became more Italianate and his arm gestures more expansive. He appeared to be conducting Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries . It was not the case that the EU did not want to help reconstruction, he said, but there was no legitimate government in Iraq to which the EU could give any money.

Ailes continued: “The United States has some reservations about organisations the EU gives money to as well as regimes it supports. In Iraq we are trying to build a new government with some democratic standards. Why won’t you help us?” he asked. “No, no, no,” Prodi said theatrically. “We will not give money when we don’t know to whom.” Which of course explained the hundreds of millions given to the Palestinian Authority by the EU. They must have known it would end up in Mr Arafat’s Swiss bank account. I had fleeting visions of jolly African dictators cashing their Euro-cheques.

One sympathises with Mr Prodi. If you have the dual goal of acting against the US while maintaining the image of acting in friendship, one’s charms get stretched. The problem is the way that the EU developed and is continuing to develop. Now it stands for Western values in name only. In substance, it stands for accommodation with those forces of the world that are the opposite of such values.

Indeed.

BLOGGER MUSIC: You can buy a copy of Ken Layne and the Corvids’ new CD here. I haven’t heard it (except for what’s streamed from the site), but it’s bound to be good.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW with Vodkapundit Stephen Green.

ON THE UPSIDE, THIS WOULD GIVE US AN EXCUSE TO INVADE: “Al Qaeda aims to topple Saudi royals.”

CORI DAUBER: “The words ‘Ritz-Carlton’ and ‘war correspondent’ simply do not belong in the same sentence.”

DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDEAST: OxBlog has a roundup of who’s for it, and who’s not.

VETERAN’S DAY READING — and it’s worth reading.

BLOGOSPHERE FAVE MISS AFGHANISTAN has won “beauty for a cause” in the Miss Earth pageant, though some folks back in Afghanistan aren’t too happy about it.

NICK DENTON’S FLESHBOT — which Halley Suit calls “a veritable InstaPundit of porn” — is up and running now. Er, probably not work-safe.

THE GOOSE CREEK INCIDENT — a commercial for homeschooling and vouchers? I discuss the question over at MSNBC on GlennReynolds.com.

MATT LABASH REPORTS that “Rock the Vote” is lame and uncool.

Of course it is.

UPDATE: So I got to thinking: If I were a candidate, what would my 30-second spot for “Rock the Vote” look like? Probably something like this. I might wear a tie, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Former TV critic Jeff Jarvis reviews my commercial: “Sounds like the Gore campaign.”

Ouch. Well, there’s a reason I’m not a candidate. Er, actually there are lots of reasons. . . . And at least I didn’t try to rap, or anything.

Still, not much of a debut. Guess I’d better fire my Campaign Manager!

MORE: Reader Colin Fraizer emails: “Instawatchers want to know: was this filmed with the XL-1S, the GL-2 or the unnamed Sony?”

Actually, it was filmed with the Toshiba. Not bad for video from a digital still camera. I even used the built-in microphone, not an external one.

STILL MORE: Hey, I picked up Dave Winer’s endorsement! Well, sort of.

MORE STILL: Heh.

ETHICS AND NANOTECHNOLOGY — some interesting developments.