SICK TODAY: Cancelled a trip for a pro bono project I’m working on. I doubt I’ll be blogging much. I’m going to try to do the meeting via speakerphone, but the rest of the time I’ll be reading the new Neal Stephenson book. See you tomorrow! I’ll leave you with a picture of a lovely day, taken yesterday as I did my circuit of Lakeshore Park.

I hope you enjoy your day, wherever you are. Get away from that computer and get some sunshine! Life is short.

UPDATE: No, I’m not dying or anything — just a cold that went from mildly annoying to quite nasty overnight. Blogging may remain lighter than usual throughout the week, as I husband my energies.

WINDS OF CHANGE has a bunch of links to ways to support the troops.

CARROLL MORSE: “The outcome in Venezuela will reveal much about whether the existing international system helps or hinders organizing in the name of freedom.”

WHILE JOHN KERRY IS CALLING FOR MULTILATERALISM IN IRAQ, we’re seeing firefights among U.N. peacekeepers in that multilateral non-paradise, Kosovo. “It is not known whether Mr. Kerry was aware of events in Kosovo at the time he recorded his demands. He may choose today to change his position.”

UPDATE: More problems with multilateralism here.

MIKE SILVERMAN: “As long as we are handing states out… Why do the Palestinians get to jump ahead of the Kurds?”

THE POWER of the link. May it continue to grow.

ANOTHER COOL PHOTOBLOG: From Juneau.

A READER EMAILS: “How can you expect people to respect you when you don’t have a picture of yourself bearing arms?”

Sadly, I don’t think I possess any such picture. However, in a spirit of accommodation, here’s a picture of some students from my Advanced Constitutional Law class, on a field trip to a local shooting range.

That’ll have to do, I’m afraid.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP OF STORIES on the retention / reenlistment issue discussed earlier. The news looks quite positive, though I stress that we should be looking at this in a long-term way even if the short-term numbers are good.

HERE’S MORE ON “UNSCAM,” THE OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL in U.S. News:

Here’s how the scam allegedly worked: Saddam sold oil to his friends and allies around the world at deep discounts. The buyers resold the oil at huge profits. Saddam then got kickbacks of 10 percent from both the oil traders and the suppliers of humanitarian goods. Iraqi bean counters, fortunately, kept meticulous records.

Coincidence. If you wondered why the French were so hostile to America’s approach to Iraq and even opposed to ending the sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War, here’s one possible explanation: French oil traders got 165 million barrels of Iraqi crude at cut-rate prices. The CEO of one French company, SOCO International, got vouchers for 36 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Was it just a coincidence that the man is a close political and financial supporter of President Jacques Chirac? Or that a former minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, allegedly received 12 million barrels from Baghdad? Or that a former French ambassador to the U.N., Jean-Bernard Merimee, received an allocation of 11 million barrels? Perhaps it was just happenstance, too, that a French bank with close ties to then French President François Mitterrand and one of the bank’s big shareholders who is close to Saddam became the main conduit for the bulk of the $67 billion in proceeds from the oil-for-food program. All told, 42 French companies and individuals got a piece of this lucrative trade. No matter how cynical you may be, it’s sometimes just plain hard to keep up with the French.

But they’re not alone. Russians received more than 2.5 billion barrels of the cut-rate crude. Some 1.4 billion barrels went to the Russian state. Not to be left out of the feeding frenzy, even the U.N. got in on the action. It received administrative fees of about $2 billion for the program, which may be fair, but the senior U.N. official in charge of the program, Benon Sevan, is reported to have received 11.5 million barrels himself. Cotecna, a Swiss-based firm hired by the U.N. to monitor the import of the food and medicine to Iraq, hired Kojo Annan, the son of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as a consultant during the period when the company was assembling and submitting bids for the oil-for-food program.

Read the whole thing. It seems as if this story is starting to get some real attention.

THEY’RE BUILDING A NEW HYATT REGENCY in Kabul. I haven’t heard a lot of good things about the accommodations there, so it’s bound to be an improvement.

WONKETTE GETS FEATURED in the New York Times.

UPDATE: Justin Katz has some thoughts. So does N.Z. Bear.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Lindgren emails:

I thought that the most interesting part of the New York Times story on Wonkette was a not-too-veiled attack on bloggers for inaccuracy, compared to their supposedly more accurate print counterparts–particularly on the Kerry-intern story. A former gossip columnist for WAPO is quoted as saying “We’re really writing fairly rigorously sourced items.”

I find this unintentionally humorous: for weeks almost every major news organization ran unsubstantiated rumors that Bush had been AWOL from the National Guard. Many bloggers were much more careful on the Bush story than the Washington Post and other big media, saying to wait for evidence. If Bush had actually showed up for service, bloggers pointed out, his pay records should prove it.

When Bush’s pay records were released and the AWOL rumor turned out to be just as phony as the Kerry-intern story, there were few (if any) mea culpas from big media for running weeks of phony anti-Bush rumors. I’d say that on balance most bloggers did somewhat worse than the mainstream press on the Kerry intern story, and much better than the mainstream press on the Bush AWOL story. More to the blogosphere’s credit, their coverage was far more balanced than big media’s; many bloggers (such as Instapundit) were cautious about both stories. If the mainstream press is determined to print unsubstantiated rumors, it would be better to do it for both parties and collectively to show the same distribution of views from credulity to skepticism that the blogosphere showed about both stories.

Once again, slight advantage blogosphere.

I also wonder whether the rumor is true that the same Democratic operative was the source for both the phony Kerry intern story and the phony Bush AWOL story. I don’t expect the mainstream press ever to tell us who duped them and why they bought one lie but not the other.

Interesting observations.

EQUAL (TAX) TIME: Jack Bogdanski, who did the Bush / Cheney tax-return analysis linked below, now takes a look at John Kerry’s tax return.

KENNETH TIMMERMAN: “What we knew — and didn’t do.”

GEORGE WASHINGTON IS AN ICON, and like most icons, he has attracted attention mostly from iconoclasts. But I just got a copy of David Hackett Fischer’s new book, Washington’s Crossing, which like Richard Brookhiser’s earlier biography, Founding Father, makes clear that Washington was, in fact, a rather amazing guy. There’s also a bit of an echo of the red-blue divide on the subject, as Fischer notes in a discussion of Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware:

In 1897, private collector John S. Kennedy bought the painting for the extravagant sum of $16,000, and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There it remained until 1950, when romantic history paintings passed out of fashion among sophisticated New Yorkers. It was sent away to the Dallas Art Museum in Texas, and then to Washington Crossing State Park in Pennsylvania, where it stayed until 1970.

Fischer then looks at the many “debunkers” of the painting, and observes that while they were sometimes (though not always) right about the details they debunked, “they rarely asked about the accuracy of its major themes.” Indeed.

UPDATE: Here’s a review of the book. And Ralph Luker has thoughts on the difference between nitpicking and debunking.

MORE UNREST IN IRAN:

A security patrol car was blocked and an agent was shot by an armed group of three young freedom fighters in the Iranian Capital. This news has been confirmed, in an unprecedented manner, in the today’s “Ghods Daily” which is an official newspaper affiliated to the paramilitary and repressive Bassij force.

Stay tuned. I think the situation there is growing less stable.

BLACKFIVE EXPECTS NEGOTIATIONS WITH SADR TO FAIL, and doesn’t seem to mind too much.

MORE PHOTOBLOGGING: Here are some very nice photos from Oregon.

UPDATE: And here are some lovely pictures from Tasmania.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten has Oregon pictures, too.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more Tasmania pictures here and here.

ANOTHER TERROR PLOT FOILED:

Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists planned a chemical attack on Jordan’s spy headquarters that could have killed 20,000 people, officials have said.
Earlier this week King Abdullah said a massive attack had been thwarted by a series of arrests, but named no target.

Now unnamed officials say the suspects have confessed to plotting to detonate a chemical bomb on the Amman HQ of the Intelligence Services.

The plot was reportedly hatched by al-Qaeda suspect Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi.

But that’s not the real news. If it’s true, this is the real news:

Jordan’s King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al Qaeda bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Interesting.

CNN ASKS “Will nanotech save the world, or is it mostly hype?” Perhaps both. Here’s more on the hype.

GOOD RIDDANCE.

UPDATE: “It’s nice when cosmic justice and individual preferences can both be satisfied.”

HERE’S A LETTER TO THE EDITOR from a recently returned Iraq vet. Like many other such letters, it says that thngs are much better there than media reports suggest.

I tend to believe that — things are better almost everywhere (except Cuba) than media reports suggest., But as I’ve said before, the biggest problem with the Iraq reporting isn’t that it’s too negative, though it is, it’s that it doesn’t tell us what we need to know. The CERP issue, for example, was probably the most important single thing going on last summer/fall but it got very little attention from the media. Likewise, the big media were slow to follow up on Zeyad’s war-crime scoop. And I ran an email regarding problems at the CPA that haven’t been addressed by big media much, but that are quite important if they’re as bad as my reader suggests.

Despite last week’s hysteria, which made factional fighting — ugly but limited — out to be a massive popular uprising, it’s clear that the real issues in Iraq are political, not military. Is our government doing a good job? It’s hard to tell. And the tendency, knowing that the media are overplaying some negatives, is to apply Kentucky windage and assume that things in general are better than they say. This may be true, but it may also be true (as the above examples suggest, and as I’ve noted before on multiple occasions) that there’s not just good news, but bad news, going unreported.

That’s especially unfortunate, because good reporting doesn’t just inform ordinary folks like us. It’s also a check on reports that flow up within the chain of command, making sure that real problems get noticed and not papered over. I’m afraid that the White House, understandably tired of the unrelenting negativity that has given us the Brutal Afghan Winter of 2002, the Invasion-Killing Sandstorm of 2003, and the Mass Popular Uprising of 2004, may have started tuning out negative reports.

That would be a mistake, and here’s one that shouldn’t be tuned out: Jordan’s King Abdullah is worried about increasing chances for civil war in Iraq: “Six months ago, I didn’t think it was a possibility. I still don’t think it is, but for the first time we’re nervous.”

He’s unimpressed with the de-Baathification program, which he says has turned many people in to malcontents unnecessarily. Is he right? I don’t know (though this echoes, in some ways, concerns raised by Chief Wiggles many months ago). But it’s the kind of thing people ought to be thinking about, and the kind of thing I’d like to see reporting on. The blogosphere has been carrying more than its share of the load on this stuff, and it’s not really something that blogs are ideally suited for. Big media can do it better — if they want to, and if they bother to.

IN CASE YOU DIDN’T NOTICE THE UPDATE in John Cole’s post that I linked earlier, the doctored photo appears to be the result of idiocy by a Marine rather than propaganda by anti-war folks.

HERE, VIA THE TAXPROF BLOG, is an analysis of Bush and Cheney’s tax returns.

I don’t know of a similar Kerry analysis yet. (Though Tom Maguire has items here and here, which TaxProf notes.) But if you look at page 25 of Kerry’s tax returns, you’ll see an $85 deduction for non-money donations to Goodwill. A tax-professor reader notes that this:

raises an interesting parallel to Clinton’s tax returns he released when he first ran for President. Remember how he got excoriated for deducting various clothing items donated to Goodwill, including, most famously, used underwear? . . . Kerry deducted $85 for a Goodwill donation! Enquiring minds want to know: what was it Sen. Kerry? Underwear? Military Medals?

Somebody should ask him.

UPDATE: The InstaWife looked at both links above and wonders why anyone is talking about Bush and Cheney as rich, when Kerry is so much wealthier. (Of course, much of Kerry’s wealth is spousal.) And she notes that Kerry seems to be paying a smaller percentage of his income than Bush in taxes. But she misses the point: Rich Republicans are richer than rich Democrats, even when they don’t have as much money!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Verdon says that many commentators misunderstand the flat tax.

And no, tax-blogging won’t be a regular thing here. I’d rather do cat-blogging. . . .

MORE: Reader Eric Lindholm (VikingPundit) emails:

I’ve tried to raise everybody’s consciousness on this, but I’m not getting any traction. So I’ll bother you.

Here in Massachusetts, the state tax return has an OPTIONAL higher tax rate of 5.85% instead of the normal 5.3% – just in case you want to pay more to the state.

Now, I cannot find Kerry’s STATE tax return. As one of the wealthy few, did he pay the higher rate or did he pay the normal rate? In other words, is he a hypocrite or a panderer?

I don’t know anything about this. Does anyone out there know more?

MORE: Here are the Massachusetts state income tax instructions. The voluntary rate is discussed at the lower left on page 12. As reader Kory Schimke emails: ” Unclear why any sane person would do this, but if one thinks that rich people should pay more tax than they currently are required to, maybe they should do it voluntarily.” There’s more on this story here.

STILL MORE: If Kerry did pay the extra, it’ll be a change from previous years, judging from this report.

MORE STILL: And on the federal front, Kerry initially underpaid: “Sen. John F. Kerry had to amend his tax return this week after accountants discovered he owed nearly $12,000 more than he thought. . . Spokesman Michael Meehan said Kerry’s accountants calculated his capital gains tax wrongly at a 20 percent rate instead of the correct 28 percent.”

But what about those voluntary Massachusetts taxes?

EVEN MORE STILL: A few lefty readers are emailing snarky comments because I’m “blogging about Kerry’s underwear.” Well, not really.

But, in fact, the Clinton underwear episode — which, as a Clinton supporter at the time, I dismissed with similar snarkiness — turned out to be massively revealing. He was donating used underwear, and taking big deductions for it. That combination of narcissism and opportunism turned out to mark Clinton’s presidency.

Likewise, if — as it appears — Kerry is talking about taxes but not taking the optional higher rate, well, that’s revealing too.

FINALLY: Tax professor Paul Caron emails:

In my federal income tax class, we joke that perhaps, in light of subsequent events (the Monica Lewinsky dress), President Clinton may have *undervalued* the used underwear he donated to Goodwill!

Good point!

AN INTERESTING SURVEY of things learned by the Mars rover Opportunity, whose mission has been startlingly successful.