HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

CHECK OUT THE IRAQ-AMERICA FREEDOM ALLIANCE: Fitting for Independence Day.

BLOG HUMOR: David Adesnik replies to a critic.

OUCH: I linked to Marine Corps reservist Eric Johnson’s critique of Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekharan earlier, but now it’s been reprinted in the New York Post. You seldom see major correspondents criticized by name this way.

DARFUR UPDATE: I don’t actually trust them to do this, but I suppose it’s still progress of a sort:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Sudan pledged Saturday to disarm Arab militias, known as Janjaweed, who have driven more than one million Africans from their homes in west Sudan’s Darfur region and to accept human rights monitors in the area. . . .

Long conflict between nomadic Arab tribes and African farmers over scarce resources in Darfur intensified when a revolt broke out last year. Rebels accuse Khartoum of arming the Arab Janjaweed, a charge the government denies.

The United States raised the possibility Friday of sanctions against Sudan if the government did not stop the militia attacks in Darfur.

You get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. . . .

UPDATE: James Moore observes the (necessary?) hypocrisy involved in diplomacy:

Now here is the irony. The Sudanese government has argued all along that it is not guilty of driving the atrocities and that it has no direct control over the janjaweeds. But if the Sudanese government’s claims are true, this same government will not be able to reign in the raiders and comply with its deal with Powell.

Powell most certainly believes that the Sudanese government does control the militias and is driving the genocide. And this assumption, in turn, is central to his current strategy—even while the same assumption is disavowed in his public statements.

Indeed.

QUEST FOR FIREWORKS: When I was a kid, I read a book (already old by then) called Henry Reed’s Journey. Reed is a boy who, on a cross-country drive, is trying to buy fireworks, but they turn out to be illegal almost everywhere he goes. As I noted back when InstaPundit was new, it’s a sort of metaphor for creeping nanny-statism in America, and Reed’s wry commentary now seems prophetic.

That seems to be changing, though. Fireworks have always been a booming business around here, but there are more and bigger stores, catering largely to tourists passing through from less-enlightened regions. And my sense is that there’s a bit less hostility to the idea of fireworks in general. I hope so. Yeah, fireworks can be dangerous. But so can lots of things. A bit of danger is part of life, as is learning how to handle dangerous things without being hurt. If you celebrate the Fourth with fireworks, I hope you do so safely. But also loudly.

Celebrating with one of these, however, would be amusing:

Some Americans this Fourth of July plan to get a bang out of blowing Osama bin Laden’s head off. The bin Laden Noggin, a cone-shaped pyrotechnic device with a cartoon of bin Laden’s face, has been a hot seller at some fireworks stores around the country. When lit, the bin Laden cone erupts in blood-red flames and screeches for 60 seconds. Two shots blow his head off.

It is part of an Exploding Terrorists Heads four-pack that also includes Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Moammar Gadhafi.

Of course, not everyone is happy:

Lisa Myer of Papillion was appalled when she heard about the fireworks while shopping for smoke bombs and sparklers for her son.

“What are we trying to teach our children?” she asked.

I’ll bet Henry Reed could answer that question.

UPDATE: Yep, I did this, too. But we wore shop goggles for safety. Meanwhile, Michael Ubaldi is unconcerned about creeping nannyism:

If Nanny is wrapping her arms around the 4th on paper, she’s accomplished nothing in practical terms. Fireworks are strictly regulated in Ohio but every Independence Day evening, as long as I’ve lived, I’ve heard and seen the incendiary stuff going off in every direction.

People have been testing their kits out around here for weeks. Given the day in question, I kind of like the irony.

Yes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: SKBubba, proud owner of a Nikon D70, offers fireworks photos taken at the Alcoa, TN duck pond last night. Very nice!

MORE: Dean Peters is collecting fireworks related blog posts. And reader Bradley Ems emails with these thoughts in response to the photograph above:

How much have I dropped in your state at the Tennessee-Alabama fireworks stands on I-24 outside of Chattanooga on our pilgrimages to Atlanta and Florida? I shudder to think. Best damn fireworks stores in the US.

Tennessee — exporting liberty!

UNSCAM UPDATE: Paul Bremer is denying charges that he slow-footed the oil-for-food investigation: “It became clear to me that the investigation should be conducted by a nonpolitical body and the Governing Council was clearly thinking in terms of a political investigation . . . The idea that I somehow stood in the way of this is utter and complete nonsense.”

ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS COLUMNIST LINDA SEEBACH has a column on an interesting Yale study on media bias:

Two researchers have combined these two disparate ideas to come up with a measure of media bias that doesn’t depend on journalists’ own perceptions of where they fit on the political spectrum, or on subjective judgments about the philosophical orientation of think tanks. Tim Groseclose, of UCLA and Stanford, and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago used data comparing which think tanks various politicians liked to quote and which think tanks various media outlets liked to quote in their news stories to estimate two ADA scores for each media outlet in the study, one based on the number of times a think tank was cited, and the other on the length of the citation.

The authors say they expected to find that the mainstream media leaned to the left, but they were “astounded by the degree.” So when people say, for example, that The New York Times may be tilted left, but people can compensate for that by watching Fox News, they don’t take into account that the Times is much further from the center than Fox. “To gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading The New York Times.” . . .

The predominance of liberals (however identified) in major media is well-documented, but there remains a great deal of controversy over how much that fact influences news reporting (this analysis looks only at news reports, not editorials, reviews or letters to the editor). Most journalists I know say they work hard to keep their personal views out of their news reporting (again, excepting people like me who are supposed to be expressing opinions). And most of them, I’m sure, sincerely believe they succeed. This is evidence that what they succeed best at is sounding like Democrats.

Here’s a link to the study she writes about.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER spent the night away, so the Instawife and I rented a movie. It was Love, Actually, a Hugh Grant / Liam Neeson vehicle that I thought was pretty weak. The Instawife (who had picked it, natch) liked it better, but she was underwhelmed, too. (Though it got pretty good Amazon reviews, except for the guy who said it was “like poo.”) Oh, well; a good time was nonetheless had by all. Sometimes you care more about the company than the flick.

“THEY CRAVED PARADISE, but blew up a parking lot.”

I’M PRETTY SURE that the proposed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment isn’t going anywhere, which is fine because it’s a dumb idea. But if you want to do your part to bury it, you might want to go here. (Yeah, these are the folks with the blogad on the right. I don’t generally offer what the magazine world calls “editorial support” to advertisers, but I’m sufficiently against this dumb amendment proposal to give its opposition a bit of a boost).

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer is savaging me on this issue. I do not, however, share his discomfort with homosexuality. As for the ad, well, it’s a typical political ad and some of his criticisms are valid, though others are rather forced. It’s true that the Constitution has been amended to do other things besides expand rights, for example, but the only contraction of rights — Prohibition — was swiftly repealed. Other amendments have either been on unrelated topics, or have expanded rights.

On the other hand, I’m not sure but I think Andrew Sullivan may be including me among those who are “complacent” about the amendment’s likelihood of passage. Maybe so, but I don’t think it has much chance. The goal, I think, is to make Kerry squirm — because he opposes gay marriage but will have trouble saying that before the Convention — and then have it die quietly. That’s no reason not to write your representatives and make your opposition known, though.

MORE: Spoons is anti-anti-gay marriage, but doesn’t like the campaign against the amendment. Or something like that. Read his post.

STILL MORE: Andrew Olmsted: “While I do not support the amendment, and in fact would vote in favor of legal gay marriage were it a ballot option, I think Spoons is in the right in this disagreement. . . . Shoot down the FMA because it’s a bad amendment. But don’t pretend that it’s bad simply because it is an amendment.” Fair enough, though amending the Constitution is like brain surgery — risky and permanent enough that proponents of the operation bear a heavy burden of proof that it’s really needed.

JEFF JARVIS: “Back in my day, we volunteered for campaigns because we cared, not because we were paid.”

You’re still big, Jeff. It’s the campaigns that got small.

MICKEY KAUS has a new Gearbox column posted, in which he reviews an “electrogothic cab of death!”

I like Electrogoth.

IF YOU CARE ABOUT FREEDOM FOR IRAN, you ought to read this.

UPDATE: Read this about Hong Kong, too.

RALPH NADER is charging that he’s the victim of “dirty tricks” on the part of the Establishment.

SPINSANITY WRITES on The temperature at which Michael Moore’s pants burn.

LAURA CLEVERLY writes that her 7-year-old son is going blind. She doesn’t want money, but she does want you to help organizations that are working on a cure. She sends this link to the Foundation Fighting Blindness, and this link to her son’s webpage.

JAMES LILEKS comments on the Hardy & Clarke book on Michael Moore:

I want to get back to reading the “Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man” book. (Note: 89 pages into the book, the title remains the sole ad hominem remark. And even so it’s a winking reference to Moore’s own work, as well as Al Franken’s deathless tome on Limbaugh. I’ll say this for the Moore book: it’s brisk and deft, and avoids screedy polemics for one-on-one factual refutations of what the authors identify as Moore’s more egregious fictitions. I was piqued by the theory that Moore manipulated his confrontation with Mr. Heston in “Columbine” – the scene where he showed Heston a photo of a murdered girl and asked for comments. If the authors are correct, what Moore did was the same thing William Hurt’s character did in “Broadcast News” – manipulating a one-camera shot to make it seem as if it was a two-camera shot, and editing post-interview footage to make it look as if it was all one contiguous event.) Full review on Monday.

I look forward to reading the full review.

UPDATE: Read this post on Moore, too.

HELP A JOURNALIST! Mark Miller emails:

I’m a researcher for People magazine and I’m trying to track down anyone who has had a blog entry backfire on him or her either professionally or personally. Any help you can be is totally appreciated.

He asks that you email him here:

EUGENE VOLOKH remains critical of Slate’s “Kerryism” feature. I now ignore both the “Kerryism” and “Bushism” items, but for those who are interested, Eugene’s critique is worth reading.

THE WHEELS OF JUSTICE: For quite a few months now I’ve been harping on a story of U.S. troop misconduct originally broken by Iraqi blogger Zeyad. (Most recent roundup, with links to earlier accounts, here; original post here). And now we see something is happening:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Army has charged four soldiers, three of them with manslaughter, over the drowning of an Iraqi prisoner while a new report criticized U.S. military detention policies, officials said on Friday.

Newspaper reports in Colorado, where the soldiers were based, said they were accused of forcing two Iraqis to jump off a bridge in the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, on January 3. The men had been picked up for violating a curfew.

One of the Iraqis swam to the river bank but the other drowned, according to the reports.

For a while it looked as if there might be a coverup. I’m glad that turned out not to be the case. I don’t know whether this case would have come to the attention of the authorities without Zeyad’s blog, but I certainly think that it’s helped to keep the pressure on. So far, Zeyad hasn’t posted anything about it on his blog, but I imagine that he will.

UPDATE: Read this.

TERRY TEACHOUT HAS THOUGHTS on Marlon Brando.

A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE FAILURE: Understandable, but it makes you wonder what else they’re getting wrong.

MATT WELCH: Striking fear into Bill O’Reilly!

A MAJOR U.S. SHOW OF FORCE in the Pacific. The Gweilo Diaries thinks that the Chinese will be unhappy, but not unimpressed.

UPDATE: The Straits Times story linked above seems to have misunderstood — it’s 7 carrier groups, but in 5 different theaters, not all off the coast of China. Reader Owen Tredennick wonders if this is a mistake, or Chinese propaganda spin:

Sina.com may be setting up a “US bullying with 7 carriers, China responds, US backs down, sends one or two” story line.

Or they may just have blown it. Another reader suggests that we’ll be applying a double-squeeze to North Korea and Iran. Beats me. Stay tuned.