WELL, THAT WAS EXCITING! Now a game for you — spot the first pundit to try to tie the Patriots’ victory to the election.

UPDATE: That certainly didn’t take long. Though there may be a Heisenberg issue here. . . .

RICH GALEN has a new post from Baghdad, and scroll to the bottom for something you can do to help the troops.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, this time involving Cecile Dubois, whose teachers are stigmatizing her for being an individual, and trying to get her to adopt their rigid middle-class code of denial and conformity.

BILL QUICK is blogging the Super Bowl in realtime.

WENT UP TO THE LAKE YESTERDAY AFTERNOON and spent the night. There’s high-speed Internet there — and even wi-fi — but we avoided it in favor of lower-tech amusements. I have sore shoulders now from tossing my 4-year-old nephew into the air.

GEITNER SIMMONS has posts here and here on how the BBC scandal is playing in London.

UPDATE: Here’s a related item. And here’s another.

LAST WEEK’S TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN warned that the nanotechnology industry’s PR strategy was likely to backfire, and cause it to be scissored between the scientists and visionaries on one side, and the environmentalists on the other. And what do you know — it’s already coming true.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting Slashdot thread.

SADDAM’S CASH: More thoughts on who reportedly got money from Saddam, by Roger Simon and The Weekly Standard.

THE PROS AND CONS OF JOHN KERRY: An interesting debate at The New Republic, to which Mickey Kaus adds his own observations, including this one: “There’s a palpable will to self-deceive among Democrats eager to rationalize away Kerry’s flaws.”

I could be interested in a Democrat if I thought he were (1) serious about the war on terror; and (2) not too bad in other ways that matter to me. But who would that be? Kerry fails both tests: he’s lame on terrorism — enough to undermine confidence pretty thoroughly. Beside that, my sense is that he hasn’t changed much since Doonesbury was parodying him in 1971. (I was put off when, on ABC just after the State of the Union, he described his own vote on the Defense of Marriage Act as “an act of courage.”)

Clark seems like a self-centered phony, the kind of officer the troops don’t trust and don’t like — and by many accounts, that’s what he was. Dean — well, I actually like him the best, somehow, even though I suspect he’d probably be a disaster if actually elected. (Though Dean is suddenly getting Strange New Respect now that his lead has crumbled). But at least there’s a there there. I like Lieberman, but his chance of getting the nomination is about as good as mine. That leaves Edwards, who I’d like to like, but who has been sufficiently fuzzy on many issues that it’s hard to tell what he thinks.

I’d like for it to be a tough decision between the Democratic candidate and Bush, and I think it would be better for the country if it turned out that way. But I don’t see where that will come from in this field.

Meanwhile, Stephen Green notes Bush’s problems, and also notes here, and in a followup here, what’s wrong with old-school Libertarians on the war.

DATING TIPS for the single geek guy: Looks like some useful advice.

STYLISH AND PRACTICAL: Here’s the InstaWife modeling her Ken Layne and the Corvids t-shirt, which I like almost as much as I like their album.

There’s no picture of me; I got a t-shirt too, but I think the women’s t-shirt is cuter. Er, and so is she.

I MADE THE LOCAL PAPER today, in a story that also links to the Rocky Top Brigade. The picture isn’t bad, for a change!

KHATAMI HOSPITALIZED:

President Mohammad Khatami was admitted to the hospital Saturday with severe back pain, forcing the postponement of an emergency Cabinet meeting to discuss the crisis over parliamentary elections, a senior official in his office reported.

Reader S.E. Brenner, who sends the link, wonders if the back pain was caused by a knife. . . .

CATS AND DOGS, LIVING TOGETHER: Tom Maguire notes that The New York Times’ Nick Kristof, and the San Francisco Chronicle, are praising Bush and evangelical Christians. No, really!

THIS SEEMS LIKE NEWS:

Congressional and CIA investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraq’s weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties.

I wonder if it’ll silence the “Bush Lied” claims? Probably not, as they’re fundamentally religious in nature. It’s true, of course, that there appears to have been some sort of intelligence failure with regard to Iraq’s WMD — at best, the intelligence community missed how well it was hidden, at worst, it was vaporware all along (er, except for those tons of anthrax UN inspectors found, etc.). But that’s not such a shock: the CIA missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Pakistani nuclear bomb, after all. And, by all accounts, was in the dark about just how far along Libya’s program was before Qaddafi decided to give it up.

Ed Morissey has more thoughts on what this means for intelligence policy, and some suggestions for the Democrats.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Wixted emails:

The implicit assumption here is that anytime an intelligence assessment is wrong, it must be flawed. People need to think through that assumption. It’s flawed if the error is a false negative (e.g., we conclude that WMDs are not there even though they are, or we conclude that the Soviet missiles are not in Cuba even though they are). It’s not necessarily flawed if it’s a false positive.

We are going to make errors in the future. Everyone already agrees that we should try to minimize those errors. But given that errors are going to made, you have to decide which kind of error is the one to be avoided. It’s a tradeoff: as false positive go up, false negatives go down. My fear is that all of this post-war intelligence hand-wringing will cause us to shift the criterion (causing false negatives to increase for fear of another false positive) without ever stopping to consider the possibility that the available evidence might be as good as we could have hoped for and that the conclusions drawn in light of the available evidence were the right ones.

Good point.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tacitus has some thoughts about imminence.

NOW THIS IS TROUBLING:

NOONDAY, Texas – William Krar and Judith Bruey assembled a frightening arsenal in three rented storage units in this East Texas town, and federal authorities are trying to figure out why.

A raid in April found nearly two pounds of a cyanide compound and other chemicals that could create enough poisonous gas to kill everyone inside a space as large as a big-chain bookstore or a small-town civic center.

Authorities also discovered nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, more than 60 pipe bombs, machine guns, silencers and remote-controlled bombs disguised as briefcases, plus pamphlets on how to make chemical weapons, and anti-Semitic, anti-black and anti-government books.

What’s not clear from the investigation is what, exactly, they planned to do with this stuff. One thing that’s troubling is the potential for cooperation between Arab terrorists and domestic extremists. There remain questions about Oklahoma City in that regard, and — as was noted here on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — there were certainly domestic wackos who were quite pleased with those attacks.

UPDATE: Jay Cantor emails:

To me, the most disturbing thing about the discovery of Krar’s arsenal, though, is that is was uncovered purely by chance. Now terrorists often trip themselves through luck, or stupidity (a la the 1993 WTC bombers), but it is scarcely
reassuring to know that someone possibly escaped being shot, poisoned, or blown up by a terrorist crackpot solely due to a misdirected mail package!

Yes. Though domestic extremists are a different breed, and often seem to view the accretion of huge arsenals as an end in itself — they’re waiting for some future date when war breaks out against the “Zionist Occupation Government.” That provides only limited comfort, however, as one can never be sure when they’ll decide that the time has arrived.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz has more worries.

EARLIER THIS WEEK AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM, I wrote about American competitiveness, and the way that public schools don’t seem to be meeting the challenge.

Now here’s a report that the Georgia schools are considering replacing “evolution” with the PC term “biological changes over time.”

Doesn’t work for me. “Biological changes over time” is when John Kerry discovers he needs Botox. Evolution is something rather different. John Scalzi has much more on this, and he is not amused.

VIRGINIA POSTREL’S RIGHT: Aesthetics do matter.

SEXUAL HEALING? I’m rather skeptical of the claim that 72 hours of sex will cure cancer. On the other hand, the side effects are better than chemotherapy, and it’s cheaper than most quack treatments. . . .

THE LAW SCHOOL HONORS BANQUET was tonight. Because we have an alumnus who believes very strongly in writing skills, we have what I’m told is the largest cash prize for law student writing in America, the Cunningham Prize. (It’s $5000). To my delight, it was won this year by one of my students, for a paper — forthcoming soon in the Berkeley Journal of International Law — on whether nanotechnology-based weapons would fall under the chemical and biological warfare conventions. I thought the paper was excellent, important, and very clear — and so, obviously, did the selection committee, which was composed entirely of non-nanotechnology-familiar people, which means that the “clear” part was especially true, I guess. It’s not out yet, but here’s another piece by the same student, Robert Pinson, from the Environmental Law Reporter, on ethical considerations in terraforming Mars.

UPDATE: Well, I meant “law school prize,” but I didn’t say that, and a reader notes that the Pacific Legal Foundation has some whopping student writing prizes.

IT KEEPS GETTING WORSE:

A court has found former French Prime Minister Alain Juppe guilty of involvement in a party funding scam in Paris in the 1980s and early 1990s. Juppe, one of President Jacques Chirac’s closest allies, immediately appealed against the conviction.

“You can imagine the political earthquake this is going to cause,” said Anita Hauser, political commentator for the private LCI television channel.

“It’s a hammer blow for Jacques Chirac, who thus loses his closest adviser and his designated successor, for whom he had real affection,” she said.

Juppe was prime minister between 1995 and 1997, when he lost an election amid industrial unrest caused by his attempts to push through social and economic reforms.

France certainly needs those.

YES, those are Henry Copeland’s BlogAds over there on the left. Credit (or blame) Matt Welch, whose post persuaded me to get off the dime. Don’t take an ad as an endorsement — I won’t run ads that I think suck, but that’s the limit of my policy, such as it is. This is an experiment, so let me know what you think.

UPDATE: So far, most people don’t seem to care. A few say go for it, a few say that it takes away from the amateurism of InstaPundit. (But all the other cool bloggers are doing it!) One reader is unhappy with the ad for Chandler for Congress: “Too bad you advertise for the left. Next the BBC maybe?” Hey, he’s a Democrat, but he’s got an “A” rating from the NRA. . . .

EUGENE VOLOKH POINTS OUT that the Framers were quite aware of the danger of foreign bribery in American politics.

JEFF JARVIS TO ANDREW GILLIGAN: “Good riddance!”

THREE WEEKS AGO, I LINKED to an account by Iraqi blogger Zeyad regarding a report of serious misconduct on the part of American troops. I updated it here two weeks ago. Slate, meanwhile, has a rather long item here. It was posted Wednesday, but I just noticed it. It’s still unclear what’s going on, but there’s certainly no danger of the incident being ignored.