DARFUR UPDATE: David Brooks observes:

Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.

And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.

Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur.

Read the whole thing, which is just damning.

KERRY’S FINAL, FATAL MISTAKE? “Kerry will never dig himself out of this one, I think. And any time he makes his old favorite argument that he is much better suited for interaction with our allies, his Allawi blunder will be thrown in his face.”

POWER LINE notes that the AP is at it again.

UPDATE: That was quick. AP has changed the headline and the story. It’s nice that they fix these things when people point them out, but it’s telling that the first iteration seems to involve such a partisan anti-Bush spin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

Doesn’t this remind you of the sneaky TV lawyers who ask a loaded question which they KNOW will thrown out upon objection?

Then, the judge intones, ” The jury will disregard…” but the damage is done. And wasn’t that the whole point of the question? CAN the jury simple forget they ever heard?

The blogosphere now sits in the judge’s role, yet, the damage is done. Thousands of news sites received the damaging title and used it. Bah!

But the witness’s credibility is damaged. Especially if you read what Power Line has discovered about the reporter in question.

MORE: A reader notes that the reporter didn’t write the headline (they never do), which is true enough, and worth stressing. But she did write the story.

JAY ROSEN HAS THOUGHTS on whether CBS News has a political future.

PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW how I’m liking the new Neal Stephenson book, The System of the World. I’m about 2/3 of the way through it now, and enjoying it very much. The opening is a bit windy, but the action is now well underway, featuring such delights as Isaac Newton and Daniel Waterhouse trying to defuse a ticking bomb only to . . . well, that would be telling.

OXBLOG’S AFGHANISTAN CORRESPONDENT files a surprisingly positive report on the run-up to the elections next month. Excerpt:

But the political skill demonstrated by Karzai since July, and the popularity he clearly possesses, are reason for optimism. Afghans themselves are optimistic. The country has passed its major political challenges reasonably well since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 – forming a transitional cabinet, drafting and approving a constitution, maintaining a steady civilian government in Kabul. The next milestone, Afghanistan’s first free presidential election in over a decade, also looks to be a qualified success. For now, that’s quite an achievement.

Read the whole thing, which is detailed and quite interesting.

DARFUR UPDATE: I’m not sure what to make of this:

ABECHE, Chad — The UN High Commissioner for Refugees proposed autonomy for the troubled Darfur region of Sudan, a solution the government has resisted but said yesterday it would be willing to discuss anew in an effort to end the violence that has killed 50,000 people. . . .

Nothing less than radical change would stop the violence, the refugee chief said. “We have an enormous responsibility now, not to accept that this can go on and on,” Lubbers said at a border town serving as the UN base for camps holding most of the 200,000 Darfur refugees in Chad.

The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum has denied widespread allegations that its troops and allied Arab militia, called the Janjaweed, have conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfur’s African population in retaliation for the uprising launched last year by the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equity rebel movements.

Stay tuned.

STRATEGYPAGE on satellite vulnerability:

September 25, 2004: Does the U.S. Air Force have adequate defenses for American space satellites? So far they do, but there’s some doubt that this will be the case in the future. The United States armed forces are more dependant on space based systems (for communication, navigation and reconnaissance) than any other country. This, naturally, makes the several hundred military and commercial satellites, that provide these services, a target for anyone planning to take on American troops. So far, there has been only one attempt to attack these space based capabilities. This happened during the 2003 Iraq war, where the Iraqis turned on some GPS jammers they had purchased from a Russian firm. The American air force had a weapon ready for this; smart bombs that homed in on GPS jammer signals. The Russian jammers were quickly destroyed and the war went on without any other attacks on American satellite capabilities.

But in the meantime there have been other successful attacks on commercial satellite systems.

Saddam had thoughts of sticking SAM missiles on top of SCUDs, but never did it. (This isn’t as dumb as it sounds — the U.S. experimented with, I believe, sidewinders on top of Pershings and discovered that it made a not-too-bad expedient antisatellite weapon).

UPDATE: Several readers want to know more, and one suggests that it may have been a Sparrow, not a Sidewinder, which is possible. I recall reading about this in one of Paul Stares’ books, either The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy 1945-84 or Space and National Security. But they’re both at my office, so I can’t look for more details.

A BOGUS KERRY FLIPFLOP? Tom Maguire is suspicious of a 1997 Kerry quote that’s been floating around today. So is Power Line, which observes: “No doubt we’ll learn more soon. In the meantime, we won’t add this one to Kerry’s Hall of Fame collection of flip-flops.”

UPDATE: In fact, the Kerry quote that’s been circulating is wrong. Follow the link for more.

INTERESTED IN BEING A LAW PROFESSOR? Read this post, and this post by Gordon Smith.

THE HOUSE PASSED A DUMB BILL that’s supposed to keep “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance by stripping federal courts of jurisdiction. As Eugene Volokh notes over at GlennReynolds.com, this approach is dumb in more ways than one.

HERE’S MORE CRITICISM OF KERRY’S CAMPAIGN DIPLOMACY — if he’s dissing our allies now, what will he do if he’s President?

UPDATE: Jason Van Steenwyk, recently returned from service in Iraq, has related thoughts.

And there’s more criticism of Kerry’s diplomacy here.

PAYPAL ALTERNATIVES: Linda Seebach recommends BitPass, and points to this explanation of why it’s supposed to be better. Other readers send links to FirePay and NeTeller, too. I don’t know much about any of these, personally. But it does seem like the field is ripe for competition.

ELEVATING THE DEBATE: Virginia Postrel has a further observation. I can’t argue. When she’s right, she’s right!

UPDATE: Okay, one major-media guy wrote something. But it’s not a “feature story.” It’s a blog entry.

ROBERT MUSIL looks at another big story from CBS.

CHIEF WIGGLES NEEDS YOUR HELP to save the life of a 9-month-old Iraqi girl. Follow the link for more information.

ERROR-CORRECTION UPDATE: Well, maybe. My TechCentralStation column noted postings on a Borders union chatboard from Borders’ employees who said they were hiding books. Now, in a message that appears in place of the original chatboard, the union says that the messages were posted by someone who may not have been a Borders employee. (They don’t say that he/she isn’t, only that they don’t verify employment. But it sounds like trolling, regardless. I’ve asked the TCS folks to note this in an update, too.)

Reader Jon Woolf, meanwhile, thinks there’s another explanation for all the anti-Bush books cluttering up bookstores — they’re just not selling as fast as the staff thought they would:

There are two possible reasons why the bookstores are full of copies of anti-Bush books, while pro-Bush or anti-Kerry books are hard to find, and those two are diametrically opposite in their implications.

Reason 1: the bookstores are anti-Bush and pro-Kerry, so they stock and prominently display anti-Bush books, while not stocking or displaying anti-Kerry books.

Reason 2: the bookstores are driven by two conflicting forces: expected sales and actual sales. They stock what they expect to sell and don’t stock what they don’t expect to sell. If they guess wrong on what will or won’t sell, they have to “push” the nonsellers because nonsellers are a big loss in money terms.

In particular, if a bookstore guesses wrong and orders a lot of copies of a book that then doesn’t sell, those copies are going to stay on the shelf for days or weeks. All those stacks of anti-Bush books that you see every time you walk into a Border’s — how many of them are the same copies, sitting on a table or in a shelf gathering dust, not being sold? Suppose a Border’s puts out a table with 20 copies of some anti-Bush book and 20 copies of UNFIT FOR COMMAND at 10:00AM. UNFIT is popular, so all twenty copies of it are gone by 10:30. Meanwhile, nobody buys even one copy of the anti-Bush book. Then if you walk in at 10:45 what do you see? Twenty copies of the anti-Bush book and no copies of UNFIT. Bias in the management? No. Just the marketplace at work.

Hmm. Interesting theory, though I’m not sure I buy it.

UPDATE: Reader Kenneth Grover emails:

In your post which reflects on the two possibilities of why bookstores have many anti-Bush books your reader posits two causes: ideological and push sales. Both reasons are in effect along with a third; false perspective. Bookstores approach the ordering of books from their ideological bent (We smart, they dumb, we buy smart books, nobody want dumb books). This leads to the first situation of sold-out conservative titles and mounds of liberal titles. Then, since this is a bad situation, they have to push the unsold liberal books as much as possible to try and get out from under. The real kick comes in with the fact that their false perspective has broken the feedback loop and nobody changes their buying decision on the next go around.

Reader Matthew DeLuca emails:

Regarding the question of whether or not bookstores are biased towards Kerry in their selection and display of political books, I’ve made a point of asking the checkout clerk at each bookstore I visit (four, so far) why there’s no copy of Unfit For Command available. Invariably, the answer has been that the book has been flying off the shelves, that they can’t keep it in stock, the publisher can’t ship fast enough, et cetera. I don’t sense that they’re feeding me any kind of line, either…so I’m sticking with the theory that it’s a simple supply versus demand issue.

I’m shocked that Al Franken’s books aren’t selling better. On the other hand, reader Shelby Clark doubts that the unsold-volumes theory really explains things beyond the short-term:

Bookstores (most especially the big chains) have relatively generous returns policies. If books are sitting unsold for weeks, they will be returned to the publisher for a full or substantial credit/refund. Bookstores absolutely will not sit on large stores of new books that aren’t moving.

I don’t really know what this means for your or Woolf’s theses, but that’s my view. Credentials: I worked for several years at a sizeable NY publisher of popular books; my wife was for many years a bookstore manager, and the industry remains a serious interest to us both.

I thought that publishers had tightened up on returns somewhat, but I could be wrong. And reader Kevin Carbis emails:

Caught your post (actually I catch just about all of ’em) on the possible explanations for the Anti-bush slant in bookstores. This has occurred to me a couple times. I work in downtown SF and the closest bookstore is a Border’s up at Union Square. I’m in there at least twice a week, I have to take the stairs up to the tech and history books. The landing on the staircase has a lot of extra space which is usually full of books. For weeks now, its been Clinton’s My Life. There must be 200 copies stacked there. Every week, 200 copies. Then one week, 200 copies all marked 10% off. Then 20% off, now 30% off. I’m sure they restock to make the stack look nice but the size of the stacks and the size of the discounts make me wonder if the second explanation might not be more plausible than I would have thought.

Beats me. But as I noted in the column, even one of my farthest-left colleagues has found the gauntlet of Bush-bashing books (which I guess Clinton’s isn’t, really) so depressing that he’s ordering from the Internet now. I wonder if store managers take that into account.

RATHERGATE, THE KERRY CAMPAIGN, AND MORE: Victor Davis Hanson has thoughts on the big picture.

RECIPEBLOGGING: This week’s Carnival of the Recipes is up.

PAYPAL SEEMS TO HAVE DECIDED to become the Web Morality Police:

Beginning Friday, PayPal will begin penalizing users who buy things it doesn’t want them to: prescription drugs from unverified pharmacies, material with even a whiff of sex and gambling or lottery services. . . .

Its policy on adult materials is especially stringent, banning not only any material or services suggesting sexual activity but also “non-adult services whose Web site marketing can be reasonably misconstrued as allowing adult material or services to be purchased using PayPal.”

Seems like we’re past due for more competition in this area.

WELL, I DIDN’T ORDER THIS VERY EXPENSIVE LENS for the D70, but after perusing some of the reviews forwarded by readers in response to my earlier post, I did buy this far more reasonably priced one. It doesn’t address my desire for a wider wide-angle, but it does provide more telephoto reach, and in a very convenient and versatile package, which is good for travel. I had some doubts about the quality given the price point, but the reviews were excellent. I’ll try to shoot a few pics over the weekend and put them up so that you can decide for yourselves.

Meanwhile, here’s a review of the lens that was too expensive for me. And here’s a review of the lens I bought.

SOME VERY USEFUL OBSERVATIONS on the stem-cell debate.

FROM THE I-THOUGHT-KERRY-WAS-A-DIPLOMAT DEPARTMENT: Charles Krauthammer joins the list of those wondering why Kerry is dissing our allies:

The terrorists’ objective is to intimidate all countries allied with America. Make them bleed and tell them this is the price they pay for being a U.S. ally. The implication is obvious: Abandon America and buy your safety.

That is what the terrorists are saying. Why is the Kerry campaign saying the same thing?

Why, indeed.

UPDATE: It just gets worse:

Democrats moved quickly to fuel skepticism, denouncing Allawi’s message in unusually pointed terms.

While Kerry was relatively restrained in disputing Allawi’s upbeat portrayal, some of his aides suggested that the Iraqi leader was simply doing the bidding of the Bush administration, which helped arrange his appointment in June.

“The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips,” said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser.

This is behavior that is absolutely unacceptable coming from a Presidential campaign in wartime, and it’s not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of such behavior. Joe Lockhart should apologize for these remarks, and Kerry should fire him. Otherwise you’re going to hear a lot of people questioning Kerry’s patriotism. And they’ll be right to.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Djerejian calls Lockhart’s comment “disgraceful,” and observes:

Remember, Kerry may need to work with this so-called “puppet” in the future. Regardless, this is astonishingly irresponsible campaign rhetoric from a key member of the challenger’s campaign team. To malign the serving PM of Iraq as appearing a “puppet” plays right into the handbook of insurgents operating in Iraq. I’m truly shocked Kerry would ostensibly authorize such an inflammatory statement (ie., not in the Casablanca ‘shocked, shocked’ kinda way).

I think that statements like this are more evidence that the Kerry campaign — or at least the Clinton folks running it — expects to lose. Hence, they don’t have to worry about who they’ll be working with, but they want to fire up the anti-Bush base. That doesn’t make it any less disgraceful to be going around uttering comments that might as well be designed to undermine America’s alliances, of course. This sort of stuff is appalling.

MORE: Roger Simon thinks there’s no strategy here, just the desperate flailing of a drowning campaign:

I think it’s more a product of “Hail Mary” desperation than a conscious desire to bring out the base. The isolationist anti-war left, noisy as they are, do not constitute a large enough minority to be useful in that regard. Bad strategy all around. It might even be a turnoff, because it leaves us with these Profiles in Courage to compare:

1. Awad Allawi – a man who was once left for dead (1978) in his Surrey home after having been bludgeoned with an ax by one of Saddam’s henchman who thought he had killed him. Allawi then spent a year in a hospital. He is still said to walk with a limp and is now the object of, one would imagine, daily assassination attempts.

2. John Kerry – a man who left the Vietnam War after 4 1/2 months after having been “seriously wounded” – a description that now even his biographer finds dubious.

Indeed. Whatever it is, it’s disgraceful, and if Roger is right I suspect that the Democratic Party will pay a stiff price for it in November. If Kerry keeps this up — making statements that are not merely anti-war, but that are deeply destructive and useful to our enemies — you’ll see Democratic candidates — and not just Tom Daschle — scampering to distance themselves from Kerry and embrace Bush.

PAYPAL SEEMS TO HAVE DECIDED that Bill Quick’s blog is a “hate site” or something, which is absurd, and they’re threatening to shut down his account.

This strikes me as a terrible move on their part, and they certainly deserve to hear from everyone who is unhappy about it.

RICHARD COHEN is defending Dan Rather for making an honest mistake: “Mistakes are what happen to aggressive news organizations.”

Yes, and so is fixing them when it’s obvious that they’re mistakes, instead of stonewalling and calling those who point them out partisan hacks. Even if the error was in good faith — which some would certainly dispute — the response wasn’t.

And this sounds like political maneuvering more than journalism:

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman argued that CBS News producer Mary Mapes became “obsessed,” with trying to prove that George W. Bush got special treatment in the National Guard, because she wanted to “save the world from a George Bush presidency, and in the last five years, she’s tried to find that smoking gun that would allow her to do that.” Appearing on MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning on Wednesday, Fineman fretted that due to the CBS scandal, it is getting “increasingly difficult to prove” that the rest of the media strive for “objectivity” and want to be “fair” and “even-handed.” Fineman also predicted that “if Roger Ailes and Fox had done something like this, you know, the world would be on fire.”

I’m guessing that Richard Cohen wouldn’t be defending them as vigorously, either. (And when some blogger blows it this way, I’m guessing that Cohen will write an I-told-you-so column rather than a bend-over-backward defense like this one, though I could be wrong.) But the damage has been done, and defenses like Cohen’s — which pretend that hit jobs intended to influence an election, based on documents that any reasonable person should have recognized as likely false, constitute “committing journalism” — probably explain why media credibility is at a low point today.