HISTORY, PERSPECTIVE AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT: Eugene Volokh has an interesting post. I’m a big fan of separating church and state, but this seems de minimis to me.

FREDRIK NORMAN was on Norwegian TV defending the United States. You can read about it here. Fredrik emails:

The debate was notably civil, particularly in that it was (almost) completely without nasty remarks about President Bush as a person, and the tone was remarkably constructive. Let’s hope that’s an indication of a change in the public debate here in Europe, but that’s probably expecting too much…

Thanks, Fredrik!

HUGH HEWITT is on vacation, but he’s posted a list of recommended blogs.

TAKING A LEAF FROM MOBY: Roger Simon notes a bogus “Republicans for Kerry” site.

ADVICE TO KERRY from Arianna Huffington: Be bold.

MORE “WEDDING PARTY” ANALYSIS over at The Belmont Club.

DEAN PETERS is hosting an interesting discussion on what constitutes success in Iraq.

WELL, SOMEBODY HAD TO DO IT: Andrew Sullivan is Fisking Susan Sontag:

What Abu Ghraib does is remind Americans that their virtue is inherent not in their somehow being better than other people around the world, but in the ability of the democratic system to flush out and correct inevitable human error. So far, the response to Abu Ghraib has borne this out. Saddam had no public inquiries into his far more grotesque abuse, no Susan Sontag essays to highlight them. This does not in any way mitigate what happened at Abu Ghraib. But it is a distinction that we still have to keep in mind. . . .

Sontag asserts that the core of the U.S. and coalition mission in Iraq is imperial conquest. This is demonstrably untrue. The motives of the French and Belgians in nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism were utterly different than the Bush administration’s attempt to pre-empt Islamist terror in the wake of 9/11. The goal from the beginning of the Iraq war has been to set up a democratic and stable Iraq and to move toward U.S. withdrawal. No imperialist would be insisting upon a June 30 deadline for the transfer of sovereignty, as President Bush did last night. The conflation of these two distinct endeavors is absurd: mere rhetoric, not argument. Was American intervention in Bosnia, of which Sontag approved, “imperialist”? It saved Muslims from a totalitarian, genocidal monster as well. And we still have troops there. If Sontag wants to make a distinction between the two wars, it would be interesting to read. But none is there. She is venting, not arguing.

Indeed.

TOM MAGUIRE is offering campaign advice for Kerry that you won’t see anywhere else.

THIS ARTICLE takes a rather skeptical view of the prospects for democratic reform in the Arab world, notwithstanding the recent declaration at the Tunis conference. On the other hand, not everyone is skeptical:

“Real reform is beginning and will go at a faster pace” in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, said Amri, who is the director and founder of a think-tank in Cambridge, England, the Said al-Amri Center for Security and Strategic Studies.

“I think within the Middle East reform will go faster than we think,” said Amri, speaking from Riyadh.

In Saudi Arabia, for example, Amri now constantly witnesses changes he would not have predicted just several years ago.

I wouldn’t pick Saudi Arabia to be a leader in reform, but I hope he’s right.

TOM CLANCY IS calling the Iraq war a mistake. He’s got a new book out with Gen. Zinni. Richard Baehr, meanwhile, thinks that some of Zinni’s criticisms are dubious.

Professor Bainbridge, who was pooh-poohing my earlier post about Bush’s vulnerabilities, thinks that this is really bad news for Bush, who can’t afford to lose the Clancy-fan vote. That’s absolutely right — though judging by the current Amazon reader reviews Clancy’s fans aren’t persuaded just yet.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman observes a trend: “The bottom line on GWB’s vulnerabilities: each day it seems like another group in the coalition that helped elect him in the nail-biting election against Al Gore is dropping away. What we seem to be seeing now is a slow but steady trend away from Bush, rather than to Kerry, who remains as exciting and palatable as a bowl of frozen chopped liver.”

Meanwhile, reader Chuck Pelto emails:

I think Tom, with his expressed desire for a cause belli, was thinking we needed something like 10,000 dead from a weapon of mass destruction that could be traced to Iraq, as the use of ebola by Iran in his book Executive Orders.

I think Bush is correct in being more pro-active than Ryan. We’ve
already had our mass casualty event.

Well, there’s a possible Russian Ebola bioweapon story in the news today. (Here’s the New York Times link.) It’s probably not a bioweapon, but given that it was a scientist at a “former” bioweapons lab who died, you could certainly spin some Clancy-like speculations if you wanted to.

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED in what people who pay close attention to space think, maybe you should check out the International Space Development Conference this weekend.

WANT MORE DIVERSITY IN YOUR BLOG-READING? You probably should, as a blog-diet of just InstaPundit (or even just the blogs I link to) would be a mistake. So check out the Carnival of the Vanities and see if any of the wide assortment of bloggers linked there strike your fancy.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A MAJOR SCREWUP BY THE FBI for which heads should probably roll:

PORTLAND, Ore. – Offering a rare public apology, the FBI admitted mistakenly linking an American lawyer’s fingerprint to one found near the scene of a terrorist bombing in Spain, a blunder that led to his imprisonment for two weeks. . . .

Court documents released Monday suggested that the mistaken arrest first sprang from an error by the FBI’s supercomputer for matching fingerprints and then was compounded by the FBI’s own analysts.

The apology is to the FBI’s credit. But it makes me wonder how many other such matches are wrong. I wonder if this is connected with this homeland security fingerprint initiative that I was criticizing two years ago?

For more on questions about fingerprint evidence, read this and this.

UPDATE: James Rummel weighs in with personal experience.

POLITICAL LOCAL-BLOGGING: Ed Cone has some interesting observations.

THIS ELECTION IS LOOKING LIKE a World Series between the Red Sox and the Cubs, as each side’s fans worry, with some reason, that their guy will blow it. Republicans are afraid that Bush is in trouble, while Mickey Kaus continues his “Dem Panic Watch” feature. There’s bad news for both candidates in the latest polls. Bush keeps falling in overall approval, but the voters seem to think less of Kerry as time goes on. It’s a bizarre race to the bottom. I’ve said for a while that this election will probably be decided by the 5% who haven’t paid any attention until the week before the election. Judging by these polls, they may be the only ones who show up to vote. . . .

There’s always McCain / Hillary!

UPDATE: Tom Maguire: “we are reminded of the famous Winston Churchill quip – the current news is bad for Bush, and Kerry is a deeply flawed candidate, but the news can change.”

Of course, I expect that a lot of folks in the media will be doing their best to see that it doesn’t.

JASON VAN STEENWYK IS CALLING OUT MAJOR MEDIA FOR FAKING QUOTES regarding General Mattis’ statement on not apologizing for his men. He’s got links and transcripts and he’s naming names, which include the New York Times, Reuters, AFP, and more:

Essentially, it looks like they’re quoting each other, or some apocryphal Q source material. They’re not quoting General Mattis. They didn’t even show up at the press conference, and they didn’t bother to get a transcript or listen to the tape. But all these reporters are passing their crap off as if they were right from the source material.

Absolutely, completely pathetic.

If this is what passes for news coverage, then they ought to fire their reporters and hire some boy scouts to write for them. At least they’ll be honest.

Read the whole thing. Interestingly, I once had the same thing happen to me, with a bunch of newspapers reproducing quotes from an appearance on the PBS Newshour as if they’d interviewed me. They didn’t mangle them nearly as badly, though.

And I’ll bet this will be all over talk radio. Hmm. Maybe there is something to the theory espoused below.

UPDATE: More on sloppy quote-recycling from Michael Drout.

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS A QUESTION FOR C.A.I.R.: Is anti-Zionism the same as anti-Semitism, or not?

ZEYAD’S BLOG gets a mention in John Podhoretz’s column on Bush’s speech.

A BUNCH OF READERS are mad because the major networks didn’t cover Bush’s speech last night. (The emails are along the lines of this blog post.) But it’s my understanding that the White House didn’t request the airtime.

True, the networks could have covered it anyway. But I don’t think it’s fair to blame them for not doing so, under the circumstances.

UPDATE: Tim Conaghan emails: “I suspect the White House has developed a rather sophisticated, below-the-radar media strategy in which one component is to allow the major, mainstream media to self-isolate themselves.”

Hmm. That would be consistent with some other reports. Are they that smart?

A WHOLE BUNCH OF NEW POSTS FROM VIRGINIA POSTREL, covering everything from highway construction economics to international trade, along with the news that Amazon is now selling beauty products.

I remember when Amazon was just for books. What next? Cars?

ANOTHER SCANDAL INVOLVING U.N. TROOPS:

Teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering.

The Independent has found that mothers as young as 13 – the victims of multiple rape by militiamen – can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.

These just keep coming. Michael Moynihan makes the “>inevitable point.

MORE POLITICAL MEANNESS: Name-calling in South Dakota. I don’t think this is all that big a deal, but some people seem to.

RX-8 REPORT: I turned my grades in this morning, and set out for a picture-taking drive through the boonies. It was nice, and along the way the RX-8 turned over 5000 miles. Since people occasionally email to ask what my longer-term impressions are, I thought I’d record a few here.

Overall, I feel about like I did when it was new. It’s phenomenally balanced — so much so that you sometimes forget just how fast it is. The gearshift is smooth, and the engine is very responsive. The steering is taut, and has good feedback. The brakes are fabulous.

I’ve found that I actually like the interior and the driver’s seat more than I did when I bought it. The seat is more comfortable, even on fairly long trips, than the seat in my Passat, which is saying something.

Fuel economy doesn’t suck, especially given the horsepower, but it’s nothing to write home about. I get in the low 20s on the highway, the upper teens in town. (Extended high-rev trips in the mountains push it lower, though; the Passat’s better, but then it has less than 2/3 the horsepower). Oil consumption — something that rotaries have issues with — hasn’t been bad. I added one quart between buying the car and doing the 5000-mile oil change last week. However, you are supposed to check the oil regularly. I do, and the dipstick location, to put it mildly, sucks. (The oil-volume sensor will sometimes falsely tell you that you’re low on oil; it seems sensitive to a combination of slope and jiggle that a couple of roads I’ve encountered possess, giving a false low reading that goes away after a minute. Be sure to check before you add more oil!)

A guy in a big pickup dinged me with his trailer hitch in the parking lot a couple of months back. I kept honking, but he just couldn’t see me. This made a hole about the size of, well, a trailer hitch in the plastic panel surrounding the right-side exhaust. To my pleasant surprise, replacing the part cost only $36.

Bottom line: I can drive the car all day, have a blast, and get out less tired than when I got in. So I’m happy. If you want more technical stuff, here’s a long-term review from Auto Week. And here’s an interesting article on the hand-assembly process used on the engine. (Thanks to reader Jim Herd for both links.)

JACOB T. LEVY writes on the libertarian threat to Bush and suggests that Bush’s people are in denial. I agree with this. Bush’s positions on stem cell research, abortion, etc., are damaging there, and the war’s pretty much a wash, with libertarians divided.

I’ve gotten some emails asking why I like Bush so much. I don’t really — I support him on the war, but if Lieberman or Gephardt had gotten the Democratic nomination, I wouldn’t have a strong preference. (They’re not my faves on other issues, but neither is Bush, whose policies on stem cells, abortion, etc., differ from mine rather sharply). Despite the claims of some writers that Bush and Kerry will have more in common than we think on foreign policy and the war (which may be true) I don’t have the same confidence in Kerry. I suppose he could change my mind on that, but I don’t really expect that he will.

But my support for Bush has more to do with the character of his opposition, really, than with Bush himself. (You don’t see a lot of Bush hagiography here). And I think libertarians who feel differently about the war have no real reason to support Bush — he’s been wishy-washy on gun control, big on spending, and generally a big-government kind of guy, not a government-off-your-back kind of guy. (And don’t get me started on Homeland Security).

Would Kerry be worse for libertarian principles than Bush? He’d probably like to be. But in reality, it’s not likely to matter a lot.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan says the slide in Bush’s approval ratings is due to the loss of Republican and libertarian support.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon observes: “There ain’t no libertarianism in Tehran or Riyadh–small or large ‘L.’ Hardly anyone even dreams of such things. What there is is a lot of Medievalism. I’m putting some of my stuff on hold for a few years. They can too.”

MORE: Bainbridge doesn’t think libertarians matter, while Brendan Loy thinks that libertarians will get some votes from unhappy Republicans, but then adds:

Of course, this notion of possible Bush weakness among libertarians and Republicans only serves to underscore what a truly terrible choice John Kerry was, and is, for the Democratic nomination. Either Edwards or Lieberman could have realistically won these people’s votes; Kerry’s best hope is that they’ll vote Libertarian or stay home.

It’s a damn shame we picked such a bad candidate when it turns out our opponent was going to be so vulnerable.

As I’ve said all along, Bush has always been vulnerable. But the Democrats have a constitutional problem with doing what it takes to capitalize on it.

Meanwhile Libertarian Dr. Kate is “rock solid” for Bush, and reports: “all the registered Libs I know are planning to vote for Bush. In Massachusetts, that’s saying something.” Stay tuned.