AMERICAN MUSLIM WOMEN fighting religious extremism. Interesting stuff.

ANOTHER HISTORY LESSON, this time from Paul Johnson.

STEPHEN GREEN IS ON A ROLL: Just keep scrolling.

IS GEORGE BUSH A “NASCAR Nazi?” That’s what this columnist says.

At least no one is questioning his patriotism! Er, unless you count Matt Yglesias’ speculation that Bush is a mole for the Mullahs. Yglesias is no doubt speaking tongue-in-cheek.

UPDATE: Josh Chafetz has comments on the “NASCAR Nazi” column. He’s unimpressed by the author’s grasp of history.

I think that Bush-hatred on the part of the left has actually surpassed Clinton-hatred on the part of the right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Hendren notes a contradiction:

Yglesias is way off. If Bush is “NASCAR Nazi” that would make him a “mole for the Mullets”!

Can’t argue with that.

THE PRINCE OF MEMPHIS: Roger Abramson has a long and interesting profile of Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., who is likely to go far. Best bit:

“I’m not a Democrat who thinks rich people have too much,” he says. . . “I don’t think enough people have the chance to get rich.”

The Democratic Party needs more people who think this way.

UPDATE: More reaction here.

EUGENE VOLOKH HAS MORE on the Kerry campaign’s intellectual property issues. I agree with Eugene that Kerry’s probably OK here.

CATHY SEIPP HAS THOUGHTS on media diversity and the blogosphere.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT:

BEIJING (Reuters) – A lone man staged a short-lived demonstration on Tiananmen Square Thursday night, the eve of the 15th anniversary of China’s bloody military crackdown on democracy protests, a witness said.

The man, about 50 years old, kneeled briefly to pray at the foot of the Monument to the Peoples’ Heroes at the center of the square, where tens of thousands of students gathered from April to June 1989 to press demands for democratic reform.

He was swiftly taken away by police, according to a Reuters photographer who witnessed the scene. Police in plain clothes and in uniform routinely comb the square on sensitive anniversaries, snuffing out protests as quickly as they start.

Indeed. And nobody seems to care all that much.

UPDATE: And there’s this:

The Beijing doctor who exposed China’s cover-up of severe acute respiratory syndrome disappeared from his home, his daughter said on Thursday, apparently as part of a security crackdown ahead of the anniversary of the 1989 massacre against Tiananmen Square protesters. . . .

Dr Jiang sent a graphic letter to senior leaders on the Beijing massacre earlier this year during the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress calling for the government to admit its handling of the incident was wrong.

The letter quoted two of the top Chinese leaders involved in ordering the troops into central Beijing as admitting the verdict should be overturned.

The detention of Dr Jiang and others is a reminder that while the 1989 killings may be fading in popular memory, they remain a source of deep division and sensitivity within the party itself.

The good news is that there’s still dissent to be crushed.

MATT ROSENBERG WRITES on Bill Cosby and the blogosphere.

HERE’S A VERY NICE PROFILE OF ROGER SIMON. And I certainly agree with his concluding sentiments.

A PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD STATEMENT:

In the terrorists’ vision of the world, the Middle East must fall under the rule of radical governments, moderate Arab states must be overthrown, nonbelievers must be expelled from Muslim lands, and the harshest practice of extremist rule must be universally enforced. In this vision, books are burned, terrorists are sheltered, women are whipped, and children are schooled in hatred and murder and suicide.

Our vision is completely different. We believe that every person has a right to think and pray and live in obedience to God and conscience, not in frightened submission to despots. (Applause.) We believe that societies find their greatness by encouraging the creative gifts of their people, not in controlling their lives and feeding their resentments. And we have confidence that people share this vision of dignity and freedom in every culture because liberty is not the invention of Western culture, liberty is the deepest need and hope of all humanity. The vast majority of men and women in Muslim societies reject the domination of extremists like Osama bin Laden. They’re looking to the world’s free nations to support them in their struggle against the violent minority who want to impose a future of darkness across the Middle East. We will not abandon them to the designs of evil men. We will stand with the people of that region as they seek their future in freedom.

Read the whole thing, which includes not only a vision, but a four-part strategy. (Via Meryl Yourish).

UPDATE: Tom Smith finds the New York Times’ coverage of this speech far less straightforward than the speech itself. Well, there’s a surprise. . . .

RYAN SAGER WRITES that it’s a bad year, politically, for the National Education Association.

MORE DISRESPECT for Robert Novak.

And why hasn’t he been subpoenaed yet?

JOHN KEEGAN OFFERS INSTRUCTION to those who are ignorant of history:

I have been recovering from major surgery for the past few weeks and so have overdosed myself on daytime television – Richard and Judy, Crucible snooker, I Want that House, A Place in Greece. Most of it is entirely forgettable. There is, however, an undeniable fascination in watching Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News, energise himself for his early evening denunciation of Anglo-American activity in Iraq. About 5.30 he comes on to rehearse his sense of outrage. At 7pm we get the full display of apoplexy and hysteria – raised voice, flushed face, physical trembles.

I do not know whether Jon Snow is a history boy who has decided to suppress what he knows in favour of his commitment to drama studies. I do know that he, and the serried ranks of self-appointed strategic commentators who currently dominate the written and visual media’s treatment of the Iraq story, have a duty to stop indulging their emotions and start remembering a bit of post-war history. Iraq 2004 is not Greece 1945, not Indochina 1946-54, not Algeria 1953-62 and certainly not “Vietnam”.

It is a regrettable but not wholly to be unexpected outcome of a campaign to overthrow a dangerous Third World dictator. If those who show themselves so eager to denounce the American President and the British Prime Minister feel strongly enough on the issue, please will they explain their reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad.

Read the whole thing.

GEORGE TENET HAS RESIGNED: And about time.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez has a glimpse of the future: “I can picture it all now. The Tenet press conference with Howard Dean’s group and MoveOn where he announces that Bush is a failed leader. The October surprise book where he blames everything wrong with intel on W., Condi & the Pentagon.”

That does seem to be the preferred path for the Bush Administration’s washouts. Of course, his most telling charge would be “Bush should have fired me on September 11th!” And that one may be a bit awkward. (Read this piece from 2002, too: “Someone remind me why George Tenet still has a job.”)

Reader Don Hoover emails: “I guess since Tenet was a Clinton apointee, he had to listen to Gore and resign. . . . Unfortunately, Tenet should have been fired 1/2001 and that’s what will be missed in this coverage.”

MORE: Mark Riebling has thoughts on Tenet’s strengths and weaknesses, and suggestions regarding a successor. (“Tenet had to leave, but our intelligence failures are not entirely his fault. . . . President Bush would do well to replace Tenet with someone who knows, and who has said publicly, that our whole philosophy of intelligence is naive.”)

And here’s a rare InstaPundit post praising Tenet for building up the Agency’s paramilitary capabilities, which turned out to be an excellent move. It’s on the intelligence side where Tenet hasn’t done as well.

STILL MORE: Reader Chuck Herrick has a darker take:

Here is what I’m injecting into my Ouija board … Tenet resigned because he has inside information that there will be at least one more horrible terror event on American soil before the election. My guess is Tenet has access to the intelligence to back this up and Tenet realizes that the next one is not preventable. The terrorists are going to get away with another one.

And, my guess is that Tenet, having had all the other terrorist events happen “on his watch” can’t handle one more. So, he’s going to flee the scene. How would you like to be his replacement? I would not. I think other terror incidents (on American soil) are preventable, but I also think that we as a culture don’t have the will to do what it will take to make this so. It will take at least the resignation of a guy like Tenet, but it will also take lots more. In that sense, there probably was nothing Tenet could do but to avoid being the guy at the helm when it happens.

Well, that’s encouraging.

It’s also possible — even though everyone, including me, is inclined to doubt it — that his stated reason of wanting to spend more time with his family is true. Consider, all you readers and bloggers, just how much paying close attention to this war has taken out of you. It has certainly taken a lot out of me. It can only be a thousand times worse for Tenet and those others at the center of things. After seven years, he may just have had enough. We always doubt such claims, because people who resign for other reasons always use them as smokescreens. But that doesn’t mean they’re not sometimes true.

MORE STILL: Here’s the text of Tenet’s goodbye speech.

Meanwhile, Michele Catalano rounds up various reasons offered for Tenet’s departure. And (via Michele) this roundup of blogospheric reactions, and this suggestion for a successor: “Why not appoint Howard Dean or Wes Clark, since they knew all along about 9/11 and that there ‘were’ no WMD?!?”

And more opinions are rounded up here.

EVEN MORE: Mickey Kaus:

My own completely uninformed hunch is that if there’s a hidden backstory it has more to do with the Plame investigation (where the CIA and the White House could well be at odds over enforcing the law against disclosure of agents’ identities) than the Chalabi business. (Update: Fred Kaplan seems to agree, and raises the other interesting possibility that Tenet was somehow playing footsie with Kerry.)

Beats me.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: “In case you wonder if Europe is truly screwed: the Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero has awarded medals – Cross of Military Merit – to his Defence Minister and three generals, not for anything as mundane as bravery or distinguished service, but… wait for it… for withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq!”

UPDATE: A reader suggests that this feat of arms should be memorialized in song.

SPINSANITY is criticizing Slate for a phony “Bushism,” noted here earlier.

From what I’ve seen (I’m not a regular reader of either feature) the “Kerryism” feature hasn’t been any better. Slate would be well advised to discontinue these features, which serve largely to undermine its credibility and its reputation for wit. And those journalists at The New Republic and The Washington Post who recycled the Slate item look pretty bad, too. Shockingly, Dana Milbank is one of them.

INTERESTING STUFF ON AGING RESEARCH over at Randall Parker’s FuturePundit.

COPENHAGEN CONSENSUS: The results of Bjorn Lomborg’s conference aimed at prioritizing world problems and solutions are out, and are now available on the web.

AMAZON NOW HAS A PAGE DEVOTED TO “plogs” or personalised blogs with links to lots of real blogs like InstaPundit and Boing Boing.

Somebody should tell them, though, that the term “plog” has already been taken. (Permalinks not working right — scroll down to the Jan. 10 entry, or just click here if you’ve got RealPlayer).

BELLE DU JOUR offers dating tips from the animal kingdom.

SHEILA O’MALLEY notes Victor Klemperer’s witness.

UPDATE: For those who wonder, yes, Victor Klemperer was indeed related to conductor Otto Klemperer (and, hence, to Werner “Col. Klink” Klemperer of Hogan’s Heroes fame — though Werner was actually a conductor himself and a man of many other talents).

ANOTHER UPDATE: By the way, the excellent NBC miniseries Uprising on the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt is now on DVD. Here’s a review that Dave Kopel and I wrote back when it came out in November of 2001.

HACKING CANON’S DIGITAL REBEL, to make it the equivalent of the far-more-expensive 10D. Interesting idea.

BO COWGILL WRITES: “Prepare for a Michael Moore film debasing Sweden.”

Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury, from whose novel Fahrenheit 451 Moore lifted his title, has a low opinion of Moore: “He is a horrible human being.” And Roger Simon comments: “Ray Bradbury’s original Fahrenheit 451, as we all know, was about book-burning. Maybe Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 is actually about pants-burning, as in ‘Liar, Liar, pants on fire!'”

Finally, Jeff Jarvis proposes some blogospheric fact-checking.

ANOTHER DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS? “If it were not vulgar, I would say the Bushies suckered the U.N. into signing on to the New Iraq through Brahimi.”

Vulgar or not, I think that’s probably right.