ANOTHER POLITICAL TV AD from the folks at Junkyard Blog — who are being tough enough to match their name. . . .

ANDREW SULLIVAN slams the Big Lie: “The NYT had the gall to demand that Bush and Cheney apologize. In fact, it’s the NYT that needs to apologize.” Though he has some suggestions for Cheney, too.

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein comments: “Hey, I can’t even find the goalposts anymore,” and observes:

I mean, now the quibble is over the relative strength of the ties between committed mass murderers, each of whom declared war on the US…?

Some people are just not serious about fighting this war. Period.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Adesnik has an interesting post on what Bush said when, and there’s more on Oxblog if you just keep scrolling.

HERE’S A PICTURE from today’s expedition. I outran the thunderstorm that was over Frozen Head when I got there (as you might expect from the name, it tends to get bad weather) but it followed me home, as you can see from the item below.

ANOTHER U.N. SCANDAL AND COVERUP?

Rwanda’s genocide began the evening the plane was shot down and many credit that incident with sparking the killing spree that left about 800,000 people dead in the tiny central African nation.

Francois Pascal, a senior investigator in the Office of Internal Oversight Services, was looking into the crash when he found that his boss, Undersecretary General Dileep Nair, recommended he be suspended. Pascal was suspended in April, a month after a black box was discovered at U.N. headquarters. . . .

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that Nair is himself at the center of corruption allegations that have rocked his department.

It’s getting hard to keep track.

JUST GOT The Simpsons Fourth Season on DVD — blogging may be limited for a while. . . .

JACK NEELY has an amusing review of Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me:

Sometimes you sense this gonzo documentarian is tipping the scales just a little. It’s hard to take very seriously some of his vaguer symptoms. When he suffers chest pains and has a “weird feeling” in his penis, you wonder if hypochondria is serving the film’s purposes well.

The fact that some of the most loyal McDonald’s devotees Spurlock interviews aren’t fat at all seems to raise questions that Spurlock doesn’t address. A couple of healthy-looking street kids who love McDonald’s insist that McDonald’s is OK if you get a lot of exercise. It seems plausible and is one of the movie’s several loose ends.

The thing seems less an experiment than a David Blaine stunt. In his own way, Spurlock does point out that living like an American is sort of an Extreme sport.

But the fact is, he’s not really living like an American, but like the cloddish middle American pictured by New Yorkers. . . . But it may even backfire. I haven’t been to any McDonald’s in a couple of years. But by the end of this film, McDonald’s was starting to seem kind of dangerous and exotic, like an opium den in Shanghai, and I was craving a Big Mac. Until Mr. Spurlock reminded me, I’d forgotten how wonderful they were.

And don’t forget the McRib!

UPDATE: Several readers note this headline from The Onion: Michael Moore Kicking Self For Not Filming Last 600 Trips To McDonald’s. Heh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Michael Greenspan points out that claims of Americans’ fatness are overstated.

And former Knoxvillian Ronnie Venable emails:

Haven’t seen this film, but I gather Spurlock eats mostly at McDonald’s in the New York area, and lemme tellya, the golden arches up here are seriously tarnished. The food, the service, the ambience are soooooooooo much poorer than in the South that it’s hard to even draw a comparison. I haven’t eaten in a McDonald’s in years, but whenever I fly into Tyson and head into town, I’m tempted to stop at the one on the Strip just to remember how they used to be……But then I remember that the Krystal is next door.

Ummmm — Krystal. You can’t beat ten-baggin’. And with free wi-fi, too!

BETTER ALL THE TIME: The Speculist has its regular roundup of good news for this week. It’s a must-read.

WENT OUT TO TAKE PICTURES, got back just in time for a thunderstorm that knocked down a tree in front of my house. More blogging later.

In the meantime, Spinsanity is taking on yet another Slate “Kerryism” that Spinsanity says is even worse than usual, “taking an accurate Kerry statement and editing it into a form that is completely false.”

Sheesh.

UPDATE: We went out for dinner with my wife’s aunt, who’s visiting, and there were trees and power lines down everywhere. Quite a storm. And, in the spirit of enterprise, when we got back a tree-and-stump service had already left us a flyer!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh says that today’s Kerryism isn’t any better and wonders if the feature has devolved into self-parody.

MARTIN DEVON looks back at Howard Dean’s rise and fall.

MICHAEL MOORE UPDATE: from The Guardian, a report that his film Fahrenheit 911 is getting a favorable reaction abroad:

Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates, the film is being offered the kind of support it doesn’t need. According to Screen International, the UAE-based distributor Front Row Entertainment has been contacted by organisations related to the Hezbollah in Lebanon with offers of help.

Indeed. Just more for these guys to work with.

UPDATE: More here, including this:

In terms of marketing the film, Front Row is getting a boost from organisations related to Hezbollah which have rung up from Lebanon to ask if there is anything they can do to support the film. And although Chacra says he and his company feel strongly that Fahrenheit is not anti-American, but anti-Bush, “we can’t go against these organisations as they could strongly boycott the film in Lebanon and Syria.” . . . Front Row, which also worked with Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, is setting a precedent with Fahrenheit as it is the first documentary ever to be released theatrically in the territory. Bowling went straight to video and had a healthy run. Indeed, Moore is, explains Chacra, “considered an Arab supporter,” locally.

He’s found his audience there, apparently.

JAMES LILEKS pens an ode to Fargo. “And now, the Ironic Twist: There is absolutely no ironic twist.”

And there’s a lesson in that, for those willing to learn.

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH has moved. Note the new URL.

SADDAM AND AL QAEDA — THE BRITISH VIEW:

Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein did let al-Qaida operate out of Iraq, Downing Street insisted today.

A US report yesterday said there was no conclusive evidence of a link between the former Iraqi dictator and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group.

But Downing Street said Saddam had created “a permissive environment” for terrorists and al-Qaida operatives were in the country during his time in office.

No 10 said it was not claiming a direct link but a spokeswoman said: “The prime minister has always said Saddam created a permissive environment for terrorism and we know that the people affiliated to al-Qaida operated in Iraq during the regime.

“The prime minister always made it clear that Saddam’s was a rogue state which threatened the security of the region and the world.”

It seems hard to argue with that.

UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy has more thoughts on Saddam, Al Qaeda, and the 9/11 Commission.

MORE ON BEING SEXY from Eugene Volokh. Meanwhile Andrew Sullivan is blaming women for insufficient sexiness.

SADR’S DECLINE CONTINUES: “NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) – Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr sent his fighters home on Wednesday in what may mark the end of a 10-week revolt against U.S.-led forces that once engulfed southern Iraq and Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrines.”

It’s not clear how well things are going with Fallujah, but the response to Sadr seems to have been handled quite well.

THE U.N. IS GETTING TOUGH WITH IRAN!

ANDREW SULLIVAN REJECTED BUSH’S CANDIDACY last month? That’s news to me.

UPDATE: Sullivan responds to Jonah Goldberg.

IS THE PRESS ABOVE THE LAW? I discuss this subject over at GlennReynolds.com.

MORE ON DARFUR:

The United Nations, United States and humanitarian agencies have been urging the Khartoum government for the past several weeks to allow humanitarian agencies unimpeded access to the war-ravaged region.

Non-governmental organizations in Khartoum say the pressure is paying off and that since May 24, bureaucratic and other forms of restrictions have been eased. . . .

Meanwhile, a senior Chadian official accused Arab militias of recruiting in his country, which neighbours the Darfur region.

“There is a covert force seeking to transport the inter-Sudanese conflict (of Darfur) inside Chad,” Allami Ahmat told AFP. He is both diplomatic adviser to the Chadian president and spokesman for Chad’s mediation effort.

Mixed developments, I’d say. Meanwhile the Beirut Daily Star is chiding Arab governments:

While the United States is considering formally labeling the Darfur crisis as a genocide in progress, the world – the world beyond the Arab world that is – is justified in asking the following question: “What are the Arabs doing about this atrocity in their own back yard?”

The answer, of course – as usual – is nothing. . . . It is time for a word of advice for the Arab League: We are sick of vacuous statements – the time for action is now. In fact, the time for action was yesterday, last week, last month, last year, last decade.

Indeed.

MORE ON THE 9/11 COMMISSION: Staffer Jonathan Stull emails:

I’d recommend that you look directly at Staff Statement No. 15 when discussing the Iraq-al Qaeda issue, specifically regarding the Commissions’ hearing today. Note that the paragraph in question is on page 5 of the attached statement. I’d point out that it is but one paragraph in a 12-page statement. The AP and others have picked up on one sentence, which was carefully worded: “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”

The rest of the paragraph concisely summarizes the cases where we can identify cooperation and other connections where they exist.

The other relevant information is included on page 8 of Staff Statement No. 16. In the statement, which exhaustively discusses the 9-11 plot, we address the movements of the hijackers in the years leading up to the attacks. This paragraph addresses reports that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agency in Prague on April 9, 2001.

While some have criticized the questioning during public hearings, I have seen few quibbles with our staff statements. I urge you to look over all of the statements.

Here’s the link to the staff statements. I couldn’t get Statement 16 to open (here’s the link to the PDF), I guess because of all the traffic. But maybe you’ll have more luck.

More here.

UPDATE: It wasn’t their server — it was a hangup (again) in Acrobat’s auto-update routine. Rebooting fixed the problem. I’ve read the passages that Stull references, and it’s not overwhelmingly convincing, though your results may differ. At any rate, as noted below, it’s important not to conflate Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attack, which the Bush Administration has repeatedly said there’s no evidence for, with Iraqi cooperation with Al Qaeda in general (existing and threatened), which there’s some evidence for and which the Commission notes. As Stull points out, the statement is “carefully worded.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Frank Lynch makes the distinction but thinks it’s the Administration that blurred it.

STEPHEN GREEN says it’s a trifecta at the Times.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett has more on the oil-for-food coverup at the U.N.: “The basic flaws are simple: Anytime you create a large institution, accord it great privileges of secrecy, give it a big budget, and have it run by someone immune from any sane standard of accountability, you are likely to get a corrupt organization.”

Indeed.

HERE ARE SOME IRAQ TORTURE VIDEOS that the press, strangely, doesn’t care about.

I THINK WE SHOULD SUPPORT THIS BLOW AGAINST IMPERIALISM:

One of France’s farthest-flung and most exotic colonial possessions, French Polynesia, elected its first pro-independence leader yesterday in a blow to the government in Paris. . . .

France annexed the archipelago, a collection of 118 islands and atolls scattered over an area the size of Europe, in the 19th century.

Mr Temaru’s election marks the end of a 20-year reign by his conservative predecessor Gaston Flosse, 72, a friend of Mr Chirac and staunch opponent of independence. . . .

France is likely to oppose any move towards independence. Thousands of French troops and civil servants are based on Tahiti.

“French Polynesia is part of France’s aspirations to have a presence in every ocean and any loss of territory would have an impact on their status as a power with global reach,” said Mr Maclellan. “The territory also has a huge exclusive economic zone, with rights to fishing and sea bed minerals.”

People are calling it a “political earthquake” in the region.

UPDATE: Tucker Goodrich emails:

Support the Tahitian Freedom Fighters!

Think we’ll see that soon?

On bumperstickers everywhere. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts on the Free Tahiti Movement.

I think I should go there and investigate. InstaPundit needs more firsthand reporting!

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More people are calling for a task force on this important issue.

MORE: The outrage is snowballing!

A NANOTECH INVESTMENT BUBBLE? Some people think so:

One of the valley’s most successful venture capitalists is railing against what he sees as the latest bubble: nanotechnology.

And that has the industry steamed.

Vinod Khosla, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has fired salvos at Palo Alto start-up Nanosys, which plans to offer shares publicly but has no revenue for the foreseeable future. He has criticized investment bank Merrill Lynch for hyping the industry just like bankers did during the Internet bubble.

Khosla said he is trying to prevent another bubble, in which public investors get hurt because they buy risky stocks they don’t understand. . . .

Khosla has invested in two nanotech-related companies, Kovio and ZettaCore. But like other critics, he believes companies should go public only once they have a product.

I’ve heard this from some other people myself.