DEREK LOWE TAKES ON physician payola in the pharmaceutical industry. This seems quite sleazy to me.

DARFUR UPDATE: James Moore has a roundup on Colin Powell’s visit to the Sudan.

JACQUES CHIRAC’S SOPHISTICATED DIPLOMACY:

Britain has concluded that its three-nation alliance with France and Germany is in effect over after a series of rows between Tony Blair and the French President, Jacques Chirac.

Ministers believe President Chirac has become impossible to work with, and one government source described him as a “rogue elephant”. The strategy of “trilateralism” has now given way to limited ad hoc co-operation on specific issues. . . .

The UK believes M. Chirac is lashing out from a position of weakness and is playing to a domestic audience.

The Government sees the appointment of Mr Barroso as an important turning point because it proved the French and Germans could not push through their choice of Commission president. The end of trilateralism will come as a relief to many smaller European nations, which feared the three most powerful countries in the EU would set up a directoire.

It seems that arrogant unilateralism isn’t paying off for Chirac. Perhaps he should have worked harder to build a coalition with Britain and smaller European nations — like George W. Bush did on Iraq!

MICKEY KAUS on this bizarre election:

In the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, “just 57 percent of the respondents say they know a lot or a fair amount about Kerry,” reports NBC’s Mark Murray. That’s “a real drop from 68 percent in the NBC/Journal March survey.” The voters actually know less about Kerry the more the campaign progresses. It’s working! At this impressive rate of memory loss, most of the electorate won’t even recognize Kerry’s name on the Nov. 2 ballot.

Kaus thinks this is Kerry’s strategy. Hey, it just might work!

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Jeff Jarvis.

If this strategy does work, I think it will be terrible for the Democrats long-term. As I’ve written before, if Kerry’s elected solely on an anti-Bush vote, he’ll have no mandate, and no base of support. He be Carterized and weak. Jimmy Carter’s Presidency begat Ronald Reagan’s, and politics haven’t been the same for the Democrats since. Would the Dems have been better off losing in 1976? Quite possibly. Or at least electing someone who stood for something, and had the force of character to govern effectively. The country would have been better off, too — and we can’t afford a Carterized presidency right now. Kerry needs to get out and campaign for something, not hide out.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Reece has further thoughts:

By allowing the media and the radical fringe elements of the left to act as his proxies, Kerry has done two things: he has surrendered control over his message (something Clinton would never have done), and he has set George Bush up to claim a mandate should he win re-election. The reason Bush can claim a mandate is fairly simple: his is the only coherent, and wide-ranging “worldview” which is being articulated in this campaign. Everything else is a reaction to and a criticism of that worldview. Should Bush win, even by a relatively narrow margin, I think he can claim that it is vindication of his policies, especially in light of all of the incredibly negative media treatment he has received in the past year. This is dangerous for the Democrats because it leaves them marginalized in the marketplace of ideas (a place with which they should be all too familiar) and politically, and it is less than healthy for the country because Bush’s policies need to be challenged and debated on the merits. I happen to agree with many of Bush’s policies, but a challenge and debate of those policies and how they have been implemented is sorely needed given the times which we face. Sadly, the “hate Bush” campaign of Kerry and the Democrats cannot and will not give us such a debate.

I think that’s right.

And I think it’s risky when your strategy involves echoing Saddam by saying “the real villain is Bush.”

DAVID BROOKS makes Michael Moore look terrible through the simple expedient of quoting him. “The standards of socially acceptable liberal opinion have shifted. We’re a long way from John Dewey.” Heck, as Andrew Ferguson notes, they’ve changed since the Clinton years.

Meanwhile, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball do some more Michael Moore fact-checking.

And filmmaker Michael Wilson is experiencing a “bidding war” for his film responding to Moore.

UPDATE: On the other hand, in a spot of good news for Moore, the Hardy & Clarke book has fallen to number four on Amazon.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Holding steady at #4! Meanwhile, Blogcritics has a roundup of reviews good and bad. But the Fahrenheit 9/11 review from Ellen Goodman is pretty negative:

Not even this alto believes that the Iraq war was brought to us courtesy of the Bush-Saudi oil-money connection. Not even the rosiest pair of my retro-spectacles sees prewar Iraq as a happy valley where little children flew kites.

Read the whole thing.

MORE: Daniel Drezner observes that Moore has hired Chris Lehane, and predicts disaster. Meanwhile Dave Kopel lists “Fifty-six Deceits” in Moore’s movie.

STILL MORE: Several readers remind me of this remark from Kos: “Lehane is an asshole.”

LORD OF THE RINGS: The Cassini spacecraft is now in orbit around Saturn:

The first images from Cassini’s close encounter with the rings were expected sometime Thursday morning, along with data on the spacecraft’s performance.

Putting the first spacecraft into orbit around Saturn marked another major success this year for NASA, which has had two rovers operating on Mars since January and has a spacecraft heading home with samples from a comet encounter.

And NASA needs a good year.

ABSOLUTELY MY LAST POST FOR A WHILE ON AGING: Over at GlennReynolds.com.

PEACE THROUGH S.U.V.’s: Well, it’s a bold approach. . .

ALLAWI 1, BROKAW 0: Why, oh, why, can’t we have decent news media?

HARDY AND CLARKE’S BOOK ON MICHAEL MOORE is now up to number three on Amazon.

BEATS ME: Reader Michael Greenspan emails:

What I find most interesting about the column by John Keegan is its contrast with Michael Rubin’s piece on NRO a few days ago. Keegan writes that “the American occupiers should not have dissolved the Iraqi army or police or civil administration, whatever the number of Ba’ath Party members they contain.” Rubin writes that “[t]he failure of the Fallujah experiment undercuts the conventional wisdom that Bremer erred with his decision to dissolve the Iraqi military.” I’ve long felt vaguely that I should have an opinion on this sort of issue, but I don’t. Plain disagreement between two smart, experienced supporters reassures me that I’m right to keep out of it. If an expert can be undeniably wrong — and either Rubin or Keegan must be — how can I possibly know what should be done?

Yes. It’s hard to know about that sort of thing — especially when, as we’ve seen, the information that we get out of Iraq is fragmentary and often unreliable. In this regard, William Safire’s column on the dangers of certitude is well worth reading. We can be certain about principles; about tactics, and even strategies, we have to make our best guess.

THIS WEEK’S Carnival of the Vanities is up. Don’t miss it.

MORE ON DARFUR:

The US and other international actors have called on Sudan to rein in the Arab “Janjaweed” militias responsible and to provide security for the displaced. This is the political equivalent of imploring the fox to guard the henhouse. The Sudanese government has been directly involved in the killings. And it has a long history of sponsoring local militias to destabilize regions of the country and, for that matter, neighboring African countries, with which it is at odds. This “outsourcing” of military operations provides the government a low-cost and plausibly deniable device for advancing its political aims. Counting on the government to ensure the security of a population it wants to exterminate is reminiscent of recent government-sponsored pogroms in Kosovo, Kurdish northern Iraq after the Gulf War, and East Timor.

The upshot: by the predatory and abusive violation of its citizens, the dictatorial government of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, like those of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, has relinquished its claims of sovereignty in Darfur.

Read the whole thing. (Via Passion of the Present).

UPDATE: Then there’s this report:

Arab militiamen in Sudan use rape as weapon
‘We want to make a light baby,’ woman says fighter told her

“They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, ‘Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,’ ” said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from a where a whip struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. “They said, ‘You get out of this area and leave the child when it’s made.’ ” . . .

In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child’s ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.

Strange that Kofi Annan is unwilling to call this genocide.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Moore has satellite images “consistent with ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide.”

HILLARY AS VP? I’m hearing that again, though I’m skeptical. Personally, I’d rather see her at the top of the ticket. I told you that the war on terror is my number one issue, and I think she’d be tougher than Kerry. She certainly has been so far.

UPDATE: Hmm. She’s certainly photographing well these days!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some people are less enthusiastic than me regarding a Hillary candidacy.

THE HARDY/CLARKE BOOK on Michael Moore is now up to #5 on Amazon.

Bill Clinton’s book is still #1 though — but maybe he should be getting nervous. . . .

WILL BAUDE writes on Scalia and Thomas, in The New Republic.

IN THE MAIL: Two interesting books. One (nicely inscribed) is Joe Trippi’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, The Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, and the other, coincidentally, is L. Brent Bozell’s Weapons of Mass Distortion : The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media. Though there are differences (they come from — obviously — different political directions) in a way they’re talking about the same thing, which is how information gatekeepers are losing their hold, and how that’s good for democracy.

I think they’re right, and I think that trying to force the changes brought by the communications revolution into an old-fashioned left/right mode, though understandable in an election year, makes little sense. To quote from BT (who thinks the revolution will be televised):

The revolution will be fought in all forms of media

The revolution will be fought on phone lines and cable modems and cellphones

The revolution will be a war of attrition, against the great dumbing down of our people.

Attrition, indeed. I suspect that Bozell and Trippi agree on that, and — based on a quick look at the books — a lot of other things. (I can’t find this song online, but it’s on this collection that I was just listening to in the car the other day). Left/Right, Democrat/Republican — that stuff’s important (sometimes) in the short run, but the overall changes are much bigger than that.

CLAUDIA ROSETT:

“Let freedom reign,” wrote President Bush as Iraq regained sovereignty Monday.

“Today, the secretary-general welcomes the state of Iraq back into the family of independent and sovereign nations,” said a United Nations statement.

In the gap between those two statements, you can see the world of difference that lies between the U.S. and the U.N. in approaching the worst troubles of our time. For America, and Mr. Bush, the struggles now upon us are basically about freedom, and rule of, by and for the people. For the U.N., and Mr. Annan, it is all about paternalism, consensus, family. And I’m sorry to say that the family that springs first to mind has a lot less to do with Gramps, Grandma and the kids than with the Mafia clan of TV fiction fame, the Sopranos.

Close, but no cigar. Actually, I think it’s more like this family:

The former underboss of the Bonanno crime family yesterday detailed the murders of three capos — allegedly orchestrated by his brother-in-law and boss, Joseph Massino — that called for him and a team of masked hit men to burst from a closet in a social club, armed with of pistols and a machine gun, to carry out the slayings.

But turncoat Salvatore “Good Looking Sal” Vitale admitted his job was marginalized to simply “guarding the door” with his tommy gun after he goofed up and hit the trigger as the thugs were setting up, spraying a wall with gunfire.

Criminal, and dangerous in a way, but not terribly competent.

UPDATE: Yes, it’s the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. “Five years after international armed intervention and UN administration, Kosovo doesn’t even have an effective police force, and no one wants to speculate on its ‘final status.’ This past March, as ethnic violence flared up again and Albanians attacked Serb homes, businesses and churches (a reversal of 1999’s violence), UN ‘peacekeeping’ forces