HUGH HEWITT NOTES that the press is giving Kerry a pass on his false statement that Bush fired General Shinseki. He suggests bias.

A TERRORIST ARREST IN TENNESSEE:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Federal authorities said Friday they arrested an Iraqi-born Nashville resident on illegal weapons charges during a sting operation set up after he made threats about “going Jihad.”

Ahmed Hassan Al-Uqaily, 33, was arrested Thursday afternoon as he was putting weapons he had purchased from an undercover agent into his car, according to an affidavit from FBI agent Greg Franklin.

Authorities said the suspect paid $1,000 to buy two disassembled machine guns, four disassembled hand grenades and hundreds of rounds of ammunition from the agent, who was working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. . . .

The affidavit says that during the later conversations with the informant, Al-Uqaily “expressed animosity towards the Jewish community” and discussed “two Jewish facilities in the Nashville area,” but made no specific threats, according to a release from the U.S. Justice Department.

Sounds like it’s a good thing they caught him.

TV-O-RAMA: I’ll be on CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer at about 5:20 p.m. Eastern time today, and then on a special pre-debate MSNBC Countdown with Keith Olbermann between 6 & 7. Meanwhile, for those skipping the debate, the Insta-Wife will be on Oxygen tonight, talking about murderous women.

And if TV’s not your bag, you can always check out the Carnival of the Recipes. (For those who are drunk-blogging the debates, meanwhile, the Bloody Mary recipe may come in handy tomorrow. . . .) Or if you’d rather watch a different pair of boobs tonight, check out the blogger Boobiethon — it’s for charity!

UPDATE: Both seemed to go OK to me. Take-away point: Wonkette thinks Kerry will lose. I think Bush will win — but noted that I’m always wrong about this stuff.

SHE’S BAAACK! Susannah Breslin, formerly of “Reverse Cowgirl” blogging fame, now has a page called “Invisible Cowgirl,” that she describes as not a blog but “the Mini Cooper version of a blog. A blogini?”

I should somehow tie this to John Bono’s old blog, “No Replacement for Displacement,” but I’m not up to automotive humor today.

UPDATE: By the way, I should mention that Bono’s got a brand new blog. Also with a cool name.

IT’S A GREEN VS. LIBERTARIAN DEBATE over at BlogCritics.

FLIT(TM) HAS AN INTERESTING BLOG-INTERVIEW with Thomas Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map. “The historical analogy we need to remember is taming the Wild West, not the British Empire.”

THOUGHTS FROM AN AUSTRALIAN BLOGGER, who notes that the Australian press is trying to deliver its 15-point advantage to the challenger there, too. (Via this roundup from Tim Blair).

MISREPORTING THE DUELFER REPORT: There’s been a lot of that.

LAW PROFESSOR MICHAEL RAPPAPORT has an article on the constitutionality of recess appointments. “I should note that I do not reach these conclusions happily. I generally support President Bush’s judicial nominations and I also believe that the Constitution confers strong powers on Presidents. In fact, when I first began to look at the recess appointments issue, I was planning on taking the opposite side. But the evidence quickly convinced me that my prejudices were mistaken and I am now firmly persuaded that the original meaning is dramatically different than the current interpretation.”

UNSCAM UPDATE:

The immense scope of an Iraqi effort in the late 1990s to curry political support for ending an international trade embargo is reflected in a list of more than 1,300 oil “vouchers” that then-President Saddam Hussein gave to more than a hundred corporations, foreign officials and political parties stretching from North America to Asia, according to a report issued on Wednesday by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group. . . .

The report said the recipients made the payments by carrying bags of cash to Iraqi embassies in Amman, Beirut, Moscow, Ankara, Geneva and Hanoi, among other places. The cash was then sent to Baghdad via diplomatic pouches.

“In the late ’90s, we understood that lots of shenanigans were going on . . . under-the-table payments and so on, to curry favor and win support for eroding sanctions,” said Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary of state. “We made various efforts to limit the scope of this,” he added. But the report said that U.S. officials were blocked by Russia, China and France in 2000 and 2001 when they tried to clamp down on oil sales outside the oil-for-food program.

Interesting.

UPDATE: A reader notes that the Post buried this story on page A30.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In fairness to the Post, another reader points out that this UNSCAM story ran on the front page. Funny how you tend not to notice stuff like that when you read on the Web — though in fact it wasn’t on the front of the WP website when I looked. I had to click on “print edition.”

IT’S HEALTHCAREBLOGGING from Megan McArdle.

AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ, in fifty years?

UPDATE: Also read Arthur Chrenkoff’s roundup of good news from the Islamic world. (Via The Speculist’s roundup of good news from all over.)

PAUL BREMER CORRECTS THE RECORD:

The press has been curiously reluctant to report my constant public support for the president’s strategy in Iraq and his policies to fight terrorism. I have been involved in the war on terrorism for two decades, and in my view no world leader has better understood the stakes in this global war than President Bush.

The president was right when he concluded that Saddam Hussein was a menace who needed to be removed from power. He understands that our enemies are not confined to Al Qaeda, and certainly not just to Osama bin Laden, who is probably trapped in his hide-out in Afghanistan. As the bipartisan 9/11 commission reported, there were contacts between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime going back a decade. We will win the war against global terror only by staying on the offensive and confronting terrorists and state sponsors of terror – wherever they are. Right now, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Qaeda ally, is a dangerous threat. He is in Iraq.

President Bush has said that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. He is right. Mr. Zarqawi’s stated goal is to kill Americans, set off a sectarian war in Iraq and defeat democracy there. He is our enemy.

Our victory also depends on devoting the resources necessary to win this war. So last year, President Bush asked the American people to make available $87 billion for military and reconstruction operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. . . .

Mr. Kerry is free to quote my comments about Iraq. But for the sake of honesty he should also point out that I have repeatedly said, including in all my speeches in recent weeks, that President Bush made a correct and courageous decision to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s brutality, and that the president is correct to see the war in Iraq as a central front in the war on terrorism.

I don’t find the press’s reluctance here especially “curious.”

UPDATE: More on an incident that supports the forward strategy against terrorism:

Federal law enforcement authorities notified school districts in six states last month that a computer disk found in Iraq contained photos, floor plans and other information about their schools, two U.S. officials said Thursday. . . . The districts mentioned are in Georgia, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon and California. The officials said last month that FBI agents in charge of those areas alerted local education and law enforcement officials.

Hmm.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

THE COMMERCIAL SPACE BILL that passed the House last spring is now dead in the Senate. Alan Boyle reports that this is probably a good thing, as some “poison pill” amendments were added.

RAY KURZWEIL ON LIVING LONGER: Interesting stuff, but there’s a somewhat negative take over at FightAging.org: “We don’t need more sellers of vitamin shakes.”

NORM GERAS interviews Joanne Jacobs.

NOSTALGIA: I recently read Bertrand Brinley’s The Big Kerplop a “new” release in his series of Mad Scientists’ Club books that I enjoyed when I was a kid. That led me to reread some of the other books, too, and I found that they held up pretty well over time. I’m donating them to my daughter’s school, which is always looking for new kids’ books.

Somebody should (heck, maybe somebody has) look at the influence of those kids’ science adventure books, including others like the older Danny Dunn books, on several generations of geeks.

UPDATE: Interesting review at Slashdot, with an observation that occurred to me, too — the kids in the Mad Scientists’ Club stories seem a lot more independent and free-ranging than kids today. And I think that, with allowances for their excessively-easy access to vital items of scientific equipment at crucial story points, these are pretty realistic portrayals of kids in the 1960s and 1970s. (Sounds like my gang o’ geeks, anyway.) Lots of interesting stuff in the comments, too, including a reference to the Henry Reed books, which I’ve mentioned here before.

Can you tell that my mom is a children’s librarian?

A SMALL BREATH OF FRESH AIR IN EUROPE:

Only by working longer and moving towards the US social model can Europe hope to attain its Lisbon goals, according to Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, Dutch Minister of Economy, speaking at an event in Brussels on 7 October.

Modernising the European social model is a matter of urgency if Europe wants to maintain its model of choice in the long term and close the productivity gap with the US, believes the minister. . .

The current European model is not performing adequately said Mr Brinkhorst pointing out how far the EU had slipped behind the US. ‘Since the early 1990s, the US has largely outpaced the EU in terms of economic growth. From 1991 to 2003, the US economy grew by no less than 47 per cent in total, whereas the EU economy achieved only 28 per cent growth.’ Mr Brinkhorst also drew attention to the fact that in 2003, the US GDP per capita was 55 per cent higher than the EU’s.

55 per cent? I knew the gap was big, but I didn’t realize it was that big.

UPDATE: Reader Mateusz Krepicz says it’s not that bad, and sends this article from The Economist suggesting that the gap, while real, is narrower. On the other hand, here’s an argument that things are worse.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike Chittenden emails:

I think part of the difference in the expansion of the EU since the Economist article was written in early 2003 to countries in Eastern Europe with much lower GDP per capita than Western Europe. This expansion may have depressed overall GDP per capita enough to explain the difference in the two figures.

Could be.

CATHY SEIPP looks at George W. Bush and John Kerry through two documentary films by Alexandra Pelosi. “It’s more an examination of the process, and has all of Pelosi’s smart-ass charm — which is sort of like Michael Moore’s minus the dishonesty, agitprop, and, of course, about 200 pounds.”

NANO-WARS: Ed Regis has an article in Wired on the nanotechnology industry’s rather unfair treatment of Eric Drexler. It’s also worth reading this for more background.

UPDATE: Daniel Moore thinks that the article is too favorable to Drexler, while I actually think it underplays the intensity and ill-advisedness of the industry’s efforts to shape the debate.

HERE’S AN ELECTION REPORT FROM AFGHANISTAN, from Scott Norvell.

THANKS to all the people who emailed about my mother-in-law. She’s home now and doing OK.

CLIMATE OF FEAR UPDATE: Here’s an extensive roundup and commentary on the subject. And there’s more here on the drive-by shooting at Bush HQ in Knoxville, including a video report from WBIR TV.

THE ANCHORESS REMEMBERS the woman in the black hijab.

HEH.