POWERS OF TEN: This is pretty cool.

ROGER SIMON CONNECTS THE DOTS:

The BBC is unmasked as political liars while French and other diplomats are under accusation for taking oil bribes from Saddam. Meanwhile, another suicide bomb goes off in Jerusalem, while the Europe-dominated World Court in the Hague moves to put the Israelis in the dock for doing the one thing any of them would have done eons ago—build a wall to keep the terror out.

Read the whole thing.

HEADS ARE STILL ROLLING:

BBC director general Greg Dyke today dramatically resigned as the corporation struggles to deal with the biggest crisis in its 82-year history.

He is the second senior figure at the corporation to quit in the past 24 hours in the wake of Lord Hutton’s devastating critique of the way the corporation handled the Kelly affair.

And in a dramatic sequence of events, the acting chairman Lord Ryder issued an “unreserved apology” for the “errors” of the past six months.

But will Andrew Gilligan keep his job?

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis comments on Dyke’s resignation, and takes no prisoners:

This is the same sanctimonious prig who lectured U.S. media: “For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility. They should be… balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other.” Mr. Dykes, for any news organization to act as a cheerleader against governent is to undermine your credibility, wouldn’t you say?

Next: Bring us the head of Andrew Gilligan.

Note to self: Never get Jeff angry at me.

WHICH CORRUPTION SCANDAL? Take your pick. Jeremy Slater has a look at the Parmalat scandal, often called “Europe’s Enron,” and notes that it has punctured a lot of Euro-smugness of the “it can’t happen here” variety. Then there’s the French frigate scandal:

Illegal payments linked to a French defense deal with Taiwan signed in 1991 have placed the French government at risk of being ordered to repay up to $600 million in murky commissions, according to a report published on Wednesday.
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The deal, involving the sale of six high-tech French frigates to Taiwan, has already linked senior statesmen in both countries with a still-unraveling tale of corruption.

Here’s more from (ironically, these days) the BBC, which observes:

It has been one of France’s biggest political and financial scandals of the last generation.

It has left a trail of eight unexplained deaths, nearly half a billion dollars in missing cash and troubling allegations of government complicity. . . .

A government order banning judicial access to key documents for reasons of state security has twice been renewed, most recently in June last year.

As a result, a criminal inquiry launched in 1997 remains stalled.

But the suspicions continue to grow: who has what to fear from the truth? Why, when the Taiwanese Government is doing all it can to uncover what happened, does France stubbornly refuse to do the same?

I can’t imagine. Of course, all of this is peanuts compared to the reports that Saddam bribed Chirac.

UPDATE: On the Chirac story, reader Augustin Naepels sends this cautionary observation:

As a French citizen with a very critical view of my country’s current policies, my sympathy towards Chirac is very limited. However, I have to point that the recent reports about politicans bribed by the former Iraqi regime do not in fact incrimate Chirac (a translation of the original Iraqi article is available here: Link)

Charles Pasqua, the French politician named as a recipient of the bribes in the article, used to be close to Chirac until he endorsed his opponent during the 1995 presidential campaign. Since then, Pasqua has left Chirac’s political party. To sum up, Chirac isn’t really tainted by these accusations.

I think the Washington Times [UPI] article you linked to had a misleading title, since the original source never mentions Chirac.

Just my two cents..and thanks for your blog that I read with great pleasure every day.

Interesting. Well, as I said before, we’ll have to wait and see how this pans out.

GIZMODO notes that Nikon’s new budget digital SLR, the D70, has been unveiled. I’m in the market for something along these lines, but I’m in no rush. And it’s overkill for web photography anyway, where size, battery capacity, etc., are more important.

HOWARD KURTZ: “The man who pioneered Dean’s Internet strategy is tossed out like the manager of a losing baseball team? Was it Trippi who suggested that Dean start yelling during his Iowa concession speech?”

DAVID BERNSTEIN wonders why liberals hate Bush, when he’s busy enacting all of their policies. Beats me. But then, they hated Nixon, too, and he did the same thing. Bernstein’s probably right about this: “[C]ultural cues are more important than policy and ideology. W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy.”

Bush should worry, though, because his policies are alienating the base. Some of the right-wing mailing lists that I get are turning nearly as anti-Bush as they used to be anti-Clinton. Here’s an example, from one of ’em:

Bush Spending budget breaking for NEA. Another bottle of urine.

One expects this kind of stuff from those FAR LEFT DEMOCRATS but when a supposed *conservative* sits in office and spends more than the known liberals – well, you really have to ask yourself what is going on. You have to realize that you have elected a PRETENDER to the THRONE.

You didn’t elect a conservative – you elected a fraud who pretended to be conservative in order to get your vote so he could do far worse than Bill Clinton -Al Gore – Jimmy Carter – could do as the *conservative element would scream them out of office if they did what George W. Bush is doing and getting away with.

I’ve followed this list (it’s basically a gun-rights list) for a while. It’s a pretty good weathervane for the sentiments of a chunk of the right, and it has shifted notably against Bush over the past few months. I expect that Karl Rove thinks he can hang on to these people, and maybe he will. But from here, it looks like he’s got serious problems with the base.

UPDATE: There’s an interesting discussion on this topic over at The Corner. Start here and scroll up.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Bernstein has further thoughts, and Dodd Harris is defending Bush:

I’ve certainly taken issue with Bush’s participation in runaway spending – among other deviations from conservative principle – plenty of times. But the fact of the matter is that Bush never pretended to be the kind of conservative these critics expected him to be. In fact, it was always quite clear to anyone who paid attention that Bush was anything but. Everything about “compassionate conservatism” was a pretty obvious announcement that he had no problem with Big Government except its priorities. . . .

I’m all for criticizing him from the right – if no-one does it, he’ll have every reason to assume his base is safely in his pocket. But calling him a fraud is too much. He told us what he would do and we voted him in, thereby endorsing those plans. If one paid attention to what he said, the best one would have hoped for was that he would turn the Leviathan a bit to the right.

Read the whole thing. But I still think that Bush has a problem with the base. Maybe they heard what they wanted to hear in 2000 — but they don’t like what they’re hearing in 2004.

KAUS is on a roll.

AN IRAQI BLOGGER WRITES AN OPEN LETTER TO HOWARD DEAN: He’s responding to Dean’s claim that Iraqis’ standard of living is “a whole lot worse now” than before the war, and his response is quite tart. It’s a must-read.

GREG DJEREJIAN reports that the BBC’s defenders are unrepentant, and continue to blame Blair. I agree with Jeff Jarvis’s assessment: “pathetic.”

THE MARKET AND ITS ENEMIES: Virginia Postrel has some thoughts, and a question for Charles Schumer.

She also accuses me of “coyly feeding” the outsourcing frenzy. Um, is that what I’m doing? Virginia doesn’t link to any posts, so it’s hard to be sure what she objects to in particular, but I thought I was just pointing to a phenomenon with major political ramifications, one that — at least until recently – wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. Surely Virginia isn’t suggesting that I shouldn’t do that, simply because the issue might be misused by “demagogic politicians.” If I only wrote about subjects that were not subject to such misuse, I’d have nothing but posts about techno. (And even that might not be safe.) And I don’t think that my views on the subject differ much from Dan Pink’s, whose article she praises. But if a reader as generally careful as Virginia thinks otherwise, perhaps I should repeat what I’ve said before: I don’t think that a legislative or political response to outsourcing as such is a good idea.

However, I do think that it’s likely to be a political issue, and I thought that I was doing something useful by pointing that out, and talking a bit about the ramifications. I’m a bit surprised that Virginia thinks otherwise.

DON’T ASK DON’T TELL: LT Smash comes out of the closet.

YOU’VE HEARD THIS in the Blogosphere before, but apparently the idea is going mainstream:

The Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble called human rights organisations a “great curse” yesterday and accused them of complicity in terrorist killings.

“One of the great curses of this world is the human rights industry,” he told the Associated Press news agency at an international conference of terrorism victims in Madrid.

“They justify terrorist acts and end up being complicit in the murder of innocent victims.”

His words drew an angry reaction from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the world’s biggest human rights groups, with about 200,000 members in Britain and more than a million worldwide.

Steve Crawshaw, director of the London office of Human Rights Watch, said:”It is extraordinarily regrettable and disappointing that, above all, a man like that says something like this.”

What’s really regrettable and disappointing is that he has to say something like this. The good news is that he had some impact:

The Madrid conference ended with a declaration which went some way to supporting Mr Trimble.

It said: “We call on NGOs and other civil organisations that stand for the defence of human rights to make a commitment to defend victims of terrorism and to identify terrorist acts for what they are, regardless of their cause or pretext and without striking balances or blurring the distinction between victims and executioners.”

That would be nice.

MORE ON THE EURO-SCANDALS:

The European Commission has overseen an “intolerable” breakdown of EU financial control while subjecting whistleblowers to vindictive treatment, Euro-MPs said yesterday.

The European Parliament’s annual report on the EU’s £70 billion budget expressed “extreme alarm” over failures in the commission’s accounting system, finding that the books did not add up and large sums of money could not be traced.

As they say, “which corruption scandal?”

PLAME UPDATE: Well, it’s more of a further thought than an update. But the weakest part of the Plame “scandal” has always been the idea that someone in the White House, like, say, Karl Rove, would try to get back at Joseph Wilson by outing his wife as an intelligence agent. Even if they knew that she was a covert agent (and if she were really secret, they shouldn’t have), deliberately outing a spy for trivial political payback purposes would just be too unimaginably stupid.

But, then, this is unimaginably stupid, too. So who knows?

JOHN STOSSEL’S NEW BOOK arrived from Amazon. The Insta-Wife promptly took custody (yes, this happens a lot). She keeps laughing out loud as she reads it, which I’m pretty sure is a good sign. She did report that Eugene Volokh is mentioned.

“IRAQI GOVT. PAPERS: SADDAM BRIBED CHIRAC” — Hmm. First the BBC, now this:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 28 (UPI) — Documents from Saddam Hussein’s oil ministry reveal he used oil to bribe top French officials into opposing the imminent U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.. . . .

Such evidence would undermine the French position before the war when President Jacques Chirac sought to couch his opposition to the invasion on a moral high ground.

Gee, do you think?

UPDATE: More here. Can this be true? We’ll have to wait and see.

Gustave La Joie: “Corruption scandal? Which corruption scandal?”

HOWARD DEAN HAS REPLACED JOE TRIPPI, the genius behind his Internet strategy, with Roy Neel. I know Roy Neel from back when I worked on Gore’s campaign in 1988. He’s a good guy, but this kind of shakeup suggests that Josh Marshall was right yesterday when he called the Dean campaign “desperate.”

UPDATE: The Scrum reports that the Neel selection isn’t going over very well. And Wonkette opines:

Dean is replacing him with Gore’s advisors. Because, uhm, yeah, they did such a great job for Gore. To review: Joe Trippi helped bring Dean from being an obscure governor of a tiny state to a national front-runner. Al Gore’s advisers managed to fumble one of the surest bets in campaign history.

Okay, so it’s not exactly “a tradition of victory.”

MORE: Mickey Kaus: “There is less of a reformist impulse in the current Democratic campaign than at any time in the modern history of the country! ”

STILL MORE: Dave Weinberger: “For all we know, Dean would still be in single digits as the ex-Governor of the Maple Sugar state if the online connection hadn’t happened.”

James Lileks: “It’s not the e-mail. It’s not the blog. It’s not the Web sites. It’s the computers, and the people behind them, connected like never before. They won’t control the buzz this year. But in 2008? Count on it.”

Josh Marshall: (Blogging from the train) “This has to be one of the most bizarre turns of events I’ve seen in Dem politics in a very long time.”

This turn of events suggests, yet again, that Dean’s big problem isn’t the Internet. It’s Dean.

ONE MORE: Best headline so far, from Jeff Taylor: “Dean Swaps Broadband for Dial-Up.”

BETTY ONG, American hero.

BRANCH OUT IN YOUR BLOG READING with the Carnival of the Vanities, a collection of posts from all sorts of different blogs.

HAMMORABI, the Iraqi blog, seems to have some interesting posts on the Saddam oil-bribery issue. If his information is correct (about which we’ll just have to wait and see), Saddam had people around the world on his political payroll. Which would explain a lot. Perhaps some intrepid reporters in Baghdad will look into this further — surely they don’t want to be scooped by an Iraqi blogger again. Note that what he calls a “milliard” is a billion in American usage — which is enough to tell you the scale involved. . . .

EUGENE VOLOKH ADMINISTERS A RIGHTEOUS FISKING to Paul Craig Roberts, whose views are, well, in need of just that.

JONAH GOLDBERG:

The emphasis on WMDs was largely the result of lawyers at the State Dept. thinking that was the only “legal” reason we could go to war. Perle didn’t reference it directly, but remember the whole kerfuffle about Paul Wolfowitz’s interview with Sam Tanenhaus in which he divulged that the emphasis on WMD above all else was largely due to “bureaucratic” pressures from inside the US government. This, predictably, was distorted into proof that neocon ideologues were lying about the real reasons for the war. But that wasn’t what he was saying at all.

Anyway, my point is this: to the extent the post-Iraq failure to find WMDs is a disaster for the United States in terms of its credibility, its relationships with allies etc. one could argue that the fault lies in the fact that George W. Bush listened too much to Colin Powell and the State Department instead of the hawks, since it was the Wolfowitz crowd which wanted to emphasize freedom, democracy, stability and the war on terror. Now that no WMDs have been found that rhetoric seems self-serving when in fact those were co-equal priorities all along. If George Bush had talked before the war about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq as eloquently as he did afterwards, he would be in a lot better shape politically and in the history books.

The irony is that Bush — who’s been hammered for paying too little attention to the U.N. — is, in this view, in trouble for paying too much attention to the U.N.

BREWING REBELLION in Saudi Arabia? Maybe.

BBC CHAIRMAN GAVYN DAVIES TO RESIGN: That’s the story on the wires, though I can’t find it on the web just yet. (Thanks to the journalist readers who sent it!). I told you they should have listened to the bloggers. . . .

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the BBC’s report. And here are what appear to be real-time reactions from BBC reporters via the BBC’s own reporter blog. Excerpt: “I don’t think anyone expected this report to be quite this damning.”

Another: “It will be interesting to see if the BBC brand can recover from this.” Maybe not. As I suggested a while back, the BBC’s political tin ear has caught up with it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan: “[A]n absolute vindication for Tony Blair and a catastrophe for the BBC.”

Tim Blair: “Some people predicted this outcome as far back as last July. Advantage: Jarvis. Also, advantage Chavetz.”

And here, via Tim, is a link to the full text of the report, now available on the Web.