FINALLY, THE U.N. is playing to its strengths.

IT’S NOT RUSSIA: Really.

RUMSFELD: “You go to war with the Senate you have.” Heh. Related thoughts here.

My suggestion to McCain and Hagel: If you think we need more troops, then pass some legislation increasing the size of the Army. That’s your job, right?

We could fund ’em by eliminating ethanol subsidies, and putting a special tax on the boxing industry.

HERE’S A REPORT that Tom Daschle had a blogger on the payroll during the election: “If I can find it, a ‘professional’ journalist can find it. Those ‘professional’ journalists went looking for Jason and Jon’s payments to impugn their blogging. Where were the ‘professional’ journalists that were looking for Schuldt’s payments?”

UPDATE: Hmm. As the update to the linked post indicates, there may be less here than initially met the eye.

SANDCASTLES AND CUBICLES is buying a defensive handgun and wants your advice. I’d recommend a Sig P239 myself, but do want to suggest that this celebration of the .38 revolver from The New York Times (yes, really) is worth reading.

Of course, being the Times it’s about police carrying guns, and even notes — in a classic unconscious blue-stateism — something that Sandcastles and Cubicles’ post belies:

More than anything else, it is carrying a gun – the daily familiarity of it, the expectation that it must be used on a second’s notice – that most sets apart the police from the policed.

In New York, more than many other places.

ADAM PENENBERG has posted a Media wish list for 2005 over at Wired News. But one of his wishes — that bloggers would start breaking news — has already been granted. It was Bill Ardolino at INDCJournal who, by virtue of getting his own forensic document expert, presented the first strong evidence that the CBS RatherGate documents were forgeries. (He interviewed CBS reporters and producers, too.) And don’t forget Zeyad’s many scoops, involving everything from anti-terrorist protests in Baghdad (picked up by the Weekly Standard) to his reports of war crimes by U.S. troops.

And, of course, there was lots of election-year reporting, not just punditry, from blogs like DaschlevThune and Power Line, or Ryan Sager’s photos of antiwar protests at the RNC, or this firsthand report debunking the AP’s bogus-boos story, or reports like this one from a 10,000-person pro-war rally that media outlets ignored, to name just a few examples.

I’m all for more original reporting by blogs, which is one reason why I’m constantly evangelizing for photoblogging and blog video, but if Penenberg wants to see more of that sort of thing, perhaps he should pay more attention to it when it happens. A little encouragement goes a long way, after all.

ROTC IS PLOTTING A COMEBACK in the Ivy League. About time.

SOME INTERESTING — and, I think, encouraging — poll numbers from Iraq regarding the coming election.

IF STEVEN DEN BESTE doesn’t already own this, I’ll be deeply surprised.

A LOW-CARBON FUTURE? Ron Bailey files another report from Buenos Aires.

MAX BOOT:

ISTANBUL — For most Americans, the most important day this month is Dec. 25. For Turks, it’s tomorrow, Dec. 17. That’s the day that the European Union will announce whether it will open full membership negotiations with Turkey.

In contrast to the ambivalence that surrounds the EU in most of its member states, Turks seem to be, almost without exception, enthusiastic about falling under the sway of a Brussels bureaucracy. EU membership is widely expected to deliver an economic windfall in the form of greater trade and subsidies. . . .

This might lead some Americans to wonder whether Turkish membership in the EU is such a good idea after all. It shouldn’t. Notwithstanding numerous transatlantic squabbles, the EU is a positive force for integrating southern and eastern European countries firmly into the fold of the West, institutionalizing democracy and opening up their closed economies. EU membership may be a bad deal for Britain, whose free market is hampered by heavy-handed regulation from Brussels, but it would be a positive force for change in Turkey, which still has a long way to go before it can enjoy British-style prosperity or stability.

I think that this is a good thing.

SKY-HIGH WI-FI: The FCC is getting with the program. About time. Here’s something I wrote in 2003.

UPDATE: Lots more from Glenn Fleishman.

“IPOD SHORTAGE ROCKS APPLE,” reports the Wall Street Journal. (Subscriber only). Here’s the most amazing bit: “The iPod line is now a crucial piece of Apple’s business, accounting for 23% of Apple’s $2.35 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter.” Nearly a quarter of Apple’s revenues. Wow.

And I can attest to the shortages. I wound up ordering this one, by HP, because the Apple model said it wouldn’t ship until mid-January.

DARFUR UPDATE: FindLaw’s Joanne Mariner reports:

No one stamped our passports when we entered Darfur, in western Sudan. There were no Chadian patrols at the border to stop our two-car convoy from crossing and, more importantly, no Sudanese troops on the other side to detain us. For many miles, there were simply no human beings at all, just desert, empty villages, and the occasional corpse of a camel or a sheep.

It was late July, and we had snuck into what the rebel groups that control the area like to call “liberated territory.” But the barren and depopulated landscape we saw before us suggested defeat rather than victory. It took a few hours of driving before we came upon people: a weary group, mostly women, with babies on their backs and random household goods on their heads, making the long trek toward Chad and safety.

Over the past year and a half, since the Sudanese government and allied militia began their scorched earth campaign against the black African population of Darfur, more than 1.5 million civilians have fled their villages.

(Via TalkLeft).

WHAT’S FUNNIER THAN mass slaughter of Republicans?

TIREBLOGGING: “Flat tire / bad rim. I haven’t gone anywhere.” I told you it was the Next Big Thing.

TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR seems to be getting more attention than it probably deserves, with a lot of people in the blogosphere favoring, well, bloggers.

I’d love to see that, of course, but I don’t think it’s terribly likely. But hey, I could be wrong, and I guess I hope I am.

Jim Geraghty has a post on the subject, and there’s more at Micropersuasion and the Hypergene Mediablog, where these two faux-cover images came from.

If we see either one of them become a reality, I’ll be surprised. But pleased!

UPDATE: Halfway there, anyway, according to Betsy Newmark, who says she’s got the inside dope.

ANOTHER RESPONSE TO MICHAEL KINSLEY, this one from Tom Maguire, who has been blogging on these topics a lot lately already.

UPDATE: Read this, from Todd Zywicki, too.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE U.N. AND LEGITIMACY, over at GlennReynolds.com.

STILL MORE ON CAMERAS: I keep thinking I don’t have more to say, but readers keep emailing. Martin Young writes:

I write to say how much I enjoyed your comments on the Nikon digital SLRs. I’ve owned a D70 and sold it because it began to malfunction within 6 weeks, a problem that Nikon would have been happy to correct. However, I found the camera to be a lightweight piece of work compared to my D100, which approaches the F5 in construction quality.

With all this, pursuant to a recent trip through Southwest New Mexico, I decided that I can no longer handle bulky cameras and a multitude of lenses while traveling. Accordingly, I took a flyer and bought a Nikon Coolpix 8800. I’m still in awe at what this instrument can do. The built-in vibration reduction device is a wonder, and the very moveable LCD (Monitor in Nikon Technospeak) satisfies my need for interchangeable viewfinders a la F3, F4 and F5. The 10x optical zoom is a treasure for all seasons, and the accessory lenses Nikon has made for this camera–still in the chain of delivery–are impressive.

One of the most important recent discoveries in my digital experience followed from getting a couple of high speed Compact Flash Cards. They really make a difference. I got a lot of great information on this subject from Steve’s Digicam.

A lot of people seem to like the the Coolpix 8800, unlike its predecessor the Coolpix 8700, which didn’t seem quite ready for primetime. There’s a lot to be said for cameras of that sort — yeah, they don’t take interchangeable lenses, but the lens they come with can be quite good, and they’re cheaper and easier to carry, and still capable of excellent quality, though not as good as digital SLRs, especially under demanding lighting and focus conditions.

Meanwhile, my earlier post on the Nikon D2H vs the D70 produced this email from reader Ryan Pederson:

You were talking about the difference between a 6 MP consumer camera and
a 4 MP pro camera. It has more to do with the size of the sensor. As you pointed out the pro’s are usually tougher and do more cool stuff but really most of the price comes from the CCD.

He notes that pixel count is one thing, but that smaller sensors — even with higher pixel counts — tend to produce poorer results. That’s certainly true, and it was a problem with the first generation of 8 megapixel cameras.

And reader Joanna Castillo emails about Internet purchasing:

A couple of years ago, I was in the market for a nice camera and went shopping around on the net. I found the best price (a listing for $500 on a MSRP of about $1000) and added it to my shopping cart. I was given an expected shipping time of 3-5 days and was then offered some “special deals” on rechargeable batteries and other accessories. The add-ons weren’t at all impressive and quite expensive. I declined the add-ons and tried to complete my purchase. I then got a message that I needed to call a toll-free number to complete the purchase…for security reasons. I called and was give a *very* hard sell on the accessories. I again declined and was then told that upon further investigation, the camera really wouldn’t be shipping for at least 3 weeks and I should just try to make my purchase again at that point. And, no, they could not add my name to a waiting list. It became clear that the online merchant was making up for the too-good-to-be-true price of the camera by selling add-ons at incredible mark-ups. So, I ended up buying the camera from J&R Music for $750.

Since then, I almost never bother with any merchant I’m not already familiar with.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it pays to check them out. And, by the way, I highly recommend the forums at Steve’s Digicams and DPreview, where you can learn a lot more from the experience of other users.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Just wondering: I have a really nice 1988 Minolta (although it’s dying, I just took into the shop and had to take it into the shop 2 yrs ago for the same problem) and it takes beautiful pictures. I’m reluctant to get a digital camera. The pictures just aren’t as good from what I’ve seen. I’m curious, what’s your opinion on the quality of pictures? Do they now compare favorably to film? Are they getting close? Since you’re a pretty techno-hip guy, I value your opinion.

I think that digital cameras are a match for 35mm now. Certainly I’m getting better results with the D70 than I got with 35mm cameras and film. On the other hand, I think that medium- and large-format film cameras still have digital beat. I’ve worked with some bigshot photographers who have gone strictly digital, and I’ve worked with some (like Baerbel Schmidt and Naomi Harris) who are still firmly attached to medium format film. I think that digital is bound to win eventually, as film has gotten about as good as it’s going to get, while digital is still on a steep upward curve, but if I were a working professional with a big investment in film equipment, I think I’d hold off if possible because any digital equipment is likely to be obsolete soon anyway.

On the other hand, if I were an amateur — which I am, and have been for all but a brief part of my photography career — and I were looking for a new camera I’d definitely go digital. Er, which I did.

ANOTHER UPDATE: At the far end of the quality spectrum — but definitely not of the usefulness-to-bloggers spectrum — Donald Sensing is writing about cellphone cameras.

HUH? BUT I THOUGHT HE WAS HITLER! The Seattle Weekly asks, “Is Bush the Antichrist?”

UPDATE: Reader Zelda Aronstein thinks this is all wrong:

Bush ain’t the anti-Christ; Santa is.

There are many structuralist alignments and axes between the two figures:

Santa is an anagram for Satan.

Both wear red.

Both have beards.

Both are associated with animals with cloven hoofs.

Santa is all about MATERIAL rewards for behavior – as an inducement for behavior; so is Satan.

Santa is short for “Santa Claus” which is another name for Saint Nicholas; Nick is an old name for Satan.

Santa lives in the North Pole – which is the exact opposite Hell; (opposites attract).

Santa is a distraction from the original purpose of Christmas; (gifts might be more properly associated with Three Kings Day – a practice which is common in Latin America).

That ole deceiver is at it again. Though, theologically, I think Satan and the Antichrist are distinct.

A NEW GROUP BLOG WITH ELEVEN MEMBERS! That’s rather a lot, really.

THE BELMONT CLUB is defending Tommy Franks against charges of incompetence from Andrew Sullivan.

SHOCKING PHOTO FROM IRAQ: No doubt it’ll be on all the Sunday talk shows.

UPDATE: I linked to it on The Corner, but now it’s gone. That’s how far the suppression has reached!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Go here.

THE WELCOME MAT IS OUT in honor of Kofi Annan’s visit to Washington.