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.