Archive for 2004
May 11, 2004
IRAQI BLOGGER ALI has an interesting interview with an Iraqi physician who worked at Abu Ghraib.
WHITE TICKET HOLDERS ONLY: Capt. Ed. notes an unfortunate turn of phrase.
MORE OUTRAGEOUS IMAGES OF PRISONER ABUSE: No doubt this will lead the news tonight. (Via Stephen Green).
UPDATE: Alex Bensky emails:
No doubt the Arab press is going to be worrying about how this outrage will affect the volatile American street. There will surely be editorials and op-eds wondering if the Arab cause is tainted by such savagery. Be sure and link to the articles, will you?
Uh, sure.
Link to the video here. And more thoughts from Donald Sensing, here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Tacitus is comparing the Arab press’s treatment of Nick Berg with its treatment of Abu Ghraib.
Somebody should do the same with the American press.
TAX PROF SHOWS SKIN TO WIN VOTES: I don’t think we need any more of that.
PHIL BOWERMASTER is introducing a new feature — a roundup of nothing but good news on, well, every subject he can find. Some stories are well-known, others obscure, but it’s an interesting effort.
NAJAF, Iraq — About 1,000 people, including a few women in black veils, marched through the streets of Najaf on Tuesday to urge radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers to leave the city.
Did I say “heh?” By a curious coincidence, Sadr now seems to be backing down.
UPDATE: Michael Ubaldi is saying “I told you so,” to the pessimists.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jason van Steenwyck is less optimistic about Fallujah.
BLACKFIVE has a list of people you should know, but probably won’t hear about elsewhere.
I wonder why not?
SEN. JAMES INHOFE is outraged that the Kerry Campaign is using Abu Ghraib pictures for fundraising.
And they were mad about 9/11 photos?
UPDATE: I’m in error, above. At first glance, the press release to which Sisu links looks like Kerry’s using “images,” but I misread that, and he’s actually not. He’s merely invoking them secondhand by referring to his own demand for Rumsfeld’s ouster. Sorry. And thanks to reader Dick Riley for pointing out the error. Though Neal Boortz is saying the same thing. No link, though.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Related comments here.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Hmm. Perhaps I was too quick to admit error. At least, this fundraising email does invoke the images, though they’re not actually shown unless they were attached in an HTML version or something:
Message from Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry Campaign Manager:
Dear Friend,
Over the past week we have all been shocked by the pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Not quite the same as running them in a TV commercial, but certainly making use of them.
GARY SILBERBERG points to a hero.
UPDATE: The link’s down, because Gary posted something he got by email that turned out to be not an original message, but an item from another blog.
INSTAPUNDIT’S AFGHANISTAN PHOTO-CORRESPONDENT, Major John Tammes of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, sends this photo and report from Bagram:
I hope you are feeling better. I thought this picture of the mightiest weapon in the US military logistics arsenal (at least here in Afghanistan) would help. Behold the Jingle Truck! Local Nationals or Pakistanis (from the port of Karachi) drive everywhere, carrying all kinds of supplies. I wondered about the name before I deployed here – one look tells it all.
Indeed it does!
STEPHEN GREEN HAS QUESTIONS for antiwar people. And Alan Dershowitz.
SISSY WILLIS is running a suppressed photo of U.S. troops in Iraq.
UPDATE: Here’s another. You just can’t keep that stuff secret in the digital age!
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS IS UP: Don’t miss it.
We have every confidence Mr. Volcker will lead a thorough investigation, but the public should not be asked to take it on faith that he will be given access to all information and rely on his interpretation alone. As the above-quoted contract makes clear, the Secretary-General has the authority to waive all these confidentiality agreements. The fact that Kofi Annan has chosen instead to pursue a campaign of legal intimidation is a pretty good indication that he intends as much of a whitewash as he can get away with. . . .
If abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers demands an accounting, so too does the world-wide conspiracy of bribery that helped prop up Saddam Hussein’s torture-based regime. Now’s hardly the time for the White House to be seen demanding anything less than full openness and accountability in any area of its Iraq policy.
Indeed. (Emphasis added.)
I WASN’T IGNORING THE SULLIVAN/GOLDBERG GAY MARRIAGE DEBATE, exactly, but it’s hard for me to get excited about the issue.
In my Advanced Constitutional Law seminar, even the most enthusiastically pro-gay-marriage students thought the Massachusetts opinion was lame — but that was a question of judicial craftsmanship. It matters to lawyers, and it should matter to everyone else. But the court of public opinion is actually moving faster than the courts on this topic anyway.
On the issue, attitudes are changing awfully fast. Rhea County, Tennessee — home to the Scopes Trial, but a place that even H.L. Mencken admitted is actually quite nice — rejected an anti-gay ordinance and wound up having Gay Day instead. (That’s the Dayton courthouse, where the Scopes trial was held, over to the right. The church sign below is from close by, a bit nearer to Decatur than Dayton — I took both of these pictures just a couple of weeks ago). And an anti-gay-marriage amendment died in Kansas this weekend, too. If you can’t win there, you’ve lost. And on this issue, the opponents of gay marriage have, I think, lost. There are legitimate process questions, but the outcome is just a matter of time. And not all that much time, really.
UPDATE: A lot of people seem to like the church-sign photo, and want to know if they can post a copy on their blogs. Sure, though I’d appreciate a credit with a link back if you don’t mind.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More on Kansas from Mike Silverman.
May 10, 2004
H.D. MILLER NOTES that while the press has hared off after another “losing the war” story, last month’s threat, the “Mahdi army,” is evaporating.
UPDATE: More here.
And read this, too.
I’M SURE THESE POLLS DON’T MEAN MUCH, but Joe Gandelman is surprised to see that Bush has actually gained a point on Kerry over the last week.
Well, Donald Sensing predicted it.
But what’s going to happen, I think, is that the election will be determined by what voters think about the war, and the economy, in late October. On the economy front, that’s probably unfair, since Presidents don’t have much actual control over the economy, but it’s probably good for Bush, since it looks like it’ll be improving between now and then.
On the war front it’s fair, I think — though no doubt the enemy will do their best to ensure that things look as bad as they can make them look around then.
UPDATE: A reader emails about “the enemy,” above:
Surely “the opposition” would be a better term, or simply, the Democrats.
We have enemies in war, but it seems a tad strong for electoral politics.
There are bipartisan alliances from time to time, and we are all Americans,
are we not?
I was actually talking about, you know, the enemy trying to influence the elections along the lines of Madrid. . . .
THANKS to all the people who sent inquiries regarding my health, encouragement to get better, donations, etc. I’m okay, though I still have the cough and still feel kind of crappy. But I think the antibiotics are working.
I took time off — and stayed pretty light in blogging even today — because James Lileks’ remark about being a “public utility” hit a little close to home. In truth, I’ve been feeling a bit like that for a while. It’s nobody’s fault — if you pass out the free ice cream (another Lileks phrase) regularly, people will tend to line up for it in advance, and even to rattle their spoons against their bowls a bit when it doesn’t appear as scheduled. Nonetheless, it starts to feel like work when that happens. As Tom Sawyer discovered, work consists of whatever a body feels obliged to do.
I’m trying to treat InstaPundit less like work. That may mean less blogging, or not (I notice that here and elsewhere, forecasts of lighter blogging often turn out to be inaccurate), but I started this because it was fun, and I want to keep it that way, not succumb to blog fatigue, as even Lileks himself notes that blogging can start to feel like a “blogligation,” not a hobby. I don’t want that.
So, anyway, there will either be more blogging, or less, or about the same, in the near future. But I’m going to try to make it feel less like work, regardless. And if I didn’t respond to your email, it’s because there are about 4000 emails sitting on the server right now, and I haven’t even tried to keep up over the past several days. That’s part of having it not feel like work, too.
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has thoughts on blog fatigue.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeez, Sullivan’s not suffering from blog fatigue. Just go there and see how much he’s posted since the item above.
RICH GALEN is back in the States and blogging, and — as someone who has actually been to Abu Ghraib — has some thoughts.
BRAVO FOR THE DEMOCRATS, who are issuing press credentials to bloggers who want to cover the convention this summer. Will the Republicans follow suit?
BAD NEWS FOR THE NANOTECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY:
May 10 (Bloomberg) — Swiss Reinsurance Co., the world’s No.2 reinsurer, said insurers may need to reconsider covering some products that use so-called nanotechnology, weeks after a study on fish raised health concerns about new developments in the field.
Though the toxic-buckyball study is dubious, and its connection to nanotechnology somewhat attenuated, as I mentioned earlier, the nanotech industry’s PR strategy has made this sort of response inevitable.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to the actual report.
SPEAKING OF THE MILLION-MOM NON-MARCH mentioned below, Alphecca’s weekly roundup of media bias relating to guns is up, with lots of interesting stuff as usual.
LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE SAYING IT’S A QUAGMIRE, HEADING FOR INEVITABLE DEFEAT, and only a resignation at the top will expiate the failure so far:
“John Kerry Must Go.”
That Village Voice headline may be a tad dramatic, but stories about disaffected Democrats are spreading like wildfire through the media forest.
I think that betrays a lack of perspective, and a willingness to give up too soon, that’s all too typical of those overexcitable political and journalistic types. Fortunately, there’s a sane blogger on the job:
Kevin Drum, a California-based columnist for the Washington Monthly, says that Kerry isn’t a great campaigner but that “it’s just too early” for such pieces. “I’m not sure it’s anything other than [reporters] looking for a story. . . . It’s pretty much inside the Beltway.”
I agree.
WITH THIS MATH, WE’D ONLY NEED THREE PEOPLE TO HAVE A THOUSAND-MOM MARCH!
The rally lacked the star power, and certainly the numbers, of the first Million Mom March in 2000, when hundreds of thousands of women flooded the Mall on Mother’s Day. Organizers this time put the crowd at close to 3,000, a figure that could not be confirmed because police no longer estimate crowd sizes.
Estimating crowd sizes is largely bogus, but if the organizers are claiming 3,000 you can bet there weren’t any more people anywhere nearby.