TODAY was spent with kids. The Insta-Wife was showing her film and lecturing to a conference of juvenile court judges and caseworkers in Gatlinburg. I took the Insta-Daughter and Insta-Niece to the Ripley’s Aquarium, which is surprisingly cool. It’s not as nice as scuba diving, but you don’t get wet. And the sawfish to the right, happily pressed against the clear plastic tunnel roof, is the only one I’ve ever seen — they’ve gotten to be fairly rare in the wild for some no-doubt dire reason.

Though we live an hour from Gatlinburg, I don’t go there much — too crowded, too touristy. I prefer the actual mountains. But it’s more fun with kids. They bought various items of exciting little-girl stuff (well, not so little anymore, really) and we had an excellent time.

That’s a spider crab below. These pics were taken with the little Olympus 2 megapixel that is my go-everywhere camera. I’m sure that the more expensive ones would have done a better job — but I had this one with me, which is an important point where digital cameras are concerned. The camera that’s in your pocket does better work than the one that’s in a drawer at home.

ONE REASON that I haven’t written more about homeland security lately is that I don’t think much has happened to change what I said in earlier columns like this one, or this one, or, for that matter, this one, which was written on September 12, 2001.

But this article on the Patriot Act and the PR wars over it is well worth reading. And this quote from Viet Dinh explains why it may have been a mistake for the Administration, too:

“The USA Patriot Act has become a brand,” says Georgetown University Law Center professor Viet Dinh, who was instrumental in drafting the act as head of the DOJ’s legal policy shop from 2001 to 2003. “Activists lump everything that is objectionable about the war on terror, anything wrong with the world really, onto the USA Patriot Act. No more than 10 percent of what people ascribe to the USA Patriot Act on any given day, is in the Patriot Act itself.”

I wish I’d thought of that objection when I was opposing it. But while I think that the Patriot Act was a bad idea, and that most of it consisted of longstanding bureaucratic wishlists that had little to do with fighting terror, I also think that we still haven’t seen any sort of very useful analysis of what has worked and what hasn’t. This article is a good start at unpacking the debate, but we need much more.

And it’s worth asking why the many, many members of Congress from both parties who voted for the Act haven’t done much to advance the debate.

HOME. Blogging will resume later.

ED MORRISSEY and Greg Djerejian have much to say about this rather critical analysis of Kerry’s Iraq plans. Key passage from the story: “But when asked for hard evidence that his victory would produce a troops-reducing deal for America, neither Kerry nor his fellow senators cite anything other than their vague perceptions and utmost hopes.”

Jon Henke, meanwhile, has thoughts on how this is playing in Europe. Short version: Not as well as you might think.

BLOGS OF WAR has been on top of the terror-alert story — just keep scrolling. And read this, too.

I don’t know how seriously to take these warnings — the government is in a damned-if-you-do-or-don’t position, and of course the warnings may serve to discourage attacks all by themselves. But the fact that they were based in part on old documents is neither here nor there, as Al Qaeda was planning the 9/11 attacks as early as 1996, or, really, 1993 and — remember the “connect the dots” discussion? — had we put together information from old documents in 2001 we might well have figured out what was going on. Or not, but it’s hardly fair to fault them for trying to do that now.

As Jeff Jarvis observes:

Can’t have it both ways, folks: Can’t scream they they don’t tell us what they know — and then when they tell us what they know, it’s not good enough for you. It’s what they know. Can’t scream that they’re not connecting the dots and when they connect some, you scream because you don’t like the picture it draws.

Yep. I’m not overly impressed with homeland security, as regular readers will recall. But this sort of criticism merely serves to demonstrate the unseriousness of the critics.

UPDATE: Reader Richard McEnroe emails:

BTW, doesn’t the fact that these terrorist operations are planned years in advance tend to give the lie to the idea that the terrorists are merely responding to our _actions_ but instead feel an implacable and longstanding enmity for what we _are_?

Good point.

MICKEY KAUS wonders if it’s too late for the Torricelli option. I don’t think things are that bad for Kerry — his campaign has no problems that he couldn’t fix with some straight talk.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: Interesting revelations from Tommy Franks.

I’M AWAY on an overnight with the Insta-Wife, who’s giving a speech tomorrow, the Insta-Daughter, and an Insta-Niece, and since the hotel wifi is down, all I’ve got is 26.4 kbps dialup. Blogging may be limited until Tuesday afternoon.

UPDATE: Rubbing salt (water) in my wounds, Jim at Smoke on the Water emails that he’s getting 51kbps — from his sailboat. Sheesh.

GOOD NEWS: “Nine out of 10 eligible Afghans have signed up for landmark October elections, the United Nations said yesterday, a resounding endorsement of a democratic experiment intended to help Afghanistan turn its back on years of debilitating war.”

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF rounds up good news from Iraq that doesn’t seem to be getting much media attention.

BLAME ELIZABETH DOLE: God knows, I do.

POLITICIANS, CELEBRITIES, AND PRIVATE JETS: Gregg Easterbrook disapproves.

TOM MAGUIRE, who continues to be on a roll, has been parsing the Kerry/Stephanopoulos interview transcript and has interesting observations on taxes and the war.

“I DON’T CARE WHAT HE SAID:” KERRY REPUDIATES HOWARD DEAN:

Kerry dismissed former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s comment that raising the terror level might be politically motivated.

“I don’t care what he said. I haven’t suggested that and I won’t suggest that,” Kerry said. “I do not hold that opinion. I don’t believe that.”

Good for him.

UPDATE: Apparently, I’m just another gullible liberal for approving this statement by Kerry. On the other hand, here’s the Dean-fan spin: “Glenn is wrong – Kerry hasn’t repudiated Dean’s (correct) observation, he just disavowed knowledge of what Dean said.” Mission: Impossible lives!

MAUREEN DOWD said that the Kerry Campaign is channeling Gilligan. Tom Maguire says that Bush is channeling Star Trek.

OF BABIES AND BATHWATER: Some thoughts on intelligence reform, in The Economist.

OPERATION GIVE is having problems with Atlas Line. Chief Wiggles’ blog and Reid Stott have more information.

SO NOW I’M GETTING mash notes from fictional characters. Oh, well.

IN THE MAIL: Michelle Malkin’s audacious new book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror.

I’ve always regarded the internment of Japanese-Americans and Japanese residing in America during World War II as both a tragic mistake and a grievous wrong. That’s the conventional wisdom, and Malkin sets out to refute it, arguing that (1) there were more reasons to fear espionage and sabotage than many critics realized until the recent declassification of intelligence data from MAGIC and other formerly secret sources: and (2) the internment wasn’t as at odds with international law and norms of human rights as critics claim.

Her bigger point, however, is that we’re still fighting the last war today by letting concerns about that history stand in the way of much-more-moderate efforts in the War on Terror. I don’t know that she’ll have much luck changing a lot of minds on this topic, though her book may serve to get the discussion going. Unless, of course, there’s another major terror attack, in which case people may wish we’d given the subject more careful thought over the past couple of years.

There is a lot of concern over illegal immigration and its links to terror — you hear a lot of it on the second-tier talk-radio shows, where the hosts aren’t quite as worried about their position in the larger media world, and I’ve heard a lot of callers express deep dissatisfaction with how the Bush Administration is handling immigration.

To me it seems we have the worst of both worlds. The immigration system is hard and unpleasant for honest immigrants, tourists, and traveling professionals, while being largely porous to criminals and terrorists. I don’t know how to fix it, but it pretty clearly needs fixing.

I’m quite pro-immigration, but being in favor of letting in people who want to come here and become Americans (like my delightful sister-in-law Victoria) isn’t the same as being in favor of scrutiny-free borders — much less a system that treats honest folks like criminals while serving as no real impediment to actual criminals. This needs fixing, badly, but I’m afraid that we’re suffering from political paralysis on this front.

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Susanna Cornett.

LETTERS FROM THE FRONT: Worth reading.

“I HAVE TAKEN MORE OUT OF ALCOHOL THAN ALCOHOL HAS TAKEN OUT OF ME,” said Winston Churchill. And it appears that he was right:

It is news guaranteed to raise a cheer among those who enjoy a glass or two: drinking half a bottle of wine a day can make your brain work better, especially if you are a woman.

Research to be published tomorrow by academics at University College London has found that those who even drink only one glass of wine a week have significantly sharper thought processes than teetotallers.

I’m obviously not drinking enough. I’ll have to remedy that. (Hey, no wonder Stephen Green is so smart!) Although between the wine, the coffee, and the Guinness, I’ll get plenty of exercise running off to pee. But that’s healthy, too!

MORE BAD PR FOR ALABAMA on the vibrator ban law:

Most of the Alabama legislature is made up of men. Just who are they protecting here? It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when the men folk have to get together and pass laws to keep their women from utilizing alternative methods for sexual gratification. What do you Alabama studs need? Lessons?

Ouch. Kerry ought to make fun of them for this — he’ll never carry Alabama anyway, so it’s a freebie!

DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE?

The German government is under growing pressure to hold a referendum on the new European constitution after 30 of the country’s most eminent legal scholars declared that federal law could easily be changed to allow a vote.

Opinion polls show that 70 per cent of Germans want a vote on the treaty but Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has refused to follow the British and French in staging a referendum. . . .

Reflecting the prevailing mood in the Berlin chancellery, Michael Muller, the deputy head of the Social Democrats’ parliamentary party, added: “Sometimes the electorate has to be protected from making the wrong decisions.”

A fair number of people are snarking at Muller’s comment. Of course, a suspicion of thoughtless popular majorities is built into our own Constitution — though Muller’s comments, if accurately reported, seem to have more to do with outcomes than with government structure.

WELL, IT’S BETTER THAN WENDY’S! And I like Wendy’s. (Via PowerLine, where we also get this comment: “You know, after all that hullabaloo over the ‘fake turkey,’ I wonder if anyone’s going to pick up on this…”)

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE WRITES about moral self-dealing by pension managers at the Presbyterian Church (USA).