CONGRATULATIONS to Joanne Jacobs.

DAVID ADESNIK reviews Team America.

JEFF JARVIS: “Welcome to the future of TV.” I think he’s right.

DARFUR UPDATE: “‘If this isn’t genocide, then what on earth is?”

THE PROTEST WARRIOR APPROACH has spread to France. Heh.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP on the United Nations effort to ban therapeutic cloning. I don’t know what the Kerry Campaign thinks about this.

POLITICIANS “PIMPIN’ THE PULPIT:” Ambra Nykol isn’t impressed. (Via Nykola.com).

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF has news from Afghanistan you’re likely to have missed.

BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT understandably absent-minded professor, I forgot my office key when I came in on Sunday. I got some work done in the library anyway, but finished up early there and took an hour or so to walk around campus on a beautiful day. I took a few pictures — some are in the “extended entry area” so you’ll have to click “read more” for them. Interestingly, these were taken with the 3-megapixel Toshiba instead of the 5-megapixel Sony, because the Toshiba was what I had with me. But viewed full-size there wasn’t a lot of difference. I think that the better lens on the Toshiba (which sadly accounts for its bulk) makes up a lot of the difference.

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RYAN SAGER ON JOHN KERRY’S TERRORISM-AS-NUISANCE REMARK: “For his honesty, Kerry has been subjected over the last week to no end of abuse in the media — and not just on the conservative side. . . . There’s a way to run for president, criticizing the present while providing a vision for the future, without sounding like the head of the Yale Political Union. But Kerry hasn’t hit on it yet.”

GREG DJEREJIAN EXPLAINS why he’s voting for Bush. “In short, Bush’s record has been mixed–but he gets the existential stakes at play. I would only vote for Kerry if: a) he got the stakes too and b) assuming ‘a’, that I thought he would prosecute the war in materially more effective fashion. I don’t believe either.”

Read the whole thing, which is thorough, thoughtful, and — despite the conclusion — unsparing in its criticism of the Bush Administration.

MORE PROBLEMS WITH KERRY’S MULTILATERAL APPROACH: First the “get NATO involved” seems to have flopped. The Germans and the French have made clear that they’re not sending troops to Iraq. Now the cheap-drugs-from-Canada approach seems to have gone belly-up, too:

More than 30 Canadian internet pharmacies have decided not to accept bulk orders of prescription drugs from US states and municipalities.

The move delivers a potentially serious setback to US politicians most notably Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry campaigning to give Americans easier access to cheap drugs from Canada. . . . But growing concern in Canada that growing exports to the US could lead to rising prices and shortages north of the border has prompted the Canadian International Pharmacy Association (Cipa), whose members include several of the biggest internet and mail-order drugstores, to act.

It’s always seemed obvious to me that we can’t generate much in the way of real savings by sending drugs from America to Canada and then reimporting them. That’s not real cost-lowering but the sort of regulatory arbitrage that — as the Canadians have figured out — is more likely to raise Canadian prices than lower American ones in the long run. (And as Tom Maguire notes, other people have figured that out, too.) Still, the Kerry Campaign might wish that the Canadians had waited a couple of weeks.

MARK STEYN ON JOHN HOWARD:

With John Howard, you don’t need that: just get him on the phone.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, he didn’t bother flying in to Camp David for the Bush-Blair photo-op or to the Azores for the Anglo-American-Spanish-Portuguese one. He could have gone, but he didn’t feel he had to. After all, he’s got a real alliance, not like the Franco-American “alliance”, which exists only at summits and ends as soon as Bush and Chirac have got on their respective planes.

The result is that, even though he’s hardly ever in the souvenir photo line-up, Howard’s a more consequential figure in world affairs these days than Chirac. Indeed, he’s a transformative figure. I know this, because my nation has been on the other end of the transformation. I’m Canadian and, for those who remember when the Royal Canadian Navy was once the third largest surface fleet in the world, it’s sobering to hear Australia spoken of as the third pillar of the Anglosphere.

Under Howard, Australia is a player while Canada is a global irrelevance. Given geography and the Islamists’ ambitions in Indonesia and South Asia, that might be true whoever was in power. But, if this is simply a reflection of regional realities, Howard expresses them better than anyone else.

Indeed.

THE INSTA-WIFE’S FILM SIX will be showing next Sunday night at the IndieMemphis Film Festival.

BLOG-O-RAMA: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up, presenting posts on business and economics from a wide range of bloggers. And speaking of blog roundups, don’t miss Simon World’s Asian blog survey.

MARTIN PERETZ is very unhappy with the look of Kerry’s mideast policy:

I’ve searched to find one time when Kerry — even candidate Kerry — criticized a U.N. action or statement against Israel. I’ve come up empty. Nor has he defended Israel against the European Union’s continuous hectoring. . . .

This muddled foolishness reflects Kerry’s sense of politics as desperate theater. . . . Kerry seems to have nostalgia for the peacemaking ways of Clinton. But what Clinton actually bequeathed to George W., says Benn, was “an Israeli-Palestinian war and a total collapse of the hopes that flourished in the 1990s…. The height of the peace process during the Clinton era, the Camp David summit in July 2000, was a classic example of inept diplomacy, an arrogant and rash move whose initiators failed to take into account the realpolitik, misunderstood Arafat and brought upon both Israelis and Palestinians the disaster of the intifada.”

Ouch. Read the whole thing.

SO DOES THIS MEAN THAT WE SHOULD BE WORRIED?

MADRID — Seven months after bombs exploded aboard morning commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people, the precise motives of the attackers remain unclear. But new evidence, including wiretap transcripts, has lent support to a theory that the strike was carefully timed to take place three days before a national election in hopes of influencing Spanish voters to reject a government that sent troops to Iraq. . . .

People familiar with this fast-moving sequence of events say it suggests the attackers wanted to make certain that Spanish voters knew that Islamic radicals — and not the Basque separatist group ETA — were responsible when they went to the polls so they would punish the ruling party.

Maybe we should be. Fortunately, widespread early voting makes such an attack more problematic.

UPDATE: Speaking of targeting the elections:

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) — Russian President Vladimir Putin says terrorist attacks in Iraq are aimed at preventing the re-election of U.S. President George W. Bush and that a Bush defeat “could lead to the spread of terrorism to other parts of the world.” . . .

“Any unbiased observer understands that attacks of international terrorist organizations in Iraq, especially nowadays, are targeted not only and not so much against the international coalition as against President Bush,” Putin said.

Indeed.