TOM RIDGE RESIGNS.

MADRID BOMBING UPDATE: A roundup on Aznar’s testimony here, from Franco Aleman, and also read this post from Iberian Notes:

Former Prime Minister José María Aznar spoke for eleven hours yesterday before the Parliamentary commission investigating the March 11 bombings in Madrid. It was all televised live on TV2; I watched some of it, especially the part where he chewed up the Esquerra Republicana guy and spit him out. Aznar was devastating.

Read ’em both.

STARTED READING JOHN SCALZI’S NEW BOOK today in the waiting room, where I had ample time to read. So far, I like it a lot; I’ll post a full review when I’m done.

IS THE U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL BROKEN? Ruth Wedgwood and Frederick Rawski have a blog-debate underway over at Legal Affairs.

Some might say that this story answers the question.

MORE ON THE TERM “LIKUDNIK” and anti-semitism.

OVER AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM, I explain to Bill O’Reilly that the Internet is a no-weenie zone.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has more thoughts, and several readers emailed to wonder if O’Reilly’s defense of Rather isn’t really just a big-media suckup move, as he angles to replace Rather or Brokaw.

SORRY FOR THE LIMITED BLOGGING: Had to take the InstaWife to the doctor this morning, as she’s still feeling ill. She’s now, however, watching HGTV and learning how to “accessorize” a dining room.

IN THE PAST I’VE MENTIONED bizarre remixes of Lawrence Welk and Henry Mancini, (you can hear samples online by following the links) — but now John Scalzi is pointing the way to an entire, streamable online album of remixes of white-bread ’70s pop, with the remixes done by people like The Supreme Beings of Leisure. It’s cool, and it’s free. Which is even cooler.

HEALTHCARE BLOGGING: This week’s Grand Rounds is up, with entries from health-care professionals on all sorts of topics.

ADVICE TO OLD MEDIA:

Too many people in newspapers speak as if there is going to be a straight migration from newspaper to its websites, albeit with traumatic commercial consequences. Ideally, they think, we will all be sitting on trains with digital versions of newspapers broadcast wirelessly to digital paper (think Minority Report/ Harry Potter). They have built their websites – often as fortresses, cut off from the rest of the net – accordingly.

This, methinks, is optimistic – and that’s putting it politely.

Indeed.

IRAQ UPDATES: Read this and this.

IVORY COAST UPDATE:

A colonel of the Ivorian gendarmerie interviewed by Agence France Presse (AFP) has affirmed that French forces on November 9 fired directly and without warning upon the crowd of protestors gathered in front of the Hotel Ivoire in Abidjan. Colonel Georges Guiai Bi Poin, who was in charge of a contingent of Ivorian gendarmes dispatched to control the crowd and coordinate with the French troops, says that the order to fire came from the commander of the latter, colonel D’Estremon.

If these were American troops, this would be getting worldwide attention.

MORE UKRAINE UPDATES HERE, from King Banaian.

UPDATE: John O’Sullivan looks at winners and losers so far:

The final losers are the U.N. and Kofi Annan. The U.N. has been invisible. As Kofi Annan has been trying to keep his head above oil, he has issued his usual appeal for restraint. But this crisis has brought forth the heroes of the Cold War from retirement — Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and Margaret Thatcher — to encourage the orange revolutionaries. And Annan cannot begin to compete with their moral authority or the legitimacy they can bestow.

Indeed.

And read this piece, on lessons from Georgia and elsewhere, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here, including a link to video.

JIM LINDGREN: “If the news accounts are correct, the new study distinguishing the brain scans of liars from truth-tellers has a serious design flaw that goes beyond the small sample size. Indeed, it is such an obvious flaw that I wonder whether the researchers really made it, or whether instead the reporters got the story wrong.”

ONLINE SHOPPING IS UP:

U.S. online shoppers, who set spending and traffic records on Thanksgiving Day and the “Black Friday” that followed, were expected to break new ground again as they returned to work on what some are calling “Blue Monday.” . . .

While Black Friday refers to the bustling shopping day that starts brick-and-mortar retailers’ move from “the red” to “the black,” Blue Monday — a name inspired by the Web’s blue links — is one of the biggest days for online retailers as workers return to their jobs, and fast Internet connections.

Businesses: Let your employees surf at work. The economy depends on it!

A MALE HOMECOMING QUEEN? Big deal. The University of Tennessee did that with Vince Staten back in 1970 (though, back in those analog days, we had a paper bag instead of a blue dot). Talk about being behind the times.

CLEANING UP THE U.N.: Is it time for Helms-Biden again?

BECAUSE THERE HAVE TO BE SOME LIMITS, DAMMIT: “I am not about to Photoshop tasteful wall decorations into an informal luncheon snapshot.”

UPDATE: Not everyone appreciates the value of restraint.

AN IMPORTANT POINT:

One of the tragic things I see developing is that the Western media narrative seems to be falling into a US vs. Russia play. And I’m seeing more and more commentary in that vein on the web. So few seem to grasp that this is about an entire system, not about an election. Yes, the people are rallying for Yushchenko, but it goes so, so much deeper than that.

The events in Ukraine are about a people fighting free of the grayness, corruption, abuse and fatalism of the post-Soviet era. All of you, Right or Left, need to see them as people. Yes, there are geopolitical ramifications. But they should be so incredibly secondary to the humanity of the Ukrainian people — these are flesh and blood human beings who are fighting to be free of a vicious, grinding system. People are proud to be Ukrainian, proud that their country is now known for something other than mafia, dead journalists, and corruption. People who a week ago were convinced of their own powerlessness are now standing fearlessly, singing together, “We are many, we are one, we can’t be stopped!”

Can anyone be so dead of heart not to find this beautiful?

Apparently so.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT:

Some people, of the sort who confuse (or who like to pretend for propaganda purposes that they confuse) libertarianism with libertinism, might expect a libertarian like me to rejoice at any collapse in marital fidelity. But my libertarianism is about the right to choose what promises you make, not about the right to break them with impunity, to the point where you are not even to be criticised for such cheating. . . .

And if anyone mentions France, where, allegedly, they take a more mature and rational view of these things, my answer is: precisely. Cynicism about private life is directly to be associated, I would say, with cynicism about the more public side of things. French public life is relentlessly corrupt and cynical, and they are oh-so-rational about adultery. I do not think these facts are coincidental.

Read the whole thing, which is about the Blunkett affair and much more.

INTERESTED IN STORYTELLING AND SCREENWRITING? If you are, you may be interested in this blog by Katy Wright. She’s written a book on the subject, too.

HOT FRENCH CHICKS WITH GUNS: The world is becoming a better place.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE has further thoughts on Wal-Mart.

UPDATE: This take is closer to my own: Wal-Mart is just an unpleasant place to shop.

THOUGHTS ON DEMOCRACY IN THE UKRAINE, from Matt Spence.

IT’S NOT PLAGIARISM when you repeat stuff from a press release without checking it — but it’s not journalism, either. It’s not even very good punditry.