WHAT IS IT about women and handbags? Though the “click for holster size chart” line on this one indicates that the Bitchgirls aren’t quite in the Sara Jessica Parker mold. . . .

SOME THOUGHTS ON HONESTY IN PHOTOJOURNALISM, a topic that has been explored here in the past.

WHAT WOULD WALT DO? Disney is having trouble with Segways and the disabled.

WESLEY CLARK: “The whitest candidate in a very, very white field.”

I’VE DROPPED THE BALL on space policy issues lately. But go here for a critical response to Josh Marshall on the subject, and here for a bunch of other interesting links and items.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY — er, well, sort of. The University of Tennessee library has digitized photos of the Smoky Mountains by famed amateur photographer Albert “Dutch” Roth. They date back to before the beginning of the National Park, and they’re pretty cool. (Via SmokyBlog.)

THE NEXT STEP:

The Bush administration has launched an ambitious bid to promote democracy in the “greater Middle East” that will adapt a model used to press for freedoms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Senior White House and State Department officials have begun talks with key European allies about a master plan to be put forward this summer at summits of the Group of Eight nations, NATO allies and the European Union, U.S. officials say. With international backing, the United States then hopes to win commitments of action from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries.

Will the “human rights” community back this, or succumb to not-invented-here syndrome?

UPDATE: Belgravia Dispatch has more on this, in a somewhat less positive vein.

Robert Tagorda, on the other hand, is very pleased.

HOW COLLEGE ADMISSIONS REALLY WORK: Kimberly Swygert offers the ugly truth.

I think it’s somewhat better at law schools (I don’t have firsthand experience, as I’ve never sat on the Admissions committee) but even there it’s heavily numbers-driven. If your numbers are high enough, or low enough, the decision is pretty much made — the rest of the application doesn’t matter that much unless you’re in an intermediate zone that can be fairly narrow.

JAMES LILEKS:

Okay, well, outtakes: went back to the microfilm today to February 1998, when the Clinton adminstration was making the case for attacking Iraq. How things change. Clinton was arguing that Saddam not only had WMD, but that one day he might want to make more WMD, and this wasn’t acceptable. Interesting to read between the lines – the Clinton administration seemed to be arguing that the potential for future production was itself a valid reason to strike. Military force is never “the first answer,’ Clinton said, “but sometimes it’s the only answer.” “If Saddam isn’t stopped now,” the AP story said, quoting Clinton,“’He will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And someday, someway, I guarantee you, he’ll use that arsenal.’” Thus spake Clinton in 1998. He went on to note that the strikes planned could not possibly destroy Saddam’s arsenal, because A) they didn’t know where everything was, and B) they didn’t want to kill Iraqis by unleashing clouds of toxins. And it gets better: a sidebar noted that this war plan – Desert Thunder – had been prepared weeks before, in case Saddam stiffed in the inspectors.

Bill Clinton had a plan to go to war before the crisis flared! What does that tell you? Obviously, he was looking for any excuse! Halliburton! We all know about the ties between Clinton and Halliburton – he gave them a sweet no-bid contract after his Balkans war, you know.

Anyway: it’s deja vu all over again. You want to talk imminence? WMD? Democratic concern and conviction? Go back to the papers of 1998; it’s all there, right down to the terrorist links: Hezbollah, for example, swears it will strike Israel if the US attacks Iraq. (A poll of Palestinians showed that 94% supported Iraq, and 77% wanted Iraq to kill Jews if the US attacked Iraq.) Bob Dole was quoted as supporing the strikes but urging Clinton to seek Congressional Authorization.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN KERRY (well, John Kerry’s office, anyway) is in the Tehran Times promising reconciliation.

GAY MARRIAGE: My Advanced Constitutional Law seminar is looking at the Baker case from Vermont and the Goodridge case from Massachusetts tomorrow, both of which find a right to gay marriage in their respective state constitutions. I just read over them both again. I have to say, the Vermont court wins on both style and substance. Its opinion reads like, well, an actual judicial opinion. Part of that, of course, is that it’s got a firmer legal ground thanks to the “common benefits” clause of the Vermont Constitution, which provides:

That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community, and not for the particular emolument or advantage of any single person, family, or set of persons, who are a part only of that community.

But the other reason is that they just bothered to write a legal opinion. Though I’m in favor of gay marriage, the Massachusetts opinion is just unpersuasive. There’s astonishingly little in the way of actual legal analysis there, and that hurts them.

BELLICOSE WOMEN:

“That’s OK, I don’t think he’ll be back,” said Lisle, who emptied one .357 revolver at the intruder before she retrieved a second one and he crashed through another window to flee.

“I was trying to miss my furniture. Priorities, right?” Lisle said. . . .

The bleeding intruder ran across the street and tried to hot-wire a motorcycle, but its owners, already armed to come to Lisle’s aid, chased off the would-be thief, she said.

She said one of the men yelled after the retreating burglar: “And that’s just our womenfolk.”

Heh.

I AGREE THAT THIS IS “UNUSUAL AND TROUBLING:”

A federal judge has ordered Drake University to hand over information related to an antiwar meeting held in November on the campus, a move that representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild have described as extremely unusual and troubling.

In addition, four people who attended the meeting, held in the student-union building of the private institution, in Des Moines, have been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury on Tuesday.

Based on this report, it’s hard to imagine what the inquiry would be about. Do they think these guys were getting money from Saddam or Osama? Seems doubtful.

On the other hand, where were these guys when the 1994 and 1996 crime and terrorism bills were passed:

“Any organization that’s operating within the law and is a political organization, the government has no business taking records relating to their internal meetings or their officers or members,” he said. “It’s very scary to me that the federal officials in Iowa think they’re entitled to do something like this.”

I’m always astounded when people say things like this, because it indicates that they have no idea how much power the federal government has, and has had for a long time.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh notes that there is more to this story, including allegations of criminal activity, and observes:

Political meetings are not safe harbors in which people can freely organize conspiracies to commit crimes, free from any risk of investigation (including coercive investigation using subpoenas). That’s true if it’s a KKK meeting used to organize racial terrorism, an Operation Rescue meeting used to organize trespass or vandalism at an abortion clinic, or an anti-war group’s meeting used to organize criminal trespass or possible misdemeanor assault. The government doesn’t have carte blanche to just demand the entire membership list of a group (see NAACP v. Alabama); but it has considerable latitude to ask people about any possibly criminal conduct that they’ve witnessed, and even about information that may simply be relevant to determining whether such conduct took place.

Read his whole post on this subject.

NOW THAT’S LIBERALISM: Australia is sacrificing the interests of the idle rich to help real people with real jobs.

SCOTT OTT HAS LAUNCHED BOYCOTTMTV.COM, a non-satirical site aimed at, well, boycotting MTV.

I pretty much do that already, but not for the same reasons. I’m not shocked by MTV, or repulsed. Just bored and annoyed. Frankly, I’d like MTV better if it showed actual people enjoying actual sex, rather than the winking, leering pseudo-sex that is its stock in trade.

Heck, I’d settle for them actually showing music videos again. . . .

ARTHUR SILBER wonders what John Kerry has against gay people.

EUGENE VOLOKH WRITES on animals, perversion, Jerry Falwell, and Rosie O’Donnell.

UPDATE: Sorry – confused Roseanne Barr and Rosie O’Donnell earlier.

CHRIS SUELLENTROP writes on the Al Gore meltdown mentioned below:

Gore is still popular with the Democratic base, but after this speech, the question for the party’s nominee has to be, do you want this man to speak at the convention in Boston? Even if you like the sentiment behind this speech, if Gore delivers an address like this one in July, the historical analogy won’t be to the Democrats of 1976 or to the Republicans of 1994. Instead, the comparison will be to the disastrous Republican convention of 1992. The angry white male is back. Do the Democrats really want him?

But how do they stop him, without him unloading his ample free-floating wrath on them?

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has a question for Al Gore.

JEFF JARVIS is liveblogging the Emerging Technologies conference, and linking to others who are doing the same. Biggest news: Joe Trippi on where the Dean money went.

HERE’S HOW CNN IS SPINNING the Zarqawi memo mentioned below. Of course, the memo is actually written by a non-Iraqi, about plans to stir up a sectarian war because Iraqis don’t want Al Qaeda to drive the U.S. out. Here’s an excerpt from the memo:

With some exasperation, the author writes: “We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases.

“By God, this is suffocation!” the writer says.

This is an absolutely unforgivable example of either (1) spinning the war into a bogus “quagmire” or (2) sheer inability to report the news accurately even when the “reporting” merely consists of accurately summarizing a story in a headline. (Thanks to the commenter at QandO who provided the link. I’ve saved screenshots in case it goes away.)

UPDATE: Glad I saved it — the headline now reads “Operative Sought al-Qaida’s Help in Iraq.”

Meanwhile Daniel Drezner has more thoughts on the memo. Short version: “Al Qaeda is losing in Iraq.”

And, while you’re at it, you might want to read today’s Winds of Change Iraq news roundup.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Grant Williams notes that the same story is being spun the opposite way here: “A letter seized from an al-Qaida courier shows Osama bin Laden has made little headway in recruiting Iraqis for a holy war against America, raising questions about the Bush administration’s contention that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror.” Um, it only raises those questions for people who are either (1) idiots; or (2) pathological Bush detractors; or (3) both. Or maybe this is the all-new spin: The flypaper strategy isn’t attracting enough flies.

MORE: David Adesnik writes: “I think that this is a case of sheer incompetence, not bias, a possibility that Glenn acknowledges. If you read the article attached to the headline, its gets the story right.” Um, yes. But CNN didn’t write the article, AP did. CNN just wrote the headline. The most charitable interpretation is that CNN didn’t read the article either, and assumed that Iraqis must want to get rid of Americans because, well, who wouldn’t? . . .

Ryan Pitts argues that the error isn’t the point — the swift correction is the point. Everybody makes mistakes, and I’m happy with the correction. But I think that at the very least the error is revealing of a certain predisposition. And even Ryan isn’t trying to defend the other spin!

There’s a sense, of course, in which headlines are like the covers of science fiction books — nearly always more lurid than, and often completely unrepresentative of, what’s inside. But I don’t like that about science fiction books, and in the case of news articles it seems considerably less forgivable.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has a survey of nanotechnology safety issues. As I noted earlier, there’s reason to think that the nanoparticle issue may be overblown — and that, if people look, they’ll find that we already know more on this subject than we realize.

LT SMASH has the Milblogger rotation covered.

CORRUPTION IN THE U.N.’S OIL-FOR-FOOD PROGRAM is finally getting some attention.

AL GORE HAS LOST IT — and if he keeps this up, he’ll lose it for the Democrats.

Again.

UPDATE: You can hear part of the speech here. Gore sounds like Dean, only more conspiracy-minded and angrier: Yeaaarrrrrrghhhh! Let the remixing begin!

AN INTERESTING AL QAEDA STRATEGY MEMO that was captured in Iraq, allegedly authored by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

The memo says extremists are failing to enlist support inside the country, and have been unable to scare the Americans into leaving. It even laments Iraq’s lack of mountains in which to take refuge.

Yet mounting an attack on Iraq’s Shiite majority could rescue the movement, according to the document. The aim, the document contends, is to prompt a counterattack against the Arab Sunni minority.

Such a “sectarian war” will rally the Sunni Arabs to the religious extremists, the document argues. It says a war against the Shiites must start soon — at “zero hour” — before the Americans hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis. That is scheduled for the end of June.

The big losers in this would be the Iraqi Sunnis, who are deeply unpopular already. But that’s consistent with the Ladenite approach, which leaves its coreligionists dead in large numbers wherever it appears.

UPDATE: More observations here.