BUSH AND BOMBING: A shocking revelation.

LOOKING FOR BOOKS? Lots of lists at the Brothers Judd site.

G.M. ROPER is taking submissions for a blog carnival on German-American relations.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ offers good advice to the Congressional Republicans: “Get clean or meet your electoral doom, guys. I wouldn’t care so much (about Republicans losing–taking bribes and lying about it we can all hate) if it weren’t ideas that are ultimately the casualties.”

I’d like to see more ideas and less bribery, please. I have to agree with Ralph Peters’ rather limited case for the GOP: “There’s plenty I don’t like about the Bush administration. Its domestic policies disgust me, and the Bushies got plenty wrong in Iraq. But at least they’ll fight.” They’ve been better than the Democrats on the war, all right. But the Republicans have managed to disappoint even my quite low expectations on many other fronts.

UPDATE: Bill Quick is unhappy, too, but draws a lesson.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Galbraith offers this take on today’s political situation:

The current political situation often reminds me of an old saying by Casey Stengel about how to successfully manage a baseball team.

“The key to managing is keeping the 50% of the players who hate you from talking to the other 50% of the players who aren’t quite sure they hate you.”

Right now, both parties are trying to prevent that roughly 50% of the electorate who hate them from convincing some of that other roughly 50% to join with them in their enmity.

And it’s a pretty close race to the bottom, so to speak.

It would be funny, if it weren’t tragic. Meanwhile, read this lengthy post by Joseph Britt.

MORE: GayPatriot is unhappy, too.

Big Cunningham-resignation roundup here.

CANADIAN GOVERNMENT FALLS: “A corruption scandal forced a vote of no-confidence Monday that toppled Prime Minister Paul Martin’s minority government, triggering an unusual election campaign during the Christmas holidays.”

UPDATE: Damian Penny has been liveblogging it.

And here’s more from Ed Morrissey, who’s been on this story from day one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Canadian MP Monte Solberg liveblogged the vote from the floor. (Via Kate McMillan).

Austin Bay has more.

MORE: Reader T.J. Marshman thinks that Ed Morrissey deserves credit for bringing down the Candadian government, by breaking the publication ban on the Gomery investigation. Could be! I started to say that before, but didn’t want to be accused of blogger triumphalism.

MORE STILL: Reader Crash Ringenberg emails:

Conservative bloggers have now taken down Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and the fricken Canadian Government.

Liberal bloggers have taken down Jeff Gannon and Jim Guckert—oh wait, that’s the same person.

Advantage: Conservatives!

Okay, that’s definitely too much triumphalism, even for a guy named “Crash.”

STILL MORE: On the other hand, Richard Riley says that Crash isn’t triumphalist enough: “Crash left out Trent Lott, Harriet Miers and The Bridge to Nowhere.” Though, contra Crash’s point, it’s worth noting that all of those — especially Lott — were bipartisan efforts.

LT. SMASH reports on an anti-war protest that he says was more “anti-victory” than anti-war.

UPDATE: A look at the recruiting numbers. Hey, they’re better than these numbers! I guess it’s more of that reverse-Vietnam phenomenon. . . .

SOME FOOL TRIED TO INTIMIDATE MICHELLE MALKIN: The results are about what you’d expect. . . .

Sending legal threat letters to bloggers seldom seems to work out well for the threateners.

TOM MAGUIRE: “Is Andrea Mitchell the next Bob Woodward?” Plus, keeping an eye on Tim Russert! And he’s got lots more interesting stuff. Just keep scrolling.

CLAY CONRAD offers advice on how to help displaced New Orleans musicians.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE has an item on “self-plagiarism” in law reviews. You can read my views on plagiarism in this chapter from the ethics book I wrote with Peter Morgan. But the short version is that I don’t think that there’s any such thing as “self-plagiarism.” Plagiarism consists in passing off someone else’s words as one’s own, so you can’t self-plagiarize. (Arthur Leff, one of my scholarly heroes, had one passage he repeated in almost everything he wrote. But it always worked. Why change perfection?)

At any rate, like many issues, this is better dealt with by contract than by rule. If law reviews think that too much work they get is repetitive and unoriginal, they’re entirely free to require that no part of any work they publish can have been published before. Problem solved, if problem it is.

JOHN FUND says that Democratic and Republican politicians are standing in the way of sensible energy policies.

I’ve had some thoughts on the subject here, and I’ll have some more later on.

EUGENE VOLOKH LOOKS AT BLOGS AND BIG MEDIA and makes some useful observations.

CHRIS ANDERSON: “The TV broadcasting business stinks.”

JON HENKE on the Democrats’ latest Iraq pronouncements:

So, after 2 years of debating Iraq policy, the Democrats have decided that training Iraqi security forces to take over and reducing US deployments as they do—”as Iraq stands up, we will stand down”—is the best course in Iraq? And this epiphany, Richard Cohen writes, may have “pointed the administration and the country toward a realistic and modestly hopeful course on Iraq.” . . .

This was the strategy Bush enunciated in August of 2003, September of 2003, May of 2004, and many other times. It was the strategy outlined in this May 2004 “Fact Sheet: The Transition to Iraqi Self-Government”.

The Democrats have not come up with a new Iraq Policy. They’ve jumped onboard the Bush administration’s existing policy, with the novel new suggestion that we stay the course…but try harder.

Personally, I think that letting them pretend they’re suggesting something novel is a small price to pay for bringing them onboard, if that’s what it accomplishes. I suspect the White House will feel the same way.

Unfortunately, the Democrats’ efforts to look as if they’re presenting something new have led them to wrap their proposals in Vietnamesque language, which has the potential to do damage in and of itself. As I said earlier: “I think that an agreement to withdraw as a democratically elected Iraqi government wants, and in a fashion that ensures it can handle the insurgents, is very different from an immediate unilateral withdrawal at the behest of U.S. politicians who say the war is ‘unwinnable.'”

That kind of language — the “unwinnable” comes from Rep. Murtha — makes a difference, as do the tiresome and inaccurate Vietnam references and “Bush lied” claims, a product of partisan politics and Boomer narcissism.

UPDATE: Reader Rick Skeean emails:

You should say”some narcissistic Boomers”. The way you phrased it makes you guilty of “Boomerism”, a form of bigotry no less pernicious than any “ism.”

Fair enough. Though the narcissist Boomers seem heavily overrepresented in politics and the media. Then again, that makes sense . . . .

MORE: Joe Lieberman, back from Iraq, says he’s encouraged by what he saw.

ACCORDING TO THE BBC, the Canadian Government is “set to fall.”

A WALKWAY with solar-powered lighted tiles? That’s kind of cool.

YUCK:

A federally funded study suggests U.S. farmers, veterinarians and meat processors have a markedly high risk of infection from flu viruses spread by pigs.

Scientists conducting the study, funded in part by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the fact pigs can be infected by swine viruses, bird viruses and human flu viruses means they act as virtual virus “mixing bowls.”

“The worry is if a pig were to become simultaneously infected with both a human and an avian influenza virus, genes from these viruses could reassemble into a new virus that could be transmitted to, and cause disease in, people,” said NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.

So we need to worry about sanitation on pig farms, not just poultry farms.

COCK CROWS, SUN RISES: Donald Sensing predicted it last week, and David Broder writes it this week.

Of course, if Broder weren’t so predictable, he wouldn’t be David Broder.

IN RESPONSE TO THE EARLIER REVERSE-VIETNAM POSTS, Armed Liberal Marc Danziger sends a link to this post on the L.A. Times’ antimilitary bias.

UPDATE: Read this post, too.

MICHAEL TOTTEN REPORTS from the Lebanese-Israeli border, where things have been hot again. We’re certainly seeing more bloggers-turned-Mideast-reporters lately.

EVERYBODY’S DOING CHRISTMAS-GIFT SUGGESTIONS, and Wired offers its “Ultimate Geek Gift Guide.” But I’m not terribly impressed.

Sure, I’d like one of these, but it’s awfully pricey. Unless Bill Gates takes a shine to me, I’m not going to get one for Christmas, and unless I hit the lottery (which would require that I, like, enter the lottery first) I’m not likely to give one, either.

I like their sorting of universal remote controls into “tricky,” “complicated,” and, of course, “nightmare”. That certainly seems about right. But it’s not selling me!

And I already got the complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus collection for Christmas last year. (Or was it the year before? At any rate, “I’ve already got one.”) Sorry; I’m a geek, but this doesn’t do it for me.

But hey, Serenity comes out on December 20th. Too bad I’ve already pre-ordered it. Now I actually do need a new blender . . . .

Several readers have emailed asking for gadget recommendations, but my gadget-blogging is mostly about gadgets I’ve bought myself (nobody’s lining up to send me free digital cameras or Xboxes), and the whole book-writing thing has kept me too busy to do much of that lately. If you’ve got any ideas that look better than Wired’s pass ’em on.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

For us broke geeks who cannot afford pricey toys, Think Geek (www.thinkgeek.com) has the greatest assortment of mindgames, geeky cubicle toys, and other assorted to goodies guaranteed to light up the geekiest heart.

Yeah, I’ve been boycotting them since a supersmall digital camera I bought was no good. But that’s probably silly on my part — I do tend to be highly loyal to people who give me good experiences, and the contrary to those who don’t — and certainly shouldn’t extend to anyone else.

Meanwhile, Will Collier emails about the “tricky” universal remote:

I bought one of the Logitech Harmony 880 remotes a few weeks ago. The wife had had it with multiplying remote controls, and demanded something simple.

The 880 was, as noted in the Amazon reviews, not a piece of cake to set up. It took me about an hour with the thing plugged into my iBook, loading settings, trying the remote, re-loading settings, and re-testing. That was not fun. Since then though, it’s been no trouble at all. Bottom line: if you get one, be prepared to spend some time getting it configured, but once you do have it set up and tweaked for your system, it’s great. One-button turn-ons for multiple devices and a nice bright color screen with simple labels like “Watch ReplayTV” or “Watch DVDs” are a nice change from the cryptic buttons on most other universal remotes. And the wife likes it.

Of course, I would be even happier if the thing were $150 cheaper, but like Steven Wright once noted, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”

Er, everywhere? And here’s a list of book recommendations, from the NRO folks.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up! So is the Carnival of Personal Finance.

CONTINUING THE REVERSE-VIETNAM THEME, here’s an article from the Christian Science Monitor on how the troops see the war. It’s quite different from what’s on the news:

Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity – if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops’ individual experiences.

Except that for the most part, what we get from the Big Media is just a different (and utterly predictable and negative) soda-straw view. You want perspective, you have to go to places like StrategyPage. Or blogs like The Belmont Club.

THE INDONESIAN GOVERNMENT is attacking Islamist terrorism by letting the terrorists talk. Experience indicates that the more people know about those guys, the less they like them. (Via ATC).

JIM PINKERTON looks at Maureen Dowd and Hugh Hefner.