SO WITH THE BOOK NOT QUITE DONE, BUT UNDER CONTROL, I took the afternoon off and went out to take pictures — not far, just up around Coalfield, Oliver Springs, and Petros. I haven’t had time to work with the pictures much, but I liked this sign advertising cheese stix of an unusual variety.

I also finally got around to watching one of the Firefly episodes on DVD. I can see why the series fans are so rabid. Serenity did okay, but not great, in spite of the blogosphere boost the first week. I’m surprised, but then again, it’s kind of like the series — better than the size of its audience would suggest. Too bad.

Sorry bloggging’s been a bit light, and email response worse than usual, these past few weeks. I’ve been bumping up against my limits. Things should get back to normal over the next little while.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: Haveil Havalim is up. So is the History Carnival, and a spinoff Asian History Carnival.

The latest Carnival of the Recipes is up over at Blonde Sagacity, and it’s all about pork! Don’t miss the Carnival of Cordite, and I think I forgot to mention the Carnival of the Vanities last week. Does that dropped ball qualify me for the Carnival of the Clueless?

Plus, don’t forget the Carnival of Liberty!

UPDATE: Oh, and how could I forget the Carnival of Comedy?

SPACE ELEVATOR UPDATE: Keith Curtis has an interview with Dr. Bradley Edwards on space elevator development.

PUBLIUS HAS PICTURES from the Boston walk for democracy in Belarus.

TOM MAGUIRE has weighed in on the latest Judy Miller / Valerie Plame stuff.

UPDATE: Tom has some further questions and observations.

ROB SMITH is checking himself into a hospital. I guess the bloggy tough–love approach worked. Good!

FINISHED JOE HALDEMAN’S Camouflage last night. The ending was a bit abrupt, but it kept me turning pages right up to the last one.

RAND SIMBERG NOTES another staged pro-war propaganda event: “Controversy has erupted among the press corps in the last few days as news has spread that the now-famous picture of the ‘victorious’ flag raising over Iwo Jima a couple weeks ago was staged.”

DAVID ADESNIK NOTES confusion at the Times and Post regarding the Iraqi elections.

Meanwhile, here’s the take from StrategyPage, whom I’ve come to regard as more reliable than either:

The government is getting better at running national elections under the threat of terrorist attacks. The legislative elections last January had fewer than ten million people voting (69 percent of those registered), and over 40 people killed by terrorists opposed to the elections. This vote, on the new constitution, brought out over ten million, and left fewer than ten dead. There are several reasons for this progress. First, the government is getting better. There are more police, and more of them are trained and reliable. The government has used its experience well, and the country was basically shut down for yesterday’s election, making it difficult for terrorists to move around. And apparently the terrorists did not move much, and attacked even less. But another reason for that was the effort by many Sunni Arab anti-government groups to get Sunni Arabs to vote against the new constitution. If the three mainly Sunni Arab provinces could get two thirds of the voters to go against the new constitution, the constitution would have to go back for more revisions and a new vote. Many Sunni Arabs decided that they could live with the new constitution, and turned out to vote that way. As a result, it appears that the Sunni Arabs did not stop the constitution.

All of this is another major defeat for the al Qaeda and anti-government forces. These two groups have not been able to stop any elections, and their efforts are weaker with each round of voting.

Read the whole thing. And note this interesting historical contrast.

UPDATE: Murdoc Online notes that every step so far has gone better than the critics predicted.

Heck, I can remember when Afghanistan was a quagmire!

Here’s some gloating from a Marine. Excerpt: “The fact that there wasn’t a major mass casualty of voters, SBVIED in polling centers or assassinations conducted that the foaming mouth reporters could get in the middle of just reinforces how far the Iraqi forces have come and how they are getting stronger than the scumbags. . . . Reporters countrywide saturated the area days prior to the elections to hopefully catch the US forces failing. Well to damn bad it didn’t happen so pound sand! . . . I know that if there were an unsuccessful election, it would have been nothing but ‘Breaking News’ shots about how we failed.”

HEH: Having finished the final chapter of the book tonight, I feel more like a robot whose batteries need changing.

I’VE NEGLECTED GODBLOGCON, but here’s the conference blog aggregator, which rounds everything up.

MICHAEL BARONE says that we have an elite problem.

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ STORY ON THE JUDITH MILLER AFFAIR is up. So is Miller’s own account.

I don’t think that too many people are going to be satisfied. Arianna Huffington says it raises more questions than it answers. Power Line calls it “low comedy.” (Though to be fully low-comedy, the “Valerie Flame” notation in Miller’s notebook would have to refer to a long-ago affair with Karl Rove, or maybe “Pinch” Sulzberger . . . .) And Jeff Jarvis rounds up a bunch of other blog reactions, mostly negative. Jay Rosen is perhaps more positive than most, though he does say that “it was Judy Miller’s newspaper.”

SGT. HOOK is back.

MORE FROM IRAQ: Via Austin Bay: “Major players are coming more and more to realize that dialog, alliances, common interests and just plain politics is the way to win– not violence, intimidation and terror. So this [lesson] is apparently slowly ‘sinking in’ in our confused and frightened Iraqi mentality.”

On the other hand, the celebratory gunfire is “much worse” than after the last election . . . .

UPDATE: Another report from Iraq, here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Omar has video of celebrating Iraqis. They’re dancing, not shooting.

Meanwhile, Dymphna gives you tomorrow’s media spin, today!

WRITING IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Ruth Wedgwood offers a defense of Harriet Miers:

And on Miss Harriet herself? Yes, she is a little older, so you’d only get 15 to 20 years, instead of 30. And she doesn’t look like Zoe Baird (strangely, I think that has something to do with early reaction — A little dowdy, not One of Us — though I’m not One of Us, either). But she has to be one tough broad to have made it up through a Texas law firm and the organized bar in that time and place, and unlike a certain cauliflower-nosed ex-president, I don’t think George Bush is scared of strong women. My only objection is that she uses the word “cool.” But I doubt she would think that European constitutional law was any “cooler” than ours — they don’t do that in Texas. Rather, she and John Roberts would move the center of the court in tandem.

Sorry, the whole thing is subscription-only. And shouldn’t Ruth have invoked Kimba Wood instead of Zoe Baird? . . . .

ANOTHER FAILURE FOR AL QAEDA in Iraq.

UPDATE: The mullahs in Iran are unhappy. But Bruce Kesler is both pleased and unsurprised.

ANOTHER UPDATE: “During the Iraq elections last January there were 347 terrorist attacks on voters and polling places. Today there were 13.”

And check out the Iraqi Elections Newswire for lots of reports and links.

MORE: Reader Stephen Stewart emails from Baghdad:

I am not as eloquent as most if not all of the people you reference on your site. I am just a retired First Sergeant working here in Baghdad supporting the troops, seeing some history and making a couple bucks.

The 10th of October I was working near Gate 12 to the Green Zone. It felt like a mule kicked me in the back. I thought “*&^%$% that was close and then car parts started raining down. We hit the deck, all this in miliseconds, and after a few seconds, I got myself workers and friends into the bunker. A car bomb, Not 50 yards from me lay the body of a young Sergeant, aquaintance of mine, he paid the ultimate price.

We had the memorial service on the night of the 13th. His buddies stood their post. We all did the “Soldier” thing of pats ,hugs, salutes and honor. They picked up their guns and went back to work. Yesterday everybody pulled back away from the patrolling near voting stations. They secured neighborhoods and History was made. Last January there were over 340 attacks during the voting. Today there were 13.

All this while up the street the Trial begins. Like clockwork. All by professionals who are fulfilling their oath, to a very opinionated country, to “support and defend the constitution of the United States, to Defend against all enemies Foreign and domestic and to obey the lawful orders of those appointed over them. Professionals doing their jobs, giving their time and lives to advance the cause of freedom and fullfill their oaths.

What a success. Anyone can find fault if fault is what they are looking for. Just stop a minute though and think of the success. This is why we sacrifice, this is why SGT. Jerry Bonifacio paid the ultimate price

Dare I say GOD bless SGT Bonifacio, his family and may God Bless America.

Indeed. More here:

I am watching the results of the Iraqi Constitutional voting, amazed. Amazed that no one is talking about this vote in the proper historical context. Because today will be as important to the War on Terror as the fall of the Berlin Wall was to the Cold War.

Read the whole thing.

STEPHEN HAYES has a lengthy backgrounder on the Wilson/Plame story. “It is certainly the case that the media narrative is much more sensational than the Senate report. A story about malfeasance is perhaps more interesting than a story about incompetence.”

Of course, nothing on this topic really counts until Tom Maguire has parsed it!

UNITED NATIONS OFFICIAL JEAN ZIEGLER is charged with dishonesty.

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY UPDATE: People have been emailing to ask me about blog-journalism tools, and the Sony DSC-P93 that I like (and have used for videos like these) isn’t easily available any more except via the Internet (though it’s fairly cheap now). But DPReview likes its replacement, the 7.2 megapixel Cybershot DSC-P200, which seems to be rather similar and isn’t that much more expensive.

Here’s the link to the review. One thing I really like about my camera is the excellent sound it somehow gets from its matchhead-sized builtin microphone. The review doesn’t mention that — it’s something that’s more important for blog-journalism (and, soon, blogvideo podcasting) than for general use. If anyone has one of these, let me know how it’s working out.

Earlier post on this kind of thing here.

PUBLIUS has an Iraq elections roundup — and don’t miss Chester’s liveblogging, which is full of news and links.

UPDATE: Roger Simon writes:

Operation Iraqi Freedom – began March 19, 2003
Election to ratify constitution for a democratic Iraq – October 14, 2005

That’s two years and seven months. . . .

Anybody want to take a bet about how history will regard Operation Iraqi Freedom? No wonder the New York Times is singing a different tune this morning.

Heh. Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Norm Geras looks at two sides in Iraq. Here’s Norm’s comment on the antiwar side: “The paragraph as a whole is a nice illustration of the anti-war system of accounting, which some of us who favoured the liberation of Iraq find hard to stomach (once stomachs is what you’re talking): everything bad that has happened since the war is a result of the war; anything good that has happened is… why, something else entirely. But there are people who are capable of seeing the trick here, of seeing that the phrase ‘the way its dictator was overthrown’ includes the phrase ‘its dictator was overthrown’.”

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More historical perspective from Gateway Pundit.

DEREK LOWE LOOKS AT ANTIVIRALS AND AVIAN FLU EXCITEMENT:

The prospect of a flu pandemic has changed things, but the problem is, it’s too soon to say if people are now being more realistic or just more hysterical. In the last few weeks, though, I think things have tipped toward the latter. Avian flu, if it crossed over into some highly infectious human form, could be very bad news. But we’re not seeing that happen (yet) with the current bird flu. It’s worth remembering that flu viruses of this type have already crossed over into humans in recent years without taking off around the world. That doesn’t mean that it can’t happen, but it does mean that it’s not inevitable.

So, no one knows how likely a pandemic is, when it might occur, and how it might behave. It’s prudent to take a look at marginal compounds like peramivir, whose possible use against avian flu was being spoken about years ago. But it’s not prudent to buy, or urge others to buy Biocryst’s stock after it’s already tripled in price.

It’s important to prepare, since some other sort of pandemic is fairly likely even if Avian Flu never materializes as a threat. But don’t panic. Yet, anyway.

IRAQI BLOGGER OMAR is photoblogging the Iraqi vote. Apparently, the heat is worse than the terrorists.

SANDEEP JUNNARKAR’S grassroots AIDS journalism project in India continues, and there’s a new website, Lives in Focus, with reports and video.

SHAWN WASSON will be liveblogging the Iraq vote.