FRENCH TV: Praising the American military? It’s bizarro-world.

“Canadian Minister in Pizza Scandal.” You don’t see headlines like that every day.

UPDATE: Some background on this scandal from Damian Penny.

PORN HAPPY IS THE TITLE of Susannah (“Reverse Cowgirl Blog”) Breslin’s new novel. It’s also the name of the blog tracking its progress.

CASH FOR COMMENTS: No, it’s not a blog scandal — it’s something good.

BIGWIG HAS THOUGHTS on politics and politeness.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis:

As I read all the sniping and snarking and bitchslapping among the ex-Deaniac bloggers at each others’ throats, I’m mindful of one thing: If things had gone their way, these people would be running the country now. Yow.

: I keep reading more comments on the various ex-Deaniacs’ blogs and I’ll add this: No wonder they lost Iowa. No wonder Dean screamed.

Politeness actually does help groups of people work together effectively.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Zephyr responds — politely — to her critics.

SHUNNING IN THE ACADEMIC WORLD: Jim Lindgren looks at a sad episode:

In the 1960s, just AFTER Ronald Coase had done his Nobel Prize winning work in law & economics and AFTER James Buchanan had done his Nobel Prize winning work in public choice, a concerted effort was made by members of their department and the administration at the University of Virginia to drive them out of Virginia. The story has been often told and some reports say that some of the letters and memos showing that this was a conscious effort on Virginia’s part survived to be seen by more open-minded members of the department in later years. A run-in with the Ford Foundation helped to crytallize university opposition to the best scholars that the department ever had and among the best ever to teach in any department at Virginia. One view was that they were on the wrong side of history. . . .

That this was done a few years after Coase and Buchanan had done their best work is just stunning. Virginia began the 1960s as the most innovative and creative among the world’s great economics departments and ended the 1960s as just another pretty good department, no better or worse than a couple dozen other departments in the country.

Had it kept them, it might remain in a dominant position today. I’m happy to report that I’m not being shunned — in fact the number of colleagues who came by to welcome me back from leave last week was quite gratifying. On the other hand, unlike Coase and Buchanan, I’m not a “right-wing extremist . . .”

UPDATE: Of course, academia isn’t what it used to be, either.

SOMEWHAT TROUBLING NEWS:

The Defense Agency has prepared a plan to defend the southern remote islands off Kyushu and Okinawa from possible invasion amid rising security concerns about China, according to documents obtained Saturday by Kyodo News.

The agency compiled the plan in November on the assumption of an invasion of the islands located within a 1,000-km zone between the southern end of Kyushu and Taiwan.

(Via Paul Musgrave, who raises some interesting questions regarding why this is coming out now.)

LANNY DAVIS: Zell Miller was right.

MORE EVIDENCE OF INEPTITUDE IN HIGH PLACES:

Accusations by an FBI contract linguist fired after complaining about suspected security breaches and misconduct in the bureau’s post-September 11 foreign language translation program “had some basis in fact” and are supported by documents and other witnesses, a report said yesterday. . . .

“The allegations, if true, had potentially damaging consequences and warranted a thorough and careful review by the FBI, which did not occur,” said Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

This doesn’t make her charges true, I guess, but it does make the FBI look bad. Maybe Porter Goss could go there next?

VIRGINIA’S FORNICATION LAW has been struck down:

The state Supreme Court yesterday struck down as unconstitutional a 19th-century Virginia law making it a crime for unmarried couples to have sex.

“We find no principled way to conclude . . . that the Virginia statute criminalizing intercourse between unmarried persons does not improperly abridge a personal relationship that is within the liberty interest of persons to choose,” said the decision, written by Justice Elizabeth B. Lacy. . . .

The opinion did not deal with a separate Virginia law prohibiting sodomy. But attorneys for both parties in the case said it suggested that the court considers most laws regulating sex between consenting adults to be unconstitutional violations of the 14th Amendment’s right to due process.

About time.

WEEKEND READING FROM THE CIA, with a troubling graphic.

UPDATE: There’s quite a spirited discussion in the comments over whether the graphic in question is right or not. Personally, I hope it’s wrong.

LOTS OF UPDATES to yesterday’s WMD post. Scroll down or click here.

I’VE PRAISED CHARLES STROSS’S IRON SUNRISE AND SINGULARITY SKY. Now, via John Scalzi, I see that Stross has a new book coming out. I haven’t read it, but Scalzi has seen an advance copy and thinks it’s going to be the book to beat in 2005, which has him a bit depressed since his book is one of the ones that will have to beat it. Not having read the new Stross book, I can’t say, but Scalzi’s is very strong. And Scalzi’s gotten a lot of blog-buzz, though he’d probably get more if, like Stross, he had a warblogger as a major character . . . .

TOM MAGUIRE continues to look at Social Security reform.

INSTAPUNDIT’S AFGHANISTAN PHOTO-CORRESPONDENT, Maj. John Tammes, sends this photographic evidence that the Afghan economy is booming.

UPDATE: Humor is lost on some people, who apparently also didn’t put their cursor over the image . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: D’oh! Reader David Block emails: “Your suggestion about putting the cursor on the image does nothing for me in Firefox.” Dang. I didn’t realize that “alt” tags aren’t displayed in Firefox. You can read it if you click “properties,” but it doesn’t automatically appear as it does with Explorer. I didn’t notice.

MORE: Thanks to reader David White, who explained how to make it pop up in Firefox (title=”” is the tag).

I HAD HOPED that the hatemail would fade after the election, but that hasn’t been entirely the case. Andrew Sullivan posts an example that, I’m sorry to say, invokes my name — and misspells it. Sigh.

UPDATE: Actually, I think that Zephyr Teachout wins the “hate-filled missives of the week” award, with the comments to this post from angry Deaniacs. Excerpt: “I would not walk across the street to piss in your mouth if you were dying of thirst. Your are the most wretched scum I have ever seen. I remember meeting you in Iowa & thinking that you were not only harsh to look at but so full of yourself that you will probably always be single.” It gets worse, but it sounds to me as if the writer probably hasn’t experienced a lot of love himself.

Tim Blair observes: “These people seem unusually upset. Perhaps Canada rejected their immigration applications.” I don’t think that’s the problem with Sullivan’s hatemailer, though.

HERE’S A TRANSCRIPT of Hugh Hewitt’s defense of blogs from a full-bore Bill O’Reilly attack.

UPDATE: Ed Cone says that Hewitt and O’Reilly misstated what was going on with the Kos/Teachout affair. I think he’s right, though it’s surprisingly hard to be nuanced on TV (and especially on O’Reilly’s show in my experience.) As I’ve said before, though, I think that what’s really interesting is what was going on in the Dean Campaign’s thinking, not what was going on with Kos.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has more. When was I on O’Reilly? Back in 2000 (yes, before InstaPundit). He let me get about three words in edgewise once he saw that I wasn’t going where he wanted me to (basically, he wanted me to say that the Clinton Administration was the most unethical in history, bar none), which mystified me since I’d had long conversations with his producer and sent them a copy of the ethics book that the appearance was about. The book isn’t exactly a robust defense of Clinton, but Lanny Davis has used it as a classroom text, so it’s not exactly red-meat Clinton-bashing either.

MORE: Chris Suellentrop has an interesting piece on the Kos/Teachout affair over at Slate. One quibble: He says that some people call Kos a “liberal InstaPundit.” That’s true, people do, but as I wrote here, it’s not really an apt analogy. Kos is a political activist, while I didn’t even get invited to the inauguration (nor would I have gone if I had; I was invited to stuff at Clinton’s first inaugural and didn’t go even though I was single and living in Charlottesville at the time, just an hour or two away — that stuff just bores me).

STILL MORE: Bill Quick weighs in, on Kos’s side. Meanwhile, in an update to this post, Hugh Hewitt responds to Ed Cone’s criticisms.

MATT WELCH VISITS the Center of Evil in the Modern World and returns to report that it wasn’t that bad. That’s actually been my experience, too.

BLACKFIVE OFFERS A WITHERING ASSESSMENT OF THE NEWS MEDIA’S IRAQ COVERAGE, from a soldier in Iraq: “Unfortunately, this sort of incomplete reporting has become the norm for the media, whose poor job of presenting a complete picture of what is going on in Iraq borders on being