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 criminal.”

UPDATE: Related post here, from Lance Frizzell.

MORE HUYGENS-BLOGGING, here:

We have seen the face of Titan and it looks…kind of like Santa Fe. So no laser-bearing quadripeds attacked the probe. Too bad.

I’m happier that way, personally. Scott Boone has much more.

THE FIRST ABU GHRAIB CONVICTION: One might think that these prosecutions would undermine claims of moral equivalence.

RUSSELL BERMAN HAS SOME THOUGHTS ON LESSONS FROM THE TSUNAMI:

First and foremost, the myth of Islamic solidarity has been shattered. Even though most victims in Indonesia, the most populous Islamic country on the face of the earth, are Muslim, the support flowing from Arab governments has been pitifully small. The decades of petrodollars and the years of high gas prices have apparently not put the oil-rich Middle East in a position to afford to offer much help to Muslims in distress.

But as Islamic victims receive support from the non-Islamic world, the already dubious claim that the general opinion of Muslims in the Middle East might be predisposed to rise up against the West becomes simply untenable.

In the face of a real disaster, neither the fundamentalists nor the Baathists nor the anticolonialists have done much at all. In contrast, the energy of the Western relief effort is likely to put a deep dent in the anti-Western — and especially anti-American — propaganda of the Islamicists.

Second, the generosity of the developed world has been considerable, especially from such regional neighbors as Japan and Australia but also from the United States and Europe. The tendentious suggestion that the United States was “stingy” failed to note that the “old European” powers initially proposed relatively low offers of aid as well. Only as the real extent of the disaster became clear did these amounts grow to many times their original size.

Moreover, the outpouring of support has highlighted the importance of private giving and therefore the role of society beyond the state, just as it has shed light on the marginal standing of the United Nations.

(Via Outside the Beltway). Read the whole thing. Meanwhile, Austin Bay has some thoughts on how to handle reconstruction.

UPDATE: Here’s a claim that the Saudis have done more than they’re getting credit for.

WE’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY: Reader Jim Herd points to this interesting look at digital photojournalism ten years ago:

It was hard to know if the NC2000e was actually taking pictures properly. It had no LCD for playing back the images it was supposedly recording and, of course, no spinning film rewind knob, nor any way — or need — to open the camera back.

In the middle of the night, somewhere around 3:00am, the shutter blew out,” Kurdzuk says, “but the camera kept working. There was no indication whatsoever that there was anything wrong. Everything I shot after three o’clock had a shutter blade straight through the middle of the frame. That kind of stuff happened all the time.” (A different NC2000’s blown shutter is shown at left.)

Kurdzuk pauses for a moment, and then figures out how to sum it all up: “The NC2000, in general, was a practice in masochistic anxiety.” . . .

There’s lots of interesting stuff. Read the whole thing.

VARIOUS LEFTY EMAILERS, mostly in rather nasty tones, have asked me to write about the shutdown of the Iraq Survey Group’s search for WMD stockpiles. It didn’t seem like big news to me, since I was actually under the impression that they had already given up. Still, I won’t invoke Tim Worstall’s remarks, because I suppose the issue still has some importance even if I have addressed it before.

But I think that the whole “the war was all about weapons of mass destruction” meme is a bit dishonest. First, it’s worth remembering (here’s a list of resolutions on Iraq) that the burden was on Saddam to prove that he didn’t have the weapons, and nobody thought he’d done that. Second, and more important from my standpoint, was that the war was about remaking the Middle East, helping to establish a democracy in a vital spot, neutralizing a longtime, and still-dangerous foe with ties to terrorists, and putting the U.S. in a position to threaten Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, not simply about getting rid of WMD stockpiles. (This was no secret. Even John Kerry said that he would have gone to war even knowing that there were no WMD stockpiles.)

The biggest criticism of the Bush Administration here is that (1) it made the mistake of listening to George “slam dunk” Tenet and the CIA on this issue; and — bigger mistake — (2) it made the mistake of trying to go through the United Nations, which required it to make more of the WMD business than was otherwise necessary. The former mistake is more forgivable, since it wasn’t just the CIA, but pretty much everyone, who thought Saddam had the stockpiles. The second mistake is less so, since it was pretty obvious that the U.N. route was a mistake. The result: Saddam was in violation, but after all the U.N. speechifying the absence of big weapons stockpiles is a major PR failure.

The Bush Administration does seem determined to fix the CIA, which is clearly called for. Whether it has learned its lesson regarding the U.N. is less clear.

That so many of Bush’s critics want to focus on the WMD issue, instead of on making Iraq work for Iraqis, and on freeing the rest of the mideast, is, sadly, typical. But the Bush Administration’s excessive solicitude toward the U.N. (which is still manifest in its soft-pedaling of the oil-for-food scandals) was a dreadful mistake, for which both the Bush Administration and, ironically, the U.N. are both paying a price.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Grant emails:

I suppose this could be included under your claim (with which I agree) that it was a mistake to go to the U.N., or perhaps the mistake in listening to George “Slam Dunk” Tenet.

But perhaps the most interesting thing I read in Bill Sammon’s book Misunderestimated was that we were originally intending to give three different presentations to the U.N. supporting our intention to go to war: WMD, human rights violations, and ties to terrorism. But for some reason the Bush administration decided somewhat late in the game to focus only on WMDs, and in hindsight that left us with nothing but Colin Powell’s discredited presentation.

I’m not sure why that decision was made, but in hindsight, it would have been good to emphasize more these other two aspects of our warmaking decisions to the U.N, and to the public at large. I know the administration always said it was about more than WMDs, but apparently they decided that the WMD argument was their most compelling one and gave it the vast majority of airtime.

Yes, that was a mistake. I imagine that diplomats thought that human-rights arguments wouldn’t have much sway at the U.N., which is probably true, but as subsequent events have demonstrated, the U.N. wasn’t the real audience anyway.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts here:

The persons who are all jumping up and down in glee because no WMD were found in Iraq (thereby, in their opinions, vindicating their position) conveniently omit one inconvenient bit of information. Those same people argued that Iraq should not be invaded and Saddam should not be removed even if Iraq possessed WMD. Thus, the full argument is that the U.S should not have invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam regardless of whether it had WMD.

Want to test this? Ask any anti-war type or Bush-hater whether he or she would support the war or Bush if WMD were found in Iraq tomorrow.

Indeed, one of the arguments we heard against invading was that it would provoke Saddam into unleashing chemical and biological weapons.

MORE: Reader Terrye Hugentober emails:

Was it the UN weapons inspectors or the US military that ascertained no weapons were in Iraq? It seems to me that many of the Bush administration’s detractors are not only ignoring the fact that most people believed the weapons were there but that most people would still believe it if we had not invaded.

We discovered the true state of our intelligence failures because of this. And it seems obvious as well that if the weapons are not there now then they might not have been there in 1998 when Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox and bombed Iraq.

So, does that make him a war criminal? I do not pretend to know where the weapon stock piles ended up. They could be destroyed or buried in Syria for all I know, but I do know that if Clinton had answered these questions and dealt with these issues effectively a decade ago we would not be having this discussion now.

After all if Bush were really as dishonest as some of the Bush haters say he is he could have planted the damn things, now couldn’t he?

And if he’d found the real thing, a lot of his critics would have said they were plants. Meanwhile, Merv Benson emails:

The debate on this issue should have been framed on the issue of Saddam’s failure to account for all his WMD, much of which he had earlier declared. If the war was about the US unwillingness to take a chance on his failure to account for weapons that would be incredibly dangerous in the hands of terrorist, then the US inablility to account for those same weapons after the war would only suggest that the dangerous weapons are still unaccounted for. The US would be in the same position as an auditor brought in to find missing money in a bank account. If it is still missing it does not mean that it was a mistake to audit the account.

Interesting analogy.

STILL MORE: Reader Joe Berkel looks on the bright side:

Someone likely has made this observation before, but it flows from Mr. Benson’s comment.

One rarely gets a chance to field test a major intelligence issue; Iraq gave us the opportunity to do so on WMD. Like the past (missile gaps, Soviet economic strength, and others), the CIA and other intelligence agencies have come up woefully short. One hopes the Administration is truly serious about overhauling the intelligence community (afterwards, they can do the same with domestic law enforcement, starting with the FBI – just as dysfunctional).

Good point. And Barry Dauphin emails:

Another reason the UN route may have been a mistake is that the whole process gave Saddam and the Baathists more time to stash weapons, money and to plan for the counteroffensive that has been taking place. The UN process itself helped create the current conditions. And leaving Saddam in place after his clear abuses, bribes and lack of following resolutions would have itself weakened the UN as well as the WoT. The UN resolutions would still be sitting there in a further state of violation or they would have been lifted. In the event of the latter, Saddam would have bio and/or chemical WMD even as we speak. We wouldn’t be arguing about the democratization of Iraq, we’d be wondering how the hell we can protect ourselves from biological attack. That much is
clear from the Duelfer report.

The most telling criticism of the Bush Administration on Iraq, I think, is the one that Bill Quick is always making — that the “rush to war” was in fact too slow, robbing us of surprise and momentum.

YET MORE: James Hudnall calls this a “decent post,” but says I’m leaving out some important stuff.

CHARLES PAUL FREUND notes the further decline of free speech in Britain, and notes this from Salman Rushdie:

The continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain.

That’s rather disturbing.

UPDATE: Justin Katz writes that Rushdie is being a bit euphemistic regarding “organised religions.”