AUSTIN BAY plans his stint as guest editor at Newsweek.

TREY JACKSON is hosting the first-ever Carnival of the Videos. It’s quite cool, but I hope that we’ll see more original video shot by bloggers.

A FEW DAYS AGO, I wondered if we were going to see dirty tricks against the Blogosphere.

The answer is yes, and sooner than I realized. In fact, I was behind the curve, because earlier this week, gun-control proponents sent fake threatening emails under Joel Rosenberg’s name in an effort to stop passage of gun-rights legislation in Minnesota.

Shameful, but not especially surprising. More background here and here.

And for those who will inevitably ask, yes, this is the same Joel Rosenberg who is well-known for his fantasy novels.

LARRY KUDLOW SAYS IT’S A DREARY POLITICAL SPRING for small-government types:

Which leads us to a difficult question: Is the White House and its congressional allies selling policy reforms that voters simply are not buying? The seemingly more popular issue of tax reform is not even on the table. But will tax-reform commissioners Connie Mack and John Breaux ever get their proposals to see the light of day in the current obstructionist congressional climate? . . .

All senators have dirt on their hands these days. The Senate, if you can believe it, just delivered a budget-busting pork-laden $295 billion highway bill, featuring several thousand special-interest earmarks and a phony tax-transfer from general revenues to the trust fund. Where was the allegedly conservative Republican-controlled Senate? This bill was voted through 89 to 11, opening the door for President Bush’s very first veto.

Oh, and let’s not forget a potential trade and currency war with China and perhaps Europe as well. But at least this is backed by a bipartisan coalition anchored by Sen. Smoot Schumer and Sen. Hawley Graham.

Well, that’s cheerful. But he’s basically right. And I hope Bush vetoes the highway bill, but I’m not counting on it.

LEBANON UPDATE: Was Hezbollah involved in the Hariri assassination? “The news item may never be confirmed simply because no one wants it to be.”

UNSCAM UPDATE: The Weekly Standard has put oil-for-food on its cover. You may want to read this piece on Saddam’s business partners by Stephen F. Hayes, and this piece by Christopher Hitchens on George Galloway:

I knew a bit about Galloway. He had had to resign as the head of a charity called “War on Want,” after repaying some disputed expenses for living the high life in dirt-poor countries. Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing’s too good for the working class: what the English call a “wide boy.” . . . Galloway says that the worst day of his entire life was the day the Soviet Union fell. His existence since that dreadful event has involved the pathetic search for an alternative fatherland. He has recently written that, “just as Stalin industrialised the Soviet Union, so on a different scale Saddam plotted Iraq’s own Great Leap Forward.” I love the word “scale” in that sentence. I also admire the use of the word “plotted.” . . .

Perhaps I may be allowed a closing moment of sentiment here? To the left, the old East End of London was once near-sacred ground. It was here in 1936 that a massive demonstration of longshoremen, artisans, and Jewish refugees and migrants made a human wall and drove back a determined attempt by Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to mount a march of intimidation. The event is still remembered locally as “The Battle of Cable Street.” That part of London, in fact, was one of the few place in Europe where the attempt to raise the emblems of fascism was defeated by force.

And now, on the same turf, there struts a little popinjay who defends dictatorship abroad and who trades on religious sectarianism at home. Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the same resolve and determination.

Read the whole thing.

DEMOCRACY IN CUBA takes another small step:

HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) — In what organizers called an unprecedented event, dissidents from groups opposed to Fidel Castro’s communist regime gathered publicly Friday and chanted “Down with Fidel.”

“Freedom! Freedom!” the group of more than 100 delegates cheered in the yard of Felix Bonne, a veteran dissident, in a working-class section of Havana. Castro’s regime would not allow the use of a theater or hotel for the assembly.

Participants included members of dissident groups that are sometimes at odds but share the goal of driving Castro from power.

More, including pictures, here, from Sardinian blogger Stefania, and, of course, just visit Babalu Blog and keep scrolling.

JEFF JARVIS IS CHANGING JOBS for something a bit, er, bloggier. Congratulations, Jeff!

YOU KNOW IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY when you read headlines like this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. government does not want billboards in space.

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed Thursday to amend its regulations to ensure that it can enforce a law that prohibits “obtrusive” advertising in zero gravity.

Though actually this issue first came up back in the 1990s.

CHESTER CHARTS some odd coincidences in the Madrid bombing.

MORE WRONG NOTES ON STEM CELLS:

Setting up a showdown with Congress over the thorny issue of embryonic stem cell research, President Bush vowed today to veto any measure that would expand federal funding for the studies – an extremely rare personal threat from a president who has never exercised his veto power.

All the other lousy bills they’ve passed, and this is the first one he’ll veto?

UPDATE: He’s losing ’em in Georgia!

MORE: “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”

QUESTIONS ABOUT SPIRIT OF AMERICA: Michael Ubaldi addresses questions here, and arrives at a conclusion here. “Omar and Mohammed Fadhil have answered questions about their brother’s accusations against the Spirit of America, their observations confirming my supposition that Jim Hake’s charity has accomplished what is possible in an often difficult environment. Additional criticism of the Spirit of America echoed Ali’s complaints that the organization did not acknowledge offers or requests for other works projects from individual Iraqis; but such ‘shortcomings’ in the field of charity are best explained by limited time and money, and the wisdom of confining a scope of operations to what is practical rather than expanding out of sentiment.”

I’ve given them money, and free ads, so I’m glad to hear that. I hope they’ll work the kinks out.

MORE PRO-DEMOCRACY EFFORTS IN SYRIA:

One dissident who spent years in prison and who preferred to stay anonymous told Koring that, “If the outside pressure continues, then the barriers of fear will be broken . . . The regime is losing its grip because of outside pressure, but that pressure must be maintained.”

So let’s keep it up.

I DIDN’T THINK THAT EITHER THE PEPSICO SCANDAL or the Linda Foley story had legs. It looks as if I was wrong about both.

UPDATE: Another Foley roundup here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Foley video here.

IN THE MAIL: A copy of Richard Posner’s new book, Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. He’s not very impressed with the 9/11 Commission or the legislation that followed. Excerpt:

In a misguided quest for unanimity, a determination to use the political calendar, and a public relations campaign to force precipitate action on weakly supported proposals for far-reaching organizational change, the 9/11 Commission, abetted by a stampeded Congress, a politically cornered President, and a press that failed to subject the Commission’s recommendations to the searching scrutiny that the modern press reserves for scandals, disserved the cause of national security in a dangerous era. It did so by successfully promoting a bureaucratic reorganization that is more likely to be a recipe for bureaucratic infighting, impacted communication, diminished performance, tangled lines of command, and lowered morale than an improvement on the system.

He’s not mincing words.

YES, THEY’RE OLD NEWS, but Joe Gandelman is very unhappy with the latest reports of prisoner abuse, reported in today’s New York Times. He’s reminded of Franco’s regime — though I suspect that in Franco’s regime he wouldn’t have been allowed to say that, and the people involved wouldn’t be facing serious charges. Still, it’s a very worthwhile and level-headed post.

UPDATE: Roger Simon calls this “highly disturbing,” but also wonders why the Times didn’t make the whole document available online.

FRED KAPLAN ON UZBEKISTAN:

President Bush has declared repeatedly that U.S. policy toward foreign governments will be shaped, above all else, by their fealty to freedom and democracy. If he continues to treat the Uzbek government—which wantonly shoots its own people—as a special American ally when U.S. interests no longer require such favor, then his declarations will be increasingly seen as insincere, and other nasty regimes, which he may try to pressure into reform, will learn not to take his words seriously.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz agrees:

This is an important point and one too often forgotten by proponents of realpolitik. Our advocacy of human rights and democratic self-rule are not PR, they are force multipliers and critical to our strategy. We use them not to be PC but because the alternatives failed. That’s why it’s important not to brush the Uzbek crackdown under a diplomatic rug, even if the regime is our ally (and why we shouldn’t ignore things like this).

Indeed, again.

MORE: On the other hand, Nathan Hamm at Registan has questions, and sounds a cautionary note:

There’s nothing I’d like more than for Uzbekistan to be a democracy. Yesterday. But I’m hearing a lot of calls for what I must, at my most charitable, characterize as a shoot from the hip, emotionally satisfying response to the Andijon massacre. I can’t deny that a part of me doesn’t want to see that, but this situation is too serious to foul up. Believe you me, I want our policy to improve. But I want us to take fully into account the realities on the ground and be willing to swallow some of the realities that we don’t like for the sake of an effective long-term policy.

Read the whole thing.

MORE: StrategyPage says the bad guys have won, and it sounds like there’s not much we could have done about it:

Uzbek president Islam Karimov appears to have put down the brief uprising in the eastern park of Uzbekistan. Karimov is smart, well organized, corrupt and ruthless. The demonstrators his troops dispersed with force were opposed to the police state methods used to hunt down Islamic radicals. The only group willing to oppose Karimov with armed force are the Islamic radicals, who don’t have a lot of religious support in Uzbekistan. But a lot more people would support the Islamic radicals if it meant a less corrupt, and more effective, government. The unrest in Uzbekistan is more about economics than ideology.

That suggests both an avenue of approach, over the longer term, and a potential downside of not acting. Austin Bay observes:

Hamas played on this same desire – less corruption– among Palestinians sick of Arafat’s kleptocracy. The Taliban played the same game when it took power in Afghanistan, ie “We’re honest, the old regime was not.” Of course the Taliban then proceeded to slide into its own brand of malfeasance (including pay-offs).

He’s posting an interesting series on “how freedom spreads” that’s related, and worth reading.

ROBERT MUSIL: “Compared to Newsweek and much of the rest of the mainstream media, Microsoft is all about the consumer.”

Now that’s gotta hurt.