IS ROBERT BYRD IN TROUBLE? I like the graphic.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

June 4, 2005 — WASHINGTON — The lawyer for a U.N. staffer fired for wrongdoing in the oil-for-food scandal insisted yesterday that his client acted on orders of higher-ups and is being used as a “scapegoat” to take the heat off Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other bigwigs.

Coming out swinging two days after his client was canned, the lawyer for Cypriot mid-level bureaucrat Joseph Stephanides said he plans a major battle against U.N. leadership to get reinstated and refute charges he engaged in “serious misconduct” in the award of a lucrative inspection contract to a British firm.

(Via Newsbeat 1, which notes an odd blackout on this story in Canada.)

I SENT COMMENTS to the FEC today on their Internet regulation proceeding, but I have to say that mine weren’t a patch on the really excellent job done by Adam Bonin for Duncan Black, Kos, and Matt Stoller. You can read those here. RedState has an excellent highlights-collection of items filed so far, which you can see here. And hey, it’s not quite too late for you to weigh in.

DON’T MISS THE CARNIVAL OF CORDITE.

PERRY DE HAVILLAND: “Shine the spotlight, name the names.”

JEFF JARVIS: “Now you have to pay FedEx just to get the assurance they gave you that they’d done their job. FedEx is turning into the Post Office.”

THE BELMONT CLUB: “Any environment capable of producing terrorism on a scale which could destroy America would be sufficiently powerful to destroy Islam — and destroy it first many times over. Any weapon that AQ Khan can make can be bought by believers and infidels alike. The theorists of asymmetrical terrorist warfare forgot that its military effectiveness depends on the very restraints that it, itself, dissolves.”

LINDA FOLEY IS AT IT AGAIN: Are you sure she’s not a Karl Rove plant?

ADVICE TO COMMENCEMENT SPEAKERS: It’s not about you. It’s about the graduates. Keep it short, and don’t abuse the captive audience.

Of course, some people don’t do this:

Best-selling author Erica Jong was booed and told to “Shut up!” and “Go Home!” during her 40-minute speech yesterday at the College of Staten Island’s commencement exercises. . . .

Ms. Jong’s remarks were met with some vehement disapproval.

“She gave a political speech when she was supposed to be doing a pep talk,” said the father of a CSI graduate who declined to give his name. “Some graduates wanted to throw stuff at her. Whoever heard of a commencement speaker talking about body bags?”

Dorothy, a 48-year-old mother of a CSI graduate, categorized Ms. Jong’s speech as “all-around bashing.

“It was disgusting, despicable,” said the Fort Wadsworth woman, who would not give her surname. “She called politicians liars, called us all liars. She trashed America. Mostly, she just wanted to talk. It was personal spewing. There was nothing about graduation.”

Really, it’s not about you. Except when they boo. Then, well, it is.

IN THE FUTURE, everyone will be Hitler for fifteen minutes.

HEH:

Brussels, Belgium, Jun. 2 (UPI) — Last year, U.S. author and social critic Jeremy Rifkin wrote a best-selling book called “The American Dream” in which he predicted that the EU’s vision of the future would quietly eclipse the United States’.

That EU dream now lies in tatters after the emphatic rejection of the bloc’s first constitution by voters in France and the Netherlands — a double whammy that could deal a fatal blow to the ambitious blueprint for an enlarged union.

You’ll seldom go wrong betting against Jeremy Rifkin.

GAY MARRIAGE AND THE ESTATE TAX: An amusing juxtaposition of principle.

IT’S THE SIXTEENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE. Even Amnesty International is marking the date, with a press release.

The Chinese government, meanwhile, continues to cover up the actual events:

A JOURNALIST considered the doyen of China correspondents has been held in Beijing and could be charged with stealing state secrets after he tried to obtain a copy of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist leader who was purged after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Ching Cheong, a Hong Kong national who works for The Straits Times, a Singaporean newspaper, would be the first reporter for a foreign publication to face charges in China. . . .

Mr Ching, 55, was detained in the southern city of Guangzhou on April 22. He had been trying to obtain a copy of interviews with the late Zhao, who opposed the use of military force to suppress the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Untold hundreds died when troops moved in to break up the student-led demonstration. Zhao, who died in January, was deposed as general secretary and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

I hope they don’t send him to a gulag.

TOM MAGUIRE NOTES politically incorrect reportage at the New York Times.

I MEANT TO MENTION THIS EARLIER, but Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe is hosting all sorts of interesting lefty bloggers. And this post by Matthew Yglesias offers some good advice for the Democrats. Complaints about old white men are just silly . . . .

REDSTATE REPORTS on what the pro-“reform” folks are saying about bloggers: Nothing very nice.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh is parsing comments too.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES IS UP: Bon Appetit!

EUROPE’S BAD PRESS: Thoughts over at GlennReynolds.com.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE to comment on the FEC’s proposal to regulate blogs.

Faisal Jawdat has posted a resource page with lots of helpful links.

IN THE MAIL: Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What it Means to be Human, by Joel Garreau.

It looks quite interesting, and certainly timely. The cover art, however, seems a bit tendentious. I don’t know how much to make of the fact that it’s on this list of Luddite-approved books . . . .

UPDATE: Not much, I guess. The Speculist has a review, and says that it’s the best book since Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “The appalling poverty of Sri Lanka or Mozambique is not some bizarre aberration that can be tracked to a cause we can cure. We are the aberration; Sri Lanka and Mozambique are the normal state of human history.” I, of course, would like to see this aberration spread until everyone is rich and healthy. But she’s right — poverty, etc., are the default condition.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Ford sends this quote:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded- here and there, now and then- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

Indeed.

IN A HOLE, DAN RATHER KEEPS DIGGING. The results aren’t pretty: “It is hard to be angry or even exercised over the sad spectacle of an old man trying so hard not to admit that he’d been played for a fool.”

DARFUR UPDATE: The Washington Post editorializes:

On Wednesday President Bush called the Darfur killings “genocide,” a description that implies some moral obligation on the part of the United States to act to stop the killing. But his administration has yet to improve on the schizophrenic pressure-cum-cooperation approach of the past year, in part because it is hemmed in by the world’s indifference. China courts Sudan because of its oil. Russia seeks to sell arms to Sudan. Egypt and other Muslim states appear unmoved by the killing of Darfur’s Muslim people. The diplomatic challenge for the United States is to persuade these partners to see Sudan’s government for what it is: the problem, not the solution.

As I’ve suggested before, some Special Forces trainers and a whole lot of AK-47s (conveniently available in Saddam’s captured warehouses) might do some good, too.

MICKEY KAUS:

Victor Navasky, former editor and now publisher of The Nation, has begun to play a “key role” at Columbia Journalism Review, according to E&P. Will the often-embarrassing media-crit magazine (and blog) now become an ideological clone of The Nation? That might require moving CJR slightly to the right. . . .

Heh.

STRATEGYPAGE:

Zimbabwe is about ready to explode in a nightmare mass murder, or bloody revolution. It’s not genocide this time, but democide (government killing massive numbers of its own citizens.) The Zimbabwe government, in power since the country became independent in 1980, dealt with increasing unpopularity by terrorizing political opponents, rigging elections, and paying off supporters by driving its most productive citizens (the white farmers) out of the country and stealing their property. This move made it impossible for the country to feed itself. Relief agencies sent in tons of food, but this was distributed in a punitive fashion, with anti-government areas getting less food, or none at all. Last year, the government proclaimed the food emergency over, and said it needed no more charity from foreigners. That was a face saving lie. This year, the government admitted there was a food problem, and requested 1.2 million tons of food.

But it appears that the government will again use the food as a weapon. For the past month, police have been shutting down black markets in the cities, where the anti-government feeling is the strongest. Over 20,000 people have been arrested and several hundred squatters have been driven back into the countryside. The black markets have been a major source of food and other goods for the urban population. Without the black markets, the urban population will be totally dependent on the government for food.

Mugabe is the poor man’s Pol Pot. And like Pol Pot, he is getting help and support from people in the West who will later pretend not to know what was going on.

This passage points to a solution, though: “There hasn’t been any revolution so far because the potential rebels cannot get guns. No one is willing to arm the dissatisfied majority, and over two thirds of the population lives in poverty. . . . The government seems determined to starve its enemies to death, secure in the knowledge that the victims are unarmed, and the government forces have lots of guns.”

That’s a reason for an international right to arms, of course. But at a more immediate level, it suggests that — as with Darfur — the United States should be sending weapons to the rebels.