I TRY TO LINK TO A LOT OF BLOG CARNIVALS, but BlogCarnival.com tries to link to all of them. It’s got search tools and a lot of features to help you organize and find blog carnivals, too. My cousin-in-law Brad Rubenstein set it up.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN SAYS THAT THE LOS ANGELES TIMES doesn’t understand the role of propaganda in wartime. I’m not so sure about that.

Stephen Green has more.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs thinks the Los Angeles Times understands propaganda pretty darn well.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More on the L.A. Times’ latest here.

MORE: Rusty Shackleford has thoughts, too.

IN THE MAIL: Peter Schweitzer’s Do As I Say (Not As I Do) : Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.

The back cover, on Michael Moore’s Halliburton stock, is amusing. I can’t tell you more, though, as the InstaWife immediately swiped it. She’s bad that way.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE LIBERATED IS UP, with links to posts from Iraqi and Afghan bloggers.

UPDATE: Also there’s the Carnival of Liberty and the Carnival of Classiness.

ADS: Yes, those are Pajamas Media ads on the right sidebar, which have replaced the BlogAds I used to run. The PJ Media ad folks want to test reader reactions, so if there’s something you like, or don’t like, about the look of the ads, email me with “New Ads” in the subject line and I’ll pass it on. (Hit “refresh” and the ads’ll change.)

In passing, I want to note that I never had any problems with Henry Copeland’s BlogAds operation. It’s a great boon to bloggers, and Henry is a great guy, blessed with smarts, good nature, and integrity. He and I have talked about this move, I left BlogAds with his blessing, and my experience with BlogAds was entirely positive. I moved to Pajamas Media because of what I hope it will eventually do to encourage firsthand blog reporting, especially from third-world countries and other areas that don’t get much media coverage now. I recommend BlogAds to anyone who’s interested in having ads on their blogs without joining an organization like Pajamas Media. It’s a big blogosphere out there, and there’s room for different approaches — and Henry’s is a good one.

UPDATE: Here’s a complaint that BlogAds is invitation-only now. Yeah, sorry, I forgot about that, and I gave away all my invitations already (guess who got the last one). If you really want in, you might ask some people with BlogAds on their site. But I suspect that any “open entry” model is going to wind up looking like Google’s AdSense, about which I hear mixed reports. I never tried it.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up.

THE WHITE HOUSE has released its Iraq strategy document. I think it owes a bit of a debt to Steven Den Beste. But hey, you can’t always rely on bloggers to explain the war plan.

UPDATE: Some people are asking what’s new about this strategy. The answer — as Jon Henke notes — is nothing, really. (“Naturally—after having paid more attention to the critics claiming there’s no plan than to, you know, the actual plan—everybody is acting all surprised and confused. . . .This isn’t the ‘first time’ the White House has disclosed the strategy for victory in Iraq, and the strategy isn’t ‘new’. This is something reporters really should know. . . . Granted, the White House should have done a better job at spreading this message from the very start. But it’s sheer laziness and/or incompetence on the part of the media and critics to pretend that the Iraq strategy hasn’t been widely available for a long time.”)

What’s new is that the White House is forcing people to pay attention to the plan, and to the fact that there is, and has been, a plan even though the press has ignored it. That many media outfits, as Henke notes, seem to think this is all new is merely evidence that they’ve been providing lousy war coverage all along.

But the White House, if a bit late in the day, is doing something it needs to do. You can’t rely on bloggers to do it all.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brian Dunn emails:

Nothing new for those who pay attention.

Perhaps the White House should have slapped a yellow cover on it and called it “Iraq Strategy for Dummies.” They could make quite a series what with the confusion over intelligence, WMD, Al Qaeda, the word “imminent”, etc.

Heh. More on Bush’s speech, including video, here.

WHAT I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS: A Potato Gun.

MORE THOUGHTS ON ENERGY-SAVING AND EFFICIENCY: My TechCentralStation column is up.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

TOUGH TALK from Angela Merkel.

THE MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRACY IN HONG KONG: Simon World notes Beijing’s dishonesty. There’s a march Sunday; more about that here.

HAVE WE REACHED A BIPARTISAN CONSENSUS ON IRAQ? I explore this over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: A reader notes that this NPR story supports the notion, too.

HARRY REID: Osama is dead?

UNSCAM UPDATE — Shredding the Volcker Commission archives?

The most urgent implication of Mr. Volcker’s incomplete findings is that his huge and expensively assembled archives must be preserved intact well beyond the Dec. 31 deadline by which Mr. Volcker now plans to start disposing of them. Above all, they must not be handed back to the U.N., where too much related to the corrupt Oil for Food program has already vanished–including, to a fascinating extent, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s own powers of recollection. The former head of the program, Benon Sevan, alleged to have taken bribes from Saddam, was allowed to skip town, U.N. pension in hand. Mr. Annan is even now resurrecting, via a new $4 million U.N. program called the Alliance of Civilizations, the career of his former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, who officially retired earlier this year after it came to light that during Mr. Volcker’s investigation Mr. Riza had overseen the shredding of three years’ worth of documents that might have better illuminated the oil-for-fraud shenanigans of the U.N.’s executive 38th floor.

As it happens, Rep. Henry Hyde, who has led the main investigation into Oil for Food in the House, introduced a bill on Nov. 17 urging that the U.S. withhold $100 million from its U.N. dues for each of the next four fiscal years, or until the secretary of state certifies to Congress that the Volcker investigation’s archives have been transferred, intact and uncensored by the U.N., “to an entity other than the [Volcker] Committee or the United Nations”–and made available for public inspection, at the very least by law-enforcement authorities.

I think they should go on the Web, in searchable form.

GRAND ROUNDS is up! So is the Carnival of Education.

A MILITARY DEFEAT for MoveOn.org, at the hands of the British.

MORE PROBLEMS for the Los Angeles Times. Some people are enjoying their predicament(s), but I’d actually like to see them do better.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE sets the wayback machine for 1998.

A DVD SECOND SEASON for Firefly?

Let’s say that Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly, wanted to bring the series back to air. (Though “back to air” is a TV phrase now as anachronistically quaint as “switching the dial.”) Let’s say he found a million Firefly fans online—and, trust me, they’re not hiding—who were willing to pay, say, $39.99 each for a sixteen-episode season of Firefly. (Not an unreasonable price, given how many people pay about that amount for full seasons on DVD.) Suddenly, Joss Whedon’s got roughly $40 million to play with—and he doesn’t need a network. Or a time slot. Or advertisers. He can beam the damn shows right to your computer if he wants to.

Great idea. But it’s a hypothetical. I actually asked Firefly executive producer Tim Minear about this kind of thing the other day, and he said there’s nothing like this in the works.

Maybe he should have added “yet.” Read the whole article, which has lots of interesting insights. (Via Bill Adams).

And this bit certainly describes my experience to a tee:

This summer, Universal did something kind of weird: It released Serenity, a sci-fi movie based on a poorly rated TV show, Firefly, that had been canceled after eleven episodes. Making movies of hit TV shows has a self-explanatory logic, but there aren’t too many movies based on TV flops. But I saw Serenity and liked it a lot, so I went out and bought the entire run of the Firefly TV series on DVD, watched it, and liked it a lot as well.

I bought the DVD set and enjoyed it too. I’d actually rather watch DVDs than regular TV.

And here’s a Blogcritics review of Firefly.

I DON’T AGREE WITH THIS POLICY AT ALL.

In fact, here’s the InstaPundit policy:

InstaPundit strongly supports the use of violent force to save lives of its workers (er, that’s me), readers, advertisers, or unrelated onlookers should they be kidnapped, held hostage, or caught in the middle of a conflict situation. The use of grossly excessive or gratuitous violence, while not exactly encouraged, isn’t exactly deplored, either.

If it saves just one life, it’s worth it.

CONGRESSMAN JACK KINGSTON is blogging about his trip to Iraq.

HOMELAND SECURITY UPDATE: “Efforts to train thousands of federal agents to protect commercial flights during heightened terror alerts were quietly abandoned more than a year ago because Congress objected to the cost, government investigators said Tuesday.”

BLOGGER / REPORTER MICHAEL TOTTEN is photoblogging Hezbollah-occupied Lebanon.

IT’S NICE TO SEE THAT REPRESENTATIONAL ART hasn’t died.

SOME ANTI-SCIENCE LAWMAKING that has nothing to do with “Intelligent Design.”