WORRIES ABOUT THE DOLLAR: Daniel Drezner collects some links.

I HAVEN’T PAID MUCH ATTENTION to the various Tom DeLay scandals — there are so many! — but here’s a roundup from Slate.

HEH: “The French government has destroyed 162,000 copies of the EU constitution because the phrase ‘incoherent text’ was printed on a page by mistake.” (Via Oxblog.)

BARN-BLOGGING: It beats “Hospi-blogging.” As I’m sure all Hospi-bloggers would agree.

JOSH WOLFE WRITES IN FORBES that it’s too early to talk about regulating nanotechnology.

SISSY WILLIS THINKS THAT KEVIN DRUM SHOULD WATCH HIS LANGUAGE: On the other hand, her headline could be construed as a bit racy . . . .

MICHAEL TOTTEN AND JIM HAKE ARE BLOGGING FROM LEBANON — with lots of photos.

THE BELMONT CLUB on Iraq:

It definitely shows to what great a depth the enemy resistance was prepared and how much they had invested in the Iraqi campaign in the long months while US diplomats tortuously attempted to obtain permission to topple Saddam Hussein. I believe that historians in retrospect will understand the Iraqi insurgency was not something spontaneously ignited by outbreaks of looting in Baghdad in the aftermath of OIF, but a meeting engagement between two prepared forces. Iraq, as Princeton’s Michael Doran observed, was intended to be the graveyard of America’s counteroffensive against terror. Instead the enemy dug the grave for themselves. What we are seeing now is not simply the rout of a few armed men, but terror’s greatest defeat in modern times.

I hope so.

WSJ POLL: “Republicans Splinter On Bush Agenda.”

The headline overstates things a bit, but I do think the poll underscores problems that some of us have been noting.

CANADIAN SCANDAL UPDATE:

Mr. Justice John Gomery has partially removed a ban on the volatile testimony from ad executive Jean Brault at the sponsorship inquiry.

However, the judge overseeing the sponsorship probe ruled Thursday that certain aspects of testimony provided by ad executive Jean Brault to the sponsorship inquiry can not be reported by the media.

“It is in the public interest that this evidence with few exceptions be made available to the public,” Judge Gomery said.

I think you’ll see some interesting discussion here shortly. I think that the blogosphere — and especially Ed Morrissey, as this NYT story illustrates — deserves some credit for this.

More here. And much more, here.

UPDATE: And Canadian news-blogger Brian Neale is all over this story.

KOFI ANNAN UPDATE:

KOFI Annan has summoned all UN staff to a meeting today in an effort to shore up his crumbling leadership of the organisation.

THE United Nations Secretary-General will address several thousand officials crammed into the General Assembly hall, where world leaders meet every northern autumn, and thousands more by video link around the world.
Aides say the embattled UN chief will deliver a “pep talk” in an attempt to buoy the spirits of UN personnel after a series of scandals, including last week’s oil-for-food report criticising Mr Annan and his son, Kojo.

He is expected to tout his recently released reform agenda, In Larger Freedom, which calls for institutional changes to revive the organisation.

Mr Annan, the first UN chief to rise up through the ranks, will find many staff angry and demoralised at what they see as the humiliation of the institution.

One mid-level official said he wanted an apology from Mr Annan, but did not dare ask.

Meanwhile, the criticism of the U.N. and its institutions just gets harsher:

Speaking at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Annan said that the world body is failing to protect against human rights abuses, particularly in Sudan’s conflict-ravaged Darfur region, and should be replaced by a council with greater authority.

“We have reached a point at which the commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough,” Annan told delegates.

“The commission’s ability to perform its tasks has been overtaken by new needs and undermined by the politicization of its sessions and the selectivity of its work,” Annan said.

And that’s just from Kofi!

BLOG RADIO: Jeff Goldstein and Bill Ardolino will be hosting Charles Johnson and Oliver Willis, among others, at 3 pm Eastern this afternoon.

THE PRESS IS IN PRE-9/11 MODE: Shark attack stories are back!

JOHN PAUL II — FAILURE?

It is therefore sad to reflect that the quarter century of his papacy was a terrible disaster for the Roman Catholic Church. Regular attendance at Mass* all over the traditionally Catholic world dropped like a stone all through John Paul II’s papacy. Everywhere in the great Catholic bastions of southern Europe — Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal — the story is the same. In France, “eldest daughter of the Church,” the only argument is whether regular Mass attendance today is just above, or just below, ten percent. In Ireland — Ireland! — the numbers declined steadily from the 90 percent of 1973 to 60 percent in 1996, since when they have fallen off a cliff, to 48 percent in 2001 and heading south. A hundred years ago the U.S. Church imported priests from Ireland; now Ireland imports them from Nigeria. . . .

The debate among devout Catholics about this calamity, so far as I can follow it, is not very enlightening. Conservatives blame it all on the reforms of the Vatican II Council (1962-5); liberals blame it on John Paul II himself, saying that his firm traditionalist approach to core doctrines turned off the more open-minded Catholic laity. Both surely know in their hearts that the real culprit is the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations.

I am less troubled by this than some, but I rather doubt that the path actually leads to Huxley’s Brave New World.

RANDALL TERRYS OF THE LEFT:

SANTA CRUZ — UC Santa Cruz junior Jonathan Perez dressed in a suit and tie Tuesday, hoping to impress company recruiters at the campus job fair.

But more than 200 student anti-war protesters got there first, storming the Stevenson Event Center, shouting and banging on windows and demanding that military recruiters in the corner of the room leave.

The noisy sit-in ended after an hour of chaos and tension when military representatives vacated their posts. Student protesters hugged each other happily after administrators allowed them to hand out information on alternatives to military careers and agreed to a meeting to discuss future job fairs.

I wonder what the University would have done if these had been anti-abortion, or anti-gay-marriage, protesters? But in fact, the antiwar movement has been reduced to this sort of embarrassing futility because it has no real popular support outside a few enclaves. And this — frankly unpatriotic — face isn’t helping it. And, yes, it is unpatriotic to obstruct military recruiting in time of war.

And if I were an employer, I’d give UC Santa Cruz a pass, this year and in the future.

UPDATE: Reader Bart Hall emails:

The rarely-mentioned dirty secret of it all is that the military are increasingly disinclined to recruit in such places to begin with. They did not push to reinstitute ROTC at places like Harvard and Middlebury because “frankly, we’ve found that students from such institutions tend to perform poorly as officers,” to quote an officer (O-4) in a position to know.

Fewer and fewer students attending places like UCSC are of the sort who can handle the military. These institutions do not, however, yet sseem recognize their growing irrelevence and its connection to a woefully distorted and unbalanced political environment.

Ouch. And Brian Dunn adds:

Why encourage employers to skip UC Santa Cruz? Where will the folks like the guy in the suit go? And it’s not like it will hurt the protesters. What corporation wants their skill set? I don’t think Taco Bell sends recruiters to campus.

Ouch, again.

MORE: A reader says that Bart Hall has it partly wrong:

Reader Bart Hall isn’t quite accurate

When I was Marine Corps recruiter I avoided career fairs like the plague because they were a complete and total waste of my very limited time. I never landed a single enlistment from one of those damn things.

Now and then I would go because I was under orders to do so. It was all a numbers game. A career fair would generate a lot of contacts, the CO could then go to his boss and say look how busy my boys are.

I would then waste yet more of my precious time having to prove that the red hot leads this event would generate (like I. P. Freely and I. C. Weiner) probably weren’t going to result in a body at boot camp.

I’m sure they were glad to leave. I would have been.

John Stockley late of the USMC

P.S. He’s being a little unfair about Harvard. The amount of officers recruited from the Ivy League is so statistically insignificant, there is no useful data available on their performance. His Major’s opinion is strictly his own.

So noted. And another reader asks why the Randall Terry comparison. I thought it was obvious — the antiwar folks here remind me of Terry’s pro-lifers thuggishly-yet-ineffectually protesting outside abortion clinics, because they’ve lost everywhere else. Both groups even call the objects of their protests “baby-killers.”

ED MORRISSEY NOTES that American media are covering the Canadian scandals now. I think he deserves a lot of the credit for that.

LAWN-MOWER UPDATE: I did buy one of these yesterday, though at Mayo’s, not from Amazon. They told me I could bring it back for a full refund if I didn’t like it. So far, I’m not quite sure: I mowed the front yard with it and it was easy to push and did a good job, though you can’t use it as a trimmer the way you can use a powered push-mower — when you stop pushing, it stops cutting. The cut was nice, and the lack of noise was pleasant.

PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS IN KASHMIR:

Some crying with joy, 31 Pakistani Kashmiris crossed the “Peace Bridge” into Indian Kashmir on Thursday, marking the first bus service linking the divided Himalayan region since it was split by war almost 60 years ago. . . .

Attacks by Islamic separatists — who have threatened to turn the buses into rolling coffins — scared off some passengers but failed to derail one of the most significant and emotive steps in South Asia’s unsteady peace process.

“The caravan of peace has started,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said as he sent off the Pakistan-bound bus in front of a crowd of thousands braving freezing drizzle at the Lion of Kashmir stadium in Srinagar, summer capital of Indian Kashmir and the region’s heart and soul. “Nothing can stop it.”

This whole standing-up-to-terrorists business has become quite the fashion. Good!

THE SCHIAVO TALKING-POINTS MEMO turns out to have been written by a Republican staffer after all. But Mickey Kaus notes that this doesn’t help Post reporter Mike Allen as much as it might:

Allen doesn’t come off looking too good in this latest account. a) The memo was apparently not “distributed to Republican Senators by party leaders,” as Allen’s initial story, sent out through the Post news service to other papers, reported. It was–at least judging from today’s account–handed to one Democratic senator, Tom Harkin, by one freshman Republican senator (who isn’t in the party leadership); b) Allen doesn’t explain why he told Howie Kurtz he “did not call them talking points or a Republican memo” when he had in fact done just that in the news service draft; c) Even the later, more “carefully worded” account Allen published in the Post itself was apparently wrong.

Oops. John Hinderaker has more.

UPDATE: Evan Coyne Maloney notes that Mel Martinez has some explaining to do.

ANOTHER UPDATE: My sum-up? This tells us two things we already knew: The press will publish stuff without much in the way of authentication, if it thinks it makes Republicans look bad. And Republicans really were interested in politicizing the Terry Schiavo matter. On both points: Duh.

OUCH.

RICK LEE has a new photoblog.

THANKS to all the folks who’ve sent donations lately. They do a fine job of offsetting the hatemail.

KUDLOW: Leave the Strategic Petroleum Reserve alone.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Gordon Smith comments on a Jim Lindgren presentation regarding the Bellesiles affair, and points out (yes, really) a Wonkette angle.

UPDATE: Lindgren comments, and adds more background, here. The Chronicle of Higher Education comes off quite badly.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Scott McLemee, formerly of the Chronicle, disputes Lindgren’s version of events:

I’m astonished to see you retailing the nonsense about the Chronicle’s coverage of the Bellesiles affair.

Until leaving the paper recently to begin writing a column for Inside Higher Ed, I worked in the section that covered the story. (It was not my beat, but I kept up with developments at the time.) Obviously I’m not speaking on the paper’s behalf, but can tell you that the notion there was any pressure to shape the story one way or the other is preposterous. Even more so is the notion that the individual now known as Wonkette was fired for some excessive zeal in pursuit of investigative reporting. That is enough to make a cat laugh.

People are not angry because the Chronicle’s coverage of the story was unfair or unbalanced. On the contrary. They are angry at not seeing only their take represented. I suppose that Bellesiles’s supporters would be unhappy, too, if he had any.

I don’t know the truth of this — though I’ve always found Lindgren reliable — but I like the phrase “enough to make a cat laugh.”

WHAT HATH BUSH WROUGHT? This observation seems right: “A Kurdish president of Iraq? A few years ago, such a thing would have been unthinkable. Hearty congratulations are in order.” Even NPR sounded surprisingly positive.