ORIN KERR: “It looks like there probably won’t be a brutal confirmation battle over John Roberts, even though Roberts is generally understood to be conservative, and Roberts’ credentials and qualifications are a part of his appeal.”

He could be right, especially as Cass Sunstein is praising Roberts, which would seem to be an indicator.

HERE’S A TRANSCRIPT of JOHN HOWARD’S DEVASTATING RESPONSE to dumb press questions about Iraq.

UPDATE: And this photo essay on Al Qaeda actions before the Iraq invasion makes Howard’s point rather graphically.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Trey Jackson has the John Howard video.

MORE: Reader Solon Brochado emails:

If someone hadn’t asked that question, you wouldn’t have prime-minister’s Howard great answer to quote (or link to), after all.

Now, I’m not trying to say that was the case. I’m sure that a great part of the press believes in that notion or, at least, think the terrorists’ acts are somehow justifiable, albeit wrong.

Nonetheless, I believe the question had to be asked. Any journalist knows what Howard’s or Blair’s answer to that will be. Still, it doesn’t matter whether you agree or not with their opinions, you’re a reporter and you have to report. And since that is a rather widespread opinion throughout the world, you MUST get Blair’s and Howard’s answer to it.

The tone-of-voice has to be taken into account, and it was, um, obnoxious.

If I were a reporter at that press conference, I would have asked: “Do you think the press’s sensationalization of the attacks, and rationalization of terrorists’ motives, is causing innocent people to be killed and put at risk?” My tone of voice I leave to your imagination, but it seems to me to be a far more reasonable question, and one that the rest of the world needs to hear at least as much.

STILL MORE: Wagner James Au emails:

Seems to me that the real issue isn’t whether the reporter asked a stupid question– he actually asks Howard if an Australian survivor of the 7/7 attack blaming the war in Iraq means we’re losing “the progranda war against terrorism”, which is a much more nuanced question than what the NRO Corner depicts (big surprise there)– the real issue is how Howard’s *response* is reported by the press, tomorrow. If at all. The mainstream media consistently promotes the uninformed narrative that coalition presence in Iraq is enflaming extremist Muslims into becoming terrorists– leaving unexplained the fact that terrorists in Iraq target Shiite Muslims far more than coalition troops (or for that matter, bomb London underground stops frequented by British Muslims.) Howard is puncturing that simplistic narrative with a frontal attack, and the press doesn’t like to be embarrassed. Look to see how many lead papers give prominent coverage to Howard’s statement. I’m guessing none to few do.

Good guess. But the question I originally referenced was asked of Tony Blair by another reporter — a woman, but I don’t know from what news service.

YET MORE: Richard McEnroe answers Au’s question with this report:

Of course, if you were in LA, you never saw it, because the minute Howard uttered the word “terrorism,” the video feed was cut. Was that the Beeb in England or Tribune in the US, I wonder?

Beats me, but it’s not surprising either way.

THERE’S AN INSTAPUNDIT PROFILE in Hotline’s Blogometer. You’ll have to scroll down, as they haven’t gotten around to adding individual permalinks yet.

MIKE KREMPASKY: “Why does the Columbia Journalism Review hate bloggers so? Why would a site whose mission is’to promote better journalism’ twist a story to the point of falsehood, just to take a slap at poor self-published pundits?”

IN THE MAIL: Down Range : Navy SEALs in the War on Terrorism, by Dick Couch. Looks pretty interesting, though I imagine that lots of the interesting stuff about special operations and the war won’t come out for decades.

SKY NEWS is reporting that the bus bomb is identical to designs used in the 7/7 attacks.

MULTI-FAITH ANTITERROR PROTESTS in Pakistan, Germany, and Australia. Gateway Pundit has a roundup and pictures.

I’M WATCHING TONY BLAIR AND JOHN HOWARD right now, talking about the London attacks and the war — Howard’s particularly good at noting that this is a war, not a series of isolated incidents — and their frequent invocation of anglosphere solidarity is almost a commercial for Jim Bennett’s book. I wonder if they’ve read it? They’re certainly living it.

UPDATE: Some idiot correspondent asked Blair if the attacks were his fault because of the Iraq war. And others are taking an equally negative line — one asks if the propaganda war against terror is being lost.

No — but if so, it’s because of people in the media like these. John Howard’s too polite to tell them to read Norm Geras, but he put them in their place with logic, noting that Bin Laden was unhappy about the liberation of East Timor and declared war on that basis long before the Iraq invasion.

Translation: You’re idiots, cowards, and political hacks. Yes! The preening, point-scoring irresponsibility of the press, which is if anything worse in Britain than in America, is one of the most striking things about this war, and it will be decades before it recovers. If it does.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER proclaims the vindication of the neocons.

AUSTIN BAY looks at the manhandling of U.S. officials and reporters accompanying Condi Rice in Sudan today, and asks “where’s the outrage” compared to reports that a Koran may have been mishandled.

I think we should bring the hammer down. Condi should announce that we’re sending guns, bombs and trainers to the Darfur rebels — and that should just be the start.

JEEZ, I CAN’T EVEN GO TO THE GYM without some Al Qaeda bozos trying to blow up London. Luckily, this week’s effort seems pretty lame so far compared to two weeks ago:

Exactly two weeks after four suicide bombers wreaked havoc in the London rush hour, parts of the capital were brought to a standstill today by a spate of apparent copycat attacks on three Tube trains and a London bus.

Emergency services were called out to incidents at three stations, including a reported nailbomb attack at Warren Street station.

A British Transport Police spokeswoman said Warren Street, Shepherd’s Bush and Oval stations had all been evacuated. An explosion was also reported on a No 26 bus at Hackney in East London, blowing out the windows but not causing any injuries.

Only one person is so far reported to have been injured, at Shepherd’s Bush.

The Times is calling these “copycat attacks,” suggesting that they’re not real Al Qaeda efforts, I guess, though I don’t know how they know that yet. Sky News is reporting that British police are in hot pursuit of one of the bombers, apparently a suicide bomber whose bomb didn’t go off. We’ll know a lot more if he’s captured.

Tim Worstall has much more.

UPDATE: There’s lots more on the Guardian blog, including this:

It is now becoming clear that there were three attempted bombings today – at Oval station, at Warren Street station, and on a 26 bus in Hackney. Speculation suggests the detonators on these devices went off, but the bombs themselves did not.

This suggests amateurism, or a substantial degradation of Al Qaeda capabilities.

The Counterterrorism Blog has much more.

More here, too.

And here’s the BBC Reporters’ Log. Latest:

The undercurrent in these police statements is that these might have been much more serious incidents, that these might have been serious bombs which might not have gone off properly.

The concern is that this could have turned out to be another serious attack on London.

Happily, it didn’t. Brian Erst emails:

One reason that the bombs may have “failed” in London this morning, provided they actually did fail, may be that these were timed explosives rather than suicide bombs.

There has been much speculation that the four bombers of 7/7 were unaware of their own impending doom, having been told that the bombs they were going to explode were actually on timers when, in fact, they were not. Presumably, this is the type of deception that works only once.

It may be that today’s wave of attackers actually did use (and insisted on checking) timers, and that these timers simply failed to work. In which case, the attacks were no less “sophisticated” than 7/7 – to the contrary, they were MORE sophisticated (to let the bomber live to bomb another day), but failed as a result of bad implementation of that plan.

Interesting point. We’ll see.

MICHAEL YON reports on a close encounter of the explosive kind in Mosul, where he was in on the capture of a major arms cache and bomb factory. Lots of interesting photos, too.

Really, this is war reporting of a caliber not often seen these days.

STRATEGYPAGE ON RECRUITING:

The army is also noticing regional patterns. Recruiting is holding steady in the Midwest, and is up in the South. In other words, the recruiting tends to follow political patterns. The Blue (Democratic) states are sending fewer volunteers, and the Red (Republican) states more. But the Blue/Red state may have more to do with job prospects than political beliefs. Areas where the unemployment rate is the lowest tend to be the toughest for recruiters.

There’s also the reality factor. Troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are more likely to reenlist. Some of this is due to higher re-enlistment bonuses, but those re-enlisting (and 35 percent of them do it in a combat zone) often say they believe strongly in what they are doing, and that’s why they volunteer to keep doing it. By the end of the year, the army expects to get 4,000 more re-enlistments than it expected. A disproportionate number of these are coming from combat troops, which is very helpful.

More on how retention is going better than recruitment here, from USA Today: “Soldiers are re-enlisting at rates ahead of the Army’s targets, even as overall recruiting is suffering after two years of the Iraq war.”

My guess is that part of it stems from media coverage: Serving soldiers have better information about what’s really going on than potential recruits, who just see the gloom-and-doom on TV. Thanks, media guys!

URIAH KRIEGEL WRITES that Bush’s selection of John Roberts is a split-the-difference move that resembles his stem-cell decision.

WILL WE SEE “DUMBASS QUESTIONS?” Count on it!

THE SMITHSONIAN has found new photos from the Scopes Trial. If, by the way, your idea of what happened in the Scopes Trial comes from Inherit the Wind, I highly recommend Ed Larson’s book, A Summer for the Gods. You might also read this post by Jim Lindgren.

And, if you’re interested, you can watch this documentary video featuring Larson and yours truly, originally done by Court TV.

NORM GERAS TAKES ON TERRORIST APOLOGISTS — in The Guardian! “It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them.”

UPDATE: Read this post by Callimachus, too.

DARFUR UPDATE: My former student Mary Littleton sends this link to the Genocide Intervention Fund, which supports military intervention, though as far as I can tell they’re not actually raising money to hire mercenaries to intervene, as the title made me hope . . . .

RON BAILEY IS REPORTING from the creationism mega-conference. Reports are here and here.

I suspect that not many attendees were fans of his new book.

RIOTS IN YEMEN: Roundup here.

UPDATE: Will Franklin has photos and more background on what’s going on: “These demonstrations are not about poverty itself, nor about gas prices. These demonstrations, targeted against Saleh’s rule, were nothing less than the early stages of revolution.” He argues — correctly, I think — that we need to be supporting democracy even though the current regime is our (ostensible) ally in the war on terror.

DARFUR UPDATE: The United States is airlifting troops to Sudan.

MAX BOOT WRITES that China is waging stealth war on the United States. “This is not a challenge the Pentagon is set up to address, but it’s an urgent issue for the years ahead.”

I’m pretty sure that Microsoft and Cisco aren’t helping matters.

WRITING IN THE NEW REPUBLIC, Bill Stuntz offers a lukewarm review of the Roberts pick: “But in the end, the political risk-taker in the White House decided not to take risks: He picked the sane, smart, and safely conservative John Roberts. . . . In other words, more a Rehnquist than a Scalia. . . . But the Rehnquist model may be better suited to politics than to law.”

UPDATE: Randy Barnett has some similar thoughts:

John Roberts is who you get when the President finally nominates the “best qualified” candidate. I mean truly best qualified as measured by college and law school degrees (both Harvard), grades (summa, Harvard; Magna, Harvard Law School), clerkships (Friendly, Rehquist), post law school job (Chief Deputy SG), big prestigious law firm job. He is widely reputed to be considered by the Justices themselves as among the very best Supreme Court oral advocates around today. And no one dislikes him.

But what sort of Justice will Judge Roberts make? I have no idea. I have never met him, so all I have to go on is his public record–a record of enormous accomplishment. But so far as I know, we know nothing about what he stands for apart from the fact that he is undoubtedly politically conservative. Is he an originalist? We don’t know. Is he a majoritarian conservative like Robert Bork? We don’t know. Would he find any limits on the enumerated powers of Congress? We don’t know. Would he have ruled with the majority in Kelo? We don’t know.

Read the whole thing.

ANOTHER UPDATE: On the other hand, Democratic reader Harvey Schneider, who frequently sends me critical emails, seems more enthusiastic about Roberts:

As an independent/libertarian who leans Democratic, I have this to say about Roberts. Good. After the liberal core of the court decided Kelo and Medical MJ, screw the liberals. Naral and NOW don’t like it? Too bad. They have one issue, and don’t seem to care about federalism, Private Property rights, or compassion for terminally ill patients. Since they seem to have it figured out I guess they don’t need my support. Besides, despite my generally pro-choice position, after fathering two children, my view has changed a little bit. Abortion up until 5 minutes before birth is not something I support unconditionally anymore.

Hmm. Expertise and credentials as a blow against interest groups on both sides? Is Bush that subtle?

REST IN PEACE, JAMES DOOHAN. I’ll raise a glass of Saurian brandy to him tonight.

BLOGS ARE TAKING OFF IN CAMBODIA:

Like many young Cambodians just now getting used to the idea of surfing the web, Mean Lux only recently heard about blogs. But his work traveling this country’s back roads may soon bring a rush of Cambodians to the blogosphere.

As part of a project launched by a pro-democracy nonprofit, Mean spent most of June in dusty provincial capitals showing high-school and university students how to publish an online diary.

In an interview last week, he said the most common question was whether people in other countries could read blogs from Cambodia. He said they could.

“They also asked, ‘How will people know where my blog is?’ I said, ‘How will they know what your phone number is? It is the same way,'” he said.

In one town, Mean wasn’t able to get a reliable connection to the internet, which is not surprising considering that until two years ago, net access in Cambodia was only available in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, a tourist destination in the north. (The International Telecommunication Union estimated that only 25 in 10,000 Cambodians were net users in 2003, one of the lowest internet-penetration rates in Asia.)

Nonetheless, about a dozen students who attended Mean’s training sessions were inspired to create their own English-language blogs after the three-hour workshop.

Keep it up, guys!