NORTH KOREA SAYS IT HAS NUKES. Bill Quick blames Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. I guess they deserve some of the blame, but honestly there hasn’t been all that much we could do about North Korea, short of nuking them, anyway. The Clinton-Carter deal didn’t help, but I don’t think it really did a lot of harm, either.

TOM MAGUIRE REPORTS that Chris Dodd is calling for the Davos folks to release the Eason Jordan tape.

THE FOLKS AT MEDIA MATTERS CLAIM that an FDR quote by Brit Hume, which I linked here a while back, is out of context and misrepresents what FDR really meant.

I’M ON THE PLANE NOW — a different plane than I had planned on. But the Delta people were really good about switching flights when the original one was delayed. (I want to get home on time because the Insta-Daughter has her karate belt ceremony tonight.) Security at LaGuardia was swift, cheerful, and efficient, too. Is this just a fluke?

Blogging will cease shortly as they make me shut off the laptop. I am, by the way, not reading the Charles Stross book I mentioned below. I realized that I was far enough into it that it wouldn’t last the trip, so I set it aside and brought Tim Powers’ The Drawing of the Dark. It’s very good so far, and I like the notion of beer being at the center of the moral universe.

BREDESEN IN 2008? I’ve got a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal that looks at the prospects.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs says I’m a shill for the Democrats.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Doug Weinstein, who’d like for me to shill for the Democrats, stresses that he thinks Bredesen’s workers’ comp. bill is bad for workers, not just trial lawyers. I’d said that in the sentence before, so I didn’t include it in his actual quote, since the piece was already running up against the length limit. That’s one of the downsides of writing for dead-tree publications.

A LATE NIGHT AND AN EARLY MORNING: Taped a segment of Charlie Rose last night with Joe Trippi, Andrew Sullivan, and Ana Marie Cox. Then went to a party at Nick Denton’s. It was a lot of fun, and I wish I got to do this sort of thing more often, but now I have to catch the plane home.

UPDATE: Gawker has photos, though I suspect that most people will prefer the ones of partying supermodels to the ones of partying pundits . . . .

And sorry, no Michael Totten style tell-all posts, even with caveats like “This is all from memory, and I was drunk part of the time.”

EASON JORDAN UPDATE: Bret Stephens reports:

By chance, I was in the audience of the World Economic Forum’s panel discussion where Mr. Jordan spoke. What happened was this: Mr. Jordan observed that of the 60-odd journalists killed in Iraq, 12 had been targeted and killed by coalition forces. He then offered a story of an unnamed Al-Jazeera journalist who had been “tortured for weeks” at Abu Ghraib, made to eat his shoes, and called “Al-Jazeera boy” by his American captors.

Here Rep. Barney Frank, also a member of the panel, interjected: Had American troops actually targeted journalists? And had CNN done a story about it? Well no, Mr. Jordan replied, CNN hadn’t done a story on this, specifically. And no, he didn’t believe the Bush administration had a policy of targeting journalists. Besides, he said, “the [American] generals and colonels have their heart in the right place.”

By this point, one could almost see the wheels of Mr. Jordan’s mind spinning, slowly: “How am I going to get out of this one?” But Mr. Frank and others kept demanding specifics. Mr. Jordan replied that “there are people who believe there are people in the military” who have it out for journalists. He also recounted a story of a reporter who’d been sent to the back of the line at a checkpoint outside of Baghdad’s Green Zone, apparently because the soldier had been unhappy with the reporter’s dispatches.

Read the whole thing. And as I said when this story first appeared: Bravo for Barney Frank.

UPDATE: Hmm. Bret Stephens wasn’t there “by chance,” and he wasn’t there as a journalist, either. Which doesn’t undercut his factual reportage, but seems worth noting.

JUST RAN THE CNET BANDWIDTH SPEED TEST on the Verizon wireless EVDO card and got 483 Kbps. Not bad for go-anywhere wireless.

STORIES ON TARGETING JOURNALISTS IN 2003: I had forgotten the BBC story, and my take on it. But Jim Geraghty remembered. If that’s the basis of Eason Jordan’s statement, well, that’s incredibly lame.

UPDATE: Here’s some real targeting of journalists in Iraq. No word on whether it will be discussed at Davos next year.

JOHN TABIN looks at post-election events in Iraq and finds them encouraging. More to the point, he notes that even longtime critics seem to find them so. Democratization is a process, not an event. But this is good news.

ADAM KEIPER BLOGS from the Congressional Nanotechnology Caucus press conference today. Some interesting observations.

I HAVEN’T PAID MUCH ATTENTION to the Jeff Gannon / Talon News story, but Rip-n-Read podcast has a roundup, available in audio or text. There seems to be some rather unsavory behavior going on here. More on the subject here.

DAVID CORN is looking for “honest and responsible conservatives” who will criticize Bush’s budget. I think I may have found one.

UPDATE: On the other hand, I don’t think that this counts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Arnold Kling writes that Corn should get out more.

OBJECTIVIST SEX NO-NOS and gay penguin voyeurism. Back to back! It must be sweeps week over at Reason. . . .

JONAH GOLDBERG has a column on monsters. They’re not quite the same monsters that I addressed in this column, but I think that the two pieces can profitably be read together.

I KNOW JOHN LUCAS, who’s a partner at the Hunton & Williams office in Knoxville. You may recall I’ve posted email from his son, who’s serving in Iraq. Now The Mudville Gazette notes a case of his son’s heroism, and how it was, ahem, reported by Reuters.

I’M AIRPORT-BLOGGING from the Cincinnati airport. It’s the first time I’ve used the Verizon card where there was broadband access and it’s quite zippy. Seems as fast as any high-speed connection.

I’LL BE TRAVELLING this morning, going up to New York on business. (I’m taking this Charles Stross book to read on the plane). Blogging will be intermittent, though I’ll have the laptop and the go-anywhere wireless card.

In the meantime, you can amuse yourself with the many excellent blog posts linked at this week’s Carnival of the Vanities. Branch out in your blog-reading!

AUSTIN BAY looks back.

TOXIC BOT-SUITS: My TechCentralStation column is up.

N.Z. BEAR has done a traffic analysis that suggests that quite a few people are reading about Eason Jordan despite the comparative silence of the big media.

More background here.

MARK STEYN:

I prefer to speak of “liberty” or, as Bush says, “freedom”, or, as neither of us is quite bold enough to put it, capitalism – free market, property rights, law of contract, etc. That’s why Hong Kong is freer than Liberia, if less “democratic”. If I had six or seven centuries to work on things, I wouldn’t do it this way in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the “war on terror” is more accurately a race against time – to unwreck the Middle East before its toxins wreck South Asia, West Africa, and eventually Europe. The doom-mongers can mock Bush all they want. But they’re spending so much time doing so, they’ve left themselves woefully uninformed on some of the fascinating subtleties of Iraqi and Afghan politics that his Administration turns out to have been rather canny about.

Nelson Ascher:

Those whom the fall of the Berlin Wall had left orphans of a cause, spent the next decade plotting the containment of the US. It was a complex operation that involved the (in many cases state-sponsored) mushrooming of NGOs, Kyoto, the creation of the ICC, the salami tactics applied against America’s main strategic ally in the Middle-East, Israel, through the Trojan Horse of the Oslo agreements, the subversion of the sanctions against Iraq etc. I’m not as conspiratorially-minded as to think that all these efforts were in any way centralized or that they had some kind of master-plan behind them. It was above all the case of the spirit of the times converging, through many independent manifestations, towards a single goal. Nonetheless we can be sure that, after those manifestations reached a critical mass, there has been no lack of efforts to coordinate them.

And so, spontaneously up to a point, anti-Americanism became the alternative ideology that came to fill in the vacuum left by the failure of traditional, USSR-based communism and its Maoist or Trotskyite satellites. Before 1989, the global left had something to fight for: either the strengthening of the communist states or the correction of what they called their bureaucratic distortions. To fight for something is simultaneously to fight against whatever threatens it, and thus, the leftists were anti-Western and anti-Americans too, anti-capitalistic in short.

Now, whatever they wanted to defend or protect doesn’t exist anymore. They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence.

Sigh. I wish he were wrong. (Via Roger Simon).

UPDATE: Sigh again:

The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.

Sigh.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ted Barlow thinks that this post means I think all leftists are terrorists. That’s hardly the case, and I respond here.

THANKS TO ALL THE PEOPLE WHO’VE HIT THE TIPJAR this week. It’s always a pleasant antidote to the hatemail.

THE FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION (F.I.R.E.) has a new blog out called The Torch.

AN EASON JORDAN SUM-UP over at GlennReynolds.com.

Meanwhile, Investor’s Business Daily editorializes: “It’s time for him to go.”

Somebody should have given Jordan one of these.