HERE’S MORE ON UKRAINE’S PROBLEMS WITH ITS PAST, and this not-entirely-encouraging observation: “Yushchenko has shown a tendency to fall into a kind of minor-league imitation of his predecessor when reporting on his government’s actions.” Minor-league is better than major-league, but people should keep pressure on him to live up to his promises.

Follow the link for much more on Ukraine, missiles, and Iraq.

VIOLENT SUPPRESSION IN KYRGYZSTAN:

Riot police have violently broken up an anti-government protest hours after Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev named a hardliner to take charge of security.

Akayev, who promised not to resort to a massive use of force against demonstrators on Tuesday, named the head of police in the capital Bishkek as new interior minister to deal with protests trying to force him from office and which are dividing the mountainous Central Asian country.

A short time later, riot police moved in and broke up an anti-Akayev demonstration of about 200 people in the capital.

Read the whole thing. And here’s a firsthand report from a high-ranking NGO official who was there, including this bit: “Most alarming was the re-appearance of people wearing white hats and red armbands. Large, threatening looking fellows, they pushed, shoved and generally made it clear that if people wanted trouble, they were ready to give it. It really is alarming the use of un-armed, non-uniformed thugs to enforce discipline. I really can only call them proto-fascists.”

UPDATE: Hmm. Reader Michael Marino notes that according to this NPR report the white-hatted folks are opposition members picking up for the police, who have gone on strike. That seems inconsistent with the report above, but I can’t tell which is right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Nathan Hamm emails: ” The report is from the south, which is still under the control of protesters. The crackdown was in Bishkek, so the white hats are not the same in each account.”

UNSCAM UPDATE:

UNITED NATIONS – After months of denials, the United Nations admitted yesterday that, in an exception to its own rules, it has paid for the legal defense of Benon Sevan. The U.N.’s own investigation panel denounced Mr. Sevan for his central role in the oil-for-food scandal that has engulfed the world body. . . .

Up until late last week, the U.N. said it had not paid any of Mr. Sevan’s legal fees. But yesterday, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard told The New York Sun that the U.N. had been paying his legal bills up until last month.

Mr. Eckhard refused to disclose the sum paid, saying that the legal bills submitted by Mr. Sevan “will be reviewed” by U.N. legal experts, indicating that the exact figure may change. Sources who refused to be named told the Sun, however, that the costs exceed $300,000. Mr. Eckhard did not address the source of the payment to Mr. Sevan’s legal team, which could come from an account financed by Iraqi oil revenues or from U.N. funds. Congress is investigating the oil-for-food scandal.

This doesn’t exactly enhance the credibility of their other denials.

MORE ON F.E.C. INTERNET REGULATION, from The Wall Street Journal:

When it comes to the law of unintended consequences, the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance “reform” is rapidly becoming a legal phenomenon. The latest example comes courtesy of the Federal Election Commission, where officials are being asked to extend the law to the very people it is supposed to empower: individual citizens. . . .

An idea kicking around the FEC a few years ago would require government to calculate the percentage of individuals’ electricity bills that went toward political advocacy (we aren’t joking). Another alternative would be to classify all bloggers as journalists, seeing as how the press is about the only entity exempt from McCain-Feingold. As much we enjoy our profession, we think a nation of journalists is overkill.

Overkill? I think it’s precisely what the First Amendment is about.

UPDATE: I’m not sure I’d take this approach, though.

RICH, BLOGGY GOODNESS: This week’s Carnival of the Vanities is up. Spread your blog-love around!

And this week’s Carnival of Education is up, too!

A WAR WE ARE WINNING: Austin Bay has a very interesting column today. He also notes how the press got it wrong, and by doing so played into the terrorists’ hands:

Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, widespread violence destroying Iraq. But that was a false impression. Every day, coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq, and if the “insurgents” were lucky they blew up one. However, flash the flames of that one rig on CNN and, “Oh my God, America can’t stop these guys,” is the impression left in Boise and Beijing.

Saddam’s thugs and Zarqawi’s klan were actually weak enemies — “brittle” is the word I used to describe them at a senior planning meeting. Their local power was based on intimidation — killing by car bomb, murdering in the street. Their strategic power was based solely on selling the false impression of nationwide quagmire — selling post-Saddam Iraq as a dysfunctional failed-state, rather than an emerging democracy.

The good news is that the press’s diminishing credibility, and the availability of alternative channels of communication, kept this strategy from working. But read the whole thing, to see how Austin, in Iraq, was able to see things that the journalists there missed.

UPDATE: Bay has more background on his blog.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader John Beckwith emails:

Your post regarding the latest Austin Bay column got me thinking about what would have happened in Iraq if there had been no blogs from Iraq and no emails from soldiers back home to circulate around the Internet.

I think the ‘quagmire narrative’ might have become a self fulfilling prophesy. Rather than completing the ‘long hard slog’ the administration might have cut and run with the looming presidential election. Key tactics and strategies, developed through trial and error in the battlefield, may have been abandoned just before they began to bear fruit. Or, Bush may have soldiered on in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence that his policies were a ‘collossol mistake guaranteeing a Kerry victory that may — rightly or wrongly — have emboldened the insurgents (Baathists and imported Jihadis) to hang on a bit longer.

As it is, we came pretty close as a society and electorate to giving up last year. If we had, it’s hard to see how the Jan 30 elections and and nascent democracy movement in the Middle East would have happened. If blog readers are as influential as some polls indicate, they may have done just enough to turn the tide.

I ask because, by last fall, I was getting 90% of my Iraq news from blogs that provided an on the ground perspective from soldiers and Iraqis in theater instead of the major media outlets. This led me to be cautiously optimistic despite the problems we have there. Certainly this affected my vote on Nov 2. I doubt I was alone and I think this was a consequential election.

Success has a thousand fathers, and we’ll see Ted Kennedy taking credit for Iraq before it’s all over. But I’d like to think that blogs played a part in neutralizing psychological warfare on the part of the terrorists.

A NEW CAPTAIN FOR THE TITANIC? My TechCentralStation column looks at Michael Griffin’s prospects at NASA.

THE LIBERTARIAN NATIONALIST SOCIALIST GREEN PARTY: As I’ve said before, never trust anyone who calls himself a “libertarian socialist.”

On the upside, maybe they can get a slot with Google News!

CHRIS NOLAN on Katha Pollitt: “It’s as if she’s taking to the web to let web readers know that The Nation and The Monthly are serious about this whole women thing. Really and truly they are. See. Here they are.”

GOP OVERREACH ALERT: In their book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge explain how the Republican coalition could go wrong: “Too Southern, too greedy, and too contradictory.”

David Brooks thinks they’ve hit the “too greedy” part already:

Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress, a new cadre of daring and original thinkers arose. These bold innovators had a key insight: that you no longer had to choose between being an activist and a lobbyist. You could be both. You could harness the power of K Street to promote the goals of Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich. And best of all, you could get rich while doing it!

Before long, ringleader Grover Norquist and his buddies were signing lobbying deals with the Seychelles and the Northern Mariana Islands and talking up their interests at weekly conservative strategy sessions – what could be more vital to the future of freedom than the commercial interests of these two fine locales?

Before long, folks like Norquist and Abramoff were talking up the virtues of international sons of liberty like Angola’s Jonas Savimbi and Congo’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – all while receiving compensation from these upstanding gentlemen, according to The Legal Times. Only a reactionary could have been so discomfited by Savimbi’s little cannibalism problem as to think this was not a daring contribution to the cause of Reaganism.

Ouch. Makes those neocons look good, though, doesn’t it?

UPDATE: A reader sends this link to a story about Jack Kemp sucking up to Hugo Chavez. I’ve mentioned that before, but it bears mentioning again. Pathetic.

SOME VERY AMUSING SPOOFS of romance novel covers. These reader submissions are pretty funny, too.

SOMEBODY SENT ME A COPY of The Scientific Conquest of Death a while back, but I haven’t read it yet. However, here’s a review.

GOOD ADVICE: “Pleasepleaseplease do not reach a precedent-setting judicial decision based on what the blogosphere says.”

GOOGLE NEWS’ COVERAGE PROBLEMS: In response to concerns about Google News’ inclusion of Nazi “news” sites, Jeff Jarvis is asking for examples of sites that Google shouldn’t include, but does, and, in a separate post, for examples of sites that Google doesn’t include, but should.

UPDATE: Roger Simon is renouncing Google Ads.

THE TABLES TURN in Iraq:

Ordinary Iraqis rarely strike back at the insurgents who terrorize their country. But just before noon today, a carpenter named Dhia saw a troop of masked gunmen with grenades coming towards his shop and decided he had had enough.

As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their own AK-47’s and opened fire, police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived. Two of Dhia’s young nephews and a bystander were injured, the police said. . . .

The battle was the latest sign that Iraqis may be willing to start standing up against the attacks that leave dozens of people dead here nearly every week. After a suicide bombing in Hilla last month that killed 136 people, including a number of women and children, hundreds of residents demonstrated in front of the city hall every day for almost a week, chanting slogans against terrorism. Last week, a smaller but similar rally took place in Baghdad. Another demonstration is scheduled for Wednesday in the capital.

I think we’ll see more of this.

IOWAHAWK: Remixed!

BILL HOBBS:

I have not written about the Terri Schiavo case because it is too complex, too multilayered, and too steeped in unknown or unknowable facts for me – indeed for most people – to have a fully informed opinion.

I don’t know – and neither do you – if Michael Shiavo is trying to murder his wife or trying to fulfill her stated wishes for just such a scenario. I don’t know what Terri Schiavo would want – and neither do you – because she didn’t tell us via a living will. We have only the word of her husband who assures us that his wife once said she wouldn’t want to be kept alive this way, and we have her parents, who love their daughter and desire only to care for her.

I do know that the Congress did the wrong thing, intervened where it had no Constitutional right, and solved nothing.

Read the whole thing. I think he’s right.

ESTONIA’S GOVERNMENT HAS COLLAPSED: Publius has more.

EUGENE VOLOKH has more thoughts on criminals and suffering.

MAYBE THIS WILL CHANGE BUSH’S MIND ON THE ESTATE TAX: Michael Barone looks at the trustfunder left.

A BAN ON IPODS? Beware the wrath of the cult.

OKAY, I’M ALL IN FAVOR OF SAFE SEX, but this seems a bit much.

RUSSIA: Picking a fight over Kyrgyzstan?

FASCISTS IN PAJAMAS, courtesy of Dilbert.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Jonathan Klein, who originally coined the “pajamas” slur, has changed his mind about the importance of blogging.

From the standpoint of the F.E.C. and the “media exception,” it’s worth noting the increasing use of blogs by traditional media. I suspect that we’ll see more of that, and more blogs banding together into quasi-news-services, especially if the F.E.C. looks likely to take an intrusive role.

RYAN SAGER: “In coming years, political historians might look back and try to pinpoint the day or week or month that the Republican Party shed the last vestiges of its small-government philosophy. If and when they do, the week just past should make the short list. For it was in this last week that the Republican-controlled Congress made it clear that it sees no area of American life — none too trivial and none too intimate — that the federal government should not permeate with its power.” Read this post by Jonathan Adler, too.