DARFUR UPDATE:

Evidence that Sudan’s government is backing Arab militias in Darfur has come from a leader of the forces, US-based Human Rights Watch has said. Musa Hilal, named by the US as a Janjaweed leader, told the group that militia attacks on ethnic Africans were directed by Sudanese army commanders.

“These people get their orders… from Khartoum,” he said in an interview transcript released by the group.

The Sudanese government has strongly denied supporting the militias.

Not surprising, of course, but nice to have it on the record. Now could we bomb them, or something?

REASSURING AND TROUBLING AT THE SAME TIME:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – A British computer specialist tried to set up a terrorist training camp in Arizona, where he met with Islamic radicals who claimed ties to Osama bin Laden (news – web sites), a government attorney alleged Wednesday.

Babar Ahmad, who is being held in London on charges he ran terrorist fund-raising Web sites, met in Phoenix in 1998 with Yaser Al Jhani, a member of the Islamic mujahedeen militia, and others who claimed to have access to bin Laden, said John Hardy, a British lawyer representing the U.S. government.

“He expressed an interest in developing a training system in Arizona,” Hardy told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from London. “That is, a training system, in effect for the mujahedeen to visit and train to fight abroad.”

Apparently, there are a lot of problems in Arizona.

DER SPIEGEL: “In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles. Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe?”

UPDATE: More background here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: And read this article, too.

THEY MAY BE RIGHT-WING over at AnkleBitingPundits.com, but they sure are down on Ted Stevens’ cable-and-satellite indecency proposal, as they should be. (“GOP Idiots At It Again Over ‘Decency’ Regulations”). It is pretty idiotic, and deserves a proper anti-idiotarian response.

I’d go for mandatory unbundling, but not decency rules.

RAISING THE STAKES:

President Bush (news – web sites) on Wednesday demanded in blunt terms that Syria get out of Lebanon, saying the free world is in agreement that Damascus’ authority over the political affairs of its neighbor must end now.

Will Assad fold?

FREEDOM IS CONTAGIOUS: “Lebanese opposition has learned much from Ukraine.”

MATT RUSTLER posts a stirring tribute to Lebanese demonstrators.

SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM: “Mostly dead is partly alive.” Of course, it’s not entirely clear what the game really is.

ONLINE AD REVENUE is surging.

“THERE’S ALWAYS THE HOPE THAT THIS MIGHT NOT WORK:” Really, the Democrats aren’t going to win any elections with this kind of talk.

UPDATE: Video here. It’s very cool that The Daily Show puts this stuff online. I wish more real news shows made their content this accessible.

HENRY COPELAND would like you to take this blog readers’ survey. It just takes a couple of minutes, and I’d appreciate it, too! And please list InstaPundit as the “referring blog” so that they’ll know you came from here.

UPDATE: The traffic seems to have killed this thing. I apologize for those who waited in vain; I’ll let you know when it’s more reliable.

PHIL CARTER wants to bring back the draft. Austin Bay comments: “I’m a fan of Phil Carter’s, but his Washington Monthly article arguing for a military draft doesn’t make the case.”

I’ll just observe that the Washington Monthly folks must have been very happy with the piece, because I’ve gotten more promotional spam from them about this article than about anything else they’ve run in months.

AN IRAN ROUNDUP, from Dan Darling.

CHARLES PAUL FREUND TO THE NEW YORK TIMES: I told you so!

READER SAKET VEMPRALA sends this link to a tabulation of Muslim victims of terrorism. Unsurprisingly — except, perhaps, to those who actually think the terrorists are “Minutemen” — there are a lot of them.

WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE: The Rocky Mountain News reports that his successor as department chair is singing a similar tune:

The acting chair of the University of Colorado ethnic studies department seems in some respects to be picking up where her predecessor, Ward Churchill, left off. In a slightly disjointed, poorly written essay for Counterpunch, a leftwing Web newsletter, Emma Perez suggests criticism of Churchill is a “neo-con test case for academic purges.” In other words, Churchill is under siege from a vast rightwing conspiracy. . . .

Then there is this remarkable assertion: “The general strategy in forcing and then manipulating this ‘investigation’ of Ward’s scholarship shares key tactics with the neo-con sinking of Emory historian Bellesiles in 2001 . . .” In fact, Michael Bellesiles resigned after a panel of scholars from places such as Harvard and Princeton concluded his failure to cite sources for material in his book, Arming America, “does move into the realm of ‘falsification.'” Hardly a poster boy for the so-called new McCarthyism.

I believe that this is the article they’re referencing. It appears that Churchill may sing more loudly, and off key, but that he’s fundamentally part of the chorus.

UPDATE: A while back, some people were upset that I identified Ward Churchill with the current state of the Left. But the Left certainly seems to be identifying with Ward Churchill.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails:

The [DailyKos] ‘diarist’ Armando wrote about how you lied and tried to associate Ward Churchill with the left. His point? That the ‘left’ doesn’t like what Ward Churchill said, they just support his right to say it. Instapundit is a liar for implying otherwise! Armando wished for comments to condemn your lies. But look what happened!! The comments turned into support for what Ward Churchill said.

Hilarious.

Thought you might enjoy it.

Oh, I did. Especially the part where Armando sputters in the comments: “I resist this hijacking of my post. This is about Instapundit lying, not about defending Churchill. Write a diary on that if you want.” Heh.

MORE: My goodness, the comments at Kos have gone crazy on this. But I think that those folks need to pick a storyline. Either (1) Churchill deserves to say what he wants without losing his job — a defensible position, though with the inconvenient (for the Kossacks) twist that it’s, well, mine (though “not losing his job” isn’t the same as “not being savagely criticized for his tawdry and despicable sentiments”) — or (2) that Churchill was right, and that America had it coming for being the Evil Empire. But you can’t simultaneously adopt position (2) while arguing that criticizing people for adopting position (2) is somehow a sham because nobody is actually depraved enough to believe position (2). At least, not without being an idiot.

More here.

INTERESTING INTERVIEW ON LEBANON AND SYRIA with Syrian opposition figure Farid Ghadry.

UPDATE: Three years ago, I wrote on preference cascades, and concluded:

This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. . . . Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

One interesting question is whether a lot of the hardline Arab states are like this. Places like Iraq, Syria, or Saudi Arabia spend a lot of time telling their citizens that everyone feels a particular way, and punishing those who dare to differ, which has the effect of encouraging people to falsify their preferences. But who knows? Given the right trigger, those brittle authoritarian regimes might collapse overnight, with most of the population swearing – with all apparent sincerity – that it had never supported them, or their anti-Western policies, at all.

Is this what’s happening? I certainly hope so.

DOCTOR-OFFICE-BLOGGING: I’m blogging from the waiting room at Helen’s cardiologist now, where she’s having her followup appointment.

Jeff Jarvis, who’s the go-to guy on the indecency issue (“Buzzmachine: Your Place for Indecency!”) has identified a wondrous new technology for controlling indecent programming.

UPDATE: Well, that turned out well. They put a sensor over her chest and interrogated the ICD, which was pretty cool. It showed that it had paced her out of a couple of strings of PVCs early on, but that she’s had no rhythm issues since the new meds kicked in. They’re happy with how everything’s going, and she seems much more cheerful about everything now.

FROM HOSPIBLOGGING TO HOSPI-COLUMNS: My TechCentralStation column looks at hospitals, and their reform.

UPDATE: Related thoughts, here.

THIS ISN’T ENCOURAGING:

The world is poorly prepared for a future influenza pandemic, with only a dozen countries purchasing significant quantities of antiviral drugs and just 50 with contingency plans on how to cope with such an outbreak.

One word: Tamiflu. But that’s just a start: We need more research on rapid vaccine production, too. And not just for flu.

AUSTIN BAY: “I don’t believe in happy endings, merely a respite before the next struggle, However, this Millennium War has reached and passed a crucial midpoint. All but the most recalcitrant, calcified and now laughable naysayers in the West suddenly recognize the pragmatism of American idealism.”

UPDATE: Over on his blog, Austin notes some important information from Gen. Abizaid.

I got an email last fall from a guy at CENTCOM who said that every time Abizaid came back from Iraq he seemed ever-more-cheerful. It’s looking as if he had reason.

ERIC SCHEIE DEMONSTRATES APPROPRIATE RESPECT FOR THE LAW — even where it’s a law against sex toys.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF HAS AN INTERVIEW with Victor Davis Hanson that’s worth your time.

I HATE ILLINOIS NAZIS: Aaron at FreeWillBlog has the roundup on Matt Hale and the murder of a judge’s family. Evidence against Hale is inferential at the moment, but rather strongly so.

OKAY, I CAN’T RESIST: Contrast the images of Lebanese pro-democracy protesters below with these pro-Syrian demonstrators and, well, it just says it all, doesn’t it?

I mean, talk about being on the wrong side of history. And I think I know which image will sell better on TV, too. I mean, who would you rather hang with?

UPDATE: As The Belmont Club puts it, it’s “a whole new species of ‘cool’.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Or, on the other side, “murderous losers” sums it up pretty well.