LOOKING PAST THE IRAQI ELECTIONS: Brett McGurk, recently back from Baghad, has written an oped and done an online chat at the Washington Post. And here’s a PBS NewHour transcript of a discussion featuring McGurk and Larry Diamond. And here’s the article on lawyering in Baghdad that I linked a while back.

DANIEL DREZNER looks at the costs and benefits of airline deregulation. And he’s right, this Matt Welch piece on deregulation and low-cost service in Europe is great.

THIS seems like good news:

U.S. consumer confidence unexpectedly rose in January to a six-month high after the economy added more jobs and incomes grew, raising the odds that spending will spur the economy.

The Conference Board’s index increased to 103.4 from a revised 102.7 in December that was higher than first reported, the New York-based research group said today. Optimism about the current economic situation rose to the highest since May 2002, helping fuel gains in stock prices and the dollar.

Consumer purchases probably rose at the fastest pace in more than four years from July through December, and weekly retail surveys suggest shoppers haven’t let up this month. Last year was the best on record for sales of previously owned homes, the National Association of Realtors said today.

Not exactly a depression we’re in, is it?

BLOGGER’S DELIGHT:

Google and Yahoo are introducing services that will let users search through television programs based on words spoken on the air. The services will look for keywords in the closed captioning information that is encoded in many programs, mainly as an aid to deaf viewers.

Google’s service, scheduled to be introduced today, does not actually permit people to watch the video on their computers. Instead, it presents them with short excerpts of program transcripts with text matching their search queries and a single image from the program. Google records TV programs for use in the service.

Not quite the whole deal, but pretty cool.

HERE’S MORE on election fraud in Wisconsin. Really, it seems as if we need to tighten up the rules on voter registration. And here’s more on efforts to fix problems in Washington state.

UPDATE: This isn’t election fraud, exactly, but it’s pretty lame.

MICHAEL MOORE is short of sympathy on the Left.

UPDATE: Roger Simon: “They adopted Moore for a short while to make a point which is now fading even for them. Most people in Hollywood now see, although maybe they won’t admit it, that democracy in Iraq is extremely important. For Moore, it’s over.”

RICH LOWRY:

For the second day in a row, the New York Times has a positive Iraq piece, this one about Sunnis wanting to have a part drafting the consitution. For weeks, administration insiders have been telling me how: 1) the Shiite slate has been amazingly respsonsible in its actions and statements; 2) there will be plenty of chances to buy reasonable Sunnis into the political process even after the January 30 election. Stunningly, both points have now been reported and given high-profile play in the Times.

That’s news, all right. Here’s the story.

UPDATE: Capt. Ed has more on the terrorists’ plans to disrupt the Iraqi elections, and observes: “What I find most fascinating is the terrorist reliance on the media and their confidence in manipulating journalists to the terrorist ends.” Terrorism is parasitic on modern media. Or, perhaps, symbiotic.

ER, I THINK YOU MEANT FISKED, HUGH:

Just this weekend, Tim Blair, an Australian blogger, a very good blogger, took a “Washington Post” piece that was completely silly — and the term is fist — destroyed it, deconstructed it, proved that it was all spin. When Barbara Boxer made her inane comments last week at the Condoleezza Rice hearings, bloggers posted them, dissected them before the news had even put it on the air.

Then again, given what Blair did to them this time, maybe it’s not a transcription error . . .

WERE THE MEDIA REALLY more enthusiastic about Iraqi elections two years ago than they are today?

JOHNNY CARSON: Pro-space visionary?

ALPHECCA REPORTS that gun crime is up in gun-free Britain.

INTERESTING COLUMN ON FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN ASIA: The term “anglosphere” isn’t used, but the concept certainly seems to be in play:

Egeland’s comment also reflects a certain European view that contends that the state, and in this case a universal state, should be responsible for the welfare of humanity. Not surprisingly, this view is not shared by the United States, which looks far more to private and community-based actions to resolve social problems. Given this context, Egeland’s complaint was seen as most directly attacking the United States. And if you’ve worked in the UN/NGO community you’d know that this sort of assumption would not be wholly off the mark.

This leads us to the second event. While American diplomats derided Egeland’s slip of the tongue, the US engaged in an activity that said far more than any words could regarding the new international order. Without any concern for the UN, the US proceeded to set up a core group of nations to deal with the disaster. Partners in the group were Australia, Japan and India. It is this alliance that will matter most to the US in the future. The four big Pacific democracies, three with strong Anglo-Saxon histories, will most likely develop into the central alliance of the twenty-first century.

Read the whole thing.

A FEARLESS PREDICTION:

Oh, by the way. Hillary is running for president. Official announcement to follow in three years. Obama will be her veep pick. It will be a campaign with energy on the left beyond anything you might have thought you saw last year.

Well, this would be in accord with the prediction that she’ll be “the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States!”

But although forecasts about 2008 are brave, Austin Bay has election predictions out to 2016.

MICHAEL MOORE: An Oscar shut-out. I think some people are unhappy with him for giving the election to Bush.

Other people are saying I told you so.

WANT HEALTH CARE BLOGGING? It’s at Grand Rounds.

MORE ON PHIL BREDESEN and the Democrats in 2008, over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Over at the MSNBC site linked above, I quote a piece from The New Republic on an antiwar “counter inaugural.” That leads reader John Lucas to write:

While these people are rooting for the enemy, here’s an excerpt from an e-mail from a guy who gets it:

“I truly see this as a battle between the forces of good and evil. How can anyone not? Good brings hope to a whole people that have never know any and evil cuts the heads off innocent civilians on tv. . . . We didn’t come here to rule an impoverished people or to gain riches for ourselves. We came here to try and win this one battle in what I am afraid is going to be a long and costly war that we have only begun to fight.”

That is from my 27-year old son who is currently fighting in Baghdad. I think that he has captured the essence of what is going on in a way that many “intellectuals” have missed. His may be the “Occam’s Razor” explanation of our national purpose.

We are in a war in which the enemy can only defeat us if they break our national will. It is being fought on the home front just as much as in Iraq.

Indeed.

ARNOLD KLING looks at the dubious future of self-marginalizing groups — in a discussion inspired by Jim Bennett’s new book, The Anglosphere Challenge.

THIS SEEMS LIKE POSITIVE NEWS:

With the Shiites on the brink of capturing power here for the first time, their political leaders say they have decided to put a secular face on the new Iraqi government they plan to form, relegating Islam to a supporting role.

The senior leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of mostly Shiite groups that is poised to capture the most votes in the election next Sunday, have agreed that the Iraqi whom they nominate to be the country’s next prime minister would be a lay person, not an Islamic cleric.

The Shiite leaders say there is a similar but less formal agreement that clerics will also be excluded from running the government ministries.

“There will be no turbans in the government,” said Adnan Ali, a senior leader of the Dawa Party, one of the largest Shiite parties. “Everyone agrees on that.” . . .

The conviction that the Iranian model should be avoided in Iraq is apparently shared by the Iranians themselves. One Iraqi Shiite leader, who recently traveled to Tehran, the Iranian capital, said he was warned by the Iranians themselves against putting clerics in the government.

“They said it caused too many problems,” the Iraqi said.

Less than a week until the elections. And I suspect they’ll be watching closely in Iran.

OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS:

Old beagles, like old humans, act younger and smarter when they get the right diet and plenty of intellectual stimulation. A report published in the January issue of Neurobiology of Aging found that a diet rich in antioxidants combined with a stimulating environment slowed the canine aging process. . . .

By the end of the two-year trial, it was clear that the enriched diet alone and the enriched environment alone were each helpful in preventing decline. But the mental functioning of the dogs given a combination of enriched diet and stimulating environment was considerably higher than that of the dogs in the other three groups, the researchers found.

Maybe there’s hope for Dan Rather.

AN APOLOGY TO THE WORLD: “P.S. If you need any help in the future, please call Canada.”

“THEY DOWDIFIED US IN THE SAME OLD WAY, and, you know, we Fisked them in the same old way.” And it wasn’t a near thing, either.

I GUESS THIS WILL BE NEXT, from various under-informed Boards of Education. (Via an amusing series of Mars photoshops at Fark).

THE BONNAROO FESTIVAL has announced its line-up of artists for this year. Tickets go on sale January 29th.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: “MIAMI – A trial opened Monday in a $3 million-plus lawsuit by 13 people who say they were injured or traumatized when federal agents seized a screaming Elian Gonzalez from his Miami relatives’ home. The opening witness was neighbor Maria Riera, who testified that she clutched her chest and thought she was dying when an agent doused her with tear gas during the April 22, 2000, raid to reunite the 6-year-old boy with his father in Cuba.”

DONALD SENSING WRITES THAT IT’S ROPE-A-DOPE IN IRAQ, and that Zarqawi is the dope. “Z-man is only marginalizing Islamism when he bombs and assassinates Iraqis who support democracy. Increasingly, his claim that such Muslims are really infidels deserving to die is seen as untenable. Mass heresy among millions of Iraqis? Who could possibly have the right credibly to claim that? Not Abu Musab al-Zarqawi nor anyone else. And who will believe it? Not the Iraqis themselves nor millions of their Arab neighbors.”