I HAVEN’T BEEN MUCH OF A HOMELAND SECURITY FAN, but this report from the Washington Post seems pretty positive.

CRACKING DOWN ON BLOGGERS in Iran. “The Internet censors are busy. Their targets include sexual content, international politics, local grumbling, chat rooms and anything else that makes the Islamic leadership uneasy. Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, a prominent human rights lawyer, estimates at least 50 bloggers have been detained since last year.”

SOMEBODY TELL “RAPE GURNEY JOE” TO STOP WITH THE VITRIOL! “Lamont says he’s surprised by harshness of attacks from Lieberman, Cheney.”

FLYING UNDER THE NEW SECURITY RULES: Varifrank reports:

How long did it take to get ticketed, baggage checked, through security and to the gate today at Austin?

30 minutes. Of course everyone in the boarding area was reading newspapers with the headlines ” Chaos at Americas Airports”. I just had to laugh. It was no worse than your average Christmas.

Virginia Postrel filed a similar report on Thursday. And here’s a report from Heathrow: “The flight today was by far the biggest hassle I have had flying since September 11th, that said, it didn’t take that much longer than normal even with all the extra security.”

UPDATE: A rather less positive Heathrow experience, reported here.

ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOONING, in Sacramento. They wouldn’t do this if Jews cut off people’s heads. Then they’d be “sensitive.”

INSIDE THE LEBANESE CABINET: An interview with Lebanese activist Tom Harb.

“DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE:” I wish that this were funnier than it is, but it’s all too close to the truth these days.

MORE LIEBERMAN FALLOUT: HANGING UP on Brendan Loy.

THREATS AND BLUFFS, inside the Lebanese cabinet.

DAVE KOPEL HAS MORE ON FAKED NEWS PHOTOGRAPHS FROM LEBANON in his Rocky Mountain News media column. And see this roundup from David Bernstein, too.

UPDATE: Don Surber has advice for the media on a related matter.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A look at “the corruption of the media.”

JULES CRITTENDEN HAS THOUGHTS on the defused bomb plot.

PAMELA ATLAS interviews John Bolton over at PoliticsCentral. Her first question: Why are we endorsing a hudna?

UPDATE: Nasrallah’s bluff called?

MICHAEL TOTTEN REPORTS from inside Hezbollah’s free fire zone.

IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, a call for an investigation of the Lebanon fake-photos scandal:

There are, however, two problems here, and they’re the reason this controversy shouldn’t be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media’s grudging response to the revelation of Hajj’s misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson’s website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj’s photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there’s anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon. . . .

There’s more, and it’s worth your time to take a look. That’s one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere, and the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody’s benefit.

What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard questions need to be asked about why it occurred.

Read the whole thing.

THERE’S A BROWSER-FRIENDLY FLASH VERSION of our Austin Bay / Jim Dunnigan podcast on the war available, at PoliticsCentral.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S FOREIGN POLICY: “All carrot and no stick.”

A STARTLING ADMISSION from The New York Times.

LAURA LEE DONOHO: “I propose a Giuliani – Romney ticket. As a southerner I understand my part of the country very well and I know we will support a Giuliani-Romney ticket in a New York Minute.”

Hmm. What do the rest of you think?

DAN RIEHL says he’s identified more phony AP reporting from Lebanon.

UPDATE: A special “peace in our time” FAQ. Best bit:

1) What would happen if all the Arab nations and their terrorist proxies like Hezbollah set down their arms and gave up their ambitions to drive Israel into the sea?

There would be peace in the Middle East.

2) What would happen if Israel disbanded the IDF, junked its nuclear weapons and declared to its neighbors that she would do anything to live in peace?

Israel would be annihilated, millions of its citizens killed. The term genocide could be used to describe the ensuing holocaust, but since that term has been so hopelessly debased by American academics, a new term would have to be created like super-duper-mega genocide to really capture the nature of things.

Read the whole thing.

TIGERHAWK: What will it take to militarize the West?

SOME SUMMER READING ADVICE from the InstaWife.

MICHAEL BARONE thinks a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be well-nigh unbeatable. I’m not sure how I feel about that — they’re both nanny-staters with whom I’m deeply uncomfortable, but at least they’re sensible on defense — but Barone’s analysis is interesting.

UPDATE: Some love for Giuliani.

LAW PROFESSOR KENNETH ANDERSON wrote to the Belgian Embassy in support of Brussels Journal blogger Paul Belien. Anderson posts the response that he got, and Brussels Journal comments. “Our case has nothing to do with racism. Belgium is following an old tradition which, in the fall of 1939, led Brussels to introduce an ‘administrative censorship’ which prohibited ‘anti-German and unpatriotic publications.'”

HOWARD MORTMAN says forget Ned Lamont — what about Charlie Rangel?

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (free link) reports that the focus in airport security is shifting from stopping bad things to stopping bad people.