PODCASTING on sex and politics.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: The Blawg Review is up. Also the Carnival of the Recipes. And the latest Carnival of Personal Finance is up, too.

Lots more carnivals at BlogCarnival.com, and in the carnival directory here over in the right sidebar.

A LOOK AT JOE WILSON AND PATRICK FITZGERALD, from Michael Barone.

LOOKING FOR A nuclear terrorist?

CLAUDIA ROSETT: “It’s a good rule of thumb that there is no one more easily offended than your average despot and surrounding acolytes. Tyranny by nature requires grand fictions, and when anyone dares point out that the emperor has no clothes, or the emperor is living it up while dressing his minions in suicide belts, or the emperor is murdering his own subjects and honing technologies and methods to blackmail, subjugate or kill anyone else in reach, then the emperor and his cohorts take huge offense. If you happen to live under their sway, they chuck you in prison. If you are outside the immediate reach of their secret police and terror squads, they do what they can to maneuver the debate onto their terms. They — who apologize for nothing — demand apologies.”

Question is, why do we listen?

UPDATE: An open letter to the Pope.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mike Rappaport: “In his book on democracy, Natan Sharansky speaks of fear societies like the Soviet Union and much of the Middle East. Everyone there is required to give the accepted answers, to Westerners and to one another, but that does not imply they believe it. Indeed, this phenomenon accounts for the sudden transformation of such societies when the threat of coercion is reduced or eliminated. But Sharanksy also notes that Westerners are often oblivious to these threats and treat the statements at face value, much as some commentators treated elections of Saddam with 100% as reflecting his support. There may not be much that the West can do about these threats. But one thing is essential and largely risk free: refuse to treat statements that may be coerced as genuine. It was worthwhile for people in the West to point out that the Prime Minister of Lebanon’s statements were possibly coerced and to question whether he meant it. Let us and others never forget the man behind the curtain.”

He’s got a gun aimed at the speaker’s head. Related thoughts here and here.

More thoughts from Jeff Jarvis.

MICHAEL CROWLEY: “How determined is Harold Ford to win over Tennessee’s culturally conservative independents and Republicans? He’s filmed his newest ad inside a church.”

Donald Sensing has much more, and wonders why Americans United for the Separation of Church and State isn’t making noise.

ANOTHER RATHER DRASTIC CORRECTION from the New York Times. It’s nice that they’re correcting these mistakes, but it would be nicer still if they didn’t make them quite so often.

MORE KIDNEYBLOGGING from Virginia Postrel.

AUSTIN BAY writes on fiddling and twiddling with Iran. The loss of momentum in the war reminds me of something that I believe Napoleon (or maybe it was Talleyrand) said: “You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.” Much of the problem in Iraq comes from Iran, and we seem curiously unwilling to do much about it. I wonder — does Iran already have nuclear weapons, and are we being successfully blackmailed?

MARTIN LINDESKOG REPORTS ON THE SWEDISH ELECTIONS: “The opposition center-right alliance has narrowly won the Swedish elections.” He has lots of interesting links and background, including an explanation of why this matters beyond Sweden.

THE NEW YORK TIMES reports on global gun rights. The opening is typically tendentious, but the story can’t help but report some interesting news:

At first, the group openly fought gun control abroad, but that enabled gun-control advocates to accuse local gun lobbies of selling out to America. In Brazil, the N.R.A. tried a new approach. Brazil has the most gun deaths annually of any country, and last October it held a referendum on a nationwide gun ban. In the run-up to the vote, polls suggested that more than 70 percent of Brazilians supported the ban. Then the Brazilian gun lobby, which previously had emphasized the desirability of gun ownership, began running advertisements that instead suggested that if the government could take away the right to own a weapon (though Brazilians have no constitutional right to bear arms), it could steal other civil liberties. This argument took gun-control advocates by surprise, and on voting day, 64 percent of Brazilians voted against the gun ban. “We gun-control groups failed to anticipate this idea of focusing on rights,” admits Denis Mizne of Sou da Paz, a Brazilian public-policy institute. As a report in Foreign Policy revealed, the National Rifle Association lobbyist Charles Cunningham had traveled to Brazil as early as 2003 to impart strategy to local gun advocates, teaching them to emphasize rights instead of weapons.

Around the world, the N.R.A. is finding that a rights-based approach translates into many languages. As the N.R.A.’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, says: “They made the rights argument [in Brazil.] They made the argument that this was being taken away from the people.” He pauses. “It caught Iansa” — the International Action Network on Small Arms — “by surprise. They already had the Champagne on ice.” In the mid-1990’s, the N.R.A. became a nongovernmental observer at the United Nations and helped form a global coalition of pro-gun groups to match disarmament coalitions. At U.N. conferences, this coalition then uses success in national referendums to argue against global treaties. “The vote in Brazil on last Oct. 23 was a mandate,” the head of one gun-advocacy group argued at the U.N. conference this July. “The international anti-gun community, especially powerful NGO’s, was intimately and extensively involved in supporting the gun-ban referendum. They lost. They did not receive the mandate.”

The notion that an individual right to arms might be included within international human rights law is, of course, a compelling one.

AN ASSOCIATED PRESS switcheroo?

THE WEBB/ALLEN DEBATE: Dean Barnett says it was a major win for Webb: “For conservatives wishing for Allen to retain his seat, their best hope is that Virginians were otherwise occupied this morning or that the state’s NBC outlets were having technical difficulties.”

The Allen Campaign liveblogged the debate, and says that Webb was routed. “Jim Webb was simply out of his league — he’s not up to the complex array of issues facing Virginia, so he’s piggy-backing on the Kennedy/Kerry wing of the Democratic party.”

I link, you decide.

UPDATE: Tom Bell emails to note that the futures market seems largely unmoved, with a modest uptick in Webb’s position but nothing dramatic. You mean TV events don’t decide elections? That’s a rout for the pundit class, anyway. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yet another take on the debate, from Decision ’08.

And Slate’s John Dickerson weighs in.

THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT ISN’T MINCING WORDS:

AUSTRALIA’S Muslim leaders have been “read the riot act” over the need to denounce any links between Islam and terrorism. The Howard Government’s multicultural spokesman, Andrew Robb, yesterday told an audience of 100 imams who address Australia’s mosques that these were tough times requiring great personal resolve.

Mr Robb also called on them to shun a victim mentality that branded any criticism as discrimination.

“We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith,” Mr Robb said at the Sydney conference.

“And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem.

“You can’t wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others.

“Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia.”

We need more of this common-sense variety of multiculturalism.

DARFUR UPDATE: Ian Davis looks at the U.N.’s failure to prevent the slaughter of civilians, despite much talk.

BARACK OBAMA SAYS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY “has become the party of reaction.” I think he’s onto something.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON remembers Oriana Fallaci and thinks about the Pope.

PODCASTING ON “THE CONGRESSMAN FROM CAIR” at Power Line.

ED KOCH: “I believe that the U.S. is faltering in the current war against international terrorism, and we are losing our will to prevail. We are losing our fighting spirit as a result of the fighting between Republicans and Democrats on just how to prosecute the war.”

LOTS OF INTERESTING GUESTBLOGGING over at Protein Wisdom.

At least I think they’re guestbloggers. It could just be Goldstein pulling a Greenwald. . . .

UPDATE: Major John Tammes emails:

When the 107 mm rockets landed on my base in Afghanistan: nervous, startled, but not afraid.

When I got stuck in some mines halfway up a cliff near Ashrafkhel: nervous, wary, but not too afraid.

When a large group of men in Qarabaghi-Robat told me they were going to kill my interpreter, then me: moderately afraid.

Being put on the approved list to guest post at Jeff Goldstein’s PROTEIN WISDOM, after what I have seen the last couple of days: Afraid, very afraid to go in there…

Smart man.

ANGELA MERKEL is defending the Pope against his critics: “‘What Benedict XVI emphasised was a decisive and uncompromising renunciation of all forms of violence in the name of religion,’ she said.”

Maybe that’s what they’re really objecting to.

UPDATE: More thoughts here. And Mike Rappaport writes: “As a promoter and beneficiary of modernity, I feel bad for those stuck in the middle ages. Not only are they led to do evil things, but it all seems very confusing for them. After all, they must mix modern claims of victimhood with medieval charges of blasphemy. It is hard to keep your stories straight, as the above quote suggests. It kind of reminds me of a weird movie I saw some years back. About ten peasants from Europe during the black death dug through a hole and came out in 20th century Australia. It was all very confusing for them. But no one thought of allowing them to get nuclear weapons.”

EVAN BAYH: “Democrats can’t be ‘bunch of wimps’ on terror.'”

It’s like he’s been reading Jim Geraghty’s new book or something.

MICHAEL TOTTEN INTERVIEWS Yaacov Lozowick, author of Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. Well, of some of them, anyway.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS looks at Saddam’s man in Niger.

AUSTIN BAY looks at the Axis of Egos.