DAVID WARREN ON THE CANADIAN ELECTIONS:

What I think the Liberals failed to anticipate up here, like the Democrats down there, was a development that may well prove the antidote to smear advertising over the longer run. For this is the Canadian election in which our “blogosphere” came of age. Sites such as Small Dead Animals, Angry in the GWN, the Shotgun, Andrew Coyne.com, Relapsed Catholic, and many others, respond to events almost instantaneously. Then, “news aggregators” such as Nealenews and Bourque direct readers quickly to the latest memes. Things that would have taken a week to unfold in the old media, now break over breakfast and are resolved by noon; and an hysterical smear ad is being mocked and parodied, long before the evening news.

No wonder they’re trying to use election law against Canadian bloggers. Warren continues:

In short, the Internet has broken the stranglehold the Liberal Party had over sympathetic media, and created an information environment in which you had better be darned sure what you are saying is the strict truth, because there’s an army of fact-checkers out there. Moreover, an army that cannot easily be intimidated by off-the-record threats from Party lawyers, or made to desist by peer pressure. For even when (as we saw in the delayed release of Gomery testimony) a legal ban on publication can be obtained, the information simply passes through electronic space across the border, and we can all read the banned material on such sites as Captain’s Quarters from the USA.

An “army of fact-checkers.” Not quite the army I would have invoked, but close enough.

THOMAS HOLSINGER offers an argument for invading Iran. Actually, simply blowing up their oil facilities and barring exports would probably bring down the regime. I suspect, however, that there’s something else in the works.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer notes that France is threatening nuclear attacks against terror-sponsoring states. Hmm. It does kind of feel like things are coming to a head.

IN THE MAIL: Fred Barnes’ Rebel in Chief: How George Bush is Redefining the Conservative Movement and Transforming America. I haven’t read it, but it’s certainly clear that Bush isn’t a “conservative” in the old sense of the word, which perhaps explains why so many people don’t like him.

YES, WE’RE WINNING: Osama bin Laden offers a truce.

The offer is insincere, of course, but that he (or his designated al Qaeda stand-in) is making it at all tells us everything we need to know. I guess that “intelligence failure” in Pakistan must have been even more successful than we thought.

UPDATE: Austin Bay: “Essentially, the new Bin Laden tape says ‘please don’t wage war on our turf, but let us wage war on yours.'”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mike Silverman offers a list of bin Laden’s Top Ten Conditions for a truce. Sample: “4. Bin Laden’s part in any future movie must be played by Christopher Walken.”

CONDI RICE wants to fix the State Department. Austin Bay looks at her plans.

THE PRESS IN BAGHDAD: An interesting report from DefenseTech on how fear of the insurgency is affecting reporting:

The abduction of 28-year-old Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll in Baghdad on Jan. 7 has had a profound effect on the city’s Western press corps. More so than ever, unembedded media in Baghdad are fortified in a handful of besieged hotels that are under constant surveillance by insurgent groups. Few Western reporters ever leave these hotels, instead relying on local stringers to gather quotes and research stories. And some reporters are finally throwing in the towel, forever abandoning this relentless and unforgiving city. . . .

.S. Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson has some sound theories about the insurgents’ media strategies. While stressing that he “can’t speak for insurgent groups,” Col. Johnson says these strategies “boil down to influencing the media environment … to get attention away from progress.”

Whether there is much progress in Arab Iraq is certainly debatable, but it’s apparent that the increasing inability of media to cover ANYTHING, much less coalition successes, is hurting the war effort. Iraq is a big, complicated problem, and as media flee or hunker down deeper in their hotel fortresses, the Western world’s understanding of Iraq can only suffer.

There is a workable solution, and it’s called embedding. No one protects journos as well as the U.S. and British militaries, but many media refuse to embed because they fear losing their objectivity. This is a valid fear, one even U.S. officers acknowledge, but what’s better: slightly biased coverage? Or no coverage at all?

As the UPI’s Pam Hess noted a while back, the press seems relatively unconcerned about being manipulated by the insurgency, but deeply afraid of anything that might slant its reporting in favor of the U.S. military; this is just another illustration of that phenomenon. But terrorism is, of course, information war disguised as military action, and manipulating the press is what the terrorists are all about. If the press were more resistant to such tactics, the terrorists would be less effective — and, ironically, the press would be a less appealing target.

UPDATE: Dave Price has related thoughts.

ROY BLUNT states his case in the Wall Street Journal. That makes all three candidates who have done this. (See also the pieces by Boehner and Shadegg this week.)

Meanwhile, here’s Boehner, Shadegg, and Blunt answering blogospheric questions on Hugh Hewitt’s show. I have to say, I think this has probably been the most open leadership contest in history.

HERE’S MORE on the Medicare Part D debacle discussed below.

TOM MAGUIRE has some questions.

OPEN AND SHUT ON THE INTERNET: My TCS Daily column is up.

MICHAEL TOTTEN writes on divisions in Syria, and Lebanon: “This is terrific in a watch-the-bad-guys-turn-on-each-other sort of way.”

MEGAN MCARDLE‘s coblogger “Winterspeak” looks at Internet Providers’ proposals for tiered service. My TCS column for tomorrow will be on the same topic.

JOHN HINDERAKER notes a double standard on leakers now that the Barrett Report is coming out.

STEPHEN TAYLOR reports on efforts to crush independent journalism in Canada.

GREYHAWK: “60 Minutes with Murtha and Me.”

UPDATE: More here.

THE LATEST Carnival of Homeschooling is up! So is Grand Rounds!

NOW IT’S Roy Blunt answering questions from bloggers, etc., on Hugh Hewitt’s show.

Meanwhile, Jim Sensenbrenner has announced for Shadegg.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott:

I must admit, it is a bit disconcerting that Blunt appears not to be sufficiently familiar with the FOIA to recognize what the acronym means. Probably indicative of how important it is to apply the FOIA to Congress.

Indeed.

BILL ROGGIO notes that contrary to claims it killed innocent civilians, the U.S. airstrike in Pakistan took down some major terrorists.

UPDATE: Robert Bidinotto says we need more “intelligence failures” like this one. And the Counterterrorism Blog has more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Further information suggests that the strike was even more successful than the above reports indicated.

MORE: Tigerhawk reports that not everyone is happy. “The uncompromising left really should do a better job of concealing its quite obvious hope that Bush fails in every aspect of the prosecution of this war. It almost makes it hard for us to believe that they support the troops, fer Chrissakes.”

IS THE NEW YORK TIMES putting itself in an email bubble? That seems unwise.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE has thoughts on UCLA’s angry alumni. My own sense is that a place where he and Eugene Volokh are happy can’t be too oppressively leftist, but then, that’s the law school. Law schools tend to be less oppressive than other graduate programs because both the faculty and the students have more options, and because lawyers tend to be unwilling to take abuse. I do agree with Bainbridge that the Bruin alumni need to distinguish between truly oppressive behavior toward students in class (bad) and political behavior outside class (nobody’s business).

On the intellectual property question I’m not sure, though it strikes me as absurd to claim that taping classes is illegal. Students do it all the time, and if UCLA enforces that rule only with regard to critics, I doubt it will stand up. Plus it’s just lame.

UPDATE: UCLA Alumna Gina Cobb says it’s worse than I think.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh weighs in. And Bainbridge has a followup post noting the power of technology: “When I was in college or law school, there basically was no way for students to speak out about alleged abuses by professors short of 1960s-style campus riots, which by the time I went to university the local cops were really good at squelching. Sure, you could give the professor low evaluations, but when the prof had tenure, that didn’t have much impact. And, there was an urban legend at my school about a guy who dropped trou on one especially annoying prof. The same was true of most authority figures back then. There was no way to effectively complain about news anchors, politicians, union leaders, or what have you. The internet has changed all that.”

MORE: On taping classes, reader Keith Wilson emails:

When I was an evening student 1L in 1981, we lived by the recorder. There just weren’t enough hours in the day to assemble class notes, hornbook notes, study group notes, etc. Remember, this was WAY before the net, hell, during the infancy of LexisNexis. Anyway, the big shock came when I went to a review from a writing professor. In our school, they were last year’s grads gaining experience by teaching legal writing. For my critique, I pulled out the Sony microcassette recorder (that then, cost about a week’s pay) and started to record the comments on my legal writing. Of course, the teacher went ballistic, accusing me of trying to “trap” him at something. I was dumbfounded. At that point in my legal career, I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. I was just a dopey 1L trying to capture as much information as possible to help me get through school!

In retrospect, I’ve altered my position over the years. I’ve vasicilated between incredulity, and acceptance. Some 25 years later, I realize he was just a putz. If he was concerned with what was being recorded, he shouldn’t have expressed it, or at least had the balls to stand by his conviction.

I never mind students taping my class. On occasion, I’ve even turned on the recorder myself for students who had to be away for some pressing reason — though I’ve been known to start the recording, and then go on, as if finishing a statement, with ” . .. . so that’s what will be on the final exam. Don’t tell anyone who wasn’t here today!” That always gets a laugh. But my feeling is that a class is a public event, not a private one. If it were a seminar where students shared private matters in discussion it would be different, but that’s not the kind of stuff I teach.

DAVID GELERNTER has posted his reply to Jaron Lanier over at Cato Unbound. You can see links to earlier responses by me, John Perry Barlow, and Eric S. Raymond in the sidebar.

JONATHAN COHN:

So just how badly is President Bush’s Medicare prescription drug program, known as “Part D,” going? On Tuesday morning, I landed in Nashville, Tennessee, to find this bold headline atop the Tennessean front page: “Pharmacists Decry Medicare Chaos.” As the article went on to explain, “Area pharmacists are saying that the federal government’s new drug plan for the elderly and disabled is a nightmare for druggists and an out-and-out catastrophe for the poor.”

A few hours later, I got a glimpse of such frustration first-hand. While I sat inside a clinic that serves a low-income, rural community near the Alabama border, I heard a nurse in the next room scream. She later explained why: She said she had just spent 45 minutes on hold with a Part D insurer, trying to inquire about a prescription, only to get disconnected. And it wasn’t the first time.

I guess the Administration could try to spin this as “making Medicare more like private insurance,” but the word “debacle” seems more fitting. Not only was this program a bad idea, any hopes the Bush Administration may have had for getting “compassionate conservative” bonus points are unlikely to be borne out.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Jagidtsch emails:

My girlfriend is a pharmacist that works in a facility that supports nursing homes. As you can imagine, virtually every order involves insurers and Medicare.

The bureaucracy of this new program is far worse than the typical government program. It has totally killed productivity, with pharmacy techs on hold forever, as your post from today states. True story: one tech called in, and the insurance company hold message stated “You are caller seven hundred thirteen in the queue.”

It’s indeed an organizational debacle…

Jeez. If you’re #713, you should just be reimbursed for absolutely anything you do. That’ll give ’em an incentive to cut the hold times.

ANDREW SULLIVAN has moved over to Time, and the new blog design is considerably more legible.

IN THE MAIL: A copy of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man : One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back. It’s basically a Male Like Me book — she disguised herself (rather convincingly) as a man named “Ned,” lived that way for several months, and writes about what she learned. I opened the book at random to this passage from the section on dating:

Bisexuals know that hurt gets inflicted by both sexes in equal measure if not always by the same means. But for these women — who had never dated other women, and thus never been romantically hurt by them — men as a subspecies, not the particular men with whom they had been involved, were to blame for the wreck of a relationship and the psychic damage it had done to them.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that in this atmosphere, as a single man dating women, I often felt attacked, judged, onthe defensive. Whereas with the men I met and befriended as Ned there was a a presumption of innocence — that is, you’re a good guy until you prove otherwise — with women there was quite often a presumption of guilt: you’re a cad like every other guy until you prove otherwise.

“Pass my test and then we’ll see if you’re worthy of me” was the implicit message coming across the table at me. And this from women who had demonstrably little to offer. “Be lighthearted,” they said, though buoyant as lead zeppelins themselves. “Be kind,” they insisted in the harshest of tones. “Don’t be like the others,” they implied, while having virtually condemned me as such before hand.

It was enough to make me want to read the whole thing (and to be glad I’m not single!), and I did, at one sitting, last night. I think the book’s terrific, and it’s going to make a huge splash. Helen’s now grabbed it, and she agrees so far. We’re going to try to get Vincent on for a podcast interview next week.

UPDATE: Reader E.J. Boysen emails:

As a 48-year-old never married single man still in decent shape, successful and now retired, and having weathered the “feminist” cultural storm still raging since my teens, I can tell you that even your having read Norah Vincent’s book, you STILL have no idea of the anger, the hatred, the vengeance and the pain so many otherwise attractive and available women are afflicted with. It is an epidemic of conflict and self-distortion that begins and ends with an impenetrable sense of entitlement, based on a false sense of victimhood, and for which not just any man but every man must pay forever for the restoration that’s never good enough.

The “feminist” demand runs from fathers to brothers to sons and husbands, to their friends and acquaintances and chance encounters; it is endless. “I am woman, hear me roar” has produced a psychological wasteland that would put Sherman’s march to shame and into which any man who travels does so at his peril. My assessment certainly does not apply to all women, of course, but the damage done by what I’m calling the “feminist” demand is so severe and pervasive that at my age, it just ain’t worth it to go through it all again only to end up with yet another petulant woman-child unwilling or incapable of accepting responsibility for her own happiness and success in life, and who deeply resents the fact I have found my own without her, and so becomes determined to destroy it. I’m too old, I’m too tired, and the scars are too deep and too close to the bone. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

Bought a dog, gone fishin’, never happier.

Of course, there are plenty of loser-guys on the dating scene, as well as loser women, but we do tend to hear more about them. However, I should stress that dating isn’t a big part of the book — just the part that caught my eye first. And Boysen’s complaints aren’t just his — in fact, Helen had a post on this the other day. Her comments indicate that many men are happier. Certainly I am.

STILL MORE: Another reader writes:

I’m 52 and didn’t get married till I was 35, so I know exactly the type of woman to which Mr. Boysen is referring. But I had the type figured out by the time I was 25, and although the petulant woman/child can be alluring, they are generally recognizable in less than a half hour of conversation. Quit complaining and move on!

He needs to find the woman who is serious about what she is and what she does without taking herself too seriously. There is no better place in the world to find that kind of woman than here in the US.

That’s the kind of woman I married. But maybe I was lucky. Also, we were put together in the best possible way — via an ex-girlfriend. Nobody knows you better than an ex-girlfriend. That’s one reason why it’s important to stay on good terms with ’em, as I generally have. Besides, if you pick your girlfriends well at the outset, you’ll usually stay on good terms with them even after you break up, because they’ll basically be decent people.

Mr. Snitch has much more.

DANIEL DREZNER has an interesting roundup on Iran. “The approach the Bush administration has pursued towards Iran — multilateralism, private and public diplomacy, occasionally deferring to allies — is besotted with the very tropes that liberals like to see in their American foreign policy. I’m still not sure what the end game will be with regard to Iran, but to date I can’t see how a Kerry administration would have played its cards any differently than the Bush team.”