Yes, it’s rained a lot around here lately.

UPDATE: Reader Mary Rue emails: “OK! What camera did you use to take that Incredible pix of the Mushroom!!!!!”

Well, it’s not “incredible” — I’m no Rick Lee — but I saw the mushroom when I drove in from dropping my daughter at school, and thought it would make a good picture; I haven’t done enough photoblogging lately. I took it with a Nikon D50 and the 18-70 kit lens that came with my old Nikon D70.

I bought the D50 because the autofocus failed on the D70 (out of warranty, of course) and it would have cost exactly as much to get it repaired as a new D50 body cost. The quality is as good as the D70, and it’s easy to use — my daughter, age 10, took this picture.

OIL PRICES drop again.

DAVE KOPEL has thoughts on what to do about school shootings.

WITH DEMOCRATS REACHING OUT TO LIBERTARIANS, Arnold Kling offers a suggestion:

What I propose is that Democrats promise to support one major libertarian experiment. In exchange for Democrats agreeing to support this experiment, libertarians would agree to vote for Democrats.

The experiment that I have in mind is school choice. If Democrats would instead prefer an experiment with voluntary investment accounts substituting for Social Security, that is an acceptable alternative. But for now, let us work with school choice.

I think his offer is likely to be rebuffed.

INTERESTING DEVELOPMENTS in Londonistan.

INDICTMENTS IN THE AIR AMERICA SCANDAL:

Two former executives at a government-funded youth organization whose finances were scrutinized after it diverted money to the liberal radio network Air America were charged Thursday with misappropriating $1.2 million of the non-profit’s funds.

Charles Rosen, a former executive director at the Gloria Wise Community Center, and his former assistant director, Jeffrey Aulenbach, face charges of grand larceny and obstructing governmental administration. Rosen was also charged with forgery.

There’s lots more on this story at Radio Equalizer.

A LOOK AT POTENTIAL MILITARY NANOTECHNOLOGY and what to do about it, from the Lifeboat Foundation. The discussion is rather speculative, but interesting.

ONE OF MY QUESTIONS about the war effort in Iraq is why we lost momentum — as I noted before, the old saying is that you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them, and we’ve been sitting on them in Iraq instead of taking the war effort to our enemies, many of whom are outside of Iraq. Mohammed of Iraq the Model has a lengthy discussion of that very topic. Excerpt: “The insurgents, terrorists and militias operating in Iraq depend on foreign support for money, training, technology and in some cases men. Moreover the influence of foreign interference is clear even in the political arena in Iraq through the numerous political crises the country had faced. Thus, this war will not see an end unless America revives the preemptive war strategy and start chasing the enemies and striking their bases in the region, especially in Syria and Iran.”

That seems right to me, and I don’t understand why the Bush Administration has let the momentum grind to a halt. (Does Iran already have nukes, and has it successfully threatened us with them? Possible, I suppose, but how likely?)

UPDATE: TM Lutas says that Mohammed and I are wrong, and misunderstand the U.S. strategy. “I’ve been writing about how the US and Al Queda are fighting on a meta-battlefield of serialization and parallelization since at least 2003. The US is fundamentally trying to slow things down, occasionally biting where it chooses, chewing, and swallowing chunks of Al Queda and company at its convenience. Al Queda tries to make it politically impossible to maintain a sustainable pace so that the US is forced by political realities into burnout, leading to an opportunity where Al Queda can actually claim a durable military victory.”

Read the whole thing. I hope he’s right.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Driscoll emails:

For what it’s worth, when I interviewed Mark Steyn last week for an upcoming TCS podcast to discuss “America Alone”, he suggested the same thing that Mohammed of Iraq the Model and you did: take the fight into countries like Syria. I replied that you’d immediately hear folks like Sen. Kerry saying, “It’s Cambodia, all over again!”

Steyn replied that Kerry would, of course, say that no matter what we did, but it dovetails into one of the central points of his book: think of how badly we’ll look on the world stage–and especially, in the Middle East–if we lose another long drawn out conflict: “America will look not like a super power, but a super pussy”. (And yes, that was the phrase Steyn used.)

Jonathan Gewirtz has more thoughts, and Barry Dauphin emails:

I can understand your desire for the pace with respect to Syria and Iran to pick up. But to paraphrase someone else, you go to war with the democracy that you have. Democracies have to fight wars with a certain level of popular support or they can’t genuinely fight. Bush’s approval ratings aren’t low because we haven’t invaded Syria, but because Iraq is so very difficult. Furthermore the opposition party has to support the kind of effort you are talking about or there simply can’t be that kind of effort. It will be a long, hard slog. I think Administration strategy is always tempered by domestic political concerns. How could it be otherwise. Should the House & Senate fall to democrats, is there any chance in heck that the Administration could move in any way close to what you are suggesting?

Yes, it’s hard to do with our current political situation. And M. Simon has further thoughts.

MORE: A reader who prefers anonymity emails:

We’re not losing momentum in Iraq. The Pentagon strategy is a very deliberate form of tough love that is forcing the Iraqis to defend their own country.

Arabs are culturally the most passive, fence-sitting people on the planet. By their own admission they follow the strongest leader out there. If we had sent 500,000 troops to Iraq and fought a Soviet-style counterinsurgency, the end result would have been an Iraq with no incentive to do the very hard work of creating viable fighting forces from scratch. We would’ve been their new masters in perpetuity.

We also can’t attack Iran and Syria right now because the Iranians would then activate their Iraqi militias and send a million Basij into Iraq. Syria would do a Saddam and start firing WMD-tipped missiles at Israel. The entire region could go up in flames.

Don’t let the media convince you that things are going badly in Iraq. The Anbar tribes are now fighting al Qaeda on their own initiative, and the Shi’ite-dominated government is slowly dismantling al Sadr’s Mahdi Army. “Experts” predicted that neither of these things would ever happen because of secular loyalties, but they are happening, and only because we’re forcing the Iraqis to stand up and fight for their country.

Finally, take a look at what happened when the French, Soviets, and Russians fought Muslim insurgencies with the kind of aggressive, “proactive” approach so many Americans claim to want.

The French lost 18,000 in Algeria, a KIA rate three and a half times ours. The Soviets lost 14,000 in Afghanistan, a KIA rate twice ours. The Russians officially lost 5500 in the First Chechen War of 1994-96, but Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia puts the actual number at 14,000, a KIA rate ten times ours. Nobody knows how many Russian troops have died in the Second Chechen War, but Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia had the number at 11,000 by 2003.

Our strategy in Iraq is sound. It’s keeping our own casualties down, and it’s forcing the Iraqis to defend themselves.

Don’t despair. We’re winning.

I certainly hope so.

ED MORRISSEY looks at events in Anbar province, and observes: “The tribal backlash shows why the Zarqawi strategy was always a loser.”

SANDY LEVINSON — one of my favorite Constitutional Law scholars — is blogging over at Balkinization, and has thoughts on slavery, genocide, and humanitarian intervention.

PORN AND GAMBLING ON THE INTERNET — KEYS TO LIBERTY? Well, they’re keeping government employees from doing their jobs. Assess that how you will.

MICKEY KAUS:

If Harold Ford is elected to the Senate from Tennessee, will he get the same adulation Barack Obama–and now Deval Patrick–are receiving from “starry-eyed Democrats” and MSM types? … kf prediction: No. Why? Ford is too ostentatiously centrist and idiosyncratic. He doesn’t activate The Dream.

Hmm.

THE DOW HITS its third consecutive high in three days.

UPDATE: Bill Quick, you’ll be surprised to hear, is unencouraged by these numbers.

ANOTHER FOLEYGATE ROUNDUP from Pajamas Media, including an item that casts doubt on Drudge’s “prank” story.

UPDATE: Much more at Hot Air. Plus this: “I’m going on record with my prediction: Hastert steps down before the close of business tomorrow.”

That would be okay with me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Advice to the GOP, from Ed Morrissey: “Unfortunately, they and their supporters have proven resistant to good advice. The sooner we quit trying to win an unwinnable argument, the sooner the air will deflate from this embarassment. If Republicans had done that last Friday, all of the subsequent revelations would have generated drastically less damage to party credibility.”

MORE: A Knoxville angle on the Foley story.

SPREADING VIOLENCE in Europe, according to Brussels Journal. That was a year ago, but this report from today says it’s getting worse.

UPDATE: Brian Dunn asks what the rioters want: “Jobs, or hijabs?”

And Tim Blair offers a quiz.

HAVE YOU LISTENED to your newspaper today?

CATHY SEIPP REFLECTS on the tenth anniversary of Fox News.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER LOOKS AT race and the Tennessee Senate election.

BOB OWENS: What did Brian Ross know and when did he know it?

And from whom?

HERE’S AN INTERESTING REVIEW of The Blog of War, in The Philadelphia Inquirer. (Via Frank Wilson).

CLAUDIA ROSETT visited Guantanamo and reports on what she saw: “To fly into the damp Caribbean heat of this U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is to enter a place of multifaceted myth, a zone that continues to inflame the imagination of the world. And yet, when it comes to witnesses, monitors and the media, there is probably no more heavily trafficked detention center on the planet.”

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: Now Drudge is reporting that “the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.”

Like Brendan Loy, I don’t think this gets Foley off the hook even if its true. (Hastert? I’m not sure.) But it certainly complicates things.

Craig Henry says this whole scandal is “anti-gay window advertising,” and Bill Quick agrees, somewhat more pungently.

UPDATE: John Podhoretz comments: “If Drudge has it right, then Foley got played by a couple of teenagers. Which seems like fitting punishment for him. But did the rest of us have to get drawn into this bottomless vortex?”

And Eric Scheie writes: “Is it worth taking another look at all the facts and finding out exactly what Foley did?”

WRONG-HOUSE DRUG RAIDS ARE BAD ENOUGH, but here’s a wrong-house annoyance-call raid:

For a 67-year-old homeowner and his wife, wrongly subjected to a shattering pornography search, saying, “Oops, wrong number” is not enough.

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich apologized Tuesday for the blunder, which he said resulted when Detective Timothy Hines tried to nail whoever was responsible for obscene calls to at least 20 women enrolled at Whitworth College.

Hines wrote down the wrong figures for a telephone number associated with the calls, and he obtained a search warrant for a house in Spokane, miles from the correct location in suburban Spokane Valley, Knezovich said.

The irate homeowner told The Spokesman-Review, which did not identify him at his request, that deputies dumped out drawers, went through his wallet and checkbook, seized computers, CDs, floppy disks, VHS tapes and other material and refused to clean up the mess in the raid Sept. 27.

A half-dozen sheriff’s vehicles converged on the house, and after taking photos outside, Hines told officers within hearing of the neighbors, “Now let’s go inside and get some porn,” the owner said.

Inside, the man said, a female deputy “giggled” about remarks at his expense.

“It’s like the gang that can’t do it right,” he said. “They shoot themselves in the foot, and then they all come to make peace.

“What would you do if somebody came to your door and ripped your whole house apart, turned everything upside down and said you are a porno freak?”

You ought to be able to sue for damages, with no bar from official immunity, and recover attorney’s fees if you win. (Via MBS).

IS THERE A RATIONAL BASIS for banning same-sex marriage?

NOT EXACTLY THEOCRACY: In the mail, a copy of Andy Olree’s new book, The Choice Principle: The Biblical Case for Legal Toleration. According to the enclosure, its central thesis is that “God ordains governments, but only for the very limited purpose of protecting citizens from those who would directly harm others through force or fraud. This understanding would exclude legislation for other purposes, such as discouraging sexual impurity or the hoarding of wealth . . . . an evangelical commitment to moral absolutes and the authority of Scripture need not entail government endorsement of religious truths or legislation of any particular view of what constitutes a virtuous life.”

Not exactly theocracy, as I said. Or anyway, if this be theocracy, make the most of it. . . .