WANT TO BUY MARK STEYN’S NEW BOOK IN CANADA? Good luck!

A Canadian author’s book about the need to defend Western civilization against Islam’s demographic juggernaut — and the United States’ vital role in that effort — has become a best-seller in the United States, but remains all but impossible to buy at stores in this country.

Conservative columnist Mark Steyn’s book America Alone has shot up best-seller lists: It stands at 13th on The New York Times list and 23rd on Amazon.com.

But Canada’s largest book seller, Indigo Books and Music Inc., does not have the book in stock at its Chapters outlets or its other book-selling subsidiaries.

Luckily, Amazon Canada carries it, and it’s doing quite well on their bestseller list. Clicks over bricks! I’ve written about this phenomenon before.

I QUESTION THE TIMING: “The unemployment rate dropped to a five-year low of 4.4 percent in October as employers added 92,000 new jobs flashing a picture of a strong labor market as the midterm elections draw near.”

UPDATE: Reader Ron T. emails: “I mailed you this afternoon to inform you that the Labor Department’s release of the October statistics at 9 AM today was standard procedure. I am surprised to visit your site nine hours later and see that your “suspicious timing” line remains in place. It concerns me that the author of a high profile blog wouldn’t make a phone call to confirm or disprove his suspicions over a very routine event.”

I missed the earlier email . . . but this post was entirely tongue-in-cheek, which I thought was obvious. But, just in case it wasn’t to everybody, well, now it is . . . .

IN THE MAIL: Dr. David Gratzer’s new book, The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care. I haven’t read it, but the Insta-Wife grabbed it and reports it’s good. Plus, it has a foreword by Milton Friedman.

I suspect it would go well with Arnold Kling’s book on the subject. And, of course, Andy Kessler’s. (Our podcast interview with Kessler can be found here).

A JET-POWERED BIODIESEL SUPERCAR? Cool.

MORE ON VOTER FRAUD: The Wall Street Journal looks at the Acorn indictments:

So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter ID laws?

We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement that “This national investigation is very much ongoing.”

Read the whole thing.

MEGAN MCARDLE EMAILS that The Economist now has blogs! Here’s Free Exchange, a blog devoted to economics. And here’s Democracy in America, about American politics.

They both look interesting. But The Economist’s tradition of institutional authorship remains. I wonder how well that will work where blogs are concerned?

UPDATE: Ack! Second link was wrong. Fixed now.

ANOTHER EVANGELIST SEX SCANDAL: I don’t think I’d ever even heard of this Haggard guy, but you’d think the picture would be enough to tip people off about the gay part. . . .

Anyway, La Shawn Barber has a roundup and thoughts, including this:

Hypocrisy is mightier than the sword. When you preach/teach/nag against something and people find out you’re doing the thing you preach/teach/nag against, you are a hypocrite who deserves ridicule, especially if you’re high profile.

Having said all that, I have to say this: No Christian should be surprised that Haggard may have given in to his perverted thoughts and turned them into perverted actions. It’s a temptation we all face. . . .

Christians constantly are being watched, and rightly so. Any little thing we do that appears hypocritical, unbelievers jump on it.

Christianity, of course, is not about perfection. Nonetheless. . . .

UPDATE: This puts me in mind of something I wrote a while back, drawing on Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. And reader Mark Shepard notes an even more on-point passage from another Stephenson book:

“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others — after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?”

“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever of his behaviour — you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception — he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

Stephenson’s position as a moral thinker is underrated. Of course, that’s an advantage of writing science fiction — you can slip that stuff in without being overbearing.

ON THE TRAIL WITH MICHAEL STEELE, at Hot Air.

WOULD THE EARTH BE A BETTER PLACE if humanity were extinct? Pardon me for not buying into that kind of ecological thought.

JIM GERAGHTY writes: “I’m sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?”

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has more:

This is apparently the Times’ November surprise, but it’s a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq’s ties to Osama bin Laden.

It doesn’t end there with the Times, either. In a revelation buried far beneath the jump, the Times acknowledges that the UN also believed Saddam to be nearing development of nuclear weapons. . . . The Times wanted readers to cluck their tongues at the Bush administration for releasing the documents, although Congress actually did that. However, the net result should be a complete re-evaluation of the threat Saddam posed by critics of the war. Let’s see if the Times figures this out for themselves.

Kind of undercuts that whole “Bush lied about WMD” thing. Reader Eric Anondson emails: “It surely must have been a Rovian plot to somehow get the Times to admit that Iraq has a nuclear weapons program on the verge of an atomic bomb by as early as 2003… and right before an election where the Iraq War is listed as the top election concern among likely voters.” (Actually, it was 1991, I believe, but this does underscore why WMD fears were reasonable, especially as Saddam was trying to restart things).

TigerHawk: “Seems that the New York Times owes Judith Miller an apology. Or at least a hat tip.”

MORE: Judging from some of the delighted emails I’m getting, I need to warn people not to get too carried away — this doesn’t say that Saddam would have had a bomb in 2004. But it does say that he had all the knowledge needed to have a bomb in short order. And as we know he was looking to reconstitute his program once sanctions were ended — and that sanctions were breaking down in 2003 — that’s pretty significant. However, perhaps even more significant, given that we knew most of the above already, is that the NYT apparently regards the documents that bloggers have been translating for months as reliable, which means that reports of Iraqi intelligence’s relations with Osama bin Laden, and “friendly” Western press agencies, are presumably also reliable.

PLAGIARISM CHARGES AIMED AT JAMES WEBB? I’m skeptical. How many millions have read his books, and this is just surfacing now?

My thoughts on plagiarism generally can be found here, excerpted here. Read this, too.

COFFEE GRINDER UPDATE: I got lots of advice, including “drink instant, it’s silent” (the coffee equivalent of responding to PC questions with “get a Mac!” I guess) and a suggestion to just put an oven mitt over the grinder. Well, if my Braun weren’t busted, I might try that . . . .

The most positive recommendations went to this Kitchenaid model — a little pricey, but people say it’s quiet and will last forever. Did I say pricey? It’s cheaper than this one, which several people also recommended. InstaPundit readers aren’t chintzy on the kitchen gear, apparently. Yowza.

Much cheaper was this Capresso grinder, which several people liked — or this one, which is also more my price range. And reader John Kluge suggests that I just go for the Cuisinart grind and brew coffeemaker. Looks good, but I’ve done all the coffeemaker buying I plan to do for a while. For the history of that, go here and here. I still like the DeLonghi coffeemaker, by the way.

UPDATE: James Lileks emails:

I’d recommend the Cuisinart, because it has a nifty & convenient feature: the cup in which you grind the beans is detachable, so you can pulverize your beans at one location and transport the result to your machine.

Unfortunately, my unit has gone rogue. Bean molecules have foiled the safety feature. Like most units, you can’t turn on the grinder without pressing down a safety button; in this case it’s the part that covers the detachable cup. Recently the grinder decided to spin up the blades as soon as the cup was reseated, shooting up a brown cloud of finely-ground coffee. So now I have to unplug it after using it. Other than that, and the possibility of losing a finger, it’s one of those appliances about which I can confidently say: the finish doesn’t show fingerprints as bad as I thought.

Well, there’s a recommendation!

THE INSIDERS AT DARTMOUTH lost big. I think blogs deserve some of the credit. Background here.

A SUICIDE BOMBER at Penn.

Perhaps he’ll be comfortable in this restroom at UCLA.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh thinks the suicide-bomber costume is no big deal: It’s Halloween, after all. Hmm. Would a university President really pose for photos with someone in a Klan outfit, or wearing blackface? I find that hard to imagine. And if not, why is the suicide bomber outfit OK?

The Nazi analogy is, I think, a poor one. Nazis are a vanquished former enemy. Suicide bombers are a current enemy. Could that be a relevant difference?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene responds: “I would likewise defend someone who came to a party as a Klansman. Same theory — Klansmen are scary; Halloween is about scary costumes; Halloween is not about endorsing the characters you’re dressing as.”

I remain skeptical that a Klansman costume would be received in the same fashion, or that an Ivy League university President would be comfortable being photographed with someone wearing a Klan costume.

ICE ON THE MOON? Maybe not. Dang.

THEO VAN GOGH’S RETURN.

ON HAROLD FORD:

Went to the Harold Ford Jr. rally this morning.

Never would have bet this mountain woman would be standing at Five Points listening to a Memphis Ford endorse tax cuts for corporations to create jobs.

Times are a’changing.

Hey, maybe Ed Morrissey is right! But not everybody seems happy.

BONO: HYPOCRITE?

A familiar paradox about leftist celebrities in the entertainment industry is that their embrace of progressivism almost never includes a wholehearted embrace of progressive taxation, i.e., the principle that the richer you get, the larger the percentage of your income you ought to pay in taxes. The latest example is U2’s Bono, a committed and unusually sophisticated anti-poverty crusader who is taking surprisingly little heat for the decision by his band, U2, to relocate its music-publishing business from Ireland to the Netherlands in order to shelter its songwriting royalties from taxation.

The irony was stated in admirably stark terms by Bloomberg’s Fergal O’Brien, who reported on Oct. 16: “Bono, the rock star and campaigner against Third World debt, is asking the Irish government to contribute more to Africa. At the same time, he’s reducing tax payments that could help fund that aid.”

It’s easier to be generous with other people’s money. Cheaper, too! And yet if anything it seems to be more admired than being generous with one’s own.

THE HISTORY CARNIVAL is up!

A LOOK AT Seymour Hersh, John Kerry, and Vietnam nostalgia on the left.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here. “It is surpassingly strange to watch an industry will its own destruction.”

UTUBE.COM VS. YOUTUBE.COM: Well, the Internet is a series of tubes, according to Sen. Ted Stevens.

MORE REASON TO BE UNIMPRESSED WITH HOMELAND SECURITY:

A Morocco-born computer virus that crashed the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT border screening system last year first passed though the backbone network of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement bureau, according to newly released documents on the incident.

The documents were released by court order, following a yearlong battle by Wired News to obtain the pages under the Freedom of Information Act. They provide the first official acknowledgement that DHS erred by deliberately leaving more than 1,300 sensitive US-VISIT workstations vulnerable to attack, even as it mounted an all-out effort to patch routine desktop computers against the virulent Zotob worm.

Sigh.

I THINK THAT THIS ASSESSMENT of George Allen’s political future is probably right:

One does hope that Allen doesn’t make Kerry’s mistake and think himself still a viable presidential candidate if he prevails on Tuesday. This ineptly run campaign has finished him in that regard, and he will show a lot more character if he just faces that fact and moves on.

His stumbles may not have been Kerry-league, but they’ve been bad enough.

ADVICE BLEG: My coffee grinder is on the fritz. It’s a Braun, works fine (er, until it broke), but has always been very loud. Can anybody recommend a replacement model that doesn’t sound like a circular saw when it’s running? I hate to wake people up when I make coffee, and they don’t let you test them with real beans in the stores.

IN THE MAIL: Lois McMaster Bujold’s new book, Beguilement. For those who have read her before, this is closer to her Chalion books than to the Vorkosigan books.