DIPTI VAIDYA makes me jealous by videoblogging from the Pelican Bar off the coast of Jamaica.

HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY: “This holiday is as good a time as any to remember how one of our greatest Americans was bugged and harassed by a paranoid, power-mad J. Edgar Hoover, in the name of National Security.”

I blame John Ashcroft. And the Patriot Act.

AT THE AMERICAN FILM RENAISSANCE, they showed excerpts from Theo Van Gogh’s Submission. Andrew Marcus and Clay Champlin have another video report, and Roger Simon, who was there, has a post up, too.

A PREHISTORY of the Great War of 2007, and how it might have been avoided.

Perhaps worth reading along with John Gaddis on the Cold War. I think our big error was in not preempting Iran in 1979. Everything since has been an effort to rectify that dreadful mistake.

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, the U.N. isn’t helping. “The top U.N. officials responsible for nuclear nonproliferation are in the business of facilitating Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

DANIEL GLOVER WRITES on the GOP’s courtship of the blogosphere, and offers a useful warning to those being courted.

UPDATE: If the GOP wants to court yours truly, it would do better to have the leadership candidates answer questions like these.

I’M READING John Ringo’s Princess of Wands, in which a serial killer (who appears to be an honest to, er, God, necromancer) is in the part I’m reading at the moment being stalked at a science-fiction/fantasy convention. Pretty fun, and a big departure from the earlier Ringo stuff I’ve read.

UPDATE: Baen Books has sample chapters online here.

CARNIVAL-0-RAMA: The Carnival of the Capitalists is up. So is the Blawg Review. And there’s also the Carnival of Personal Finance.

MARK STEYN on the Alito hearings:

The media did their best to neutralize the impact of this pitiful spectacle, with expert commentators on hand to assure us that smart fellows like Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden were only going through the motions for the sake of all that MoveOn.org fund-raising gravy. Don’t worry, Ted and Chuck and Pat are way too savvy to believe this junk. Thus democratic politics reaches a new level of circular hell: The spin is that it’s only spin.

As I understand it, with the Jack Abramoff dirty-money stuff, lobby groups give big bucks to politicians to advocate various things which, pre-check-cashing, the politicians may or may not have believed in. But this last week of Senate hearings has been so absurd it may bring the whole system into disrepute: Big-time Democrats are out there dancing for dollars in a cause so obviously non-viable that their media buddies feel obliged to signal that it’s merely a charade. Does that satisfy anybody?

Not so you’d notice. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A somewhat similar view from PrawfsBlawg:

I don’t normally post more partisan observations, for a variety of reasons — reasons which are only reinforced by the blogging discussion at the AALS conference. But it seems to me this has been a great week for the Republican Party. Although it will come back, of course, the Abramoff/DeLay/Ney/Project K story largely dropped off the front pages this week. Congressman DeLay couldn’t have timed his decision not to seek to regain his leadership seat better: it dropped into a Saturday/Sunday news hole, and was pushed aside by Monday to make room for the Alito hearings, at which the Senate Democrats did themselves no particular favors and for which the price of their obedience to Democratic-leaning interest groups was a front page photograph of a nominee’s wife tearing up.

The conclusion: “I appreciate the value that interest groups such as NOW and NARAL have to the Democrats in the political process, but if I were running the party I would be seeking a Sister Souljah moment with those groups at least once a week, or better yet ignoring them altogether.”

And here’s a Wall Street Journal roundup (free link) on the “confirmation battle that never was.”

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE photoblogs the L.A. Auto Show.

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER? Some thoughts on Zawahiri and “civilian” casualties.