THE NEW BUSH ADMINISTRATION SPACE POLICY was unveiled yesterday; I meant to post it then but got distracted.

I’ve written on some aspects of this policy already, here and here. And, on the commercial side, read this, too.

BRENDAN LOY looks at misrepresentations about Joe Lieberman and comments: “This is precisely the sort of tactic that makes me so incredibly hostile to the entire anti-Lieberman movement. As I’ve said repeatedly, if Connecticut voters feel so strongly about Lieberman’s stance on the war that they want to vote against him on that basis alone, I have no problem with that, even though I disagree. But instead of running an honest campaign on the issue(s), Lamont and his allies — and before anyone tries to distance Kos from Ned, let’s recall that they appeared in a campaign ad together — have consistently smeared Lieberman’s character and distorted his record. . . . I realize that distortion and deception is par for the course in politics, but to see such tactics used by one Democrat (and his vast array of far-left allies) against another, more moderate Democrat is what made August’s primary defeat feel a bit like a purge.”

YEAH, I KNOW, the timestamps on my blog are messed up. It’s nothing in the blog settings — I think the server clock is off by 12 hours or something.

MICHAEL RUBIN: ” Let’s be fair: To condemn the Axis of Evil speech is to condemn Bush for prescience. He didn’t create the Axis of Evil; rather, he voiced the problem. And if that shocked European diplomats, well too bad. If it’s a choice between national security and enabling European diplomats to remain secure in their illusions, I’d hope both Republicans and Democrats would favor the former. Clinton administration attempts to engage the Taliban and the North Korean regime were folly. Any attempt to do likewise with Iran would be equally inane. Certain regimes cannot be appeased. Dialogue is no panacea.”

Yes, though diplomats tend to overvalue dialogue. I listend to former (Bush I) Ambassador Gregg’s Diane Sawyer interview on XM yesterday, and it made me very grateful that he no longer has a hand in formulating U.S. policy. Some excerpts from that interview can be found here.

BYPASSING THE BEEB: Britain’s first Internet TV station, with a very different political slant, will launch tonight. Tim Montgomerie has the scoop.

JOE KATZMAN WRITES on why North Korea shouldn’t be our focus.

K.C. JOHNSON GETS SOME CREDIT in a New York Magazine article on the Duke Lacrosse case:

“I’ve never felt so ill,” says one reporter about the paper’s coverage of the Duke lacrosse-team case. Luckily, a blogger’s on the story, too. . . .

In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He’s the most impressive of the “bloggers who have closely followed the case,” in the Times’ tacitly pejorative construction. But Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the species—passionate but committed to rigor and facts and fairness, a tenured professor of U.S. history (at Brooklyn College), a 38-year-old vegetarian who lives alone in a one-bedroom Bay Ridge apartment and does pretty much nothing but study, teach, run, and write.

Johnson has no connection to Duke. (His B.A. and Ph.D. are from the Harvard of the Northeast.) His attention was grabbed in April by the “deeply disturbing” public comments of Duke faculty that righteously indulged in invidious stereotypes and assumed the lacrosse players’ guilt. “One area that the academy, especially since McCarthyism, is supposed to stand up is cases where due process is denied,” he says.

Read the whole thing.

KAUS is still not convinced that Bush will sign the fence bill. At this point, I’d be very surprised if he didn’t.

Ed Morrissey called the Hill instead of the White House and agrees: “Expect to see this get signed somewhere between October 24th and November 1st. The White House considers this bill a front-and-center accomplishment and wants the boost to last all the way through Election Day.”

The somewhat weak response that Kaus got from the White House, however, suggests that they need to work on their PR operation a bit more.

ESKIMOS: NOT WARMING TO HUGO CHAVEZ:

In Alaska’s native villages, the punishing winter cold is already penetrating the walls of the lightly insulated plywood homes, many of the villagers are desperately poor, and heating-oil prices are among the highest in the nation.

And yet a few of the small communities want to refuse free heating oil from Venezuela, on the patriotic principle that no foreigner has the right to call their president “the devil.”

Read the whole thing. (Via Dan and Angi, where there are some suggestions. Anybody know how to donate to these folks?)

GOOGLE BUYS YOUTUBE: A roundup of reactions here.

KNOXVILLE’S MAYOR, BILL HASLAM, AN ANTI-GUNNER?

Seems Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam is a member of Michael Bloomberg’s Alliance of Mayors Against Guns. I have intentionally left off the word illegal because Bloomberg’s antics have not targeted illegal gun dealers but legal and lawful dealers. . . . Now, the mayor of Knoxville has allied himself with that. What was he thinking?

One issue is that what is illegal in New York is, for the most part, not illegal elsewhere. What Bloomberg is targeting is not illegal here. So, Mr. Haslam, what’s the deal?

This seems quite odd to me. Haslam is thought to have ambitions toward statewide office, and this sort of thing isn’t likely to fly, well, anywhere in Tennessee.

UPDATE: A related post from Dave Hardy.

WELL, OF COURSE Jon Stewart reads blogs.

ED DRISCOLL has a podcast interview with Mark Steyn, in which Steyn talks about his new book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

THE BELMONT CLUB ASKS: “Was North Korea testing a suitcase nuke?”

MARK BOWDEN ON MOGADISHU: “No, the battle was not an al-Qaeda ambush. Yes, President Clinton could have done more.”

(Via The Mudville Gazette.)

JIM GERAGHTY LOOKS BACK at 2001’s anthrax attacks, and draws some lessons for today.

AN END TO THE FENCE KERFUFFLE? Patrick Ruffini emails: “I have checked up on this and there is nothing more to the story beyond the President’s CNN quote. The President will sign the Secure Fence Act.”

DEFENSETECH SAYS IT’S A DUD: “No one has ever dudded their first test of a simple fission device. North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever. . . . I’d say someone with no workable nuclear weapons (Kim Jong Il, I am looking at you) should be crapping his pants right now. First the missile, then the bomb. Got anything else you wanna try out there, chief?”

UPDATE: Donald Sensing says not so fast with the jeering:

I don’t mean to belabor the point I have made before, but I was trained in the Army as a nuclear-target analyst. A yield of 550-800 tons (.55-.8 KT) is not too small by any means as an achievable yield. It does not require a lot of fissionable material, either, which is one factor mitigating against the “hoax” conclusion. If the test was a “proof of concept” test rather than one intended to validate an actual warhead, then it makes sense for the DPRK to use as little nuclear material as possible. They don’t get the stuff very easily.

Well, in the abstract this makes sense. But it doesn’t seem to fit the North Koreans’ style very well. I’d like it if they were this short of fissionable material, though.

I THINK THIS IS THE BEST KIM JONG-IL PHOTOSHOP I’ve seen.

UPDATE: Okay, this one is pretty good, too.

I know that in the real world he’s a nasty murderer. But no matter how hard Kim tries to act like a badass, he just comes across as a sort of Austin Powers villain.

MICHAEL FUMENTO is blogging from Ramadi. This passage contains the bottom line:

Guthrie also offered, “This place has gotten a lot better but it’s still a shit hole.”

The ever present trend-vs.-present-state distinction.

I WAS GOING TO DO A COLUMBUS DAY POST, but honestly I think that this one from last year holds up pretty well.

CHESTER LOOKS AT ARGUMENTS that the North Korean nuke test was actually a fake. I wouldn’t put it past the North Koreans. Perhaps, however, we should act as if it’s a hoax anyway, regardless. If nothing else, this will annoy the North Koreans. And if the test was real, this mockery will encourage them to set off another nuke to prove us wrong, causing a waste of valuable nuclear material . . . .

Meanwhile, here’s more from Captain Ed.

UPDATE: More on this from Clayton Cramer. And still more here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more from Jay Manifold.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER watched the Memphis Ford/Corker debate and reports that this time Ford came across as “too slick by half.”

I heard local talk-radio star Hallerin Hill talking about it this morning, and he said that what struck him were Ford’s frequent and overt biblical references, plus an out-and-out statement that “I love Jesus.” Kleinheider comments on that, too.

UPDATE: Here’s a blog-report on the Talent-McCaskill debate in Missouri: “If you missed the debate this morning, you didn’t miss very much.” They have transcripts and video, too.

BLAMING FOLEY, NOT THE G.O.P.: “The aggressive politicization of the Foley story is itself a story and the voters witness it and react. It’s hardly surprising if they’ve reacted with revulsion to politicians for their expedient use of the story to claw toward power, which really is more repugnant than self-indulgent sexual expression. Would it shake your preconceptions to find out that even hardcore morals voters see that?”