TOM SPAULDING remembers Porter Wagoner.

MIKE HUCKABEE responds to John Fund.

AN ELECTRIC SCOOTER with a five-mile range and a 15 mph top speed. This might actually be useful for some people’s commutes.

THE ULTIMATE LIST OF spendy DVD sets.

And I thought I was splurging when I ordered The Time Tunnel.

AN ENVIRONMENTALIST WORRIES ABOUT “PLUNDERING THE MOON.” And note the defeatist, anti-humanity tone of many of the comments to his piece. Happily, others are more sensible.

Actually, however, Rob Merges and I have this topic covered already, in this (relatively short) piece from the NYU Environmental Law Journal. You’ll pardon me if I think that our discussion is sounder, as well as more nuanced. Among other things, private property rights are likely to be both more environmentally friendly and more wealth-creating than centralized regulatory schemes.

MICHAEL YON IS WORRIED ABOUT AFGHANISTAN: “Iraq is looking better month by month. But at the current rate, surely we shall fail in Afghanistan.”

Sounds like we need to take a new approach, as we did in Iraq.

UPDATE: Lawhawk says the problem is Pakistan. “Instead of fighting to win, the Pakistani government under Musharraf is fighting to simply bide time. That’s a losing strategy for everyone but the Islamists, who use this time to regroup and rearm.”

And read this analysis from Strategypage: “While the Taliban are seen as the major problem in Afghanistan, that is not really the case. The big problems are poppies, corruption and Pushtun tribal politics. All three of these combine to produce the Taliban. But to eliminate the Taliban, you have to destroy the highly profitable drug business, curb the corruption and deal with the Pushtun problem. None of these solutions are easy to implement.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Chuck Simmins emails:

Glenn, the problem with Afghanistan is that it is a NATO operation. The European approach, as we have seen in Basra in Iraq, involves far more accommodation, and far less giving terrorists new accommodations.

The major complaint in Afghanistan is the lack of participation by our NATO allies in the pacification / anti-terror operations. Indeed, the utter lack of preparedness for any such ops. The Canadians have been outstanding, punching well above their weight class. The Brits and Aussies have done well, too, though the Brits have given away gains through diplomacy on several occasions.

The Dutch and French Air Forces have made their ground troops look bad.

I’ve heard quite a few complaints about the NATO operation in Afghanistan.

MORE: A contrary note from Josh Foust of Registan:

I noticed you posted about some frustrations on the mission in Afghanistan. Over at Registan.net, we’ve been covering the ways it has been faltering for years, as well as a series of policy prescriptions for how to right it. The most salient to the thrust of your post is this piece on what’s going on in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and urges caution about drawing too many conclusions:
Link. (and more here: Link.)

I have to point out that with the possible exception of pointing fingers at Pervez Musharraf, your links to analysis are almost entirely flat out wrong. Strategy Page in particular seems to confuse cause and effect—poppies are a symptom of severe instability and a wrecked infrastructure, not a cause ( Link ); similarly, for centuries Pashtun tribal politics (called “Pushtunwali”) have provided appropriate, non-violent means of conflict resolution and justice, and it is only in recent decades as we deliberately imported Saudi-style Salafism into the tribal regions that things got out of hand (the excellent Afghanistanica covered this several months ago: Link). In this analysis, corruption is likewise both a cause and symptom, though to conflate it with opium and the Taliban (or even to conflate the Taliban with Pashtunwali) is a mistake.

Similarly, the bit about NATO is at best sort of true: while it is true the European countries have been stingy in their commitments, so have we: to date, Afghanistan a total amount of aid from us what we send to Iraq every few months. From the start, it was crippled, underinvested (the first year of occupation only had a few million dollars allocated toward development and reconstruction, and already troops were being siphoned off to invade Iraq), and ignored—by both the media and by the Bush administration. It’s a bit silly to complain that NATO doesn’t shell out when we can barely be bothered to.

Well, unlike Europe we’re busy elsewhere.

MORE: When I posted the above I didn’t realize that Josh Foust had posted on this. Sorry, Josh, but taking a few hours to respond to your email is nothing I’m going to apologize to, and linking to people you disagree with is not error requiring “correction.” And the rather churlish reference to “superwarblogger Michael Yon” explains why I tend to discount your analyses — Yon’s spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, he’s got a lot of contacts there, and he’s got a good track record.

SUPREME COURT ADVOCACY: You get what you pay for.

ANOTHER TERRORIST ATTACK FOILED: “Azerbaijan detained a group of militant Islamists preparing an armed attack near the U.S. embassy in Baku, the security ministry of the former Soviet state said on Monday.”

Michael Silence thinks this is good news in the larger war on terror: “Is it not telling that the terrorists can’t even pull one off in Azerbaijan? I mean, for heaven’s sake, one of its neighbors is Iran.” We have seen a lot of foiled attacks lately. It’s as if someone’s selling them out.

YOUTHFUL REBELLION OVERCOMES parental fear and prejudice. It’s like the 1960s all over again!

BRUCE ROLSTON celebrates a blogging milestone. I think I’m at something like my 50,000th post, but I’m actually not sure.

IN GREENLAND, an upside to global warming. “But now that the climate is warming, it is not just old trees that are growing. A Greenlandic supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time. Eight sheep farmers are growing potatoes commercially. Five more are experimenting with vegetables. And Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests. . . . Cod, which prefer warmer waters, have started appearing off the coast again. Ewes are having fatter lambs, and more of them every season. The growing season, such as it is, now lasts roughly from mid-May through mid-September, about three weeks longer than a decade ago.” During the Holocene climatic optimum, hardwood forests grew to the edge of the Arctic ocean, and Norwegian women wore string miniskirts. Downside: The American midwest was near-desert. That probably outweighs Norwegian women in string miniskirts, however appealing that may be.

TAKING DOWN terrorist websites.

Plus, behind enemy lines with a suburban counterterrorist. Somebody ought to write a book about this stuff. Oh, wait . . . .

JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS! James Lileks’ new book, Gastroanomalies: Questionable Culinary Creations from the Golden Age of American Cookery. I love the cover art.

JOHN FUND says that renewed interest in the “Fairness” Doctrine is all about liberals’ failure to compete in talk radio:

The stakes are high. “Lovers of liberty must expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are,” writes Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

That’s because the attempts to control the airwaves won’t stop with so-called equal time rules. Al Franken, the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota, is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. “You shouldn’t be able to lie on the air,” he told Newsweek’s Mr. Fineman earlier this year. “You can’t utter obscenities in a broadcast, so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying.”

In fact, you can be “fined” for lying, if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, especially if they are public figures–and for good reason.

Given how things are going at The New Republic, the “fines for lying” idea seems a risky move.

WALTER SHAPIRO wonders which Republican presidential candidate is most macho.

Among the Democrats, of course, it’s not even a contest . . . .

THE MOTHER OF ALL TAX HIKES. Funny how Saddam’s little turn of phrase has outlasted Saddam by a sizable margin.

GOODBYE RON PAUL EXPERIMENT. Hello Stephen Colbert experiment.

BILL HOBBS HAS TAKEN THE BOEING.

Me, I’d settle for a membership in JumpJet.

WHAT’S AL QAEDA GOT TO DO with the California fires?

UPDATE: Related item.

A POINT OF HONOR: Bob Owens gets serious about The New Republic.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY SPLIT OVER WAR grows deeper and angrier.

THIS PROPOSAL is likely to do as well as the boffo Jimmy Carter documentary: “Hollywood now proposes that in a new live-action movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line, Joe’s — well, ‘G.I.’ — identity needs to be replaced by membership in an ‘international force based in Brussels.'”

RUDY CRITICIZES HILLARY for interfering with U.S. diplomacy.

A LOOK AT political correctness in Imperial Rome.

STILL NO WINNER IN THE LUNAR LANDER PRIZE, which means that the entire two million is still on the table.