HERE’S A LENGTHY BIG PICTURE POST from Michael Yon. It’s beyond excerpting, but I’ll excerpt this bit: “I’ve been back in Iraq now for about three months, and sadly have to report that, despite signs of progress in many key areas of the battle space, the conditions on the media/military front have not improved since early 2005. . . . One overarching message from the front is that our combat forces are overwhelmingly good to the Iraqis and extremely accommodating to media, but there is a deeper substrate. We simply cannot beat the terrorists if we do not learn how to embrace media realities. With all the focus on training Iraqi Security Forces, it might be worth considering training our own team, too.” As I said yesterday, someone with a clue in the White House or the Pentagon needs to intervene.

UPDATE: Rick Richman emails:

Glenn — Thank you for the link to Michael Yon’s remarkable post. You were correct that it defies summarization, and needs to be read in its entirety, but I think your brief excerpt may obscure an equally important point closer to the end of the post:

“[I]t bears frequent reminding that General Petraeus has won complex battles before in Iraq. He is extremely open with the media, and nobody with PhD from Princeton would invite a bunch of writers to document an historical fight he plans to lose. He’s invited press to a process he aims to resolve.”

COMMENTARY has posted a forthcoming article from its April issue by Arthur Herman, entitled “How to Win in Iraq — and How to Lose.” The article sets forth General Petraeus’s new strategy and makes it clear it is far beyond a simple increase in troop levels. The article provides considerable insight into the reasons Petraeus wants the media around.

Thanks.

A NAVAL BLOCKADE OF IRAN would be a traditional response but I doubt we’ll see that.

IN THE MAIL: Neal Boortz’s new book.

They’re also still pushing his “Fair Tax” book. My first thought was that it’s less likely to fly in a Democratic Congress. But given the performance of the GOP Congress I’m not sure that’s really true. And maybe there’s a Nixon-goes-to-China angle on this . . . .

A EUROPEAN POLITICIAN WORRIES: “Political correctness is killing our freedoms.” Read the whole thing.

OUCH: “Dennis Hastert is looking more competent by the hour.”

POLYGAMY IN NEW YORK CITY: Interesting report. This would be dealt with more effectively in a non-multicultural framework, I suspect. (Via Ann Althouse).

XENI JARDIN HAS MORE on imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman.

MORE TALK ABOUT FRED THOMPSON.

INSPIRED BY THE SECRET, Phil Bowermaster tries an experiment. Somebody should ask Ryan O’Neal . . . .

HEH: ‘”When Democrats say “We support the troops”,’ Rep. Pelosi said, ‘these are the troops we’re talking about.'”

UPDATE: More from Jules Crittenden.

IS THE WESTERN WORLD GIVING UP ON WAR? And is that such a good thing after all?

UPDATE: Eric Scheie says it’s not.

THE EXAMINER: “Why can’t Washington politicians level with the American people, particularly when they are about to raise our taxes? That question is posed regularly on this page and it is addressed as directly and as often to Republicans as to Democrats. When the Democrats won a resounding victory last November in great part because they promised to clean up the corruption in the nation’s capital, we hoped there would be fewer occasions to justify repeating the question. If hope is the father of optimism, then the Democrats in charge of Congress are about to inspire a lot of pessimism.”

UPDATE: A challenge to politicians to put up or shut up.

WHY CD SALES ARE PLUMMETING: The music industry blames piracy, but other factors — from the ability to just buy the songs you like, and not a CD full of filler, to competition from other things like games and the Internet, to the fact that releases tend to suck more than they used to — seem more significant.

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly — movies, music, newspapers, TV women’s shows — seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren’t. I’d be interested to see more analysis on that subject.

UPDATE: On newspapers: “Newspapers are powerful. Or were. Many of the big guys — the LA Times, NY Times and the old Knight-Ridder newspapers — put people in charge who could not handle the power. That the real problem here.” That probably applies across the board, actually.

LIFE IMITATING ART IMITATING LIFE — imitating politics.

DEAN BARNETT on Elizabeth Edwards. A must-read.

LIVEBLOGGING AL GORE’S An Inconvenient Truth.

I wonder how this would compare?

NOT AS HARD TO FIND AS WALDO.

ED MORRISSEY EMAILED to ask why I hadn’t posted any Cayman dive pictures. Well, I’ve done that before. But here’s something better, a dive video. I didn’t shoot this — in fact, you can see me in it with the black split fins, yellow mask, and yellow “spare air” cylinder on my chest. It was shot by Kaz Vickery of Ocean Frontiers Diving, who’s a terrific underwater videographer and who was happy to have me post a bit online. (I replaced his very nice music with Mobius Dick’s Submarine on Europa just to be sure there were no issues with the music permissions.) All of this was done in Adobe Premier Pro, and it took me about 30 minutes to put this together from the much longer video he shot.

He shoots everything in 1080i HD, but of course, that won’t matter here. If you’d like something a bit clearer than the MotionBox video below, though, you can download the video in 512kbps WMV by clicking here. This dive was on Grand Cayman’s East End, where as you can see the reefs and sealife are in excellent condition.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Ayers emails:

Thanks for the video of the Cayman diving.

As a relatively new diver (cert a year ago, 70 dives ranging from Little Cayman to Fiji) I have never even *seen* a spare air on a diver. I understand the game, but have never seen one.

You might blog sometime on your decision …

That’s a fair amount of diving in one year! Here’s the Spare Air page. It’s basically a small air tank with its own regulator, enough to let you make a leisurely ascent to the surface if your main air supply goes bad. Its main role is as wife-comforter, but if you lose a high-pressure hose or O-ring you’ve got about 45 seconds before you’re out of air from the main tank, which is enough time to get to your buddy and share air, but not a lot more. I’ve seen a high-pressure hose go for no apparent reason before, though it’s not common. I don’t know how many divers use spare air — I’ve seen a few others, and even one guy who dove with a “pony tank” (much bigger, though still smaller than a regular tank) and separate regulator as a spare. Dive equipment is quite reliable, and seldom fails catastrophically. On the other hand, the spare air gadget isn’t very expensive (you’d certainly pay more than that for air if you happened to need it!) and it’s a gadget, which as you may have noticed I’m disposed to like.

And here’s an interesting blog entry on out-of-air situations. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in diving don’t let this talk discourage you. Emergencies, especially due to equipment failure, are very rare. And as the video illustrates — though it’s a pale shadow of reality — there’s a lot of natural beauty to enjoy. Plus, as I’ve noted before, I think that diving encourages people to care about the environment.

Also, there’s more dive video — from my rebreather story for Popular Mechanics — here.

LOSING THE MEDIA WAR, ONE GENERAL AT A TIME: Michael Yon reports that a general is trying to get him thrown out of Iraq. Austin Bay is rightly upset.

Jeez. Can somebody at the Pentagon or White House with a clue intervene here?

We interviewed Michael Yon from Baghdad yesterday — here’s the podcast.

MORE ON THE L. A. TIMES SCANDAL, from Mickey Kaus.

UPDATE: More problems for the LAT here.

THIS IS NEWS:

Dozens of grand jury subpoenas issued in a terrorism financing investigation of Muslim charities in northern Virginia have spawned a largely secret legal battle before a federal appeals court, according to court records and a person close to the investigation.

Read the whole thing.

LOOKS LIKE THE FCC WON’T ALLOW in-flight use of cellphones on planes after all. I don’t know what I think about that, but I definitely agree with the people who say that in-flight broadband Internet is more important. It is to me, anyway!

ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES A HERO: Or something like that: “It really can’t be both, can it? That Mr. Edwards would have been heroic for dropping out, and that he’s also a hero for carrying on?”

UPDATE: Reader Larry Stamper emails:

While these assertions of heroism may seem contradictory, you do see a wide range of reactions by the families of cancer victims. Often these reactions are called courageous by those that care about them, though one case may seem at odds with another. It’s just that in this case the same persons are involved. I think the thing to get out of this is that dealing with cancer requires courage, and people who care will find a way encourage them.

Good point. It’s just the ability of commentators to turn on a rhetorical dime that he’s making fun of.

SEND HOYERS, GUNS AND MONEY: Things in the House don’t seem to be going well for the Democrats, but at least Mortman’s getting good titles out of it.

MICHAEL BARONE looks at the polls for the presidential race.