BRINGING BACK LETTERS OF MARQUE: A reader is interested in the idea:

Thing is, I’ve enough money to hand to train, equip, and deploy six people for six months in the area between Baghdad and Kabul. I’m ex-military, and I’m young enough to be up for a challenge.

Why not open-source the Global War on Terror?

As I recall, the Independent Institute — a libertarian thinktank not to be confused with that other libertarian thinktank, the Independence Institute — was pushing this idea right after 9/11. And so was Ron Paul. If I recall correctly (and Wikipedia says the same thing) the United States never signed the treaty renouncing letters of marque and reprisal. So if you want one, apply to Congress, but I doubt the application will be received favorably at this point.

JOE BIDEN EXPLAINS the Democrats’ Iraq plan.

MORE ON PARKER: Bob Levy sends this as a followup to my earlier post:

Let me briefly recap the pro-cert argument for Parker, and make a couple of other points:

First, black-letter law is pretty clear. Parker will be vacated — either by the Circuit or the Supremes — if a mootness event (e.g., passage of the DC Personal Protection Act) occurs anytime between now and the date that the Supremes either deny cert or issue their opinion. In other words, if the bill passes, Parker is almost certainly history, with no precedential value anywhere.

Second, the time is ripe for SCOTUS review: (1) The Court’s makeup is better than it has been and better than it’s going to be. (2) The other side has more to lose (47 states) than we do (3). (3) Congress and state legislatures can trump the Court if necessary. (4) An adverse decision on the merits is unlikely, especially during an election year. (5) If the Court is so inclined, it has ways to reverse Parker without reaching the merits (e.g., standing, DC statehood). (6) A bad case will ultimately go up if Parker doesn’t. Public Defenders continue to challenge felon-in-possession charges on 2d Amendment grounds. Sooner or later, a bad Court is going to grab one of those cases. (7) Silberman’s opinion is great, and so are the underlying facts of our case. (8) Incorporation isn’t an issue. (9) DOJ will likely change its view of the 2d Amendment under a liberal AG.

The NRA has stated to me and others that cert is desirable. Sen. Hutchison’s press release says she agrees. The other major gun groups, Gun Owners of America & Second Amendment Foundation, also agree. That’s the “official” position of insiders who are supposed to have the best crystal ball regarding the Supremes.

Nobody at the NRA has provided a credible answer to this simple question: Why is the NRA pushing the DC Personal Protection Act? If the NRA were to say, “You’re going to lose, so we want to kill the litigation,” I would understand that argument — although I would dispute the premise. Instead, we’re hearing that the NRA wants the Supremes to review Parker. There’s a disconnect somewhere.

Beats me. My assumption has been the “you’re going to lose” argument. Maybe I’m wrong.

I CAN SEE THIS: “Space thriller Serenity has beaten Star Wars to the title of best sci-fi movie in an SFX magazine poll of 3,000 fans.”

ERIC SCHEIE HAS THOUGHTS on crime and punishment.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: “What is disturbing about the Iranian piracy is that it establishes a warning of what we can come to expect when Iran is nuclear, and how organizations like the UN, the EU, and NATO will react. If a few Iranian terrorists in boats can paralyze an entire nation and the above agencies, think what a half-dozen Iranian nukes will do. This was the hour of Europe to step forward and show the world what it can do with sanctions, embargoes, and boycotts, and how such soft power is as effective as gunboats—and it is passing.”

“Soft power” might work, but not when the people wielding it are even softer.

FEMINIST IN AMERICA, subservient in Syria.

IN LEBANON: “The anti-Syrian majority in Lebanon’s parliament handed a petition to the United Nations on Tuesday asking for steps towards an international court to try suspects in the killing of a former prime minister, majority sources said. . . . Majority leaders accuse Damascus of the 2005 killing of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri and a string of other attacks on anti-Syrian figures. Syria denies involvement. The attacks are being probed by a U.N. investigation.”

UPDATE: Read this, too.

MIKE PENCE IS blogging from Iraq.

FLIP. FLOP.

U.N. STAFFERS COVERING UP North Korean counterfeiting operations? Nothing that those guys did would surprise me, these days.

A “SECRET WAR” AGAINST IRAN? Well, not any more. . . . .

I don’t know how reliable this report is, but if it’s true it suggests that there’s something to Edward Luttwak’s “divide and conquer” take. See this somewhat similar piece by Spengler, too.

UPDATE: C.J. Burch is questioning the timing: “Don’t kid yourself even for a second — this story was floated to give Iran cover, period.”

J.D. JOHANNES — whose Iraq documentary Outside the Wire is very much worth your time — is back in Iraq and reporting on things.

UPDATE: By the way, if you’ve seen the film, J.D. would like you to post a review on Amazon.

U.S. SUCCESSES AGAINST AL QAEDA: Bad news!

BIPARTISAN SUPPORT FOR PORK in Congress. The Roll Call article is subscription only, but here’s an excerpt:

EPW Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), at a markup March 29, said the only way to guarantee the WRDA bill moves speedily to the floor is to “oppose all amendments” and keep the bill “at the same level of funding as last year.” The Senate passed a $13 billion WRDA bill last year but was unable to reach agreement with the House on a final bill.

But keeping the bottom line the same has not meant that last year’s legislation is inviolable. Boxer’s markup vehicle had a new, $140 million project inserted at Baucus’ request to repair an 85-year-old system that delivers water to towns along Montana’s northern border.

Republicans objected, but Boxer explained that she had made an agreement with Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), the ranking members of the committee and subcommittee respectively, to allow Baucus’ measure and provide a way for Republican project to be “treated equally.”

According to Isakson, the deal essentially means that Republicans on the committee now have $140 million to divide among the projects of their choosing.

“The agreement was that if they were going to put that treatment in [for Baucus], there had to be equitable treatment for our side,” Isakson told Roll Call last week. “I did not feel that it was appropriate for me to say where the money would go without all the members of our committee participating.” So Isakson said Democrats agreed to “let our side get together and determine what they ended up going to.” . . .

The Senate has approved legislation that would require Members to declare their earmarks and declare that they have no direct financial interest in the earmarks. But the House has not acted on similar legislation, so the new rules are not in effect in the Senate. Environment and Public Works Committee staff said at this point there is not any plan to require disclosure of the earmark request in the WRDA bill.

Isakson said he thinks the sponsors ought to be disclosed.

“I think that’s what we have voted on the floor of the Senate,” he said. “My intent is to follow the spirit of what happened on the floor. I think that would certainly be the thing to do.”

But staff said that the two sides have agreed not to disclose earmarks on this bill because the new rules are not yet in place.

Enthusiasm for pork crosses party lines, and Senate rules . . . . Or perhaps we should say that they’re pretty much all members of the Pork Party.

MICHAEL YON posts another report from Iraq. He says we’re losing the media war, and that it’s partly the Pentagon’s fault.

IN THE MAIL: Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It looks quite good, and comes well-blurbed by the likes of Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell.

Taleb is also the author of the very interesting Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.

BUSH IS HARDER ON THE DEMOCRATS than he’s been lately. Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

AN ARGUMENT THAT IT’S worth the risk to fix the Hubble Telescope.

ROBERT LEVY IS COMPLAINING about Congressional efforts to overturn D.C.’s gun ban, arguing that they will undercut the Parker case before it gets to the U.S. Supreme Court.

That would be bad — at least as compared to an alternate future where the U.S. Supreme Court took the case and ruled correctly, in favor of an individual right to arms. On the other hand, how likely is that? It’s not impossible, but it is, to put it charitably, far from assured. On the other hand, there’s reason to believe that repealing the D.C. gun ban is the best move, and that it will create momentum toward gun control rollbacks elsewhere.

Who’s right? Who knows? Which is why it’s unfortunate to see gun-rights people imputing bad faith to those who disagree. This sort of uncertainty is typical in litigation of this sort — one reason why I like to show my students in Constitutional Law the excellent film about Brown v. Board of Education, Separate But Equal, is that it does a good job of displaying how people of good will in the civil rights community disagreed on whether it was best to go full-bore to end segregation, as Thurgood Marshall ultimately did, or to proceed incrementally. And as the film makes clear at the end, the answer to that question still isn’t certain.

UPDATE: Levy emails:

Glenn, in my DC Examiner article, to which you link in your posting today, I am indeed complaining about the NRA’s confusing postion on the Parker litigation. But nowhere in the article did I impugn the NRA’s motives. I raise a number of questions, advance a number of arguments, and contend that the NRA’s endorsement of the DC Personal Protection Act undermines Parker and is a disservice to the gun rights movement. Those are the facts as I see them. But I have not suggested that the NRA is acting in “bad faith” or is motivated by anything other than a desire to promote the same ends that Parker seeks.

He’s right, and I didn’t mean to suggest that he was doing so, though the passage above could easily be read that way. That’s my error, and I should have had a better transition from what Levy was saying to what other gun-rights advocates are saying — and, believe me, a lot of them are (wrongly, I think) suggesting that the NRA has bad motives here.

DISCOVERING MISOGYNY ON THE WEB.

REP. SAM JOHNSON TALKS TO NEWSWEEK about the Democrats and the war.

Plus, John McCain shops in Baghdad:

“After landing at the airport we drove from the airport into various parts of the city. We stopped at Bab Sharqi market where we spent well over an hour shopping and talking with the local people,” said McCain.

“Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I have been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today,” he boasted.

But read the whole piece, which has a certain, er, slant.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Does the AP report that you linked to this morning lend some support to the Drudge report you retracted, with its reference to a reporter “giggling” in the back at the press conference? I know Ware was sitting up front. Did Drudge’s source misidentify the laugher?

Hmm. Possibly. It’s AFP, though, not AP. Which may explain the slant. Then again. . . .

NEWT GINGRICH: A Barry Goldwater for the 21st Century?

HOWARD KURTZ THINKS THAT POLITICAL FUNDRAISING is getting too much coverage:

I think it’s an overrated indicator. I lost track of how many big-name political journalists told me in late 2003 that Howard Dean was nearly unstoppable for the nomination because he was the Democrats’ leading fundraiser. But his $40 million — some of which had been frittered away earlier — didn’t do him much good once he got to the Iowa caucuses. All the money in the world doesn’t help a candidate who can’t close the sale.

I got bleary-eyed in 1996, reading all the glowing pieces about how strong a candidate Phil Gramm was because he was raising truckloads of money. Gramm never made it to New Hampshire. The donors might have been buying, but the voters weren’t.

But you have to report about something. And fundraising stories have numbers, meaning that they’re totally objective!

PROTESTS IN UKRAINE: “Thousands of Ukrainian protesters streamed into the capital Tuesday in the most serious confrontation between the prime minister and the president since the two men faced off during the Orange Revolution.”

As always, Veronica Khokhlova is on the story. She has lots of photos, here.

UPDATE: Publius has much more.