THOUGHTS ON POLITICAL OUTING OF GAYS, from Michael Silence.

Heck, I can remember when you weren’t even supposed to out people as communists.

REUTERS GETS IT WRONG again.

THIS IS INTERESTING: “The impactor believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and other life forms on Earth some 65 million years ago has been traced back to a breakup event in the main asteroid belt.”

A KIDS’ GUIDE to camping out. By a writer for “Bill Nye, the Science Guy.”

MARY KATHARINE HAM INTERVIEWS BRAD SMITH about blogs, campaign finance, and federal election law.

NO SURPRISE HERE: “Congressional Democrats are trying to undermine U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus’ credibility before he delivers a report on the Iraq war next week, saying the general is a mouthpiece for President Bush and his findings can’t be trusted.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ REVIEWS Michael Ledeen’s new book, The Iranian Time Bomb.

CORRUPTION ARRESTS IN NEW JERSEY: Another chance to play Name That Party!

THIS SURVIVAL TOOL gets a great review at BoingBoing. It does look kind of cool.

Plus, Popular Mechanics loves the Leatherman Skeletool.

FLEMMING ROSE on the terror arrests in Denmark. And Michael van der Galiën on the terror arrests in Germany.

STRATEGYPAGE:

The major problem in Iraq is back in the United States. There, many politicians either don’t bother, or don’t want to believe, what is actually happening, and has happened, in Iraq. In a way, that makes sense. Because what is going on in Iraq is so totally alien to the experience of American politicians. But many Americans take a purely partisan, party line, attitude towards Iraq. So logic and fact has nothing to do with their assessments of the situation.

Read the whole thing.

PAUL BREMER WRITES:

IT has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.

By the time Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the Iraqi Army had simply dissolved. On April 17 Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of the Army’s Central Command, reported in a video briefing to officials in Washington that “there are no organized Iraqi military units left.” The disappearance of Saddam Hussein’s old army rendered irrelevant any prewar plans to use that army. So the question was whether the Coalition Provisional Authority should try to recall it or to build a new one open to both vetted members of the old army and new recruits. General Abizaid favored the second approach. . . . Moreover, we were right to build a new Iraqi Army. Despite all the difficulties encountered, Iraq’s new professional soldiers are the country’s most effective and trusted security force. By contrast, the Baathist-era police force, which we did recall to duty, has proven unreliable and is mistrusted by the very Iraqi people it is supposed to protect.

Read the whole thing.

TRAVELLING HSUS: Suitably Flip goes Knock, knock, knockin’ on Norman’s door.

AS PROSTITUTES TURN TO CRAIGSLIST, the law takes notice. “Augmenting traditional surveillance of street walkers, massage parlors, brothels and escort services, investigators are now hunching over computer screens to scroll through provocative cyber-ads in search of solicitors.”

SO I’M READING JACK GOLDSMITH’S NEW BOOK, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration, and so far it’s quite good. Excerpt:

It is unimaginable that Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a new and deadly foe. . . . Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.

As I’ve said before, this war has been overlawyered, which is not to say it has been well-lawyered. Goldsmith notes that the Defense Department alone has over 10,000 lawyers, not including reservists. More:

In my two years in the government, I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls. These men and women did not believe they were breaking the law, and indeed they took extraordinary steps to ensure that they didn’t. But they worried nonetheless because they would be judged in an atmosphere different from when they acted, because the criminal investigative process is mysterious and scary, because lawyers’ fees can cause devastating financial losses, and because an investigation can produce reputation-ruining dishonor and possibly end one’s career, even if you emerge “innocent.”

Why, then, do they even come close to the legal line? Why risk reputation, fortune, and perhaps liberty? Why not play it safe? Many counterterrorism officials did play it safe before 9/11, when the criminalization of war and intelligence contributed to the paralyzing risk aversion that pervaded the White House and the intelligence community. The 9/11 attacks, however, made playing it safe no longer feasible. . . .

Two factors exacerbated this anxiety in the spring of 2004 when Philbin and I brought our bad news to the White House. The government was beginning to receive terrorist threat information that was more frightening than at any time since 9/11, according to then-CIA director George Tenet. And the 9/11 Commission was preparing to grill Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft, Robert Mueller, and George Tenet on national television about all the things that hindsight showed they might have done, but didn’t, to prevent the September 11 attacks. . . .

After 9/11, the Bush administration feared for the nation’s safety as much as Franklin Roosevelt had. But Roosevelt’s political conception of legal constraints had largely vanished, and by 2001 had been replaced by a fiercely legalistic conception of unprecedented wartime constraints on the presidency. When President Bush and his senior advisors began to order the aggressive actions that they believed the post-9/11 situation demanded — covert military action, surveillance, detention, interrogation, military trials, and the like — they encountered these constraints for the first time in a major conflict.

Indeed. In his book about the 9/11 aftermath, After, Steven Brill reports that John Ashcroft’s instructions to his subordinates — repeating President Bush’s instructions to Ashcroft — were not to ever let something like that happen again. It hasn’t, but that command certainly affected attitudes — and, now because nothing like that has happened again, we find ourself back in more of a 1990s mindset.

UPDATE: Reader Holmes Gwin emails:

Welcome to the post-SarBox, Elliott Spitzer world. We in business face this on a regular basis. I can’t decide whether I’m glad public servants experience the same headaches we do or concerned because an intelligence/military failure costs lives, while a business failure costs only money (though when Spitzer was around, it also sometimes cost freedom).

In business, not only has bad judgment become a crime, so has a good decision made on the basis of incomplete information, which later turns out to have been the wrong call. This is not good for America, where innovation and risk are what we do better than Europe, China, or India.

Law and lawyers are swell in their place. The extent of that place, however, is not unlimited.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brian Gates emails:

Do the Volokh guys have the same book? See the discussion here, for instance. They (and the Washington Post, I suppose) make it sound like Goldsmith views the administration as a cabal of anarchofascists, actively destroying the laws that should apply to them even when it would be easier to get Congress and the courts to just change the law to suit their needs better. Your post on the book has a somewhat different feel. Are you all reading the same book?

I may be wrong, but I think the folks at Volokh are reading what newspapers have chosen to excerpt, which I think gives the book more of an anti-Bush spin than it really possesses (though I’m only about halfway through so far). Goldsmith is quite critical in places, but he also makes clear (as the passages above do) that he thinks people in the Administration meant well, and were responding to near-intolerable pressures, even if he often thinks they responded in a sub-optimal fashion.

MORE: Question answered. And lest I myself be accused of selective quotation, I’ll note that Goldsmith emailed me to say that these excerpts captured the central point of the book, so I think they’re representative. But I’ll have more on the book later.

STILL MORE: Related thoughts from TigerHawk.

MICKEY KAUS: “It looks as if Gov. Schwarzenegger is on the verge of achieving one of his big systemic reforms, an end to gerrymandered legislative districts.”

FRED THOMPSON ON JAY LENO: Video here. Reviews here and here. And Joe Gandelman weighs in.

UPDATE: Just watched it on TiVo. Don’t agree with Geraghty that Thompson looked too thin — he looked good on my HDTV. I thought his performance was good but not stellar; if Fred Thompson can’t perform well on The Tonight Show, he’s not Fred Thompson. But he didn’t do any better than what you’d expect, considering. He did well enough; it’s what comes next that will matter.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Roger Simon.

MORE: Further thoughts on Thompson’s appearance here.

PLANS FOR A U.S. SPACEPORT ARE UNVEILED:

The spaceport is quite striking, which isn’t surprising given that it was designed by famed British architect Norman Foster, in collaboration with American design firm URS Corp. The facility is a low-slung structure that uses natural earth as a berm and relies on passive energy for heating and cooling, with photovoltaic panels for electricity and water-recycling capabilities. A press release describes “a rolling concrete shell that acts as a roof with massive windows opening to a stunning view of the runway and spacecraft. The terminal and hangar facility are projected to cost about $31 million, and will provide a destination experience for visitors to Spaceport America. It will include Virgin Galactic’s pre-flight and post-flight training facilities and lounges, as well as the maintenance hangar for two White Knight 2 and five Spaceship 2 aircraft.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: “Vulviform architecture”? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

OOPS, I THOUGHT I’D POSTED THIS YESTERDAY, but didn’t actually publish it. FEC applies media exemption to blogs. Good news.

HSU’S ON THE LAM! Illustrated!

BIG NEWS: For the first time in 10,000 years, farming isn’t the dominant industry worldwide. “And thus passes a tremendous milestone in the history of our species.”

A PETITION TO SUPPORT THE SURGE. Signatures are solicited.

STEPHEN GREEN is live-blogging the New Hampshire debate. So is Ed Morrissey’s crowd. Also Lance Dutson and Jason Clarke, who are there.

UPDATE: Okay, I’m not liveblogging, but all this piling-on toward Fred Thompson is as likely to build him up as to tear him down. Stephen Green comments: “First question: Is Fred Thompson smarter than you guys? Answer: If he’s having a postshow cocktail in Leno’s greenroom, he is.” Similar thoughts here: “They’re spending a tenth of the debate, debating Fred Thompson. Who says that Fred can’t dominate a debate which he doesn’t attend?”

TigerHawk is blogging, too.

MORE: Okay, I think Ron Paul’s bit on homeland security after 9/11 was dead-on.

But later when he talked about how the American people didn’t go to war, just a small cabal of neoconservatives, he sounded like, well, a kook. What about that Iraq war resolution in Congress?

STILL MORE: Just noticed that Ann Althouse is blogging too.

FINALLY: It was more of a debate than these have been. Fox’s focus group seems to think McCain did best. One interviewee: “He made me feel safe.” Another: “He has experience and it came though in his answers.” Big complaint about Rudy — every answer he gave revolved around New York.

And here’s video of the Huckabee-vs.-Paul spat.

Dan Riehl was watching the people meters and observes: “Putting the candidates aside for a moment, what I saw was that when the message was win in Iraq, it didn’t matter which candidate was saying it – the numbers for both conservatives and moderates went through the roof. And the stronger the talk, the higher the mean number. The only other issues that came close were immigration and taxes.”

And expect more video highlights at Hot Air. Allah just emailed to say that they’re on the way.

CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVISM: Air travel for me, exercise for thee. “To be fair, there apparently are other projects that don’t involve tethering people in developing countries to human hamster wheels.”

J.D. JOHANNES WRITES on Charles Schumer’s revisionist history.

UPDATE: More here: “And let me point out that Schumer voted for this war. He sent the troops to Iraq. Now he derides their achievements. The man has no shame.”