AN INTERESTING PIECE in the Boston Globe, by Nasser Weddaddy:

THE MUSLIM new year has come in with a bang. On the eve of the high holiday of Eid Al-Adha, explosions abound. Outside Beirut a car bomb kills four. A double-blast in Quetta, Pakistan, destroys eight lives. Twin suicide bombings in Iraq’s Diyala Province murder 26, including six women and children. Two bombers in Algiers, one a grandfather, claim over 35 victims.
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This year-end killing spree – whose victims were nearly all Muslim – has again revealed a profound failure to stop violent extremism across the Muslim world. The international community, increasingly numb to a steady tide of slaughter in Muslim lands, has little to say. Muslim leaders offer a ritual disclaimer that the radicals don’t represent Islam – a “religion of peace” – and then retreat into silence.

We have failed to offer a robust response to the brutal wave of human sacrifice. This failure has allowed extremists to garner headlines and define the agenda without meeting an equally passionate response from the moderate center. It is long past time to mount a vigorous campaign against the cult of death and reaffirm a culture of life.

An essential first step is admitting we have a problem.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to reader Jina Hassan for the link.

ROMNEY’S gun problem.

A BEST-OF-THE-YEAR ROUNDUP.

AN AMERICAN imprisoned in Nicaragua Will Hinton says it’s unfair.

DEAN BARNETT: To be, or Huckabee. The Republican Party’s question. Huckabee as a Jesse Jackson-like practitioner of identity politics?

WASHINGTON POST: Key Setbacks Dim Luster of Democrats’ Year.

DOESN’T SOUND LIKE WE’RE HEADING FOR A RECESSION: “Gross domestic product rose at an unrevised 4.9% annual rate July through September, quicker than its solid, 3.8% performance in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday.”

BOB KERREY APOLOGIZES TO OBAMA for raising the Muslim issue.

A SURGE OF THEIR OWN: Iraqis take back the streets. As IraqPundit notes, even the Guardian is sounding more positive than Harry Reid these days.

SANTA CLAUS without the beard.

THE TUNGUSKA EXPLOSION: An asteroid strike, according to Sandia, and by a smaller asteroid than had previously been thought possible. “That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed.”

BUT DIDN’T THEY SIGN KYOTO? Germany Cries Foul Over EU Plans to Cut Car Emissions.

GOOD TIMING: “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s youngest sibling is a deadbeat dad who owes tens of thousands of dollars in child support to his politically connected ex, The Post has learned.” Just what Hillary needs. Is it a plant?

As Mickey Kaus says, sometimes a story is just a story. But why didn’t they get this cleaned up? It seems to me that it would be worth tens of thousands to the campaign to keep this story out of the news. (Via JWF).

ROD DREHER ON MIKE HUCKABEE:

I don’t want to overdo this. I think it’s perfectly fine to be worried about Huckabee’s vagueness, and his unpreparedness. I’m worried about these things too, which is a big reason why I can’t say I’d vote for him (though honestly, any Republican who finds himself worked up over Huckabee’s lack of knowledge about foreign affairs, say, should ask himself if he felt the same way about Gov. Bush in 1999 and 2000, and if not, why not). Still, it’s hard to shake the belief that the real problem with Mike Huckabee, as far as the establishment is concerned, is that he’s not clubbable.

I’d say just the opposite. I think that Huckabee has gotten a lot of mileage out of being a likable guy. I liked him a lot too when we talked to him. Now that he’s moved up in the polls, people are starting to give him the kind of scrutiny that the Giulianis and McCains have been getting all along, and his positions aren’t holding up well. As for why people didn’t feel that way about Bush in 1999, that’s easy — it was because America was still taking a holiday from history, and foreign affairs and national security didn’t seem that important. Maybe we’ve learned something since then. Had we looked at things in 2000 as we do now, they might have turned out differently.

POLICY LEADER OF THE YEAR: The X-Prize Foundation. Good call.

SAUDI CLERGY turn on Al Qaeda.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Ron Paul’s supporters see the might of his common sense slashing through the doubletalk of the financial solons. I see a really, really smart economist responding to Ron Paul the same way you react to Cousin Mildred when she corners you after Christmas dinner to complain about the flouridation of the water supply.”

LAWBLOG STAGNATION? Orin Kerr observes: “In the 2003-06 period, it looked like the blawgosphere — the part of the blogworld devoted to law blogs — was expanding rapidly and becoming more and more important. As 2007 comes to an end, however, I think we can see a very different picture for 2007. For the most part this was a year of little growth or even a slight decline among law blogs.”

Only so many people are interested in legal matters. Though it seems to me that I’ve been doing somewhat more law-blogging in the past year than in previous years.

AFGHANISTAN: “The U.S. is upset that NATO countries have failed to deliver three infantry battalions, 3,000 trainers and 20 transport and attack helicopters they promised to send.”

UPDATE: More on Afghanistan here.

BILAL HUSSEIN UPDATE: The defensive crouch on the use of Iraqi stringers seems well underway.

WHEN IS A GAME CONSOLE not a game console?

AN IRAQ TURNAROUND: “An astonishing turnaround occurred in the Senate on Tuesday: 70 senators voted to fund the Iraq war with a fresh $70 billion and no strings attached. Think about this a moment. Last winter, after Democrats captured the Senate and House, it seemed likely they’d succeed in limiting or ending the Iraq war, probably by setting a firm timetable for withdrawal of American troops. After all, both President Bush and the war itself were highly unpopular. The Democratic triumph in the election made that clear, even to those who doubted opinion polls. And Democrats made the anti-Iraq crusade their top priority in the new Congress. Now, the 70-vote approval of the war by the Senate represents the breathtaking dimension of their failure.”

Or of General Petraeus’s success.

VIDEO VS. THE POLITICO: You decide.

UPDATE: The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong. Just remember, this is the other Roger Simon. The real Roger Simon would have known there’d be video out there somewhere.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Silly hats.

MORE: A big-picture roundup on questionable reporting. (Bumped).

MARK LEVIN: “Mike Huckabee is now becoming a very divisive figure in the Republican party. It’s not his faith or his Merry Christmas commercial that many conservatives question (I certainly don’t), but it’s his record as governor and his stated positions on the war, foreign policy generally, taxes, spending, and illegal aliens.”

A GIULIANI BOOST from Kit Bond.