RAND SIMBERG COMMENTS on a new Bush Administration education initiative. It’s certainly addressing a serious and undeniable problem.

UPDATE: More evidence of pressing need here.

KERRY: KOREAN CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION contretemps.

NEW YORK TIMES: Bush didn’t lie!

UPDATE: Tom Maguire: “Is this a rowback, or just a complete collapse into schizophrenia?”

HERE’S MORE ON TOMORROW’S scheduled private manned spaceship launch by Burt Rutan.

DAVID BROCK’S MEDIA MATTERS SITE is accusing CBS of hypocrisy.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF posts a Euro-news roundup.

ANN ALTHOUSE thinks Ray Bradbury should be mad at Michael Moore, and has some thoughts on a non-Moore documentary about serial killer Aileen Wuornos and another about the band Metallica.

AUBREY DE GREY WRITES: “The biogerontologist David Sinclair and the bioethicist Leon Kass recently locked horns in a radio debate on human life extension that was remarkable for one thing: on the key issue, Kass was right and Sinclair wrong.”

De Grey’s comments are part of a review of this book from Brookings, Coping With Methuselah: The Impact of Molecular Biology on Medicine and Society, which looks quite interesting; enough so that I’ve ordered a copy.

And yes, as a review of my recent stuff indicates, I’m getting more interested in this topic. It’s my sense that the science — and the regulatory impulse — are both approaching the take-off point in this area.

A RATHER IMPRESSIVE multimedia presentation by the Dallas Morning News on the Catholic Church’s priest abuse scandal and its emerging international dimensions. It’s on their front page, too.

HUGH HEWITT is busting Peter Beinart: “I suspect that Peter was handed a quote by a research assistant.”

MANY BLOGGERS ARE NAMED in this story about blogging the political conventions. I agree with Bob Somerby, myself, but I’m glad that others feel differently.

BLACKFIVE has more on the Sudan horrors.

ETHNIC SELF-CLEANSING: Joe Gandelman reports that, sick of antisemitism, Jews are leaving France in large numbers.

PLANS FOR ETHNIC CLEANSING IN ZIMBABWE: It has been obvious that this was coming for a long time. Will the world care? The track record of the “international community” with regard to such things has been poor.

WHEN PEOPLE TELL ME THAT I WORK TOO HARD, I usually laugh it off. But being the only car in the faculty parking garage when I came into the office today makes me wonder if maybe they’re onto something. . . .

Nah. I can quit working so hard whenever I want to.

Besides, I know other people who work harder.

JIM HAKE OF SPIRIT OF AMERICA is back from Iraq, and has a report on conditions there and on what you can do to help.

MICKEY KAUS: “Could terrorists be undecided swing voters?”

Eric Scheie has related thoughts.

MICHIKO KAKUTANI is slamming Bill Clinton’s book: “The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull.”

At the moment there are no reader reviews posted on the book’s Amazon page, but I predict that when they appear they’ll be sharply divided.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey notes that Clinton is supporting Bush on Iraq, and thus undermining Kerry, in interviews. First Putin, now Clinton. Interesting.

MORE QUESTIONS about the 9/11 Commission’s treatment of the Atta meeting: “The staff omits at least seven facts in ‘Staff statement #16’ that the full Commission deserves to know to render its own judgment.”

UPDATE: This is interesting, too. Saddam threatening terror against the US in 1990?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Greg Djerejian says that The Washington Post has blown the 9/11 Commission story. Dana Milbank is involved. And read this.

“INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM” AT THE BBC: “A senior BBC correspondent in the Gaza Strip is reported to have told a Hamas gathering that journalists and media organizations are ‘waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people.'”

Then there’s the New York Times . . .

UPDATE: Reader David Gerstman emails that the BBC story is 3 years old, and cites this item from 2002. He’s right, and here’s what I think is the original report. I don’t think that makes it any less revealing, though — and, in retrospect, certainly explains a lot about media coverage in the Middle East since 9/11.

Here’s more on the BBC’s own foreign policy in the Mideast, which would seem to contradict its claims of impartiality. And don’t miss this bit:

The BBC efforts not to “offend” Arab extremists even extend to their reports on ethnic cleansing and genocide. On both the occasions in the last week when I heard BBC World Service Radio refer to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the BBC took scrupulous care to avoid saying who the perpetrators were (they are Arab militias) and who the victims are (hundreds of thousands of Black Sudanese Africans — Muslims, Christians, and Animists). The BBC didn’t make any mention whatever of the long history of mass slavery in Sudan, carried out by Arabs with non-Arabs as their victims; nor of the scorched-earth policies, and systematic rape being carried out there by Arabs.

Yet in one of these very same news bulletins, the BBC mentioned that “settlers” in Gaza were “Jewish” and the land they were settling is “Palestinian.” . . .

The BBC’s Middle East problem is not just a British problem but also an international one. The BBC pours forth its worldview not just in English, but in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Turkish.

I’ll bet it’s all “Vulfervitz’s” fault.

UPDATE: Hmm. Tough question.

BOTH EXXON/MOBIL AND CHEVRON/TEXACO have received oil-for-food subpoenas:

The U.S. attorney in Manhattan is investigating the program.

A spokeswoman for Exxon Mobil, Prem Nair, said the subpoena covered only documents related to the program and did not accuse the oil giant of wrongdoing. “We are in receipt of the subpoena, and we are responding accordingly,” she said. “We follow all laws and regulations.” Exxon Mobil declined to comment further on the subpoena.

At ChevronTexaco, “we have received a request for information from the U.S. attorney,” said Jeff Moore, a spokesman for the San Ramon, Calif.-based company. “We are cooperating.”

Very interesting. Perhaps the Unscam scandal is getting some traction.

JOE LIEBERMAN UNDERSTANDS what’s going on:

The Islamist jihadist terrorists who wage holy war against us in Iraq and elsewhere represent a system of values exactly the opposite of America’s.

There is no better way to know this enemy than to read their words. The father of the jihadist movement, Sayyed Qutb [KUH-tahb] of Egypt, wrote in 1952, “The death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood.” The cause of which he speaks is to “establish a [Muslim] state” that “sets moral values,” “abolish[es] man-made laws” and that would impose, by force if necessary, the Islamic system on “all human beings, whether they be rulers or ruled, black or white, poor or rich, ignorant or learned.”

This is a radicalized, violent vision of Islam, as yet embraced by only a minority of Muslims. Pluralism of any kind – a diversity of views or faiths – affronts this radical minority’s absolutist vision. Their theological totalitarianism leaves no room for individual freedom.

Restoring the caliphate – the seat of secular and ecclesiastical power that existed for centuries across a wide territory – is their goal. You can read it in their writings: They would create a new evil empire, stretching from Istanbul to Islamabad, from Khartoum to Kabul, from Kuala Lampur to Bangkok, and beyond.

Osama Bin Laden is the leading advocate of this jihadist view in the world today, the current mastermind of this malevolent movement. Every American should carefully read his clearly stated words of intention to know why we must defeat him.

In his “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad,” issued in February 1998, Bin Laden says that “to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim… every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward [must] obey God’s command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can.”

In his November 1998 “Letter to America,” Bin Laden condemned the United States because, he said, like all democracies, it is a “nation who, rather than ruling by the Sharia of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, chooses to invent your own laws as you will and desire.” After September 11th attacks, he gloated triumphantly that “the values of Western civilization… of liberty, human rights, and humanity, have been destroyed.”

In this war of ideas and values, Bin Laden is the quintessential anti-American. . . .

The prison abuse scandal has caused many to question our moral standing in Iraq and to use it as an excuse to pull our troops out. That is thoroughly unjustified and profoundly dangerous. As I said earlier, the terrorists will never defeat us militarily. We cannot let them defeat us politically.

I’d like to see Lieberman as Kerry’s running mate, but I guess that’s not going to happen.

THERE ARE LOTS OF BASEBALL BLOGS, but here’s a golf blog.

MORE ON SUDAN AND DARFUR, here, here, here, and most recently here. All from the Cake Eater Chronicles, a blog that has been paying a lot of attention to the subject.

UPDATE: Me and Ophelia is another blog that’s paying a lot of attention to this subject.

TYLER COWEN REVIEWS Control Room.