AFGHAN ELECTION UPDATE: Karzai looks like a winner with 55% of the vote.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF INSTAPUNDIT: I’ll be travelling for several days and not blogging much if at all. Ordinarily I’d just let the blog lie fallow, or make a superhuman effort to post, but this time I’ve got an all-star team of guestbloggers coming in: Ann Althouse, Megan McArdle, and Michael Totten. You can still reach ’em by the regular email address. InstaPundit as a female-dominated group blog? Why not? Meanwhile, Tom Maguire will be filling in over at GlennReynolds.com.

JIM BENNETT’S NEW BOOK ON THE ANGLOSPHERE rose pretty high in the rankings this weekend after I mentioned it Saturday — from about a quarter-million to about 3,000 on Amazon — so I guess a lot of InstaPundit readers are interested in that stuff. Bennett emails to suggest that one major benefit of blogs is that they can bring obscure books more general attention. He also notes that — despite what it says on the Amazon page — the book is actually out now.

BRAZIL has successfully launched a rocket into space. Hey, if Burt Rutan can do it, why not?

IF YOU MISSED THIS WEEKEND’S Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology in Washington, well, it’s too late. But hey, they had overcapacity crowds anyway, so you can feel good about not adding to the human density. But you can read Adam Keiper’s liveblog.

And it’s not too late to attend the University of Tennessee’s nanotechnology conference on Tuesday, done in conjunction with Oak Ridge National Lab.

BUSH TO HAWAII? Hey, it worked for Elvis.

UPDATE: Tony Blair would vote for Dubya. “‘Tony thinks the world is a very dangerous and precarious place. Bush is the tough guy who keeps the bad guys under their rocks.'”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Joseph Malchow disagrees with Blair: “No! Bush is the tough guy who turns over the rocks and neutralizes what he finds underneath. Isn’t that what we’re seeing in Iraq?”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Joshua Sharf emails: “I’d even go one better: Bush is the guy who picks up the rock and uses it to smash what’s underneath. Iraq used to be a base for terror, now the population is getting to use its resources to fight it.” This metaphor is getting overstretched.

Meanwhile, Clarence Page wonders if Bush will surprise people by doing well with black voters. If, as Peter Beinart suggests, race is no longer a big political issue in America, then why not?

MORE: In tenuously-related “election” news: Dang, I never did ask people to vote for me in this blog poll at the Post.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

Interviews with dozens of former and current Iraqi officials by congressional investigators have produced new evidence that Saddam Hussein micro-managed business deals under the U.N. oil-for-food program to maximize political influence with important foreign governments like Russia and neighboring Arab states.

The Iraqi officials, who were flown outside of Iraq for their own safety during the interviews, provided a list of foreign companies favored by Saddam and his top lieutenants for import contracts under the U.N. program. They also revealed a parallel blacklist of companies that the then-Iraq leader disqualified from getting deals, investigators told The Associated Press.

The precaution of redoubled secrecy comes after an Iraqi official involved in the oil-for-food investigation of corruption died in a car bombing in late June after speaking with investigators.

I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten more attention.

DONALD SENSING: “Here is one of the newest US Marines, my son, PFC Stephen Sensing. He graduated yesterday from Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island. It was a fantastic day!” Congratulations: That’s something to be proud of.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “My election day prayer is: may whoever wins win by a lot.” Amen.

TWO GREAT ITEMS FROM OTHER PEOPLE’S COMMENT SECTIONS. This one from a post of Tom Maguire’s, in which the healthcare problem is solved:

The dirty little secret about healthcare insurance is that you have to maximize participation of young childless males either through coercion (single-payer) or obfuscation (make it free, which means take what would otherwise be salary and put it into the insurance pool). These guys don’t use or need the healthcare system except for accidents, so it’s rational for them not to sign up for insurance until they get married and have kids. Their payments offset the higher healthcare utilization of females, the old, etc.

With HSAs guys can chip in early and build a sizable nest egg tax-free for the day when they have a wife and kids, rational behavior that supports family values too. And if they have good genes and a healthy lifestyle, after a time they can take some of that money and buy a motorcycle! After the accident, the balance of HSA savings goes to their beneficiaries.

Bush should’ve used this argument for health savings accounts at the debate! Or maybe not. . . . And this somewhat more serious take on why the war, and Iraq, is important, from Will Allen over at Asymmetrical Information:

True enough, there are more than a few members of the Bush Administration that likely have failed to grasp how difficult every single thing is in the conduct of war, but since I think this war needed to be fought, I still prefer those who were willing to wage it to those who likely would have refrained.

Why do I think it needed to be waged? I agree with you that the Islamic world does not pose an existential threat to the U.S.. However, if the Islamic world does not rapidly change, we pose an existential threat to them, and although being among a few hundred million slaughtered is about as bad as things get, being among those who do the slaughtering of a few hundred million is pretty damned awful as well, and it is worth taking great, great, risks to avoid such action.

In fact, this prospect is so grim, and in my view, so likely, absent rapid revolutionary change in the Persian Gulf , I see no way that Kerry, who is essentially a reactionary, can be worthy of a vote. A politically, militarily, and economically, and technologically backward people who sit atop of the natural resource greatly desired by far more militarily, economically, and economically powerful people, are going to meet an extraordinarily violent end if they exhibit any proficiency for hostile action against the more powerful people. Obtaining and using the technology of the more powerful people for hostile action merely seals their doom. Neither Bush or Kerry is likely to be the 21st century Andrew Jackson or Phil Sheridan, but he will be found in short order absent the people of the Persian Gulf modernizing rapidly.

I hope he’s wrong about that, but I fear that he’s right.

MARK STEYN ON JOHN KERRY: “These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney’s lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush’s curriculum vitae than on the central question of the age.” Read the whole thing, as they say.

UPDATE: Arthur Chrenkoff on the weakness of Kerry’s Euro-coalition:

European leaders must secretly love the Bush Presidency, as it allows them to do nothing (which is the usual European tactic) and at the same time feel very righteous about it. . . .

The Europeans are like teenage children of a divorce, who prefer to spend time with their Democrat mother rather than a strict Republican dad, not because they like the mother more (dude, parents they like, suck, or what?) but because she won’t force them to take out the trash and clean the dishes. No wonder the father is increasingly thinking that his 59 year old teenager should finally move out of home and start supporting himself.

Indeed.

CHARLIE BOOKER’S GUARDIAN COLUMN (noted here earlier), with its shout-out to Lee Harvey Oswald, etc., has drawn this correction from The Guardian:

The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer.

“Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action – an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind.”

So there you are. The column has been replaced by the correction, but you can still see it, for the moment at least, here.

UPDATE: James Lileks: “Look, you lackwits: we’re not that stupid. Of course it was an ironic joke, at least if you define “joke” as “mirthless adolescent japery along the order of drawing a Hitler moustache on your teacher’s yearbook picture.” What’s noteworthy is that it got through in the first place. Slid through like mercury down a mirror, probably. No one gave it a second thought. Stands to reason any sensible person would want the tosser done away with, no?”

I DON’T THINK I’D BLAME JOHN KERRY FOR THIS:

Rosie O’Donnell addressed a nearly vacant CLUB OVATION Saturday night in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida during a get-out-the-vote rally for Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry. . . .

The debacle came one night after only a couple hundred came out to see Cher rally for Kerry at Miami Beach’s CROBAR disco.

I mean, honestly, how many people can there be who want to hear either of those two talk about politics?

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON ANTISEMITISM ON THE LEFT in Australia, with possible application elsewhere.

UPDATE: Some comments, with a Thomas Friedman angle, here.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.

These neurons are growing on top of a multi-electrode array and form a living “brain” that’s hooked up to a flight simulator on a desktop computer. When information on the simulated aircraft’s horizontal and vertical movements are fed into the brain by stimulating the electrodes, the neurons fire away in patterns that are then used to control its “body” — the simulated aircraft. . . .

Currently the brain has learned enough to be able to control the pitch and roll of the simulated F-22 fighter jet in weather conditions ranging from blue skies to hurricane-force winds. Initially the aircraft drifted, because the brain hadn’t figured out how to control its “body,” but over time the neurons learned to stabilize the aircraft to a straight, level flight.

Just in case you forgot we were living in the 21st Century. More here.

VIDEOBLOGGING UPDATE: I’ve had poor experience with small, cheap MPEG4 videocams. But this one from Phillips (it’s also an MP3 player!) seems to be getting good reviews on Amazon. The size is nice, and the price (about $200) is good. On the other hand, my cheap Sony still camera isn’t a whole lot more expensive, and I strongly suspect that the video is better — though it won’t hold 25 minutes’ worth on one chip. Adam Keiper is managing to do his Nanotech Conference videoblogging using the same Sony camera that I have. And I just noticed that he was inspired by some of my videoblog envangelism:

There is a secondary goal here, too: I’m going to try to test the limits and usefulness of liveblogging, or newsblogging, or conferenceblogging (an unwieldy neologism). Professor Glenn Reynolds, the InstaPundit, among others, has pushed the concept of bloggers as news collectors, and I hope to put that idea to the test. So this is a sort of media experiment, too.

Looks like a successful one to me, and I hope that more people will emulate his approach.

UPDATE: Reader Melody emails:

You might want to check out the little Canon Powershot S410 for this purpose. It’s a 4.0 mp digital still camera about the size of a cigarette pack, but takes pretty good video with surprisingly decent audio quality. My 20 yo daughter purchsed this for herself recently. She has the 256 ultra chip — she tells me ultra is important because it’s faster — but says they also have a 1 gig chip for it. Go to thenitelite.net under “media” then “Summer of Darkness” at Trees, Dallas is an example of some video shot with this camera but by her 14 year old sister. It was the first time she’d used the camera. They recorded several songs in their entirety, but only uploaded this partial one because it was shorter and she didn’t want to spend all evening uploading to her friend’s site. It wasn’t the best of the video they shot that evening.

I agree about the Sony cybershots. We have two different models in our household, and they’ve been excellent little cameras for the price. Two years
being used by teenaged daughters, and never a single problem. They seem rather slow, though. Neither of ours gets audio with the video.

Some time ago you mentioned buying an all weather or waterproof camera for someone deploying to Iraq. I’d be interested in seeing an update on how that has worked out. We’re considering purchasing one for a gift for use in that environment, so obviously it needs to be tough and dustproof.

Yeah, that was this Pentax. I’ll see if I can get a review posted on that. The Canon Powershots are great little cameras, but they don’t take AA batteries in a pinch, which I think is important when you’re trying to do blog-journalism. But the concert video — and sound — is pretty good!

And here’s more from Justin Katz. (Katz link bad before — fixed now. Sorry.)

MORE: Reader Jay Kim corrects me on the PowerShots — well, one of them, anyway:

The Canon PowerShot S1 is my video camera of choice. It costs ~400, and has a video mode of 640×480, with 10X zoom, and image stabilization. 3.2 MP stills, too. Can take CF cards up to 4GB, AND AA BATTERIES!

Cool. And it’s about $350. Doesn’t look easily pocketable, though.

MORE OF THOSE ANALOG BROWNSHIRTS: They’re everywhere this year, it seems.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Russell Wardlow says that the Rethuglikkkans are dropping the ball here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related observations here. And, even more pointedly, here, at RealClearPolitics.

IS TOM MAGUIRE THE “FAIR PRINCE” THAT Megan McArdle was looking for? I think so!

UPDATE: Or maybe this guy is Megan’s “Prince” — er, at least I think it’s a guy.

HEH:

To Bush-bashers, it may be the most infuriating revelation yet from the military records of the two presidential candidates: the young George W. Bush probably had a higher I.Q. than did the young John Kerry.

The second-most infuriating thing must be having to read this in the Sunday New York Times . . .

MORT ZUCKERMAN notes the overlooked parts of the Duelfer Report:

There is, in fact, a much darker side, and here it is:

Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq’s banned weapons programs, including nuclear weapons.

Saddam was determined to develop ballistic missiles and tactical chemical weapons when the U.N. sanctions were either lifted or corroded.

Saddam retained the industrial equipment to help restart these programs, having increased from 1996 to 2002 his military industrial spending 40-fold and his technical military research 80-fold. Even while U.N. weapons inspectors were in Iraq, Saddam’s scientists were performing deadly experiments on human guinea pigs in secret labs.

To what end? The overlooked section of the Duelfer report could not have put it any clearer: “Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agents in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two.” While Saddam had abandoned his biological weapons programs, he retained the scientists and other technicians “needed to restart a potential biological weapons program,” and he “intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems [that is, missiles] and . . . the systems potentially were for WMD.” . . .

With the complicity of the U.N. officials allegedly involved in Saddam’s Oil-for-Food bribery scheme, can there be any doubt that the sanctions would have eventually disappeared?

The French worked at every turn to frustrate efforts to hold Saddam’s feet to the fire. A French legislator even told an Iraqi intelligence official that Paris would veto any U.N. resolution authorizing war against Iraq. In fact, France threatened to do just that. But for what, exactly? Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, told Duelfer that “French oil companies wanted to secure two large oil contracts.” National bribery on top of individual bribery–now, that’s something you don’t see every day.

Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “Sanctions were in free fall . . . . If not for 9/11, I don’t think they would exist today” and described Saddam as “a grave threat” to the Middle East and to the entire world.

Glad to see this stuff getting some attention outside of the blogosphere.

JOHN LEO RESPONDS TO ANDREW SULLIVAN:

But consider the background music here. “Even within the Democratic Party” is an acknowledgment that a good many Americans don’t trust the Democrats to run a war on terror. “Has to be a bipartisan affair” blinks the message that the Democrats, as a national party, often seem detached from that war, not just from the campaign in Iraq.

Many of the doubts that hover over Sullivan’s case for Kerry are rooted in the value system widely shared among Democrats: Most people are basically good; wars are caused not by evil motives but by misunderstandings that can be talked out; conflict can be overcome by more tolerance and examining of our own faults or by taking disputes to the United Nations. As a personal creed, these benign and humble attitudes are admirable. As the foundation of a policy to confront terrorists who wish to blow up our cities, they are alarming.

These doubts explain why Kerry’s two oddest verbal slips–“nuisance” and “global test” –have resonated.

Read the whole thing.

ANALOG BROWNSHIRTS: These are the headlines at Drudge right now:

Early voting brings cries of bullying…

Bush/Cheney Cincinnati headquarters robbed…

Republican Party headquarters in Flagstaff vandalized…

UK GUARDIAN: ‘John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr – where are you now that we need you?’…

Sigh.

LAPHAMIZATION UPDATE: Images of the covers of the Evan Thomas election book, which goes both ways.

INSTAPUNDIT CORRESPONDENT DAN CASSARO sends these photos and a report from a Bush rally in Jacksonville, which looks to have been well-attended:

Taken with my Nikon 5700, fyi….

The original site for the rally was the Jacksonville Landing, a riverside location that would hold, at most, a few thousand. Demand for tickets was so high they moved it to Alltel stadium (where the Jacksonville Jaguars play). Attendance was estimated at 40,000. We passed a group of Kerry supporters on the way in, maybe 50 at most.

First is a wide shot of the stadium, they had the top levels blocked off. Not a lot of empty seats anywhere. When GWB came out, the noise was incredible. That’s him in the blue shirt at the microphone.

Second is the lone protester I saw leaving the stadium, with a with the word “War” on one side, and moral equivalence on the other. I don’t think he was old enough to vote either way….

Finally is the moonbat with the “Utilize Poland!” sign. He wouldn’t answer questions, he just kept shouting “Poland!” I don’t get it. Nobody else did, either.

PS Air Force One made a low, slow pass over the stadium on the way in… an awesome sight!

[LATER: Air Force One pics here and here]. More photos below.

I don’t get the Poland bit either. Maybe he meant this?

UPDATE: ConfigSysBoy has posted a recap (“The Babes for Bush phenomenon is alive and well in Jacksonville. . . Speaking of which, the turnout today among the 18-30 demo was absolutely staggering.”) and image gallery from the Jacksonville rally. And for those few who insist on Big Media coverage, here are some pictures from the Times-Union.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME?