THERE’S A NEW BELMONT CLUB URL: Be sure to note it, and to visit regularly.

MICKEY KAUS notes reports that Kerry is finally going to get around to signing his Form 180 and observes:

Kerry’s military records, when fully opened, better show something at least mildly embarrassing! If they’re completely innocuous, why couldn’t Kerry have signed Form 180 a year ago and cleared up many of the rumors that helped sink his candidacy (and his party)?

Kerry does seem to have maneuvered himself into a lose/lose situation.

THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY CARNIVAL OF THE CATS celebrates the joys of catblogging.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF LOOKS AT WHAT YOU CAN DISCOVER by reading past the headline: “That is, more than half of the people killed in insurgent attacks were the insurgents themselves.”

Another casualty: The credibility of news organizations, who are, perhaps deliberately, missing the story again.

I’M NOT A REGULAR READER OF ANTIWAR.COM, but via Clark Stooksbury I see that they’re involved in a copyright dustup. I think that AntiWar.com has the better of the law here, but I think that web etiquette is being violated all around. I think it’s OK to link somebody’s image if you’re not causing them bandwidth problems, but I think that it’s churlish not to take the link down if they complain. On the other hand, it’s also churlish to complain too readily.

VARIOUS PEOPLE seem to think I should have an opinion of the Terry Schiavo case. I’ve tried, but I really just don’t. I think I’ll let Randall Terry and James Wolcott fight this one out without me. If you want more, Sissy Willis seems to be providing some pretty balanced coverage.

UPDATE: Reader Harvey Schneider emails: “You have no opinion on Terri Shiavo!!! Good, because neither do I. Other than it sounds complicated, tragic…and really none of my business.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel.

SYRIAN HACKERS are outsurfing the Mukhabarat.

IRAQ VS. JORDAN — Austin Bay comments:

Iraqis are sick and tired of Zarqawi’s and Al Qaeda’s murder and destruction and they want other Arab Muslim countries to take strong action. This hatred for Zarqawi isn’t a new phenomenon – I heard similar comments last summer in Baghdad. Now –after the Iraqi elections– the Iraqi people feel confident enough to demonstrate in the streets. That means they attract cameras– even Al Jazeerah’s.

The demonstrations are another huge political defeat for Al Qaeda. The demonstrations make the point that Al Qaeda kills Arabs, Al Qaeda kills Muslims. Washington fretted -and quite correctly– that the coalition was losing the “information war.” Since January 30th, the Iraqis have been winning that war.

Indeed.

SIEMENS HAS BOUGHT Knoxville imaging company CTI Molecular Imaging for $1 billion. One of my former students is CTI’s general counsel; I hope he made out well.

WHAT HATH MAUREEN DOWD WROUGHT? DAVE WINER is standing up for white male pride.

THE F.E.C. AND BLOGS: Here’s a transcript of my talk at the Politics Online conference last week.

TIM WORSTALL HAS POSTED his regular BritBlog roundup. Don’t miss it.

VERMONT’S BATTLE CRY: Heh.

UKRAINE UPDATE: It’s hard to deal with the previous administration’s misconduct, sometimes.

TWO YEARS LATER, WAS THE IRAQ WAR WORTH IT? Iraqi blogger Husayn Uthman writes:

So you ask me, Husayn, was it worth it. What have you gotten? What has Iraq acheived? These are questions I get a lot.

To may outsiders, like those who protested last year, who will protest today. This was a fools errand, it brought nothing but death and destruction. I am sheltered in Iraq, but I know how the world feels, how people have come to either love or hate Bush, as though heis the emobdiement of this war. As though this war is part of Bush, they forget the over twenty million Iraqis, they forget the Middle Easterners, they forget the average person on the street, the average man with the average dream.

Ask him if it was worth it. Ask him what is different. Ask him if he would go through it again, go ahead ask him, ask me, many of you have.

Now I answer you, I answer you on behalf of myself, and my countrymen. I dont care what your news tells you, what your television and newspapers say, this is how we feel. Despite all that has happened. Despite all the hurt, the pain, blood, sweat and tears. These two years have given us hope we never had.

Egyptian blogger Big Pharaoh comments: “I believe it should be published in newspapers worldwide. Reading about Husayn’s feeling is special because he lost his cousin in the Hilla terrorist bombing.”

UPDATE: Meanwhile, this antiwar protest in Rhode Island gets a rather negative review from American blogger Kelli Sorrells. And don’t miss this report from Dean Esmay, either.

MORE STUFF TO WORRY ABOUT:

The UN says Ethiopia has moved over 30,0000 troops up to the Eritrean border, most of them near the disputed town of Badme. This breaks down to approximately six new divisions. Ethiopian infantry divisions have roughly 5000 troops. Ethiopia now has 90,000 troops in the area. This UN report follows a series of reports from mid-December 2004 that Ethiopia was reinforcing units on its side of the Temporary Security Zone (TSZ) created by UNMEE (United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea). Other sources indicate Ethiopia is also sending new military units the Somali-Ethiopian border. Ethiopia has indicated it will offer troops to any new Somalia peacekeeping effort , either under the auspices of the UN or the African Union. Many Somali clans, however, have long-standing disputes with Ethiopia and claim that Ethiopia has been meddling in Somali affairs. This could get interesting.

Eritrea is mobilizing, too.

I GUESS IT REALLY IS 1978 IN EUROPE, as the latest Consumer Reports shows further declines in relative car quality:

Our survey also shows that improvement in the reliability of U.S. vehicles was no fluke. American cars and trucks continue to edge closer to Japanese and Korean makes. European vehicles continue to be among the least reliable overall.

I don’t know whether automotive manufacturing quality is a marker for overall social/economic health — probably not, or the British would do better — but the parallel to the U.S. in the 1970s is interesting.

PUBLIUS HAS ANOTHER HUGE LEBANON ROUNDUP POSTED:

A lot has happened since the last update. Lahoud was already weak, but now he is even in the position of possible resignation. Karami is thinking of resigning again, and Hizb’allah’s hold is weaker as well. The most startling news over the past couple of days has been a car bomb, which is roundly being said to be a “goodbye present” from the Syrian services.

Loads of links and information, so don’t miss it.

UPDATE: GatewayPundit reports riots and wide-scale unrest in Kyrgyzstan.

HERE’S MORE CRITICISM OF THE LANCET STUDY mentioned below, from a statistician-blogger.

GREG DJEREJIAN notes some positive developments in Iraq. And don’t miss the P.S.

EUGENE VOLOKH has changed his mind on the advisability of painful punishments — or at least on the ability of the legal system to mete them out fairly as opposed to their abstract fairness.

I think that’s right. I feel somewhat that way about capital punishment. I’m utterly unpersuaded by the argument that there is something uniquely immoral about state-sanctioned killing. (At its core, the nation-state is all about killing; everything else is window-dressing). But I’m quite persuaded, as I’ve written before, by what Charles Black called “the inevitability of caprice and mistake” in the application of the death penalty.

UPDATE: Some readers wonder what I meant about the nation-state being all about killing. That seemed pretty obvious to me: We have nation-states because they’re more effective at focusing violence against those who threaten their authority than other human organizations. That’s why nation-states have pretty much taken over the game of doing things via violence. They don’t have a monopoly, of course, but they owe their preeminence to their success in this regard, not to their other characteristics. As I say, this seems quite obvious to me.

I FINISHED CHARLES STROSS’S The Atrocity Archives last night, and also read the interesting essay in the afterword about the relationship between Lovecraftian horror and the Cold War spy thriller. (Stross, like me, is a Len Deighton fan.)

For those wondering why I haven’t reported on Accelerando yet, it’s because I got it in electronic form, and I just haven’t been comfortable reading it on the laptop. I guess I need to print it out.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up! I should post some new ones, too. When I was in Washington last week, several people approached me to say they’d tried the “Insta-Chicken” recipe with good results. I hope I’ll be doing more interesting cooking when things settle down here, which I hope will be in the not-too-distant future.

BRAVO TO THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH for taking a sensible position in defense of bloggers:

Whether one has journalistic protections should depend less on job title and more on function. Anyone, like Mr. Ciarelli, who gathers news on a subject of public interest and disseminates it to a waiting audience is entitled to the protection of a journalist. ThinkSecret has 2.5 million to 5 million page views a month.

A few years ago, there was an absurd debate about whether online reporters should have the same status as print reporters. The argument about bloggers will seem as frivolous – and irrelevant – in a few years.

Already, bloggers have played a key role in a number of important news stories, including Sen. Trent Lott’s racist remarks at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s birthday, CBS’s flawed report on the president’s military record and Eason Jordan’s resignation as a CNN vice president for briefly suggesting U.S. soldiers might have targeted journalists.

The democratization of the news media through the blogosphere is the inevitable product of technological development. The principle of the public’s right to know doesn’t depend on who is gathering the news. The American people are entitled to read and hear all of the information that enterprising newshounds, including bloggers, legally can pry from the clutches of corporate and government officials.

Like I said, bravo!

I’M QUITE BUSY with family stuff this morning. But Tim Blair has a roundup of interesting items that should keep you from being bored in the meantime. Dennis Raimondo? It doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?