HOLIDAY-TRAVEL HELL: I remember seeing the New York Air desk at Washington National literally overrun by a mob once. They deserved it, too. Read this story and see if you think it was deserved here. Excerpt: “One thing for sure is that I’ll remember this Thanksgiving experience long after US Airways is out of business.” Kind of like I remember New York Air . . . .

THE CARNIVAL OF THE CATS is up. So is Haveil Havalim.

UPDATE: Also the Carnival of Debt Reduction. And for something different, check out the Carnival of the Mobilists. There’s also the Carnival of the Insanities and the Carnival of Marketing.

And here’s a question: I love digital cameras, but is the About.com Carnival of Digital Cameras just a cheap traffic-getting tool for a corporate pseudo-blog, or is it a genuine item worth linking regularly? Your opinions solicited.

IT’S A TWOFER: Don Surber hosts RINO Sightings (NSFW version) and the Carnival of the Vanities.

I BLAME JOHN ASHCROFT:

OAK RIDGE – When Oak Ridge High School Principal Becky Ervin ordered the seizure of the latest school newspaper, she unleashed a controversy that’s still unfolding.

An article detailing various birth control methods and a feature about students with tattoos and body piercings triggered the seizure.

School officials searched teachers’ classrooms and desks after hours to confiscate copies of the paper, a teacher and a student say.

If only they were this diligent about teaching math.

UPDATE: This comment on the AtomicTumor blog posts what it says is the article in question. Looks pretty harmless to me.

PLAME UPDATE: “A second Time magazine reporter has agreed to cooperate in the CIA leak case and will testify about her discussions with Karl Rove’s attorney, a sign that prosecutors are still exploring charges against the White House aide.” Or somebody, anyway.

IT’S A REVERSE-VIETNAM: On Reliable Sources I said that the Plame scandal was a reverse-Watergate, with the press, not the White House, keeping the important secrets about what happened. But looking at the transcript, I see that Iraq is also a reverse Vietnam, as made clear in this statement from UPI correspondent Pamela Hess:

KURTZ: Welcome back to RELIABLE SOURCES.

Pam Hess, during Vietnam U.S. officials were often accused of distorting or even lying to the press to try to make it look like the war effort was going better than it was. When you were in Iraq did you feel like you were getting the straight story?

HESS: Certainly from the militarily I did. They have no interest in cooking the books, as it were, they — they understand that they were blamed for Vietnam and what happened, and they don’t want that blame again.

They want people to understand the kind of enemy that they are facing and how long it’s going to take. And frankly, most of them said to me, “Please go back and tell them not to pull us out because we are finally at a point where we have enough people here now on the ground between soldiers and Iraqis that we can actually start doing some good and start turning things around. And if you pull us out, we’re just going to be back here three years from now.”

KURTZ: More optimistic, at least than some of the journalists.

HESS: Yes.

(See it on video here.) In Vietnam, the brass talked happy-talk, the press talked to grunts and reported that the war was going worse than we were told. But now it’s Americans who are talking to the grunts, and, as StrategyPage noted last year, getting a different picture of how the war is going:

So you don’t have to wait for the official version of what’s going on, or for reporters on the scene to get their stories to the folks back home. The troops send email, or pick up the phone, sometimes a cell phone, and call. This has caused a lot of confusion, because the media reports of what’s happening are often at odds with what the troops are reporting. This has been particularly confusing in a year where there’s a presidential election race going on. The Democrats decided to attack the way the war on terror, and particularly the actions in Iraq, was being fought. Part of that approach involved making the situation at the front sound really, really bad. But the troops over there seemed to be reporting a different war. And when troops came home, they were amazed at what they saw in the newspapers and electronic media. Politics and reality don’t mix.

It’s not surprising, then, that the more connection people have to the war, the better they think things are going. That’s precisely the opposite of what we saw in Vietnam, of course.

By the way, I often link Dunnigan’s StrategyPage, but if you’re interested in this kind of stuff you should really check out his books. There are quite a few, but I particularly recommend his primer on all things military, How to Make War, and his book on special forces, The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of U.S. Warfare.

While I was in New York I managed to have breakfast with Dunnigan and Austin Bay, and enjoyed listening in on their conversation. I wish we saw more of that sort of thing in major media — but then it wouldn’t be a reverse-Vietnam, would it?

UPDATE: This seems different, too:

Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale — with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale. . . .

Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to “gain a partisan political advantage.”

It’s just not 1969, however much some people might wish otherwise.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein has more: “I’d add that this latest poll—coming as it does on the heels of a forceful Administration counterattack against their critics—suggests what we’ve always known, anyway: down deep, most Americans are optimistic, and will treat with suspicion those who preach US weakness and failure and dishonesty.”

MORE: My colleague Tom Plank, who was leading a platoon in Vietnam while I was learning to ride a two-wheeler, emails:

I saw your post on Reverse Vietnam. I am deeply skeptical of the claim that the military misled the press or the American people about the Vietnam War. It may be that the top political leaders downplayed the costs of the war, and perhaps senior military officers went along with this, but I thought the reporting on the war was nevertheless much more negative than what was actually going on. The idea of the press reporting objectively on the war is I think another urban myth.

Two classic examples: the 1968 Tet Offensive, reported as a great defeat for the US, but which was a victory for the US and which was a devastating loss for the Viet Cong and NVA (essentially resulted in the destruction of the indigenous South Vietnamese Viet Cong).

The second example is the seige at Khe San. This was reported as a defeat for the US, with lots of comparisons to Dien Bien Phu, but the several month long seige at Khe San resulted in the destruction of several NVA divisions at the cost of several hundred US troops. By 1970, the US had defeated the NVA (the indigenous Viet Cong had long been pretty much out of the picture).

The real failure in Vietnam was not to invest in the development of a truly representative democratic government in the south and commit to protect that government from invasion from the north. Of course, then we were primarily interested in fighting communism instead of developing democracy and self determination. In Iraq, I think we have learned to foster self determination, local style.

Well, good point. I was referring to the conventional narrative above, and tried to be properly noncommittal in my phrasing: “the press talked to grunts and reported that the war was going worse than we were told.” But in truth, the extensive, and sometimes obviously deliberate misrepresentation of this war has caused me to revise my confidence in other reporting in the past sharply downward.

Another favorite bit from the Reliable Sources transcript, by the way, is this from Paul Krugman: “If Walter Cronkite were alive — sorry, he is alive.” Heh. Cronkite remains alive, and was most recently heard emitting Grandpa-Simpsonesque complaints about the Internet. Colby Cosh’s valediction: “he seems to lack the vestigial humility one might demand of someone whose preeminence in American life is long vanished, and was based mostly on the parts of his career spent reading other people’s words into a camera lens.” Krugman’s Cronkite-nostalgia is predictable, though, and predictably misplaced.

IRELAND VS. THE SCANDINAVIAN MODEL: Some interesting data at Brussels Journal.

THIS WEEK’S BLOG MELA is up!

THE MANOLO offers some holiday-shopping fashion principles.

MORE ON GENERAL MOTORS’ TROUBLES, over at GlennReynolds.com.

I’LL BE ON CNN’S “RELIABLE SOURCES” in a little while, talking about the week’s events.

UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has the video.

APPARENTLY THE ATTACK DOCUMENTARY DIDN’T WORK — or maybe the counter-documentary did. . . . Anyway, there’s this news about Wal-Mart:

The world’s largest retailer said Saturday that it expects to post a solid 4.3 percent gain in same-store sales for November, helped by better-than expected sales during the post-Thanksgiving day shopping rush. That’s at the midpoint of its growth forecast of 3 to 5 percent. The sales results cover the four-week period through Friday.

Sales seem to be good in general. That’s good economic news, I guess.

PLAN B: I THINK THAT DRUG APPROVAL should be based on whether drugs are safe and effective, not on political considerations.

Here’s more from the GAO.

WHAT FRANCE NEEDS: More diversity.

MORE CIGARETTE PHOTOSHOPPING, courtesy of HarperCollins. Yes, it’s silly, but in a slightly creepy way.

HE WAS FOR IT BEFORE HE WAS AGAINST IT: Al Gore on “extraordinary rendition.”

UPDATE: More on posturing here. (Via Don Surber).

MADD PEOPLE STAFFING SOBRIETY CHECKPOINTS? Sounds like an abandonment of law enforcement responsibility for the sake of politics.

MIDGE DECTER, spiritual mother.

NAZIS. I HATE THOSE GUYS. But apparently the folks at Teen People are more flexible in their attitudes.

UPDATE: Dean Esmay isn’t surprised.

HERE’S AN AMERICAN EXPAT who’s blogging on the Harbin disaster in China. There’s also a roundup here.

HENRY FRIENDLY ON ABORTION: A roundup.

SO I CAME DOWNSTAIRS and my sister-in-law was laughing out loud at this. Understandable, but that screws my plans to give her one for Christmas. . . .

UPDATE: That produced this email from (I assume — the email address is one of those that gives no information) Bryan Fuller Tim Minear*:

I know, I know, I know! Give her this! And though I was the exec producer, I swear I don’t make a dime. But I can promise she’ll dig it. If not, I’ll personally supply Firefly.

Firefly isn’t up her alley. More like stuff off the Independent Film Channel. Though the main thing that this seems to have in common with Firefly is that the fans liked it but Fox seemed to go out of its way to kill it.

* He emailed almost immediately to correct me.

UPDATE: Reader Mara Schiffren emails:

Tim Minear gives you excellent advice. Wonderfalls is wonderfully quirky and funny. And delightful and witty. And most of all, as is rare on tv, intelligent.

And it’s completely different from Firefly or Angel or The Inside, which are his other recent shows. Of all of them, it’s closest to the sensibility of both the IFC and Lileks (in its humor).

And if not for your sister in law, check it out yourself. The Instawife might like it as well, as it develops intelligent psychological portrayals of its characters.

Actually, I ordered it last night.

COSTA RICANS MARCH FOR FREE TRADE: Now if we could just get people to do that here.

UPDATE: Here’s more on why Costa Ricans are angry.

JAMES JOYNER looks at gaming the TTLB ecosystem. This takes me back to the halcyon days of MP3.com, when people had all sorts of logrolling schemes to boost their chart positions. In the comments, Steve Verdon predicts more efforts to outwit N.Z. Bear’s system. As the ecologist Thomas Ray said, “Every successful system accumulates parasites.” So I guess the blogosphere ecosystem is a success!

UPDATE: N.Z. Bear emails:

The hue and cry James thoughtfully responded to in his post isn’t a reaction to a new revelation that people are figuring out how to game the Ecosystem. It’s a reaction to the fact that I’m figuring out ways how to stop them. There will always be new approaches people will try to artificially inflate their rank in any system such as mine, but believe it or not, I’m actually quite optimistic about staying, if not one step ahead, then at least not far behind those who would try to rig the system in their favor.

But I need help: the blogosphere is a community, and the more the community as a whole shuns stunts such as “open trackback parties” that exist for no reason other than to exchange link counts, the less I’ll have to worry about figuring out the latest algorithmic way to filter such exploits out. I can handle the obvious out-for-profit spam blogs — it’s the “real” bloggers who like to skirt the grey areas that I need the community’s help to dissuade from bad behaviour.

Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: LaShawn Barber has thoughts, too.

SHIFTING POSITIONS at The New Yorker.