THIS SHOULD BE INTERESTING: “A federal judge has ordered Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.) to testify in a defamation case related to the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in 2005, according to the Associated Press.”

DOES BERNANKE KNOW ABOUT THIS? “The Dollar Aisle has abandoned all pretense. Some items now go for $2.50, which contravenes the very foundational premise of a dollar aisle.”

THE BEST THING WRITTEN ABOUT the Ahmadinejad visit.

NEWS FROM COLOMBIA, where FARC isn’t doing that well.

HSUPOCRISY: Talking reform but taking cash.

CAPTURING WAR ON FILM: This is not a trailer.

JAMIE KIRCHICK ON MUGABE IN the Los Angeles Times: “Those who say Zimbabwe’s president was once a hero are fooling themselves.”

IS HILLARY the new old Al Gore?

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, leading queer theorist?

UPDATE: Somewhat related item, here.

NEWS FROM UKRAINE: “Yulia Tymochenko has said she is preparing to become the next prime minister of Ukraine after exit polls gave her more than 30 per cent of the vote in the country’s legislative elections.”

IT’S NOT A “SMEAR” — it’s better understood as “battlespace preparation.” And the target is the traditional media; the intent is to limit the ability of people like Limbaugh or O’Reilly to drive stories in the mainstream news as we get closer to the election. Expect more of this, with more targets.

Of course, it’s also generated some blowback.

UPDATE: More here.

MORE: Desperately seeking “Betray-us.”

HEH. Indeed.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: More trouble for Ted Stevens:

The 83-year-old senator is under scrutiny in a far-reaching Alaska corruption investigation. The FBI has been looking into whether Stevens received illegal gifts from a once powerful energy contractor, Veco Corp. Last week, a former Alaska House speaker was convicted of taking bribes from the same company. And during that former legislator’s trial, bruising details of the bribery scandal—which has engulfed several former state lawmakers, including Stevens’s son—have come to light.

Chipping away. No charges have been filed against Stevens or his son, and the senator maintains his innocence, as does his son, Ben Stevens. But the recent revelations appear to be chipping away at the elder Stevens’s support base. GOP Gov. Sarah Palin has called on Stevens to explain himself, and one independent poll taken this summer showed that 44 percent of voters in Anchorage had a negative view of the senator.

Stevens should retire now. But I doubt that he will.

THAT’S PROP-A-TAINMENT! “What accounts for Hollywood’s failure to capture the reality of war? . . . Tinseltown’s ‘moralistic monkey has climbed back up on its shoulder,’ resulting in films that have nothing to do with combat and everything to do with politics.”

Actually I think it’s just evidence that this prediction (“War focuses issues in ways peace cannot.”) was overoptimistic.

I GUESS IT’S A HYBRID, OF SORTS: A human / electric bike with an electric-powered range of 62 miles and a top speed of 28 mph.

A GAY LOVE SONG for Ahmadinejad. “I know you say that there’s no gays in Iran — but you’re in New York now, baby!” I hope that the image of Ahmadinejad in a slinky red dress atop the piano gets plenty of circulation with the folks back home.

THIS IS INTERESTING:

A KEY suspect in the alleged plot to mount an attack in Germany on the scale of 9/11 is on the run in Britain, German security officials disclosed yesterday.

Scotland Yard counterterrorism detectives are hunting the man, who escaped from Germany after a plot to explode bombs at Frankfurt airport and a US airbase. The collective power of the bombs would have exceeded those in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005.

The plot was foiled on September 4 when three men were arrested at a rented holiday apartment near the central German town of Kassel. Police recovered chemicals and bomb-making equipment which investigators believe would have led to the biggest loss of life since the 9/11 attacks in America six years ago. . . . Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s interior minister, revealed last week that the three arrested men had acquired detonators that originated from Syria and had received direct orders to act from operatives in Pakistan. “We know that there is a clear network, highly conspiratorial,” he said.

Read the whole thing. And note this earlier report: “The prime suspect in a German terror plot that allegedly intended to blow up hundreds of people may have had contact with Mohammed Atta, who hijacked one of the planes that was flown into the Twin Towers.”

UPDATE: Beware of the fear-mongering.

CAR LUST: Remembering the Plymouth Super Bird: “The Super Bird came with the stock 440, the legendary 440 Six Pack, or the epic 426 Hemi. Power was not a problem.” I used to see one of these driven around Knoxville occasionally, but I’m sure it’s been snapped up by some collector in the past few years.

DOUG BAND QUESTIONS, from Mickey Kaus.

MORE ON the Marines in Oakland.

HSUTZPAH: “Fund-raiser Norman Hsu: Dismiss rap, give back my $2M bail.”

BLOG LIKE A PIRATE: Corsair interacts with the folks from ReputationDefender.

I’VE GOT A REVIEW of Mark Penn’s book, Microtrends, in the New York Post magazine. You can read it online here.

MORE ON THE SHOCKING lack of homosexuals in the Arab world: “It may come as a surprise to Columbia faculty and students to learn that a current professor at Columbia has argued that there are no homosexuals in the entire Arab world, except for a few who have been brainwashed into believing they have a homosexual identity by an aggressive Western homosexual missionizing movement he calls ‘Gay International.'”

UPDATE: A reader emails with a splendid idea:

Maybe we should embrace Ahmadinejad’s view on gays in the Middle East, with a Darwinian twist.

Why aren’t there gays in the Middle East? Because, when Middle Easterners realize that they’re gay, they do the right thing from Ahmadinejad’s point of view and become suicide bombers, or they join the Revolutionary Guard and walk through mine fields to clear them for the troops behind. So Ahmadinejad is right; gayness is slowly being eliminated from the population. It also explains where suicide bombers come from. Remember those Taleban-in-eyeliner photos? Everything is all falling into place.

Let’s go with it: Maybe a gay rights group could adopt a few suicide bombers, post their martyrdom videos and celebrate their presumed gayness posthumously. I suppose people who want to become suicide bombers for other reasons could object that this will tarnish their sacrifice, but they are either bigots or, more likely, protesting a bit too much, don’t you think?

Indeed.

SO I’VE HAD MY JVC HDTV for most of a year, and I’ve been very happy with it. My only complaint is that the HDMI connections are in a different — and hard to see — place from the rest of the connections and when I set it up I spent longer than I should have looking at the back and scratching my head. (The manual shows the HDMI connections, but only in close-up, so that didn’t help.) But the picture’s great, the connectivity’s great, and it’s been completely trouble-free.

This information is, of course, largely useless since almost a year is ages in consumer electronics time. But the new Consumer Reports has a big roundup with this unsurprising good news: “Bigger, better, cheaper — those three words sum up the major trends in LCD and plasma TVs this year.” If only everything got better this fast. That’s one reason I like gadget-blogging; it’s inherently cheerful because things pretty much always are better than last year.

There is, of course, a downside to constant improvement: Last year my TV was the one they liked best; this year it didn’t make the list at all, and this 50″ Panasonic plasma got the nod as producing the best picture they’d ever seen on a TV. And for less money than I paid for my TV last year . . . .

Looking at the reviews, though, the big news seems to be the price drop for smaller TVs in the under-40 inch category. They recommend this 37″ Olevia, and it’s only 800 bucks. For those interested in a TV in this size range, I’d say waiting no longer makes sense, as prices can’t fall that much farther. I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer for mine, though: Yeah, I could have gotten a bigger, better TV for the same money by waiting (or the TV I bought last year for less money this year), but the one I got was more than adequate for my needs, and I’ve had it for the past year. That’s worth something too. The other news is that last year people were saying that plasma TVs were on the way out, but this year the Consumer Reports people seem surprisingly bullish on them.

UPDATE: Reader Darren Miller emails about the 37″ Olevia:

I got one this past March, but it appears to be a slightly down-version of the one you linked to. I checked out all the reviews in advance and have to agree:

1. The remote *does* look cheap. It works, but it just looks cheap.
2. The tuner can take 3-5 seconds to change channels when you press the CH+ or CH- key, or when keying in a channel.

Other than that, I really like it.

Can’t beat the price. Older HDTV posts here and here — but bear in mind that the advice is even more dated than mine. And lots of HDTV questions answered, from the folks at Popular Mechanics.

Also, in response to another reader question, as I noted last year, I got my TV locally from H.H. Gregg, which matched the Amazon price. I think it’s probably fine to order ’em from Amazon — obviously, lots of people do — but I kind of liked having somewhere local to complain to if something breaks, though that’s less and less of an issue as the technology matures.