Tom Wolfe once wrote a terrific article on what it's like to land an F-4 Phantom onto a Navy aircraft carrier. In one memorable paragraph, he wrote that the pilots referred to it as landing on constantly heaving greasy skillet.

President Bush will be landing on the deck of the USS Lincoln in an S-3B Viking tomorrow. Patrick Ruffini has the details, and a description of his own landing, onto the deck of the USS John F. Kennedy.

SLUGGING THROUGH COMMUTER LANES: Terrific article by Radley Balko on how the free market system is beating bureaucratic communist, err...commuter lanes.

For my take on the evils of commuter lanes, check out this article from April of 2001.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE MEN GONE ON CAMPUS? Orrin Judd has some thoughts--but not a brainstorm. Definitely not a brainstorm!

DEEP WITHIN THE LAND OF THE ROCOCO MARXISTS: Steven Den Beste writes of academia's pomo crowd:

It's hardly surprising; after 20 years of intellectual masturbation they didn't produce any babies. Their ideas were revealed as being empty. What they mostly reaped was ridicule. Their proposals didn't pass the horselaugh test.

Curiously enough, as Jonah Goldberg recently wrote, it's slowly, very, very slowly--painfully slowly--beginning to dawn on them on just how ineffective their work has been.

SHELF LIFE: How the Rick Santorum story played itself out in the press in seven days.

THE INTERNATIONAL ED DRISCOLL! I can't read much of it, but someone at CNet Japan has picked up on my Tech Central Station column on Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Arigatou gozaimasu! (By the way, if anyone wants to organize EdDriscoll.com Live at Budokan (or simply live at a good Tokyo sushi restaurant), talk to my agent--I'm sure we can work something out.)

YOU MAY HAVE SEEN Glenn Reynolds' link to this survey of blogs and bloggers, being offered by two professors at the University of Tennessee.

They're still looking for people to participate in it, so if you haven't yet, click on over, and tell them how you feel about Weblogs, and news on the 'Net in general.

PAGING DR. ORWELL: Check out this bit of Clintonian parsing from John Kerry:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Tuesday that his controversial wartime comment saying the United States, like Iraq, needs a regime change was intended as a lighthearted remark.

''It was not about the president, and it was not about the war. It was about the election,'' Kerry said during a campaign stop in Alabama.

Say what? If it was about the election, then by its very nature, wouldn't it be about the president?

Dale Amon of Samizdata wrote in November that "Political Correctness is not a matter of what is said; it is a matter of who says it. The annointed are 'allowed' freedoms of speech unavailable to the hoi polloi."

Fortunately, I'm not sure how annointed Kerry is these days.

UPDATE: "Sen. Daschle's Fate [in the next election] Rests on War Comments"

SOME DETAILS ON THE LATEST BOMBING IN TEL AVIV, that you probably won't see covered by AP.

UPDATE: And here's their Web site.

"FIND WMDs OR ELSE": Congressman J. D. Hayworth writes:

What makes the left's "find WMDs or else" argument even more curious is that for months we were told that the president was constantly changing his rationale for war, going from WMDs to Iraq's link to 9/11 and terrorism to human rights to regime change to introducing democracy into the Arab Middle East and back to WMDs again. The fact is, it was all those reasons, and yet the critics can now remember only one.

Furthermore, British PM Tony Blair continually and persuasively made the case for invading Iraq purely on the grounds of the gruesome and threatening nature of Saddam's regime. Does that imply Bush has explaining to do but Blair doesn't? That U.S. credibility is lost but Britain's isn't? That Basra was legitimately liberated but the rest of Iraq wasn't?

What would have today's left thought about 1776? How much sniping would they have done about that war, its causes, and its aftermath? Fortunately, the Weekly Standard fired up their Tardis, and found this.

HEY, I THOUGHT THAT WAS REUTERS' SCHTICK: The BBC also likes to refer to Bin Laden as a "Saudi-born dissident". Or as Andrew Sullivan writes, "Sakharov, Walesa, bin Laden. That's the mind of the BBC."

TIME MAGAZINE REPORTS ON an "Iron Maiden Found in Uday Hussein's Playground", writing:

In his capacity as head of Iraq's Olympic committee and also of its soccer federation, he is known to have ordered the torture of athletes who performed below his expectations.

A bad day on the field for a player on the national soccer squad could result in savage retribution: Players had their feet scalded and toenails ripped off for failing to win tournaments. Allegations of torture had even resulted in investigations by international sports governing bodies, most notably soccer's FIFA, but these had failed to produce conclusive evidence — hardly surprising, since no player would dare admit to suffering such abuse, for fear of even worse.

We wrote briefly about Uday's sadism on one of the first days of the war.

(Time article found via Charles Johnson.)

ANOTHER BLOGCRITICS POST: "B-Bending Away The Blues".

And yes, that's my guitar in the close-ups.

NUMBER 47 ON YOUR SCORECARD: "The former Iraqi oil minister, Amir Rashid Muhammad al-Ubaydi, has surrendered to the U.S.-led coalition forces, the U.S. Central Command said", according to AP, who reports that Al-Ubaydi was listed as Number 47 on the coalition's list of the 55 most-wanted officials from the Saddam Hussein regime, and was denominated as the six of spades in the deck of cards issued to coalition forces to identify top regime members.

Awww--and it was Saddam's birthday today, too. Sorry old chap!

THE NEXT NEO-CON SUPPORTED INVASION: Another exclusive by Scott Ott.

CONSPIRING TO AID THE TALIBAN: That's what a former Intel engineer has been charged with by federal prosecutors.

EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS: Just posted a long essay on Blogcritics, on the documentary version of Peter Biskind's 1999 book, which debuted on the Trio cable network last night.

FORD KILLS THE NEW T-BIRD, "and not on a Friday", according to Mickey Kaus, who asks, "Is 'Retrofuturism' a thing of the past?"

THE LITMUS TEST: "A crackdown on terror will be the real litmus test of the new Palestinian government, a senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said on Thursday", according to CNSNews.com.

GREAT MOMENTS IN NFL DRAFT HEADLINES: "Bengals take drive-by shooting victim in fourth round".

WHAT A SCOOP: Right Wing News has an exclusive interview with Condi Rice!

(Hmmm...I've never played Barry White in the background when interviewing somebody. But it really seemed to work, more or less.)

GEE, HERE'S A SHOCKER: "France briefed Iraq on war: report".

This Photoshop prank is beginning to look more and more plausible everyday.

NEOCONS GET BOOST IN DEFEAT OF SADDAM, according to The Washington Times.

Good article, but considering that the Times should be sympathetic to the idea of neoconservatism, I'm wondering why the quotation marks in the headlines.

SMOKING GUN, PART 2,387: "Paper: Documents Show Iraq-Al Qaida Link"

No word yet on what Janeane Garofalo thinks of this, however.

SARS: Neil Seeman writes how the media has fumbled the ball on SARS in Toronto, for (surprise!) both hype and political correctness:

Whatever the facts, the SARS epidemic will always be more about psychology than epidemiology. If we live in a global village when it comes to the dissemination of news information, then we live in a global cocoon when it comes to the dissemination of fear and rhetoric. The media have a role to play here, and must take it very seriously.

The essential problem is shoddy reporting. In order to make the illness appear more widespread, journalists seldom report on the attack rate within discrete, at-risk populations — SARS in Toronto is a disease affecting health-care workers and elderly patients within hospital settings, and with underlying illness. In the province of Ontario, doctors estimate that the case-fatality rate for those who actually contract SARS is less than one percent for patients under 50.

Journalists habitually lump together "probable" and "suspected" cases, without ever explaining why. Lumping the two categories together can make the picture of SARS appear bleaker than it might otherwise seem, since, at this stage in the outbreak, many suspected cases may be excluded after investigation and follow-up.

Just as disturbing, most media reporting has succumbed to political correctness. Canadians are clueless as to the ethnicity and country of origin of the victims.

Read the whole thing. And check out this post by InstaPundit, who says, "I can't see Bush overexerting himself on Chretien's behalf." Gee, I wonder why?

THE STATE OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT: Steven Den Beste writes, "The problem with State is that sometimes it seems as if they've forgotten just who they work for and whose interests they're supposed to be representing. It's almost the diplomatic equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, where the people in the various bureaus in State identify more with the nations they're assigned to than they do with the US. And there seems to be a strong and very unhealthy strain of post-nationalism there, to the point where in some cases they seem to agree with the French that America is actually the problem."

Unlike some others, Den Beste isn't thrilled that Newt's on the case, however.

BLOGGING CAN GET RESULTS, according to this post on Across the Atlantic.

AN OFFER YOU CAN REFUSE, at least if your initials are GWB. That's essentially how Steven Den Beste describes North Korea's "New Bold Proposal".

NFL DRAFTNIKS UNITE! Today is your day. ESPN has a whole section of their Website devoted to NFL Draft 2003.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN: Scott Ott, breaking yet another exclusive, writes that the Dixie Chicks are launching a USO tour overseas.

You go, girls! (Please.)

EUTHANASIA: H.D. Miller writes of three "elderly elderly gentlemen [who] should be put to sleep".

Jimmy Breslin is one of them. Read the article in full that Miller links to--it's jaw-dropping in its insensitivity and lack of diversity and open-mindedness.

On the other hand, Tom Wolfe, a contemporary of Miller's three stooges (and one of my all time heroes as a writer and social commentator), sounds remarkably fresh and vibrant, as usual.

Wolfe's ongoing commitment to new journalism requires that he do at least some reporting (interviewing, visiting locations, researching, etc.), even for his fiction. Maybe that's kept him more in touch with reality than some of his peers.

IS RICK SANTORUM A DEMOCRATIC PLANT? James Pinkerton writes:

Some say that Santorum will suffer a Trent Lott-like fate, and ultimately lose his leadership post. But that's unlikely. What's more likely is that Santorum will stay right where he is. As a result, at a time when the GOP needs to be hitting harmoniously on all cylinders, foreign and domestic, various factions within the party will be sniping at each other over an issue that has nothing to do with anything on the legislative horizon for 2003. Moreover, long term, Santorum's continued presence will send a signal to potential swing voters that for all the successes of President Bush, for all the earnestness of his outreach efforts, the Republican Party is still home to haters. And some potential voters will be deterred.

See? That's my point: Santorum is a Democratic plant. It's the only explanation.

Well, maybe not the only explanation, but an interesting one, nonetheless.

WITH APOLOGIES TO DAVE BARRY: You know, whenever anybody asks me who are the new kick-ass Swedish rock groups, I simply point them here.

IF YOU'RE OLD ENOUGH TO DIE FOR YOUR COUNTRY, YOU OUGHT TO BE ABLE TO...smoke? CNS News has an article titled "NJ Mulls Hiking Legal Smoking Age to 21".

Like this is going to stop smoking by teenagers. I went to a school in New Jersey whose main building was decimated by a fire caused by an errant cigarette in the senior class lounge. (The structure shown on the home page of their Website took about twenty years to finally get built to replace it--but that's another story.) After that, the school banned smoking on campus by students, at the risk of expulsion. As I recall, a couple of years later, the daughter of the headmaster got caught...smoking. And lots of kids would simply sag off to the street behind the school to smoke.

As marijuana appears to slowly, very slowly creep towards decriminalization, it's counterpart, legal since the days of Sir Walter Raleigh, appears to be far more rapidly approaching complete prohibition. Odd, isn't it?

HEH: Writing about George Galloway, Andrew Sullivan says, "When I first mentioned the possibility of a fifth column, I presumed it would be fueled by ideological fervor. I didn't contemplate it could be fueled by the mighty dollar. You've got to love these Marxists, don't you?"

"SADDAM's FAMILY LIFESTYLES SHOCK IRAQIS": Via Little Green Footballs.

BOB KEESHAN: NABBED. Oops, sorry, it's Tariq Aziz, who if he's put on trial, would be the 21st century equivilent of Herman Goering at the Nuremberg Trials. But the photo that Drudge used makes him look exactly like Capt. Kangaroo.

UPDATE (2:10 PM PST): Currently, Drudge is linking his Aziz headline to this story, which seems grimly fitting, oddly enough.

UPDATE (2:25 PM): He's replaced the above story with this article. (And I don't feel as bad about my silly headline, when I see ABC News referring to Aziz's "Groucho Marx appearance".)

"BUT GOD, I LOVE SOY ICE CREAM!" The Institute for Humane Studies sponsored a contest to produce the best creative faux-advertisement "encouraging people to think about and discuss freedom". The winner was Reason magazine's "2001 Burton C. Gray Memorial Intern", Rhys Southan, who produced a 30 second (or so) mock-PSA called called "Consuming Hypocrisy".

As the voiceover says, "In a capitalist society, even anti-capitalists can find everything they need."

UPDATE: Maybe Madonna needs to see that commercial.

GREAT MOMENTS IN EBAY HISTORY.

Jay Nordlinger writes about Teresa Heinz Kerry, whom he describes as "a Martha Mitchell for our time", who's "going to be a big story in the '04 campaign":

Anyway, the really beautiful stuff comes from Teresa. She said, "They [the Republicans] will probably say he's French, he's Jewish . . . he's a monkey. I just find it sad."

Whoa, whoa: Jewish? monkey? You mean, the GOP — my GOP — will attack Kerry for having a smidgeon of Jewish ancestry, somewhere (so he says — but wasn't he supposed to be Irish?)? The Democrats had an actual Jew on the ticket in 2000. I don't recall my party going all brownshirt on him.

And where did "monkey" come from? (I know: Darwin.)

But here's the kicker: Mrs. Heinz Kerry sniffed about the White House, "They probably don't even speak French."

Aside from the delicious hauteur of that comment: How much you wanna bet the lady's French stinks? I've heard it before: rich (American) lady's French. It's not pretty.

I almost pity the Kerry campaign. They're going to have to do something about this live wire.

In other campaign news, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean was asked by Wolf Blitzer if the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam:

Dean said, "We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet, Wolf. We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance."

Could anyone arrange some face time between Dean and Adnan Shaker?

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that "the Justice Department's public integrity section has opened a criminal investigation into donations made to the presidential campaign of Senator John Edwards by employees at a prominent Arkansas law firm, according to lawyers close to the matter."

Err, a prominent Arkansas law firm? That has a familiar ring to it...

"WHERE ARE YOU NOW, FIDELISTAS?" Cathy Young of Reason writes, "there are times when silence equals consent—and this is one of them."

Read the whole thing.

JUST SUE, REDUX: "Litigious Raiders spent $33.5 million on legal fees in 1997-2001".

Al, call my wife--she's more of a 49ers fan, but she's always happy to take on new clients.

REPORT CARD TIME: Media Research Center grades TV's war coverage.

Surprisingly, considering how harsh they've been on him in the past (and usually deservedly so), Dan Rather got pretty good grades. Not surprisingly, Peter Jennings didn't. But read the whole thing--or at least the executive summary.

US DRAWS UP PLAN TO BOMB NORTH KOREA'S NUCLEAR PLANT, according to AFP.

(Link via the Brothers Judd, via a post called "Reteaching the Osirak Lesson".)

THE GINGRICH ROLLOUT? Jonah Goldberg says Gingrich's speech yesterday at AEI is the beginning of a Nixon-style rehabilitation program.

Fine with me--I rather liked Newt in 1994 and '95, prior to the infamous budget battle that put the brakes on Newt, Congress, and the Contract with America.

HERE'S A RACHEL CORRIE UPDATE, via Cold Fury.

THE OBESITY-SUBURBAN SPRAWL "LINK", as identified by Mike Alissi on Reason's Hit & Run blog.

Meanwhile, James Lileks deconstructs the perpetual doom and gloom of the Earth Day folks.

"PROFESSOR, STUDENTS IDENTIFY 'DEEP THROAT'", according to UPI.

It's not Linda Lovelace. On the other hand, it's not Pat Buchanan, either.

The truth is out there!

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS FORCIBLY REMOVED from trailer park. Surprisingly, The Onion has the exclusive.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

McGREEVY'S MISSTEPS: NJ's GOP hopes to capitalize on the Democratic governor's mistakes, according to CNS News.

Still, the governor does have Amiri Baraka in his corner...

THE WAR ROOM: No, not the one in Qatar, these war rooms are the rooms that every team in the NFL will be using this weekend during the NFL draft. ESPN's Greg Garber writes that fortunes can be made and lost there.

STEPHEN MOORE, president of the Club for Growth says he doesn't want to kick Senators Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich out of the Republican party. He just wants them "to start acting more like Reagan and less like Daschle. Is that asking so much?"

Meanwhile, Donald Luskin writes, "If the New York Times can say no to high taxes, so can liberal lawmakers."

BILL BUCKLEY ON CASTRO and his recent executions: "The most decisive counteraction in the West was done by HBO". Buckley adds:

The movie and television company had been planning a splashy introduction of an extended documentary on Fidel Castro by — Oliver Stone. It was all packed up, ready to go. In fact it had been screened in February at a movie festival in Berlin. Castro had given three whole days to Oliver Stone, and that proved to be total immersion — Stone came away a devout apostle of Castro and Castroism.

* * * The wording of the HBO official on the fate on Mr. Stone's documentary was finger-dippingly delicate. "In light of recent alarming events in the country, the film seems somewhat dated or incomplete." Perhaps it will be shown after Fidel Castro restores liberty to the Cuban people, who have been without it for 44 years.

With our aircraft carriers standing down in the Gulf and returning home, would a detour in the Caribbean be possible?

JUST ASKING: I assume there's little chance that an American politician would be found to be on the Iraqi payroll.

Right?

HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY TO MOSAIC, the first widely available Web browser (which eventually morphed into Netscape, as I recall).

WAS GEORGE GALLOWAY, British antiwar MP, paid off by Iraq? InstaPundit has some thoughts.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg writes, "If I was the commanding officer in charge of sifting through these Iraqi files, I would be barking out orders to find the 'R' file -- for Ritter."

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has more on Galloway, here and here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As does "Group Captain Mandrake", who has numerous links as well.

JUST DISMISS, BABY: "A state judge on Monday dismissed a suit by the Oakland Raiders seeking to prevent the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers from wearing their uniforms for games in California because they allegedly violate the Raiders' trademark rights", according to this AP article, which adds that the judge "did not rule on the merits of the case, but rather said it belonged in federal court. Raiders officials said Monday they were exploring their legal options."

I'll bet they are. Al Davis's coaches should be as creative and persistent as his attorneys.

US FINDS IRAQ CONTRACTOR WITH NO POLITICAL TIES: Scott Ott has the err, exclusive.

THE INVISIBLE WINNER IN IRAQ is "Post-Pan-Arab liberalism", according to a perceptive essay by Reason's Charles Paul Freund.

TEN YEARS AFTER: Today is the 10th anniversary of the tragedy at Waco.

Curious, isn't it, that an administration that made a fetish out of the phrase "do it for the children" is bookmarked by Waco and Elian Gonzalez.

(Link to Waco article via Reason's Hit & Run blog.)

I'LL EVEN HARA-KIRI IF YOU SHOW ME HOW: Check out this classic from James Taranto in the Journal's Best of the Web Today:

[Iraqi Major] Saleh Abdullah Mahdi Al Jaburi...says: "We were desperate when Baghdad fell so quickly. If we were not Muslims we would have done like the Japanese and committed suicide [but] . . . our religion forbids it." If only the Fedayeen, the Palestinians and al Qaeda followed the same religion.

Exactly.

BLACKLIST, HOLLYWOOD STYLE: The Media Research Center reminds us that while Tim Robbins is crying "blacklist" because he was disinvited to the Baseball Hall of Fame, he's organized at least one blacklist of his own:

While ABC ached for Tim Robbins, who ached when Robbins led the boycotts? ABC found post-war boycotts a horror story of free speech under attack, but did not warn of the impending doom three years ago, when it was Robbins and other leftists organizing boycotts and blacklists. ABC gave Hollywood hypocrites a free ride.

In 2000, the Screen Actors Guild went on a long strike against advertisers, demanding higher residual payments for actors appearing in commercials. Not only did Robbins and his colleagues demand that everyone punish Procter & Gamble workers with a boycott, they were highly interested in punishing any actor who crossed the picket line.

When model-actress Elizabeth Hurley made an Estee Lauder ad, and then claimed she was unaware of the strike, Robbins was in a punitive mood, calling for Hurley to be punished, even banned from Hollywood. Hurley was eventually fined $100,000, not banned, but if she’d lost her SAG card, her acting career would have been ruined. Wooten didn’t have any time in his report last night for Tim Robbins’ attempt at Hollywood blacklisting.

HERE'S ONE CLASS ACTION SUIT I CAN GET BEHIND. (Found via InstaPundit.)

GREAT LINE by Steven Den Beste: "CNN sold its soul, but it didn't sell ours". Found in a long, but fascinating essay on what CNN did to remain in Baghdad, and what will happen as a result of it.

NATIONAL REVIEW LOVES AC/DC: No, really!

LINGERING ANGST: Mona Charen on the "fantasy world [that] is all too common among Arab countries reluctant to live with hard facts and truth."

THE MAN WHO BUILT THE DALLAS COWBOYS: Tex Schramm, who was the team's president and general manager from 1960-89, will be added to the Ring of Honor at Texas Stadium this fall.

TOO MANY GOOD ITEMS IN Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus today to quote just one, so click on over and read the whole thing.

OK, well, I will quote this one:

David Letterman had a priceless comment about Iraq — deep, too. "And now the really difficult part: We have to rebuild Iraq into a strong and independent nation that will one day hate the United States."

As Nordlinger writes, "There is enough wisdom in that crack to merit a dissertation."

DASCHLE DOUBLE-PLAY: The Senate minority leader has been ordered to stop calling himself a Catholic, according to The Weekly Standard:

The Senate minority leader and the highest ranking Democrat in Washington has been sent a letter by his home diocese of Sioux Falls, sources in South Dakota have told The Weekly Standard, directing him to remove from his congressional biography and campaign documents all references to his standing as a member of the Catholic Church.

This isn't exactly excommunication--which is unnecessary, in any case, since Daschle made himself ineligible for communion almost 20 years ago with his divorce and remarriage to a Washington lobbyist. The directive from Sioux Falls' Bishop Robert Carlson is rather something less than excommunication--and, at the same time, something more: a declaration that Tom Daschle's religious identification constitutes, in technical Catholic vocabulary, a grave public scandal.

The article also has a very illuminating comment about California's Gov. Gray Davis, who received a similar chastisement from Bishop William Weigand of Sacramento:

Russ Lopez, a spokesman for Davis, responded with the hilarious and deeply revealing complaint that Bishop Weigand was "telling the faithful how to practice their faith." In Lopez's mind--as, indeed, in the minds of many--the promise of the separation of Church and state, in which no political figure gets to tell believers how to practice their faith, has turned into a need for the separation of Church and Church, in which not even a religious figure gets to tell believers how to practice their faith.)

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that "Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, would lose to a prominent state Republican, according to a poll conducted for the National Republican Senatorial Committee."

We're very...disappointed in Senator Daschle. It's all so...troubling. And...saddening.

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE U.N.: Scroll down to the bottom of today's Best of the Web Today to find it.

In other Max Headroom-like retro/modern recombinant news, Glenn Reynolds asks, "what would Bugs Bunny Do?"

JUST SUE BABY, PART MMCCCLXVII: "Raiders seek to force changes in uniforms of Bucs, Panthers".

I'd say this is proof that Al Davis has officially jumped the shark, but San Jose's hockey team might sue me...

UPDATE: Ray Ratto of ESPN.com says "Monday was Groundhog Day at Al Davis' house, which means he came out the front door, saw a court date and a lawyer, and thereby signaled the beginning of spring."

COULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED TO A NICER COUNTRY: "France Told It Owes Jews Millions for Vichy Plundering", according to this Reuters article.

STEVEN DEN BESTE has some news for the BBC.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR OUT OF COURT SETTLEMENT: Marvel asks court to revoke Sony's Spider-Man license.

Considering that Marvel itself isn't in the best shape these days, both financially and emotionally, they certainly have a lot of chutzpah if they're serious about revoking Sony's license for the superhero--which I doubt they are.

HEYWOOD JABLOME: He's everywhere these days!

WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES OPTIMISTIC? Paul Jaminet, (who I guess is the other, other brother), weighs in on the Brothers Judd Blog.

LOW FIDELITY: Clayton Cramer explains the First Amendment to Tim Robbins, who seems to have problems understanding what it actually says.

Cramer also links to this AP story:

One casualty of the war with Iraq is the First Amendment right to oppose it, actor Tim Robbins says.

Robbins and longtime companion actress Susan Sarandon are war opponents whose scheduled appearance at baseball's Hall of Fame was canceled last week by former Reagan administration aide Dale Petroskey, now the hall's president.

"A chill wind is blowing in this nation," Robbins told a National Press Club luncheon Tuesday. "Every day the airwaves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent."

If Robbins has ever commented on the previous administration, which was alleged by numerous conservative groups of siccing the IRS on them, please email me--I doubt it very seriously.

RANDY MOSS SUED BY TRAFFIC OFFICER, the same one the Minnesota Vikings' wide reciever hit with his car last fall.

THIS IS CNN: The first four of the seven items on the Media Research Center's daily CyberAlert are all about CNN, including this classic bit of doublethink by NBC's Tom Brokaw:

Tom Brokaw scolded CNN's Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive who late last week confessed that CNN withheld specific information he had about Saddam Hussein's brutality and endangerment of Iraqis CNN employed, suggesting he should have kept his knowledge secret since the revelation now casts doubt on anything CNN reports.

On Tuesday's Late Show, Brokaw told David Letterman that CNN “should have worked harder at conveying” what Jordan knew, but that if you “decide to keep that as a secret for yourself to protect those people and to protect the interests of your company, then you probably ought to keep it secret for a long time because it opens them up now, wherever they go, wherever they're stationed, 'well what are they not telling us now?'”

"So much for journalists demanding full disclosure", says Brent Baker of the MRC. Or as Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday, "If any other institution had performed as badly, the media folks would be all over it and demanding government action."

UPDATE: If CNN is going down, they're determined to take others with them: CNN's pre-written obits for Ronald Reagan, Dick Cheney, Bob Hope, and Fidel Castro were discovered recently on a publicly accessible server. The Smoking Gun has the details (along with screen captures).

ANOTHER UPDATE: This cartoon neatly sums up CNN and the Baathists.

NEWSPUNDIT.NET has permalinked us. Be sure to stop by Douglas Oliver's site several dozen times today--and tomorrow as well.

THE KYOTO TREATY: Is it the hidden cost of victory?

God, I hope not.

GROUP CAPTAIN MANDRAKE HAS MOVED TO A NEW BLOG: Adjust your hyperlinks and CRM-114 discriminators to the new URL.

IS COLONEL SANDERS THE NEW IRAQI STRONGMAN? This quote by Joanne Jacobs pretty much sums the difference between the anti-war far left, and...well, just about everyone else:

When I think of "Western cultural values," I think of individualism, freedom, democracy and tolerance. Anti-war activists think of fast food. And they're not tolerant of Iraqis' right to make choices about what's for dinner.

Ouch. Jacobs adds, "Of course, anti-war protesters also think scenes of Iraqis joyfully welcoming U.S. troops are staged. They know better than the Iraqis how they feel about their new colonial masters, who will force them to eat fried chicken with seven special herbs and spices. With a spork."

OK, I'm with them on protesting that spork thing...

CAN'T KEEP HIM AWAY: Andrew Sullivan, ostensibly on vacation, weighs in on the BBC's coverage of the arrest--in Baghdad--of Abu Abbas, the mastermind behind the Achille Lauro hijacking.

The version of the BBC article now online seems much toned down from the Reuters-ish equivocation that oozed out from the original draft of just a few hours ago. I'm actually surprised the BBC rewrote it that quickly, but I wonder if anybody has saved their first version.

FORMER PHILLY EAGLES OWNER DIES: Leonard Tose, the high flying (and later, hard crashing) former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, died Tuesday at age 88. Besides owning the Eagles from 1969 until 1985, Tose also was also the driving force behind the Ronald McDonald House program, and the Eagles Fly for Leukemia fund.

NOT QUITE THE AXIS OF EVIL, BUT...: The Village Voice writes of a "Republic of Fear" at the New York Times under Howell Raines.

MAYBE A SEVEN DAY WAITING PERIOD WILL BE NEXT: "Modern Day Prohibitionists Want to Ration Your Alcohol".

WHAT DOGS BARKED? Patrick Ruffini, writing on the tricked out NCC-1701-A version of his site, runs down what Saddam did and didn't do during the war.

LOOTING AND LIES: Jonathan Foreman on what CNN, the BBC, et al, haven't mentioned about the looting in Baghdad:

The hysterical tone of some press reports may reflect the fact that some of the reporters who have been sitting in Baghdad for months have lost sight of the nature of the Saddam regime: They are mystified by the exhilaration felt by so many liberated Iraqis.

But the failure of so many reports to mention the fact that many of the looted stores, institutions and even hospitals were linked to the regime is more troubling. These institutions were dedicated to the exclusive use of Ba'ath Party members - the ordinary public could not make use of them - or were owned and operated by known supporters of the regime.

It's not clear if this whale of an omission reflects disingenuousness or genuine ignorance.

But it is telling that some of the doctors now being quoted about the horrors of looting are the same ones who furnished journalists those massively exaggerated reports of civilian casualties from U.S. bombing - a dishonesty that benefited both the regime they served and the journalists' need for a dramatic story of American cruelty.

Gee, you think?

UPDATE: See also this InstaPost about who might be behind the looting of Iraq's National Museum.

JUMPED THE SHARK: Brian Doherty posts about Kurt Vonnegut, a superstar author who wishes he had never been born!

MARINES START FIGHT FOR TIKRIT, according to The Washington Times

OF COURSE--AS SOON AS ALEC BALDWIN MOVES TO FRANCE: Will Janeane Garofalo apologize as she promised she would?

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST EUROPE: I wonder what Oswald Spengler would think of James Bennett's essay, titled "Why do they hate us?":

The widespread anti-Americanism in the world, of which Continental Europe is the ultimate source, has almost nothing to do with the character of President George W. Bush or the current administration, or other such cosmetic issues.

The modern world was first carried forward by two great civilizations. The Anglosphere was one. The dynamic industrializing culture of 19th century Continental Europe, to which the spark of the Judaeo-Christian encounter was so important, was the other. That culture committed suicide in the '30s. Perhaps its successor is not the revival of that culture, but rather its zombie.

In considering the Holocaust, most attention has been given to its direct victims, as is appropriate. However, we must also consider that it was a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture.

It would not be surprising if the twin anti-modernist themes of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, now rapidly coalescing into a single nasty mess visible in many of the pro-Saddam demonstrations of the past year, become once again the predominant political-cultural theme in Western Continental Europe, overwhelming the decent and positive forces there that had previously prevailed.

Be sure to read the whole thing. I was struck, particularly, by these paragraphs:

How can we calculate how much more dynamism was added by the everyday interaction of people who had previously been kept in parallel and uncommunicative spheres? The Germanosphere, including not just the Second Reich, but Austria-Hungary, German Switzerland, and the German-speaking communities of Eastern Europe and the Americas, really might better be dubbed the Judaeo-Germanosphere during that period.

Continental European Jews, because they owed their very presence in the larger civilization to the values of liberalism and modernism, were one of the first and most obvious targets of the Industrial Counter-Revolution.

The collapse of globalization and consequent rise of totalitarianism set the stage for the end of the great Judaeo-German hybrid civilization of Europe and its French counterpart. Those European Jews who were left alive at the end of the war overwhelmingly desired to leave, and they left to two destinations: Israel, and the Anglosphere.

With this emigration, on top of the previous great Jewish emigration to London and New York in the late 19th century, much of the energy, creativity and contributions of European Jews were given to the Anglosphere rather than the Continent. The cost to the Continent, and the benefits to the Anglosphere has never, to my knowledge, been calculated. The cost might never be calculable, but it is real.

This very much ties in with a Steven Den Beste essay from December, where he looked at the lack of technological innovation coming out of much of Europe, echoing (actually foreshadowing) Bennett's comments:

If you ask someone with any kind of technical background to list high-tech Japanese companies, they'll have no trouble at all reeling off several names immediately (often brandnames chosen for the American market, like Pioneer), and several more after a few seconds of thought: Sony, Toshiba, Matsushita; the only reason there aren't more names on the list is because of the Japanese zaibatsu system. Ask pretty much anyone to list American high tech companies and they may come up with 50 names before they have to slow down.

But ask people to list high-tech companies from continental Europe, and I think most people would have to think hard to list even one. I, myself, having been in the industry for 25 years can only list a few: Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel, Philips and then I run out, and honestly can't think of any more right now. And among them, Philips as the only one actually doing cutting-edge research. (They developed the laserdisc, which led to the CD and DVD, among other interesting things.)

And Virginia Postrel posted in January about laws originally passed by National Socialist Germany in the 1930s that continue to impede the success of its own businesses, and prevents greater sales by American firms there.

No need to fret however. The EU will cut through so much of Europe's red tape...

UPDATE: Quick thought: In a way, the impending grounding of the supersonic Concorde neatly foreshadows the slowing pace of European business development, and the growing strangehold the transnational progressivist EU is placing on European business development.

HE'S BACK! Patrick Ruffini, after a nasty hack attack, is back with what he calls PatrickRuffini.com Version 5.5, now running on the Moveable Type blogging platform.

Stop by today!

COULD DEION SANDERS BE COMING BACK TO THE NFL? ESPN's Len Pasquarelli writes that Sanders is now a free agent, and therefore, free to play for any team.

For our previous coverage of the cornerback formally known as 'Prime Time', click here.

In other football news, Pasquarelli writes that Junior Seau may be going to the Miami Dolphins, "perhaps over the weekend, no later than Monday afternoon".

LOSS OF FUNDING: Steven Den Beste writes that "one of the biggest supporters of the Palestinian Intifada just went bye-bye. Saddam paid $25,000 to the family of every successful suicide bomber to hit Israel, but there was other less public support for the Palestinians, monetarily and in other ways. There's a good reason that the Palestinians were visibly pro-Saddam during the war; they knew who their friends were." Den Beste adds:

This week's victory in Iraq is the most important event in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the last 20 years. The chance for peace between them has never been greater. This is actually the best thing that's happened to the Palestinians in years, even though they don't think so yet. But it's going to begin a process leading them to abandon the struggle to try to destroy Israel, and a process of beginning to fundamentally accept that they will have to coexist with Israel. Only then can peace come.

Read the...well, you know.

MIRROR, MIRROR: It's December 2008. President-elect Gray Davis ponders his new administration...

"OH YOU POOR PEOPLE!": Great cartoon by John Cole for the Herald Sun.

(Found via Little Green Footballs, which has lots and lots of other good stuff today.)

UPDATE: This is, if anything, an even funnier cartoon, found via Patrick Ruffini.

BUSH #41 DOORMAT in Baghdad Hotel Dismantled.

SCOTT RITTER KNEW:

"The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children - toddlers up to pre-adolescents - whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace." - Scott Ritter, Time Magazine, Saturday, Sep. 14, 2002.

Now that the Baath Party is out of power, will Ritter ever come clean about his stunning about face?

CNN's chief news executive finally admits what The New Republic reported last year--that CNN's coverage of Saddam's regime was a sham, and that CNN endangered local Iraqi employees simply to be able to put a "live from Baghdad" tag under their heavily censored and manipulated video feeds.

Contrast that to this statement from last year, when Iraq expelled foreign journalists:

Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, said the planned expulsion is "a draconian measure that will sharply curtail the world's knowledge about what is happening in Iraq." Jordan said CNN stands by Arraf and all of CNN's Iraq reporting as "accurate, fair, and forthright."

So how long will CNN continue to use their slogan of "Most Trusted News Network?"

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has a quote from Jordan last year on the New Republic article.

REALLY LATE UPDATE (3/31/04): The Times has moved Jordan's op-ed behind their "buy this article if you want to read it" firewall, which is too bad, considering what a staggering mea culpa it is. Fortunately, it's still online, in the middle of this page.

PETER JENNINGS "RUES LOSS OF HUSSEIN SCULPTING JOBS": No, this is not a Scrappleface headline. Jennings actually said that.

KEEPING THE BACK BENCH WARM: Back in the 1970s, "me too Republicans" in Congress ensured that their party would stay on the back bench for many years, by offering little in the way of new ideas. Rather, they'd look at the welfare and social spending by the Democrats and talk about how expensive it was, and that the fat should be cut out of it. They'd focus on the cost of a program, instead of offering a different approach to solving the problem.

Flash forward 25 years to today, as Democrat Nancy Pelosi says, "I have absolutely no regret about my vote on this war".

While she pays lip service to "The cost in human lives", she spends far more time discussing, "The cost to our budget, probably $100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less. The cost to our economy. But the most important question at this time, now that we're toward the end of it, is what is the cost to the war on terrorism?"

Pelosi is the House Minority Leader--and looks to continue to keep her party in the minority.

UPDATE: Tom Harkin is doing a pretty good job himself.

"MUM'S THE WORD": Andrew Breitbart writes, "Hollywood celebs may not quite be pro-Saddam, but there's one tyrant they love."

Only one?

NEW JANEANE GAROFALO TV SERIES "UNDER FIRE": ABC is taking lots of flak from viewers for developing a show around the pro-appeasement Garofalo.

Meanwhile, the Hollywood box office is down 18 percent, and Tim and Susan aren't going to Cooperstown.

As I've written before, Hollywood is becoming increasingly removed from its customers' values--which means it's also becoming increasingly removed its customer's wallets. Maybe they'll eventually make the connection, before it's too late.

MOHAMMED ALDOURI UPDATE: The soon-to-be-ex-Iraqi UN Ambassador is set to leave New York.

CONCORDE GROUNDED FOR GOOD: How long before another attempt at supersonic passenger service?

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Group Captain Mandrake has more details, and some observations.

FOUL BALLS: The Baseball Hall of Fame wants nothing to do with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, the stars of Bull Durham.

Robbins' pusillanimous reaction--and utter inability to understand Cooperstown's reaction to them--shows just how right the Hall of Fame is.

THREE MILLION DEAD IN THE CONGO: David Janes asks, "where's all the loud mouths, the hippies, the priests, the trade-unionists, the anarchists, the anti-globalists, the peace lovers? Where's all the people blathering about their concern for the "women and children", the only human beings worthy of compassion anymore."

EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY SOMETIMES DEPARTMENT: Why yes, there is a Web site whose URL is "www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com"!

STEPHEN GREEN: "the real work has yet to begin. We've bought the deed to a crack house in a bad neighborhood, and now we've got to turn it into a place where decent people can live decently. The folks next door aren’t going to be too happy with our gentrification efforts, either. We can expect lots of drive-bys while we pull the weeds and put up new drywall."

WHY IS THIS ALLY OF OURS SO UPSET? Fox News reports:

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud, looking upset at a news conference, called for a quick end to Iraq's "occupation." In a rare departure from diplomacy, Saud responded to a question about Arab anger toward the United States with: "I don't want to talk about anger if you don't mind today."

Gosh, you'd think they had something to worry about, judging by their tone.

By the way, maybe Jerry Brown is right, after all!

MARINES HOLD NUCLEAR SITE, south of Baghdad.

IN OUR NAME: I couldn't have said it better than this post by Charles Johnson.

See also the great post by Tim Blair, titled "I shouldn't be so happy" (scroll down--Blogger has eaten his archives), and this short essay by Christopher Hitchens.

PHOTO OF THE DAY: This is a classic.

IRAQ'S UN ENVOY says "The game is over", insulting--as only someone trained in the French art of international diplomatic effrontery can--everyone involved on both sides of the war. The writer of this AP article unfortunately doesn't speculate, and apparently didn't even ask the ambassador (who hopefully is now, or shortly will be, an ex-ambassador), what happens to him, now that his boss is no longer in power.

Maybe he and Peter Arnett can team up to write a book on international grooming tips...

UPDATE: I emailed Stephen Den Beste for his take on what will happen to folks like Hussein's ambassador. His response?:

I don't really know the answer. I doubt he'll go on trial, unless there's specific evidence of his complicity in genocide or the like. It isn't a war crime to be a mouthpiece for a corrupt regime.

One thing is, I think, clear: he won't continue to be protected by diplomatic immunity for much longer. I think he'll be informed by the State Department of the date when we won't honor diplomatic immunity for him any longer.

But not quite yet. As long as major combat continues, they won't take that step. Until we control Tikrit and Mosul, the war isn't over.

Fair enough. Thanks Steven! (Posted with his permission.)

"I HOPE YOU USE YOUR OWN TOOTHBRUSH": Very funny post on The Corner on National Review Online.

GUESS I DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT FOX NEWS BEING DROPPED FROM DIRECTV: "Murdoch Seals Deal for DirecTV Stake".

THIS PUTS THINGS INTO PERSPECTIVE, doesn't it?

Hopefully France (and Germany) will make up for things by heeding Sen. McCain's advice...

THE WAR CONTINUES: Ramesh Ponnuru cautions President Bush to not turn his entire focus inward now that Iraq has been liberated:

If Bush stakes everything on a legislative agenda, he could end up looking like a success abroad and a failure at home — which is to say, exactly like his father.

He's right. But I think Bush #43, Cheney, and Karl Rove have learned enough not to repeat the mistakes of Bush #41.

GREAT INSTAPUNDIT POST putting the liberation of Baghdad--and the BBC's clearly negative coverage of it--into perspective.

WHOOPS: Timing of new Hong Kong advertising campaign really backfires.

UPDATE: Nicholas Stix has an article on SARS titled, "Six Degrees Of SARS: Of Politics, Greed, And Plagues."

THE DANGERS OF WAR: It causes massive displacement of people who find themselves out on the street, looking for work--often looking for new lines of work.

Joe Bob Briggs looks at one such person, now recently unemployed.

Hey, perhaps Jerry Haleva has some suggestions!

NEWSWEEK SUFFERS "'War Whiplash' Injury". The Media Research Center has the details.

AN AMAZING VICTORY: I'm quoting Andrew Sullivan, but I won't sully the phrase with quotations around it:

This is an amazing victory, a victory over a monster who gassed civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands, and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet. It's a victory over those who marched in the millions to stop this liberation, over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America crowd, and the armchair generals. It's a victory for the two countries in the world that have always made freedom possible and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made dark by terror. It's a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage and restraint. It's a victory for optimism over pessimism, the righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against postmodern excuses, and of political leadership over appeasement. Celebrate it. Don't let the whiners take this away from you or from the people of Iraq.

Not surprisingly, Glenn Reynolds and The Corner each have extensive roundups of the coverage.

THE SPECULATION ABOUT THE RUMORS MAY BE TRUE, according to Scott Ott...

"HAND-OUT CITY" is the title of this Debra Saunders essay that sums up, as she puts it, "the slow but steady spread of blight across this otherwise stunningly beautiful city", San Francisco. Saunders quotes Gavin Newsom, a city supervisor who sponsored Care Not Cash, a homeless reform measure:

Newsom remembers a local panhandler who recently died from a drug overdose. "The person who gave Joe that last dollar probably drove away feeling good about themselves."

Naturally of course, as she notes, "city politicians contrived to undermine the voters' will by throwing up bureaucratic roadblocks."

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER DEPARTMENT: My wife, who's an attorney, just complemented Ruth Bader Ginsberg--for defending states' rights--in an email to me:

The Supreme Court today dealt the Trial Lawyers (aka ambulance chasers) a blow in State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. v. Campbell. The Court not only cut back a 145 million dollar punitive damages award, but finally gave more clear cut guidelines as to what can be considered in awarding punitives (which are what the Trial Lawyers feed off of, and which no longer include the wealth of the defendant) and as to what is a reasonable amount of punitive damages.

Not surprisingly, the oddly named Center for Constitutional Litigation (aka, the Trial Lawyers) tried to downplay the importance of the case. But for those who have been unhappy about the trend towards huge judgments solely because the defendant's resources, and away from any personal responibility (ie, having the sense not to balance hot cups of coffee in your crotch) - this is a good decision.

As a little federalist action, Judge Ruth (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg) dissented saying this is all a matter for state courts.

Just passing on a link from the legal department here at EdDriscoll.com.

Brent Bozell observes that the left want "more war gore" (as he titled his weekly column):

Last week, CNN anchor Aaron Brown, the supposed top face of that old Ted Turner channel, devoted a half-hour of his day to the far-left Pacifica radio network, absorbing some old-fashioned socialist abuse on its program "Democracy Now."

The greatest complaint of the Pacifica hard-liners, and every other frenzied anti-war protester inside and outside the press is: why don’t we see more death? More gore? Apparently, most Americans are so stupid they have no idea that people actually die in wars. Apparently, the public sees American troops actually dropping bombs on abstractions, not enemy positions and human beings. Leftist Susan Sontag complained in the New York Times that being a spectator to "calamities" like the American war effort is the right and privilege of every citizen in this modern age.

Bozell also quotes Walter Cronkite (from 1991) as saying, "It ought to be almost compulsory [for Americans] to sit in front of the television set and have to view the horror that they're enduring. The military and the politicians don't like that kind of domestic exposure. If we start seeing, live, on the air, people dying in combat, it's going to have one terrible effect."

What would Sontag or Cronkite think about showing the gore from the attack on the World Trade Center on television more? Shots of people jumping out of the windows of the WTC to their certain deaths rather than be burned in the fire or smashed by collapsing rubble? I doubt they'd be in favor it. And certainly the media has downplayed--practically eliminated--those images from its library of stock footage because, as ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times, it was " disturbing".

To paraphrase Jonah Goldberg, I don't mind being disturbed, as long as it works both ways. Show me the horror of war--both on their soil--and ours.

UPDATE: Al Barger agrees. He's asking, "Where are the bodies?"

NEW HARVARD STUDY heats up 'Global Warming' debate:

A team of Harvard University scientists examined 1,000 years of global temperatures and reviewed more than 240 scientific journals from the past 40 years and concluded that despite man's influence on our environment, current temperatures are not as warm as during the Middle Ages.

"This new study merely affirms the obvious: climate alarmism based on a few years' or even a century's data is sheer folly, reminding us again that geological cycles spanning millennia do not share the rush of agenda-driven scientists or activists," Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free-market environmental think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, told CNSNews.com.

The Harvard study is set to be published this spring in the journal Energy and Environment. According to the study, a global medieval warming period lasting from about 800 to 1300 A.D. was followed by a Little Ice Age between the years 1300 to 1900. The study also states that the earth has been warming slightly since 1900.

Or as Dennis Miller recently said:

There's a lot of differing data, but as far as I can gather, over the last hundred years the temperature on this planet has gone up 1.8 degrees. Am I the only one who finds that amazingly stable? I could go back to my hotel room tonight and futz with the thermostat for three to four hours. I could not detect that difference.

Exactly.

SOMEONE SET UP US THE BOMB: All your base are belong to us!

(Via InstaPundit.)

THE MEDIA: If last night's bombing was successful, it should be interesting to see the slant that the media takes. I wouldn't be surprised to see the media start calling it something like "a heavy-handed end to the war", comparing it to the atomic bomb blasts that ended World War II, or something equally hyperbolic. (Remember the Dresden riff from the first Friday of the war?)

It's already started, courtesy of CBS's Lara Logan, live from Baghdad, on The Early Show.

Backseat drivers, indeed.

BUSH, BLAIR, AND THE UN: It looks like there will be some role for the UN in post-war Iraq, if only to placate Tony Blair:

Bush has said he supports a U.N. role and the creation of an interim governing authority for Iraq. But he has not provided key details, such as the exact nature of the U.N.'s role and the makeup of the authority.

"There will be a vital role for the U.N. in the reconstruction of Iraq," Blair said. "But the key is that Iraq in the end will be run by the Iraqi people."

Questioned for details on that "vital role," Bush said the body could provide humanitarian assistance, collect donations and make suggestions about the makeup of the interim authority. It was far from the broad mandate sought by some allies, and could undermine Blair's efforts.

Fortunately, it sounds like the UN will be kept on a short leash by President Bush and the US.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste agrees:

What that doesn't mean is that the UN actually will control the interim administration. And it doesn't mean that the UN bureaucracy gets to decide who gets post-war reconstruction contracts, so that it can assign the majority of them to French companies.

What it means is that the British and Americans are going to set up interim governments and get on with the job, UNSC action or no UNSC action. Which means that Bush didn't budge.

Which means that TotalFinaElf is going to be out on its ear. Watch for major moves on the French stock market today.

Den Beste adds, "Bush has all the cards". Read the whole thing, as somebody once said.

MY GOD, THEY TOOK OUT FRED SANFORD AS WELL! "Saddam Strike Plane Told: 'This Is the Big One'".

"Elizabeth...I'm coming to join you. Elizabeth..."

LILEKS: "If he’s dead, what a Monday: Saddam dead, WMD found, and US forces swipe the ashtrays at a Presidential palace. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, men."

DID WE GET HIM? Rowan Scarborough and Bill Gertz on the most recent strike against Saddam.

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE WORLD B. FREE, OUR NATION TURNS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU: Steven Den Beste had a dream. He had an awesome dream.

(Sorry to butcher both Paul Simon and Lionel Richie in the above post, however. And if you don't remember the NBA's World B. Free, click here.)

In an article with the terrible headline of "Linkage cache trail" in The Washington Times, Deroy Murdock writes about Salman Pak, Saddam Hussein's terrorist training camp, which is equipped with a parked airliner, for practice hijackings.

"I DO BELIEVE THIS CITY IS FREAKIN' OURS", said Capt. Chris Carter of Watkinsville Georgia, quoted by the Everett Washington Herald, which also quotes an intelligence report that says, "Regime collapse is a matter of days, not weeks."

BODY OF "CHEMICAL ALI" IDENTIFIED BY BRITISH TROOPS, according to AP (CNN just announced it as well).

C-130 LANDS AT BAGHDAD AIRPORT, "the first known U.S. aircraft to arrive in the Iraqi capital", AP reports.

THE MEDIA WILL CALL IT "THE SIEGE OF BAGHDAD", but it's not, Steven Den Beste says, placing the fighting there in historical perspective.

HOW'S THE WAR GOING? Glenn Reynolds has a nice roundup of links from the Blogosphere and beyond, as well as this quote, which sums everything up quite nicely:

Meanwhile, a guy in the bar last night observed that you can tell how the war is going just from glancing at the television -- they used to be showing maps of Iraq, but now they're showing maps of Baghdad.

Be sure and read the excerpt from Mark Steyn that Glenn quotes.

RHETORIC MEETS REALITY: "Victim of Saddam makes [pro-Saddam Parliament member George Galloway] shut up"

ADVANTAGE, EDDRISCOLL.COM! Back on March 16th, we wrote a fairly long post titled, "America, the Middle East, and Vietnam", tracing back the roots of our Middle East involvement to our failure to win in Southeast Asia.

David Warsh picks up the theme in an even longer (and very interesting) essay titled, "The Iraq Invasion in (An) Historical Perspective".

(Found via Reason's "Hit & Run" blog.)

PULL OSAMA'S FINGER seems to be the gist of this post by Rick Brookhiser, who adds, "The truest thing in the story is that the CIA, given its recent record, probably is looking into it."

"THE TRAIN IS LEAVING THE STATION", says Victor Davis Hanson, who has its number.

You've probably read it all ready, but if not...RTWT.

"ASYMMETRY": Eric Olsen gives his take on the difference between the recent anti-American (or at least anti-Bush) gestures of Pearl Jam versus the Dixie Chicks.

AP IS ON THE CASE: "U.S. Tanks Enter Baghdad for First Time".

THREE CIA "ASSETS" EXECUTED BY IRAQ, according to this UPI report.

THE MARINES ARE INSIDE BAGHDAD, according to Fox News, who has some great video of tanks and APCs rolling in.

UPDATE (8:39 PM): Sounds like a small number of troops, probing how the Iraqis will respond, according to Major Garrett, Fox's man in the Pentagon.

A SPINAL TAP FOR THE 21ST CENTURY? Dave Kopel looks at Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, and concludes it's as much a "mockumentary" as Spinal Tap was.

HASAN AKBAR CHARGED IN GRENADE 'FRAGGING': Joel Mowbray says follow the money.

Here's my coverage from the night the incident occurred, and the day after. See also this post by Steven Den Beste.

DO SMOKING BANS CUT HEART ATTACKS IN HALF? Doubtful, but Jacob Sullum says that won't stop the claim from being "credulously repeated" by the media.

ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL: Jonah Goldberg's kicking it old school G-File style (ala, his early 1999-ish columns) on NRO, with some thoughts on what Iraq should be called.

Can't say I'm crazy about his final choice, but it would certainly be fun to see how the French react to it...

THE LONG AND WINDING BOX SET: My slightly stream-of-consciousness review of the The Beatles Anthology DVD is up on Blogcritics.

A MEME IS BORN: God bless James Lileks for creating the logo below, available in both large and small versions, via his site.

For more on the story behind it, click here.

US MAY ISOLATE BAGHDAD: This may just be fog of war or misinformation. But according to AP:

American forces might stop short of storming Baghdad and instead isolate it while the makings of a new national government are put in place, President Bush's top military adviser said Thursday.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated the coming days might bring neither an all-out fight for the city, as many have predicted, nor a conventional siege of the capital.

"When you get to the point where Baghdad is basically isolated, then what is the situation you have in the country?" he said at a Pentagon news conference. "You have a country that Baghdad no longer controls, that whatever's happening inside Baghdad is almost irrelevant compared to what's going on in the rest of the country."

And with communications effectively cut, or at least severely curtailed between Saddam (if he's still breathing) and the battlefield, one of the (many) real weaknesses of a totalitarian regime its army is revealed, as Steven Den Beste wrote late last year:

This is another area where training and morale come into the picture, with regard to Iraq, because they don't have either. When a military is cowed by fear, constantly culled by executions, and filtered based on political reliability, which is to say that when the primary mission of a military is to not execute a coup, then it is extremely vulnerable to decapitation. For ten years, demonstrating initiative in the Iraqi military was a one-way ticket to death, and few at any level will make any decision if they can refer to higher authority. This tendency to pull all decisions upward is endemic in all Arab militaries anyway, and it's going to be at its most extreme in Iraq now. Since everything is centrally controlled, then if that central command is destroyed, or even if it loses communications, then the rest of the army will be essentially useless. The men won't know what to do, and they're not used to making decisions for themselves. Even officers at ranks as high as Colonel are not used to actually thinking for themselves. And even if they were, it's not at all clear that they have any dedication to the cause of defending Iraq or fighting against us. The reality is that most of them hate Saddam as much as we do.

Of course, given the number of media casualties the last announced "pause" created, like I said, it may be just be another ruse.

THE 2003 NFL WEEKLY SCHEDULE HAS BEEN PUBLISHED. Look for some interesting rivalries and games in new or massively refurbished stadiums.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE: Check out these two photographs of American soldiers, from both World War II and today.

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

GROUCHO WATCH: Glenn Reynolds is apparently getting secret--and very silly--communiques from the Iraqi Information Ministry--or perhaps Saddam himself.

CARNAC WATCH: Johnny Carson's old Carnac character is apparently now the Chief Mufti of Russia.

MEANWHILE, Iran has plans in post-war Iraq as well.

IRAQI EX-PATRIOTS HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE GO-AHEAD to return to Iraq today, according to a news item my wife just heard on KCBS radio. (One gentleman, who was thrown out of Iraq 30 years ago for being a dissident, and who recently studied at the Naval Post Graduate College at Monterey left today via SFO.) I'll have more if I can find a link to a news article.

UPDATE: Here's the news article, from the KCBS Web site:

An Iraqi refugee who now lives in Monterey has been summoned by the Iraqi National Congress to help establish a civilian government in his home country once the war is over.

KCBS reporter Margie Shafer says Akeel Taee left Iraq in 1977 after being tortured by Iraqi state police for belonging to a dissident student union.

He has been studying defense resource management at the Naval Post Graduate school in Monterey and is now headed to Qatar anticipating the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"I really would like to see a transitional government established right away," Taee said. "We need this operation to be finished."

Taee spoke to KCBS before boarding a plane to Qatar via London.

He said once Saddam's regime is toppled. "then we will see all the solutions for all of our problems, ethnic and minority culture and the sharing of the power."

Taee told KCBS he is confident different Iraqi ethnic groups can peacefully coexist after Saddam is gone.

People "always work together, and nobody really tries to have a conflict," he said. "We never have a conflict within Iraqi society, even during the last 200 or 300 years."

Taee is one of 200 members of the Iraqi National Congress invited to help US Central Command set up a transitional government.

Taee's family will stay in London while he works on the new government.

UPDATE: Here's more, via the Drudge Report.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Sometimes I think the reason America is so despised in some quarters is that we fail to live up to other peoples’ worst expectations."

FULL METAL FISKING: As Stephen Green writes, "Do not piss off Asparagirl".

RONALD BAILEY HAS A MODEST PROPOSAL to help solve Europe's problem with anti-Semitism.

I like it, myself.

ALSO MIA: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il hasn't been seen in seven weeks.

Of course, all he has to do is say, "No matter what it says on EdDriscoll.com, I’m still alive"...

EVEN-HANDEDNESS: Steven Den Beste says of Moises Saman, the photographer for Newsday detained by the Iraqis, "After their terrible peril, he could not bring himself to actually say what we all know: the government of Iraq is monstrously evil."

As David Frum recently wrote:

I am not a believer in journalistic “objectivity” in wartime. Journalists who cover fires cheer for the firefighters. Journalists who cover crime don’t keep neutral between the crooks and their victims. What kind of warped system of values forbids journalists to support their country when the guns are blasting?

Or as someone once asked CNN, "Who do you think you are? Switzerland?"

I LIKE IT: New recruiting slogan was introduced by the Navy this fall. Team Stryker has details and a shot of one of a new Navy poster.

TIMESWATCH is a new offshoot of the Media Research Center, focusing on bias at (you guessed it) the New York Times.

"WHITE HOUSE TO END DRUGS & TERROR ADS": Talk about long overdue--I can imagine the negative calls that the White House got after they were broadcast during the Super Bowl.

US OFFICIAL SAYS AMERICAN POW RESCUED, according to AP.

THE REAL DOGS OF WAR: Buster swings into action!

Virginia Postrel, writing on her new and improved Dynamist Blog, has an interesting look at the angles that the American, British and Arab press take when slanting their stories.

TWO MISSING NEWSDAY JOURNALISTS FOUND, alive and well.

I DIDN'T SEE SADDAM ON TV THIS MORNING, but that's OK, neither did anybody else...

UPDATE: "By the way, notice that there's been no trace of Qusay or Uday since the bombing? I think we got all three of them", says Stephen Den Beste.

Good. Although, just as in World War II, when several--but not all--of the members of Hitler's inner circle committed suicide rather than face capture, it would be have been nice to Saddam and his progeny tried after the war.

"A PERSONAL MEMOIR": Nice eulogy for Daniel Patrick Moynihan by William F. Buckley Jr.

PUTTIN' ON THE RITZ: Well, this explains a lot!