WASHINGTON — Media analysts sounded an increasingly gloomy
note today following news that a full-scale outbreak of civil war in
Iraq had been averted. “The prospects for regime change in Washington
seem increasingly remote,” said one senior White House reporter who
spoke on condition of anonymity.

Glenn Reynolds
writes:

When other groups decide that the way to get favorable press is to
use violence, those who have wimped out now will have no one to blame
but themselves. As a reader emailed me a while back, what use is a
free press if it doesn’t believe in free speech?
People talk about Eurabia, but what’s really happened [...]

Former Soviet Dissident
Warns For EU Dictatorship. Sound like a crazy premise? Wait. It gets
better. Vladimir Bukovsky, a leading dissident of the Soviet era whom was
invited to testify at the Russian government’s inquiry into whether the
Soviet Communist Party had been a criminal institution. got to see more
of the KGB’s secret reports to [...]

Doc Searls asked me to put the argument for total telecoms deregulation into a nutshell, then blog it so he could point at it. Here it is.

Any democracy should aspire to a perfect, fraud-free voting system. But today’s loudest complainers on this issue — mainly Democrats complaining about Republican election victories — should be careful what they wish for, because they might get it.
To see why, let’s apply a little game theory to the problem. Ask yourself under what circumstances [...]

CNNMoney reports:

Demand for technology workers in the United States continues to grow
in spite of American companies shifting more technology work overseas,
according to a new study.

Sigh. Is there, like, some cosmic law that reporters have to be
poisonously ignorant about economics? Of course outsourcing
stimulates domestic demand. Increases in efficiency and better
exploitation of comparative advantage [...]

Keith Windschuttle gets it. In The Adversary
Culture he identifies the same suicidalist pathology that
Mark Brittingham and Jeff Goldstein and I have been writing about
recently.
Windschuttle, an Australian historian, identifies historians and
cultural-studies types on the academic left as vectors of the
disease. I wonder if he’s read Koch on Willi Munzenberg or Haynes
& Klehr’s Denial and gets [...]

Segway inventor Dean Kamen unveils his next act, and it’s a doozy.
He’s invented two devices to address the power
and clean-water problems in the Third World — essentially, a
rugged still and a generator that burns cow dung. But the real
challenge to conventional thinking is Kamen’s (rightly) contemptuous
dismissal of conventional development economics, and his plan to
end-run [...]

Politics is nasty enough when it’s about real issues, because it
always reduces to somebody holding a gun on somebody else. But
somehow I find it hardest to take when it’s about faux issues, all the
machinery of coercion enlisted to no purpose other than for fools to
posture at each other.

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.
We [...]

Recently, The Nation ran an article,
The End of the
Internet, that viewed with alarm some efforts
by telephone companies to hack their governing regulations so they can
price-discriminate. Their plans include tiered pricing so a consumer’s
monthly rate could be tied to the amount of bandwidth actually used. They
also want to be able to offer preferred fast access [...]

They laughed at me when that bitch Monica rug-burned
her knees in the Oval Office. They laughed at my universal health
care plan. They laughed when I told them of my conversations with
Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost — they said I was mad.

Mad, am I? I’ll show them mad…soon, I’ll unleash my
mainstream-media minions and deploy my [...]

Warning: I am about to vent. If splenetic ranting is not your
thing, back outta here now, for I am seriously pissed off.

Here’s another one for the file marked “Bush’s opponents are so
deranged that they are good reasons to support him”. At The Corner,
via InstaPundit, Tim Graham has this
report:

Driving in, I had to sample some “progressive talk” on the SOTU [State of the
Union address]. At the Stephanie Miller Show, they were laughing about (and
playing an audio [...]