Population: One

Huh. This is really interesting; someone took a listen to the ABC live broadcast of Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and the CNN report on Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and you know what? CNN really has the boos miked way higher. There’s one guy yelling “Booo” really loudly in the CNN version who doesn’t show up at all in the ABC version.

Listen for yourself. I didn’t think I’d hear a difference, but I did. I’m not gonna claim it’s foul play — it could just be a different set of mikes used by CNN — but it is really distinct.

This also tends to explain why a fair number of bloggers perceived nothing but boos, which honestly confused me at the time. I watched the Oscars live, and I was pretty sure I heard mixed boos and cheers. Anyone just watching the CNN footage would certainly have gotten the impression that the boos outweighed the cheers by a country mile.

I got my first piece of spam offering copies of the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards today. Some yobbo’s selling the PDF on Ebay. You can download it for free from the DoD, of course. Here’s someone who printed out the PDF onto card stock, and is selling the results for 16 bucks a pop; he’s also claiming that you can’t print from the PDFs others are selling.

Just amazing.

Frontline ran an excellent piece on North Korea tonight. As usual, they stuck all the good stuff up on their Web site. Gotta love it.

And, since (as we all know) PBS is hopelessly liberal and biased, they made sure to include an interview with the highest ranking North Korean ever to defect in which he praises Bush to the skies. Cunning, those liberals.

My cynicism aside, I particularly liked the Ashton Carter interview. He has lots of good insights, and he takes a pretty rational appearing line on the implications of a war on the Korean peninsula. Also, he has the quote of the entire piece:

I remember in 1994, when we were dealing with North Korea, the intelligence experts would come in, and they would say, “That’s a very interesting statement by the North Koreans. It’s rather conciliatory.” I’d say, “How can you tell that’s conciliatory?” And they would say, in effect, “Well, you know, it doesn’t say anything about your mother.”

There’s wide-spread looting in Iraq today. Not very surprisingly, the social structure of the country is in chaos. Hospitals are being looted; suspected looters are being killed in the street. On the BBC this morning, a reporter talked about seeing a man beat to death in front of him. The killers said “He wasn’t from this neighborhood.” Was he a looter? Maybe, maybe not. But man, it’s getting rough out there.

This is about as indicative of the future of Iraq as the cheering was yesterday. The fact that Iraqis cheered Americans yesterday does not mean that they will be cheering six months from now. The fact that there is widespread looting today does not mean that there will be looting six months from now.

And that’s why I feel we while we should not be saying “Sure, but…” (an excellent post by Philippe de Croy, btw), I feel we should all be saying “Let’s wait till things have stabilized.”

Philippe de Croy of the Volokh Conspiracy provides guidelines for conservative commentators who want to talk about Iraq’s chemical weapons. It’s a nice public service, really.

(Or anyhow, I assume that’s what he means when he says “Talk a lot about things that ‘aren’t clear’ or that ‘remain to be seen.’ These sorts of assertions are good because they are hard to falsify.”)

Sauce for the goose…

Kurdish forces have occupied Kirkuk; according to NPR this morning, there are about 20,000 Kurdish soldiers in the city along with a fairly token US presence. This is supposedly a trigger point for a Turkish invasion, so we’ll soon see if Turkey and/or the US are bluffing or not. Abdullah Gul, the Turkish Foreign Minister, said Colin Powell agreed to allow Turkish military observers to go to Kirkuk, and that US forces would arrive “within a few hours” to take control of the situation.