I wonder if Joe Wilson’s new book will feature an author bio on the jacket that …Betrays His Wife’s CIA Identity just as his website bio did.

Since we know who outed Plame (Wilson himself), I’m most interested to see who he fingers as having made the foolish decision to involve him in the first place. I imagine it must have gone down something like this: “have you guys been selling any weapons to Iraqis lately? No? Great… I’m late for tennis. Ta ta.”

Economist and NRO contributor Don Luskin answers a question I emailed to him in response to his last column dissecting one by Paul Krugman.

This factors into my (forthcoming) review of the Ron Suskind / Paul O’Neill book…

Here’s a picture of my newborn niece. She was born on Friday, Shakespeare’s birthday.

Meanwhile, my brother seems to have taken Terry McAuliffe’s suggestion literally, banishing his “Republican attack dogs” to the back yard so that Anna won’t be bothered. I helped him assemble the new dog house - it’s like canine tupperware - unreal.

Not bad for my first 5k, given that I didn’t train for it and hadn’t ran at all for two months. Here’s a goofy picture of me near the finish line.

I’ve got to give props to a fellow memphibian. Joefish, over at the Freshwater blog, has a clever post comparing the two JFKs.

I was at the Memphis airport to pick up my mom, and I was wondering what it would be like to spot a celebrity. Then I saw this tall guy wearing sunglasses and thought he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him - I laughed to myself that my train of thought was leading me to believe anyone who happened by would be a famous person. But it did look like he was trying to hide his face with the sunglasses.

Still looking around for my mom, I went down to the luggage area and saw the guy sitting alone making a call on a cellphone. A little later, I thought about asking him if anyone ever told him he looked like the guy from Better than Ezra, but I decided against it.

Then I saw three other guys join him, and they had tattoos all over their arms. I asked them if they were Better than Ezra. When I asked, they all looked around and didn’t answer. Then I asked if they were here for a show. They said yes they were going to play at the Southaven Springfest. I could tell they were a little annoyed or uncomfortable, so I just said I saw them last summer on Mud Island, and a few years ago at Harding University. They said “Oh, yeah?”… and relaxed a bit. Then I said I hoped they had a good show tonight and walked away. I think they were anticipating an autograph or photo request. It’s true, I would have taken a picture, but I had decided to leave my camera in the car. Stupid me. But I’m also a bit glad that I didn’t bother them any more than I did. It was just funny that it happened like it did.

Village Voice reporter Jason Vest thinks he’s stumbled onto something novel - a [n Iraqi] Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) memo that warns, “U.S. efforts have created an environment rife with corruption and sectarianism likely to result in civil war.”

Vest says the memo is “notable for its candidly troubled assessment of Iraq’s future,” especially against the backdrop of “matter-of-fact optimism” on the part of Bush Administration officials. For this, he includes rosy statements such as Rumsfeld’s saying Iraq has “good days and bad days,” with current challenges being merely “a moment in Iraq’s path towards a free and democratic system,” or Bush’s, “Our coalition is standing with responsible Iraqi leaders as they establish growing authority in their country.”

But Vest shouldn’t wet himself too quickly. Both versions of Iraq could be correct, just as they were in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

American forces in Iraq may have “created an environment… likely to result in civil war,” but so did American Colonial forces. The result was indeed civil war but also the advancement of individual liberties, a democratic government and a nation of united states.

The CPA memo may be “notable for its candidly troubled assessment of Iraq’s future,” but such assessments were commonplace at the birth of our Union.

The conventional wisdom then was that creating a new government was “impossible,” and “the safest bet was that the early American republic would dissolve into a cluster of state or regional sovereignties,” according to Founding Brothers author Joseph Ellis. “The overwhelming judgment of the most respected authorities was that it could not be done… the states and regions comprising the new nation had no common history as a nation and no common experience behaving as a coherent collective.”

Update: welcome Instapundit readers.

U.S. productivity is at a 40-year high, and it’s in that robust spirit that I’ve added some items to the Iraqi WMD blog and the Dream blog, and since I’m participating in TV Turnoff Week, I might get to finish reading the O’Neill book and post my review.

Just don’t make me turn off the laptop.

Here’s a summary of news items from the last 30 days appearing on my Iraqi WMD Blog:

Al Qaida terrorists struck in Madrid in order to get Spanish troops out of Iraq.

Poland’s President said his country was “taken for a ride” about the WMDs, but that he would continue the mission in Iraq and was disappointed by the Spanish government’s decision to withdraw troops in the face of terrorist threats. A New York Post editorial adds that other groups were also misled, including the Bush administration, American intel, President Clinton, Sen. Kerry, Congress, the United Nations, and “maybe even Saddam himself.”

On the one-year anniversary of the Iraq war, 57% of Americans polled said the US did the right thing.

The press continued to misquote Cheney’s thoughts on Iraq’s nuclear capabilities, as expressed in his interview on Meet the Press.

It was noted that Richard Clark connected Osama Bin Laden to Iraqi nerve gas experts in 1999.

Charles Duelfer, the CIA’s new chief Iraq weapons inspector, said he would not rule out finding weapons of mass destruction. “We regularly receive reports, some quite intriguing and credible, about concealed caches,” he said, adding that former Iraqi senior officials were not talking to interrogators. Duelfer said the Hussein regime was in “clear” violation of several UN resolutions banning WMD programs in Iraq.

Duelfer told Fox News that only a “tiny fraction” of Iraq documents obtained have been translated and that new information shows Saddam Hussein’s dual-use industries were able to produce biological and chemical weapons on “short notice.”

An Iraqi exile told The Age that he had access to three secret underground bunkers where chemical weapons were stored; he also knew of two others around Baghdad, Basra and Tikrit. The exile spoke out using an assumed name, saying “it’s still too dangerous for us to speak out; I don’t know who to trust. There are former army officers living in Australia who were close to Saddam.”

The New York Post reported that a “biochemical plant” was found in Iraq.

Colin Powell conceded that some WMD intel was not “solid.”

A document by the Iraq Survey Group leaked to a Scottish news agency concluded that Saddam Hussein had the ability to unleash biological and chemical weapons at short notice, and was plotting to expand his facilities.

Al Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in Iraq.

The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency said Iraqi nuclear equipment and missile engines have been smuggled out of the country and were discovered in European scrap yards. Mohammed ElBaradei, the IAEA director general, wrote, “It is not clear whether the removal of these items has been the result of looting activities in the aftermath of the recent war in Iraq, or as part of systematic efforts” to clean up contaminated nuclear sites in Iraq. “In any event these activities may have a significant impact on the agency’s continuity of knowledge of Iraq’s remaining nuclear-related capabilities and raise concern with regards to the proliferation risk associated with dual use material and equipment disappearing to unknown destinations.”

General Franks told the AP that he now thinks the WMD intelligence was “incomplete” and “not correct.”

According to NewsMax, Jordan’s King Abdullah said that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al-Qaida bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. In his testimony before Congress last year, weapons inspector Kay said U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S. attack on March 19, 2003. Five days after Jordanian officials announced the arrest of several terrorist suspects, the State Dept said they were linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Al Qaida operative living in Iraq.

In a new tape, Osama Bin Laden offered Europe a truce if they pull troops out of “Islamic countries.” Europe declined.

that doesn’t exist?

More info here.