Richard Botkin writes in WorldNetDaily about the work of Don Brewster and James Pond in Cambodia to free very young children from sexual slavery. Brewster's a pastor. Pond's a retired Force Recon Marine. Both are on the front line of impeding this horrific industry which is a huge business in Cambodia. You'd think a 60 Minutes or a Dateline would have cameras at the ready.

I mentioned on the program tonight that yesterday, driving first north and then south on the I-17 in Arizona, I passed a huge Christmas tree in the median between the separated north and south bound lanes.

A listener sent me this link to the picture of the tree, and this link to its history.

I am relieved to report that even uber-liberal Duke law prof Erwin Chemerinsky does not think this unconstitutional.

Alleged GOP Senator Lincoln Chafee faces a tough primary opponent in Cranston, RI Mayor Stephen Laffey in the September 12, 2006 Republican primary, and even if he survives that face down with Republican voters, another tough opponent in likely Democratic nominee, RI Secretary of State Matt Brown.

Despite the clear indications that support for Chafee is crippling its fundraising with the grass-=roots, the National Republican senatorial Committee is already spending scarece resources to attack Laffey and defend Chafee.

The trouble is, these attacks seem to be helping Laffey.

One other point/question:

Matt Brown is a candidate in an FEC regulated race. The Huffington Post is giving him valuable blog space. Is this a contribution? If Brown was running editorials on a television station, would that be an in-kind contribution? If a newspaper allowed Campbell to run daily op-eds, would that be a contribution?

I along with most other bloggers absolutely reject the idea that anything a blogger writes or says on blog is a contribution to a candidate's campaign, but I haven't thought through the situation where the blogger is a candidate for office blogging on another's website. This is a much more troublesome and thus inviting target for the overactive regualtors at the FEC. I'd welcome the opinion of experienced campaign counsel.

From tomorrow's Times of London:

Western white woman is suicide bomber
By Anthony Browne, Brussels Correspondent

MIREILLE, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad.
In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalization, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing.

Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman’s true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam.

"Bush isn't backing down. Not. One. Inch."

Bill Hobbes takes down the LAT.

The best laugh of the day comes via a letter from 24 Democratic Congressman bemoaning the paper's cancellation of Bob Scheer's ravings. Dennis Kucinich posted it at the Huffington Post. Before you think, "Good for the Times for dumping the crazy," ask yourself if there has ever been a columnist for the paper whose column --if cancelled-- would elicit a protest from two dozen conservative members of Congress? There is of course no such columnist, and never has been. In fact, there isn't a single high profile center-right writer identified with the Times in any capacity other than syndicated columnists. But the Times cheerfully indulged Scheer all these years, and then in a vain attempt to cover its quality control firing of the around-the-bend Scheer, tossed the only conservative on Spring Street, cartoonist Michael Ramirez, over board at the same time.

What a disaster the Tribune Company has on its hand: It knows it must win back center-right readers to survive, but it lacks the guts to try to do so boldly, and its Ramirez-move steps on its big anti-MoveOn.org gesture. Here's the whole letter:

Jeffrey M. Johnson
Publisher
Los Angeles Times
202 West First Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Dear Mr. Johnson:

We, as Members of Congress, object to the dismissal of Robert Scheer, a 32-year veteran of the LA Times with a long history of excellence in reporting and op ed pieces. For example, over the last 10 years:

Scheer, in 1995, was a leading critic of the Gingrich plan to cut social spending to record low levels and he wrote adamantly about the need to save affirmative action.

In 1996, Scheer criticized welfare reform for its effect on the poor as soon as the economy turns south.

Scheer wrote in 1999 in defense of Wen Ho Lee, the nuclear weapons scientist accused by many of selling nuclear secrets, despite the lack of evidence.

In 200, Scheer predicted the Bush/Cheney ticket's close ties to the oil industry would ensure consumers would "feel the sting from the exorbitant price of gas."

In 2001, Scheer identified the dangerous precedent of the Patriot Act. He forecast the attack on our basic liberties.

In 2003, Scheer was already making a strong case for the U.S. getting out of Iraq.

Scheer's final column highlighted military intelligence documents that suggested Iraqi intelligence was manipulated, as opposed to simply bad intelligence.

On Nov. 11th, the LA Times reported this dismissal along with other staff cuts. According to the article, a conservative contributing editor to the National Review has been hired to write for the op-ed pages. In effect the LA Times has hired a Bush Administration cheerleader to replace a leading critic of the Administration.

Your readers, and the nation, deserve better. We hope that you will reconsider your dismissal of Robert Scheer.

Sincerely,

Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
Diane Watson (D-CA)
Barbara Lee (D-CA)
Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)
John Tierney (D-MA)
Neil Abercrombie (D-HI)
Lloyd Doggett (D-TX)
Richard Neal (D-MA)
Michael Honda (D-CA)
Raul Grijalva (D-AZ)
Patrick Kennedy (D-RI)
Juanita Millender-McDonald (D-CA)
Bob Filner (D-CA)
Maurice Hinchey (D-NY)
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
Gwen Moore (D-WI)
John Lewis (D-GA)
George Miller (D-CA)
Bill Clay (D-MO)
Donald Payne (D-NJ)
Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
Hilda Solis (D-CA)
Sam Farr (D-CA)
Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

While the United States Congress is on recess, and the Patriot Act unextended and set to expire at the end of the year, the Brits uncover the latest terrorist plot in the UK. From The Sun:

A SUSPECTED terrorist plot to stage a Christmas murder blitz in Britain was smashed yesterday by police and MI5.
A 28-year-old Asian man was snared as he allegedly tried to buy a rocket launcher near the M25 South Mimms services.

It is feared he planned to blast a holiday flight at a major UK airport.

The British-born Muslim was kept under surveillance for weeks by Met chief Sir Ian Blair’s anti-terror cops and MI5 agents.

From The Belmont Club:

Attempts to develop "network-centric" methods of warfare in the service of a nation state are ultimately limited by their subordination to a highly centralized command and control system. They lack the final degree of freedom that terrorist organizations have, which is to take on a life of their own.

John Arquilla wrote the book on netcentric warfare, and I don't recall that he was so pessimistic about the ability of nation-states to match netted-up terrorists. There must be some sort of advantage that technology available to the hierarchy-bound nation-state provides that provides the decisive advantage over low-tech but much more decentralized terrorists. Which is why the critical task in the GWOT seems to be denying terrorists the base from which they can develop not technological parity, but gap-closing improvements in their capacities, which combined with their greater flexibility, poses the most lethal threats.

Read the whole post, and Arquilla's book as well.

From an op-ed in today's Washington Post, "Foolish Fences," by Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey:

Unfortunately, unilateral attempts to close the border won't solve the problem of undocumented immigrants. They will only make it worse.

This assertion is simply absurd. It might be difficult to, say, build a border long fence and the roads to patrol it (not as difficult as the construction of the interstate highway system, though). And it might strain relations with Mexico. Such a fence would certainly not end illegal immigration as fences can be gotten over and under, and there are thousands of other entry points in the United States.

But it is just foolishness to argue that a fence would not dramatically cut the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, even as the fence along the border in San Diego has done.

When anyone entering the immigration control debate refuses to admit the obvious, their credibility is gone.

"The National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is available online.

From the WSJ.com's Avian Flu News Tracker:

Chinese Health Minister Gao Qiang defended the government against accusations of a cover-up of bird-flu cases. "I am not afraid of local governments in China covering up an epidemic situation," Mr. Gao said. "What I am afraid of is the low level of competency and technical expertise of hospitals, clinics and medical personnel at the grassroots level." He said he is "worried about the inability of our medical and quarantine personnel at the local level to diagnose and discover epidemics in a timely fashion due to their low abilities and relatively backward equipment."

and

Indonesian tests confirmed that a 25-year-woman who died overnight in Jakarta had bird flu, officials said, as they investigated the possibility that several members of one family were infected by the virus. Dr. Ilham Patu said the government would wait to update its human bird-flu death toll, which now stands at seven, until the woman's lab tests were confirmed by a WHO-accredited laboratory in Hong Kong. That could take several days.

There's a new sheriff at NBC News, Steve Capus, and he's really shaking things up:

Its most notable innovation so far was announced by Mr. Capus earlier this month: NBC became the first broadcast network to make its early-evening newscast available later each night, at no charge, on the Internet. Soon, the network expects to offer similar online versions of "Today" and "Meet the Press," and is already providing news updates to cell phone customers of Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, among others.

Unfortunately for Mr. Capus, the trend lines aren't good:

[W]hile "NBC Nightly News" has recently widened its lead over "World News Tonight" on ABC, both programs have lost several hundred thousand viewers in the television season that began in September, as compared to the same period a year ago. While some of the falloff could be attributed to waning interest since last year's presidential election, Mr. Capus said yesterday that there were surely other dynamics at work.

"We would all be foolish to ignore that number about how much we're off," Mr. Capus said. "We all have to figure out new ways to grow the audience. That's why we're putting so much emphasis on these new platforms. It gives us a whole new group of audience members that weren't there before necessarily, and don't sit down to watch the 'Nightly News' at 6:30 every night."

The problem --the root, basic, deep down and undeniable problem-- is that at least half of America's news consumers, the red state voters, don't trust the nets. It is difficult to get that trust back, and NBC has done exactly zero to do so.

The innovations that would pay off with viewers would be innovations that brought balance and credibility back to a news division that is rightly regarded as very left of center, and very pro=Democrat.

You can offer Tim Russert in real time, and he'll still be the charming, talented, pro-Democrat anchor he's always been.

You can air Keith Olbermann round-the-clock, and he'll still be a sportscaster rooting for his home team Dems.

The first rule of holes still applies.

Read Major K's analysis of the critical role played by American forces in Iraq in situations like the aftermath of the assassination of a Sunni Shiek. The U.S. military is trusted by all sides except the terrorists. Key question:

Secondly, for all of the people at home and in the media that think we are such a widely hated and mistrusted "occupying force," I would like to know why they think the Iraqis hate their honest broker. I have found that only the arhabi do.

John Tierney has a great column on the aspects of WalMart that the anti-Walmart forces never bother to discuss, "The Good Goliath." Unfortunately the "stupid goliath," The New York Times, continues to try and get people to pay for online opinion pieces. Key conclusion from Tierney:

Wal-Mart has been one of the most successful antipoverty programs in America. It provides entry level jobs that unskilled workers badly want -- there are often 5 or 10 applicants for each position.

Meanwhile, over at the online paper of record, The Wall Street Journal's WSJ.com, a new news tracker has joined the indispensable Avian Flu News Tracker. This one is the "Holiday-Sales News Tracker." Example of post in this tracker:

8:45 a.m.: Online retailers and analysts are crunching the "Cyber Monday" numbers. Amazon.com reported one million items were ordered from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. yesterday, compared with 660,000 items during the same time on Sunday. Online bag and shoe seller eBags announced that its sales jumped 60% on Monday from a year ago.

This "deep and current silo" approach to news is a fascinating revolution that is a new standard for online editions. I suggested a Campaign 2006 News Tracker yesterday, but would also like to see a "D.C. Scandals News Tracker," "Baseball Hot Stove" and "NFL Draft" trackers, and of course a "New Media News Tracker." The WSJ.com staff is providing the sorting and real-time functions that information consumers are demanding in greater and greater numbers.

Here's my suggestion to corporate gift-givers everywhere: Save that expenditure on Christmas cards that get thrown in the trash the day they arrive and on the candy for clients campaign. Rather, give gift subscriptions to WSJ.com. You'll be the most popular corporate gift-giver of them all.

And if the WSJ.com marketing folks were as smart as their news types, they'd discount the $99 a year subscription and feature it on the front page.

From an article in this morning's New York Times on the early Christmas season best selling gifts:

In fact, those looking to buy an Xbox 360 may be out of luck. It is largely unavailable now, and the few that can be had are fetching double and triple the $400 retail price from online stores and eBay.

How could that be, with four weeks left in the shopping season? Could Microsoft have so badly calculated demand as to exhaust its available supply four days into the shopping season? If so, what were they thinking? A new marketing campaign to become the Grinch, or to drive would be shoppers into the arms of Sony? And given the fierce cynicism of young consumers, doesn't a buzz-inducing shortage seem just the sort of cue that could make Gatesland even more loathsome to the under 25 crowd?

So, what's Microsoft saying about this? Almost nothing.

Xbox 360 has a site which asserts "Xbox 360 in stores now," and the site has a calnendar of future game releases etc. There's a forlorn comment or two in the Xbox forums, but Google news doesn't have one piece I can find asking the company how such a shortage came to be. With spokesmen as farflung as Ireland being very cagey about supplies, the suspicion grows that Microsoft is managing this to create a shortage which in turn creates buzz.

Here's MajorNelson's take on the situation. And many posters on this thread are very unhappy game-players.

HBS must see a new case study unfolding, and if Microsoft doesn't start the spin machine soon, look for plenty slow news season stories on the worst new product roll-out in a decade.