Heh:

There are flops, almighty flops and then there are books by Mary Cheney.

That’s Andrew Sullivan “book-clubbing” Cheney, according to Daniel Gross at Slate.

There’s an etiquette to BookScanning. You BookScan your enemies to take joy in their failure or to aggravate the agony you feel at their success. You don’t BookScan your buddies, your colleagues, or your editors. That’s partly to protect the BookScanned from the embarrassment of having others know that the project on which they labored for five years racked up sales in the middle three digits. And partly to protect the BookScanner from the embarrassment of knowing just how successful the guy who sits in the next cubicle has been. After all, the only thing worse than seeing friends fail in the literary marketplace is seeing them succeed in the literary marketplace.

Uh-oh. Fair warning:

BookScan also has its own karma. There are probably a bunch of authors laying in wait for the day when Edward Wyatt writes his first book or when Andrew Sullivan’s next volume comes out. To paraphrase Bob Dylan (whose Chronicles, Volume 1 has sold 370,000 copies in hardcover, according to BookScan), the scanner now will later be scanned.

Well, at least someone’s talking about books! (about which a lot more here and here)

…is Katie Holmes. She gets $3 million a year if she stays married to Toothy Tom:

It’s amazing that they even got a prenup. Their love seems so genuine.

(from StarkedNY)

Philip Tetlock, for his book Expert Political Judgment, set out to find out how much credibility we should give to “experts” (aka pundits):

The basic idea was to solicit thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then score the predictions for accuracy. We find that the media not only fail to weed out bad ideas, but that they often favor bad ideas, especially when the truth is too messy to be packaged neatly.

The evidence falls into two categories. First, as the skeptics warned, when hordes of pundits are jostling for the limelight, many are tempted to claim that they know more than they do. Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers….

• “boomsters… assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.”…

• “doomsters… assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time.”

William Kristol on Zarqawi and the aftermath of his death:

Zarqawi is a perfect reminder of why we had to fight in Iraq. Would we be safer if he were living there, under Saddam’s protection, securely planning attacks around the world and working on his chemical and biological weapons projects? Zarqawi’s life and death remind us that we are engaged in a global struggle. When he died, Palestinian foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, a leader of Hamas, linked the “resistance” in Iraq to that against Israel, deploring what he termed the “assassination” of Zarqawi. As Saul Singer noted in the Jerusalem Post, we are “witnessing the seamlessness of jihad. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and al Qaeda come from different sides of the Sunni-Shiite divide, but they agree on the need to wage jihad against the West, particularly Israel and the United States.”

Normally, I would be skeptical of pushing the line that the jihad movement is becoming seamless. But the New York Times suggests the same seamlessness today in a piece by Steven Erlanger.

In the middle of a story about the fractured politics between the PLO and Hamas, Erlanger includes advice to the Palestinians from al Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Hamas made another appeal on Friday to Mr. Abbas to cancel the referendum, as a senior figure of Al Qaeda called on Palestinians to vote against Mr. Abbas in any such referendum.

The Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya of Hamas, asked Mr. Abbas to back down for the sake of Palestinian unity and continue dialogue instead on the basis of a document produced by prisoners calling for a national-unity government.

The Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, urged Palestinians to reject a platform that implicitly recognized Israel alongside a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders. “I call on them to refuse any Palestinian referendum because Palestine belongs to the Muslim world,” Mr. Zawahiri said in the videotape broadcast Friday on Al Jazeera.

Mr. Zawahiri also criticized the 2002 Arab proposal that offered Israel peace if it pulled back to pre-1967 borders, which Israel has rejected. He called it the “Arab capitulation initiative.”

Once upon a time, Yasser Arafat tried to distance himself from bin Laden and al Qaeda. He was shrewd enough to know that the linkage was poisonous, because of 9/11. Neither Hamas nor Abbas seems to have the exquisite grasp of PR that Arafat had. These new Palestinian leaders seem to have no compunction about allowing Zawahiri and bin Laden to speak for them.

Interesting development. Let’s see where it leads.

She makes me cringe. As I read her behavior, she’s trying to test the limits of her free speech…and rake in the bucks while doing so. She seems to be doing both: everyone is talking about her, which should help boost her book sales.

She has also succeeded in exposing the totalitarian impulse in some of our fellow Americans…in this case a congressman:

Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, D-Ill., said Thursday on the House floor that Coulter is a “hatemonger” and called on Republicans to denounce her: “I must ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Does Ann Coulter speak for you when she suggests poisoning not Supreme Court Justices or slanders the 9/11 … widows? If not, speak now. Your silence allows her to be your spokesman.”

Voltaire is my North Star on this. So, even as I shudder at her heartlessness, I defend her right to say it.
On Coulter’s right to speak her mind rests our own right to say as we wish: free speech for me and for thee.

And—and this is especially important: the remedy for “hate speech” is more speech, not less speech.

That is what separates us from the totalitarians, for whom some ideas, words, thoughts, jokes, stories, and speech are too dangerous and must be “denounced.”
Let there be no witch-hunts. From either side of the “debate.” ***

***I’ve written about this subject a lot. Click here and here for posts on this and related subjects. I’m an Enlightenment Fundamentalist.

Via Paul Belien, of the Brussels Journal, I find that Hirsi Ali has got another movie coming out soon: Submission 2. The subject is Muslims’ intolerance toward gays.

The Dutch authorities fear that “Submission 2,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s soon to be released new movie, might make the Netherlands a target of angry Muslims worldwide. The movie criticizes Muslims for their intolerance of gays. In a report published last Wednesday the country’s National Anti-Terrorism Coordinator (Nationaal Coördinator Terrorismebestrijding, NCTb) warns that one must seriously take into account the possibility of an international Muslim boycott of the Netherlands, similar to the boycott of Denmark by the Islamic world earlier this year over the Muhammad cartoons.

Meanwhile, the Dutch, with their queen at the head of the parade, continue their very vocal arguments about political correctness:

Meanwhile there was a political row in the Dutch Parliament earlier this week, concerning a visit by Queen Beatrix to the Mobarak Mosque in The Hague. The Mobarak Mosque is the oldest mosque in the Netherlands. It was established 50 years ago. Like all visitors the Queen took off her shoes before entering the mosque. However, she also agreed not to shake hands with the imams and radical religious leaders running the mosque. According to the imams, who belong to a radical group, Islam forbids them to touch women other than their wives. Jan-Peter Balkenende, the Dutch Prime Minister, praised the Queen for the “example of religious tolerance” that she had given by not shaking hands. The conservative politician Geert Wilders, however, told Parliament on Wednesday that he had been “greatly irritated” by the Queen and the Prime Minister, who “under the pretext of tolerance are selling out Dutch values such as the equality between men and women.”

I see that Jeff Jarvis and Mickey Kaus both wrote about the sensational flare-up between the New York Times and GM.***

For what it’s worth: it happened to me, too.

I had my first-ever letter published by the Times a while back. It was pretty cool to get the call—they really liked my letter—and to get it published.

They overcorrected my grammar and punctuation, which made me laugh. They also deleted two words. Hmmm. Okay…well…hmmm….well…whatever.

It bugged me, though, and it continued to bug me. Without those two words, my argument wasn’t complete.

So now you’re reading this blog.

*** I also wrote about this yesterday (and neglected to tip my hat to Romenesko, which I do now belatedly).