HARRY POTTER: THE FIFTH YEAR



Yes, it is true. I'm reading the fifth Harry Potter book. So far, it's pretty good.

BLAIR'S SPEECH: EXCELLENT



Tony Blair is a great orator. The text of his remarks can be found here. You can watch video of the Prime Minister's address here.

TOP 10 THINGS THE "PUNDITOCRACY" GOT WRONG LAST WEEK



Here is one of Mark Steyn's top 10:

"Iraq's slide into violent anarchy" (Guardian, April 11). Say what you like about Saddam, but he ran a tight ship and you didn't have to nail down your nest of tables: since the Brits took over, Basra's property crime is heading in an alarmingly Cheltenhamesque direction. MBITRW (Meanwhile Back In The Real World): A year from now, Basra will have a lower crime rate than most London boroughs.

To read the rest, click here.

LIBERATION I



From the AP, with the following caption "An Iraqi man kisses an American soldier in downtown Bagdhad on Wednesday, April 9, 2003."

ON THE PRISON FOR TYKES



From James Lileks:

Allied troops liberated a children�s jail today.



I wish that sentence made no sense.



Someone had to decide there would be children�s jails. Who? Saddam? He had more important things to do. Children matter as much to his world as dogs, or lamps. He may have signed off on the idea of creating a youth brigade, and put a gold star in the dossier of the sweating toady who proposed the idea. When someone put forth a proposal for jails to hold the children who resisted joining the brigades, he may have felt that spasm of impatience that shoots through the dictator�s heart from time to time: why are you bothering me with this? Build them; I don�t care. You think this is the path to advancement? You want my ear and my eye, kill someone who matters.

Read the whole thing.

ABSOLUTELY RIGHT



Read Andrew Sullivan today:

This is an amazing victory, a victory over a monster who gassed civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands, and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet. It's a victory over those who marched in the millions to stop this liberation, over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America crowd, and the armchair generals. It's a victory for the two countries in the world that have always made freedom possible and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made dark by terror. It's a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage and restraint. It's a victory for optimism over pessimism, the righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against postmodern excuses, and of political leadership over appeasement. Celebrate it. Don't let the whiners take this away from you or from the people of Iraq.

THE "BIG LIE" EXPOSED AGAIN



Courtesy Fox News:

Iraqi civilians are rising up against Saddam Hussein's militia in Baghdad and Basra, the country's two largest cities, according to various news reports.



Sources in Baghdad were reporting citizen uprisings against the Fedayeen Saddam, Kuwait News Agency said Monday.



Fox News also has confirmed that preliminary tests on substances found at a military site near Karbala in central Baghdad have indicated the presence of several banned chemical weapons.