What the U.S. should promote in Iraq is some kind of oil trust, or stock or revenue dispersal, that would give individual Iraqis a share of their oil wealth. This would be both a tool to build national unity and to prevent any one political group from dominating Iraq's main revenue source. If Mr. Schumer wants to help on that score, he might do some good.

I don't place much faith in Charles Schumer, but I'd love to be wrong. And I've been pushing the oil trust idea since 2003. Had it gone into place then, I suspect we'd have seen things go much more smoothly. However despite support for the idea from Hillary Clinton, Milton Friedman, and Vernon Smith, as well as Michael Barone, it never really took hold.

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program _ a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium _ reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" _ the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment _ was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More here.

UPDATE: Bill Ardolino emails:

Saw your post on Bud Day. I just happened to finish his biography written by Robert Coram, and all I can say is "wow" and "highly recommended:"

The man was beaten with a rubber strip hours at a time for months during the summer of 1969, and he never gave up any info about his unit to the North Vietnamese. He once ejected from an exploding jet, his parachute failed to deploy, and he lived. And that's the tip of the iceberg; the story of his life is so incredible, it's almost hard to believe.

Anyway, highly recommended. Maybe someone should mail a copy to CNN.

Or several.

Plus, Austan Goolsbee's unconvincing anti-NAFTA spin.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed the complaint against Catholic Insight Magazine. . . .

This is good news. It means that the political campaign for freedom of speech and freedom of religion is working. It means the CHRC does not want to be seen to treat big fish differently from little fish. It does not want to be seen as operating outside the rule of law. That is a good thing. It means the CHRC wants the scrutiny to go away and fast.

Free Speech for everyone. What a concept. Keep the pressure on. Plus more here:

While the Canadian Human Rights Commission has bowed to widespread public opposition to proceeding with a complaint against Maclean's magazine brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress, less powerful and prominent Canadians should beware: For them, the threat of censorship remains. . . . Ironically, it is not I, Mansur, Steyn or the editors of Maclean's who are ill-serving Canadian Muslims. It is Muslim leaders like Elmasry. By using rights tribunals to intimidate and silence critics, these authoritarian Muslims are undermining the fundamental freedoms of all Canadians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

Of course, more than a few non-Muslims also betray scant regard for the historic rights of Canadians to freedom of expression.

Read the whole thing. It's as if the whole "human rights" thing is really just a weapon for silencing political opposition.

The letter dated 26 June, which BJP has seen a copy of, is in response to correspondence sent by the Union secretary general, Jeremy Dear, who expressed concern at police surveillance of journalists, in particular photographers.

'First of all, may I take this opportunity to state that the Government greatly values the importance of the freedom of the press, and as such there is no legal restriction on photography in public places,' Smith writes. 'Also, as you will be aware, there is no presumption of privacy for individuals in a public place.'

However, the Home Secretary adds that local restrictions might be enforced. 'Decisions may be made locally to restrict or monitor photography in reasonable circumstances. That is an operational decision for the officers involved based on the individual circumstances of each situation.

They can photograph you, but they get to decide when you can take photographs.

I don't think it's Republicans who are hammering him the hardest, though; I think it's disappointed Netroots types.

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body. . . .

"Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises," said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam.

Perhaps they just fear being tried for crimes against humanity.

UPDATE: Reader Jason Epstein emails:

Did you notice that the writer suggesting that the report was being kept secret "has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush?" Huh?!? How come there is no mention of the culpability of the environmental community, who pushed biofuels more than anyone else?

Yeah, how come?

Two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to kneel down and 'pray to Allah' during a religious education lesson.

Parents were outraged that the two boys from year seven (11 to 12-year-olds) were punished for not wanting to take part in the practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

They said forcing their children to take part in the exercise at Alsager High School, near Stoke-on-Trent - which included wearing Muslim headgear - was a breach of their human rights.

You can't make this stuff up. And, sadly, you don't have to.

UPDATE: Clark Stooksbury is surprised to learn that Stoke-on-Trent is in England. I guess he wasn't lucky enough to have Mr. Wolfenbarger for geography like I did. He also seems a bit unclear on the point of this "They Told Me" series, which highlights the way in which apocalyptic things said about the Bush Administration tend to come true in rather different settings. I'm pointing that out here, just in case anyone else hasn't been paying attention.

MORE: Stooksbury's update just demonstrates that the Andrea See quote over in the right sidebar here is right. Sorry, Clark, you're just missing the joke here.

UPDATE: Related item here.

UPDATE: Reader Mike Dini emails:

I'm a slow runner and I've had several heart rate monitors. I've had one top-of-the-line model from each of the major vendors -- Polar, Garmin, Suunto. To coin a technical phase related to engineering EDA software: 'use what sucks the least'.

Given my experience with the T6, Suunto is dead last in this market. The device was nearly unusable. The SW sucked and regularly crashed. The heart rate monitoring function would occasionally go wild. This wildness was impossible to edit out of the database (My heart will not go 220 BPM). It would take a weird form of chanting to get the watch to recognize the foot pod and chest strap. The display is ODD and hard to read. The UI is not intuitive -- merely starting and stopping the watch takes effort. If you take a vacation for 7 days, you will need to reread the manual. I had trouble giving the thing away. You claim: 'I like the diving stuff'. The T6 made me extremely suspicious (read: terrified) of the diving products.

Polar (S625X) is pretty good, but it is only recently that they added GPS capability in the newer RS800G3. Note that the reviews of the RS800G3 are poor on Amazon. UI to the watch is fairly good (S625X). It is obvious, for example, how to start/stop the watch and save a lap time. All the functions needed are here, but it can take a rocket scientist to get some desperately needed things to work. The most important is to alarm when the aerobic threshold is exceeded (in my 167 BPM). This task taxed all of my 25 years of computer engineering skill to figure it out. The manual is terrible. Technical support is non-existent and hostile. I always had trouble with the IR link. This appears to be a sick company.

At present I'm using a Garmin 305. It is a little large and bulky, but has GPS capability. GPS is *VERY* slow to lock and I question its accuracy. The UI is wretched. It seems as if the engineers designed this product as a wrist-based GPS unit that happens to have a heart rate monitor. This should be reversed: a HR monitor that has GPS capability. The buttons are in the wrong place -- during a training run, I regularly shut off the watch during the most critical time of a run by hitting the 'off' button rather than the 'lap' button. The display is hard to read, and doesn't have nearly as much information as it first appears. The alarm is too faint. The SW is OK, but nothing spectacular. The connections on the back corrode. The watch behaves incorrectly at some of the boundary conditions. The battery life is too short (10 hours or so).

At the moment, I'm using the 305 -- it sucks the least. But, it wouldn't kill me to downgrade to the S625X. I will never use a Suunto HRM product again. OK to use my name and verify. Fix spelling and grammar please.

Ugh. None of this sounds especially appealing . . . .

The 55-mile-per-hour speed limit is a bit of idiocy I hoped we'd left behind. I'm not suprised to see Mr. Private Jets supporting it, though. Meanwhile, here are some better ideas for energy savings.

There's also this dodgy belief, fervently embraced by many liberals advocating regulations--"Look, even a big business head who would be regulated believes it's a good idea! It must be!" Au contraire, mon frere. The heads of big businesses often love big new regulatory bodies, because they have the resources to best negotiate a complex regime. The end result of this kind of radical regulation is usually that the big companies capture the regulator and use it to shut out competition.

Really big companies are more like bureaucracies than capitalist enterprises. See, e.g., Dilbert.

This is not the Barack Obama that I knew. Well, that might nail down the InstaPundit endorsement . . . .

While most Americans probably slept, 1,215 Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines raised their right hands and committed to a combined 5,500 years of additional service during the largest reenlistment ceremony in the history of the American military. Beneath a large American flag which dwarfed even the enormous chandelier that Saddam Hussein had built for the Al Faw Palace, members of all services, representing all 50 states took the oath administered by Gen. David Petraeus, Commander of Multi-National Forces Iraq.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Also at Ask.com, and Yahoo!

Boy, they're sure pumping these things out for the Independence Day weekend, though.

UPDATE: TalkLeft: "NARAL leaders ought to feel like idiots. . . . As I've said all along about his religious outreach, you don't get something for nothing and if he wants the evangelical vote, he's going to have to offer them something. Is this it?"

Instapundit does a much more effective job clearing Obama on the issue of home mortgage favoritism than Obama's own clumsy web site. ...

I do try. Especially as I ponder an Obama endorsement, in anticipation of his refined position on the war . . . .

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) promised primary voters a swift withdrawal from Iraq, in clear language still on his website: “Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.”

Not anymore. Heading into the holiday weekend, Obama and his advisers repudiated that pledge, saying he is reevaluating his plan and will incorporate advice from commanders on the ground when he visits Iraq later this month.

A top Obama adviser said he is not “wedded” to a specific timeline, and Obama said Thursday he plans to “refine” his plan.

You could see this one coming. Hmm. With all these changes, Obama's morphing into a candidate I could support!

UPDATE: Obama denies altering proposed Iraq withdrawal timeline.

But, at ABC, Obama’s Iraq Quagmire.

And John McGinnis emails: "You can wait for the Obama Pivot. I want to watch the Olbermann Squirm!"

Olbermann will praise Obama's "manly firmness" in deciding to keep troops in Iraq.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ann Althouse: "This is what I was expecting. Weren't you?"

MORE: A clarification. This should resolve all doubt.

And TigerHawk asks the eternal question.

STILL MORE: Remembering Samantha Power.

Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine. It took six months and the men's life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.

That's because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.

Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.

Jeez. They'd better get used to it -- surveillance is a two-way street now, and that phenomenon is only going to increase.

UPDATE: Bill Bradley thinks this post suggests that Obama is a Muslim. I told him that anyone who's been paying attention -- which certainly includes InstaPundit readers -- knows that Obama has a Muslim heritage but isn't a Muslim now. Indeed, that's the point of the linked article. But the sensitivity on this question does suggest that Obama and his supporters think there's something wrong with being a Muslim, which was also the point of the linked article.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So thinking about this, is it just out-of-bounds to use the words "Obama" and "Muslim" in the same sentence? Does that join the ever-lengthening list of things we're not allowed to talk about?

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights".

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

Who do you trust less? Viacom, or the NSA?

UPDATE: More on the Google story here.

Remember when Democrats were all about ending the "culture of corruption?" Now that sounds so 2006.

UPDATE: A reader who asks anonymity -- but he's a guy who's written me before -- emails:

I'm hesitant to add to this story, but I obtained a mortgage from Northern Trust in Chicago for my client at roughly the same time as Obama. The mortgage terms I got for my client were materially better than Obama's--a 30 year fixed at almost a full percent less than Obama's mortgage with a much larger principal amount.

Northern is an unusual bank that specializes in cases that require more attention and analysis than a typical bank will provide. I don't find Obama's mortgage to be anything special or unusual in the context of Northern's very competent Chicago office, though I could see how his situation and unusual income stream would make Northern pretty attractive to him.

This mortgage story is not even remotely comparable to the congressmen like Dodd who solicited what can only be called "constructive bribes" from Countrywide's CEO. The Tony Rezko aspect of Obama's home purchase is sleazy enough without drawing hyperbolic conclusions about his mortgage.

Yeah, I agree it's different from Dodd et al., but these members of Congress always seem to be getting some kind of good deal. Still, it's good to get an inside opinion.

She may have defaulted on mortgages and lost a home in foreclosure, but that hasn't stopped Long Beach Rep. Laura Richardson from driving in style and at great expense, courtesy of the taxpayer. The lease on Richardson's 2007 Lincoln Town Car costs about $1,300 a month -- the most expensive lease of any member of the House of Representatives, reports the Daily Breeze. Richardson's monthly lease, paid by the federal government, is much larger than the $400 to $800 a month that other House members pay, according to a taxpayer group.

While Richardson has leased the vehicle only since last fall, it already been involved in one traffic accident while being driven by a staff member. In addition, Long Beach police ticketed the car in January for illegal parking, a ticket that has gone unpaid.

But that's not all. Read the whole thing. And try to guess her (unmentioned) political affiliation . . . .