You'll want to read Rich Miller's column in the Sun-Times this morning. Miller takes on critics of the blogosphere (Rago, et al) and concludes:

This phenomenon is not going away, no matter how much it is dismissed or chastised. The Internet has been seized on as a democratizing tool by millions of perpetually democracy-hungry Americans. Bloggers should definitely be open to criticism by the mainstream media. That's America. But lumping everyone together with the crackpots is neither fair nor honest. And the fact that so many reporters and pundits can't seem to get the story right just proves the bloggers' point that too many of them don't know what they're talking about on everything else.

Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah, has been cleared by the Indonesian Supreme Court of any involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people.

Australians are rightly outraged over the verdict and, interestingly, the head of Labor Party is attacking Prime Minister John Howard and suggesting some of the blame lay at the feet of the U.S. Government:

Labor leader Kevin Rudd questioned why Indonesian authorities were not given access to Bali bombing mastermind Hambali as part of their investigations.

He said Hambali, now being held by the US in Guantanamo Bay, could have provided vital evidence to convict Bashir.

Mr Rudd asked what Mr Howard had done to have Hambali found accountable.

"What representation did Australians make to the Americans to enable the Indonesians to get access to Hambali and why were those representations rejected?"

UPDATE: Here's an interview with Bashir from September. Here are some snippets of what the cleric told Al-Jazeera (all emphasis added):

The Muslims understand that my goals are righteous, that I want to uphold sharia law. I'm not trying to convert them into Muslims, but I'm just trying to uphold sharia law for all human beings...

I'm just telling people what our prophet Mohammad said about Islam, you have to understand that these things are not coming from my thoughts. I'm delivering what Islam is according to Mohammad and his friends...

So there is no other way. If human beings want to have good things, then they have to return to Islam, because that's the concept from God. And what George Bush has been telling people, is the concepts of Jews and criminals and that will destroy human beings...

Please give my message to the leaders in the West, Tony Blair, George Bush tell them to stop fighting Islam. Islam will win, definitely. You can kill Muslims, but Islam cannot be killed. You will be destroyed if you fight Islam. Advise them to convert to Islam, so they will be saved. That's my message.

It occurs to me that the more naive among us might read Bashir's words and conclude that what he's saying is no different than what a Christian evangelical might say: "convert so you will be saved." But while Christians might threaten non-believers with the specter of judgement before God and a rather uncomfortable eternal afterlife, Bashir's threats are less spiritual than they are terrestrial: convert, live under sharia, or die.

Lest there be any confusion about that fact, remember that according to Australian intelligence authorities Bashir - the man who claims he is "delivering what Islam is according to Mohammad" - was "clearly was a key figure" in the bombings that led to the slaughter of more than 200 innocents four years ago.

More good news from Iran.

The Golden State's population growth rate has declined for the sixth consecutive year.

Once again, discussion of whether conservatives will vote for Giuliani over McCain generated a flood of email responses, mostly in Giuliani's favor:

I, along with an overwhelming majority of my friends plan on supporting Rudy in the primaries. I am a staunch conservative, and disagree with Rudy on several key issues (you hit the main ones in your blog yesterday). But the reasoning is two-fold:

1) Rudy solves problems, and is viewed in that light by many conservatives. We don't see a great deal of grandstanding or foaming at the mouth about "how bad these problems are" and "what we need to do", blah, blah, blah as we see with McCain and most other blowhard senators - regardless of party afiliation.

2) McCain, while professing to be conservative, caves on everything from taxes, to the judiciary, and wastes precious government time delving into less important issues, i.e. the sports-related investigations.

I'd rather admit my losses up front where the judiciary is concerned, and let Rudy solve a few problems. It is a much more desirable alternative than McCain's holier-than-thou bloviating, and backstabbing, where nothing gets done in the end.

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I consider myself a "religious right" person, and am nonetheless enthused about Rudy and antagonistic to McCain. Your analysis is pretty on key, I think. There's something about McCain that doesn't ring conservative (opportunisitic, maybe) And there's quite a difference between agreeing with McCain-Feingold post facto, and having your name on it. And nothing any national politician has done will ever top the refusal of the check from the Saudis. That shows who Rudy is, what he believes and what he'll put up with, and won't. There's no candidate for president on our side whose views match mine 100%, and I wish Rudy was more pro-life. But he'd be a great president, and on the right side of the aisle.

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As a "Jesse Helms Conservative" in South Carolina, I would vote for Rudy in a hearbeat if he could provide assurances that social issues were, for him, legislative rather than judicial issues, and would be appointing people to the court based on a philosophy of judicial restraint and sound, constitutional jurisprudence, that included commerce in the mix.

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I would like to add my 2 cents worth to why I am STRONGLY supporting Rudy over McCain, and I am a conservative. The reasons you state about his likeability factor are very true. But it is more than that. He has run a large city; he dealt with the bureaucracy, and all the various elements that make up NYC very successfully. To me that is why I think there hasn't been a president since JFK who didn't have more governmental and/or managerial experience than simply running a Senate staff. Beyond that, I lived in NYC during the 90s and what a difference that man made. I am much more interested in a man (or woman) with a vision and true leadership skills which I think Rudy showed us before and on 9/11. I only worry about his more liberal social issue views in that they might hurt him from getting the nomination. In spite of disagreeing with him on some of those issues, I believe he would be the best man to lead us during the next certain to be troubled four years after 2008.

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As a lower case "c" conservative I disagree with Giuliani on some issues, but can live with honest disagreements having tremendous respect for his character and judgment on other issues. Giuliani was an agressive prosecutor, and he ran NYC which is no small task. Giuliani in my mind has the sine qua non of any man or woman who seeks to take on an executive position such as the Presidency. He acts. Of Teddy Roosevelt it was said he was pure act; and Giuliani seems cut from the same cloth.

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TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

YES, southern, Christian, conservatives will vote for Rudy. ANYBODY but McCain.

By the way, that last email was signed, "Grandmother from the rural South."

A couple of self-identified single issue national security voters pronounced both candidates acceptable, and a few said neither would get their vote.

Some also found it ironic that the man critics used to refer to as "Adolf Giuliani" and the "Mussolini of Manhattan" is now cloaked in the mantle of likeability:

Rudolph Giuliani's controlled pugnacity may seem refreshing now to heartland conservatives, but I predict that feeling won't last out a long campaign. Do you like arrogance, vendettas, barely concealed disdain for citizens and adversaries treated as enemies? You don't know him the way New Yorkers do -- but if he runs for President, you will. I voted for him twice for mayor, and I assure you there wasn't an ounce of affection in it. The city needed him. Can the same now be said for the country? As president he will be non-ideological and yet polarizing.

Then again, stories of McCain's temper are legion - and legendary. Here's one from a reader who says he is a former Hill staffer for one of the most conservative Members of Congress:

I staffed a couple of House-Senate conference committees and McCain is a nightmare. He was brusque with the other Members and in one meeting berated a staff person in front of everyone for a rather minor transgression. At one point I thought his head was going to explode he got so red in the face. It was apparent that the other members of the conference committee were uncomfortable with his behavior. He struck me as petty, self-righteous and tyrannical. When he has taken his "maverick" positions, they appear highly calculated to get maximum exposure for him in the media and designed to put a thumb in the eye of either the Senate leadership or the Bush Administration or both. The press, of course, eats it up when a Republican criticizes his own party. He is a fool to think the major media will continue its flirtation with him as soon as there is a real Democrat in the race against him. He is only useful to the press when he is bashing his own party.

Giuliani on the other hand has never, to my knowledge, spent much time attacking his fellow Republicans as easy as that would have been for him in deep blue NYC. Most of us are politically mature enough to know that there is virtually no candidate with whom we will agree on every issue and even where we may not see eye-to-eye with Giuliani, we don't feel insulted by him.....

Ultimately, most presidents have little real say about gay rights or gun control other than to sign or veto laws regarding the same after Congress hashes it all out. In the case of abortion, the political branches long ago ceded that issue to the courts. On gun control, abortion and gay rights, I suspect that Giuliani will be respectful to all comers on those issues; McCain has proven he won't. Giuliani has his baggage but so does McCain. On the whole, Giuliani has plenty of issues that the base can love and a raft of personal characteristics that would make him a fine candidate.

One late email from a liberal friend makes a worthwhile point:

key internal of one poll I saw last week--can't remember which one--was that 75% of those surveyed did not know Rudy's positions on social issues--again, don't remember whether that was Republican voters or entire electorate. That's obviously key threshold for him--at this stage, you just can't underestimate how LITTLE people know about most of these people. Look at Obama--for us, we feel like he's practically living in our homes, we're already sick of him!!! Yet even 45% of Dems don't have a clue about the guy (which does make his polling results pretty impressive, i.e. most people who do know about him have a very favorable impression, and his upside is much higher than, say, Hillary).

I tend to think that Republican activists (i.e. the kind of people who will vote in primaries) are fairly well informed about Giuliani even at this early stage and do have at least some level of understanding about his position on social issues. I may be wrong - and certainly issues surrounding Giuliani that might be perceived as being somewhat benign right now may look very, very different after sharp-shooters from rival campaigns get done framing them for conservative primary voters.

Here are the results of the latest Gallup poll on 2008, with last month's results in parentheses:

Republicans
McCain 28 (26)
Giuliani 28 (28)
Rice 12 (13)
Gingrich 8 (7)
Romney 4 (5)
No Opinion 7 (7)

Seven other candidates scored 2% or less.

Democrats

Clinton 33 (31)
Obama 20 (19)
Gore 12 (9)
Edwards 8 (10)
Kerry 6 (7)
No Opinion 5 (6)

Seven other candidates scored 3% or less.

Interestingly, despite the massive media publicity Barack Obama has received over the last month or so, nearly half the Democrats taking part in the survey (47%) responded "no opinion" when asked to provide a favorable/unfavorable rating. More specifically, 33% of Democrats said they have never heard of Obama, and another 14% said the name sounded familiar but they didn't know enough to form an opinion.

On the other side, 69% of Republicans had "no opinion" of Mitt Romney.

In overall favorability, Rudy topped all '08 hopefuls at 77%. More importantly, and circling back to my post the other day about Rudy vs. McCain and the "likeability" factor, Giuliani scored a 92% favorable rating among Republicans. McCain favorable rating with Republicans is 63%.

Hillary's favorables are also worth a mention. She does well among Democrats (86%), but significantly less well with Independents (48%) and she gets the lowest rating of any Democrat in registering a crossover favorable rating from self-described Republicans (13%). Even John "Botched Joke" Kerry gets a 16% favorable rating among Republicans in this poll, and Al Gore gets 19%.

This is yesterday's news - literally - but it's worth a comment. Here's how Washington Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire announced $4 billion worth of spending increases in the state budget over the next two years:

"These are good times, these are exciting times. Now is the time to make the investments in the future," Gregoire said. "If we fail to make the investments ... then the future can say, 'Shame on us.' We had the opportunity and passed it up."

It's hard to imagine a comment more illustrative of the difference between liberals and conservatives with regard to fiscal policy. Gregoire's attitude is that if there's any extra money laying around, it must be spent - I'm sorry, "invested" - by the government. Not returned to the people who own it. Not used to pay off debt. The ranking Republican on the Budget Committee said he couldn't find a single instance - not one - in which the governor reduced spending on any program in the entire state.

More from the Seattle Times story:

Gregoire's 2007-09 general-fund budget of nearly $30 billion would add nearly 3,800 new state jobs; spend about $1 billion on pay raises for teachers and state workers, $343 million for public schools and $110 million for health-care programs; and put millions more into state parks, higher education and early learning.

It also would burn through most of a projected $1.9 billion budget surplus and possibly set the state up for a shortfall of more than $600 million when lawmakers have to put together a new budget in 2009. [snip]

Gregoire brushed aside concerns about how much money she wants to spend. "I think the fact that we're headed to that size of the budget is simply an indication that we put people to work and the economy is booming," she said.

"I love my budget."

I bet. Gregoire's giddiness over engaging in a spending spree with taxpayer money should be a helpful reminder to the GOP about the importance of fiscal austerity - a concept that seems to have escaped quite a few members of the Republican party at the state and federal level in recent years.

If you're not from Chicago this headline from today's Sun-Times may not make sense until after you read the article:

Cubs woo Dave Matthews despite poo

The president said yesterday that he's asking new Defense Secretary Gates to tell him how many more troops should be sent to Iraq. Gates is in Iraq now, meeting with senior commanders and, presumably, going out in the field to see things for himself. In the wind is a three to six-month "surge" of troops to Iraq. A few key questions need to be asked before we send anyone more to Iraq.

First is what will they do when they get there? Some pundits think we're going to "take the gloves off", destroy the militias and somehow - by house to house fighting if no other way - rout the insurgents of all stripes to give the Iraqi government breathing room in which to accomplish their political compromises and sing a chorus or two of "Kumbaya." None of this is remotely possible.

First, if we are temporarily deploying more forces we are necessarily telling the insurgents to fade away, take their money, weapons and key people underground, and wait us out. They can evade us and wait us out. It's almost as bad as announcing a firm date for withdrawal of all Americans. We are in a very tough spot because some military leaders have said publicly - in Congressional hearings and elsewhere - that we lack the forces to support a sustained effort in Iraq much longer. The enemies watch those hearings more closely than Americans do.

Second, the Maliki government is so terribly weak, and so dependent on the support of thugs such as Moqtada al-Sadr, that it will not permit us to do what should be done to destroy the Shia militias and the Sunni insurgents. If we choose to operate regardless of Maliki's limitations, his government and the Iraqi constitution would be nullities. We'd be back where we were in 2003. Which may not be entirely a bad thing. If Maliki fell without taking the Iraqi constitution with him, a stronger coalition government has a chance to arise. Now, one does not.

Third, without a clear military mission for the increased forces, we may - by default - start ordering them to perform routine street patrols that had been patrolled recently by Iraqis. They will be little more than moving targets for snipers and IEDs. The success of such local patrols depends on time on the streets: the more you have, the more the people learn to trust you, not fear you, and the more success you have in learning who is the good guy and who isn't. Our soldiers aren't policemen. And to train them to be police, we untrain them for their primary combat role. They can't be both.

We can "send a message" by sending more troops temporarily. But it's not the message that we are determined to win this war. Mission and strategy are what troops are to perform. Not nation-building or sending diplomatic signals.

Michael Powell and Chris Cillizza's article on Rudy Giuliani in the Washington Post today doesn't cover much new ground. Mostly it just recycles the obvious question surrounding Rudy's potential '08 candidacy: will his liberal-leaning positions on social issues be a deal breaker with conservative primary voters and caucusgoers? The conventional wisdom has been and remains "yes," but there continues to be anecdotal evidence beyond polls suggesting the conventional wisdom may turn out to be wrong.

Last August I wrote two columns, one critical of McCain and one critical of Giuliani. The former column argued that while McCain is pitch-perfect with the base on certain key issues like spending and national security, he's utterly tone deaf on others like immigration and the First Amendment.

The latter column argued that even if you set aside the obvious baggage Giuliani carries on social issues and with respect to his personal life, the Mayor takes all the same positions as McCain on those key issues which McCain is constantly vilified by the conservative base. For example, Rudy is very much in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, and he publicly supported McCain-Feingold in 2000 when he was flirting with a Senate run against Hillary.

Rudy hasn't paid much of a price for those views so far - certainly not in the same way McCain has. The question is whether he will begin paying a price for them once the campaign gets seriously under way and voters start comparing the two candidates and asking: why would I vote for Rudy when he holds all the same views I don't like about McCain and he's also much more liberal on issues like abortion and gay marriage?

The answer to that question may turn out to be as simple as this: Rudy is just more likeable. Last August I asked conservatives to explain why they would be willing to vote for Giuliani over McCain, and among the flood of email responses I received Rudy's likeability and sense of party loyalty stood out as a key factor:

Despite the argument that it's McCain's turn because he's "paid his dues," many just don't see him as a loyal party man - for obvious reasons. But the problem is deeper than McCain's willingness to go against Republicans on key issues, there is a real sense of dislike toward McCain among some for his self-aggrandizing chumminess with the media. In other words, it's not just that McCain disagrees with Republicans on some issues but the way in which he does the disagreeing that irks them. Rudy doesn't seem to engender any of those same feelings - just the opposite, in fact.

Likeability with base voters is important, and intangible. McCain doesn't have it. Rudy does. Romney does too. This will help them to some degree in getting past a few respective hurdles to winning the nomination, but not all.

One thing Rudy and McCain both have right now that Romney doesn't is a sense of electability. It's early and that could certainly change over time, but Republicans will want to keep the White House and to the extent the race gets further along and Romney continues to trail in general election matchups against prospective Democratic opponents, it will begin to become an issue for him and a bigger advantage for Giuliani and McCain.