Fireworks explode over the Sydney Opera House as the city ushers in the first day of 2007. (Getty Images) Around the World, It’s Happy New Year!

I don’t have much more to say about Saddam Hussein’s execution. I wrote about it extensively before it took place — see here — and, at The Reaction, Creature wrote the words I was searching for in a subsequent post — see here: “I feel sad, not for Saddam, but for what we have become.” This was America’s doing, and America should not have allowed it to happen. To the extent that Iraq was involved, I argued at the time, it was vengeance, not justice....

I realize the title of this post, alone, will anger a lot of readers and, as a result, some of them will take time to leave comments here, pointing out that the bad in this Administration far outweighs the good. And that’s probably true. But it doesn’t change the fact that on this subject, the Administration got it right. Cheers to Captain Ed for this reminder.

Joe made an important observation in an earlier post on the differing interpretations of the Saddam execution. The conventional wisdom is that Shi’ites and Kurds are happy that Saddam has died, and Sunnis are despondent that the last leader who privileged them in Iraqi society has now passed away. But anybody hoping that the trial and execution would help the Iraqi nation turn the page toward a new era of multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic democracy must be terribly disappointed by some of the taunting...

My New Year’s resolutions.

I’m really just testing the new WordPress software, but since I feel I should give you some reason for reading, Check out “Indexed”, a really fun and entertaining blog that makes me glad I learned how to read graphs (really, really, simple graphs, but graphs).   Really–it’s worth your time.

The Washington Times featured an interesting post election analysis that showed that Republican Senators gave far less money to struggling candidates than did Democrats. I believe that this is relatively true in the House races as well. It was not that they soberly calculated that they were going to lose in a landslide and decided not to throw good money after bad. They just threw their candidates, who were within fractions of a percentage point of winning, under the bus. Why? I wonder if this...

“The Vertical Hour,� David Hare’s timely new play, refers to that moment in combat medicine when you can be of some use after a soldier is critically wounded. Julianne Moore makes her Broadway debut as an American foreign correspondent turned Yale University professor who finds herself caught in a romantic triangle with Bill Nighy, who plays an esteemed British physician, and his son and her fiancé, Andrew Scott, who plays a thoroughly Americanized physical therapist. “The...

For every moderate voice who has ever struggled with questions about the utility of moderation, I offer these thoughts on the doorstep of the new year. (Warning: The linked post is a rather lengthy read. For those who attempt it, I only hope it proves worthy of the time you invested.)

One of the “givens” of the non-ending Presidential campaigns, is the early annointing of a media “front-runner” who has the money OR the name power OR the organization OR the charisma. So look at Hillary Clinton. Oh, well: three out of four ain’t bad… Times Online has a piece that utters the seemingly unutterable in some quarters: Hillary is often charisma-challenged, which can be a problem when the media is finding huge interest in anything it runs on Illinois...

Several Senators have taken it upon themselves to travel the world, negotiating with radical states behind the Administration’s back because they think it’s the appropriate measures for one individual in one house of one branch of the U.S. government to take.In reality, their glamorous actions only threaten the effectiveness of American foreign policy: an effect that such trips in the past have wrought upon our dealings with Iraq, Iran, and others. Get the full story.

The Times of London on Hillary Clinton: Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense. A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination. Despite winning re-election to the US Senate...

Dahlia Litwick looks back at 2006 for Slate and compiles a "the 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006"-list. The numbers 3 -1: 3. Abuse of Jose Padilla First, he was, according to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States." Then, he was planning to blow up apartments. Then he was just part of a vague terror conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia...

And now the prevailing question becomes: what will be the impact of Saddam Hussein’s hanging? Will the Iraqi populace’s lingering images be of the guy in that photo with the seeming glint of fear in his eye as they put the noose around his neck? Will it be the dead-and-hung Saddam, lying on his side? Will it be the Saddam of the video (which will most assuredly show up in full on the Internet or on some network newscast sooner or later, showing him swinging from a noose)? Will it be the...

This is a bit dated in blog terms, but awhile ago Ezra Klein had this to say on the Bush administration’s reluctance to withdraw from Iraq: The question, of course, is why we don’t [withdraw from Iraq]. What’s the compelling national interest in occupying a country that deplores our presence? That murders our soldiers? That depletes our treasury? That shows no sign, hint, or hope of molding itself to our desires? There is none. Instead, we remain in Iraq because the current Administration...

Ted Koppel has apparently joined up with the Discovery Channel and produced a documentary that tries to explain the decades of antecedents behind the latest US/Iran impasse by uncovering the average Iranian’s view of the United States. It is an attempt at mutual understanding, an intriguing and needed project, to be certain. Unfortunately, it suffers from an expected pro-American, anti-Iranian bias at times, propagated by Koppel himself even if he doesn’t realize it. The documentary’s...

Right now I can’t figure out how to re-publish a publish post I’ve gone back and edited like the one below. Please have patience. I will post very little until I can figure this out and get an answer. It’s allowing me to redit but there is no button I can see to republish. UPDATE: This is one of the few “housekeeping” posts you’ll see on this site, only because it’s our maiden evening on WordPress. I found out I was doing something dumb, which is probably...

We’ve MOVED! TMV today completes the first step to revamping this site. As you may be aware, over the past few weeks we’ve added some “reader friendly” features such as categories. More things are in the works…and even a bit of an adjustment of design in 2007. But please bare with us. All of here at TMV are now learning how to use new software so things may look a bit weird — more weird than our normal posts. Also, some things on the site as it is now might not...

Secret Asian Man, an online comic strip by Tak Toyoshima.    

Saddam’s death is Mr. Maliki’s moment of truth, says Ned Parker in the London Times blog. He is the Baghdad Correspondent for The Times and has been based in the country since March 2003. He has also filed extensively from Israel and the Palestinian territories. “Maliki must take the political capital from executing Saddam to prove that the Shia have moved beyond their fears of the old regime. If he cannot lead the Shia on a moderate path, Iraq looks likely to fall into civil...