Never boring, Israeli politics has taken another amazing turn as long time Labour Party leader Shimon Peres has left his left-wing party to join Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who already left his right-wing one (Likud), in a new center party. These two fascinating and charismatic geezers have decided it’s time to make peace before they leave the stage. Let’s hope the Palestinians are listening. Here’s Peres in his own words: ‘To put country before party.’ Can you imagine, say, Harry Reid ever writing something like that?

I’m sure everyone has noted that Pajamas Media-served ads are now appearing on this site, as they are on Instapundit today. The other blogs in our group will soon be serving PJ ads as well (as quickly as we can get to them all). I would like to echo Glenn’s gracious comments about Henry Copeland’s BlogAds, which also used to appear here. They are a fine system. We’re going in a different direction. It’s a big… scratch that… a huge and growing blogosphere, plenty of room for different models to exist side-by-side.

… with the first Pajamas Media Special Report. She begins: Greetings, and a quick tip: Anyone in favor of censorship and internet taxes can skip the rest of this column.

OK. For those still with me, who probably agree it is not a good idea to have Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe editing your blog and then charging you for it…

Who wouldn’t want to read the rest?

UPDATE: PJM will be holding an international blogjam on the question of who controls the Internet in the next few days. This should be of special interest to bloggers who are, of course, directly affected by this.

In his bloggy insta-analysis of the Bush Iraq War speech today, my Pajamas colleague David Corn offers some praise but mostly brickbats for the president. He backhandedly compliments Bush for finally recognizing that the comically misnomered “insurgency” (Zarqawi equals Zapata?) is a combination of unreconstructed Baathist fascists, Al Qaeda-style religious psychokillers and assembled lumpen street thugs - not just amorphous “terrorists.”

Well, David, did you really think Bush - or nearly everybody else on the planet - didn’t know that? Yes, there are people in the “insurgency” who couldn’t be less interested in what happens in Cincinatti and, yes, there are people who believe that we are all infidels who should be sent to hell and the caliphate installed uber alles. And there are even those who are willing to play it both ways, for whatever reason (like Saddam).

The question is, as Comrade Lenin said … What is to be done? This is something our modern reified left rarely asks or says. They don’t even seem to be very interested in it. Corn skips over this most relevant of all questions, saying only that Bush’s speech “won’t matter.” Very few speeches indeed do (and most only in retrospect). You would think left/liberals would have some positive response about the overthrow of a hideous dicator, something which, when I was on the left, I was begging our government to do (Pinochet most notoriously). But now, it would seem, since a Republican was involved, we were over-reaching. Well, maybe so. But historically, the jury is still out on that … way out. And the soi-disant left still has no real response to the world situation other than Not Bush. Bo-ring!

It’s hard to know for sure from Sen. Harry Reid’s cryptic comments (via PJM) on the possible death of Osama bin Laden in a Pakistan earthquake whether the Senator was working from secret intelligence or from media reports. But whatever the case, the Senator has proven himself again “the very model of the modern Major Political Hack” (to mutilate Gilbert & Sullivan) - extremely high on partisanship and extremely low on brains (a match made in heaven).

Atlas Shrugs has a post on what may be (my idol) Oriana Fallaci’s last speech. Michael Totten has fascinating photos of Hezbollahland. Don’t miss either.

Early (very early) supporter of Pajamas Media celebrates his success.

Well, not Damascus, Baghdad really (big difference!)… but what should be surprising to everyone, given what we’ve been force fed, is this poll reported by Sen. Joseph Lieberman after his fourth trip to Iraq:

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America’s bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

Now wait a minute, I’m told every night on television and every morning in the papers that the war is a fiasco. You mean it’s actually possible the Iraqi people themselves may see it differently? Well, they’re just Iraqis. What do they know? Do they read the New York Times? [At least six of them.-ed. But more important, do they read Paul Krugman? He'd set them straight. No one in Iraq wants to pay for that.]

I hope the New York Times, CBS, the LAT and the rest run this poll as prominently as they trumpet the latest debacle on Bush’s domestic war numbers. Will they do it? I doubt it. But their war coverage, of course, is what is most responsible for those domestic numbers. They owe it to the Iraqi people to set the record straight. But like those neurotics who always “want to be right,” I don’t think our media will wander into the treacherous land of self-examination. Only mass therapy would help. But who is going to give that? (via Glenn)

According to the AP:The United States defended its decision not to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Monday, saying during the opening of a global summit on climate change that it is doing more than most countries to protect the earth’s atmosphere.

Well, who knows? But a short way down in the article:

Dr. Harlan L. Watson, senior climate negotiator for the State Department, said that while President Bush declined to join the treaty, he takes global warming seriously and noted that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions had actually gone down by eight-tenths of a percent under Bush.

Wait a minute. The US economy grew at a fairly good clip under the Bush administration and yet greenhouse emissions actually went down? How could that have happened? Some people, of course, as noted in the article, are skeptical:

Elizabeth May of the Sierra Club Canada, however, accused the world’s biggest polluter of trying to derail the Kyoto accord, which has been ratified by 140 nations.

“We have a lot of positive, constructive American engagement here in Montreal - and none of it’s from the Bush administration, which represents the single biggest threat to global progress,” May said.

Fighting words from Ms. May indeed, but then words from a Canadian these days may be worth as much as a drink of water in Harbin. What’s beginning to interest me in my… er… “modern maturity” (?) is how things are rarely as they seem. We residents of Los Angeles, if we’re honest, are now pretty grateful we can see the mountains from our back yards and can even play a set of tennis without collapsing. Something changed. But how? Well, here’s an interesting quote:

Despite a childhood in Southern California, Richard Nixon was so hopelessly disconnected from nature that he wore dress shoes to the beach. Yet, no other chief executive approved as much important environmental legislation.

The author of the monograph being described here goes on to opine that Nixon did all this only for poltical reasons and later reversed his views. Could be, but the legislation lived on and changed America. So things happen in strange ways. I used to be for Kyoto, but now find it too politically-motivated and essentially anti-environmental in its complete inability to deal with the world’s fastest growing economies. But what do I know? Well, I think I do know this - morality (and ecology) is not as simple as Ms. May of the Sierra Club wants to make it. I used to be a member of the Sierra Club too. But these days I favor the older High Sierra. You remember the Raoul Walsh film in which Bogie plays ‘Mad Dog’ Roy Earle, the escaped con. The whole world hates him but there’s something good about him too. Now there’s nothing even remotely ex-connish or Mad Doggish about Bush, but he suffers from that same kind of misjudgment. Bono, of course, recognized this when he noted Bush’s generosity in Africa. I guess the Ms. Mays of the world can’t wrap their minds around that. They’re kind of stuck in their world views and fund-raising needs. Ultimately, I don’t think that’s very good for the environment.

Is it any wonder that the UN’s great friend turns out to be a center of corruption? … But speaking of the UN, here’s what I think is going to be the most exciting development at PJ Media since we’ve started (other than taking pokes at us). Special Reports like this (see the announcement at the middle of the page) are part of what we’re here for. And who better to get us started than La Rosett. She will be followed - in one or more Blogjams - by various and sundry interesting folks logging in on whether the UN (or anyone for that matter) should control the Internet. And, yes, we welcome suggestions of people to be included in our discussions.