CALIFORNIA DREAMING Rough&Tumble is a weblog covering California politics. The California recall is either a nightmare of democracy at work, or yet another opportunity for the Republican Party to make an end-run through legal dodges and populist shilling (read: Florida. Texas. California.)

TRANSLATION, PLEASE The Daily Kos parses Paul Wolfowitz's recent statement about how people throughout Iraq were giving him the "thumb's up" on his recent trip. Wolfowitz said it was a sign of how popular the U.S. is; Daily Kos says it might be something entirely different.

"Thumbs up" as a positive gesture quickly gained popularity in the U.S.A., especially as a visual signal in noisy environments. Pilots unable to shout "All's well!" or "Ready!" over the noise of their engines used it frequently. With a slight backwards tilt, this gesture is used for hitchhiking. However, in most of the Middle East and parts of Africa (notably Nigeria), this symbol can be obscene.

A SOLDIER'S VIEW This web journal maintained by a soldier in Baghdad offers a no-nonsense, day-to-day view of living in sweltering heat, being consumed by boredom, and trying to figure out what in the world the purpose behind the military effort in Iraq is. He also maintains a photo log, chockful of pictures of Baghdad.

ADD IT UP As the Bush administration claimed (and apparently believed) that it would take fewer troops to police Iraq than to conquer it, at least one (now former) official painted an accurate picture. James Dobbins was Bush's special envoy to post-Taliban Iraq, and oversaw postwar reconstruction efforts in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. His experiences in the 1990s led him to several conclusions about Iraq -- stabilization would require upwards of 500,000 troops, and the faster the war the tougher the post-war effort. Slate's Fred Kaplan offers up some of Dobbins' perspectives in this must-read of the day.

GOODBYE, JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE A new edict from Attorney General John Ashcroft is yet another step toward a centralized judiciary, where federal judges have no need for -- and in fact are legally discouraged from -- independent decision making.

I WAS BORN A POOR PRESIDENT Comedian and writer Steve Martin offers up a spirited defense for President Bush to use when asked about his State of the Union address. I've clipped the whole thing, saving you the trouble of visiting the NYTimes.

So if you're asking me did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, I'm saying, well, it all depends on what you mean by "have."

See, I can "have" something without actually having it. I can "have" a cold, but I don't own the cold, nor do I harbor it. Really, when you think about it, the cold has me, or even more precisely, the cold has passed through me. Plus, the word "have" has the complicated letter "v" in it. It seems that so many words with the letter "v" are words that are difficult to use and spell. Like "verisimilitude." And "envelope."

Therefore, when you ask me, "Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction," I frankly don't know what you're talking about. Do you mean currently? Then why did you say "did?" Think about "did." What the heck does that mean? Say it a few times out loud. Sounds silly. I'm beginning to think it's just the media's effort to use a fancy palindrome, rather than ask a pertinent question.

And how do I know you're not saying "halve?" "Did Iraq halve weapons of mass destruction?" How should I know? What difference does it make? That's a stupid question.

Let me try and clear it up for you. I think what you were trying to say was, "At any time, did anyone in Iraq think about, wish for, dream of, or search the Internet for weapons of mass destruction?"

Of course they did have. Come on, Iraq is just one big salt flat and no dictator can look out on his vast desert and not imagine an A-test going on. And let's face it, it really doesn't matter if they had them or not, because they hate us like a lassoed shorthorn heifer hates bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

Finally, all this fuss over 16 lousy words. Shoot, "Honey, I'm home," already has three, with an extra one implied, and practically nothing has been said. It would take way more than 16 words to say something that could be considered a gaffe. I don't really take anything people say seriously until they've used at least 20, sometimes 25, words.

When I was criticized for my comment, I was reluctant to point out it was only 16 words, and I was glad when someone else took the trouble to count them and point out that I wasn't even in paragraph territory. When people heard it was only 16 words, I'm sure most people threw their head back and laughed. And I never heard one negative comment from any of our coalition forces, and they all speak English, too.

DESIRE Streetcars returning to Richmond?

WHEN TRANSFORMATION FAILS Columnist David Ignatius demonstrates how the military's passion for transformation won a war and is quickly losing the peace. Military transformation, largely technological, allowed American troops to overrun Iraq in a matter of days.. That same transformation -- fighting from a distance -- is what is keeping American troops from winning the peace. You can't rebuild a country at arm's length.

MISCASTING Slate's William Saletan says that Joe Lieberman has the right message; he's just the wrong man to deliver it.

Lieberman isn't the only candidate in this race who's mismatched with his message. One of the comedies of the 2004 campaign is watching all the candidates other than Dean claim to be angry when they clearly aren't. Lieberman just happens to be the least convincing of them. "I share the anger of my fellow Democrats," he croaks faintly. The impersonation is miserably weak. If you got into a fender bender with Dean, and he got out of his car and started walking toward you, you'd be afraid he was going to hit you. If, on the other hand, you looked up and saw that the guy approaching your car was Lieberman, you'd relax and roll down your window.

OUR OWN WORST ENEMY Salam Pax shares two anecdotes, one of which demonstrates how some American soldiers are having a positive impact on people, even as the Iraqis appointed to run the country sit on their fat asses. The other raises the spectre of a religious Iraq, ruled by paranoia and Islamic fear.

ISLAMIC LAW In his latest post, G. gives us a glimpse of at least one way democracy can fail in Iraq: Shia custom, law and paranoia.

MARILYN'S ANNIVERSARY Forty-one years ago, Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home. Alistair Cooke, who has been reporting on America since before World War Two (and continues reporting today) covered her death as follows:

Marilyn Monroe was found dead in bed this morning in her home in Hollywood, only a physical mile or two, but a social universe, away from the place where she was born 36 years ago as Norma Jean Baker. She died with a row of medicines and an empty bottle of barbiturates at her elbow.

These stony sentences, which read like the epitaph of a Raymond Chandler victim, will confirm for too many millions of movie fans the usual melodrama of a humble girl, cursed by physical beauty, to be dazed and doomed by the fame that was too much for her...

FRIEDMAN UNVEILED NYTimes columnist Thomas Friedman -- for better or for worse -- has become one of the most influential public voices on Middle Eastern affairs. A seasoned reporter -- he spent the 80s in Beirut and Jerusalem for the Times -- Friedman speaks about Iraq, terrorism and his own views as a "liberal hawk" in this Guardian interview.

Friedman calls himself a liberal and, clearly, he is when compared to the right wing of American opinion, exemplified by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post - commentators who refuse to countenance the notion that violence against America or its allies might have economic or political causes, and for whom anything but the incantation that the enemy is evil comes close to being treachery. He is sympathetic, too, to criticisms that some on the right are quick to dismiss as anti-Americanism: "We go and tell the world, there's a war on terrorism, folks, and you're either with us or against us. But that war for a greener planet? 'Sorry!'... well, that pisses me off as an American. I can imagine how much it would piss off Europeans."

But he is way to the right of the dissenting left (Michael Moore, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky) for whom the blame rests largely with western societies in general and American foreign policy in particular. "I believe there are root causes," is how he puts it - "but not just ones that we [create]."

Underlying it all is an undimmable optimism about the role of the US in the world that Friedman attributes to his midwestern upbringing. "So much of who I am is about Minnesota," he says. "I grew up in a community that worked. I grew up in the age of Humphrey and Mondale, these really optimistic politicians who believed in America as a country and as a community, and its missionary role in the world. I'm not exactly the naive American: I lived in Beirut for five years. Much of my work is really a tension between the Minnesota boy and the Beirut boy."

Deep down, he is happy to concede, this position is based on an emotional commitment as much as an intellectual argument, a hunch he knows very well can be criticised as Panglossian complacency. "I think, on the whole, that a lot of bad things in the world happen without us, and not many good things happen without us, in terms of big initiatives. And I think that in more places, on more days, we're a force for good than for bad. And I would hate to see a world where France was the world's only superpower."

THE BLINK OF AN EYE The CSMonitor looks at one soldier's death in Iraq, and explores the randomness of the attacks on U.S. troops, as well as the impact on morale and the families back home. As American troops continue to come under attack, they hunker down and detach themselves from the Iraqis they were sent to help, creating a spiral that feeds resentment and hostility on all sides.

MOSUL, IRAQ – For Spc. Brett Christian, the morning of July 23 began ordinarily enough. He brushed his teeth and shaved. Then, climbing into the cab of his 21/2-ton diesel troop carrier not long after sunrise, the young soldier pulled into an Army convoy headed west out of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Specialist Christian's mission was routine. He and a couple of dozen other troops from the 101st Airborne Division were bound for a firing range to zero their weapons. As was his habit, the gregarious 27-year-old was trading jokes in the cab. In the turret behind him, the machine gunner scanned flat brick rooftops and dusty streets.

The five-vehicle convoy rumbled past some charred chassis and artillery shells cluttering a scrap-metal dump - the kind found on the outskirts of many Iraqi cities - and began rolling up a hill.

Then, mid-joke, Christian's world exploded.

AL QAEDA SPEAKS Jihad Unspun has posted a complete translation of the audiotape released last week apparently featuring al Qaeda's #2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Al-Zawahiri's message spoke primarily about the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay.

THE DEAD SEA One of the world's largest environmental disasters of the last century is the destruction of the Aral Sea, once one of the largest inland seas in the world. Today, thanks to irrigation projects of the former Soviet Union, the Aral Sea is two seas and a desert. And the seas are dwindling.

There is broad agreement that it is impossible to return the sea level to its pre-1960 level, 72 feet higher than it is now. That was before the rivers that fed it were diverted to irrigate cotton fields and rice paddies.

The World Bank is financing the next best option, an $85 million project to revive the northern part of the sea, known as the Small Sea, while giving up on the largely dead Big Sea to the south.

Work on the project, an eight-mile dike, started here last month. Officials expect three miles to be completed by Dec. 31, with the rest to be finished next year, Yuri Ponomarev, the site manager for the main contractor, from Moscow, said in an interview here...

... [The river] Syr Darya water will be prevented from flowing into the Big Sea, where it has been losing a battle with evaporation. Instead, it will flow to the Small Sea, which in four years or so engineers expect to rise 13 feet and recover 230 square miles of exposed former seabed...

...As a result of the two components, experts said, the salt content of the Small Aral should drop, to somewhere from 4 parts per thousand to 17 parts. It is now up to 35. Many of the 24 fish species that once supplied a 50,000-ton-a-year fishery are expected to return.

A PIRATE'S LIFE, INDEED It's not a great film, but "Pirates of the Caribbean" sure is entertaining, thanks especially to modern-day pirate Johnny Depp.

Giving what will no doubt be remembered as a truly brilliant performance as rogue pirate Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp was attracted to the project for the opportunity to create a totally new and lively character. Having developed strong ideas about Sparrow’s attitude and appearance, his inspirations for the character were diverse - encompassing legendary Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, the cartoon character Pepe Le Pew and modern-day Rastafarians.

“After I read the script, I was trying to figure out what pirates were like in the 18th century,” recounts Depp. “I thought, ‘What would be the equivalent today?’ Pirates of the 18th century were really the rock and roll stars of that era, so I just started thinking about rock and roll stars. Who’s the greatest and coolest rock and roll star? To me, it was Keith Richards. Keith is pretty piratey, so Keith became the main ingredient.”

GEE IS BACK Another Iraqi making a return to the blog-o-sphere is G. who hasn't posted since the end of June. He's back this month with a lengthy, wry post tinged with optimism and humor.

RIVERBEND IN BAGHDAD Salam Pax introduced his readers to "Riverbend" earlier this year. A female Iraqi, she is now in Mosul, and reports through Salam on the situation there with a mixture of emotional vehemence and perspective.

SCHISM? Mel Gibson's new film, The Passion, is setting itself up to be a force in the Christian world, and many people feel it will not be a good force. The film, which Gibson calls "evangelical," recounts the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus entirely in Aramaic and Latin. Gibson is previewing it for conservative Christians, but Catholics and Jews who have read the script are alarmed by its content, which they say is rife with anti-Semitism. The last thing conservative Christians need is another excuse to hate a group of people.

Mr Gibson's critics say the ramifications go way beyond the film. "This is a story for which millions paid with their lives," says Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told New York Newsday. "They were burned at the stake, killed in pogroms ... and it was those ideas that served as the foundations of the Holocaust. We have a right to be concerned."

INBALANCE If you think the Bush administration's foreign policy is unstable and wrong-headed, wait until 2005. The more balanced wing of the administration is beginning to look outside the gilded halls of Foggy Bottom, which means that a re-elected Bush will have a hawk-heavy team in Defense and State.

BEATABLE Conservative political analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia has published his first electoral take on the 2004 presidential election. The winner? It's not Bush in a landslide. In fact, it's not even Bush.

BAGHDAD NEWS The English-language Baghdad Bulletin continues to provide a good perspective on what passes for news in Baghdad.

TIMBUKTU National Public Radio and National Geographic have teamed up to produce Radio Expeditions, which wanders the world. NPR has set up a comprehensive website that wanders through Mali in West Africa.

ONE JOBLESS MAN'S JOURNEY Two weeks ago, several Bush Cabinet members boarded a bus and swept across the heartland, hoping to get a sense of how the economy is doing. And to get some good film footage for next year's presidential campaign. One unemployed man saw it as an opportunity to speak directly to Treasury Secretary John Snow. His story follows...

TEXAS JUSTICE Anthony Shadid paints a sad, depressing picture of how Iraqis are dealing with issues of collaboration, particularly in the Sunni area north of Baghdad.

NOT BUSH'S STRONGEST SUIT As the Bush administration's dithering over the cost of operations in Iraq continues, the bill continues to mount -- in lives, dollars and lost credibility. Unfortunately, as the Post points out, this is a trend Americans should be comfortable with by now. Candor, honesty and forthrightness are not exactly en vogue at the White House these days.

It's more critical than ever that the administration level with lawmakers and the American people about the likely financial costs of U.S. involvement in Iraq. But it's not happening. The evasion has a familiar feel. In the weeks leading up to the war, the administration treated anyone who had the temerity to ask about cost as a boob who failed to comprehend that such figures were, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "not knowable." Then, five days into the fighting, the administration produced a remarkably precise figure for the size of the check it needed Congress to cut -- instantly. At the same time, the administration waved off questions about the costs of postwar reconstruction, pointing confidently to billions in oil revenue and seized assets. As it turns out, the anticipated oil revenue this year will be a relative trickle, and the amount anticipated for 2004 is far less than needed to get Iraq functioning.