THE SPIN, IT DOTH BEGIN You'll hear it spun seven ways to Sunday -- Clark and Clinton in 2004, or Clark paving the way for Clinton in 2008, or... New York Magazine's Michael Wolff expounds on why a General and a former First Lady might just make history in 2004. Oh, and save the Democratic Party from defeat.

OPUS, DATED I had the date wrong when I recently jumped for joy that Bloom County's Opus would be returning in his own Sunday strip. Opus makes his debut on November 23. Makes you want to sniff dandelions, doesn't it?

ASS KICKERS The Democratic Party has a weblog finally. In its first weeks, it's done a good job of capturing the main messages that are spun from various Democratic webs.

TANGIER'S FADED GLORY Part travelogue, part Paul Bowles biography, this Post travel piece on the lost glory of modern Tangiers paints a picture of a faded, forlorn place with the barest of holds on its European -- and colonialist -- roots.

JETBLUE TURNS RED When JetBlue Airlines released private information on five million of its commercial customers to a Defense Department contractor, some people got upset.

In September of 2002, JetBlue Airways secretly gave the Transportation Security Administration the full travel records of 5 million JetBlue customers.  This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and then posted on the Internet.

Anyone who flew JetBlue  on or before September of 2002 should assume that all information given by them to JetBlue, including credit card numbers, is in the possession of both the TSA and Torch Concepts.  Furthermore, Torch Concepts (now doing business as Torch Technologies obtained the Social Security number, date of birth, and associated credit histories of many of the 5 million passengers in the JetBlue database.  Some of this information, including SSNs, was posted by Torch Concepts to the Internet.  The document was freely available for download on the Internet for over six months and was taken down on the 17th of September, 2003.  The full document is available for download here.

The 5 million JetBlue records handed over to TSA appear to have been used to test off-the-shelf technologies to improve aviation security.  These tests occurred prior to the formal announcement of CAPPS II, but it is obvious from the Torch Concepts presentation that a CAPPS II-like system was the goal.

GOING MAINSTREAM, OR UPSTREAM? William Greider continues to be an astute observer of the American scene, and raises an eyebrow at iconoclast Michael Moore's virtual endorsement of General Wesley Clark for President. Greider also wonders when Clark will begin to drop hints that Hillary Clinton would make an outstanding Vice President.

WHAT ELSE CAN GO WRONG? From the lens of Baghdad's Riverbend, the occupation (or liberation) of Iraq continues to go horribly wrong, most recently with the attempt on the life of Akila Al-Hashimi. It sends a powerful message to Iraqis interested in peace, as well as to women throughout the country.

Choosing her was one of the smartest thing the CPA did since they got here. It was through her contacts and extensive knowledge of current Iraqi foreign affairs that Al-Chalabi and Al-Pachichi were received at the UN as 'representatives' of the Iraqi people. She was recently chosen as one of three from the Governing Council, along with Al-Pachichi, to work as a sort of political buffer between the Governing Council and the new cabinet of ministers.

But there has been bitterness towards her by some of the more extreme members of the Governing Council- not only is she female, wears no hijab and was the first actual 'foreign representative' of the new government, but she was also a prominent part of the former government. The technique used sounds like the same used with those school principals who were killed and the same used with that brilliant female electrician who was assassinated... I wonder if Akila got a 'warning letter'. She should have had better protection. If they are not going to protect one of only 3 female members of the Governing Council, then who are they going to protect?

MANN, ALIVE Sally Mann has stirred up controversy as often as she has stirred imaginations. The Virginia photographer has now turned her ghostly sights on Civil War battlefields, where her old-fashioned approach to photography is oddly appreciated and almost understood.

BY NOW Mann is used to being misunderstood. In 1992 she published “Immediate Family,” a book of photographs of her children, shot mostly around the family farm outside Lexington, Virginia, where Mann herself was born. The pictures captured an Edenic vision of children at rest and at play. But in many of them the children were nude, in poses that suggested a knowingness, a lack of innocence, that any reflective parent would recognize but that few willingly acknowledge. Overnight, Mann was tossed into the strange ranks of photographers—notably the late Diane Arbus—whose work leaves you squirming even as it holds you spellbound. While Arbus sought out such misfits as sideshow freaks and transvestites, Mann rarely looks beyond her own family. Yet both artists cast you in the role of voyeur and then force you to question why you can’t turn away. But they also reward your struggle. While your sense of propriety is getting worked over, your sense of humanity is mysteriously expanding.
        This fall, coincidentally, brings new books by both Arbus, who died in 1971, and Mann. “Revelations,” the Arbus book, accompanies a huge retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it majestically confirms what we already knew: that she was one of the great photographers of this or any age. Mann’s book “What Remains” offers greater surprises. She’s wrenched her attention from the domestic scenes in “Immediate Family” and turned to matters of mortality and death, looking for clues (and finding a disquieting loveliness) in a Civil War battlefield, her dead dog’s skeleton and decomposing bodies at a forensic laboratory. And instead of the crystalline clarity of the family pictures, these new wet-plate images bear an almost corroded look, with scratches and blurs and starbursts and dark corners. The fragility of this antiquated method captures the tenuousness and the mystery of what we’re looking at. We see through a glass darkly, but we see more, not less.

AMERICA IS IDEAS Is that from Archibald MacLeish? The Library of Congress and U.S. News & World Report have teamed up to present 100 documents that shaped America. The truth is that the majority of the documents listed shaped the world, providing 100 examples of the power of having ideas and ideals, even when a nation falls short on them.

MOON POWER The science geek hidden deep inside of me gets excited when I see that there are people in the world interested in cleaner forms of power, even when they cost half a million dollars per household.

OSLO (Reuters) - Homes on the Arctic tip of Norway started getting power from the moon on Saturday via a unique subsea power station driven by the rise and fall of the tide.

A tidal current in a sea channel near the town of Hammerfest, caused by the gravitational tug of the moon on the earth, started turning the 33-foot blades of a turbine bolted to the seabed to generate electricity for the local grid.

The prototype looks like an underwater windmill and is expected to generate about 700,000 kilowatt hours of non-polluting energy a year, or enough to light and heat about 30 homes.

"This is the first time in the world that electricity from a tidal current has been fed into a power grid," Harald Johansen, managing director of Hammerfest Stroem which has led the project, told Reuters.