Tuesday Linkage

A number of good links this morning from around the blogosphere:

Mark Steyn mocks the self-righteous eurocrats who’ve got their panties in a twist over Prince Hal’s lack of taste:

It’s a good rule of thumb that, no matter how big an idiot someone is, he can never compete with the political class’s response to his idiocy. Thus, whatever feelings of unease I might have had about Prince Hitler were swept away the moment the rent-a-quote humbugs started lining up to denounce him.

Machias Privateer compares murder rates in Baghdad and Chicago:

“In Baghdad, with population 5 million people, three spitballs were thrown near the heavily guarded Green Zone, causing no casualties but annoying American and Iraqi officials. It marked the third straight day of “insurgent” attacks on the zone, the nerve center of the U.S. and Iraqi administration, after a lull of a couple of weeks.”

The Times of London reflects on the tunnel vision of those pundits who can’t see past Vietnam in analyzing the present situation:

It has become the dominant reference point for discussion of any current military campaign. The war to liberate Afghanistan had barely begun before sceptics were suggesting that a “Vietnam-style quagmire” loomed. And from the moment plans were laid to topple Saddam’s regime, cynics were certain that the Iraq war would lead, if not to Apocalypse Now, then to the quagmire to end all quagmires.

And on a completely different topic, Elon Musk of PayPal and SpaceX has committed himself to winning Bigelow’s America’s Space Prize; that is, to develop a private orbital vehicle by 2010:

Although Falcon I, with its single Merlin engine, will be able to launch only small satellites, five Merlins will be mated to the first stage of the far more powerful Falcon V rocket, perhaps as early as this year. Falcon V, Musk told Wired News, will be able to carry at least five people into low Earth orbit.