June 09, 2007

A NOVEL DEBATE PROPOSAL gathers steam.

WHO SAID THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WASN'T KEEPING AN EYE ON THE BORDER:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday that Washington is taking steps to address Mexican concerns the U.S. is not doing enough to stop illegal weapons from being smuggled across the border and into the hands of brutal drug gangs. . . . "The firepower we are seeing here has to do with a lack of control on the (U.S.) side of the border," Patricio Patino, Mexico's top anti-drug intelligence official, said last month.

Maybe they could build a fence, or something . . . . Really, you can't make this stuff up.

CHINA IS CENSORING FLICKR: Probably trying to keep citizens from seeing Taiwan's Betelnut Beauties and wondering if they're on the wrong side . . . .

REASONS TO LIKE BILL RICHARDSON:

He owns a 12-gauge Browning over-and-under shotgun, which he has used for hunting birds, including quail and dove. Richardson also owns a 9mm semiautomatic pistol, which is not for hunting, but he has a state permit to carry it concealed. He has borrowed rifles to hunt big game such as elk, deer and the oryx. . . .

While a congressman, the Democrat voted against a ban on assault weapons and opposed a seven-day waiting period for handgun purchases. As governor, he backed and signed legislation allowing New Mexicans to carry concealed weapons.

His space-related record is good, too. (Via Alphecca). I don't like what he says about the war, though like all the candidates, what he says now is one thing, what he'll do once actually in office in 2009 is another.

ANBAR SPREADS?

U.S. military officials say they are making progress in negotiating with tribal leaders in a turbulent region north of Baghdad, using a formula that helped reduce violence in western Iraq. . . .

Anbar province, once among the most violent regions in Iraq, is held up as an example of how local politics can reduce violence. "A year ago we were about to write off Anbar province," Everett said. "We have turned it completely around."

A key part of the turnaround was an effort to work with tribal leaders. A growing number of the leaders, sometimes called sheiks, have joined with U.S. forces and turned against al-Qaeda militants. The average weekly attacks in Anbar province dropped from about 250 last year to about 100 last month, according to the U.S. military. This year 12,000 Iraqis volunteered for Iraqi security forces in Anbar, up from 1,000 in 2006, Odierno said.

"Anbar could be a microcosm of what could happen in the rest of country if the right elements come into play," said Army Col. Ralph Baker, a former brigade commander who served two tours in Iraq and now serves at the Pentagon.

Goins said he has used the example of Anbar when meeting with tribal leaders. He said he has met regularly with them since arriving in Iraq last fall.

Diyala differs significantly from Anbar. Anbar is almost entirely Sunni Muslim and influenced by tribal leaders. Diyala is split between Sunnis and Shiites and has 25 major tribes and more than 100 minor groups or offshoots. "The melting pot of tribes in Diyala makes it problematic," Goins said in a telephone interview from Iraq.

Let's hope they can pull it off.

AUSTIN BAY LOOKS AT Putin, missiles, and Russia's problems.

ANTIGUN CONGRESSMAN FORCED TO GIVE UP HIS RIFLES AND SHOTGUNS: Heh.

VACLAV HAVEL criticizes appeasement at the E.U.

I still think he should have been Secretary General of the UN.

STANLEY KURTZ ECHOES BILL QUICK: "Without the conservative web, the immigration bill would likely have passed–probably in a rushed vote before Memorial Day."

Hmmm. You can write off Quick's comments as blogosphere triumphalism, but not so much with Kurtz.

ANOTHER TERROR BUST: "A suspected international arms dealer was arrested yesterday in Spain and charged with conspiracy to sell millions of dollars in weapons to a State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization in Colombia to kill Americans."

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS is up!

WAS THE IMMIGRATION BILL COLLAPSE A DEFEAT FOR BUSH? Yes, but:

On the other hand, the immigration compromise was almost universally disliked and threatened to split the GOP coalition. Maybe its death was a blessing for the president.

Unless he's dumb enough to bring it up again, which I predict he will be.

MORE ON THE WINKLER CASE.

A COLLECTION OF FATHER'S DAY GIFTS that goes beyond power tools and grilling gadgets -- not that there's anything wrong with those!

Me, I like the Simpsons DVDs.

PARIS HILTON: Victim of society! And George W. Bush!

It's a fair cop.

WAS PATRICK FITZGERALD'S APPOINTMENT unconstitutional? Some big names on the brief.

IS IT "CASTLE DOCTRINE" DAY IN TENNESSEE? Actually, I think that every day is.

MICKEY KAUS: "I'd never work for an organization that would botch a big story as thoroughly as the Washington Post Company's flagship has botched this year's immigration bill coverage! ... Oh, wait."

UPDATE: Hey, it's not the only story they're blowing!

Maybe we could make a shorter list of reporting that doesn't contain massive factual errors induced by beltway spin?

KEEPING THE NATIVES poor and happy. And picturesque!

UPDATE: It's the Green Man's Burden!

A LOOK AT what's a hate crime, and what isn't, using the Channon Christian / Christopher Newsom murders as a springboard.

SO IS THIS GOOD NEWS OR BAD NEWS?

The U.S. trade deficit narrowed more than forecast in April as a weaker dollar pushed exports to a record and demand for imports waned.

The deficit fell 6.2 percent, the most in six months, to $58.5 billion, from a revised $62.4 billion in March, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. The gap declined even as the shortfall with China widened.

The dollar's drop and expanding economies in Europe and Asia are fueling demand for American-made goods and the deficit is retreating from a record $67.6 billion in August. The gain in exports may also help economic growth accelerate after the slowest quarter in more than four years.

Good news, I think. Am I wrong?

June 08, 2007

BRINK LINDSEY'S NEW BOOK, The Age of Abundance, gets a very positive review from George Will:

It took confidence for Brink Lindsey, of the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, to venture onto this well-plowed ground with “The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.” This constantly stimulating book vindicates that confidence. His thesis, stated ironically with Karl Marx’s categories, is that in the second half of the 20th century, America left the “realm of necessity” and entered the “realm of freedom.” Americans “live on the far side of a great fault line” separating them from all prior human experience. . . .

Lindsey rightly says that “today’s typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago.” And “the typical bluestate liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power.” In “the bell curve of ideological allegiance,” the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an “implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle.” If so, material abundance has been, on balance , good for us, and Lindsey’s measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.

As I mentioned a while back, I read Brink's book and thought it was very good.

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER: "After hearing more than four hours of testimony and attorney arguments today, a McNairy County judge sentenced Mary Winkler, who shot her preacher-husband to death last year, to what amounts to a week in prison and 60 days in a facility where she can receive mental health treatment. . . . Winkler, 33, was charged with first-degree murder after shooting Matthew Winkler in the back with a shotgun on March 22 last year as he lay in bed."

UPDATE: More here.

MORE EVIDENCE that your tax dollars are wasted.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION.

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE REELECTED, prudishness would dominate the airwaves. And they were right!

JFK TERROR UPDATE: "The investigation into the thwarted plot to bomb Kennedy International Airport is widening beyond the four men in custody, with more suspects sought outside the U.S. for their suspected roles, a law enforcement official said Friday."

Meanwhile, here's a suggestion that the terrorists' plan was poorly conceived.

RASMUSSEN ON WHY THE IMMIGRATION BILL FAILED:

The reality is much simpler and has nothing to do with legislative tactics. The immigration bill failed because a broad cross-section of the American people are opposed to it. Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters are opposed. Men are opposed. So are women. The young don’t like it; neither do the no-longer-young. White Americans are opposed. Americans of color are opposed.

The last Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll found that just 23% of Americans supported the legislation.

Bill Quick adds: "I have to say that the right blogosphere as a whole did an excellent job of revealing and mobilizing this sentiment. . . . Ten years ago, this bill would have been passed and signed by the president before most Americans were even aware that it existed. Those days are over."

J.D. JOHANNES offers predictions for this summer in Iraq. Excerpt:

If the Anbar Awakening works, AQIZ is in trouble and will be seen as losing not only the war against the U.S. but of losing support among their core constituency--Sunni Muslims.

Baghdad will be increasingly violent because if the surge shows even some signs of success, it will be extended and therefore deny victory to those who profit by chaos and a U.S. departure.

The best way for AQIZ and Jaysh al Mahdi puppet masters to derail the surge and the awakening is through spectacular violence--truck bombs, suicide vest bombs, suicide attacks on coalition bases and increasingly violent ways to carry out the sectarian murder campaigns.

The spectacular generates news media coverage and ratings points that drown out all other facts and progress leading public opinion to an ill informed conclusion--that the whole project should be abandoned because it cannot be won.

As the summer wears on expect more spectacular and more frequent attacks.

I also predict the Anbar Awakening will not remain isolated to Anbar. The Sheiks of Anbar are already reaching out to other Sunni provinces. These Sheiks will embrace the Anbar model of local neighborhood watches, check points and an IP that works with the coalition.

The Sheiks of Anbar will also be sending more 'qualified men' to Sunni suburbs in Baghdad.

Read the whole thing.

SO AS I MENTIONED A WHILE BACK, I set up the weather radio that's supposed to warn you if there's a tornado warning or other threats. Then, of course, we immediately got the calmest spell of weather we've had in ages. But today we had a Severe Thunderstorm Warning and though no alarm sounded (I silenced it for most alerts, as we get a lot of those, and I don't want to be awakened for something like that) it lit the little "warning" light and "Severe Thunderstorm Warning" scrolled across the display. So I guess it works!

GOODBYE TO TOTINO'S. There's actually a Totino's Restaurant behind the famous "Party Pizza?" Weird. That's like hearing that your dad used to date Mrs. Filbert.

LIVE FROM LIFTOFF: The Popular Mechanics folks are blogging from the Shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral. Plus, ten tough questions for NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.

TERRORISM BY THE NUMBERS.

MICKEY KAUS has a roundup on the immigration bill's failure.

A LOOK AT politics and Roe v. Wade.

WINNING BY LOSING in suing Gateway. Or is it losing by winning?

MICHAEL MOORE WOULD BE JEALOUS: A look at Russian film history.

ANOTHER PHOTO ESSAY from Michael Yon.

I PREDICT THAT THIS WILL DO WELL: The Fred Factor: How Fred Thompson May Change The Face Of The '08 Campaign.

PROMISE BREAKERS:

The ABC News/Washington Post poll found that among all Americans, only 29 percent approve of the way Bush is handling the immigration issue. That’s the lowest Bush has ever been on the issue in the survey.

Note, too, that overall approval ratings of the Democratic majority in Congress are even lower than those of the president.

Clearly, most Americans don’t approve of promise breakers.

But that's what we keep getting.

A NEW BOOK BY MICHAEL BARONE: Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers. (Via, er, Michael Barone.)

ACE OFFERS IMPORTANT THOUGHTS on leering and feminism. "Weird. Feminists continue insisting that it's empowering to f*ck everything that moves, except your actual husband, who must be sexually punished as a state-sanctioned enforcer of The Oppressive Patriarchy."

Plus this:

Old, Hateful, Barbaric Rule: Women must keep their eyes averted when speaking to their superiors, men

New, Empowering, Enlightened Rule: Men must keep their eyes averted when speaking to their superiors, women

Upside: On looking at Jeri Thompson's actual age, as opposed to that originally imagined by feminist bloggers, I'm now declaring the Insta-Wife to be the "Insta-Trophy-Wife."

UPDATE: Alex Bensky emails: "Hey, Glenn, why not consider the possibility that you're Helen's trophy husband?"

Good point! Yeah, that's the ticket!

ANGEL FLIGHT: Alan Boyle looks at financing new commercial space ventures.

MICHAEL MALONE WRITES that working at home isn't as glamorous as you might think:

There's a video of me, when my kids were young, sitting in a rented house in Oregon on vacation. Barney is on the television, my boys are having a pillow war all around me, my wife is vacuuming, and I am on the couch with my laptop writing a New York Times column, oblivious to the noise, flying objects and general chaos around me. Somehow, over the years, I learned how to focus -- despite almost having flunked out of college because I was incapable of studying while wearing music headphones. Can you do that?

Read the whole thing. But the photo accompanying his article is certainly glamorous! Oh, wait, he addresses that: "In truth, real life working at home is to those glamor stories as real life home offices (empty coffee cups, magazines on the floor, overstuffed waste baskets) are to the photos that illustrate those articles."

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS looks at what (Fred) Thompsonomics might look like.

A LOOK AT FRED THOMPSON'S FUNDRAISING RESULTS so far.

A LOOK AT IRAN'S "secret cells" in Iraq, from Bill Roggio.

THE POLITICO: immigration deal collapses. Is it fully dead? Or just mostly dead? Because mostly dead is still slightly alive. So it may not be time to go through its pockets and look for loose change yet..

Kaus agrees: "Of course, the bill isn't dead. Just resting."

June 07, 2007

ANOTHER MYTH BUSTED? "He’s the ultimate symbol of radical chic but was Che Guevara really a homophobic, racist square who personally ordered the jailing and executions of innocent men, women and children?"

"GREEDY LITTLE PIMPS' EYES:" It does seem to be a transatlantic phenomenon.

INTERNET CENSORSHIP IS SPREADING, partly because big companies are collaborating. Perhaps some shareholder pressure is in order.

GUNS ON CAMPUS: Law enforcement officials are split on the subject.

AND THAT'S A BAD THING: "The story according to which politically connected industries block economic developments that would be beneficial overall but redound to the detriment of the big players is one expounded mostly by cranks in the U.S., but is commonly accepted in Europe. This results from the fact that in Europe, this kind of thing happens."

Of course, the United States is not immune to politically connected efforts to block new technologies.

TAUNTING ME with Kegerator blogging.

BATTERED COLUMNIST SYNDROME.

QUESTIONING THE TIMING of questions about the timing.

UNSECURE SECURITY AT THE F.B.I. Homeland Security remains not ready for primetime.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: David Obey is getting home-state flak:

In six months David Obey has gone from hero to villain.

Late last year the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the powerful House Appropriations Committee helped to spark an effort to save taxpayers billions of dollars by reining in pork-barrel spending.

But Obey is now dodging the very reforms he helped to generate. . . . He announced that because more than 30,000 earmark requests had been made so far this year, it was impossible to determine which had merit.

His solution was to wait until the end of the lawmaking process, where earmarks would be submitted in closed-door sessions of the committee that negotiates the differences between House and Senate versions of bills.

With this maneuver, Obey would enhance his own power but prevent the public and most lawmakers from questioning earmarks until it is too late.

Read the whole thing. Especially if you're Obey, or live in his district.

HAPPY SUMMER VACATION: E. Coli in beach sand.

HOW TO REVIVE A FADING CAREER: Israel-Bashing! It's the Boost Plus of politics!

IN THE MAIL: Dr. Grattan Woodson's The Bird Flu Preparedness Planner.

A couple of other avian flu items here and here. As I've noted before, regardless of whether avian flu ever becomes a deadly human pandemic, the likelihood is fairly high that we'll see some sort of deadly pandemic in the next decade or two. And most flu preparations will also help in the case of some other dangerous disease outbreak.

Also, on a not entirely unrelated subject, Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Overall, the world is getting richer, even most of the world's poor. But there are still a lot of dirt-poor people out there, and that raises the risk of disease outbreaks.

WAYS TO REDUCE YOUR ENERGY FOOTPRINT: And bills!

Plus, summer lawn-prep. Mine consists of praying for rain. Hey, we got some!

SPEAKING OF FLOATING ADVANTAGEOUS RUMORS: "A man has sued the maker of the health drink Boost Plus, claiming the vitamin-enriched beverage gave him an erection that would not subside and caused him to be hospitalized."

What do you think: Does this hurt Boost sales or help them?

Erection story -- good for Boost sales or bad?
	Good. Are you kidding?
	Bad. Who wants a "Winter Shunt" in his wingwang?
pollcode.com free polls

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE looks at pirates and the law.

STUCK IN virtual reality. Didn't that plot start with Tron?

TURNING SKIN CELLS INTO STEM CELLS: "In a surprising advance that could sidestep the ethical debates surrounding stem cell biology, researchers have come much closer to a major goal of regenerative medicine, the conversion of a patient’s cells into specialized tissues that might replace those lost to disease."

Bring it on!

YOU'VE GOT TO FIGHT, FOR YOUR RIGHT to leer.

Hey, they said that if George W. Bush were reelected people would be trying to turn the clock back to the 1950s. And they were right!

BILL ROGGIO TAKES A LOOK AT the state of Iraqi security forces.

WATCH OUT WHERE THE HUSKIES GO: "Dirty snow may warm Arctic as much as greenhouse gases."

IT'S STILL ALL IMMIGRATION, ALL THE TIME at Kausfiles. Rapid fire! Multiple updates! He's blogging like he's afraid Slate will hire a recently amnestied immigrant to replace him!

UPDATE: More here.

PATRICK FITZGERALD, call your office.

DOES THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT REALLY "hate and fear Fred Thompson?" I haven't gotten that impression, but maybe I've missed something.

Of course, given the popularity of the GOP establishment, maybe it's the Thompson camp that's floating this idea . . . .

GIVEN THAT THE ORIGINAL TRIAL SEEMED LIKE A GROTESQUE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE, this is good news:

Julie Amero, the substitute teacher who could have received 40 years in jail after porn appeared on classroom PCs, was spared that fate—for now. Instead, Amero will get a new trial after revelations that the original computer analysis was flawed.

Since it was almost certainly malware that caused this, a new trial seems like the least that can be expected here. This case shouldn't have been prosecuted.

Much more from Mark Frauenfelder.

JAMES LILEKS IS NOW POSTING AT BUZZ.MN, too.

MICHAEL YON EMAILS:

Many readers are asking about the situation in Hit, Iraq after LTC Doug Crissman arrested General Hamid. http://www.michaelyon-online.com/wp/the-final-option.htm

In response to overwhelming reader inquiries, I asked LTC Crissman if he would address the public at home and give folks an idea of the outcome. LTC Crissman just responded via email. This posting is with his permission. The outcome is as fascinating as the arrest:

Mike,

The Hit City Council now unanimously stands behind the nomination for Gen Hamid's replacement. Though I haven't spoken to him myself, the Provincial Chief of Police reportedly also concurs and has forwarded our nomination to the Anbar Provincial Council for their final review/approval. We're still working hard to reschedule the visit by the Governor, Provincial Council Chairman and Provincial Chief of Police which was cancelled due to weather last Saturday. Through Coalition channels, we continue to encourage a sense of urgency for the Anbar Provincial Government so we can get a new guy into the seat ASAP. In the meantime, I've met with the incumbent several times already and truly believe he'll be the professional we need to get this Police Force on the right track. A career officer from the Iraqi Army, he thinks, looks, and acts like a soldier...which is exactly what we need here in Hit. Yesterday, he recommended 3 other retired/former members of the Iraqi Army to be hired as members of the Hit District Staff -- all of whom have impressive credentials and skill sets we've been trying to build ourselves.

After about 72 hours of increased Coalition Force presence and a stricter curfew in Hit, we've now returned to business as usual. There are still those who feel Hamid should have merely been fired rather than detained, but the overwhelming majority agrees what we did needed to be done...and I continue to remind them that they asked us to do it...repeatedly.

Doug

Sounds good.

June 06, 2007

RONALD REGAN, GEORGE FORMAN, AND RUDOLF GIULIANI? Well, it's not Speller of the Year. Those tend to be homeschooled.

UPDATE: Yes, having three misspellings in one PR email -- and misspellings of famous names at that -- does tend to suggest that the not-ready-for-primetime character of the Edwards campaign hasn't been fixed.

BARACK OBAMA MET WITH PHIL BREDESEN YESTERDAY: "Obama didn't elaborate on what was discussed, but he said Tennessee has smart Democrats who are able to fashion the kind of agenda that attracts support of independents and Republicans."

Gee, where have I heard that before? Hmm. . . Obama/Bredesen?

UPDATE: More on Obama/Bredesen -- including video -- here.

LOTS OF SPACEBLOGGING at the Carnival of Space.

CHUCK HAGEL GETS A CHALLENGER:

The attorney general of Nebraska, Jon Bruning, stopped by our office yesterday to let us know that tomorrow he will announce he will challenge Senator Hagel in the Republican primary, which is in May of 2008. A poll conducted for Mr. Bruning shows him leading Mr. Hagel among likely Republican primary voters by 9 percentage points. Mr. Bruning assails Mr, Hagel for being, "The Republican that talks like a Democrat," pointing to Mr. Hagel's support for a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, as well as his discussion of impeaching President Bush. "He's become arrogant and out of touch," Mr. Bruning said. "His constituent services are very poor."

That's bad poll news for an incumbent. (Via Bill Quick, who thinks the GOP establishment will try to sink Bruning. They'd be crazy to -- which, I suppose, doesn't rule it out.)

UPDATE: Via Bill Quick's comments, here's Bruning's website.

GRAPHING THE SURGE.

IT'S NOT JUST CAPE WIND, but a far more general problem:

Al Gore has been hectoring Americans to pare back their lifestyles to fight global warming. But if Mr. Gore wants us to rethink our priorities in the face of this mother of all environmental threats, surely he has convinced his fellow greens to rethink theirs, right?

Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life. . . .

These dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California. Replacing this energy with natural gas -- the cleanest fossil-fuel source -- would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual emissions of 102,000 cars.

Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don't even let many states, including California, count hydro as renewable. . . .

Their opposition to nuclear energy is well known. Wind power? Two years ago the Center for Biological Diversity sued California's Altamont Pass Wind Farm for obstructing and shredding migrating birds. ("Cuisinarts of the sky" is what many greens call wind farms.) Solar? Worldwatch Institute's Christopher Flavin has been decidedly lukewarm about solar farms because they involve placing acres of mirrors in pristine desert habitat. The Sierra Club and Wilderness Society once testified before Congress to keep California's Mojave Desert -- one of the prime solar sites in the country -- off limits to all development. Geothermal energy? They are unlikely to get enviro blessings, because some of the best sites are located on protected federal lands.

Kind of makes you doubt their sincerity. If global warming is the crisis they say, then all the other stuff is secondary. If all the other stuff isn't secondary, then do they really believe it's the crisis they say? It's just a Laurie David of a different color.

NEWS: "Iran caught red-handed shipping arms to Taliban." By NATO officials, which will make it a bit harder for the Euros to ignore.

WHY NOT HAVE THE DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES debate each other now? "Whoever wins is EVENTUALLY going to be pitted against someone from the opposite party.... shouldn't we want to see what they seem like in contrast with their eventual opponent?"

UPDATE: I like the Family Feud suggestion in the comments!

MORE ON L'AFFAIRE BRITTNEY, here, and here. Also here, and a poll, here.

UPDATE: Beware the bloggers' bile! "The smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed." Even when, as in Brittney's case, the ridiculers are confused.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here. And here.

STRATEGYPAGE ON IRAQ: "Militarily, U.S. troops are unstoppable. But American military success is not what will bring victory in Iraq, it's the willingness of Iraqis to stop killing each other. Ultimate success is a quiet Iraq and American troops going home. But the Sunni Arabs have had a real hard time living with the idea that they are no longer in power. However, four years of getting hammered by U.S. and, increasingly, Iraqi, troops, has caused a very visible shift in attitudes." The question is whether things will change fast enough, in enough places, to prevent disaster, especially disaster for the Sunnis.

MY EARLIER WIND POWER POSTS produced this email from PR guy Marshall Manson:

I saw your post this morning about Wind Power, and I thought you might like to know that the American Wind Energy Association (our client) is currently putting on Windpower 2007, the industry’s huge convention and trade show. We had a number of bloggers attend and provide coverage, and thought you might be interested in a couple of good posts:

Link

Link

AWEA also did a Flickr feed for the event and a YouTube channel which has some great video of some of the expert discussions.

Link

Link

Very interesting.

PROBE: "A group of House Republicans are calling for an investigation into 'the release of sensitive information' in a recent ABC News report on CIA covert activities against Iran."

UPDATE: Oh, well, the word's out anyway!

YOU'D THINK THE WHOLE NIFONG THING WOULD BE OVER, but you'd be wrong. Just keep scrolling.

A PROBLEM WITH ASSIMILATION: "Moslem migrants get off the plane from the old country, and within a short time, they are looking at the same newscasts they consumed back home. When they attempt to discus world affairs with the locals, they quickly find a vast difference of opinions. Most Moslems recoil and retreat into an insular migrant mind set. This is why you have Moslems in places like Britain, or anywhere else in the West, clinging to old country myths, even with a lot of contradictory evidence confronting them daily."

It's unfortunate that as immigration gets easier, the forces of assimilation get weaker.

SOME RANDOM OBSERVATIONS FROM IRAQ, courtesy of J.D. Johannes. Lots of good stuff, but note this:

The bureacracy--even in combat--is staggering. To get some things done the request has to go through 15! steps of approval.

One Company Commander summed it up like this:

"They trust me with the lives of 100 men, humvees, weapons, ammo, civil affairs negotiations, classified intelligence, radios, everything. But I cannot be trusted with $20k worth of Dinar to hire a crew to build up an IP station?"

Which is interesting, because I keep hearing that the appeal of JAM and AQIZ is the money.

I saw one sheet listing the rewards for tips. But the rewards were lower than what JAM and AQIZ pay.

Is the coalition losing a bidding war?

Read the whole thing. Remember my earlier blogging about the CERP program and how the bureaucrats were blowing it?

THE TRUTH ABOUT SYRIA: Michael Totten interviews the author.

BRITTNEY GILBERT hangs up her keyboard in response to reader abuse. "I do not want to be seen as a victim here, I only want to honestly tell you why I will no longer be authoring NIT. Your host is simply not cut from strong enough cloth. This is the internet. People are vicious."

It's true, they are. But I suspect Brittney will be back, because the addictive nature of blogging is strong, too.

UPDATE: Oliver Willis emails:

You may want to (I know you probably won't) note that a lot of the vitriol got directed at Gilbert, right or wrong, after she linked and excerpted a mean dig at the recently deceased Steve Gilliard.

But I know you've got an agenda and a cause to push and all.

Hmm. I thought this was about the Bob Krumm / Kleinheider dustup. But since Brittney is an antiwar blogger who doesn't like me very much, I'm not sure what "agenda" and "cause" I'm pushing here. Better email Rove for instructions, I guess!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oliver emails that it's actually about this post.

MORE: Bruce Hill wonders if Oliver and I have had a falling out. Well, I had high hopes for Oliver once, but since he went to work for Media Matters I think he's squandered his potential. Still, Oliver seems to care much more about my blogging than I do about his. But then, he's paid to, I guess.

MORE STILL: Various readers note that Oliver is in no position to criticize anyone for speaking ill of the dead. Basically, though, he went off half-cocked and made a fool out of himself, along with a lot of other lefty bloggers here.

But yeah, he's in no position to take a "have you no decency, sir" stance on, well, anything. People who work for David Brock seldom are.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS ON Giuliani's libertarian health reform plans.

WHO CARES ABOUT THE PLANET? KOSSACKS STILL LAGGING:

Come on, you guys can beat InstaPundit if you try. There are supposed to be a lot more Kos readers, and surely they care about the planet. Right?

UPDATE: Reader Bradley Ems emails: "As PJ O’Rourke once said, everyone wants to save the world; no one wants to help mom with the dishes."

A LOOK AT INKJET IMAGE PERMANENCE, or the lack thereof.

SNAKE-HANDLING CONGREGATIONALISTS for freedom.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON MYSTERY, SOLVED.

STILL MORE SCARBOROUGH.

INFORMATION WARFARE:

The days of the independent, neutral war correspondent, objectively reporting from a war's front lines, are quickly coming to an end. In the future, a war correspondent will either effectively be soldier for one faction of a conflict, or he will literally not survive in the war zone. In today's media age, the requirement for combatants to shape perceptions about the nature of a conflict, and the necessity of denying that ability to the enemy, are more crucial than firepower and logistics, the traditional measures of battlefield dominance. Successful media operations energize a faction's supporters and demoralize its enemies. When effective, this is more important than squadrons of fighter-bombers or train-loads of assault rifles. Whether they like or not, journalists are in the army now.

You couldn't tell it from their product. Well, I guess that depends on which army you mean . . .

A LOOK AT AIDS, AFRICA, AND THE ELECTIONS:

Bush didn’t just renew his historic initiative, he vastly expanded it. But unlike with the first five-year run of PEPFAR, this time he won’t be around to make good on his promises. That will fall to the next President. So if you think of yourself as a social-justice-loving sort of person, you should make damn sure that whoever you vote for has made clear that, on Africa, they’ll carry forward Bush’s legacy, rather than bringing us back to the dark days of Clintonian indifference.

If that happens, it will be because of personal belief, not politics. As Bush's history makes clear, his support on this issue has done nothing for him politically, as not enough people care.

TURKISH TROOPS in Iraq.

UPDATE: Huge roundup on the subject here.

IN THE MAIL: Joshua Kurlantzick's Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World. He's right about that, and the kinds of things that China is doing are things that we ought to be doing better, but that our bureaucracies (and in particular the State Department) aren't very good at. Perhaps this book will draw some attention to that problem.

EVERYBODY'S A CRITIC: "I'd like to congratulate Mitt Romney on being the first to introduce a term from mathematical set theory into a presidential campaign... except that he plainly has no clue what 'null set' actually means. If he DID have any clue, he'd know to say 'THE null set,' not 'A null set.'"

A JOE SCARBOROUGH ROUNDUP, from Howard Kurtz.

GOOD NEWS from Derek Lowe. "I'm very glad to announce that I've accepted an offer of a new research position. . . . It's a bit unsettling for me to realize, though, how much my search was helped out by things that had no official connection to my old position - this blog, for one thing." Not surprising, though.

A CONFESSION: In my entire life, I've never felt bad about my neck. That doesn't make me a shallow person, does it?

UPDATE: I guess it's part of the Zabar's Zeitgeist!

TERRY HEATON 1, COMPUSA . . . 1. Why isn't this just a victory for Heaton? Because when CompUSA treats a customer right, it wins, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Phony earmark reform:

Last December, victorious congressional Democrats pledged a one-year moratorium on all earmarks. New appropriations chairmen Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., issued a joint statement promising voters “there will be no congressional earmarks” until 2008 — and only after tough reforms were enacted.

But if you watch what they do instead of listen to what they say, it’s abundantly clear that just six months later, the earmark moratorium is already over. . . .

The cavalier way the new Democratic majority quickly abandoned its promise to “drain the swamp” was succinctly summed up by Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., earlier this week. In a frank admission to Examiner editors, Mikulski said she would continue to sponsor “smart earmarks” — with the term conveniently defined by her. But there’s nothing “smart” about tacking on billions of dollars in earmarks to phone-book-sized appropriations bills that bypass agency procurement rules, competitive bidding, congressional oversight and public scrutiny. As a Mikulski aide told The Examiner: “Federal funding is either competitive or an earmark, it can’t be both.”

The situation is no better on the House side where the Lower Rio Grande Valley Water Resources Conservation and Improvement Act of 2007 came to the floor Tuesday loaded with 14 earmarks for water projects throughout Texas. No names of the earmarks’ sponsors were included because, since the bill was considered under a suspension of the rules, the House reforms adopted in January didn’t apply.

I didn't think it was possible for the Democrats to be worse in this regard than the GOP Congress was. Clearly, I suffered from a lack of imagination.

TODAY IS THE ANNIVERSARY OF D-DAY.

A WRAP-UP ON LAST NIGHT'S DEBATE, from Marc Ambinder.

FRED THOMPSON'S NEW WEBSITE, ImWithFred.com, is up and running.

According to the pollsters at Pew, he shows "broad popular appeal."

POLITICALLY CORRECT WARFARE: "PC brigade ban pin-ups on RAF jets - in case they offend women and Muslims."

UPDATE: Never mind. I withdraw any criticism. Apparently, they plan to replace the nose art with the London Olympics logo, thus sending any enemies into convulsions caused by either epilepsy, or aesthetic revulsion. It's brilliant! Er, but does it pass the Geneva Conventions?

DESPITE TED KENNEDY'S BEST EFFORTS, wind power is booming: "The U.S. is the fastest growing global market for wind power, according to the Energy Department's first annual report on U.S wind power installations. U.S. wind power capacity jumped 27 percent in 2006, the largest incremental jump on record and the highest incremental capacity in the world, the DoE study found."

Wind will never be a really major source, but it's a nontrivial one.

IF IT QUACKS LIKE A DUCK:

Kopel told me that he thinks conservatives should keep the conservative media honest.

But charged with being deceptive, O'Reilly exploded, falsely accusing Kopel of being a "secular progressive." Not only that, but O'Reilly told Kopel to shut up and quit filibustering.

O'Reilly's modus operandi on this particular program seemed to be, "Don't talk while I'm interrupting." He looked completely ridiculous. . . .

All of this followed O'Reilly's claim that if Kopel were not a secular progressive, then he, O'Reilly, was Donald Duck. . . .

It was to O'Reilly's credit that he had Kopel on his show, and he thanked Kopel at the end of the interview, after insulting him. However, there was absolutely no excuse for O'Reilly to have behaved this badly on the air. It was an embarrassing moment for O'Reilly and the Fox News Channel.

Donald Duck is a frequently-blustering type with an excessively high opinion of himself. . . .

RIAA CHARGED WITH extortion and conspiracy.

A LOOK AT THE NANNY STATE -- and that "pilfering" business, by the way, happens a lot.

ILYA SOMIN LOOKS AT THE IMPACT OF passing the Equal Rights Amendment: "If enacted, the ERA is likely to have a greater impact than many expect."

CRIMINALIZATION OF NAPPING? Well, new news stories suggest there's more than was originaly reported: " A teenager had been up all night drinking at a party before coming home to baby-sit her stepsister and another toddler, who both wandered outside and drowned in a nearby pond while the teen slept, state police said Tuesday."

So it's not so much napping here, despite what the initial reports said.

June 05, 2007

A LOOK AT Russia's re-emerging nightmare.

A VERY DIVERSE press conference in Prague.

BUT WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO when these guys get too old?

LIVEBLOGGING THE REPUBLICAN DEBATES. More debates? Did I know about those? I had forgotten, if so.

More from Dave Weigel: "Hasn't John McCain been tortured enough?"

The more of these debates they have, the smarter it is for Fred Thompson to stay out as long as possible.

More liveblogging at The American Spectator and at Jim Geraghty's place.

UPDATE: The McCain people are on top of things -- they've already sent this YouTube video of McCain on Iraq.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots more liveblogging rounded up here.

Plus, a debate highlight reel at Hot Air.

IT'S AN Assault on Seasons.

Plus, global warming criminals identified.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA: A COMPARISON AND CONTRAST.

LISTEN TO the experts!

INDECENCY AT THE FCC.

MORE ON THE OPPOSITION TO WIND POWER, here.

CAN YOU MAKE A CAMPAIGN COMMERCIAL ON THIS? I'll bet someone can, and I'll bet someone will. But not yet.

THE PERFECT LAPTOP (FOR NOW): The sunlight-friendly lcd display, though, isn't new -- my old NEC Versa Daylite had that, and it was great. It was also thin and got great battery life.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER in Prague.

IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN:

House Democrats, in their first draft of new energy legislation, would wipe out California's landmark global warming law -- despite their California speaker's promises that her party would use the state as a model to combat climate change.

The legislation would pre-empt California and 11 other states from implementing laws requiring automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across their fleets. The bill would prohibit the Environmental Protection Agency from granting the states waivers to put their climate change rules into effect.

California officials, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top environmental aides, blasted the legislative proposal.

They keep retrenching. Though it sounds like this won't last.

A TRULY OPEN LETTER ON SPACE POLICY, to Gregg Easterbrook from the National Space Society. You can't get much more open than that.

VIDEO: Freeman Dyson on global warming.

MARC AMBINDER joins The Atlantic's stable of bloggers.

MORE ON THE DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL from Arnold Kling.

Kling seems to be getting a lot out of Amity Shlaes' new book.

BRITAIN'S NANNY STATE GETS MORE NANNYISH:

Middle-class wine drinkers will be the focus of government plans to make drunkenness as socially unacceptable as smoking, The Times has learnt.

Under the plans published today, a fresh audit is to be conducted by the Government into the overall costs of alcohol abuse to society and the National Health Service.

A return to the era of tar and feathers is probably the only way to stop this sort of thing. It's warranted, I think.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CIVIL WAR AND 'FACTIONAL FIGHTING," explained.

NO LOVE FOR JOE SCARBOROUGH: No, really, no love: "I have to once again ask the 'Don Imus' question: Does anyone at MSNBC watch its own programming?"

ERIC SCHEIE looks at "gun violence." "Yeah, but it's all the fault of the gun. It made this ex-con possess it, and file the serial numbers off, and shoot people."

NOW HERE'S A POWER TOOL that most dads would like. Moms, too!

Well, it's a power tool of sorts. Though not quite like these.

UPDATE: How did I find this? The Insta-Wife asked if I wanted one for Father's Day. I declined, even though it looks cool, for the same reason I didn't get the Kegerator.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bradley Burris emails: "I bought one for my wife. Quick and easy ‘rita’s. It’s definitely increased our tequila purchases. The ice shaver could be a little better, but close enough to restaurant quality for us."

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada, yada:

When Democrats took control of Congress four months back, incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., bragged it would take her party less than 100 hours to curb wasteful pork spending by requiring members to attach their names to their "earmarks," exposing such waste to the harsh light of public scrutiny.

She failed to mention this "reform" would remain in effect for little more than 100 days.

At this point, "Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify 'earmarks' -- lawmakers' requests for specific projects and contracts for their states -- in documents that accompany spending bills," The Associated Press reported Monday. . . .

The whole point of the Democratic "reform" was to allow other members to criticize and oppose pork set-asides. But last month, when Rep. Murtha (the second-ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, a man so powerful that he secured more than $200 million for his personal pet projects in 2006 alone, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense) sponsored an earmark to authorize $23 million for the National Drug Intelligence Center -- a government agency that happens to be based in his district -- Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., a former FBI agent, had the nerve to rise and propose the allocation be canceled.

Rep. Rogers was acting in accordance with the Bush administration's desire to close the office, which duplicates services provided by the FBI and which has received repeated low marks from several federal review boards.

Rep. Rogers' attempt to cut the $23 million failed. Despite that, on May 17 an outraged Rep. Murtha -- who in his failed bid for majority leader described the ethics package in a private meeting with lawmakers as "total crap" -- approached Rep. Rogers on the House floor.

"I hope you don't have any earmarks in the defense appropriation bill because they are gone, and you will not get any earmarks now and forever," the now-tabled resolution quotes Rep. Murtha as telling Rep. Rogers.

Rep. Murtha has never disputed Rep. Rogers' account. He doesn't have to. He knows he will never be disciplined for violating Ms. Pelosi's reforms, because he had it right the first time. The "anti-earmark reforms" are just for show. Mere window dressing. Why, if we enjoyed the immunities of a colorful old Democratic congressman, we might even call them "total crap."

And there's more unhappy editorializing here:

The new game that House Appropriations Chairman David Obey intends to play with budget earmarks this year is worse than the usual hide-and-seek. He is taking the whole thing underground, as though he is to be trusted as a one-man auditor for congressional pork. If this is to be the new ethic that Democrats promised, voters might want their ballots back. . . .

The result, then, is that the earmark projects will receive almost no public scrutiny and no congressional debate. This is precisely the kind of environment in which convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff thrived, the kind of place he fondly called the "favor factory."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to drain this swamp, of course, but Democrats attached enough pork to the Iraq appropriations bill this spring to render that commitment a fraud. Neither the House nor the Senate has delivered on its promise to fully expose and limit the special-interest earmarks.

As budgetary gambits go, though, Obey's is particularly insidious. It is what Democratic caucus chairman Rahm Emanuel last fall called "earmark abuse" when he introduced an amendment that sought to prohibit "the inclusion of earmarks and other provisions in conference reports without the language having first been in either the House or Senate legislation's original language."

That was when the Republicans were in charge. Now the Democrats run the bank, and it appears open for withdrawals again.

Could this kind of thing have any connection to the Democrats' massive slide in the polls? Nahhh.

UPDATE: More backsliding here.

MICHIGAN CRAVES CORN, AND I DON'T CARE: Howard Lovy on ethanol and Jennifer Granholm.

BILL HOBBS INTERVIEWS SEN. LAMAR ALEXANDER on immigration and Iraq, and Alexander's planned amendment to the immigration bill.

ANOTHER EMAIL FROM MICHAEL YON:

After the arrest of General Hamid in Hit last week, there was serious concern there would be violence. Hamid was/is a hero to many Iraqis. In fact, our own soldiers talked about Hamid with admiration. When our soldiers arrested Hamid and 14 police that day, our guys were upset. They had run many missions with those police, and did not want to arrest them. LTC Doug Crissman was saddened that he had to arrest General Hamid. But Hamid was running wild, and many of the Iraqis could see it. I arrived back in Baghdad yesterday. Up to that point, there had been no violence in Hit subsequent the arrest. There was a peaceful demonstration, and someone threatened to kidnap Hit City Council members to secure Hamid's release, but nothing had happened. Anbar Province in general seems to have turned a corner for the better. There is still some fighting, but the action has greatly abated this year.

Not so down in Basra and Maysan, where our British friends are fighting.

I'm with Strykers again, which means I will be in combat again soon. Strykers go where the trouble is.

I look forward to another report.

CLASH OF TITANS: The FBI vs. the Zabar's Zeitgeist.

J.D. JOHANNES POSTS ANOTHER DISPATCH FROM IRAQ:

The times I have been around injured Marines I pitched in to help. I ran to get the stretcher. The only photos I have taken of an injured person were of a Soldier treating an Iraqi man for shrapnel wounds. You see the soldier doing his job, but not the face of the Iraqi man.

If I were to be wounded while embeded with Soldiers, Seabees or Marines they would provide medical attention and likely risk their lives to protect me and save my life.

I feel I should reciprocate because these young men and a few women I roll with outside the wire would not stand around snapping photos of me while I bled out--they would do what they do best. Save Lives. . . . Perhaps I do not have what it takes to be a big-time big-media reporter.

I agree with him on journalistic detachment. Wasn't it CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta who got criticized by the usual journalistic chin-pullers for treating some wounded Iraqis instead of maintaining his reportorial distance?

J.D.'s work, like Michael Yon's, is supported by reader donations. If you like it, consider hitting the tipjar.

NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN: "So far this year, Taliban and drug gang related violence has left about 1,700 dead. It's less than last year, and lower than the average annual death toll in Afghanistan for the last three decades."

FOCUSING ON THE BOOBIES: It pretty much always works!

IT'S ALL IMMIGRATION, ALL THE TIME AT KAUSFILES: Mickey remains on fire, but what about the cars? And the Burkle-bashing?

CLAIRE BERLINSKI WRITES on what's going on with Europe.

UPDATE: Our podcast interview with Claire from a year ago can be found here. And there was some followup discussion here.

HONEYMOON OVER:

Six weeks ago the Democrats held a 24-point lead over Bush as the stronger leadership force in Washington; today that's collapsed to a dead heat. The Democrats' overall job approval rating likewise has dropped . . . Yet the Democrats' losses have not produced much in the way of gains for Bush or his party.

Our political class is dysfunctional, and the polls indicate that the voters realize it. (Via Dean Esmay, who notes Obey's pork moves).

STUART BUCK SAYS I WAS WRONG IN THIS POST, where I criticized the USDA over mad-cow testing. He makes a convincing case. He also warns about "the danger of trusting anything that a journalist says about a legal proceeding."

REMEMBERING THE SIX-DAY WAR forty years later.

NIGERIA UPDATE:

The kidnapping of foreign oil workers has increased in the last month, despite police and military efforts to stop it. Nearly 150 have been taken so far this year, yielding at least $100,000 per captive in ransom. No one ever says anything, on the record, about ransoms. However, the money is simply too good, and has attracted some well run criminal organizations. . . . While the oil companies are trying to treat the ransoms, "danger pay" and additional security, as a cost-of-doing-business in Nigeria, it is reaching a point where is simply is not worth the extra effort. Nigeria is in danger of seeing its primary source of income (mainly for corrupt politicians), shut down by the cost of dealing with criminal activity.

Sigh.

June 04, 2007

FORMER HIPPIES UPSET ABOUT SMELLY STREET PEOPLE driving down their property values -- in Haight-Ashbury.

MY EARLIER POST on Cape Wind reminded me of something I had read a while ago, and this column on the Cape Wind affair brought it back: "A tip of the hat to author William Tucker, who wrote an essay for Harper's magazine in December 1977 titled, Environmentalism and the Leisure Class: Protecting birds, fishes, and above all, social privilege." That article, on how rich landowners who wanted to protect their views used bogus environmental claims as a smokescreen, fits the Cape Wind scenario pretty well, too.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, this federal legislation looks pretty suspicious. Notice that it's sponsored by a representative of a coal state. And though the bill purports to protect birds from wind turbines, note these figures on bird deaths from the article sidebar:

Human-caused bird deaths

Domestic cats: Hundreds of millions a year

* Striking high-tension lines: 130 million - 1 billion a year
* Striking buildings: 97 million to 976 million a year
* Cars: 80 million a year
* Toxic chemicals: 72 million
* Striking communications towers: 4 to 50 million a year
* Wind turbines: 20,000 to 37,000

Source: National Research Council

Ban cats!

MORE: Read this, too. And this.

I'M WATCHING DAVE KOPEL ON BILL O'REILLY, and O'Reilly has been reduced to yelling "shut up!" at Kopel.

Watching O'Reilly try to paint Kopel as a big lefty "secular progressive" just demonstrated that O'Reilly has no idea what he's talking about. I'm not a big O'Reilly fan -- the one time I was on his show he would hardly let me get a word in edgewise, and he's obviously frustrated that he couldn't do that with Kopel. O'Reilly was just wrong about this story and he's not willing to back down and admit it, substituting bluster for actual evidence. Not very impressive, but O'Reilly made the mistake of booking a guest he couldn't bully on an issue where O'Reilly was just wrong.

Background here.

UPDATE: More from Clayton Cramer.

WILLIAM JEFFERSON UPDATE:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) moved quickly to force the expulsion of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) from Congress following his indictment Monday on federal corruption charges.

The Republican leader will ask members of the House to vote on a resolution requiring the ethics committee to review the indictment filed against him in order to seek his expulsion from the House, according to his office.

Boehner will offer a privileged resolution on the House floor as early as Tuesday calling for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to review the 94-page indictment filed against Jefferson Monday. The House will then vote on his resolution calling for the ethics panel to act.

The Justice Department indicted the Louisiana Democrat Monday on federal charges of racketeering, soliciting bribes and money laundering.

Boehner's resolution is intended to "jump-start" a previous investigation into Jefferson's alleged misdeeds that apparently expired last year.

I think we'll see a lot of this sort of thing in the next year or two.

THOUGHTS ON FREE SPEECH AND THE LACK THEREOF, from John Leo.

LOADS OF COOL NEW MARS IMAGES HAVE BEEN RELEASED, and you can see them here.

THIS ISN'T VERY ENCOURAGING: "Overall, 4.0% of search results link to risky Web sites, which marks an improvement from 5.0% in May 2006. Dangerous sites are found in search results of all 5 of the top US search engines (representing 93% of all search engine use)."

On the other hand, maybe it'll make things dangerous for those Google-using terrorists . . . .

KAYAKING on the Tennessee River, at downtown Knoxville.

MORE BACKGROUND on the JFK terror plot.

"REAL IF TEPID SUPPORT" for Bush's climate change plan.

Well, you wouldn't want heated support . . . .

AN ECONOMIC VIEW of the Democratic debate.

NEW LEGISLATION ON GUANTANAMO seems to have created more confusion than it dispelled:

Omar Ahmed Khadr, a Canadian national, faced murder charges for killing an American soldier in Afghanistan with a hand grenade when he was 15-years-old. In a surprise ruling, the presiding judge at the war crimes tribunal Monday, said he does not have jurisdiction to try Khadr under a new 2006 law.

The judge said according to the new law, each detainee must have been officially designated as an "unlawful enemy combatant." He said Khadr had only been designated an "enemy combatant." The judge did say, however, Khadr could be recharged if he undergoes a new hearing to determine his status.

A Defense Department spokesman told VOA the military prosecutor will appeal the ruling to a board in Washington set up to supervise the tribunals.

Osama bin Laden's former driver also is due to appear later Monday before the war crimes tribunal in Guantanamo.

This war has been over-lawyered, which is not to say that it has been well-lawyered.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: An interesting nanotechnology development at Harvard:

George M. Whitesides, a Harvard University chemist, is a renowned specialist in nanotechnology, a field built on the behavior of materials as small as one molecule thick. But there is nothing tiny about the patent portfolio that Harvard has amassed over the last 25 years based on work in his lab.

Today, Harvard and Nano-Terra Inc., a company co-founded by Professor Whitesides, plan to announce the exclusive licensing for more than 50 current and pending Harvard patents to Nano-Terra. The deal could transform the little-known Nano-Terra into one of nanotechnology’s most closely watched start-ups.

Big news.

INTERESTING: "Federal prosecutors have named three prominent Islamic organizations in America as participants in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support a Palestinian Arab terrorist group, Hamas. Prosecutors applied the label of 'unindicted co-conspirator' to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust in connection with a trial planned in Texas next month for five officials of a defunct charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development."

Read the whole thing. And stay tuned.

I'M SURPRISED IT TOOK THIS LONG:

A federal grand jury will issue an indictment today against U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, accusing the New Orleans Democrat of multiple counts of bribery in connection with a web of business deals in Africa, a federal official said. . . .

The indictment pulls back the cover on a government investigation that became public when the FBI raided the congressman's Capitol Hill townhouse in August 2005, finding $90,000 stashed in his freezer. Prosecutors say the cash was part of the $100,000 that an informant had handed Jefferson days earlier in a northern Virginia parking garage.

I wonder how many other members of Congress may figure in this investigation.

AT THE POLITICO, some reports on voter suppression efforts.

A LOOK AT LAW SCHOOLS AND THE U.S. NEWS RANKINGS, from William Henderson and Andrew Morriss. There's a longer treatment of the subject by the same authors here. (Via Jonathan Adler).

BRITISH SOLDIERS IN IRAQ: A new dispatch from Michael Yon. "On three consecutive missions with three different British units, their soldiers killed roughly 40 enemy in combat action that also saw two British soldiers killed in action, and three wounded. The enemy apparently is attempting to paint a perception that the long-planned draw down of British soldiers in southern Iraq is actually the result of a successful “rout,” and they are stepping up the tempo of attacks."

Read the whole thing. He's got lots of photos, too.

CHEW THE FAT WITH CHEWBACCA: Adventurecon is in Knoxville. Also here, and perhaps more interesting to InstaPundit readers, Ron Glass (Shepherd Book from "Firefly").

IN THE MAIL: Jeanne Giraldo and Harold Trinkunas' Terrorism Financing and State Responses: A Comparative Perspective. Looks quite good; I plan to use this in my National Security Law class next time.

JOHN FUND has thoughts on Fred Thompson. "Mr. Thompson will run an unorthodox campaign, one that will challenge the conventional wisdom about how to run for president. Even if it proves unsuccessful, it's useful for a candidate to occasionally come along and ask if the rules everybody is following were made for a different time and new approaches are appropriate."

GREG MANKIW on federalism.

SMOKING OUT ANOTHER SECRET HOLD:

Today, the Sunlight Foundation launched a new campaign to reveal which senator is blocking passage of the Senate Campaign Disparity Act (S. 223). If you’ve been following this story here you know that twice this bill - which would require senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically - has been blocked by an anonymous Republican senator who is being hidden by Sen. Mitch McConnell. In his home state of Kentucky we are launching a billboard and a Web site to force McConnell to reveal the name of the anonymous senator. The Louisville Courier-Journal and the Politico have already picked up the story.

Note that -- as took me a bit to realize -- this is a different secret hold from the one on the FOIA expansion legislation. You can't tell the secret holds without a scorecard these days.

A "NIGHTMARE SCENARIO" at the New York Times.

OUR SYNTHETIC FUTURE:

Scientists in the last couple of years have been trying to create novel forms of life from scratch. They've forged chemicals into synthetic DNA, the DNA into genes, genes into genomes, and built the molecular machinery of completely new organisms in the lab—organisms that are nothing like anything nature has produced.

The people who are defying Nature's monopoly on creation are a loose collection of engineers, computer scientists, physicists and chemists who look at life quite differently than traditional biologists do. Harvard professor George Church wants "to do for biology what Intel does for electronics"—namely, making biological parts that can be assembled into organisms, which in turn can perform any imaginable biological activity. Jay Keasling at UC Berkeley received $42 million from Bill Gates to create living microfactories that manufacture a powerful antimalaria agent. And then there's Craig Venter, the legendary biotech entrepreneur who made his name by decoding the human genome for a tenth of the predicted cost and in a tenth of the predicted time. Venter has put tens of millions of dollars of his own money into Synthetic Genomics, a start-up, to make artificial organisms that convert sunlight into biofuel, with minimal environmental impact and zero net release of greenhouse gases.

Bring it on -- with due care.

RICK MORAN is asking for help.

ISLAMISM ON CAMPUS: A video interview with former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat.

"THAT BERGER DIDN'T FIGHT SPEAKS VOLUMES:" Ron Cass on why Sandy Berger gave up his law license.

ANDREW KEEN'S NEW BOOK on how the Internet is bad for children and other living things gets a frosty reception from Larry Lessig. I've got a review of the book coming out this week, too.

HETERODOX CLIMATOLOGY.

Well, "heterodox economics" is chic these days, so. . . .

ARE "GENIUS" AND "MISFIT" SYNONYMS? Well, obviously not: Most misfits aren't geniuses. But I agree that life is easier for misfits, and especially misfit geniuses, than it used to be.

MORE ON THE DECLINE OF MANUAL SKILLS: Reader Scott Methvin emails:

For the last 13 years I've been an over-the-road truck driver, although I was trained as an aircraft pilot and aircraft mechanic. It's been my impression for some time now that there is an epidemic of un-handy-ness among automobile drivers. I don't mean "I never learned how to gap spark plugs" type of mechanical non-competence. I mean "my tire went flat and I will sit on the shoulder of the road for 3 hours waiting for AAA to arrive, open my trunk, and install the spare tire" type of non-competence. It always seemed obvious to the people I grew up with and went to school with that every driver should know how to change a flat tire, even if they chose not to get dirty doing it.

The number of nearly new, and presumably mechanically sound cars and SUVs I see parked on the emergency shoulder with just a flat tire seems to grow every year.

As a professional driver, it's not that the rampant ignorance of the motoring public has surprised me recently. Your mention of growing ignorance of the most basic and likely to be needed skills reminded me of this observation. Hey, when did "Keep Right except to pass" become "Keep Left until you hear gunfire or see your exit?"

Yeah, I wonder about that, too.

HOW TO SAVE NEWSPAPERS? Government subsidies, of course!

June 03, 2007

A LOOK AT WHO'S CARRYING WATER FOR CHAVEZ, and why.

A LOOK AT REPUTATION ON THE WEB: "Nobody knows you're a dog on the Web--or a mechanic, athlete, hacker, marketing whiz, zealot, or SQL programmer. That is, unless you tell them. In which case, they may or may not believe you, and they have few options for verifying your credentials anyway. . . . Make no mistake, though; online identities matter, and they'll matter even more as the number of blogs, wikis, and social networks grows, making it increasingly difficult to sort out the Web's wheat from the chaff of misinformation, factual errors, and malware. What we need--bloggers, businesspeople, technology professionals--are better ways to let others know who we are, verifying what we tell them and showing that we've got the cred to back it up." People are working on it.

A SAVAGE DIAGNOSIS: "Everybody wants to save Darfur but no one will do the obvious thing. Everyone bemoans what's happening to Zimbabwe but no one will touch Mugabe. Everyone knows what Iran is up to, but heaven forfend we should do anything serious about it. Everyone sees that Putin is finlandizing Europe—I mean, he just said "I will nuke you if you try to defend yourselves against Iran"—but he's an honored guest at the big banquets. etcetera, etcetera."

A HUGO CHAVEZ ROUNDUP from Gateway Pundit (who, by the way, is blogging from the Democracy and Security Conference in Prague at the moment).

CRIME OF THE CENTURY: "Columnist and author Eric Alterman was arrested Sunday night inside the debate spin room and charged with criminal trespass after police say he refused repeated orders to leave."

UPDATE: Eric Alterman tells his side of the story. Click "read more" to read it.

Read More ?

FROM J.D. JOHANNES, a tale of two wars.

A ROUNDUP of novels for teenage girls.

I'VE HEARD BILL O'REILLY GOING ON about sex education at Boulder High School, but I haven't been paying much attention. On the other hand, Dave Kopel has been.

SCARE HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: "Ethanol boom may fuel shortage of tequila."

STEVE GILLIARD has died.

ANN ALTHOUSE IS WATCHING the Democratic debate in New Hampshire.

So is Jim Geraghty.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel, too. Best line: "a nice, 3rd grade homeroom tone." Plus this: "If we repeal the Bush tax cuts, can I have a lifetime supply of root beer and a perpetual motion machine? Because apparently repealing them would pay for everything."

ANOTHER UPDATE: More at The Hotline blog.

MORE: Upside: The Iran problem, solved!

And Rudy Giuliani concludes that the lesson of the debate is that "America needs a strong leader like Rudy Giuliani."

STILL MORE: More debate posts here and here.

THOUGHTS ON LOWERING THE DRINKING AGE, at State 29.

MORE CRITICISM of The Economist. It does seem to have gone downhill lately.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Meet the new boss, yada yada:

After promising unprecedented openness regarding Congress' pork barrel practices, House Democrats are moving in the opposite direction as they draw up spending bills for the upcoming budget year.

Democrats are sidestepping rules approved their first day in power in January to clearly identify "earmarks" — lawmakers' requests for specific projects and contracts for their states.

Rather than including specific pet projects, grants and contracts in legislation as it is being written, Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them. . . . What Obey is doing runs counter to new rules that Democrats promised would make such spending decisions more open.

I really didn't think that the new Democratic Congress would -- could! -- turn out to be worse than the Republicans. But this is just another case of my political expectations, despite their modesty, being disappointed.

MORE NUMBERS ON IRAQ, FROM JOHN WIXTED:

Having brought to you the continuing bad news about the security situation in Iraq, I did also want to remind you that, when asked, more Iraqis than not say that life is better today than it was under Saddam Hussein. This always amazes me because, if you ask around, you'll find that almost every opponent of the invasion of Iraq believes that we have simply ruined a stable country that, as bad it was, was nevertheless much better than what it has become. But as I have noted before, if you ask the Iraqi people themselves (who should know), they disagree. . . . That tells you something that is largely missing from discussions about Iraq. What's missing is an assessment of what things were like in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The media was not interested in that, so they did not fill in the blanks for you.

No, they were busy actively covering up problems in Iraq so as to maintain "access" under Saddam. Read the whole thing.

IMAGINE.

A LOOK AT WHAT'S GOING ON IN FALLUJAH, where things aren't as peaceful as they are in Ramadi and Hit.

DO CHEAP CONSUMER GOODS produce a lack of hands-on skills? I'm not so sure, but Sarah Natividad thinks they do.

TAKE OUT A WARRANT FOR FRAUD: Red-light camera gets wrong person.

THE BLIND LEADING THE DISHONEST: George Stephanopoulos and John Murtha on the JFK terrorist plot.

DOES THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS MARK A CULTURAL MOMENT? Consider this piece from The New York Times:

I remember we called it “play.” It occurred on weekends and after school, when the grown-ups weren’t around. Sometimes it hurt. It hurt when the ball struck someone in the face. It hurt when the thing we were climbing — the tree, the fire escape, the face of the sandstone cliff beside the river — suddenly grew slippery or broke. But those were mere physical injuries. They healed, often after trips to the emergency room. The injuries that lingered were the emotional ones, incurred when someone came in last in one of the contests we dreamed up. And, being boys (girls were simply not part of our thinking), we made contests out of everything, from walking, balance-beam style, down the railroad tracks to collecting crawfish from the creek.

Who knew at the time (not we children, certainly, growing up more than 30 years ago in small-town Minnesota) that playing and getting hurt would come to be regarded later on as exotic, threatened activities sorely in need of a cultural revival led by concerned adults?

Read on and you'll find some pushback, along with what appears to be a bit of wilful misunderstanding, but that itself is more evidence for the cultural-moment theory. (As Chris Nolan emails: "The politically correct, multicultural 'it's all about nurture' set are getting defensive. Must be a cultural moment indeed.") And I think that he's got it all wrong. There's nothing contrived, or expert-driven, about saying "Go outside and play." It's what parents do. The real problem is that the kind of nannyism that leads to the criminalization of napping has gotten in the way.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

WHAT IF ISRAELIS HAD abducted a BBC man?

IN THE MAIL: Tobias Buckell's new science fiction novel, Ragamuffin. The cover art lacks the retro-cool of his previous novel, Crystal Rain, but I've started the book and it's good -- kind of post-cyberpunk, vaguely reminiscent of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon or Chris Moriarty's Spin State.

Should make good beach reading. Plus, scroll down here to get the first 1/3 of Crystal Rain for free online.

JOHN TIERNEY SEEKS ethical enlightenment. I don't think it will come from ethicists, though.

THE GUARDIAN: "Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved."

Carbon markets aren't inherently dishonest, but all you needed to know to predict this particular state of affairs is contained in this sentence: "While the CDM is run under the umbrella of the UN, the second market is overseen by the European commission."

AL GORE: We're not worthy of him.

A LOOK AT WHO IN CONGRESS IS TAKING MONEY FROM THE RIAA.

MORE THOUGHTS ON THE LACK OF BASIC MANUAL SKILLS: When you're grateful that someone knows how to use a screwdriver, we've got a problem.

FRED THOMPSON talks to Republicans:

"Folks, we're a bit down politically right now, but I think we're on the comeback trail, and it's going to start right here," he declared in the deep Southern rumble made famous by his roles in film and on television's "Law and Order." . . .

But he received his biggest applause for blasting the bipartisan plan for immigration reform, which he called unworkable. "We are a nation of compassion, a nation of immigrants," he said. "But this is our home . . . and we get to decide who comes into our home."

Thompson reminded guests that he now lives in McLean, but he offered himself as a Beltway outsider, saying there was a "disconnect" between Washington and the rest of the country "like I've never seen before." He said the GOP had lost its congressional majorities because "some of us came to drain the swamp and made partnership with the alligators."

A journalist who was there emails with uncharacteristic enthusiasm: "it's what a stump speech should be.... a standing ovation in the middle of the speech even." He calls the WaPo account "dry." You can see the speech yourself on C-SPAN tonight if you're interested -- 6:30 or 9:30 pm Eastern.

PAUL GEARY WATCHES the evolution of a story at the Associated Press.

RON BAILEY looks at Barbara Kingsolver's latest fiction: "Reading Kingsolver, one could also conclude that pesticides were created by giant chemical companies whose sole aim was to cause cancer."

STRATEGYPAGE: "For the last five years, the army has been using more cash, and more science, including regular opinion surveys, to maintain its strength without conscription. This is very unusual during wartime. "

THOUGHTS ON THE INFORMATION WAR, from Fred Thompson.

And some further thoughts from Ed Morrissey.