July 14, 2007

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GEORGE MCGOVERN!

Meanwhile, Nixon's house is for sale. It's a nice house.

I'M SHOCKED, SHOCKED TO HEAR THIS:

By a 39% to 20% margin, American adults believe that the three major broadcast networks deliver news with a bias in favor of liberals. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 25% believe that ABC, CBS, and NBC deliver the news without any bias.

Similar results are found for CNN and National Public Radio (NPR).

Oh, well -- they're doing better than professors!

NEW RESEARCH DEBUNKS public health claims about obesity.

SIX MONTHS ON, Vista users are still griping.

A SIXTY WATT solar power kit. Mostly good for keeping batteries charged in RVs, etc., but string a few of these together and . . . no, I won't do it. I have enough hobbies.

A REVIEW OF the new Harry Potter movie.

And stay tuned for a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as soon as it's out.

OVERJUDGED: A case about nothing.

IN THE MAIL: Ward Farnsworth's The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law. Looks very interesting.

STANDING UP AGAINST FREE SPEECH:

Senate Democrats on Friday blocked an amendment that would have prevented the return of the Fairness Doctrine, a federal rule requiring broadcasters to air opposing views on issues. . . .

The subtext of the debate over the Fairness Doctrine is talk radio's perceived dominance by conservative voices.

In a telephone interview, Coleman said his motivation was to preserve the First Amendment. But he added: "I do have a strong objection to folks wanting to cut off talk radio because it's conservative. Let the people be able to make the choice."

Thune agreed.

"Having the bureaucrats dictate the content of the airwaves isn't much different from what we are seeing in places like Iran and Russia where they are rolling back freedom of the press," he said.

Nice to see such a robust commitment to robust discourse. As noted earlier: "This is all thinly-disguised posturing for what's really bothering the senators: They don't like that people are allowed to criticize them on public airwaves."

UPDATE: Reader Brian Hollar notes that the article linked above has been taken down. Here's a cached version.

A BLOW TO BLOOMBERG:

A key Congressional committee dealt a major blow to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaign against illegal firearms yesterday, refusing to allow police departments broader access to data that tracks guns sales.

The bill restricting release of the information, approved by the House Appropriations Committee, must still be passed by the full House and reconciled with a similar Senate measure. But since the Senate bill is considered even more beneficial to the gun industry, the Bloomberg administration appeared resigned to defeat.

I'm always happy when Bloomberg loses one.

UPDATE: Read this, too. And Pro-gun Democrats played a key role. Bravo.

IMPORTANT POLITICAL ADVICE: When making an attack ad, be sure you have the right mayor.

OPTIMUM COPYRIGHT PERIOD determined by math.

Turns out the folks in the first Congress were pretty smart.

A NEW A.P. POLL ON CONGRESS:

In the eyes of the public, Congress is doing even worse than the president.

Public satisfaction with the job lawmakers are doing has fallen 11 points since May, to 24 percent, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. That's lower than for President Bush, who hasn't fared well lately, either. . . .

The 24 percent approval rating for Congress matched its previous low, which came in June 2006, five months before Democrats won control of the House and Senate due to public discontent with the job Republicans were doing.

Just two months ago, 35 percent of the public approved of Congress' work.

But what a big two months it's been.

PEACE ACTIVISM meets al Qaeda.

BUSH WILL VETO ANY EFFORT to reinstate the "Fairness Doctrine."

HOUSEHOLD ITEMS AND DEADLY ARMS: "Leaf blowers, laser pointers, and speedboat hulls. Right now, they are the cutting edge in American military might."

July 13, 2007

IOWAHAWK FOR PRESIDENT: He's got my vote!

QUEEN ELIZABETH MEETS WITH TWO OF ENGLAND'S three surviving WWI vets. (Via Dave Hardy).

MEXICAN DRUG GANG threatens foreign journalists. And as usual, it works.

CAPTION OF THE DAY: Are you there God? It's me, Hillary.

However, I should note that I was writing about Hillary's religious streak years ago.

"FEELING 'BETRAYED,' KUCINICH CALLS EDWARDS' BLUFF."

GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED CHILD PORN IN GEORGIA:

"We have to protect our children from district attorneys," Sen. Emanuel Jones said Friday. If state law allows the distribution of the tape, he said, it or similar material could be available to anyone who filed a public records request -- even if they wanted the material for nefarious purposes.

"I believe state laws have been violated," Jones said. "I believe federal laws have been violated."

He said he plans to call the legislation, which he will introduce next year, the McDade Act.

District Attorney McDade is likely to be unamused. Here's more from the Sex Crimes Blog:

I still doubt that the U.S. Attorney's office has the political will to prosecute a sitting state prosecutor for child porn crimes related to the tape distribution. However, this particular prosecutor has made some dumb moves in the past . . . .

I just can't help but think of the incongruence that the Adam Walsh Act so severely limits a defendant's access to examining child pornography evidence used against the defendant while a prosecutor may get away with distributing the tape to the public. The very clearly stated rationale for limiting the defendant's access to child pornography evidence is that to do so is a form of revictimization. If a single defendant viewing child pornography evidence (that a guilty defendant would have already viewed many times previously) is revictimization enough for adopting a very suspect restriction on defense access to evidence, then surely a prosecutor who allowed dozens or hundreds of people to view such evidence has revictimized on such a greater level that some legal sanction is required.

Seems that way to me. Otherwise people will be saying that we have to protect our children from District Attorneys! Oh, wait . . . .

UPDATE: More from Doug Berman:

The saddest part of all this, of course, is that McDade continues to wreak havoc on Georgia justice while Genarlow Wilson remains behind bars. It is a sad shame that Georgia's Attorney General and Governor are far less concerned about the unjustifiable activities of rogue prosecutors than about teenagers' consensual sexual activities.

A shame, and an embarrassment for Georgia.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Charges of racism.

JOBS AMERICANS WON'T DO -- In response to my earlier post on lost handyman skills, reader Chris Anderson -- not this Chris Anderson -- sends this email:

Just an anecdote dealing with your recent article regarding the lack of handiness in general. In 2001, I was laid off of my job as a Director of Technical Services for a software company. This was at the height of the dotcom bust. I had an MBA, and an MS in Computer Science, but couldn't find a job for love or money in my area. Thankfully, I had also built 2 houses from the ground up with my father as a teenager, and had never been afraid of handyman work over the years. I didn't realize it, but apparently I had skills that most people lacked.

Flash forward a few months... still couldn't find a job in my industry, but I was working full-time being a handyman. I just fell into it by accident, having decided to replace my roof at the behest of the insurance company. I couldn't afford a professional roofer, so I did it myself. Two neighbors noticed, and over that summer, I replaced 7 roofs in my neighborhood. I was making more as an unskilled roofer than I was as a Director.

That winter, I painted, installed appliances such as garbage disposals, refrigerators, stoves, and dishwashers. I replaced windows and rebuilt fences. I fixed sprinkler systems and installed ceiling fans. I installed dimmer switches and repaired water damage.

None of this is difficult. In fact, it doesn't even require any real skills beyond following directions and not being afraid of the problem. Yet people were willing to pay me -- an uncertified and unlicensed guy off the street -- to do these things. My income was limited by the number of hours I was willing to work per day, and I had more work available than time to do it in.

Eventually, I got back into the computer industry. What's funny is that my income is less now than it was as a handyman.

The moral of the story? I think that people are so used to farming out these kinds of jobs that they don't develop any kind of appreciation for how easy they are. Fear of screwing up, more than anything else, holds people back and they never develop any skills as a result. I think that the concept of methodically tackling a problem and solving it one step at a time is the biggest skill that my father ever taught me. It's a pity that people can do this in their workplace, but can't manage to bring that home.

Interesting.

NRO: The President is Surging Ahead:

Forget the leaks and the speculation, President George W. Bush is not looking for a way out of the surge and the Iraq war. In a session with about ten conservative journalists Friday afternoon, a confident and determined president made it clear that he is going to see the surge through, and will rely on General David Petraeus’s advice on how to proceed come September, regardless of the political climate in Washington.

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl looks at Congressional Republicans who are waffling and asks why can't Republicans learn from experience?

UPDATE: How to become a "Key Republican Senator."

WELL, "FRIENDLY SKIES" ISN'T Continental's slogan, after all.

PERFECT FOR FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH: Wizardology.

I'M SURE THERE'S MORE KUDLOW GLOATING GOING ON:

Wall Street extended its gains Friday, with the Standard & Poor's 500 index breaking through a trading high set in March 2000 and the Dow Jones industrials passed the 13,900 mark for the first time.

I credit the new Democratic congress!

IF YOU TARGET LIBERTARIANS, you might get Crash'd.

THOUGHTS ON WEATHER, CLIMATE, and "global coldening."

JEEZ: "Churchill dropped from England's history syllabus."

THE INSTAWIFE: Profiled at Normblog. So that's like, a profiler profiled.

KIDS TODAY: Michael Barone assesses William Strauss and Neil Howe's Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 in light of recent events.

GENDER CONFUSION at Salon?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Another editorial on pork:

Shedding light on how members of Congress spend taxpayer money is the common-sense aim of earmark reform. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is advancing that worthy cause again this week by shedding light on how some prominent members of the Senate are blocking the attainment of that goal.

Sen. DeMint has worked long and hard to end the inherently flawed practice of allowing the addition of "earmark" projects to appropriations bills during the conference-committee process. That tactic has long let legislators pile on the pork in virtual anonymity. Ending that shadow spending would reduce waste by increasing scrutiny. It also would reduce the temptation to feather the nests of special interests.

Sen. DeMint and bipartisan partners finally succeeded last month in the push for the Senate to make earmark spending far more transparent, with an ethics bill provision mandating disclosure of which senators back which earmarks — and certification that they have no financial interest in the appropriations.

Unfortunately, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., now insists that the Senate-House conference committee be given a chance to dilute, or even eliminate, that overdue earmark rule as the panel works out differences in the two chambers' ethics bills. . . .

So why can't the Democratic leadership, which promised both lobbying and earmark reform while winning control of Congress in last year's elections, deliver both?

Good question.

VETERANS WHO WANT TO WIN THE WAR: If 3 veterans want a pullout, they'll be on TV everywhere. These guys could put a thousand on Capitol Hill and get ignored.

JOHN MCINTYRE: Rudy derailed McCain's train.

EDWARDS' HEADQUARTERS BECOMING A NUISANCE TO NEIGHBORS: Bob Owens makes snide remarks, and who can blame him -- but these fake-anthrax scares are hardly Edwards' fault.

On the other hand, since Edwards likened the war on terror to a bumper-sticker slogan, there's some irony here somewhere.

NIFONGING IN GEORGIA: Here's more. We need much closer scrutiny of prosecutors, it seems.

DEBATING THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE in the Senate.

MORE OUTRIGHT FAKERY AT THE BBC. And I agree with this: "If it transposes a picture sequence like this to sex up a story about the Queen by transmitting an outright falsehood, just think what it is doing in the Middle East."

JONAH GOLDBERG: "What's refreshing about this is that Yglesias is honestly and correctly admitting that liberals have no problem imposing their morality on others via a powerful and intrusive state. I wish that most liberals were as honest."

IN THE MAIL: Orson Scott Card's Shadow Puppets, in audiobook format. I never listen to audiobooks, but maybe I should give it a try.

You can hear our podcast interview with Card here.

A BLOW TO BLOOMBERG:

A key Congressional committee dealt a major blow to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaign against illegal firearms yesterday, refusing to allow police departments broader access to data that tracks guns sales.

The bill restricting release of the information, approved by the House Appropriations Committee, must still be passed by the full House and reconciled with a similar Senate measure. But since the Senate bill is considered even more beneficial to the gun industry, the Bloomberg administration appeared resigned to defeat.

A loss for Bloomberg on gun control is always good news.

JOHN TAMMES ROUNDS UP news from Afghanistan that you may have missed.

RICK MORAN: Hypocrisy all around.

I WANT ONE: A 40 gigabit per second Internet connecton. It should be easy: "Apparently 'the hardest part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC.'"

"FREE GENERAL VANG PAO!"

JAMES BENNETT posts a review of Michael Barone's new book. Excerpt: "In the two decades prior to 1688, virtually every phenomenon of modern electoral politics could be discerned, at least in embryo. Even modern bloggers were presaged by the network of pamphleteers on both sides, mostly vicious, libelous, and highly partisan rumor-mongers. Sound familiar? Even sock-puppetry was not unknown."

RUDY GIULIANI: Not so much Swiftboated as Dan Rathered?

Between this and the silly stuff about Fred Thompson, Democrats are looking more nervous about 2008 than you'd expect.

UPDATE: Dave Weigel thinks I'm confusing "Democrats" and "journalists." That's easy to do.

NIFONG'S CHILDREN: Another grandstanding District Attorney.

Who may be liable for distributing child pornography.

More here: "For the prosecutor to just hand this tape out, which seems to clearly fit the definition of child pornography, should result in a criminal prosecution."

BEWARE THE "Informational Vermin"!

AARON HANSCOM: "Rosie O’Donnell might do well to remember - before declaring radical Christianity as threatening as radical Islam - that homosexuality is punishable by death under Islamic law . . . Around the world, Moslem governments and individuals aren’t just talking about physically harming gays. They’re actually doing it."

I MIGHT BE WRONG about the Ice Age thing.

ERIC SCHEIE: "Are the Bush critics suggesting that his administration has been the most hostile to the right to keep and bear arms? For that matter, are they suggesting Guantanamo is worse than FDR's Japanese internment camps? . . . Has Bush really been more hostile to the 9th and 10th Amendments than any other president?"

I wish he'd stop quartering those troops in the guesthouse, though. Cholmondeley is tired of tidying up after them.

HAPPY Friday the Thirteenth.

MICKEY KAUS: "On reflection, homemade YouTube ads seem more potentially subversive than I originally thought."

EUGENE VOLOKH: God forbid that people should look at demographic data.

MARK STEYN: "If Yemen cuts its fertility rate, Yemen will empty out. If Britain cuts its fertility rate, Yemen will move in."

PHOTO-SPACEBLOGGING FROM DALE AMON: And notice how strongly Dale is starting to resemble Scotty . . . .

GOOD GRIEF: People must be really scared of Fred Thompson.

But then, who isn't?

July 12, 2007

GOOD NEWS: "Wall Street soared Thursday, propelling the Standard & Poor's 500 index and Dow Jones industrials to record highs as bright spots among generally sluggish retail sales allowed investors to toss aside concerns about the health of the economy. The rally, which gave the Dow its biggest one-day percentage gain in nearly four years, was perhaps surprising given that there was no extraordinary announcement or other catalyst often seen with such a huge gain, and that it came before most companies have announced their second-quarter earnings." I'm watching Kudlow on the Tivo and he's gloating. Rightly so.

Maybe it has something to do with that incredible shrinking deficit?

THE PURGES BEGIN!

UPDATE: The Weblog Archipelago.

MICHAEL YON ON HUGH HEWITT:

HH: Now yesterday, Harry Reid said on the floor of the Senate that the surge has failed. Do you think there’s any factual basis for making that assertion, Michael Yon, from what you’ve seen in Iraq over the last many months?

MY: He’s wrong, he’s wrong. It has absolutely not failed, and in fact, I’m finally willing to say it in public.

Transcript of full interview here. Read the whole thing.

IS "LADIES NIGHT" discriminatory?

HADITHA UPDATE: Murtha running for cover?

HOW TO UPDATE HORROR FILM:

Apparently the default style for a haunted house is still the Victorian model, with high-backed chairs, rotted filigrees, oval portraits of sour men with dead eyes and string ties, and the general sense of emotional suffocation we associate, however inaccurately, with the Victorian house. But that’s old. Very old. If the Victorian house was scary in a 40s film, it’s because it was from the Grandma era, half a century ago. The modern equivalent would be a style from the 50s no one builds any more – say, a classic one-story rambler. Haunt that, and you’re on to something. Have ectoplasm seep from the push-button GE electric range, and you’ll connect with the Boomers.

Bonus horror points if there's a knotty-pine recreation room. But if you want real horror, shouldn't it be something from the 1970s?

DAN RIEHL: Who the Hell elected Helen Thomas?

AN INCONVENIENT TURBINE:

In neighborhoods across the country, there's a battle brewing: the environmentalists vs. the aesthetes.

As "green"-minded homeowners move to put in new energy-efficient windows, solar panels and light-reflecting roofs, they are bumping up against neighbors and local boards that object, saying the additions defy historic-district regulations, will look ugly or damage property values.

Yeah. I wouldn't mind a wind turbine, but I'll bet my neighborhood association would object.

WHY THERE WILL NEVER BE A REALITY SHOW ABOUT ACADEMIA: "The reason professors sleep with their students in fiction is because any realistic portrayal of your jobs would bore readers out of their skulls within ten minutes."

But check the thrilling minute-by-minute account that follows.

A LOOK AT women as leaders.

WHERE THE SINGLES ARE: Men vs. women.

TYLER COWEN ON RESOURCES AND CORRUPTION:

It is unfortunate that economists have to debate whether natural resources are a blessing or a curse for a developing nation. Minerals, diamonds or oil may appear to represent automatic wealth but resource-rich countries usually become mired in corruption. High oil revenues, for instance, allow a government to maintain power and reward political supporters without doing much for its people. The government of Nigeria has taken in billions from high oil prices, yet the average person was probably better off 40 years ago. The easy-to-reach wealth of a resource also encourages coups, and thus political stability is problematic.

The solution is to make these governments more accountable in spending their money, but how can that be done? Paul Collier, an economics professor at Oxford University, has a new and potentially powerful idea.

I got a copy of Collier's book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What to Do About It in the mail, but I haven't read it. But read Tyler's article for a summary of the issue. Corruption and lack of accountability are a serious problem, as Nigeria certainly demonstrates. In fact, what worries me about Iraq is that Nigeria may plausibly represent an upper bound for civil society in a country with ethnic divisions, oil wealth, and a history of widespread corruption.

FIDEL CASTRO and the equal sharing of misery.

Well, sort of equal.

DON SURBER ON Hillary Clinton, Robert Byrd, and Iraq.

BILL ROGGIO GOES NONPROFIT: So if you want to donate to his reporting efforts, it's deductible.

ANOTHER INDICTED POLITICIAN WITH no discernible party affiliation.

JAKE TAPPER TRIES AND FAILS TO GET A STRAIGHT ANSWER FROM HARRY REID:

TAPPER: Senator Reid, what do you say to critics who say, "Look, the Senate voted, including two of you up on the stage, to authorize the president to use force in Iraq. Is there not a moral obligation of the United States to make sure that the Iraqi people are safe before the U.S. withdraws"? It's very clear that withdrawing U.S. troops might make U.S. troops safer, but it won't necessarily make the Iraqi people safer.

Follow the link to see Reid's lengthy non-answer.

RUMORS THAT LAMAR ALEXANDER MIGHT LEAVE THE SENATE to become chancellor of Vanderbilt University are fairly dubious in my opinion. On the other hand, Michael Silence observes: "Alexander's five years in the Senate is the longest he's held a job since he was governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987. I'm just saying..."

A $5 BILLION EARMARK?

LEE HARRIS WONDERS WHY WE'RE AFRAID OF THE F-WORD: "Fanatic," that is:

To Ghazi and his followers, the overwhelming odds against them made no difference in their calculations. It simply did not matter to them. They still refused to compromise or surrender. They accepted in advance the death that awaited them, and with a fatalism that we in the West find virtually incomprehensible.

Such suicidal behavior is not militancy; it is fanaticism. The militant may be prepared to risk his life in battle, but it is always a calculated risk. The fanatic is not given to such calculation. If his cause is lost, he will still refuse to compromise or surrender. Not only will he prefer death for himself, but he will choose it for his entire group, including his own family.

Though in fact Ghazi was trying to cut a deal for his own escape, and probably would have donned a burka to escape the siege if he could have. The true fanatics are a bit further down the chain of command, and might more properly be labeled "chumps."

Nonetheless, the entire essay is worth reading.

U.S. NUCLEAR STOCKPILES IN EUROPE are being drawn down further: "An administrative document showing that there would no longer be nuclear weapons inspections at Ramstein airbase, means that the U.S. no longer stores nuclear weapons there. These bombs were intended for the use by German aircraft, in the event of a major war with, well, there don't seem to be any suitably scary enemies available any more. There are still apparently about 300 American nuclear weapons stored in Europe, all of them believed to be 1960s era B61 nuclear weapons, configured as a half ton bomb that can be carried by most U.S., and some European, fighter-bombers."

THE DAWN OF A PRIVATE SPACE AGE: My Popular Mechanics column for next month is up.

SHADES OF NEAL STEPHENSON: New Victorians in New York City.

IN THE MAIL: Daniel Yankelovich's Profit with Honor: The New Stage of Market Capitalism.

THE JOYS OF ONLINE COMMENTS: Whole Foods Is Hot, Wild Oats a Dud -- So Said 'Rahodeb'. Then Again, Yahoo Poster Was a Whole Foods Staffer, The CEO to Be Precise.

LISA GOLDMAN ON BEIRUT A YEAR LATER: And look at the reaction to her reporting.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times editorializes:

PORK IS NOT PARTISAN. Republicans took over Congress in the mid-1990s promising to cut wasteful government spending, then started a feeding frenzy at the public trough. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, the number of earmarks (home-district projects whose funding is inserted into spending bills) in the House went from 3,000 in 1996 to 15,000 in 2005. Democrats wrested Congress back last year with many of the same promises and initially seemed to be fulfilling them, but in reality they just found a sneakier way to fund their pet projects. . . .

Back in January, when pork was very much in the public spotlight, the Senate passed a bill requiring disclosure of the names of earmark sponsors. The House simply changed its rules to require disclosure. Since then, the process of reconciling the Senate bill with a similar version passed in the House has stalled. Some senators are disclosing their earmarks anyway, while others refuse. It is a near certainty, though, that unless the practice is codified in law, senators will return to business as usual. House rules, meanwhile, can be altered with each new session of Congress.

Attaching names to earmarks won't eliminate them, but it decreases the likelihood that politicians will try to grab funds for something truly outrageous, such as the notorious $223-million Alaskan "bridge to nowhere." The public is still watching; Democrats will pay a political price if they let earmark reform die.

And they should.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST EXPLOIT: A look at mercenaries and cyberwar. "There hasn't been a full out, no-holds-barred Cyber War yet. But there's no longer any doubt that it is possible. And the major powers are getting ready."

BIGGER AND BETTER THAN AN IPHONE: "Special Forces troops and infantry unit commanders are finally getting a handheld device that will show them real-time video taken by UAVs or aircraft overhead."

SOME THOUGHTS ON LAWYERS AND WAR: Our war on terror is overlawyered, but it's not well-lawyered.

PLAYING NAME THAT PARTY! And again!

THE "FAIRNESS DOCTRINE:" Politicians using laws to bully those who don't agree with them.

And I like this on the inhabitants of Incumbistan: "This is all thinly-disguised posturing for what's really bothering the senators: They don't like that people are allowed to criticize them on public airwaves."

I think that's right.

MCCAIN SKIRTING CAMPAIGN FUNDRAISING RULES?

MICKEY KAUS: "Mayor Villaraigosa appears to have drawn a line around Mirthala Salinas and put his credibility, if not his career, on it."

Plus, the case of the Diamond Dildo.

HOMELAND SECURITY -- STILL A JOKE: "Undercover Congressional investigators set up a bogus company and obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March that would have allowed them to buy the radioactive materials needed for a so-called dirty bomb."

A TALE OF TWO SENTENCES.

CONSEQUENCES: Austin Bay sketches seven scenarios on withdrawal from Iraq.

UPDATE: Don't miss this Gateway Pundit roundup, with lots of charts.

SEVERING THE LINK between oil and Al Qaeda.

SECRET MILITARY FILES FOUND ONLINE: Nice job, guys. "And these are the people who want to monitor our phone calls and online traffic?" Hey, they're letting us read their secrets . . . .

SALON: Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus.

July 11, 2007

MOYNIHAN? Say it ain't so.

ANOTHER TAPE OF ZAWAHIRI SOUNDING DEFENSIVE.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Roll Call editorializes:

After much sturm und drang, the House has a full disclosure policy on earmarks, at least as far as appropriations are concerned. Now the Senate is heading for turmoil on the issue, with even the August recess in doubt.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is threatening to keep the chamber in session during August if leaders do not agree to adopt a Senate rule requiring full earmark disclosure.

Vacation plans aside, we think that on the merits Senate leaders should accede to DeMint so disclosure of spending requests is not delayed until President Bush signs an ethics reform measure that still has not even gone to a House-Senate conference.

The House, in one of its first actions in the 110th Congress, passed a rule requiring disclosure of the sponsorship of all special benefit requests by Members in appropriations, authorization and tax bills. The Senate lopsidedly passed similar requirements — though excluding tax bills — but as part of its ethics reform bill, not as a Senate rule.

House implementation of its rule surely has been rocky. Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.) tried to delay disclosure until appropriations were at the House-Senate conference stage. A Republican-media uproar forced him to guarantee disclosure before a bill hits the House floor.

The House rule is still weak when it comes to taxes. Disclosure is required only when a tax provision affects 10 or fewer taxpayers. But at least the House’s policy is set and working as the chamber processes appropriations.

In the Senate, Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) agreed to impose a disclosure rule voluntarily, but reports issued by the Congressional Research Service and Taxpayers for Common Sense show major omissions in the six bills processed by the committee so far. . . .

We don’t oppose earmarks in principle. Members come to Washington, D.C., partly to see to it that their districts and states get federal help. But, as events last year amply demonstrated, earmarks can be a source of rotten corruption. Full disclosure is crucial, and the Senate ought to institute it forthwith.

Indeed. If you want to let your Senators know what you think, here's the Senate contact list.

UPDATE: Bringing home the bacon in Missouri. And in North Dakota! I wonder if more local media outlets will start picking up on the PorkBusters index.

BACK WHEN THE GORES DIDN'T LIKE ROCK MUSIC quite so much.

A COLUMN FROM FRED THOMPSON, at Power Line.

ANOTHER GRIM MILESTONE: MORE FINANCIAL PROBLEMS for The New York Times.

THIS IS COOL: "Astronomers said on Wednesday they had discovered the best evidence yet of water outside our own solar system -- in the atmosphere of a giant planet 60 light years from Earth. Writing in the scientific journal Nature, researchers said the planet itself, HD 189733b, was unlikely to harbor life but evidence supported the search for life in other solar systems."

Yes, if there's water there, there's likely to be water elsewhere.

SNOT FOR BOTS: Synthetic mucus for robot noses.

WHISPERING TRUTH to power.

KIMBERLY KAGAN IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: "In Washington perception is often mistaken for reality. And as Congress prepares for a fresh debate on Iraq, the perception many members have is that the new strategy has already failed. This isn't an accurate reflection of what is happening on the ground, as I saw during my visit to Iraq in May." Read the whole thing.

STEALTH GUN CONTROL? New OSHA proposed rules on ammunition.

FISH. BARREL. SMOKING GUN: "Writing a newspaper column is like shooting fish in a barrel. But the fish need to be shot and I am happy to do my part."

STAND YOUR GROUND: Sounds like a bad prosecution to me:

Borden, 44, who was acquitted of all charges yesterday, was walking his dogs last year when three men in a Jeep tried to run him down. He pulled a gun and shot five times through the windshield, then moved to the side of the vehicle and fired nine more rounds.

He thought the shooting was self-defense, but a prosecutor put him on trial in the deaths, despite a new Florida law that grants wide latitude to people using deadly force to protect themselves. . . .

In Borden’s case, a prosecutor filed charges against him, even though he privately thought Borden might have been correct to open fire. In Kentucky, a man suspected of murder was offered a plea agreement because the law was too difficult to explain to jurors.

If the prosecutor thinks a defendant acted correctly, he shouldn't prosecute. That's what prosecutorial discretion is for. And if the law's too hard to explain to jurors, you shouldn't prosecute, and the legislature should have to pass a new law that people can understand.

RADLEY BALKO: "So why is that despite the fact that there hasn't been a terror attack on U.S. soil in nearly six years, it still feels like we're losing the 'war on terror?'" He blames Homeland Security hype, and I think he's got a point.

UPDATE: Reader Shahid Alam emails:

With regard to Radley’s reason.com post on Chertoff, it does seem to me that Radley succumbs to the same fallacies that seems to have struck most of the sinistro-sphere dumb but unfortunately not mute. They are of two main parts:

1. Fighting terrorism, as for some fighting wars in general, is a science, not an art. This would only be possible with complete knowledge and no fog of war. I don’t read Chertoff’s statement that he woke up one day feeling that something was gonna come absent evidence. He sees a whole bunch of things which may indicate something specific or more likely something general, but there’s always guesswork involved, and nothing’s better at that guesswork than an experienced gut. We can argue whether Chertoff’s gut would be considered experienced, but it’s certainly more experienced than mine. (No comment on Radley’s... perhaps he moonlights as a counter-terrorism agent, one never knows.)
2. Fighting terrorism is entirely a responsibility of the government and we have no part. I believe we do, and that part is to remain vigilant. This doesn’t mean living in fear as Radley seems to think, but it does mean there will be some inconveniences which can hopefully over time be minimized. And so, I don’t see Chertoff’s warnings an attempt to cower us. Rather, it is to tell the first responders throughout our federal system, and all citizens, to be aware of what’s going on around them, and at least to have a stake in making sure that any attack is prevented, and failing that, its effect is minimized.

Until we can eliminate or drastically attenuate the root causes of terrorism, much of the battles we will have with its purveyors will have to be fought at the points where they choose to contact us. Sometimes, this will mean when they’re close to action. UK, with its MI-5 and blanket coverage of at least London in surveillance infrastructure may be better equipped to keep the battle entirely to its agents of state. Maybe, but July 7th still happened. In any case, we have neither in the US, and I’m betting Radley would be rather opposed to bringing them here, and, I wouldn’t disagree, for good reasons. However, this does mean that a significant burden does fall on us, the citizenry.

We can argue about whether our elected and appointed leadership is doing enough so that the citizenry remembers its responsibility. But it doesn’t help when opinion leaders swing to the opposition on principle instead of trying to help. Shrillness sells to the amen-chorus, but I’m not sure it’s beneficial either to the debate or to the civic or public good.

Shrillness seldom pays.

HERE'S MORE ON Nancy Pelosi and gas prices.

TIME TRAVELLING with Bruce Moon.

LEARNING ABOUT Nina Totenberg, at Above the Law.

PSYCHOLOGY, "PEACE," AND POLITICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A look at a very different Dr. Helen.

BAD NEWS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION: "As legislation is introduced in more than a dozen states across the country to counter political pressure and proselytizing on students in college classrooms, a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows. Nearly six in 10 - 58% - said they see it as a serious problem, with 39% saying it was a 'very serious' problem. The online survey of 9,464 adult respondents nationwide was conducted July 5-9, 2007, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage points."

DEFICIT FALLS: "The nation's budget deficit will drop to $205 billion in the fiscal year that ends in September, less than half of what it was at its peak in 2004, according to new White House estimates."

THE MSM ONCE AGAIN falls for bogus numbers.

JULES CRITTENDEN offers advice on how to read Associated Press reports.

And there's more on the AP's shoddy reporting here.

GORDON BROWN as Cornelius Fudge.

MORE ON EARMARKS, at The Stump.

AL QAEDA ON THE RUN: Michael Yon has a new report. Excerpt: "The focus on al Qaeda makes sense here, where local officials have gone on record acknowledging that most of the perhaps one thousand al Qaeda fighters in Baqubah were young men and boys who called the city home. This may clash with the perception in US and other media that only a small percentage of the enemy in Iraq is al Qaeda, which in turn leads to false conclusions that the massive offensive campaign underway across Iraq is a lot of shock and awe aimed at a straw enemy. But as more Sunni tribal leaders renounce former ties with al Qaeda, it’s becoming clearer just how heavily AQ relied on local talent, and how disruptive they have been here in fomenting the civil war." Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here's more from John Wixted.

I WAS JUST ON BRIAN LEHRER'S SHOW, talking about the importance of being handy. I don't think my own appearance was especially brilliant, but it was interesting that the WNYC phone lines were jammed with people wanting to talk on the subject. More evidence for my "cultural moment" theory. Here's the post that got them interested.

UPDATE: Oh, and if you're coming here from the show, here's the Skill Sets page I mentioned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Hignite emails:

When I'm at our apartment in NYC, I often visit the Home Depot on 3rd Ave. I've lost count of the number of times women and even a few men have come up to me while I'm looking at something asking me about the item, how it installs, what tools do you need, etc. A single guy with moderate handyman knowledge could make a killing in Manhattan in more ways than one.

Now there's an incentive.

MORE: They were nice enough to send me the player code, so you can listen below if you like:

IN THE MAIL: Mark Penn's Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes. Looks pretty interesting, and when I opened it at random I found this passage on romance in the workplace and the need to accommodate people's changing lives:

As the number of female Ph.D.'s skyrocketed -- from about 8000 in 1966 to over 20000 in 2002 -- there was a huge boom in the number of academic couples. As a result, universities have been working for decades on ways not only to permit, but to encourage, positions for double-entry candidates . . . .

It's a new workplace out there, and in what was once a male-dominated office environment, where sexual harassment was the number one problem, the power structure is changing and so is the social structure.

I think that's probably right, though I have to note that the book has a blurb from Bill Clinton . . . .

WHEN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING goes too far.

IS ETHANOL FUEL leading to higher milk prices?

DANIEL SOLOVE: "I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy.

AL KAMEN ON Nancy Pelosi and gas prices.

Is it really her fault? No more than it's Bush's -- though she could help matters longterm by pushing a relaxation of rules on offshore drilling. Er, and refineries.

BANNING FAST CARS to fight global warming. Even the Prius wouldn't pass this rather strict test:

Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures -- a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as ``boys' toys.''

Is it climate-protection, or social engineering? As I've said before, the hairshirt approach to environmentalism is a mistake, but some people can't resist it -- because for them, the hairshirt isn't a bug, but a feature.

J.D. JOHANNES WRITES on how Al Qaeda is winning the information war even as it's losing the actual war.

But al Qaeda's largest harvest from "random slaughter" strategy was realized in America. Through acts of indiscriminate violence transmitted by the media, insurgents brought their war to America's living rooms. The atrocity-of-the-day is the principal informational input most Americans receive. This forms their knowledge base. The public does not live in the villages and mahalas of Iraq. Patterns of recovery, of normalcy, are not evident.

This is the essence of 4th Generation Warfare. And al Qaeda is clearly winning it. . . . Al Qaeda is running its war on smoke and mirrors - or, more accurately, on bytes of sound and sight. Congress could act on General Petraeus' reports from the ground, rather than broadcasts generated by insurgents. This requires a simple commitment - one foreign to many in the elective branch: Leadership.

Read the whole thing. Targeting our politicians and journalists is clearly going after our weak points. . . .

THE EXAMINER: Hold Firm on Iraq.

THIS WILL MAKE SOME PEOPLE FEEL OLD: "Pink Floyd’s hit — 'The Wall' — is as contemporary today as 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo' was in 1969."

MOLLOHAN UPDATE:

Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.) paid a Washington law firm more than $22,000 during the past three months, according to his most recent campaign finance report.

Last year, the FBI reportedly investigated whether the congressman had properly disclosed his real estate investment with a West Virginia businessman whose company received a $2.1 million contract with the federal government earmarked by Mollohan.

Mollohan paid the Washington law firm Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel $22,671 in three installments from the middle of May to the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission filings released Tuesday.

Mollohan's office did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

Mollohan, who chairs a prominent subcommittee on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, was forced to relinquish his position as the ranking Democrat on the House Ethics Committee in 2006 amid revelations surrounding lucrative real estate investments, including one with a former aide-turned-lobbyist, and questions about his connection to a series of nonprofit groups in West Virginia that had received millions in federal funding.

More on Mollohan here. So far, promises of a cleaner Congress remain unfulfilled.

FREEMAN DYSON ON OUR BIOTECH FUTURE:

I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

I see a close analogy between John von Neumann's blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto. The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight. It is likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations.

I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.

Read the whole thing. (Via The American Scene).

ARMY RECRUITING, which had been running ahead of goals, has now fallen short two months in a row. Interestingly, this coincides with the new wave of surrender-talk in Congress, which probably does cause volunteers to think twice. Still, I worried about this in our podcast interview with (then) Army Secretary Francis Harvey last year. The Army still thinks it'll make goal for the year as it started out ahead, but this subject deserves close attention.

UPDATE: Hey, numbers are bad all over. And here's more background on the Army numbers.

July 10, 2007

IT'S A MADAM-O-RAMA. I still think we should legalize prostitution. More on that here.

FANTASIES AMONG SOME OF IRAQ'S SUNNIS.

COLUMNIST BRUCE BARTLETT calls it quits: " I think there will always be a market for quality commentary, however, and some day someone will figure out a better way to make money from it. In the meantime, I have decided to devote myself to writing books, where authors still have control over their output and can make better money."

A LOOK AT blog power in the Congressional Record.

SUPREME COURT JUSTICES: Different, but so similar.

A BASE-PLEASING 2008 Democratic ticket.

SOME THOUGHTS ON touching at work.

CHINA APPLIES MUSCLE in America.

THOUGHTS ON CRACKING IRAN, from Investor's Business Daily. "It won't take much to topple the regime. That should be our goal. Taking action today will save us a lot of heartache tomorrow." I certainly hope that's true.

UPDATE: Not much optimism here.

APPLAUSE BUT NOT DEVOTION:

House Republican Whip Roy Blunt spoke this afternoon to an audience at the Heritage Foundation in an address entitled 'Laying the Groundwork for a Revolution.' Blunt set forth the principles that he believes must guide Republican efforts to regain a majority on the Hill. In the main, Blunt reaffirmed the ideas that won Ronald Reagan the presidency and which earned a GOP majority in Congress starting in 1994. . . .

Blunt said lots of things to remind fiscal conservatives and security hawks why they need Republicans in leadership. But to the extent that bloggers represent the GOP base--admittedly, a somewhat iffy proposition--he probably won't get a lot of love. And even if he did, would it make a difference in 2008?

Well, it might. But mostly this is news that the GOP leadership is starting to recognize the problem. The key will be what it does over the next year or so, not what its leaders say.

OKAY, THEN HOW ABOUT: MORE BLARNEY, LESS BARNEY. Nope, that doesn't work, either . . . .

UPDATE: Heh.

GREENLAND'S warm and forested past: "But Dr. Willerslev does offer a consolation prize, of sorts, for climatologists. Ice as old as that which he analyzed is normally useless for climate analysis. But the types of trees he found — including spruce and pine — show that winter temperatures couldn’t have been below about 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and summer temperatures must have been above 50."

DOES THE D.C. MADAM HAVE A SOFT SPOT FOR THE PRESS?

One of the numbers dialed out from Palfrey's phone on the afternoon of Jan. 3, 2001 matches that of the Tribune national desk.

You know, if I were running a prostitution ring, I'd be sure that my little black book had the names and numbers of a lot of bigshot journalists, politicians, and law enforcement people even if they weren't actual customers. Just as insurance. . . .

CONN CARROLL THINKS THAT THE L.A. TIMES' attacks on Fred Thompson are manna from Heaven: "If Thompson keeps his primary fights confined to Michael Moore and the LAT, he'll cruise to victory." That the LAT is backing off its own reporting doesn't hurt.

WELL, YEAH: "The more I learn about the direction and pace of biotechnological innovation, the more I think bioconservatism is increasingly irrelevant."

AN AL GORE / JOHN ROBERTS COMPARISON that I didn't see. But that's why I'm an ordinary blogger instead of an extraordinary one, like Jeff.

THOUGHTS ON RFK JR. AND TREASON.

UPDATE: TigerHawk sees a parallel.

JAMES POULOS TAKES A SKEPTICAL LOOK at proposals for constitutional "reform."

BARACK OBAMA on The Pivot: "Sen. Barack Obama today chided his Democratic presidential rivals for vehemently opposing the Iraq war after initially voting to authorize it, contending real leaders don't get any 'do-overs' on an issue as monumental as war."

He's right.

THE HILL: "A bipartisan proposal to implement the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations is gaining momentum among Senate Republicans, but is putting Democrats in a tough position with an anti-war base that wants the chamber to take a much harder line during this month’s Iraq war debate."

MICKEY KAUS connects the dots.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Lawmakers try to save their earmarks:

After Democrats won control of Congress, they moved to fulfill their pledge to crack down on the controversial practice of lawmakers slipping projects in spending bills without public scrutiny.

In February, they scrapped Republican-drafted bills loaded with earmarks and passed a bill that they boasted had none.

Among those celebrating the achievement was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who said that piecing together the $463.5-billion spending bill was difficult, "but we got it done without a single earmark."

But the day after President Bush signed it, Reid wrote federal agencies to "strongly support the priorities" in the discarded GOP bills. "I believe they are essential to the nation and to my home state of Nevada."

Reid was not alone in seeking to save his earmarks.

Lawmakers from both parties — including Democrats ranging from the most senior, such as Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, to one of the most junior, such as Sen. Jon Tester of Montana — pressed agencies to grant their spending requests, according to correspondence obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The behind-the-scenes lobbying for projects stripped from this once "earmark-free" bill underscores how difficult it will be for lawmakers to curtail a practice that has expanded despite criticism that it is out of control. Already, lawmakers are seeking to replace lost earmarks in next year's appropriations bills, although they have promised to be more open about it.

"What is ironic is that at the same time lawmakers were crowing about no earmarks this year, they were surreptitiously drowning agency heads in funding requests," said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Ironic, yet wholly predictable.

BRINK LINDSEY on the libertarian center.

THIS IS KIND OF COOL:

Last weekend, Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks — and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons.

Destination: Idaho.

With instruments to measure his altitude and speed, a global positioning system device in his pocket, and about four plastic bags holding five gallons of water each to act as ballast — he could turn a spigot, release water and rise — Couch headed into the Oregon sky.

Nearly nine hours later, the 47-year-old gas station owner came back to earth in a farmer's field near Union, short of Idaho but about 193 miles from home.

"When you're a little kid and you're holding a helium balloon, it has to cross your mind,'' Couch told the Bend Bulletin.

Many times. (Via Buzz.mn).

HOWARD KURTZ: "Ever notice that reporters are the first to say no comment when they get into trouble, even though they know better than anyone how that will be interpreted?"

I HAVEN'T PAID MUCH ATTENTION to the D.C. Madam story, but I agree with this:

I hate seeing people publicly humiliated for the sexual things they do in private. But the government is criminally prosecuting a woman, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, for what it says was a prostitution ring. These are federal charges, and the senator, David Vitter, has some responsibility for the laws that make this prosecution possible.

I would legalize prostitution if it were up to me. To some degree, it is up to Vitter, since Congress has authority over the District of Columbia. But it's a crime, and he's looking to get out with an apology. How about moving to make prostitution legal in the District instead? It would be an appropriate penance, and D.C. would be a . . . fitting . . . place to start.

WHY RON PAUL ISN'T LIBERTARIAN ENOUGH. It's a shameless ploy for traffic, but it will probably work.

PAGING CLARENCE PAGE.

IT'S LIKE SHE'S SOME KIND OF WEIRDO OR SOMETHING:

Madonna surprised organizers of the Live Earth concert in Wembley Stadium by demanding that anyone who interviewed her backstage had to make eye contact and could not look away.

  "Eye contact must be maintained at all times," interviewers were told, according to the London Mirror. "Never look down to check notes — all questions must be memorized or the interview will be terminated."

"We thought her people were just joking," a source told the paper. "But it soon became apparent that they were deadly serious."

Serious in a weird kind of way.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Ted Stevens is back in the news:

In 2004, two business partners of Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) sold an empty lot in Anchorage to the National Archives and Records Administration for just over $3.5 million, more than doubling their year-old investment in the property.

Stevens earmarked the appropriation for NARA to purchase a site, although there is no indication he received any direct benefit from the deal and his spokesman said the Senator had nothing to do with the selection of the specific property.

But the project is one of several valuable contracts that the developers, Leonard Hyde and Jonathan Rubini, entered into with federal agencies while Stevens was either the ranking member or chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee — and had significant investments in several Rubini/Hyde companies.

Stevens’ investments with the two real estate magnates over a seven-year period turned him from one of the Senate’s least wealthy Members into a millionaire, according to his financial records and statements by Stevens over the years.

That relationship has prompted questions from watchdogs who say, at the least, it raises the potential for an appearance of a conflict of interest.

Gee, do you think. It also creates the appearance -- really more like the certainty -- that the Senate rules aren't doing the job:

“It absolutely raises flags when you have a Member having a business relationship with someone who may benefit from the Member’s official actions,” even in an indirect way, said Bill Allison, a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group that pushes for greater disclosure by lawmakers. “The way [disclosure is] being handled now is just completely inadequate,” Allison added.

Allison and other watchdogs argue the lack of adequate disclosure rules in the Senate makes it extremely difficult for the public to make an informed judgment on whether Stevens, for example, is acting appropriately, and they have called for more stringent rules.

Nothing should get in any bill without it being clear who put it in and why. How hard is that?

MINIATURE ROBOTS play nanosoccer.

YOUTUBE CAMCORDERS: Popular Mechanics reviews two inexpensive video recorders aimed at the Web: theh Flip Video camcorder and the DXG 506V. They're not overwhelmed with either.

I think you're better off with a digital still camera that shoots video: It's only a bit more expensive, and the quality is better.

OVER AT PORKBUSTERS, a scorecard on pork, ranking members of Congress. It's a web-friendly version of The Examiner's spreadsheet.

The Index brings together in one place all the data about how everybody who served in the Senate in 2005-2007 voted on 12 key opportunities to say "yes" or "no" to genuine earmark reforms when the Senate clerk called their names. The Examiner and Porkbusters consulted knowledgeable Senate insiders to insure that each of these votes represented a real chance to make a difference for taxpayers.

Here's the Examiner editorial on the subject. Excerpt:

Congress appears headed to approve a record number of earmarks in 2007, despite the fact that last November angry voters registered their disgust with the practice by electing Democrats who pledged a new era of transparency in government spending.

A quick glance at The Examiner Newspapers/Porkbusters.org Earmark Reform Index for the U.S. Senate helps explain why. Two-thirds of the senators are adamantly opposed to reforming their appropriations perks, no matter what the public says.

Read the whole thing. Then you might want to call your Senators and Representatives and tell them what you think about their performance.

NRO TO REPUBLICANS: Get a grip on Iraq!

When even the BBC is saying that Washington looks to be wimping out just as the surge may be working, it's not a good time to panic.

JULES CRITTENDEN OFFERS advice to the New York Times.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Continuing the battle:

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) resumed his efforts to implement a series of new ethics and earmark reform rules Monday afternoon and warned his colleagues that he may force the chamber to remain in session through the August recess if Democratic leaders do not drop their objections to his demands.

DeMint proposed Monday to adopt the new Senate earmark rules - which, among other things, would require the Appropriations Committee to disclose all earmarks requested by individual lawmakers that have been included in spending bills - and then begin the long-stalled conference on a lobbying and ethics bill.

Pointing to a recent Congressional Research Service report stating Appropriations subcommittees have had varying degrees of success with implementing the new rules voluntarily, DeMint argued that "it's clear we need a formal rule in place that applies to all committees" and warned that he could object to the start of the August recess if the rules are not adopted. "Maybe that would be a good thing," he argued.

DeMint's gambit - which Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was forced to object to - follows a similar showdown on the Senate floor just prior to the July Fourth recess.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) were seconds away from agreeing to begin the ethics conference in late June when DeMint called the Republican cloakroom to remind McConnell of his long-standing hold on the bill. As a result, the agreement to name conferees collapsed and Democrats used the GOP mix-up as a chance to hammer Republicans on ethics.

DeMint has blocked the naming of conferees on the lobbying and ethics bill because Democrats included in the measure a set of Senate earmark reforms, despite the fact they apply to that chamber and do not need House approval to be put in place.

DeMint and a core group of GOP conservatives are expected to continue their tactical fight with Senate leaders as the chamber takes up appropriations bills later this year, many of which are packed with earmarks.

Bring it on.

WELL, THIS SUCKS: "I just had a rather disturbing email from a company advertising a new service called Buy Blog Comments (no follow tags used) promoting a new service offering to leave comment spam on blogs for those wanting to increase their SEO ranking. The service offers to leave spam comments at a rate of 100 comments for $19.99, 500 comments for $99.99 and 1000 comments for $199.99."

Can't we just, I dunno, stake them out on an anthill or something instead?

I'LL BET HE'D VOTE DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME:

HOUSTON – A state lawmaker shot a man he says was trying to steal copper wiring from the house he is building, police said Monday. Rep. Borris Miles, D-Houston, told police he was working on the second floor Sunday night when he heard a noise on the lower floor and saw two men trying to steal the wiring. One of the men threw a pocketknife at Mr. Miles when confronted, a Houston police spokesman said. Mr. Miles, a former law enforcement officer who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon, shot the man in the left leg, police said. The wounded suspect was being treated at a Houston hospital. Mr. Miles voted against the "castle doctrine" that gives residents stronger rights to defend their property. The law goes into effect Sept. 1.

Just a guess.

INVASION OF THE CONCRETE PENISES. And that's only the beginning, though Xeni Jardin seems curiously unalarmed.

USING BOGUS CHILD PORN ACCUSATIONS to kill file-sharing sites?

DEPLOYING A NETWORK OF SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS IN NEW YORK: As usual, I think it's a waste of time and money in terms of security, and a potential threat to privacy as well.

A TRIP BACK IN TIME AND SPACE, at the Harvard Observatory.

July 09, 2007

THE ASSAULT ON THE RED MOSQUE HAS BEGUN.

A GALLERY OF REGRETTABLE LILEKS PHOTOS: Photoshoppery at its finest!

A LOOK AT "ZERO ENERGY" HOME PLANS, from Matt Edens. Excerpt:

Starting in 2002, ORNL's Building Technology Center teamed up with Habitat for Humanity to build four demonstration homes outside Lenoir City. Built for less than $100,000 each, those homes' daily energy costs averaged out to a mere 82 cents a day compared to the $4-$5 of an average Lenoir City home. They weren't entirely “off the grid,” but at times, their meters more or less ran backwards. Credit for excess electricity contributed back to the power grid trimmed an average of almost $300 off each home's annual utility bill.

Read the whole thing.

OUCH:

Continuing to strike fear into the hearts of, well, everyone, Taser has released an electrified round that works with any 12-gauge shotgun. The Wireless eXtended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, is a fin-stabilized, self-contained round with no wires leading back to the gun and a maximum range of 100 ft. . . .

The XREP punctures the target with multiple probes, and then unspools to dangle from the unfortunate belligerent's body, all the while applying Taser's infamous rapid-fire electrical pulses. As an added bonus, any helpful passerby trying to yank the XREP out of the target before the 20-second discharge cycle is finished will also get zapped, thanks to a "hand-trap wire" that's nestled
in among the other hanging cables.

Impressive -- but it'll be pretty important to be sure that your 12-gauge is really loaded with Taser rounds when you think it is, and not, say, slugs. Or vice versa. I'm not sure that mixing nonlethal and lethal capabilities in the same weapon is a good idea, accident-wise. Never mind the laughing-gas bullets.

STILL MORE ON ROBERT HEINLEIN, from Brian Doherty, in Reason. Excerpt:

Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein's bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture's freedom or survival. . . .

That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America. Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.

It isn't a quality amenable to pigeonholing, or to creating a movement around "What would Heinlein do?" As Heinlein himself said of his work, it was "an invitation to think-not to be-lieve." He created a body of writing, and helped forge a modern world, that is fascinating to live in because of, not in spite of, its wide scope and enduring contradictions.

Read the whole thing.

ED MORRISSEY INTERVIEWS Ambassador Said T. Jawad of Afghanistan.

MAGGOTS.

EASY ON THE EYES, BUT HARD ON THE HEART: Padma Lakshmi dumps Salman Rushdie. Not even a knighthood was enough, I guess. Or maybe he got too old and fatwa-ed.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: "Democrats Can't Wait Around for GOP Defectors to End the War."

Well, they can vote to end it themselves. But they'll be responsible for what comes next. And they don't want that -- in fact, one of the things they most want is to take the issue off the table before fall of 2008 so they don't have to offer a policy.

I agree with Mickey Kaus:

The New York Times is for withdrawal of U.S. troops from most of Iraq, except maybe the Kurdish north. Even the promising Anbar-type initiatives--which seem to require an aggressive U.S. military presence--are apparently to be abandoned. The Times admits the result of the withdrawal will "most likely" be chaos, including "further ethnic cleansing, even genocide." But it still prefers withdrawal. Jules Crittenden finds this morally curious, and so do I. ... I could be convinced that withdrawal is justified because the ensuing burst of sectarian killing will be short, followed by relative stability--preferable, in the long run, to continued occupation. I could be convinced we should abandon the goal of a unitary Iraqi state and focus on some sort of engineered partition. I hope I couldn't be convinced that we should abandon Iraqis to "genocide" just because the resulting deaths can be blamed on Bush. Does that mean they don't count?

Not to me, but perhaps the folks at the Times feel differently. But I think they're crazy to think -- as I believe they do -- that such a result would help the Democrats. Won't they at least listen to the BBC?

Meanwhile, it seems clear to me that (1) Bush can pretty much run out the clock on the surge, with at least 6 or 8 months before Congress can make him do much; and (2) Whoever's President in 2009 will do what looks right at the time, regardless of what he or she says in 2007. (This is why I kind of like Richardson, despite what he's saying about Iraq.) It's also clear that at the moment nobody has much of a strategy for 2009 if the issue's still on the table. Realistically, even if we're making steady progress, the American public is way past the "three year rule" on overseas combat and by 2009 they'll be more than double that amount. Heck, I'm not hearing much in the way of useful ideas on what to do about Iran, either. So I guess whoever the next President is will pretty much wind up improvising, regardless of what's said now. So who in the current field looks like a good improviser?

UPDATE: I agree with Hugh Hewitt that Republican Senators are kidding themselves if they think that going wobbly on Iraq is going to help them. But it's of a piece with the kind of self-defeating strategy that Byron York points up. Can you say "Republican Death Wish?"

Related thoughts here and here.

And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. isn't afraid to call people traitors when they don't appreciate the nature of the threat confronting us . . . . "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors." Hey, I thought it was wrong to question people's patriotism!

Meanwhile, Dan Riehl offers some historical perspective. Yeah, our losses are lighter, and our military is better, but our politicians are worse.

THOUGHTS ON CONSERVATIVE JUDICIAL ACTIVISM.

HACKING THE VIRTUAL FENCE: At least you need a hacksaw to hack a real fence . . . .

SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY sued over speech codes by the Alliance Defense Fund.

"INCREASINGLY EFFECTIVE IRAQI TROOPS:" Andrew Sullivan says that's the line I'm pushing, but as seems to be his wont when describing me lately he doesn't link to an actual post of mine, and I can't find that phrase on my blog, though Andrew presents it with quotation marks twice. It is true, though, that we're hearing from people actually in Iraq, like Michael Yon and J.D. Johannes, that the Iraq troops are generally getting better, though Yon says Iraqi commanders and logistics are still subpar. Still, if Andrew's going to present something as a direct quote, he might want to point to where I've actually, you know, said it. With a link. This is a trivial matter, of course, except for the likelihood that Glenn Greenwald or somebody will start linking to this post of Andrew's while attributing things to me in a misleading way, kind of like they've done with "more rubble, less trouble."

UPDATE: Reader Gregg Reynolds (no relation) writes:

Because it's been a few weeks since I've visited Sullivan's site, I was intrigued by your reference to Sullivan today and wanted to get to the bottom of it.

The "increasingly effective" quote comes evidently from a recent Jules Crittenden column: http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/07/08/genocide-prefered/

Here is Sullivan's post on it: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/07/continuing-the-.html

Now Sullivan labels you and anyone you cite "approvingly" on still trying to win in Iraq with the moniker "the 'stab-in-the-back' right" or some similar construction. I'm still confused about where that label comes from. I'm guessing it's pejorative, though.

I hope this reduces confusion.

Well, a bit. I followed a link to Andrew's post and didn't spend enough time poking around, obviously. The "stab in the back" label basically involves calling me a Nazi, which is of a piece with his behavior lately. But I've never rejected Sullivan.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Han Meng emails:

Sullivan's "'stab-in-the-back' right" apparently refers to Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth, which Sullivan seems to think everyone's familiar with, but makes little sense if one isn't. And I don't think it applies to you:

"Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as usual, by the right's media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees....Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were traitors and "revolutionaries," individuals who were "conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops," and "excrement" who could now be safely incarcerated "immediately" or even "eliminated.""

Hmm. I hadn't read that piece, but I don't think it applies to me, either: I certainly haven't called for eliminating or incarcerating war critics. Meanwhile, more on the Nazi angle from Hub Blog

MASS ARRESTS IN ZIMBABWE over price controls and inflation.

GOOD THING IT SEEMS TO BE A SLOW SEASON: "Hurricane Center director replaced in wake of staff rebellion."

UPDATE: Brendan Loy says I'm wrong, and that it's not a slow season. I cheerfully bow to his superior expertise, but that doesn't make me happier about this fiasco.

PARSING Hillary Clinton and Matt Drudge.

AIRBRUSHING AND BACKTRACKING at The Los Angeles Times?

IF THE GENDERS WERE REVERSED, WOULDN'T THIS BE A FIRING OFFENSE?

"I sort of slapped him around,” Couric admits to the magazine. “I got mad at him and said, 'You can’t do this to me. You have to tell me when you’re going to use a word like that.'"

Just imagine if Brian Williams "sort of slapped around" a female producer.

IF THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO KICK OFF A GORE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY, I'd say it failed:

NBC's three-hour primetime "Live Earth" special, which included highlights from Saturday's global concerts, failed to generate much enthusiasm in the ratings.

The estimated 2.7 million viewers was slightly under the 3 million viewers NBC has averaged on Saturday nights in the summer with repeats and the Stanley Cup hockey playoffs on what is already the least-popular night of television.

As a reader Bob Houk notes, a guy who can't outdraw hockey won't make much of a candidate.

NEWS FROM THAILAND:

The security forces have finally forced the Islamic terrorists to the surface. This was done by identifying religious schools and villages where the terrorists were hanging out, and then making arrests. Large quantities of weapons and bomb making material have been found, and over a hundred people have been arrested in the last week alone. Religious schools are being shut if they are found to harbor terrorists. Last month, 160 arrests were made, and that total will double or triple this month. All this is the result of months of intensive intelligence work and sorting through thousands of incidents and individual records.

Sounds like profiling to me.

FLOATING WINDMILLS for the North Sea.

Maybe we should try it in Nantucket Sound. Ted Kennedy won't mind . . . .

RODNEY DANGERFIELD MEETS GLOBAL WARMING.

WHEN IS FISH BAD FOR YOU? When it's pork.

I FINISHED RICHARD MORGAN'S THIRTEEN, and it was quite good. Part of the backdrop for the story is a U.S. that has divided along the "Greater Canada" / "Jesusland" lines in that post-election cartoon. Morgan doesn't do much with that -- he's not an American, and he treats the flyover states as one big Mississippi, which would be irritating if it played more of a role in the story. Even Mississippi isn't really one big Mississippi in that fashion. One thing that he gets right, though, is that everybody's worse off from the change.

A post-secession America would be a better topic for a novelist with a lot of multi-culturalist chops like Tobias Buckell, somebody with enough understanding of America to pull it off in a way that Morgan was smart enough not to attempt.

WHEN IDEOLOGICAL DIVERSITY is not enough.

GENERAL PETRAEUS VISITS BAQUBAH: Michael Yon reports. And more questions about why this isn't getting more coverage.

UPDATE: Here's more. And note this post from Hot Air and this from Bob Owens on the Associated Press's coverage.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

So let's see. Mr. Bush and al Qaeda's Ayman al Zawahiri agree that Iraq--not Afghanistan--is the central front in the war between them. But GOP Senators looking ahead to the 2008 elections have decided that the real front in the war lies not in Baghdad or Baquba but in the Beltway, and that a "bipartisan" redeployment is a worthier goal than backing the current battle plan. The irony is that this political retreat is taking place even as General David Petraeus's military offensive is showing signs of progress.

We have better soldiers than politicians. Then again, we have better everything than we have politicians. . . .

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: "For a self-congratulatory culture issuing moral lectures on everything from global warming to the dangers of smoking, the silence of the West toward the primordial horror from Gaza to Anbar is, well, horrific in its own way as well."

GEORGE WILL REVIEWS Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression. (Via the InstaWife).

THOUGHTS ON MEN'S RIGHTS, from Bryan Caplan.

UPDATE: Related item here.

JONAH GOLDBERG: "I can only assume the folks at the NEA have let their comments section weed-over with spam because they are being so diligent with our tax dollars elsewhere. "

Meanwhile, the private sector steps up.

SYRIA INVADES LEBANON.

IMPORTANT Harry Potter news!

REMINDING COLIN POWELL of what he said then.

I know some people still like him for President, but he seems to have a history of saying what people want to hear at the time. And sometimes he does it retroactively . . . . And if he was just "being loyal" then, does that make him more credible now?

UPDATE: Ross Douthat said it better:

Maybe had Powell won more bureaucratic battles, everything would have gone swimmingly in Iraq, and the fact that it didn't is all Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney/George W. Bush's fault. But given that he was present at the creation, not just part of the government that took us to war but one of its leaders, there was something a little off-putting about his self-justifying explanation that he tried to stop it, and besides it was the right thing to do, and anyway the fact that it fell apart is somebody else's fault.

Yeah.

DID RUMSFELD BLOW A CHANCE at getting Zawahiri?

UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy says not so much.

JAMES LILEKS: "I’ve noticed that most people who romanticize the French Revolution are a little unclear on the details, particularly how it turned out."

IN THE MAIL: Michael Barone's new book, Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers. Looks quite interesting.

RANK INGRATITUDE.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: The Carnival of Cars is up! So is the Carnival of Homeschooling. And there's always the Carnival of Feminists if those don't float your boat. Plus, the Carnival of Recipes.

I've been pretty lame about covering carnivals lately, but there's always BlogCarnival.com, which covers the carnival scene better than I can anyway.

JULES CRITTENDEN FINDS a new reason to live.

A LOOK AT DUTCH CENSORSHIP.

ERIC SCHEIE: "I'd rather not take the New York Times surrender plea seriously, and I cannot believe that any sane human being would."

Meanwhile, Hot Air notes that the New York Times' editors might want to start reading their own paper.

RASMUSSEN ON LIVE EARTH:

The Live Earth concert promoted by former Vice President Al Gore received plenty of media coverage and hype, but most Americans tuned out. . . .

Skepticism about the participants may have been a factor in creating this low level of interest. Most Americans (52%) believe the performers take part in such events because it is good for their image. Only 24% say the celebrities really believe in the cause while another 24% are not sure. One rock star who apparently shared that view is Matt Bellamy of the band Muse. Earlier in the week, he jokingly referred to Live Earth as "private jets for climate change."

Only 34% believe that events like Live Earth actually help the cause they are intended to serve. Forty-one percent (41%) disagree. Those figures include 10% who believe the events are Very Helpful and 20% who say they are Not at All Helfpul. Adding to the skepticism, an earlier survey found that just 24% of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on Global Warming.

Given a choice of four major issues before the United States today, 36% named the war in Iraq as most important. Twenty-five percent (25%) named immigration, 20% selected the economy and only 12% thought Global Warming was the top issue.

As I've suggested in the past, turning the hype-engine to 11 has probably done more harm than good. (Via NewsAlert). As Jack Shafer writes, in journalism, green is the new yellow.

Plus, a global-warming bet from Professor Scott Armstrong.

UPDATE: British TV ratings were a bust.

Plus, a Live Earth environmental assessment.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Kurtz discovers that it's not media bias if they believe in it:

NBC and its cable networks devoted a total of 35 hours of air time Saturday to the Live Earth concerts, organized by Al Gore to call attention to what he calls a global warming "crisis."

The worldwide series of concerts, featuring 150 artists from Madonna to Red Hot Chili Peppers, was also designed to raise money for the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit group chaired by the former vice president. Commercials aired at a reduced rate.

Doesn't this strike a discordant note? Wasn't NBC, whose news division covers the debate over climate change, providing a huge platform for advocates on one side of a contentious issue? And isn't the network helping a prominent Democrat -- who granted "Today" an interview last week in which he was asked again about his presidential ambitions -- raise money?

Dan Harrison, an NBC senior vice president, does not back away from the message. He calls the Gore effort "an initiative we believe in," including parent company General Electric. "I really don't think climate change is a political issue," Harrison says.

Really?

Green is the new yellow. Except that I think Hearst and the Yellow Journalists knew what they were doing. These guys are so clueless that they really believe there's nothing political about causes they agree with. Or maybe I'm giving them too much, er, credit.

DREAMING OF A heroically liberal Supreme Court.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GLASGOW TERRORISTS, from an Indian Muslim. (Via Amit Varma, who has more here).

THE USS Robert A. Heinlein?

MICKEY KAUS: "Wasn't Jacqueline Bouvier kind of a 'trophy wife'? Just asking!" When Democrats do it, it's "glamor."

UPDATE: Ouch: "In 2004, America came fairly close to electing a trophy husband."

July 08, 2007

MORE ON COLOMBIA:

FARC is shifting tactics to terrorism and Information War, in response to its inability to deal with the army and police on the ground. Fueled by cocaine profits, FARC believes it can survive the military superiority of the government. Money can buy politicians and police, preventing the government from wiping out FARC completely. Since FARC has merged with the drug gangs it used to just protect, the leftist rebels believe they are invincible. Meanwhile, the battle on the ground is costing FARC thousands of members each year, and the territory they used to control, or at least terrorize.

The "Information War" strategy is cheaper, safer, and more likely to find allies in the media.

ROBERT NOVAK'S CIA LEAK: Now it can be told.

THE SEPTEMBER 11TH digital archive.

MUQTADA AL-SADR runs to Iran. "Sadr's flight from Iraq and return to Iran comes as Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki issued an unusually strong statement calling for Sadr's Mahdi Army to disarm, and Iraqi security forces continue to battle his Mahdi Army in southern Iraq."

A BRITISH WARNING: Look out for people doing things!

REMEMBERING ROBERT HEINLEIN: A friend at NASA sent me a copy of the remarks by NASA's head of legislative affairs, Bill Brunner. Excerpt:

This is a real pleasure – joining with all of you in saluting a great writer and visionary – a man whom we honor here this weekend for using the power of words to inspire, to shape values and attitudes – and yes, to make a buck or two (those us here who have ever tried to sell a manuscript honor him especially for that).

As a testimony to the power of his ideas, I’d like to share my personal story with you.

The first real novel I ever read was Rocketship Galileo. After that, I read as much Heinlein as I could find. I can honestly say that, as a young black male raised by a single mom, RAH shaped my views on many subjects from race – to politics – to the nobility of military service – to the equality of the sexes – to the future of humankind on the space frontier.

Many times, the reader would not know that a major character in a Heinlein narrative was black - and always, there was passionate advocacy for freedom over tyranny woven into every storyline.

Heinlein wrote a lot of memorable words. But there’s one line that I found especially striking in preparing for today’s talk. It was his declaration that, “[a] generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”

Full text below: Click "read more" to read it.

Read More ?

LGF goes Web 2.0.

PAY NO ATTENTION to those jet pilots behind the curtain.

A LOT OF PEOPLE WANT TO BRING BACK TROLLEY CARS -- but they're forgetting about the electric terror!

NIGERIA UPDATE:

The separatist movements in the Niger Delta are not making much progress, but the copycat gangs that have emerged to join in the growing banditry and mayhem, are. Gangs of robbers roam the main highways, some of them in police uniform (and some of those may actually be police). More gangsters are demanding protection money from businesses, and that leads to gangs fighting over control of territory to "protect." The government is concerned because of the billions of dollars in lost oil revenue. About a quarter of Nigerias oil production is now shut down by the violence. The government cannot muster sufficient security forces to pacify the Delta, and has been unable to negotiate a deal to get the new players, the Delta gangs, to do it for them.

Obviously, we should pull our troops out. Oh, wait . . . .

KIKI MUNSHI, meet Michael Yon.

In a not-directly-related matter, Ed Driscoll asks: "And yet, both TV news ratings and newspaper sales have cratered. Why on earth could that be?!"

WHY BLOOMBERG CAN'T WIN. If he runs, though, it won't be about winning. It'll be about handing the election to someone else.

DON SURBER: "Africa burns while UN blue helmets look askance and indulge themselves in child porn and petty theft. That is the Times prescription for Iraq."

UPDATE: More from Jules Crittenden. And more on the NYT here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

A LOOK AT EUROPE IN DENIAL: But a few cracks seem to be appearing.

BOYCOTTING the British academic boycott of Israel.

MICKEY KAUS: "Lone blogger Luke Ford, and not the L.A. Times, continues to be where you go go to find out what's really happening in the Villasalinas sex scandal."

Plus, how Liddy Dole has saved her career.

UPDATE: The Villaraigosa scandal is a Hollywood thriller dripping with sex! And most of the press coverage seems to be dripping with, er, something else.

ANOTHER UPDATE: "Sex, sex, and more sex."

MORE GREENHOUSE HYPOCRISY:

51 plane flights in six months for an environmental author and lecturer--embarrassing? Yeah, that's one way of putting it. Another would be "I guess my entire career has really just been one long act of satire." It is possible that none of these flights were even slightly superfluous?

I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis.

FROM THE LONDON TIMES, a Live Earth postmortem: "As a concert, Live Earth was not the repeat of Live Aid/Live 8 it clearly wanted to be. Unlike the events organised by the charismatic Sir Bob Geldof – upon which this one modelled itself closely, right down to its choice of name – the acts who answered the call from Al Gore’s people to play at Wembley Stadium were a bit short on superstar clout."

UPDATE: Ouch:

But out back, where revellers go to buy their fluids and to get rid of them, and where big events often live or die, there was a different kind of drought. Faced with record beer queues, thirsty fans at Saturday's Live Earth concert at Sydney's Aussie Stadium were seen by the Herald offering others $50 for their beer rather than wait an hour to buy refreshments.

Thousands, deprived of the traditional rock 'n' roll accompaniment, went to a Coca-Cola stand, forgetting that its manufacturers had been under fire in India for allegedly creating water shortages and pollution around their bottling facilities.

Scores were seen leaving within the first two hours of the nine-hour festival, fed up with the lack of basic services, cutting their losses on a $99 ticket. Gate attendants were heard telling the human tide that they should complain to the promoter.

It was "unAustralian", one spectator protested. "This is what happens when you let hippies organise a big event," another said.

No beer? Now we're talking crisis, mate.

JIHADISTS against climate change.