December 22, 2007

IT'S ALL ABOUT BILL: "Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama. . . . Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well."

WELL, GOOD: Pakistan's Islamic Parties Struggle for Support. ""People were asking for clean water, and they didn't get it. We were very hopeful. But the mullahs did nothing for us." No surprise there.

2008 ELECTION PREDICTIONS from Bill Quick.

I DON'T KNOW THIS BLOG, and can't vouch for it myself. But if this story about Huckabee's speaking fees pans out, it seems that it's likely to be pretty damaging. I've got no problem with taking speaking fees from stem-cell research companies -- but it contradicts Huckabee's positions, doesn't it?

UPDATE: More from the Globe: "He opposes embryonic stem-cell research, but this year accepted a fat speaking fee from drugmaker Novo Nordisk, which conducts embryonic stem-cell research." (Via John Stephenson, who has more).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Shades of Jim Wright? Well, possibly. Reader Bill Nelson sends a link to this report that Novo Nordisk -- the stem-cell company -- distributed 35,000 copies of Huckabee's book, translated into Spanish, for free. No word what Huckabee was paid; possibly nothing, possibly a lot. No doubt people will be asking the campaign about it.

HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.

A REPORT FROM onboard the Ron Paul blimp.

THE JOYS OF LIVING off the grid.

HEH: The war on terroir. (Via ¡No Pasarán!)

SAVING THE PLANET by shopping online: Nice to see my own thoughts backed up by research.

UPDATE: Katie Granju saves the planet, too!

VANESSA REDGRAVE bails out terror suspects.

STEPHEN F. HAYES reports from Iowa.

I MENTIONED BOB ZUBRIN'S Energy Victory earlier -- a reader emails that he'll be on C-SPAN2 tonight starting about 7 pm Eastern. And here's a bit on Zubrin's book from Alan Boyle. And here's a review from Cliff May.

UPDATE: Another review here.

Meanwhile, although I think that corn-based ethanol is a bad deal, that doesn't mean that all biofuels are bad. For example, cellulosic ethanol looks promising. And Zubrin told me a while back that you can make methanol out of kudzu, which will certainly appeal to folks in my neck of the woods.

A SURPRISE MOVE BY THE NLRB on employee Internet use.

AN INTERVIEW with General Petraeus.

HUFFINGTON POST: Giuliani's Exoneration Over Expense Scandal Falls On Deaf Ears. "Over the past several weeks, Rudy Giuliani's presidential aspirations have been weighed down by allegations that he hid trip expenses to see then-mistress Judith Nathan by billing them to obscure city agencies. Now, however, a new review of records has partially exonerated Giuliani for what was widely perceived to be a cover-up. And conservatives and even impartial observers are bemoaning that the scandal received far more attention compared to the revelations of innocence. "

BEN SMITH: Should Republicans distrust Obama?

I dunno, is he a politician? Plus, thoughts on experience.

A LOOK AT lawfare in Israel. "While the soldiers and general public view the war as a failure, one sector of Israeli society sees the war as a great triumph. For Israel's legal establishment, the war was a great victory. It was a war in which its members asserted their dominance over Israel's political and military leadership. . . . Given the contrast between Mandelblit's and Mazuz's view of the war as a triumph and the public's view of the war as a failure, it is worth considering whether there is a connection between the unprecedented 'lawyerization' of the war in Lebanon and the fact that Israel lost the war." Lawyers are fine in their place. Which has its limits. Overlawyering war is likely to lead, over time, to the position that all laws of war are productive of defeat and the product of self-interested behavior by special interests. That is not a desirable outcome.

LEGAL HARASSMENT: Department of Sartorial Intimidation. The intimidation is entirely intentional. I'd like to see some turnabout on issues like this.

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION: Sarkozy in Afghanistan.

A HOLIDAY VIDEO FROM FRED THOMPSON. Rather different from Hillary's or Huckabee's approaches.

THERE'S A FREE MARK STEYN! BLOG, complete with a list of things you can do to help.

GOOD NEWS FOR PROCRASTINATORS: Reader Dean Knight emailed yesterday that Amazon was offering shipping as late as Sunday afternoon for Amazon Prime members with delivery on Monday. I didn't get the email that he got, but I discovered that this shipping schedule on Amazon only shows the Saturday 4 pm cutoff unless you're logged in, but then, if you're an Amazon Prime member, it shows the Sunday 2 pm (Eastern) deadline instead. So you're not out of luck yet, though I wouldn't wait until the last minute for anything that really matters. No system is perfect, and this is pretty late.

HERE'S A REVIEW of Bob Zubrin's Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.

IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT! "A woman stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife following an argument that began when she accused him of opening a Christmas present early, authorities said Friday."

SUDDEN DIVORCE SYNDROME.

OUCH:

"Who is your favorite author?" Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

"My favorite author is C. S. Lewis," she said.

If you're gonna pander that shamelessly, you've got to be able to read the crowd.

UPDATE: Huckabee hears a who. "I hope he does not read 'The Butter Battle Book.'"

REMEMBER, IT'S THE OTHER ROGER SIMON: More Doubts Raised About The Politico's Thompson Article. An interview with the fire chief, plus an editor who says "no comment."

UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of going out and interviewing people mentioned in questionable media accounts. And the less I think some "journalists" will be pleased with the results.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader says that The Politico missed the real story -- Thompson's refusal to pander:

AKD: What will you do for the farmers of Bremer County?

FT: (laughs)

AKD: You knew this was coming, right?

FT: I would continue to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I’ve been looking all over Iowa for a bad steak and I can’t find it. Been trying my best. It’s not a matter of what I would do for the farmers. Farmers are not looking for a president to hand them something. Farmers want fair treatment and a chance to prosper in a free economy and that’s what I would help ensure. There’s a lot of programs we’ve got out there, some of which are good programs, some of which are not. And I think that we need to work our way through that and make sure we’re doing what’s good for the country, not just the farmers, not just the people of Iowa, not just the people of Tennessee. But good for the country. A sound policy that makes sense. I think there’s a lot more that we could do for the working farmer in terms of ecological programs and environmental programs - land conservation, soil conservation - that would be fair and it would be beneficial to the nation and to Iowa and to our country. We’re going to have to phase out the corporate welfare system we’ve got, however. There are extremely rich people living in skyscrapers in Manhattan that are receiving subsidy payments. I think that’s wrong. I’d put a stop to that if it was within my power. That still continues in this latest Farm Bill and it’s not right. There ought to be a cutoff at some level and it’s not right ot have millionaires receiving farm subsidies.

Non-pandering in Iowa? There's a man-bites dog story. This seems like it should have been bigger news.

WHEN DID THE FRENCH BECOME a bunch of prudes? I blame Chirac. Plus, a surprise appearance by Cruella de Ville.

SINUS PROBLEMS? Wash them away! Can it really be that simple? (Via NewsAlert).

UPDATE: Maybe it is. I've gotten a lot of emails like this one from Evan Maxwell:

I doubted, then I tried and damn, it works.

I've had sinus infections at least once a year for more than a decade. I started the first of three surgeries to correct the problem but quit after one, once I learned the process was marginally successful for most folks and often needed to be repeated every three or four years. So I treated with antibiotics and had a low-grade problem most of the time.

Then my old college roommate, a vet, prescribed NeilMed, which is kind of a Neti pot on steroids, using a plastic bottle to boost the pressure. I haven't had a sinus outbreak in almost two years and my breathing generally is better.

Once a day seems to work but I think you can use the system more often if you want.

Yogis are no fools, even if they dress funny sometimes.

That's true.

MORE: An email from a "longtime reader who is an ENT doc." Click "read more" to read it.

Read More ?

HARRY REID FLIPFLOPS ON THE SURGE. A failure? No, it's helped!

December 21, 2007

HDTV ON SATELLITE VS. CABLE: Some thoughts and a request for your experiences.

HEH: Radio stations want Congress to look into major label recording contracts. They're just five years behind Ken Layne. "What happens when an industry mistreats its customers and its suppliers? When 8,999 of 9,000 audits show shoddy accounting practices?"

PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DRUGS for professors? Some would say it's about time . . . .

QUESTIONS ABOUT blogs and privacy.

QUESTION-PLANTING in Canada? "Those are the questions that the CBC wants us to ask tomorrow."

UPDATE: More planting in America?

SOME THOUGHTS ON dashboard design from Mike Allen.

ABU MUQAWAMA ON the exodus of the captains: "There is so much that is absolutely %$#@ed in the way the U.S. Army is handling its young officers that it might take decades to fix this." Somebody should start.

UPDATE: A lengthy email from reader Patrick Walsh. Click "read more" to read it.

LATER: A couple of responses to Walsh, also after the jump.

Read More ?

SASQUATCHES AND SKUNK APES: Monster-spotting in North America.

POLITICO: Witnesses recall Romney-MLK march.

Well, fine. But my dad marched with Martin Luther King, too -- not that he was famous enough for anyone to notice -- but I didn't see it, and I never claimed I did. Romney seems to have suffered from politicians' disease, where it's not enough to report that something happened, you have to report it in a way that puts you in the story. Trouble is, he wasn't in the story. Is that a big deal? Not really, I guess. But it was an unforced error at a crucial time and it underscores the feeling a lot of people have that Romney's just a bit too airbrushed to be true.

"SAFE" VS. PROMISCUOUS web browsers.

ANOTHER SURGE, this time in consumer spending.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: A PorkBusters letter to President Bush on the Omnibus Bill and earmarks:

This past week, Congress passed an omnibus spending bill that will soon be presented for your signature. While it is consistent with the total budget targets your administration has set, the 3,417 pages of the bill and associated reports are bloated by more than 9,000 earmarks which were subjected to little or no review during the scant 24 hours between the publishing of the bill text and the House voting to pass it. When combined with the more than 2,000 earmarks in the Defense Appropriations Bill this Congress has churned out over 11,000 earmarks this year. The vast majority of these earmarks do not even appear in the legislative text, but rather are buried in the committee reports that accompany the bill, further removing them from proper review and scrutiny. While the total number of earmarks is down compared to record highs and there is increased transparency, there are still far too many to be effectively vetted.

The rushed way in which Congress passed the omnibus - one of the largest pieces of legislation ever considered - made a mockery of our legislative process, and Congress itself bears the responsibility and shame for that. But you have the power to send a message both to Congress and the American people that the waste and corrupting influence of earmarks will not be tolerated. A December 18 legal analysis by the Congressional Research Service concluded that "because the language of committee reports do not meet the procedural requirements of Article I of the Constitution -- specifically, bicameralism and presentment - they are not laws and, therefore, are not legally binding on executive agencies... Given both the implied legal and constitutional authority as well as the long-standing accepted process of Presidents, it appears that a President can, if he so chooses, issue an executive order with respect to earmarks contained solely in committee reports and not in any way incorporated into the legislative text."

On December 20, you stated that you were "instructing the budget director to review options for dealing with the wasteful spending in the omnibus bill." We applaud you for this leadership, and ask that you follow through by issuing an executive order formally directing all Federal agencies to ignore non-legislative earmarks tucked into committee reports and statements of managers. Such an action is within your Constitutional powers, and would strike a blow for fiscal responsibility now while setting a valuable precedent for the future.

Lots of signatories at the link.

UPDATE: Coverage in The Wall Street Journal!

SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION IN PUBLIC LIFE that Mike Huckabee might have profited from.

OKAY, I'M A BIG FAN OF COMPACT FLUORESCENT BULBS -- and the Kossacks are still way behind the Insta-readers.

But the gradual ban on incandescent bulbs in the new energy bill is just asinine: "Incandescent light bulbs will begin to be phased out in 2012, with a complete ban finalized in 2014. Manufacturers will be forced to switch to compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, which can cost more than six times as much as the common incandescent bulb."

Let's show we're serious about energy conservation, by forcing members of Congress to fly commercial instead of on government executive jets. . . .

ROMNEY: Looking pretty lame on the MLK front.

I'M SHOCKED: Rudy’s security expenses scandal turns out to be mostly crap?

VIDEO: Fred Thompson responds to The Politico on the hat story. "Just remember...we don't raise our hands when we're told to, and we don't wear any hats, unless they're our own." Bob Owens observes that Thompson's video is funny, but The Politico's stonewalling is not. The story's also leaking out into the journalism press.

BACK TO THE FUTURE IN EUROPE: "In fact, the planned ratification of the Lisbon Treaty smacks of old Europe - when the ruling elite got its way regardless of the wishes of the people over whom it ruled." Yes, much of the E.U. project has seemed to me like an effort to bring back the transnational aristocracy that ran Europe before World War I. And that certainly worked out well . . . .

LIMBAUGH GOES AFTER HUCKABEE: I told you attacking him was a bad idea. That would be like Hillary going after Oprah.

UPDATE: Ouch: "I believe this Rush-bashing incident may turn out to be Huckabee’s Howard Dean scream moment."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Huckabee's Chip Saltsman lays on the love for Limbaugh: "We have nothing but respect for Rush Limbaugh and know that he's a big part of the conservative movement in this country. That's one person's opinion in DC, but it doesn't represent the view of the Huckabee campaign. I can only hope we'll get a chance to talk to Rush and make sure that he knows that's not coming from us."

ANN ALTHOUSE on Nickelodeon, Jamie Lynn Spears, and Zoey 101.

IN THE MAIL: Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, featuring short stories by Orson Scott Card, Cory Doctorow, George R.R. Martin, and more.

JUDICIALIZING WARFARE: "Ah yes, the new 'rules of the game' — which, you might notice, don't include winning."

BELGIUM ARRESTS 14 in terror probe.

QUIET BACKTRACKING on the Rudy expense story.

ONE STEP FORWARD: Another Iraq dispatch from Michael Yon.

DESTROYING ANTHRAX TOXIN with carbon nanotubes.

JETSONS STYLING and 300 mpg -- a test drive of the Aptera car by the Popular Mechanics folks. "It's better than driving a Lamborghini."

SOME POLL SKEPTICISM from John Podhoretz.

THE AMAZON MAILBOTS ARE REMINDING ME that you can still order as late as 4 pm eastern time tomorrow and get it by Christmas Eve, God and UPS willing. I've had good luck -- only one present still hasn't arrived, and it'll probably get here -- but if I were planning on having stuff show up Christmas Eve I'd want to have a backup plan, just in case . . . .

Or there's always a gift certificate. They email those.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe they're right to point this out: "35 million Americans haven't started Christmas shopping yet. Thank God He created Fed Ex on the 8th day. " And it arrived the morning of the 9th! Absolutely, positively!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dean Knight emails: "Glen, don't know about you, but I got a bot from Amazon this morning saying, as a Prime customer, I have until 12 Noon Pacific time Sunday to order and get it Christmas Eve. Guess you don't order enough from them. Ha!" I feel sorry for anyone who orders more than I do.

MICKEY KAUS: "Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electorate is splitting into two diverging parts--people who follow politics and people who don't--with the people who follow politics much better informed than they were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don't follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. . . . But there's a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn't anymore."

A FRED THOMPSON ENDORSEMENT from Bob Krumm. "Fred Thompson won. That didn’t surprise me. What I didn’t suspect was how well John McCain placed according to my analytical estimation."

PATRICK HEALY:

I just got a phone call — unprompted — from Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democratic candidate for president, blasting Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying she would withdraw nearly all American troops from Iraq within a year of beginning redeployment.

“Senator Clinton’s comments are a stunning flip-flop — she’s been saying she would keep troops in Iraq for five years, until 2013, and now she comes up with an inconsistent, incredible turnaround,” Mr. Richardson said.

Richardson must think that his shot at being Hillary's running mate -- or, rather, of Hillary being in a position to have a running mate -- is looking iffy. He's been quite gentle with her up to now.

AND HE EARNED EVERY PENNY: "Russian president Vladimir Putin, whose alleged accumulated wealth of $40bn would make him Europe's richest man."

HOMELAND SECURITY IS A (SOMETIMES CRUEL) JOKE -- and Tom Maguire notes that it's been that way since before Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias started to pay attention.

I actually remember something like that happening to an English graduate student and his family who lived across the street from us at Holden Green when I was a kid.

Plus, this crucial distinction: "In fascism, you're persecuted because of who you are and who your parents were. In an American airport, you're persecuted because you're there."

December 20, 2007

OUTED.

THAT DOESN'T SEEM SMART: Huckabee insider disses Rush Limbaugh.

A LOOK AT Argentina, Iran, and nuclear weapons.

GPS UDPATE: So the GPS that I ordered -- this one -- showed up the other day. I've had it on the dash for a couple of days, just to see how it works. Pretty well. The maps are clear and so far seem entirely accurate. The routing doesn't always choose my regular routes from place to place -- which may be a flaw in the device but is more likely a flaw in my regular routes -- and when I was stuck in traffic on Kingston Pike it found me a shortcut through a subdivision that I didn't realize connected through to another main road. The voice directions are clear and come in plenty of time to make turns. It's easy to use -- I haven't even looked at the manual, which, lamely, but typically these days is on a CD not in a print version. I think I'm glad that I sprung for the wider screen model -- I'm sure that the cheaper nuvi 350 is plenty good, as lots of readers enthusiastically endorsed it -- but the big screen does seem exceptionally clear. Haven't really had a chance to test out the traffic receiver yet.

And apparently I'm riding a trend as sales of GPS devices are way up this season. Well, they've gotten cheap enough, and good enough, that even the people who were holding back are starting to buy them. That's me!

HOW TO DRAW TRAFFIC AND COMMENTERS OUT OF THE WOODWORK: Do what Megan McArdle has done, and repeatedly criticize Ron Paul on the gold standard.

UPDATE: I think they'll soon abandon her for Stephen Green.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Charles Johnson emails: "If you really want to stir up the Paulians, just post a picture of him with Don Black of Stormfront."

WEBLOGS VS. THE NEW YORK TIMES: Dave Winer bet on Weblogs and -- sort of -- wins. But Rogers Cadenhead says that both lost.

TOM TANCREDO: Polka is child abuse. With its own category in the Grammies.

BELDAR ENDORSES FRED THOMPSON.

IF YOU MISSED IT ON XM RADIO, you can hear the latest edition of PJM Political online.

HOW TO MAKE HUNTING POLITICALLY CORRECT: Call yourself a committed locavore.

LINDA ELLERBEE AND SEX: Bad marketing? "I wouldn't want my kids to learn the facts of life from Linda Ellerbee."

UPDATE: Reader Gerald Dearing sees an upside: "Linda Ellerbee teaching kids the facts of life? Could lead to a resurgence of abstinence!!!"

MORE: Reader Chuck Pelto emails: "Another reason to kill your television."

RON PAUL: Bad for both parties? One can only hope . . . .

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, sadistic minions of the state would torture those who got out of line with cruel electric shocks. And they were right!

A state report identifies multiple failures by staff members of a group home that allowed two emotionally disturbed teenagers to be given dozens of electrical shocks at the direction of a caller posing as a supervisor.
more stories like this

The report says none of the six staff members in a Stoughton residence run by the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center on the night of Aug. 26 acted to stop the harrowing events for three hours, despite ample reasons to doubt the validity of the caller's instructions to wake the boys in the middle of the night and administer painful shock treatments, at times while their arms and legs were bound.

I blame Dick Cheney and the neocons.

OH, GOOD, MORE NANNY-STATERS IN THE RACE: Bloomberg & Hagel talking about a third-party run? Hagel's got no GOP support, and Bloomberg is just Rudy Giuliani without Rudy's virtues. I can't imagine that they'd pull many Republican votes -- my guess is they'd hurt the Democrats more, but I think that they're unlikely to catch fire with very many people regardless, as neither has much in the way of charisma.

UPDATE: TigerHawk: "Good news for the Republicans, I would say. In particular, the regular running of advertisements with Hagel's profoundly incorrect predictions about 'the surge' ('This is a dangerously wrong-headed strategy that will drive America deeper into an unwinnable swamp at a great cost... We cannot escape the reality that there will be no military solution in Iraq') should both interdict Republican defections to Bloomberg and promote Democratic ones."

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Hagel kiss of death?

TANCREDO DROPS OUT, endorses Romney.

MORE ON GROWTH AND STAGNATION among lawprof blogs.

WHAT BILL CLINTON AND VLADIMIR PUTIN have in common. An amusing pair of photos.

Plus, who knew that Putin was so literary?

UPDATE: More on Putin here.

MOVING THE GOALPOSTS? I think this is rather unfair to the netroots crowd.

COINCIDENCE? We talk to Huckabee, he surges in the polls. We talk to McCain, he surges in the polls. Rudy, Fred, what are you waiting for?

UPDATE: An emailer asks, what about Mitt? We interviewed him just about a year ago.

IRAQ ELECTRICAL POWER hits postwar high.

Much more here, courtesy of Michael Yon.

WHERE DO I ORDER ONE? Toshiba's home nuclear reactor.

UPDATE: Reader M. Simon says he can't find any confirmation from Toshiba, and suggests that this is a hoax. Too bad, if so.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dave Moelling emails: "The Toshiba mini reactor is for real. They’ve been having some discussions with remote towns in Alaska. It’s an updated version of the old Army mobile reactors from the 1950’s that were used in Greenland and Antarctica. The idea is to have a very stable, safe plant with a very long life without refueling. The real market is future industrial applications."

And reader Thomas Wunderlin of Arctic Green Energy writes: "This is decidedly not a hoax. The first installation is slated for Alaska. Here are a couple of links:" Link 1, Link 2.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Matt Szekely sends this 2005 New York Times report.

AND THAT'S EVEN WITHOUT COUNTING THE SPEARS FAMILY: U.S. fertility rate on upswing.

THE TWO MANOLOS are getting along better than the two Roger Simons.

DON SURBER SPOTS a genuine Iraq quagmire.

CLINTON LAUNCHES Obama attack websites.

SCALIA LECTURES EUROPEANS on jurisprudence.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE NEW HILLARY AD: "Isn't this like when you get presents from family members and you know they charged it on your credit card?"

HOWARD KURTZ: "Just back from Iowa, and I've got a theory about why Hillary Clinton has been having a difficult time. It's because she is the issue." Plus, an Al Gore / Hillary comparison.

THE JAMIE LYNN SPEARS STORY occasions a look at statutory rape law. I agree that the laws in that area offer great potential for injustice.

ROGER SIMON ON ROGER SIMON: "Having viewed the video, I can say this: I don't know what the hell the other Roger Simon was talking about."

CHRIS CUOMO on America's "inherent racism." (Via Extreme Mortman.)

IN THE MAIL: Roy Gutman's How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan. Looks interesting.

WATCH OUT, POLITICO: Bob Owens is on the case.

AN INTERESTING PIECE in the Boston Globe, by Nasser Weddaddy:

THE MUSLIM new year has come in with a bang. On the eve of the high holiday of Eid Al-Adha, explosions abound. Outside Beirut a car bomb kills four. A double-blast in Quetta, Pakistan, destroys eight lives. Twin suicide bombings in Iraq's Diyala Province murder 26, including six women and children. Two bombers in Algiers, one a grandfather, claim over 35 victims.
more stories like this

This year-end killing spree - whose victims were nearly all Muslim - has again revealed a profound failure to stop violent extremism across the Muslim world. The international community, increasingly numb to a steady tide of slaughter in Muslim lands, has little to say. Muslim leaders offer a ritual disclaimer that the radicals don't represent Islam - a "religion of peace" - and then retreat into silence.

We have failed to offer a robust response to the brutal wave of human sacrifice. This failure has allowed extremists to garner headlines and define the agenda without meeting an equally passionate response from the moderate center. It is long past time to mount a vigorous campaign against the cult of death and reaffirm a culture of life.

An essential first step is admitting we have a problem.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to reader Jina Hassan for the link.

A BEST-OF-THE-YEAR ROUNDUP.

ROMNEY'S gun problem.

AN AMERICAN imprisoned in Nicaragua Will Hinton says it's unfair.

DEAN BARNETT: To be, or Huckabee. The Republican Party's question. Huckabee as a Jesse Jackson-like practitioner of identity politics?

WASHINGTON POST: Key Setbacks Dim Luster of Democrats' Year.

DOESN'T SOUND LIKE WE'RE HEADING FOR A RECESSION: "Gross domestic product rose at an unrevised 4.9% annual rate July through September, quicker than its solid, 3.8% performance in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday."

BOB KERREY APOLOGIZES TO OBAMA for raising the Muslim issue.

A SURGE OF THEIR OWN: Iraqis take back the streets. As IraqPundit notes, even the Guardian is sounding more positive than Harry Reid these days.

SANTA CLAUS without the beard.

THE TUNGUSKA EXPLOSION: An asteroid strike, according to Sandia, and by a smaller asteroid than had previously been thought possible. “That such a small object can do this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids are something to consider. Their smaller size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we had believed.”

BUT DIDN'T THEY SIGN KYOTO? Germany Cries Foul Over EU Plans to Cut Car Emissions.

GOOD TIMING: "Hillary Rodham Clinton's youngest sibling is a deadbeat dad who owes tens of thousands of dollars in child support to his politically connected ex, The Post has learned." Just what Hillary needs. Is it a plant?

As Mickey Kaus says, sometimes a story is just a story. But why didn't they get this cleaned up? It seems to me that it would be worth tens of thousands to the campaign to keep this story out of the news. (Via JWF).

ROD DREHER ON MIKE HUCKABEE:

I don't want to overdo this. I think it's perfectly fine to be worried about Huckabee's vagueness, and his unpreparedness. I'm worried about these things too, which is a big reason why I can't say I'd vote for him (though honestly, any Republican who finds himself worked up over Huckabee's lack of knowledge about foreign affairs, say, should ask himself if he felt the same way about Gov. Bush in 1999 and 2000, and if not, why not). Still, it's hard to shake the belief that the real problem with Mike Huckabee, as far as the establishment is concerned, is that he's not clubbable.

I'd say just the opposite. I think that Huckabee has gotten a lot of mileage out of being a likable guy. I liked him a lot too when we talked to him. Now that he's moved up in the polls, people are starting to give him the kind of scrutiny that the Giulianis and McCains have been getting all along, and his positions aren't holding up well. As for why people didn't feel that way about Bush in 1999, that's easy -- it was because America was still taking a holiday from history, and foreign affairs and national security didn't seem that important. Maybe we've learned something since then. Had we looked at things in 2000 as we do now, they might have turned out differently.

POLICY LEADER OF THE YEAR: The X-Prize Foundation. Good call.

SAUDI CLERGY turn on Al Qaeda.

MEGAN MCARDLE: "Ron Paul's supporters see the might of his common sense slashing through the doubletalk of the financial solons. I see a really, really smart economist responding to Ron Paul the same way you react to Cousin Mildred when she corners you after Christmas dinner to complain about the flouridation of the water supply."

LAWBLOG STAGNATION? Orin Kerr observes: "In the 2003-06 period, it looked like the blawgosphere -- the part of the blogworld devoted to law blogs -- was expanding rapidly and becoming more and more important. As 2007 comes to an end, however, I think we can see a very different picture for 2007. For the most part this was a year of little growth or even a slight decline among law blogs."

Only so many people are interested in legal matters. Though it seems to me that I've been doing somewhat more law-blogging in the past year than in previous years.

December 19, 2007

AFGHANISTAN: "The U.S. is upset that NATO countries have failed to deliver three infantry battalions, 3,000 trainers and 20 transport and attack helicopters they promised to send."

UPDATE: More on Afghanistan here.

BILAL HUSSEIN UPDATE: The defensive crouch on the use of Iraqi stringers seems well underway.

WHEN IS A GAME CONSOLE not a game console?

AN IRAQ TURNAROUND: "An astonishing turnaround occurred in the Senate on Tuesday: 70 senators voted to fund the Iraq war with a fresh $70 billion and no strings attached. Think about this a moment. Last winter, after Democrats captured the Senate and House, it seemed likely they'd succeed in limiting or ending the Iraq war, probably by setting a firm timetable for withdrawal of American troops. After all, both President Bush and the war itself were highly unpopular. The Democratic triumph in the election made that clear, even to those who doubted opinion polls. And Democrats made the anti-Iraq crusade their top priority in the new Congress. Now, the 70-vote approval of the war by the Senate represents the breathtaking dimension of their failure."

Or of General Petraeus's success.

VIDEO VS. THE POLITICO: You decide.

UPDATE: The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong. Just remember, this is the other Roger Simon. The real Roger Simon would have known there'd be video out there somewhere.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Silly hats.

MORE: A big-picture roundup on questionable reporting. (Bumped).

MARK LEVIN: "Mike Huckabee is now becoming a very divisive figure in the Republican party. It's not his faith or his Merry Christmas commercial that many conservatives question (I certainly don't), but it's his record as governor and his stated positions on the war, foreign policy generally, taxes, spending, and illegal aliens."

A GIULIANI BOOST from Kit Bond.

HOLLYWOOD AT WAR: "The cluelessness on display here is sad. On the other hand, it might have been their way of preparing our correspondent for life on the home front." I doubt it, though, since hardly anyone on the home front actually saw Rendition. No, really: "(Ninth place, with a shockingly bad $4.1 mil). The French have a word for a movie like that, PopWatchers, it's called une bombe."

MERRY CHRISTMAS, Curious George.

A VERY HITCHENS Christmas! (Via Ann Althouse).

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: "How many more will die in 'gun-free' zones before the media start asking why?"

MICKEY KAUS senses a contradiction.

IN OUR PODCAST INTERVIEW EARLIER THIS WEEK, John McCain delivered a lot of I Told You Sos. This YouTube video from 2000 suggests that he might add his assessment of Time Man of the Year Vladimir Putin to that list.

I have my problems with McCain on domestic policy issues, but on national security and foreign policy he's good, and this video makes you wonder how he would have done had he won in 2000. The other striking thing about this video, though, is how much younger both McCain and Bush look. Well, the years since haven't been easy ones.

UPDATE: More here.

BULL DOG PUNDIT: John Edwards deserves the benefit of the doubt.

ELECTRONICS THAT DON'T SUCK: Dr. Mercury emails:

I just read your "Keep It Quiet" article on TCS Daily. I wanted to buy a couple of backup power supplies a few months ago, did some research, and was amazed to find that the Geek Squad supplies from Best Buy actually (gasp!) have a button that lets you turn off the ultra-annoying beeper. If it's daytime (and the room lights aren't on) and my power goes off, I'd never know it except for the little 'click' the power supplies make as the relays engage. Very nice.

I'll buy some as soon as the Christmas traffic disperses.

Plus, a look at the ever-shifting reasons for a "disappointing" shopping season. I'm playing it safe and blaming Dick Cheney.

BETTER BATTERIES WITH NANOWIRES: "'It's not a small improvement,' Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.'"

GIULIANI ON EARMARKS. Glad to see this becoming a campaign issue.

SOME SUGGESTED luxury gifts.

JOHN LEO: "It is slowly dawning on the public that fake hate crimes, like the one just perpetrated by Princeton student Francisco Nava, are quite common on college campuses."

A SURPRISING PRESIDENTIAL ENDORSEMENT, from Frank J. Fleming. "I should note, though, that the most important factor in IMAO endorsing Fred Thompson is that I already have an awesome t-shirt designed for him which will pretty much go to waste if he isn't the nominee. "

Read the whole thing. The Thompson campaign emails: "Frank J’s reasoning is impeccable."

MATH-CHECKING DICK DURBIN. Ouch.

NO FLOATING CROSS from Rudy.

But there are multiple crosses in the background at the end of this Ron Paul Christmas message. Well, sort of.

REMEMBERING THE Citroen CX. A guy who lived up the street from my dad had one, and I thought it was cool until it caught fire one day and burned to a cinder.

GEORGE W. BUSH, CLIMATE-CHANGE HERO:

The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.

* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.

They told me that if George W. Bush were elected, the United States would lag behind the rest of the world on greenhouse gases And they were right!

UPDATE: Actually, if you look at the most recent years the news gets better:

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels decreased by 1.3 percent in 2006, from 5,955 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MMTCO2) in 2005 to 5,877 MMTCO2 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates recently released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

The economy, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), grew by 3.3 percent and energy demand fell by 0.9 percent indicating that energy intensity (energy use per unit of GDP) fell by 4.2 percent. Carbon dioxide intensity (CO2 emission per unit of GDP) fell by 4.5 percent.

The market seems to be doing what Kyoto hasn't. (Somewhat related item here).

THE WAR AGAINST SCIENCE: ""As reported by Science magazine, Congress has cut science funding increases for fiscal year 2008. This comes in spite of the earlier announced presidential initiative to increase funding for basic research to improve the future economic competitiveness of the United States." Nobody tell Chris Mooney.

POWER LINE LOOKS AT THE 1864 DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM, but a reader notes something interesting that they don't highlight. Among the Democrats' complaints about Lincoln is this:

the interference with and denial of the right of the people to bear arms

They don't seem to be talking about state militias, either. (Thanks to Insta-Reader Bruce Stewart for the pointer).

THE JOHN EDWARDS STORY is back up on the Enquirer's website.

LIQUID PORK:

There’s a simple reason that ethanol is popular with politicians: money. Substituting corn ethanol for a large fraction of the gasoline we burn will mean sluicing gushers of cash from more populated states to politically powerful farm states. And a lot of that cash will wind up in the pockets of the big agribusinesses, like Archer Daniels Midland, that dominate ethanol processing—and whose fat checkbooks wield enormous influence in Washington.

Read the whole thing.

SO THEY SENT ME A PRESS RELEASE ON "JUDICIAL HELLHOLES," but now I can't get the song out of my head.

You know where you stand in a hellhole. I guess that's the point, though.

PRINTER INK AT $8,000 a gallon.

I BLAME THE ENVIRONMENT-DESTROYING HALLIBURTON: "An ocean is not the source of the jets emanating from Saturn's moon Enceladus, a new study concludes."

After all, they've already been implicated in Mars scandals.

AN UGLY LOOK AT criminal justice in Japan.

FRENCH TV. FAKE KILLINGS, AND THE AL DURA SCANDAL: Roger Simon interviews Philippe Karsenty, who was sued by French TV for daring to point out that they were engaged in a blood libel supported by bogus video.

HEY, I MADE THE FORBES Web Celeb 25.

THIS WILL BE A BIGGER QUESTION in the general election:

The National Archives is withholding from the public about 2,600 pages of records at President Clinton's direction, despite a public assurance by one of his top aides last month that Mr. Clinton "has not blocked the release of a single document."

Perhaps someone can smuggle out the crucial documents in his/her socks. Apparently, security at the Archives is less than airtight.

THIS IS GOOD NEWS: "After years of development, Nanosolar has announced today that they have shipped their first batch of inexpensive solar panels to the site of their first real-world deployment, a megawatt solar plant being built on the surface of a landfill in eastern Germany."

FROM PAPER PLANES to paper AK-47s.

IN THE MAIL: Glenn Beck's An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems. Amusing cover.

BECOMING A WEB STAR with online lectures:

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

Traditionally, teaching has played second-fiddle to scholarship at many institutions because it can't get external plaudits. I wonder if online course will change that.

GEORGE W. BUSH, "pro-life liberal?"

A VIDEO REPORT on the new Congress.

ANOTHER DEMOCRAT SOUNDING POSITIVE ON IRAQ:

U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly returned from a second trip to Iraq in five months encouraged that the mission there is going better and that by 2009 the U.S. military's role could be primarily as trainers and advisers.

"I feel we've made progress, and the other part is I feel we can see an end game in sight," Donnelly, D-Ind., told reporters on a conference call Tuesday from Washington. "It isn't we just keep plugging away in the hopes something will turn out right. Gen. (David) Petraeus is working a plan and we seem to be heading toward a place where the Iraqis can be self-sustaining and we'll have a smaller presence in the background."

Donnelly's findings were in stark contrast to his visit to Iraq last July, when he said the only positive thing that happened in that country since the beginning of the war in March 2003 was the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

Maybe Harry Reid should give up on giving up.

GEEK THE VOTE: A roundup of candidate policies on science and technology.

HOW CHINA abets genocide in Darfur.

MORE IOWA POLLING PROBLEMS: "The networks could leave the Iowa caucuses to their own perverse, undemocratic and historically misguided devices without making them more perverse and undemocratic. But then how would network polling divisions justify their existence?"

ASK DR. HELEN: Should Alimony Be Abolished?

AMERICANS ARE IN A MORE POSITIVE MOOD, according to this poll. I guess that's because Iraq is going better, and Congress hasn't done anything . . . .

MCCAIN: End the Alternative Minimum Tax.

VERNOR VINGE: What if the Singularity doesn't happen?

You can hear our interview with Vinge here.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Three cheers for retail.

MORE NEWS ON PETER JACKSON'S THE HOBBIT, and I find it a bit disappointing. "Jackson will executive-produce, not direct or write." A few other developments, too -- read the whole thing.

JIHADINETS: Thoughts on terrorism and the Internet.

December 18, 2007

WHEN TERRORISTS GET TO THE AFTERLIFE, THEY'LL FIND THAT NONE OF THEIR 72 WOMEN ARE STILL VIRGINS.

Why? Because of Fred Thompson.

If he's got the guts to run this in Iowa and New Hampshire, he's got my vote . . . .

SOME GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS for college students. How can any dorm room be without a Wi-Fi Rabbit?

UPDATE: Not much love for the wi-fi rabbit here.

HOW CAMPUSES DEAL WITH PHYSICAL THREATS: Badly. If they don't develop some backbone, people will start capitalizing on this in an organized fashion. That would be bad.

IS THIS THE JOHN EDWARDS SCANDAL we've been hearing about? (Via Kaus).

UPDATE: Bill Quick: "Has Clinton minion Ron Burkle finished taking control of the National Enquirer yet?"

ANOTHER UPDATE: "It would be a bigger problem if Edwards had a prayer." Some people can't reach the Enquirer story, but I'm seeing it fine. Here's an excerpt:

The woman linked to Presidential candidate John Edwards in a cheating scandal is more than six months pregnant and telling a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her unborn child, The NATIONAL ENQUIRER has learned exclusively.

Is it true? Hey, it's the Enquirer -- so it's as reliable as the New York Times! I agree with Kaus that it makes no sense for Hillary to be spreading this story. Obama, on the other hand, would benefit from having Edwards out of the picture, giving him the undiluted anti-Hillary vote.

MORE: Denying everything. And now the story's down from the Enquirer site. Kaus: "I don't know why, but you can't be too paranoid when Ron Burkle might be involved."

WELL, GOOD: "The Senate voted Tuesday to provide $70 billion for U.S. military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, handing a victory to President Bush and his GOP allies on Capitol Hill."

TOM MAGUIRE: "That would be 'Mr. Idiot' to you!"

Related post here. "Hey, if Jim Henley can do it, so can I!" Everybody makes mistakes. Also here.

SPEAKING WITH PORKED TONGUE: GOP lawmakers who decry pork take their slices.

RAND SIMBERG ON THE C.I.A.: End it, don't mend it.

APPEARANCE STANDARDS FOR male political candidates.

THIS RECIPE FOR hangover cure pasta sounds like a rough-and-ready (but still yummy) version of this recipe, which is a favorite around our house, though hangovers are vanishingly rare here.

DAVE HOFFMAN interviews George R.R. Martin.

ED MORRISSEY: "Harry Reid doesn't know when to give up, or more precisely, when to give up on giving up." He has not yet begun to surrender!

LUNAR LAND PRICES ARE BOOMING!

UBS strategists said their "esoteric research" of archived news reports suggests lunar property trends may even be a leading indicator of U.S. house prices.

Rising sharply between 1997 and 2001, the cost of a slice of land on the moon suffered a mid-cycle retreat in 2002-03 after the dot.com bubble burst, the bank said.

But prices defied gravity to hit record highs of $37 per acre in December 2005 -- nine months before U.S. housing peaked.

Their fall to earth was a step ahead too, with lunar prices dropping 56 percent to $16 per acre between 2005 and January 2007, the report said.

"Our calculations suggest lunar land prices appear to be a reasonable lead indicator of U.S. house prices by around 12 months. This suggests a trough in U.S. house prices may occur around the beginning of 2008," the bank said.

Sadly, the Moon has not yet suffered from an overbuilding problem. (Via Rand Simberg).

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Schultz emails: "Let’s hope this means the President and Congress will bail out those who bought lunar land at inflated prices. The lunar economy is depending on it!" Heh.

FAUSTA WERTZ on Princeton's phony hate crime. Plus, Tom Maguire looks at the temporally confused Dave Niewert.

MICKEY KAUS: "Provisions buried in the huge omnibus spending bill about to pass Congress gut the program to build a border fence, according to Republicans--and they appear to have a point."

WHY DID NEW LINE CUT A DEAL WITH PETER JACKSON TO PRODUCE THE HOBBIT? "I would suppose one very relevant proximate cause would be Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne trying to save their asses in the wake of the very expensive The Golden Compass cratering very badly at the box office ($40 million in two weeks, with a nearly 66% dropoff in the second weekend — not good news when your production budget is $180 million and you’ve sold off the foreign rights). My guess: it’ll work."

A LOOK AT universal health care in Romania.

GIFT IDEAS from grilling diva Elizabeth Karmel.

A BALI GREENHOUSE UPDATE:

AMID talk of offsetting the hefty carbon footprint of the United Nations climate conference in Bali, organisers missed a large elephant in the room.

The air-conditioning system installed to keep more than 10,000 delegates cool used highly damaging refrigerant gases - as lethal to the atmosphere as 48,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and nearly the equivalent of the emissions of all aircraft used to fly delegates to Indonesia.

With hawk-eyed representatives of more than 100 green organisations present, it was probably the worst place in the world to commit an environmental faux pas.

Well, possibly.

BOOZE AS A TREATMENT FOR COLDS: "Nonetheless, two large studies have found that although moderate drinking will not cure colds, it can help keep them at bay. One, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon in 1993, looked at 391 adults and found that resistance to colds increased with moderate drinking, except in smokers." Plus, this: "The study, in The American Journal of Epidemiology, found no relationship between the incidence of colds and consumption of beer, spirits, Vitamin C or zinc. But drinking 8 to 14 glasses of wine per week, particularly red wine, was linked to as much as a 60 percent reduction in the risk of developing a cold. The scientists suspected this had something to do with the antioxidant properties of wine."

Red wine is good for everything.

BILL ROGGIO: Iraq by the numbers.

FRED THOMPSON: The Pejman endorsement.

JOEL ROSENBERG has been on top of that Minneapolis wrong-house no-knock raid. And yes, he's the same guy who writes fantasy/science fiction novels, but he's also a handgun instructor.

MORE ON CANADA'S HUMAN RIGHTS PROBLEM: "It's odd: Mohamed Elmasry, an apologist for Islamo-fascism, using the same tools as an 'anti-racist' leftist like Richard Warman. At first glance, they may seem like opposites, but they're actually identical: Both are illiberal censors who have found a quirk in our legal system, and are using it to undermine our Western traditions of freedom."

Canadians should start bombarding the Human Rights Commission with complaints about politically correct groups. It's probably still too soon to go for tar and feathers.

PETER JACKSON will be making a movie out of The Hobbit. Cool.

A THOMPSON / EDWARDS surge in Iowa?

UPDATE: Steve Forbes on Rudy Giuliani and the economy.

GALLUP: CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL SINKS TO NEW LOW.

A DEBATE VIDEO REMIX from Mary Katharine Ham.

MARK BAUERLEIN on the adversarial campus.

IN THE MAIL: Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter's new novel, Firstborn. It's funny -- I was just cleaning out my office yesterday and ran across a letter from Clarke from a few years ago and wondered how he was doing. Pretty well, it seems.

COED COMBAT: My University of Tennessee colleague Rosemary Mariner is guestblogging at the Volokh Conspiracy.

ANNE APPLEBAUM compares Saudi Arabia with Apartheid South Africa. I think, however, that she underestimates some aspects of the problem. Too many western feminists respond with things like this: "I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we're all going to hell fast and maybe we are all going to hell fast."

JOHN TIERNEY on smart machines and dumb designers.

I've had some thoughts on the subject myself.

POLITICO: Liberals lose bigtime in budget battle. "This much is clear: Democrats in Congress buckled under pressure from the White House to hold spending near the administration’s specified limit, and they’re poised to give the president more war money with no strings attached. But the buckling didn't stop there."

CHARLES PAUL FREUND: A brutalist bargain.

KERRY HOWLEY on guest worker programs.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! "Republican Presidential candidate Fred Thompson today, upon hearing that rival Ron Paul’s supporters had raised $6 million in 24 hours to commemorate the Boston Tea Party, called on his supporters to match that figure in gun purchases before Christmas to mark George Washington’s victory at the Battle of Trenton."

MICKEY KAUS: "Has anybody updated Patrick Healy's May, 2006 story and calculated the number of days Bill Clinton has spent in Hillary's Washington, D.C. house in the past year (now that it's been officially designated as the place where you live when you live 'with' Hillary)? If you're going to flaunt your home life then people are entitled to examine your home life."

ABC: John McCain -- The Comeback Kid? Hey, where have I heard that before?

GOOD NEWS OR BAD NEWS? Online sales up 18% over last year. That's good, right? Well, not necessarily: "Despite this increase in sales this year, the growth rate for online retailers holiday sales numbers is lower than the increase last holiday season saw. "

MOVING AWAY FROM ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES in Ohio and Colorado. All I can say is, I told you so.

THE G.O.P. in search of itself.

REBECCA ROBERTS: "All of a sudden, Chelsea Clinton is on the campaign trail in Iowa. I have to say I'm surprised. . . . Until her mom started having serious Obama problems, we hadn't heard a peep from her. Either Des Moines in December is a lot more fun than Manhattan, or she's decided her mother really needs her out there."

RIGHT: "Women must stop admiring men who drive sports cars if they want to join the fight against global warming, the Government's chief scientist has urged."

Not gonna happen.

A LOOK AT PATIENTS and evidence-based medicine: "The decisions whether and how to treat a disease ultimately lie with patients, who makes these decisions with their doctors' help. It's a value judgment, and there is no way to measure value. It is not quantifiable in inches, pounds, or miles per hour."

December 17, 2007

RON FOURNIER: "Bill Clinton says Sen. Barack Obama is a callow, highly ambitious political prodigy who is asking voters to 'roll the dice' and elect him president. He should know — that's a fair description of Clinton when he sought the presidency in 1992. The fact that the former president is stealing a page from the same Republican playbook used against him 15 years ago underscores the threat Obama poses to the candidacy of Clinton's wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York."

SOME RECOMMENDED CHRISTMAS GIFTS for under a hundred bucks. And if that's too rich for your blood, here are some recommendations for under 25 bucks.

MORE PROBLEMS for Eliot Spitzer.

MEGAN MCARDLE WONDERS what happened to the wild office party?

STEPHEN BAINBRIDGE: The case against Ron Paul. Significant, as Bainbridge opposed the Iraq war.

THOUGHTS ON TORTURE, from Stuart Taylor. "We've come a long way since September 2002, when Nancy Pelosi, then a House Intelligence Committee member and now the speaker, listened without a peep of protest while being briefed about the CIA's use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on Qaeda leaders."

DONALD SENSING experiences a moment of clarity, at a lower cost than some.

MICKEY KAUS: "The TV networks are screwing around with the already-absurd Iowa caucuses again, using an 'entrance poll' of only 40 precincts (out of more than 3,500) that threatens to manufacture a misleading result."

A DEFENSE OF HILLARY CLINTON, from . . . Rush Limbaugh?

BOB KERREY digs into Obama a bit more. Hey, Obama, Osama, what's the difference? Even Ted Kennedy can't keep things straight.

UPDATE: Allah has video and asks: "Deliberate faux-innocent smear or well-meaning ignoramus? I’m inclined towards the latter just because it seems so hapless and heavy-handed that if it was deliberate it’d be more artfully done. Dropping the phrase 'Islamic manchurian candidate' in the midst of his 'apology'? C’mon." Yeah, it's gotta be innocent, then.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More at the Huffington Post.

SELECTIVE FEAR OF RELIGION? Demonstrating, I guess, that it's better to be feared than to be loved. But then, they say you always hurt the one you love . . . .

WILL NANOTECHNOLOGY MEDICINE BE AFFORDABLE? Ultimately, I think it will be dirt-cheap. How long it takes to get to "ultimately," however, depends on a lot of policy issues.

WAS IT EVER REALLY GONE? The return of the partisan press.

HERE DUMBS the judge?

TWO WORDS THAT NEVER BELONGED TOGETHER: Remembering the Chrysler Maserati TC.

POPULAR MECHANICS' COVER STORY this month is on the growth of the surveillance society.

And my column, entitled Watching the Watchers, talks about the importance of surveilling right back.

UPDATE: Hey, I got Slashdotted! (Bumped).

TWO CLIMATE SCIENTISTS WILL DEBATE GLOBAL WARMING on Blog Talk Radio at 3 pm Eastern/ 2 central.

THE OTHER FALLUJAH REPORTER: Michael Totten busts some journalistic malpractice.

AND HUCKABEE'S NOT EVEN PRESIDENT YET: Death Ray Replaced by Voice of God.

GUESS THE TOP THREE FINISHERS IN IOWA AND NEW HAMPSHIRE and you can win an iPhone. So even as the country loses, you'll win!

PRINCETON ASSAULT WAS A HOAX, according to a report in the Daily Princetonian. Another fake hate crime, I guess. Congrats to Fausta's commenters, who smelled it first. To me, the concussion made a hoax seem unlikely, but that just proves that some people will go to great lengths, I guess.

OMNIBUSTING: A blog aimed at restoring a bit of sanity to the omnibus appropriations process.

GETTING CLOSER to Europa. Is there life under the ice?

H.E.D.G.E. -- a subprime country song from Merle Hazard.

Plus, Merle Hazard meets Arthur Laffer and is moved to song.

GOOGLE: Robber barons?

CAMPAIGN PHOTOS -- UNFAIR TO WOMEN? "We make high demands on women. A picture like this of a male candidate would barely register. Fred Thompson always looks this bad, and people seem to think he's handsome." But if Fred went from apparently smooth-skinned to wrinkly overnight, people would notice.

UPDATE: Reader Thomas S. Baker emails:

I disagree that male candidates aren't held to a similar standard regarding their appearance. Remember all the media attention regarding John Kerry and his alleged botox injections?

I would also note that since the advent of television, we haven't elected any bald presidents. (President Ford was bald, but not elected.).

Bad news for Thompson and McCain. Er, and Joe Biden.

HAPPILY, NO ONE WAS KILLED: Minn. man shoots cops after SWAT team kicks down wrong door. If you're going to kick down a door, it had better be the right door.

BELL LABS IS GONE: Academia steps in.

TOM FRIEDMAN'S carbon footprint.

But it plays well with the ladies.

IN THE MAIL: Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. You'll never guess which blogosphere fave blurbed it.

TIM HAMES IN THE LONDON TIMES: Iraq: The best story of the year.

MAKE YOUR OWN ANDROID, complete with jealousy software.

EARMARKS AND THE OMNIBUS SPENDING BILL: The battle begins.

The Glenn and Helen Show: John McCain in the Home Stretch

The Iowa Caucuses are just around the corner, and we thought it was a good time to catch up with Senator John McCain, who's seeking the Republican nomination for President. (Our earlier interview with Sen. McCain is here.) We talked about the election, Supreme Court appointments, the Second Amendment, Iraq, and much, much more -- including whether the CIA should be abolished, or just shaken up. McCain was rested, relaxed, confident, and full of I-told-you-sos, but then he was staying in a Holiday Inn Express when we talked to him.

You can listen directly -- no downloading needed -- by going here and clicking on the gray Flash player. You can download the file and listen to it at your leisure by clicking right here. And you can get a lo-fi version suitable for dialup by going here and selecting lo-fi. Plus, there's a free subscription available via iTunes -- why wouldn't you want one?

This podcast was brought to you by Volvo Automobiles. Music is by Todd Steed and the Suns of Phere.

GEORGE WILL ON THE SUBPRIME MESS: Not bad, but not up to the standards of Iowahawk.

VICTOR FLATT looks at greenhouse related legislative proposals.

MICKEY KAUS ON STRIKING WRITERS' YOUTUBE VIDEOS: "The video is funnier than most TV comedies. It reportedly got 400,000 hits--more than many cable shows. It was put up on the Web by unpaid performers seemingly just for the hell of it (and maybe the exposure). Doesn't that sort of make Marc Andreesen and Rob Long's point about the tenuous positon of both Hollywood and the Writers Guild? ... It's as if the Linotype operators went on strike and decided to publish their story in four color offset!"

PLANNING FOR High School militia classes.

A READER ASKED FOR A LIST of my "They told me if George W. Bush were re-elected" posts. Here it is. Enjoy!

December 16, 2007

IN TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES, Adam Freedman looks at the role of commas in the Second Amendment. He's right that people shouldn't make too much of this -- in fact, if I recall correctly the punctuation wasn't the same in front of all the ratifying states -- but this part, while not exactly wrong, stops short of the conclusion:

Likewise, when the justices finish diagramming the Second Amendment, they should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the originalist arguments to the contrary.

It's short of the conclusion because he misses a key point: the Framers considered an armed populace important, but didn't trust the government -- at either the state or federal levels -- to arm the people. Since the armed populace (the "militia" was said to consist of "the body of the people") was essential as a check on government power, the government couldn't be allowed to disarm it by neglect. Thus, the Second Amendment may be "about protecting militias," but it does so by keeping the populace armed. In fact, Brannon Denning and I expanded on this point at more length in this article from the William and Mary Bill of Rights Law Journal a few years ago. Click "read more" for an excerpt.

UPDATE: Comments from Eugene Volokh. (Bumped).

Read More ?

TAYLOR OWEN thinks Huckabee may be okay. Meanwhile, Bill Quick writes: "I’ve been suspicious of the almost overnight groundswell for Huckabee, and I think there may be some huge surprises coming in Iowa."

CHRISTMAS GIFT BOOKS for kids.

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GEORGE W. BUSH WERE RE-ELECTED, unaccountable death squads would terrorize American cities, protected by official silence. And they were right!

GREG MANKIW looks at current vs. historical tax rates: "Notice that all groups are paying lower tax rates than the historical average. But in contrast to some popular perceptions, the change is not concentrated among the upper income groups. In fact, the opposite is true."

IT'S THE 234TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOSTON TEA PARTY, and Rand Simberg has some thoughts.

ADVICE ON HOOKING UP HOME THEATERS. "How much do you need to spend on cables? Ah, the age-old question--and one that you should never let a chain store's salesman answer for you." And links back to the whole home-theater how-to series.

Plus, space opera from Elizabeth Bear.

UPDATE: Reader M. Simon emails: "'Hooking Up In Home theaters' Is what I first read. Then I asked, 'how the heck do you do that'? I want to get in on that. Then I read more carefully. You can not underestimate my disappointment. :-)" Just put on a movie that your wife likes. It seems to have worked for this guy. . . .

JUSTICE William Jefferson Clinton.

HEH: Cindy Sheehan: Impeach Pelosi for collaboration with Bush administration on torture. You can't actually impeach a member of Congress, though. The correct remedy is expulsion by the member's house. (Via Weasel Zippers).

BIRD FLU IN PAKISTAN, the World Health Organization is investigating.

A QUESTION: "Why Did Bob Kerrey Mention Obama's Middle Name -- 'Hussein'?"

VIOLENCE IN IRAQ is at the lowest level since 2004.

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Sadly, you don't have to:

A video of a Gucci- and Louis Vuitton-clad politician attacking capitalism then struggling to explain how his luxurious clothes square with his socialist beliefs has become an instant YouTube hit in Venezuela.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Pedro Carreno was momentarily at a loss for words when a journalist interrupted his speech and asked if it was not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and a tie made by Parisian luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.

He should be sent to a special part of Guantanamo Bay supervised by The Manolo.

BRIAN PICKRELL: "With the Iowa Caucuses just a few weeks away, and with the final debates of both parties in the bag, it’s once again time to look at the situation on the ground here in Iowa."

INDEED: "What had seemed gospel in some quarters--Iraq's 'civil war' is unstoppable and American armed forces cannot do anything to diminish the fratricidal conflict--looks less certain today. "

PERRY DE HAVILLAND POINTS TO a "splendiferous expression of the manifest superiority of western civilisation." Plus comic relief.

HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND DENIAL, in Canada. "This dysfunctional venom does not come from Christian, Jew, Hindu or Buddhist and fatuous relativism will only blind the foolish. It is time for free discussion in this free country, whether it offends or not."

JOHN TIERNEY: Contrarians at Bali: "We always need contrarians to challenge orthrodoxy, so it’s good to see a few scientists raising questions about the established wisdom at the Bali conference on climate. But I’m such a contrarian myself that I have to quibble with them."

IMPORTANT THOUGHTS on cheap, macho watches, from Tom Smith.

SOME RECOMMENDED GIFTS for under fifty bucks. I love it that you can get DVD players for $36.99.

UPDATE: Reader Josh Eno emails: "I'd rather pay $15 for a National Geographic subscription directly from
nationalgeograpic.com than pay $34 through Amazon. Give your readers a tip and save them $19."

Um okay, but that link looks a bit iffy. This one, on the other hand, offers the good price. Funny, in my (limited) experience the magazine subscriptions through Amazon have been cheaper.

ADVICE TO NEW BLOGGERS from Jorn Barger, who coined the term "weblog." I like this one: "If you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility." But then, I would, wouldn't I? Plus this: "Being truly yourself is always hipper than suppressing a link just because it's not trendy enough. Your readers need to get to know you."

GAIA IS YOUR FUEHRER: "'When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it,' he says. 'This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not.'"

They told me that if George W. Bush were re-elected, fearmongering would be the end of democracy. And they were right!

JOE LIEBERMAN endorses John McCain. Hmm. A McCain-Lieberman unity ticket?

UPDATE: On McCain-Lieberman, Stephen Green writes: "Dude, I called that one almost two weeks ago." Nice, but InstaPundit reader Richard Whitten called it in July of 2004.

A LEGAL ANALYSIS of the Sony BMG rootkit incident.

PUSH-POLLING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE.

NASA: Warp drive, when?

A REPORT ON upgrading from Vista to XP: "Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. . . . In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up." Congratulations, Microsoft!

THANK YOU for not existing.

BLOGGING MITT ROMNEY on Meet the Press.

UPDATE: A false claim of an NRA endorsement. That's not good.

A SUBPRIME CRI DE COEUR from Iowahawk: Please don't destroy my American dream!

FUNDRAISING: Fred Thompson beat his 2400 donors in 24 hours goal. And Ron Paul has raised $2.1 million since midnight. This tells you that there are a lot of people out there who aren't too happy with the frontrunners.

UPDATE: This may be the secret to Paul's sudden surge . . . .

IN THE MAIL: John Ringo's Vorpal Blade. Also, John Ringo's Sister Time.

MICKEY KAUS: "Obama goes after Edwards: Hillary's not even Obama's main rival anymore?"

UPDATE: Brendan Loy isn't happy: Edwards vs. Huckabee? Shoot me now.

Huckabee was a nice, likeable guy when we talked to him. But honestly, I think I'd vote for Edwards over Huckabee, though I'd feel dirty the next morning. And I'd be even more likely to vote for Hillary or Obama.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch: "Huckabee is the Harriet Miers of the presidential candidates. Two words: under... qualified."

And some related thoughts from Rand Simberg.

MORE: One of Rand Simberg's commenters wants to know why I'd prefer Edwards over Huckabee. Basically, I believe that both would have similar socialist/populist programs, but that Republicans would combine against Edwards' programs, producing useful gridlock. On the other hand, Dems would be only too happy to go along with Huckabee's programs, and too many Republicans might do so too, out of party loyalty. The main thing Huckabee has, policy wise, that Edwards doesn't is that he favors Second Amendment rights, but I wonder if he wouldn't jettison them in some sort of "for the children" compromise at a crucial point, knowing that he'd get media adulation for doing so. Plus, the more I watch him operation, the more Clintonian his campaign seems. Edwards', on the other hand, is just inept, which suggests that he wouldn't be very scary in office. And both would probably be equally Carteresque in foreign policy.

TENNESSEE RECONSIDERS merit-based scholarships. Personally, I think that students should be rewarded for working hard and being smart. Need-based financial aid is fine, too -- but assistance based on merit sends an important message.

STALIN REDUX: "A Russian opposition activist has been sent to a psychiatric hospital by authorities a day before a planned demonstration. Artem Basyrov's detention is the latest in a series of incidents suggesting a punitive Soviet-era practice is being revived under president Vladimir Putin."

DICK MORRIS: Why are the wheels coming off the Clinton bandwagon?

WASHINGTON POST: Poll shows more optimism on war.

GLENN SACKS ON Stephen Baskerville's Taken Into Custody.

HUCKABEE: Falsely claiming a theology degree.

That's not cool.

DAVE KOPEL on the media and copycat killers.

MORE THOUGHTS ON THE REPORTED hate crimes at Princeton. I'll just note that they told me if George W. Bush were reelected, unpopular groups would be subject to beatings and intimidation. And they were right!

And as a commenter notes, this would get more attention if it had involved a noose on a doorknob even though in this case, according to the reports, we have an actual physical assault and beating.

UPDATE: Princeton resident Fausta Wertz notes that there's been no coverage in the town paper.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Further thoughts from Prof. Tom Smith.

MORE: Some of Fausta's commenters think this is a hoax. That's always possible with "hate crime" reports, of course (see the Redstate item linked at the top of this post), but this one did involve a concussion, which probably wasn't fake. At any rate, media skepticism about possible hoaxes -- as another commenter notes -- seems absent whenever there's a noose involved.

STILL MORE: But Fausta's commenters turn out to be right. Jeez. I think hate-crime hoaxes should be punished severely; they cause as much fear and hate as the real thing, oftentimes.

THIS SOUNDS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

Scientists from The University of Manchester have pioneered new ways of tweaking the molecular structure of antibiotics -- an innovation that could be crucial in the fight against powerful super bugs.

Hope it pans out.

RALPH LUKER: "If you've devoted your professional career to teaching World History or Western Civ, you might rather slit your wrist now than watch this clip from ABC's The View." He's right, though some of us might omit the qualifier.