January 20, 2007

GETTING AWAY with murder.

ANDREW SULLIVAN leaves Time for The Atlantic.

CALIFORNIA EARTHQUAKE: Moving the California primary ahead to February?

WHO KNEW? Hillary is running for President.

UPDATE: Hillary's announcement analyzed here.

ERIC SCHEIE: "If Jimmy Carter is any indication of what's going on with the Democrats, and Dinesh D'Souza is any indication of what's going on with the Republicans, not only is the war on terrorism lost, I'd say so are the two parties."

We've had a highly dysfunctional political class for decades, something that's been mostly masked by how well the rest of the country has been doing. But such dysfunction isn't costless.

APPARENTLY THE OIL-FOR-FOOD SCANDAL was just business as usual at the United Nations: "Has North Korean leader Kim Jong Il subverted the United Nations Development Program, the $4 billion agency that is the U.N.’s main development arm, and possibly stolen tens of millions of dollars of hard currency in the process? According to a top official of the U.S. State Department — using findings made by the U.N.’s own auditors — the answer appears to be a disturbing yes, so far as UNDP programs in North Korea itself are concerned. And just as disturbingly, the U.N. aid agency bureaucracy has kept the scamming a secret since at least 1999 — while the North Korean dictator and his regime were ramping up their illegal nuclear weapons program and making highly publicized tests of intermediate range ballistic missiles."

DAVE KOPEL'S CHINESE WEBSITE is now operational. Among other things, you can find a Chinese translation of an article I wrote with him on nanotechnology.

WELL, THIS SUCKS:

The wizardry of contextual advertising and blog publishing platforms will allow internet publications to flourish in a thousand niches. Well, that was the theory. The practice? AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from entrepreneur-provocateur and Valleywag staple, Jason Calacanis, in 2005. The bulk of AOL's ad revenues from its blog network, running at more than $1m a month according to Calacanis, come from a few star brands such as Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. They're in traditional broad categories: consumer electronics, autos and video games. The Time Warner internet unit has told editors of smaller and unprofitable sites that they will be shuttered at the end of the month. So far, we're hearing lesser-known titles such as BBHub, Divester, DV Guru and PVR Wire; do let us know about others, so we can establish a count.

I like Divester, and I've linked to it a number of times. On the other hand, it seemed to mostly push dive gadgets -- it's always seemed to me that there's more dive-niche money in travel ads.

GET YOUR SURGE ON, at The Mudville Gazette.

AT JEFF JARVIS'S PLACE: Questions for Davos.

A WHILE BACK, when the Insta-Mom posted some kids' book recommendations here, a lot of readers suggested that she start her own blog devoted to kids' books. Now she has -- it's here.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG has started a new blog. Not surprisingly, she's also got a new book coming out.

WHAT ELITE PROFESSORS THINK: Does it matter?

BILL HOBBS: "For a guy who says he's not running for political office, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson sure is raising his public political profile lately."

IRAQIS SPEAK TO AMERICA: At Hot Air.

TV WEATHER PERSONALITIES square off over global warming.

THE USS ARIZONA IS WASTING AWAY: "If you've been thinking of visiting the memorial at Pearl Harbor, consider booking the trip sooner than later."

DON SURBER on the new Senate ethics bill: "If it is such a good bill, why did it get such widespread support? I do not recall a single one of these senators saying he or she is giving up a damned thing in this bill."

January 19, 2007

HUGO CHAVEZ VS. HARRY REID.

WORRIES ABOUT AL QAEDA TRYING TO COME BACK: And note the Algerian angle.

NO CHARGES for Paul Hackett. (Via Volokh).

HUGH HEWITT offers a weekend assignment.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: "Can the 'Seattle Democrats' Save Globalization?"

JACK SHAFER SAYS WE SHOULD ABOLISH THE FCC: He makes a strong argument.

FRED THOMPSON is podcasting.

WIN A FREE TRIP TO SPACE? That's what FreeSpaceShot.com is promising. Detalis here.

"BLUE DOG" DEMOCRATS to split with party over Iraq?

HEH.

The Glenn and Helen Show: Gordon Crovitz on the WSJ, Old and New Media, and Blogging as an Art Form

People in the newspaper business seem awfully gloomy about the future right now, and with reason. But there's one bright spot: The Wall Street Journal's publisher Gordon Crovitz, who describes himself as "the last person in the country with 'newspaper publisher' in his title who nonetheless is an optimist."

We'll talk about why he's optimistic, about how the Wall Street Journal's online edition came to be the fourth biggest newspaper in the country -- bigger than the Washington Post or the L.A. Times -- and how newspapers, and newspaper publishers, should be adapting to the new era. Plus, his view of blogging as "a great journalistic art form."

You can listen directly -- no downloading needed -- by going here and clicking on the gray Flash player. You can download the file directly by clicking right here, and you can get a lo-fi version suitable for dialup, cellphones, etc. by going here and selecting lo-fi. And, of course, you can always subscribe via iTunes. We like it when you do that. Check out past shows and look for new ones at GlennandHelenShow.com. As always, my lovely and talented cohost is taking comments and suggestions.

Music is "Superluminal" by Mobius Dick. This podcast sponsored by Volvo USA. If you buy a Volvo, tell 'em it's all because of The Glenn and Helen Show.

ASTROTURFING THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT: An interesting report from The Mudville Gazette. Are parts of the news media this easily suckered, or are they happy to play along?

MICHAEL TOTTEN POSTS A PHOTO ESSAY from Hezbollah's "Capital" in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Michael Yon posts a report from Ramadi in Anbar province, Iraq. Excerpt:

Saddam is past tense. There was more consternation among these soldiers when the CSM announced that Coalition-provided fuel was being cut off to Iraqi security forces on 31 December 2006. Along the route, most of the soldiers he informed were surprised at this news. Many soldiers who heard this edict protested in some way or another, but the CSM was firm: No more free gas starting 1 January 2007.

The CSM made it clear that the fuel-edict did not come from Washington, but was an order from the Multi National Force in Iraq. Later during a private meeting between the CSM and an American lieutenant colonel where I was present, the LTC said this blanket fuel-policy could cause his mission to fall flat, and he wanted General Casey to hear that message.

The previous sentence might seem trivial, but to military professionals, the sentence is worth a book. It speaks volumes about the integrity of the lieutenant colonel and to the command culture under General Casey, where honest-and-informed opinions are valued.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Totten link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

WHEN POLITICIANS TALK ABOUT "SACRIFICE:" Jim Geraghty does some digging.

NOT A SURGICAL NANOBOT, but close: a surgical microbot.

THE AKAKA BILL IS BACK: Lots of background information here.

IN THE MAIL: Scott Page's The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Defenders of affirmative action as practiced today will find this limited comfort, though, as he's calling for actual differences among people in organizations, and his analysis provides as much support for notions that universities should hire conservatives and newspapers should hire military veterans, as for requiring minority hires.

Plus, from Frank J. Fleming, his blockbuster The Chronicles of Dubya Volume 1: The Defeat of Saddam.

Frank J. advertises it as "The dumbest book ever written about the Bush administration!" I dunno, there's an awful lot of competition for that spot.

And it's blurbed by me, though curiously I don't remember actually doing that . . . . And I should note that this link counts as a compensated endorsement, as he sent me a free t-shirt that says "Ask me about puppie smoothies." No, really, he did.

GOOD NEWS: "Mild winter weather has something to do with it. So does heavy selling by financial funds. But a largely overlooked factor in the recent plunge in oil prices may portend an end to the multiyear rise in crude: For the first time in years, the developed world is burning less of it. Fresh data from the International Energy Agency show oil consumption in the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development fell 0.6% in 2006. Though the decline appears small, it marks the first annual drop in more than 20 years among the OECD countries. . . . The fall in oil use by the industrialized world is a sign that the reactions to higher oil prices by businesses and consumers from the U.S. to Germany to Japan may be adding up to a cycle-turning downdraft in demand. The resulting shift in global cash flows could mean a big boost for oil consumers' economies at the expense of producers and exporters."

FEDERAL EMPLOYEES owe $2.8 billion in taxes, according to a report at TaxProf.

DOES AGING AMERICA EQUAL ECONOMIC PROBLEMS?

Chairman Ben Bernanke warned the U.S. Congress on Thursday that failure to take action soon to deal with the budgetary strains posed by an aging U.S. population could lead to serious economic harm.

"Unfortunately, economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the nation's impending fiscal problems," Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee.

Bernanke acknowledged that official projections suggest the U.S. budget deficit could stabilize or shrink in the next few years, but cautioned: "We are experiencing what seems likely to be the calm before the storm."

Left unchecked, the costs of so-called entitlement programs, such as
Social Security and Medicare, are set to soar as increasing numbers of the baby boom generation retire.

Of course, we could try to deal with this problem by having people live longer.

UPDATE: Yes, of course they'd have to retire later, too. Follow the link, please.

IT'S THOSE THEOCRATIC RED STATES IN THE SOUTH AGAIN: A life sentence for adultery?

Oh, wait . . . .

UPDATE: On the other hand, a murder conviction gets you an apartment and free college tuition -- plus, judging from the photo, a really tacky suit, complete with pimp hat and fur coat.

PUTTING THE BRAKES ON LIGHT SPEED:

Scientists said yesterday that they had achieved a long-sought goal of slowing waves of light to a relatively leisurely pace and using those harnessed pulses to store an image.

Physicists said the new approach to taming light could hasten the arrival of a futuristic era in which computers and other devices will process information on optical beams instead of with electricity, which for all its spark is still cumbersome compared with light.

This is big -- read the story to see why this new approach is a breakthrough -- but I'd rather they were able to push the speed of light way up, thus enabling fast interstellar travel . . . .

UPDATE: Ask and ye shall receive: Reader Stephen Waters sends this report (see the box toward the bottom):

ringing light to a standstill is not the only effect that a laser-manipulated atomic gas can have on a light pulse. Last year Lijun Wang and co-workers at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, pushed the speed of an electromagnetic pulse to greater than the speed of light in vacuum by passing the pulse through a chamber filled with caesium gas . . .

When a carefully tuned probe pulse was then fired into the medium, its speed became greater than the vacuum light speed. In fact, the pulse appeared to come out of the medium 60 ns before it entered!

However, Einstein's general theory of relativity was not violated because information - due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations - cannot be carried faster than the vacuum light speed, even by the superluminal light pulses.

A long way from warp-drive still, alas.

INTERESTING FOLLOWUP to the Reuters photoshop scandal: "In all of Reuters’ statements and reports on the incident, they’ve never mentioned that a 'top photo editor' was also fired. Why were they secretive about this, and why won’t they release the editor’s name?"

AL-SADR AIDE ARRESTED: "U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested a top aide to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on Friday in Baghdad, an official in his office said."

Nice, I guess, but Muqtada himself should enjoy no immunity here.

UPDATE: More thoughts from TigerHawk: "Having failed to bail out in time, it is very heartening that al-Maliki is now supporting a severe crackdown on the Shiite extremists. He knows that his personal risk increases with every Shiite militia commander he arrests, and eventually he will pass through a door through which he cannot return. Still, he is going after al-Sadr's thugs. That means that al-Maliki believes, or at least hopes, that (i) the new plan has a chance for success."

STEPHEN SPRUIELL:

The Senate has passed an ethics reform bill, 96-2. The process was not entirely without conservative victories: . . .

All that said, Sen. Tom Coburn (one of the two senators who voted no) had the best take on the bill that just passed: "The problem in Washington is not lobbyists; the problem is us. Unfortunately, many of the provisions in this bill are focused on the wrong problem."

Indeed.

January 18, 2007

THE KNIVES ARE STILL GOOD, but the Swiss Army is in trouble.

THE ABA, LAW SCHOOL DIVERSITY, AND ACCREDITATION: Gail Heriot posts another case study.

GOOD NEWS: "Oil prices briefly fell below $50 per barrel Thursday for the first time in 20 months, after the U.S. government reported larger-than-expected jumps in crude oil and gasoline inventories. Oil has dropped 17 percent since the end of 2006 amid weeks of mild winter weather in the U.S. Northeast, a key consumer of heating fuels, and growing energy stockpiles. Stockpiles of gasoline and distillate fuels, like heating oil and diesel, also rose last week, the Energy Information Administration said."

THE BENNETT AMENDMENT has passed the Senate, which I believe puts an end -- for the moment -- to worries that bloggers will be treated as lobbyists. Note the party breakdown. (Via Jason Pye).

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge thinks those worries were bogus all along.

HMM. I LIKE THE SOUND OF THIS: "BAGHDAD, Iraq - Mahdi Army fighters said Thursday they were under siege in their Sadr City stronghold as U.S. and Iraqi troops killed or seized key commanders in pinpoint nighttime raids. Two commanders of the Shiite militia said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting the group under pressure from Washington and threats from Sunni Muslim Arab governments." Let's see if it pans out.

MICHELLE MALKIN: "Bush administration = Lucy. Bush administration defenders = Charlie Brown. Argh."

STRATEGYPAGE:

Let's destroy a myth. In this case that sending more American troops to Iraq will "break the army." In reality, it works like this.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: James Ruhland did, and emails:

Very good overall, but one caveat because it keeps coming up, about the military wanting to arrange things so that troops spend one year on deployment and two years at home.

So far, it hasn't worked that way in reality: At least for the units I'm familiar with. 4th ID, which I am in, was back for a year. 1st Cav, also out of Fort Hood, relieved us. Then we went over, a bit over a year after 4th ID had come back. We got relieved by 1st Cav. - so they had only been back for slightly over a year.

In the meantime, in betweentime, 3rd ID was in the mix both times. From my rough calculations, they were also deployed for a year and home for ~1.5- years.

I know they want to give people more time home, but for a variety of reasons it doesn't generally work out the way it does "on paper", with a 1:2 deployed:home ratio.

A lot of people don't mind that - indeed, at the moment I'm trying to get sent back over right now, having just been back for a couple months. But, then, I'm single. For others it's a much greater sacrifice.

In that sense, those who call for "more sacrifice" have a point. But not the one they mean to make. I don't *think* they mean we should expand the ground forces (Army & Marines) up to the size they were in the '80s by cutting other Federal spending programs (including subsidies of various kinds) that perhaps aren't a priority in time of war. That kind of sacrifice, which would affect their wants and needs, isn't what they mean (they mean that *others* should sacrifice: surprisingly, the same people they target whether there's a war on or not!)

We have a 90s "peace dividend" military fighting what is supposedly the biggest struggle of our time, and not enough people see the disconnect. Indeed, too often they paint a Panglossian picture of things simply because there are so many (so few, but proud) people willing to shoulder the burden the country puts on them, somewhat cavalierly. And those are the better people (the worst people devote all their energy fighting fiercely against their domestic political opponents, rather than our country's foreign enemies, and see the war not as an American problem but "Bush's" or "the Republicans").

For "sacrifice," I think that incumbent politicians should term limit themselves to a single additional term. Also, there should be a ban on private non-commercial jet travel, and limousine service in large metro areas, for the duration of the war. And a 100% excise tax on movie tickets and DVDs . . .

What? That's not what they mean?

AS AN INSTAPUNDIT PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER^TM you're entitled to an advance look at the Pajamas Media Presidential straw poll. Vote early and vote often!

THE MYSTERY OF THE BLINKING PLAYSTATION THREE: Turns out it's a lame copy-protection issue. More at the link, including video.

AUSTIN BAY'S BLOG is back up. And he's just published a new dictionary of milspeak.

PROBLEMS for Ahmadinejad.

Plus he's got those pesky UFO reports to worry about . . . .

REMEMBERING the "Fairness Doctrine" and the crushing of dissent.

CALL IT "THE PELOSI BOOM!" Consumer spending jumps 6.9%!

It certainly beats the Bush debacle.

YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO CALL THEM "NEW YORK MONEY PEOPLE:" Complaining to the Justice Department about the "Jewish Lobby."

UPDATE: See this followup post.

ARE TECH COMPANIES FINALLY STANDING UP TO CENSORSHIP by Chinese and other authorities?

Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone are now committed publicly to a process "which aims to produce a set of principles guiding company behavior when faced with laws, regulations and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights." As BSR's CEO Aron Cramer put it: "This important dialogue reflects a shared commitment to maximize the information available via the internet on the basis of global principles protecting free expression and privacy."

A number of other companies had the opportunity to join this process - including one of the four companies called on the carpet before Congress last year - but they have lacked cojones. Maybe the first-movers will help them find some?

Rebecca MacKinnon has more at the link.

FLIP. FLOP:

On Dec. 5, Newsweek magazine touted an interview with then-incoming House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes as an "exclusive." And for good reason.

"In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq," the story began, Mr. Reyes "said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a 'stepped up effort to dismantle the militias.' "

"We have to consider the need for additional troops to be in Iraq, to take out the militias and stabilize Iraq," the Texas Democrat said to the surprise of many, "I would say 20,000 to 30,000."

Then came President Bush's expected announcement last week, virtually matching Mr. Reyes' recommendation and argument word-for-word -- albeit the president proposed only 21,500 troops.

Wouldn't you know, hours after Mr. Bush announced his proposal, Mr. Reyes told the El Paso Times that such a troop buildup was unthinkable.

Go figure. Maybe it had something to do with that Sunni/Shiite confusion thing.

VIDEO: Mary Katharine Ham on Congress, and what it takes to make her "a happy chick," on MSNBC.

LEGAL TROUBLES FOR NEW ORLEANS' Mayor Nagin over his illegal gun confiscation program?

Background here and here.

JAMIL HUSSEIN UPDATE: Heh.

THE SILICON BULLET: Will the Internet kill the NLRA?

JOHN BELLINGER, THE STATE DEPARTMENT'S TOP LEGAL OFFICER, is blogging at Opinio Juris this week. Lots of discussion on unlawful combatants, the Geneva Conventions, the laws of war, etc.

LOTS OF LIBBY COVERAGE, over at JustOneMinute. Murray Waas takes a shot: "it is very hard to defend Mr. Waas on this, since he surely knows better."

UPDATE: Meanwhile, is Richard Armitage leaking again?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Apparently not -- at least the BBC attributes the story to Lawrence Wilkerson. Thanks to reader Michael Ware for pointing that out.

HARRY REID INTRODUCES BILL TO REGISTER BLOGGERS? Hmm.

Put this together with a move toward the reintroduction of the inaptly named "fairness doctrine" and it's starting to look like a rather heavyhanded effort to silence critics.

UPDATE: Much more here, including the revelation that -- surprise, surprise -- Trent Lott is on board.

DON SURBER:

Big Pharma update. Big Pharma develops a vaccine for a virus that causes 70% of the cervical cancer in the world. Liberals in the West Virginia Legislature stop clubbing Big Pharma long enough to notice this development and to push for a bill requiring girls get vaccinated.

The conservative Daily Mail endorses the idea.

But liberals already are back to clubbing Big Pharma. It is Luddite liberalism.

Puts a different shine on this report:

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

I hope it pans out, but if it does people will probably find a way to bash the drug companies over it.

NEWSPAPER BLOGS triple readership.

IN THE MAIL: Frank Luntz's book on communication, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. He must be good -- check out the blurbs!

Plus, Richard Fenno's Congressional Travels.

SO I JUST FINISHED READING Larry Solum's article on open access and legal scholarship and the influence of the Web and the blogosphere on legal academia, and it's really quite good. I touched on a few of these ideas several years ago, but Larry's treatment is much more up to date and thorough. I'm on a faculty committee that's looking at changes in legal scholarship in recent years, and Solum's piece is right on target with the sorts of things we've been discussing.

GOOD NEWS: "The number of Americans who died of cancer has dropped for a second straight year, marking a milestone in the war on the disease, officials said yesterday." But don't get cocky.

And don't give in to the cut-and-run crowd:

President Bush lauded the news during a visit to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. "This drop was the steepest ever recorded," he said. "Progress is being made." . . .

Several advocates and cancer experts said, however, that the good news is tempered by cuts by the White House and Congress in funding for health research that has helped fight cancer.

"The government's investment in the war on cancer has fueled the progress we've made against this disease," said Daniel E. Smith, president of the cancer society's Cancer Action Network. "We risk jeopardizing those gains if we retreat from the fight."

Beating cancer is a process, not an event. No, really.

UPDATE: Reader Bill Brogdon emails:

Reading the item today about the drop in cancer deaths, I was struck by the comment "cuts by the White House and Congress in funding for health research..."

Checking the NIH funding reveals steady $ growth in every category after 1995, in which funding was reduced.

http://www.nih.gov/about/almanac/appropriations/index.htm

What cuts? Or is that just a mantra?

Sometimes "cuts" is used as a synonym for "reductions in the rate of growth." Or perhaps there were cuts in some subcategories despite overall budget growth.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: From the Wall Street Journal, a report on an earmark victory:

If Republicans are wondering how best to shorten their time in the minority, they could do worse than to build on this week's Senate earmark victory. That reform success proves how good policy translates into good politics.

The Senate on Tuesday passed significant earmark reform, 98-0. But that unanimous tally masks the bitter battle that preceded the vote. When Republican freshmen Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint first launched an effort last summer to make earmarks more transparent, they struggled. Republicans had to be dragged into even minimal reform, and among their first acts after losing the election was to attempt to slip thousands more earmarks into their lame-duck spending bills.

Still, minority status has a way of focusing the mind, and combined with continued DeMint-Coburn shaming, Senate Republicans appear to have re-embraced some principles. When Majority Leader Harry Reid last week attempted to water down House Democrats' earmark reform, Messrs. Coburn and DeMint rallied enough fellow Republicans (and a few Democrats) to outmaneuver the spenders. Red-faced at getting caught trying to submarine their own party's plan for reform, Senate Democrats did an about-face and jumped on the earmark-reform bandwagon.

The result was a mini-competition as to which side of the aisle was tougher on earmarks, and a final bill that goes beyond even the House reform. Senator DeMint passed (98-0) an amendment that broadens the definition of an earmark; even those slipped into last-minute conference reports will have to be disclosed. Under the original Senate legislation, 95% of earmarks would have escaped scrutiny.

More amazing was Democrats' new enthusiasm for oversight. Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin -- who started off trying to tank Mr. DeMint's reform -- finished by passing an amendment (also 98-0) that requires lawmakers to post their earmark requests on the Internet 48 hours before a vote. (The House version of the bill simply requires a public disclosure form.) California Democrat Dianne Feinstein also joined in, passing by voice vote a provision that would bar lawmakers from including earmarks in the classified parts of a bill or a conference report unless they also included language in unclassified terms describing the project, funding levels and sponsor. Classified reports were among the ways that former Rep. Duke Cunningham -- now in federal prison -- hid his earmark payoffs.

Read the whole thing (it's subscription-only, but the link should work for a few days). It's progress, but there's lots more to be done. Last year, pork and earmarks polled higher than Iraq as voter priorities for Congress. Maybe Congress is noticing?

UPDATE: Robert Bluey writes that it was the bloggers:

In ways both big and small, bloggers are changing how business is done on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., learned firsthand last week the effect bloggers can have on public policy when he was handed the first defeat of his short tenure as majority leader.

It all started last Thursday when conservative Sen. Jim DeMint,

R-S.C., sought to strengthen the Senate’s ethics reform bill by amending it to include the same earmark reform language in the House-passed version. Reid’s deputy, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., tried to kill the amendment, but nine Democrats broke ranks and backed DeMint. Instead of accepting defeat, Reid tried to twist arms and reverse the vote.

That’s when bloggers took notice. Rallying to DeMint’s defense, a coalition of bloggers, led by Andy Roth at the Club for Growth, documented Reid’s strong-arm tactics. The Examiner’s own Mark Tapscott and Ed Frank at Americans for Prosperity jumped on the story. I posted video on YouTube of Reid and DeMint’s clash on the Senate floor.

In the meantime, bloggers sent e-mails to Jon Henke, the newly hired new-media director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. It’s Henke’s job to deal with bloggers, and if there was ever an occasion, this was it.

Read the whole thing.

ARNOLD KLING: "Education is an example of an issue where free-market proponents were betrayed by the Republicans during the Bush Administration. In fact, on the domestic issues that I consider important, my take on the Republican Party in the 2006 elections was, 'With friends like you, who needs enemies?' This essay lays out what I would like to see on the agenda, and how I will be keeping score."

MICKEY KAUS charges Barbara Boxer with "Mommyism:"

The "it's all about children" meme must focus-group really well, because Democrats keep trotting it out (most famously to justify welfare payments for "children," even though it's adults who get the checks). I don't remember Mommyism winning any national elections, though--especially during a war.

Boxer also managed to leave the implication that if only her children were of the right age, they would of course be volunteering to serve their country in the military. I don't know Boxer's childen, but I'm skeptical.

Me too.

MORE THAN 14 MILLION ONLINE POLITICAL ACTIVISTS: Micah Sifry got a leaked copy of the Pew report and has some thoughts.

BILL ROGGIO is back in Iraq on another embed.

And Bill Ardolino is posting more stuff, too, including a response to Bryan Preston's post yesterday.

You know, for all the talk about bloggers not doing original reporting, it seems to me that lately the blogosphere has had more people reporting from Iraq than all but a handful of MSM outlets.

January 17, 2007

THANKS TO THE MAGIC OF AMAZON RECOMMENDATIONS, I was just informed of the Swiss Army Cybertool. It looks like it has most everything you'd need to work on computers.

I gave my brother one of these rather cool Swiss Army Keychain USB knives, with builtin memory. Even though he's a dedicated Leatherman guy, he says he's found it extremely useful.

UPDATE: Reader R. Kissel emails: "Re, your post on the Cybertool. I've had one for about 7 years now. Bought it in Europe. While it is very useful, for computer work I find only 2 tools are essential: A #2 Phillips and a 5mm nut driver with decent handles. The Torx and Allen bits in the Cybertool are just no longer needed except for laptop work, which is rather tricky anyway and requires experience. Also useful are a small flashlight and a magnifier. Both can fit in the side pockets of the leather pouch.
Thing to consider: I've lost one of the bits and can't find a replacement."

VIDEO: Jim DeMint talks about Earmark Reform.

UPDATE: Via email from DeMint's office:

Senate Republicans this evening defeated a motion offered by Democrats to cut off debate on the lobby and ethics reform bill. The debate got hung up on an amendment offered by Senators Gregg and DeMint to give the President line item veto/rescission authority. Majority Leader Reid was reportedly working with Senator Gregg to achieve a compromise but West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd intervened making it clear to Reid that he would object to voting on the Gregg-DeMint amendment now or anytime in the future. As such, Reid acquiesced to Byrd's demands and continued to disallow a vote on the measure.

Gregg's LIV provision is nearly identical to a provision that Byrd hinself offered himself in 1995 under President Clinton.

Not very smart politics, it seems to me.

SOME FAIRNESS DOCTRINE QUESTIONS: "Would Marsh back a Hollywood Fairness Doctrine? A Conservative Academic Bill of Rights?"

GLOBAL WARMING IN ACTION:

Snow Falls In West LA, Malibu

CHP To Escort Motorists Through Icy Grapevine

The last snowfall recorded at Los Angeles International Airport was in January 1962, according to the National Weather Service.

Okay, actually just as (contrary to media treatments) a spell of hot weather doesn't prove global warming, cold weather doesn't disprove it. But I think that the real cause of this cold snap in the L.A./Hollywood area is that Al Gore has been shortlisted for an Oscar. Al just can't catch a break.

I'm not the first to note this phenomenon.

UPDATE: Hey, it's made the Urban Dictionary:

Gore Effect

The well documented phenomenon that leads to very low, unseasonal temperatures, driving rain, hail, snow or all of the above whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global "warming". Hence the "Gore Effect."

How does he do it?

GROWTH HORMONES don't seem to help against aging. Millions of spammers aren't convinced yet, though . . . .

More here.

DON SURBER: "Bob Byrd delivered a 2,079-word speech in defense of earmarks, just in time for the end of the earmarks era. . . . Just remember, Byrd delivered the last filibuster before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. Mr. Timing."

SHOULDN'T THAT BE "GYNISMO?" A look at mothering machismo.

UPDATE: It's heating up in the comments!

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: There's more excitement on the Senate floor. Andrew Roth reports:

The Democrats are refusing to allow a vote on an amendment offered by Senator Judd Gregg that would give the President rescission authority, which is similar to the line-item veto.

Reid has been preaching about ethics reform and his strong desire to reduce wasteful spending, but his talk is cheap. He blocked strong earmark reform last week until he was forced to retreat and now he's blocking a vote on another important measure that would help break the big-spending habits of Congress.

He's got a number of updates. And Mark Tapscott reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, is speaking on the Senate floor as this is written in opposition to allowing the Senate to vote on an amendment by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-NH, to the Senate ethics reform bill.

Gregg's amendment uses the president's existing recission authority as a mild version of a line-item veto and is designed to give the President a tool for highlighting wasteful spending and forcing Congress to take a second look at such proposals. The proposal would clearly make it more difficult for Members of Congress to slip wasteful spending like earmarks into legislation.

According to Gregg, the amendment provides that the president can send up to 4 rescission packages per year. Congress would be required to fast track the President’s recommendation within 8 days.

Also, unlike a line-item veto proposal that was defeated in Congress in 1996, Gregg's amendment today requires congressional affirmation of the President’s rescission package.

Savings from rescissions passed by Congress must be used for deficit reduction. The authority sunsets after 4 years – giving Congress the ability to evaluate merits of rescission authority after President Bush and his successor have had the opportunity to use.

Reid doesn't want the Senate to vote on the Gregg amendment, which has 30 co-sponsors, including senators from both sides of the aisle.

Incredibly, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, Reid's majority whip, is claiming Gregg's amendment is actually a parliamentary trick by the GOP to "bring this ethics bill down."

Doubtful. More background here. And there's more at Government Bytes.

I regard the line-item veto as a gimmick, and during the brief period when Clinton had one it didn't accomplish much. I'm not sure if this is different, though the extent of the opposition from porkmeisters like Reid and Durbin suggests to me that it might be. How's Trent Lott voting? . . . .

UPDATE: Best argument against the proposal that the Democrats won't use: The federal deficit is disappearing anyway and will be gone within 18 months. Hmm. Anything big happening about then? . . .

THE ABA'S DIVERSITY STANDARDS FOR LAW SCHOOL ACCREDITATION: Gail Heriot takes a look here and here. She's been doing some Freedom of Information Act work to see how the ABA actually behaves.

ERIC SCHEIE: "It appears that one of the great pioneers of socialized medicine, Fidel Castro, may soon die as a result of what appears to be bad health care."

JAMES LILEKS: "It took four people to write and report that piece. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a tale about ruthless cutbacks in the newsroom."

JOHN KERRY IS MAKING UP HIS MIND ABOUT whether to run in 2008. I think he should!

DUKE (NON) RAPE UPDATE: "Two hundred ninety-five days after issuing their statement, the Group of 88 has re-emerged, in a defiant statement posted yesterday."

UPDATE: Ann Althouse comments:

"The disaster is the atmosphere...." -- we're told. The students' perceptions matter and deserve to be "give[n] voice." But the professors don't like how they were perceived by the world outside the university; that was misreading. But if it is perception -- atmosphere -- that matters -- how can you think that you can contribute things to be perceived and avoid responsibility for the effect that you have?

LaShawn Barber:

The whole ad, the whole concept behind the ad, is a joke.

And so, increasingly, is Duke. And the whole thing is self-inflicted.

IN FOREIGN POLICY, DONALD STOKER WRITES: "Vietnam taught many Americans the wrong lesson: that determined guerrilla fighters are invincible. But history shows that insurgents rarely win, and Iraq should be no different. Now that it finally has a winning strategy, the Bush administration is in a race against time to beat the insurgency before the public’s patience finally wears out." Read the whole thing. The question is whether -- with the "three-year-rule" having more than run its course -- we've got the time.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum is unpersuaded.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE:

A bird flu pandemic remains a threat that the U.S. health care system must take seriously despite less frequent media coverage and the absence so far of human cases in the United States, experts warned.

John Bartlett, an infectious disease expert at John Hopkins University, said the decentralized U.S. health system will make it more difficult to get ready for a possible human pandemic of H5N1 avian virus -- or anything else.

He disagreed with the suggestion that the bird flu threat has been overstated by the media.

"The number of cases in 2006 was more than it was in 2005, which is more than it was in 2004 ... so it continues to go up in people," he said in an interview.

"And it continues to be just as lethal as it was in the beginning," Bartlett said at a conference aimed at helping U.S. hospital administrators prepare for a pandemic.

How big a threat? It's hard to say, but as I've noted before, most of the preparations we make for an avian flu outbreak will also help with other possible epidemics. And the odds that we'll have to deal with something nasty in the next decade or two seem fairly high.

IN THE MAIL: Adrienne Martini's new book, Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood. She was my editor when I used to write local music reviews for Metro Pulse under the pseudonym of "Electroboy," but she's since gone on to bigger and better things.

BILL ROGGIO has lots of interesting war news. Just keep scrolling.

ALTHOUSE TO HILLARY: "Confronted with her line, I say: A slogan about a slogan is too slogan-y. And don't think that by making a slogan about a slogan that you can distract us from seeing that you think failure is an option."

BILL FRIST: Running for Governor in 2010?

THE PROBLEM WITH TOM TANCREDO: He's too liberal? Well, that's a new slant.

BRYAN PRESTON: "Michelle and I spent four days patrolling the environs around Forward Operating Base Justice in north and west Baghdad last week. . . . This post is mostly about mistakes. The troops didn’t sit down with us and tick off all the mistakes that they think we have made in Iraq to date, so what follows isn’t their gripe list being published under my name. They did answer our questions forthrightly and we learned much from interviewing them and just talking with them over chow and listening to their crosstalk in the Humvees. So this post is made up of my observations after seeing the war up close and following it from afar, including mistakes, fumbles and ways forward to win–and what victory actually looks like." Read the whole thing. He concludes: "Having said all of this, Iraq is still very winnable." That's what Michael Yon is saying, too.

And here's a video report from Baghdad on Hot Air. Folks at CNN, et al., should be trembling.

UPDATE: Here's audio of Michelle Malkin reporting from Iraq on the Laura Ingraham Show.

J.D. JOHANNES' INDEPENDENT IRAQ DOCUMENTARY, OUTSIDE THE WIRE, IS NOW ON SALE. He's got a blog, too.

AIRCONGRESS.COM is Daniel Glover's new venture aiming to cover Congress in new ways. (He hasn't quit his day job at National Journal, though.)

SERIOUSLY GOOD: Lots of food- and cooking-blogging from Kevin Weeks. I ran into him at Panera a while back and he was surrounded by very attractive women. Well, I advised one of my nephews that if he learned to cook well and to give good back rubs he'd never lack for girlfriends; Weeks has mastered at least one of those.

HERE'S ALEX POURNELLE'S REPORT from the Consumer Electronics Show.

January 16, 2007

BILL ARDOLINO interviews a Fallujan police officer.

TOM MAGUIRE: "Day One of the Libby trial has passed, and the sun did not stop in the sky - whew!"

ANGRY TALK: Stanley Kurtz looks at Internet excoriations, and reviews Peter Wood's A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today.

JOHN TIERNEY is blogging.

I'LL BE ON CAM EDWARDS' SHOW in just a minute, talking about my NY Times gun piece.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Benon Sevan indicted in New York over oil-for-food scandal wrongdoing.

SO MUCH FOR FREE SPEECH: Kucinich wants to bring back the fairness doctrine. "Why would Kucinich want to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine and kill off the AM band and talk radio? Because his allies have proven less successful than conservatives at building a market for their broadcasts."

Neal Boortz doesn't like it.

STEM CELLS CREATE beating heart muscle.

MIKE RAPPAPORT AND JOHN MCGINNIS WRITE in defense of originalism. (Via Larry Solum, who says "get it while it's hot!").

CONFIRMING EARLIER REPORTS: Al Qaeda flees Baghdad. And some probably wish they'd fled this place a bit sooner.

HMM: Seems like good news to me: "Oil prices dropped below $52 a barrel to new 19-month lows Tuesday on a report that OPEC powerhouse Saudi Arabia said further production cuts aren't necessary right now."

Part of it's warm weather, and I believe it. My December heating bill was less than half of last December's. The greenhouse effect: reducing carbon consumption worldwide!

Meanwhile, Jay Leno's garage is going green.

UPDATE: Reader Lou Minatti thinks it's a new version of the Oil Weapon:

It should be obvious why Saudi Arabia won't cut production. They fear Iran. Iran desperately needs oil revenue. Chavez and Ahmadinejad are touring the world announcing anti-American initiatives and kicking out foreign investors because in the past these were good ways to rile up the oil markets.

The world is awash in oil right now. Saudi Arabia intends to collapse the price and cause a great deal of damage to their enemies in Iran, and they won't have to fire a shot. As a bonus, Chavez in Venezuela will also be gravely damaged. I believe this is all political strategy, and I believe the Bush Administration is coordinating it with the Saudis to eliminate two threats at once.

Hmm.

WITH MICHAEL YON REPORTING THAT "IRAQ IS VERY WINNABLE," Dean Barnett wonders what if the surge works?

I think it won't be allowed to work, at least in terms of media reporting and public perception, if the press has anything to say about it.

UPDATE: Or maybe some people who were for the surge before they were against it will be saying "I told you so" if it works! I can live with that eventuality, if it eventuates.

HEY, MY GUN PIECE MADE IT onto the New York Times' most emailed list.

UPDATE: A reader points out that it's number three on the "most blogged" list. Cool. I suspect that soliciting a piece from me was a bit of a stretch for them, so I'm glad it worked out.

DON SURBER ON THE A.P.:

I have got a great boss who lets me do my thing here. But some of my colleagues, privately, remain skeptical of blogs because there is no editor. Bloggers can write anything, blah, blah, blah. . . .

Given the stonewalling over the fake Captain Jamil Hussein — Iraqis have no police captain with that name and AP will not admit it used a pseudonym as a source — AP editors have forgotten to protect their agency’s credibility. They have to work to earn it every day.

Just like the bloggers.

Indeed.

ANNE APPLEBAUM OFFERS SOME SENSIBLE THOUGHTS on Afghanistan and the opium trade.

UPDATE: Ilya Somin comments: "I'm not sure I agree with all the specifics of the Applebaum's proposed program, and I don't know enough to evaluate some of the details. My own preference would be for a less heavily regulated legalization than what she describes. Be that as it may, the Turkish model, as described by Applebaum, is far preferable to the Bush Administration's dangerously misguided poppy eradication campaign." Yes, I think the drug warriors are seriously interfering with the real war.

NIFONG UPDATE:

District Attorney, Mike Nifong, is focusing on his upcoming ethics complaint preliminary hearing next week.

The state bar will decide this spring if his public comments about the case were a violation of the professional rules of conduct.

Mike Nifong stated in December 2006, "I'm not really into the irony of talking to reporters about allegations that I talked to reporters."

Since the charges were announced the embattled D.A. has limited his comments to the media.

But legal experts say it may be too little too late considering he was warned early on.

Read the whole thing. And this sounds like an understatement to me: Duke case may hurt prosecutor's career. Gee, do you think?

More developments here. And, as always, K.C. Johnson is on top of things.

IS NANCY PELOSI GETTING A FREE RIDE FROM THE PRESS?

I wonder if traditional feminists are at all uncomfortable with all this celebration of a stay at home mother who now can have it all. And how little mention there is of her very wealthy husband who perhaps made all this motherhood and rise in politics possible. I've seen more mentions of her father politician than her husband. Why is he getting shortchanged? As the San Francisco Chronicle wrote recently, he is deliberately keeping a low profile. I guess having a multimillionaire husband doesn't fit the entire image. There's nothing wrong with having a husband who has made many millions in investments, but it is part of the complete picture and some mention of him should belong in the media profiles.

If the genders -- or parties -- were reversed, we'd probably be hearing more about this.

NON CAMPOS MENTIS: Heh. Anybody who can bring Jeff Goldstein out of retirement with a gleam in his eye is okay by me, however silly his writings.

THIS MAY BE A TREND: Videoblog TVJersey.com bills itself as The television station New Jersey doesn't have.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll likes it.

MICHAEL TOTTEN INTERVIEWS A CLERIC Hezbollah doesn't like:

In the dahiyeh, the suburb, of Haret Hreik south of Beirut, where Hezbollah built its command and control center and the “capital” of its illegal state-within-a-state, lives Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini, a moderate Shia cleric with a doctorate in religion from Qom in Iran, who steadfastly and publicly opposes Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah’s doctrine of war and jihad. He uses the Koran and the Islamic religion as the basis for an alternative vision of peace, independence, and democracy for the people of Lebanon.

My translator Henry informed me that Lebanese journalists are no longer allowed to publish or interview Sayyed Husseini. Dissent from the likes of this man is intolerable and has to be smashed. Hezbollah issued its threats. After the two-year spree of car-bombs against journalists, threats from Nasrallah pack weight.

Read the whole thing.

THE NATIONAL REVIEW FOLKS are having a big summit on the future of conservatism, featuring a lot of big-name speakers. I won't be able to attend -- and I don't think that actual conservatives care much about where I think conservatism ought to go anyway -- but it looks very interesting.

NEAL STEPHENSON'S The Diamond Age is going to become a Sci-Fi Channel miniseries, with George Clooney as Executive Producer. I'm not sure what I think of that, though I'm pretty sure I'd prefer, say, Tim Minear. And speaking of Minear, Nathan Fillion of Firefly will reportedly be appearing in Minear's new show "Drive."

BTW, my interview of Stephenson is here, and our podcast interview of Tim Minear is here.

STEPHEN SPRUIELL TAKES A LOOK AT PORKBUSTERS and comments:

Perhaps the biggest success of the Porkbusters movement has been its ability to incorporate the efforts of both left- and right-leaning bloggers, transcending the partisan bickering which characterizes so much of the political blogosphere. “The real split on this stuff is not conservatives vs. liberals or Republicans vs. Democrats. It’s insiders vs. outsiders,” Reynolds says.

And it’s not just the Porkbusters who are bipartisan. Just ask Trent Lott and Harry Reid. As they’re likely to attest, you can find the Porkbusted on both sides of the aisle.

May it remain so. Given its modest resources, PorkBusters has done pretty well. But there's a long, long way to go. And I want to stress the importance of lefty outfits like TPM Muckraker and -- as Spruiell notes elsewhere -- The New York Times in helping to bring this along. It's truly a nonpartisan issue, as I say above.

MAYOR BAILS OUT of Bloomberg's anti-gun mayors' group.

CONGRESS CHANGES HANDS: Or does it?

WILL A LARGER MILITARY mean lower standards?

MORE KIDNEY-BLOGGING from Virginia Postrel. ("In a system that is terribly difficult to reform, fixing that law should be relatively simple--if only the beneficiaries weren't too sick and weak to campaign for reform.") Podcast interview on this topic with Virginia here. Plus, has the romance gone out of travel?

JAMES MCCORMICK: "America will get the MSM it wants when America takes its national security as seriously as its football."

MICHAEL YON REPORTS: "Iraq is very winnable."

January 15, 2007

IT'S IN TOMORROW'S NEW YORK TIMES, but as an InstaPundit Premium Subscriber^TM -- which is, well, everybody -- you get access to it tonight! It's my oped on municipal gun-ownership ordinances and why they're a good idea. Read it, enjoy it, email it to your friends, whatever. And it's absolutely free -- just like everything else on InstaPundit. [What about the plans for "InstaPundit Select"? -- Ed. On hold for the foreseeable future.]

UPDATE: Some people are surprised to see a piece like this in the New York Times. It certainly runs counter to their own editorial stance, but I should note that they solicited the piece based on a couple of blog posts I had; it hadn't even occurred to me to write an oped on the topic.

And, interestingly, Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing is on the same page. Maybe it's an experiment to see if opeds by bloggers bring more pageviews!

UPDATE: Cafe Hayek: "While I oppose statutes that mandate gun ownership, these statutes do strike me as being more consistent with the 'public-goods' rationale for state action than is most of what government does -- and certainly more consistent with this rationale than are statutes that prevent peaceful people from owning guns."

The mandatory nature of these statutes, as I note, is pretty notional -- but in fact, the government clearly has the constitutional power to mandate gun ownership, and in fact did so in the past.

MORE: "Another sign of the apocalypse?" Heh.

AND WITHOUT MY LAME BIRD THEME: The Carnival of the Recipes is up! And so is the Carnival of the Capitalists.

STEVEN POSTREL on economists and physics envy.

HMM: History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers. Actually, it's a pretty compelling comparison.

BIRD-O-RAMA: Megan McArdle cooks chicken, then has thoughts on hawks and doves:

Now, of course, I supported the war, so I can be expected to say something like what I am about to say. My only excuse is that I have been thinking hard about this, trying to pick out what went wrong, and I think that I am willing to admit where I was wrong. I was wrong to impute too much confidence to my ability to interpret Saddam Hussein's actions; I was wrong to not foresee how humiliating Iraqis would find being liberated by the westerners who have been tramping around their country, breaking things for their own reasons and with little regard for the Iraqi people, for several hundred years. I was wrong to impute excessive competence to the government--and not just the Bush administration, but to any government occupation.

However.

This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass. It's just that independently, things they didn't predict made the invasion not work. If I say we shouldn't go to dinner downtown because we're going to be robbed, and we don't get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I "right"? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.

Read the whole thing(s). And here's my favorite chicken recipe.

UPDATE: Okay, it's not a bird, but here's my recipe for lamb and Guinness stew. And no, I'm not sure that this experiment in "theme" blogging really works. But hey, it's an experimental medium!

"CHERRY PICKING," redefined.

THE MOST FUN YOU CAN HAVE, without being tasered.

HUGE MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY ROUNDUP here.

MORE ON THE ANTI-GUN JOYCE FOUNDATION'S funding of anti-gun research. Again, this isn't necessarily wrong, b