WHAT’S RIGHT, WHAT’S LEFT? Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is pondering the difference between the left and right blogospheres’ reactions to the Kelo decision.

KILLING THE OFFICE BLOGGER?

IT’S ALL IN THE ADJECTIVES: Object lessons from Bill Quick and Orin Kerr.

ROGER SIMON foresees a Buchanan/Feingold ticket in ’08.

JEFF JARVIS notes an interesting passage in a New York Times report:

But perhaps more striking, considering the huge gap between the hopes stirred when American troops captured Baghdad in April 2003 and the grim realities now, were the number of Iraqis who expressed a more patient view. Among those people, the disappointments and privations have been offset by an appreciation of both the progress toward supplanting the dictatorship of Mr. Hussein with a nascent democratic system and the need for American troops to remain here in sufficient numbers to allow the system to mature.

If that’s so striking, asks Jarvis, “why wasn’t it the lead?” You may well ask.

[He is asking — Ed. And well he may.]

AUSTIN BAY has new posts on his blog. And I’m expecting more video from him.

PEGGY NOONAN WONDERS why our politicians are so full of themselves. They obviously see themselves differently than most Americans see them.

FUTURE TENSE is a new blog from Corante looking at the future of work, and related issues. Since I’ve written on these subjects myself, I think it’s pretty cool.

HERE’S A COLUMN BY A FORMER NORTH VIETNAMESE P.O.W. correcting Dick Durbin’s remarks.

Durbin probably wishes he’d kept his mouth shut by now.

TOM MAGUIRE: “President Bush’s speech has jolted the the NY Times editors into contact with reality.” Tigerhawk notes a different jolt.

THIS WEEK’S TANGLED BANK science carnival is up.

IN THE MAIL: Tara Ross’s new book, Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College. It looks quite interesting.

NOBODY’S PERFECT: My TechCentralStation column, about the Planetary Society’s mission failure, is up.

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG has a piece on the White House’s Supreme Court nomination process. I think it’s doomed to failure, as the names “Volokh” and “Kozinski” are conspicuously absent from the short list.

I HAVEN’T DOWNLOADED IT YET, but the new version of iTunes appears to make podcasting much more user-friendly.

ED MORRISSEY finds editorial reaction to Bush’s speech predictable.

VIRGINIA POSTREL is feeling sorry for Steven Levy, who’s suffering at the hands of a clueless boss. She’s right that Levy’s Hackers is a great book, and she’s also right that it’s painfully obvious that Levy’s boss has no idea — even at the Amazon-blurb level — what it’s about.

UPDATE: In an update to Virginia’s post, Levy defends his boss. But that produced this email from reader Paul Snively:

I’m a former Apple employee and have made my living writing software or supporting other people who do (Macintosh Developer Technical Support at Apple) my entire career. I’ve met Steven Levy, although he wouldn’t remember it. . . .

From this we learn that Mr. Levy is just as clueless as his boss is, if not more so. The unwritten secret is that all of us who can write software and have had to learn the vagaries of the various operating systems and networks that we work on “CAN break into computers.” The various reasons that we don’t are the same as the various reasons other people don’t steal, assault people, rape, murder, etc. (It literally never occurs to us, it occurs to us but we believe it’s wrong, it might be tempting but we’re afraid of being caught, we wouldn’t mind getting caught but jail is a boring place, whatever).

We’re a lot like locksmiths. The reason you can feel reasonably physically secure behind locked doors is that locksmiths do a reasonable job of guarding the knowledge that would make it possible to subvert all but the highest-grade industrial locks. Magicians– escape artists–basically study the same materials that locksmiths do and then build a show around it (Erich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini, was a former locksmith’s apprentice).

None of this would be worth noting at all, except for one thing: it seems to me like yet another instance of a disturbing general trend to fail to distinguish among classes of people according to what they do, as opposed to what they can do. Levy’s comment means that it’s OK to call both MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club of the mid 1950s and Kevin Mitnick “Hackers” because both “CAN break into computers.” That’s a ludicrous, and dangerous, conflation of definitions.

All definitions are permitted to the definer, if clear. But I can see why computer professionals would object to this choice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Lowell McCormick emails:

Hi Glenn, I read the book “Hackers” back in 1987(?). It is very entertaining, informative and full of computer history. I loved it. I loaned it out back then and never got it back. I bought another copy in the last couple of years and read it again. It was just as good as the first time. I highly recommend it.

Yes, I’ve assigned it in my Internet Law class before. It’s excellent.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF EDUCATION is up.

THOUGHTS ON IRAQ AND DEADLINES, over at GlennReynolds.com.

And David Adesnik has some related thoughts.

UPDATE: The MSNBC folks have now added video of Austin Bay’s appearance on Kudlow & Company — just scroll to the bottom of my GlennReynolds.com piece.

MEGAN MCARDLE’S POST on making markets in the political economy should be must-reading for Democrats.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg thinks that the market for “compassionate conservatism” has peaked. “Let’s have no more of that.”

I HAVE AN “OPPOSING VIEW” PIECE in Wednesday’s USA Today: “I think that reporters’ privileges are a dubious idea, but if we’re to have them, let’s have them for everyone who reports news, not just professional journalists.”

JEFF JARVIS: “Well, bravo, at long last, major media concedes that the agenda it has set in Iraq — of unrelenting doom — has another side. But they can’t leave it at that.” Indeed.

AUSTIN BAY REPORTS FROM AFGHANISTAN: Here’s a short report on A-10 missions using video Austin emailed me. Quicktime version is here.

WELL, THAT HITLER THING was getting sooo passé: The first known comparison of Bush to the BTK Killer. Jeez, Rove’s stooges are everywhere.

MY EVIL PLAN seems to have worked. Heh.