TALKS WITH IRAN: An advance transcript.

JIHAD: The (short) motion picture.

THE WASHINGTON POST EDITORIALIZES:

THE BUSH administration has tolerated Egypt’s brutal crackdown on domestic dissent and the broader reversal of its democratic spring of 2005 in part because President Hosni Mubarak argues that his adversaries are dangerous Islamic extremists. It’s true that the largest opposition movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood; how dangerous it is can be debated. But what is overlooked is that Mr. Mubarak reserves his most relentless repression not for the Islamists — who hold a fifth of the seats in parliament — but for the secular democrats who fight for free elections, a free press, rights for women and religious tolerance.

The latest case in point is a blogger named Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, who was sentenced to four years in prison last week on charges of religious incitement, disrupting public order and “insulting the president.” A brave and provocative 22-year-old student, Mr. Soliman first achieved notice with postings that denounced riots in Alexandria directed at Egypt’s Christian Copt minority. He said the brutality he witnessed was the result of extremist Islamic teachings, in part by his own university, Al-Azhar, which he called “the other face of al-Qaeda.” . . .

As a political prisoner, Mr. Soliman will join Ayman Nour, who was sentenced a year ago on fabricated charges after he ran for president against Mr. Mubarak on a liberal democratic platform. As many as 800 members of the Muslim Brotherhood have also been jailed in the past year. This by a government that continues to be one of the largest recipients in the world of U.S. aid, collecting more than $2 billion a year. What do American subsidies support? Not least, the elimination of what would otherwise be the strongest secular democratic movement in the Arab Middle East.

Seems like we’re getting a bad deal. (Via Xeni Jardin, who emails: “I wonder how many Americans realize this guy is going to jail in part because he stood up for Egypt’s *Christian minority* on his blog? When Americans hear about these free speech cases in developing countries, I think many of us assume the issues at hand have nothing to do with our own cultures or faiths.”).

Danny Glover has more.

JAMES LILEKS IS WITHOUT INTERNET AT HOME, and doesn’t entirely mind:

At this moment I’m back at the coffee shop where I filed two pieces yesterday morning, then returned at 7 PM to file another. I’ve caught up on everything I need to read, and have realized that I do not have to check sites nine times every ten minutes. I can catch up Achewood (always brilliant, but I loved this) and the rest of my imaginary friends, and then I can close the machine and do something else. It’s remarkable the things you can get up to, once you leave the house.

I’m enjoying a bit of that, using the “scheduled posting” feature of Movable Type to let me stay away from the computer for longer periods. It is kind of nice. And useful, since I was busy doing stuff like checking in with the Insta-Mother-in-Law at the rehab center.

THOUGHTS ON HYPOCRISY AND POLITICS, from Eric Scheie.

A “SCIENCE FICTION NIGHTMARE?” At least there are no zombies.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: “The law reviews have made a hash of the manuscript submission process, which once more raises the question of why legal scholarship remains dependent on the whims of twenty-something second and third year law students. Personally, I plan to stick to books and symposia articles until the law reviews get together and coordinate their requirements.”

I’ve been hearing that kind of thing from a lot of people lately. And it may be one of the pressures on faculty scholarship to evolve beyond the traditional law-review forms. (Via Larry Solum).

A BEE EPIDEMIC.

SARAH PULLMAN WRITES on treating Seasonal Affective Disorder.

BRIAN FLEMMING REPORTS ON more YouTube censorship. Flemming comments: “If YouTube turns into a war of various interest groups organizing to red-flag expressions of ideas they don’t like — and YouTube’s policy is to give in to that pressure automatically whenever it gets high enough — then YouTube is going to suck. YouTube really needs to fix their complaint system.”

That sounds right to me.

A TIMELY WARNING:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke renewed a warning to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday that failure to take action soon to prepare for the retirement of aging Baby Boomers could lead to serious economic harm.

Bernanke did not address the outlook for U.S. interest-rate policy or Tuesday’s collapse in global stock markets in his prepared testimony to the House of Representatives’ Budget Committee, which were nearly identical to remarks he delivered to a Senate panel last month.

“A vicious cycle may develop in which large (budget) deficits lead to rapid growth in debt and interest payments, which in turn adds to subsequent deficits,” Bernanke said.

Bernanke told Congress that over time, the United States needed to move toward fiscal policies that were sustainable and that would promote more saving to support the Social Security retirement program without imposing undue costs on taxpayers.

However, he offered no specific policy.

Perhaps we should work on a longevity dividend.

A NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT obsession.

GLOBAL WARMING SOLVED: By IowaHawk.

PROPOSING AN EXPERIMENT, at InstaPunk. “I propose an exercise to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months’ worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin’s infamous ‘7 Dirty Words.'”

MORE ON CARBON OFFSETS, from Tyler Cowen.

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHO BUSH WOULD NOMINATE if he got another Supreme Court pick.

A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT.

A QUESTION from the New York Times.

Why don’t they start asking similar questions about the Joyce Foundation . . . ?

AT ECOTOTALITY: “Why the Gore story matters.”

UPDATE: In all of this, we’re just following in Eric Alterman’s footsteps. Here’s what he wrote in the September, 2004 Atlantic Monthly (not available for free, alas):

Needless to say, Hollywood offers nearly limitless opportunities for anyone seeking to expose hypocrisy in the lifestyles of the rich and progressive. Laurie David, who dedicates herself to fighting for improved fuel-economy standards and reviles the owners of SUVs as terrorist enablers, gives herself a pass when it comes to chartering one of the most wasteful uses of fossil-based fuels imaginable: a private plane. (She’s not just a limousine liberal; she’s a Gulfstream liberal.) One night I visited the home of the former TV star Heather Thomas (The Fall Guy) and her husband, the entertainment lawyer and philanthropist Skip Brittenham. I drove past SUVs and assorted luxury vehicles on what felt like a quarter-mile-long driveway to a mansion large enough to house one of the small Amazonian villages the Brittenhams want to save. Just the energy consumed by the house and all the vehicles would power a sizable chunk of Amazonia. And this was nothing next to the Sunset Strip home of Stewart and Lynda Resnick, where I attended a book party for the journalist and progressive candidate-conspirator-hostess Arianna Huffington. Guests picked at smoked-salmon and caviar hors d’oeuvres beneath twenty-foot ceilings supported by towering Greek columns. Each gilded room was larger than most New York City apartments. The house would not he out of place if plunked down as an extension of Versailles, save for the enormous bust of Napoleon in one of the salons. The Resnicks, Lynda told me, are the “largest farmers in America”; they are the country’s biggest grower of fruits and nuts, and a member of the Sunkist cooperative (she urged me to try the selection of new Sunkist beverages at the well-stocked bar); they also own the Franklin Mint. Later I listened to her refer to the celebrity-laden crowd as “disenfranchised.”

But it’s a rich lode of hypocrisy, and it’s nowhere close to mined out. And who knew that Eric Alterman was the original coiner of the term “Gulfstream liberal?”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Also in 2001, Jonathan Rauch coined the more-euphonious “Learjet liberal,” though he wasn’t really talking about global warming or energy efficiency.

And there’s more, over at Creative Destruction.

MORE: Don Surber comments on the coverage:

After reading the Editorialist’s coverage at the Washington Post of Al Gore’s overuse of electricity, I don’t want to hear about Republican hypocrisy ever again.

If Al Gore were a Republican, the story of his consuming 20 times the national average while lecturing the rest of us on cutting back on our energy use would be front page news from coast-to-coast. Late-nite comedians would have a field day. The editorial pages would puff up about Republican hypocrisy.

Instead we get excuses, excuses, excuses. . . .

As a proud member of the mainstream media, let me suggest that this double-standard — this refusal to hold Al Gore accountable for his actions which are contradictory to his words — only feeds the belief that the media is biased in favor of liberals — particularly born-to-the-manor, overfed, limousine liberals who consume 22,000 kilowatts of electricity each year in just one of his three homes.

Well, look at the kind of people who own newspapers . . . .

AND YET IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE PART OF THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE:

The government is not denying the fact that it knew what was happening. Nor is it saying the plaintiffs were wronged but are asking for too much money. The government is instead arguing that it had no duty to come forward.

Remember that.

MAYBE THIS IS WHY I’VE BEEN FEELING SO CHEERFUL LATELY:

If there’s one thing that mitigates the annoyance of having to witness the antics of the current wave of hair-shirt prophets, it’s the hours of harmless fun that their hypocrisy never fails to provide. Only recently, we’ve had Gore’s house to condemn, Feinstein’s jets to gawp at, and now, delightfully, we have Prince Charles’ pies to savor:

Via the London Evening Standard, we learn that the prince who would ban McDonald’s has a few guilty secrets of his own. It turns out that a Big Mac “contains fewer calories, fats and salt than some products in [Charles’] own organic Duchy Originals food range”. The horror!

Mmm. Pie. More on Prince Charles here.

A GUIDE TO PODCASTS AND PODCASTING, from Mark Glaser.

THOUGHTS ON FREE SPEECH, from Ann Althouse.

UPDATE: Still more on free speech, here.

SOME CRITICISM of the U.S. News law school rankings. I think they’re modestly useful, but just remember that their chief purpose is to sell magazines.

And yes, I realize that the same observation applies to everything you read in magazines, etc.

MORE PRAISE FOR JOHN EDWARDS, from Doug Weinstein.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg charges historical revisionism.