AMITY SHLAES looks at “girlfriend salaries” at the World Bank. Apparently there are rather a lot of them. “In any case, the old corporate rule holds yet again: When salaries seem odd, something is out of balance — just not always in the way you think.”

RIDE BLOG TO THE SOUND OF THE GUNS: OMAR FADHIL reports from Baghdad.

JOHN TAMMES ON preparing for the worst.

TODAY’S FRED THOMPSON RALLY IN COOKEVILLE: I thought about going, but we’ve been a bit under the weather. But reader Jim Brown emails this YouTube video: “It was filmed and edited by my fifteen year old Grandson, Matthew Matheson. I was late in picking him up so he missed the first part of the rally. He makes and designs web sites and has all the latest technology and software to work with. He is young, but very good. Who knows? He might start making political commercials for the candidates.”

I think he already has.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl doubts the Thompson campaign would approve. Er, well, if there were a Thompson campaign, anyway . . . .

He’s probably right. But in YouTube politics, that’s not the point, is it? You’re going to get campaign videos by 15-year-olds about what they think is important, not about what the campaign thinks is important. And anyone who wants to go anywhere will have to learn to live with that, and work with it. It’s all part of the growth of free agent media.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Matheson asked me to embed a newer edit that he likes better, so I did. But for archival purposes, the original can be found here.

FREE CARBON OFFSETS! Sadly, these may be just as good as a lot of the others. . . .

VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES: surprisingly good news from Iraq. Especially surprising since it’s via the New York Times. “Anbar Province, long the lawless heartland of the tenacious Sunni Arab resistance, is undergoing a surprising transformation. Violence is ebbing in many areas, shops and schools are reopening, police forces are growing and the insurgency appears to be in retreat.”

(Via Tom Maguire, who has some thoughts on what it might mean).

UPDATE: Plus this New York Times report about Afghanistan: “Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan, one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the fall of the Taliban regime, health officials said Thursday. . . . 40,000 to 50,000 fewer infants are dying now than in the Taliban era, Dr. Fatimi said.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ace has an amusing take.

MORE: A look at what the Times left out. Surge? What surge?

Another reader cynically suggests that we’ll see more good news in the near future — having achieved their goal of persuading Americans to pull out, the press will loudly report some good news in order to protect themselves against postwar charges of bias. I think that’s overly cynical.

STILL MORE: NYT: Late to the party.

MORE STILL: Criticizing the Times on the surge mention may be unfair. A Marine officer with knowledge in the area who asks that I not use his name emails:

I know a good bit more about things there than I can let on, but one thing I did want to email and make clear: There has been no surge of extra troops to Anbar yet. What has been accomplished thus far has been with the same force structure that has been more or less in place there for the past three years. I might even go so far as to say that the new strategy for the entire country — begun in January — had its genesis with the actions of one particular Marine battalion working in the far west in the fall of 2005.

It was so successful that its methods – which I won’t go into – were adopted in some manner throughout Anbar and now we are seeing their fruits.

Worth noting. And this underscores a point made here before — that the ‘surge” isn’t so much about more troops as it is about different tactics.

HILLARY CLINTON GETS strange new respect.

“TOTALLY MEAN AND IRRATIONAL:” I think the war between the Democratic establishment and the Netroots is heating up.

FROM ONE OF MY COLLEAGUES AT U.T., A LOOK AT NON-CORN-BASED ETHANOL:

Biomass can also be derived from residue left behind after forest products have been harvested or from the elements of corn left in the field to rot after the grain has been harvested. Cellulosic ethanol comes from the part of the corn plant not used for food.

So, in addition to corn grain-based ethanol, Tennessee has an array of potential new energy sources from biomass – cellulosic ethanol. This expands ethanol’s potential availability well beyond corn grain, which greatly expands our alternative fuel options – and in no way competes with any utilization of corn.

A unit of corn ethanol, made from grain, yields about 40 percent more energy than it takes to produce that unit, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

A unit of cellulosic ethanol yields more than 500 percent of the energy that goes into producing it. In contrast, gasoline made from petroleum returns 20 percent less energy than it takes to produce it.

That’s why cellulosic ethanol is the future of energy.

Since cellulosic ethanol can already be made in the lab, the next challenge is to make it at the commercial scale.

The only political downside is that this isn’t likely to win the kind of enthusiastic support from corn farmers that corn-based ethanol enjoys. But it seems to me that ethanol from waste biomass is a lot better than ethanol that’s made from . . . food.

UPDATE: The prospect of making fuel from waste biomass inspires reader Brian Cubbison to utter a single magic word: “Kudzu.”

Watch out, Saudis!

CROSS-CULTURAL TOILET COMPARISONS.

JOHN WIXTED: “Awareness of al Qaeda is slowly growing in the minds of mainstream media reporters who have been hamstrung by the civil war schema that they simply cannot get out of their heads. Even so, there is not the slightest mention of the fact that al Qaeda was probably behind yesterday’s bombing. . . . Just because you don’t want to reinforce Bush’s claim that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror is no reason to be deliberately misleading when presenting the news from Iraq.”

But, he says, Reuters got it right. No, really.

“SLAM DUNK:” “This country faces important tasks, like completing the liberation and stabilization of Iraq and stopping Iran’s Islamofascist regime in Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Why, with a global war on terror to win, are we wasting time worrying about a years-old quip?”

Because Tenet, who should have been fired shortly after 9/11, is still trying to justify himself. As are a lot of press, pundits, and politicians who supported the war in 2002 and 2003, and who often went on about Saddam’s threat as far back as the 1990s, but are trying to execute a pivot in time for 2008. But read the whole thing. And don’t miss the video here.

Oh, hell, I’ll just embed it below:

FANS AND CRITICS for Nancy Pelosi: The Washington Post is surprisingly critical.

ANOTHER ANTI-ISLAMIST PROTEST in Turkey.

PRIVATE GROUPS MONOPOLIZING PUBLIC LANDS: “This finding should not be particularly surprising. ‘Public’ lands are political lands. Management and access rules are ultimately driven by political considerations, and this gives concentrated interest groups and well-heeled organizations a leg up.”

ANOTHER SPACE VENTURE TAKES OFF:

The cremated remains of Star Trek actor James Doohan and Apollo 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper soared into suborbital space today aboard a rocket launched in the New Mexico desert.

The launch was the first success at a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern part of the state.

The rocket was fired by Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan, who sent the missile carrying small amounts of their husbands’ ashes into the sky at 8:56 a.m.

The rocket soon plummeted back to Earth as planned at the White Sands Missile Range.

About 200 other families paid $495 each to have their loved ones’ ashes sent into space aboard the Spaceloft X-L rocket.

Bill Richardson deserves a spot of credit, too, as he’s been good about pushing the New Mexico spaceport.

UPDATE: More here.

TROUBLING THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, from Rick Moran. Sadly, I agree that our domestic political situation will make constructive action difficult. As I’ve said before, it was obvious in the 1990s that we had a dysfunctional political class, but it’s become much more obvious in the current decade. (Via TMV). And yes, time’s the enemy now. Pentagon planners talk about the “three year rule” for domestic support in a war, and it’s been four — five if you count Afghanistan.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

FIRE MELTS STEEL: Somebody tell Rosie O’Donnell.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: “Will someone explain to me why I have to hurry and beat the After Church Rush to get a seat in the smoking section of a bar?”

UNREST IN IRAN: May it strengthen and spread.

MAYBE THERE’S HOPE: The Dangerous Book for Boys, a politically incorrect work indeed, has topped the sales charts in the UK and it’s now shipping in the United States. More on that book, and its writers’ views about the overly safe PC culture that surrounds kids today, here.

UPDATE: Great line from the comments: “I rode myself two miles to baseball practice and back all summer. The proportion of child molesters was probably the same as today, but there was no 24-hour news cycle, so we were free.”

ACROSS THE COUNTRY IN A “SMART CAR” AT 48 MILES PER GALLON: This is interesting, but I’m not all that impressed. My mother just traded in her 12-year-old Saturn SL, which routinely got over 40 mpg on the highway. It was a bit sluggish, but it had four doors. The compromises made here to get a bit more don’t seem worth it.

She replaced the Saturn — she loved it, but at 165K+ miles it was time — with a Honda Civic. She likes it, and she’s getting 36 mpg in mixed driving, so I imagine that with her legendarily frugal driving style she could get around 40 on the highway. Is it worth chopping off the back half of the car to get 48?

UPDATE: Alex del Castillo emails: “Have we unlearned something? I remember my boss’s zippy little CRX getting 50 real world MPG in New Orleans back in 86. One would think that 20 years later we could do better than the Smart Car. I am not prone to conspiracy theory, but it almost seems as if they are sandbagging…”

I don’t think it’s that. Extra safety requirements added weight, and consumers quit caring about mileage.

IN TODAY’S NYT: CARBON-NEUTRAL IS HIP, BUT IS IT GREEN?

On this, environmentalists aren’t neutral, and they don’t agree. Some believe it helps build support, but others argue that these purchases don’t accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square-foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism.

As long as the use of fossil fuels keeps climbing — which is happening relentlessly around the world — the emission of greenhouse gases will keep rising. The average American, by several estimates, generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide or related gases a year; the average resident of the planet about 4.5 tons.

At this rate, environmentalists say, buying someone else’s squelched emissions is all but insignificant.

“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”

“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.

Read the whole thing.

JAMES TABOR lists five books he likes on the theme of man vs. nature. It’s not quite the same thing, but to that list I’d add David Baron’s excellent book, The Beast in the Garden: The True Story of a Predator’s Deadly Return to Suburban America. In fact, there’s probably a deep sociological point in the contrast between this book, and the books that Tabor discusses.

GLOBAL WARMING, GLOBAL COOLING, and a Blue Oyster Cult reference, all in one post.

ERIC MULLER HAS A ROUNDUP of all his posts on Uncle Leo and the Holocaust. And Doug Weinstein has some thoughts.

SCHLOCK AND AWE: “And here we thought shock and awe was about bringing Saddam Hussein to his knees.” Heh.

GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS, from Jules Crittenden.

IN LIGHT OF MY EARLIER POST ON IMPORTED OIL, I should probably note this column from today’s WSJ which makes an important point:

As long as the U.S. remains part of a global market in fuels, the impact of events abroad will not stop at the border. For example, in a crisis that cut off supplies from Saudi Arabia, the price of oil needed in Europe and Asia might double or triple overnight. Prices would rise in response in the U.S. even if we weren’t importing oil, as markets directed the fuel that was available to the highest bidders.

That’s true — and it also means, of course, that a shutdown of oil at its source wouldn’t just hurt the U.S., but all of Saudi Arabia’s customers. And it certainly suggests that building up domestic sources — especially things like oil shale — will help buffer shocks from elsewhere.

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS IS UP! Lots of other carnivals, of course, at BlogCarnival.com.

STUART BUCK: “The way that our country treats chronic pain sufferers who use too much pain medication seems insane to me. I can’t find any evidence that Oxycontin, say, is anywhere near as dangerous as alcohol — i.e., tens of thousands of fatalities every single year. But we don’t make people get a prescription to buy a beer, let alone throw people in jail for 25 years for having a bottle of vodka in the house.”

And read this on the Hurwitz case, by John Tierney.

THOUGHTS ON OBAMA VOTES AS RACISM OFFSETS?

Let’s hope it’s more genuine than the carbon offsets are turning out to be . . . .

GEORGE TENET’S NEW BOOK inspires some thoughts from Tom Maguire.

Plus, a look back at intelligence. And here’s another one in which he seemed pretty confident that we’d find “caches of weapons of mass destruction” once Saddam was overthrown. Plus, Zarqawi. So he was batting .500!

YOU CAN FEEL THE EXCITEMENT: “After 6 years of the Bush presidency, we finally have a sex scandal. And not the Mark Foley naughty e-mails stuff. A Clintonesque affair complete with hookers.”

If we legalized prostitution, would stuff like this still be a scandal? We should, anyway.

ZELLMENTUM! The Draft Zell movement seems to be taking off!

NICK GILLESPIE TALKS ABOUT IMMIGRATION, on Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! YouTube version available here.

ROSS DOUTHAT moves to The Atlantic. They’re really snapping up talent.

DEMOGRAPHICS: Will Wilkinson asks: “So what explains the fact that America is the land where white people reproduce?”

BUMBLING THE BEE SCARE: I like the photos.

SENATE DEMOCRATS are rallying to Harry Reid’s defense against that loudmouthed conservative David Broder.

The real message, of course, is that they expect the Post and its columnists to stick to their real job — attacking Republicans — and not stray off the reservation. If I were Broder, I’d respond with a column on Harry Reid’s land deals.

HIRING “SCANDALS” AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE: Todd Zywicki is far from scandalized:

Oh my goodness–a bust of James Madison in his very office! Gracious, a civil rights lawyer who clerked for Charles Pickering–who “congressional Democrats … contended” was hostile to civil rights (apparently since some congressional Democrats “contended it,” all of his clerks are disqualified from working in the office).

The other example cited in the article seems odd as well–why is it supposed to be a problem that a graduate of Regent Law School might be interested in working on “some religious liberties” cases. Would we be similarly shocked if a minority graduate of Southern Law School, for example, expressed a particular interest in working on Voting Rights cases, or a former intern at a pro-choice organization was interested in reproductive rights cases?

The unintentional irony of this is that these examples are provided as examples of the “nonideological” bona fides of the career lawyers who offered them as examples. The career lawyer who is cited (as well as the authors of the article) seems confident that any right-minded person would shocked and outraged that a lawyer was a member of the Federalist Society and had a bust of James Madison in his office or that one of Judge Pickering’s clerks worked in the civil rights division. . . . But if these are the “smoking gun” examples that are the best ones that career attorneys can offer as conservative ideology run amuck at the DOJ, then it seems to me that this says more about the real biases of the supposedly “nonpolitical” attitudes of DOJs career attorneys and the ideological parochialism of the Washington Post than about some sort of hiring “scandal” at DOJ. If these are the sorts of trivialities that career DOJ attorneys consider to be evidence of an extreme ideological shift to the right at the DOJ, then forgive me for being skeptical that the end result of giving career lawyers a monopoly on hiring for these positions is going to eliminate ideology from the hiring process.

I guess they should have called it a diversity hiring program.

‘IT’S A SHAME CARS DON’T RUN ON COGNITIVE DISSONANCE:” Mocking celebrity hypocrisy on the environment at The Daily Show.

SANDMONKEY HAS QUIT BLOGGING: “One of the chief reasons is the fact that there has been too much heat around me lately. I no longer believe that my anonymity is kept, especially with State Secuirty agents lurking around my street and asking questions about me since that day . . . .And speaking of the state of the egyptian blogsphere, it has been pretty depressing in its own right. One has to wonder at some point the futulity of being a keyboard warrior in a country where nothing seems to matter to its people anymore.”

AT BOINGBOING, an interesting post by Cory Doctorow on Dan Gilbert’s book, Stumbling on Happiness.

ON BILL RICHARDSON:

Isn’t Richardson the manliest of the Democratic candidates, with his guns and his sports? Unfortunately, he doesn’t look athletic and, in any case, Democrats seem to be immune to such red state attractions. At least not until after they’ve chosen their candidate.

Richardson is polling way ahead of other Democrats among InstaPundit readers. As I’ve mentioned before, I like his positions on space, too. Interestingly, Kos likes Richardson. That may not be surprising, as he’s been happy to back Democrats who look like they might win Red State votes — e.g., James Webb.

VOTING ON the greatest car chase in movie history.

IOWAHAWK offers an amusing take on gun control efforts.

ROGER SIMON on the real life and the phony life.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY notes recent Al Qaeda attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and observes: “Perhaps the most devastating attack Osama bin Laden could deliver on America wouldn’t be in America. It would be in Saudi Arabia, on its oil supply. Saudi Arabia is the world’s top oil exporter, and Osama has called for attacks on its refineries and pipelines expressly to cripple our economy.”

In the short term, expanding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will help. In the longer term, less dependence on imported oil would help more.

UPDATE: Well, here’s a report that Colorado oil shale is back in play. Better to move away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but the ones we use should probably be domestic.

OKAY, SO I HAVE A PRETTY NICE ELECTRIC BLOWER-VAC, except that the vac attachment got smashed and it would probably cost more to replace it than to just get a whole new blower. I’d be happy to just buy another — it’s been fine and it’s pretty cheap — but I wonder if there’s a cordless blower-vac that works well enough to be worth buying. Everything I can find seems kind of wimpy, with disclaimers like this: “While this blower provides adequate air velocity for doing maintenance cleaning in the areas mentioned above, it is not designed to be a blower for use in moving fall leaves on the lawn.” Am I just asking too much?

I find the blower-vac one of the most useful yard tools out there. What’s your favorite?

MICKEY KAUS OBSERVES: “Don’t the crowded Democratic debates need at least one more candidate–a conservative dark horse who can sharpen the debate from the right the way Kucinich sharpened it from the left?”

How about Zell Miller? The DraftZell.com domain shows as available . . . .

A PROVEN APPROACH to cleaning up the environment:

While the modern environmental movement often portrays capitalist industrial societies as the world’s biggest pollution problem, Forbes notes something interesting about the top-25 cleanest cities in the world: Most of them are in wealthy industrialized democracies. Turns out, all that industrialization created wealth which, in turn, buys the things (mass transit, especially) and pays for the policies that create a cleaner environment.

Yep. The good things in life generally come from wealthy, industrialized democracies.

FROM AUSTRALIA: “The US Congress’ vote to push for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq was wrong and will bring comfort to Al-Qaeda insurgents, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Friday.”

From Iraq: “I am an Iraqi. To me the possible consequences of this vote are terrifying. Just as we began to see signs of progress in my country the Democrats come and say, ‘Well, it’s not worth it.Time to leave’.”

UPDATE: A look at the effect of timetables in Basra: “Now that the Brits and Danes have given the people of Basra a drop-dead date for their withdrawal, they have set in motion a fight for power that will only amplify as the withdrawal date approaches. Instead of throwing in with the central government, the flight of the Coalition has convinced Iraqis in that area that they have to find the strongest warlord for protection. We can expect this across the country if the US withdraws precipitately from Iraq. A pullout will embolden the violent and frighten the law-abiding, and the end result will be a completely failed state. Regardless of whether one supported the invasion or not, it is obviously not in the American interest to leave behind a collapsed Iraq where the boldest and most vicious terrorists rise to power in fiefdoms small and large.”

Some people don’t care, though, if it might give them a leg-up in the next election.

CARBON TRADING — not just a scam, but a government-encouraged scam:

The government department spearheading Britain’s effort to reduce carbon output is driving companies and individuals towards paying under a European Union system for emissions cuts that do not take place.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has also channelled more than half of £215m paid out under a pilot UK greenhouse gas trading scheme to just four companies which spent considerably less than they received on emissions cuts.

The first charge against Defra is that, under a new code of practice, it has been advising businesses and consumers wishing to offset their emissions to buy carbon credits through the EU or a separate UN carbon trading scheme. However, phase one of the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been discredited for giving companies so many carbon credits – effectively permits to pollute – that no overall reduction in emissions took place.

Why am I not surprised?

GENERALS IN IRAQ: In response to yesterday’s post on the subject, a reader in Iraq who asks for anonymity emails:

Boot has a point about Generals.

They don’t control much on the ground and the tactical decisions, but they have a huge say in asset allocation and priorities. (They know, but don’t control.)

To see all the assets that have been arrayed on huge bases like Balaad, Al Asad, TQ, Victory Baghdad, then compare them to say PB 548 north of Habbaniyah, you see the priorities for asset allocation were inside the wire for a few years.

That is just now starting to switch.

Petraeus is fighting a battle not only against the enemy, but the military’s bureaucratic machine. A machine built up over years in garrison without combat and now turning major bases in Iraq into garrison.

I heard a second hand story last night about a female soldier who was not complying with certain rules on a major base. The rules were because it was a ‘combat zone.’ Her defense? The base she was stationed on was not a combat zone.

I think I would have acquitted her.

Troops in big bases are a lot less likely to get killed, and casualties generate bad press. On the other hand, troops outside the wire can do a lot more, but at the cost of higher casualties.

A LOOK AT SEX AND GRADES in adolescence.

FORMER STATE SEN. JOHN FORD has been convicted of bribery. More here. The good news for Harold Ford, Jr. is that this will be old news by the time he runs for office again.

BEE UPDATE: MICKEY KAUS posts a report from the field: “My mother says her garden is ‘absolutely buzzing’ with bees. So they haven’t all disappeared.”

Meanwhile, although the cellphone theory got a lot of attention, the finger of suspicion is now pointing at a fungus.

CRIMINALIZING THE CONSUMER: The Economist writes on where DRM went wrong.

I think that the adversary relationship with their customers that record companies have fostered will do more to harm them than piracy, over time. In fact, I think it already has.

JAMES WEBB GUN UPDATE:

Authorities dropped charges Friday against an aide to Virginia Sen. Jim Webb who carried a loaded gun into the U.S. Capitol complex.

“After reviewing and analyzing all of the evidence in the case, we do not believe the essential elements of the crime of carrying a pistol without a license can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor, top prosecutor in the District of Columbia, said in a short statement.

Webb senior aide Phillip Thompson, 45, was arrested on March 26 after Capitol Police spotted the loaded pistol and two other loaded magazines in a briefcase being scanned by an X-ray machine at the entrance of the Russell Senate office building.

Stlll no news on who the gun belonged to, though. I think this was the right outcome, as there wasn’t any evidence that Thompson knew he had a gun in the bag. I just hope that others will get similar treatment. People don’t always get off as easily in these circumstances. (Via Volokh).

UPDATE: Reader Patrick Gigliotti emails:

Webb is in Virginia, yes? Va. Tech is in Virginia, yes? If Senator Webb were a Republican we would be swamped with stories in the media about how his gun obsession influenced the minds of the youth in his state. The normal story line of “what message does this send to our children” did not appear. Gun control nutters have not mentioned his name. Curious.

Good point.

MIKE GRAVEL, superstar.

WELL, THIS IS NICE: “The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans. Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the ‘high-value detainee programme’ at Guantanamo Bay.”

Hey, wait — an “al-Qaeda leader” who’s also a “former major in Saddam Hussein’s army”? But I thought there was no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Or between Al Qaeda and Iran . . . .

UPDATE: Don Surber: London bombings? What London bombings?

The U.S. announced on Friday that it captured the mastermind behind the 7/7/2005 bombings in London.

But you would not know it by reading the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Associated Press.

None of them mentioned the London bombings in reporting on the capture of the man who organized that attack, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (aka, Abu Abdallah).

Instead, reporters concentrated on where this major player in the war on terrorism was held after his capture. Incredible.

I don’t know. It doesn’t surprise me.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey comments: “All of these papers had hours after the Times of London report to get the London bombings into the story. The Times goes to bed at 7 pm ET and hits the feeds and wire services. None of the American media bothered to check on Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi. Readers should ask themselves whether that comes from a lack of intellectual curiosity, or whether it comes from a bias that puts the circumstances of the detention of a terrorist at a higher priority than the terrorism itself.”

Either way, they’re doing a crappy job. But if he’d had a connection to Jack Abramoff, you can bet they’d have mentioned it!

EMAIL OF THE DAY:

Subject: Comments Sectino

To: pundit

So, did you eliminate the comments section because you were tired of having us Libs hand you your anti-intellectual ass, or were you just trying to hide the fact that your fans are drooling mouth-breathers?

Given that I’ve never had a comment section — or even a “comments sectino” — I have no idea what provokes emails like this. But they certainly don’t encourage me to add one, if this is the kind of person who’s, er, drooling at the prospect of posting on my site.

REPUBLICANS VS. HILLARY: Interesting.

THE NORTH CAROLINA ATTORNEY GENERAL has released the report on the Duke Lacrosse prosecutorial debacle. The report’s here. Excerpt:

The re-investigation led to the conclusion that there was no credible evidence to support the allegation that the crimes occurred. The new investigation revealed additional weaknesses in the State’s cases based on the case files that had already been developed.

The State’s cases rested primarily on a witness whose recollection of the facts of the allegations was imprecise and contradictory. This alone would have made it difficult for a prosecutor to prove the allegations. However with additional evidence uncovered in the new investigation, it was clear that there was no credible evidence that these crimes occurred at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in Durham that night.

Naturally, K.C. Johnson is all over this. The Durham Police Department is coming off badly, too.

A CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY IN KANSAS, as the legislature overrides a veto of liberalized carry laws by Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

A CIVIL RIGHTS VICTORY IN KANSAS, as the legislature overrides a veto of liberalized carry laws by Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.

UPDATE: It’s certainly better than this approach. Jeez.

FIGHT! FIGHT! It’s Lou Dobbs vs. Gavin Newsom.

Time to weigh in on this important topic:

But will someone please explain to all concerned that Hermann Goering was not the Nazis’ propagandist-in-chief? That’s Joseph Goebbels. If you’re going to go all Godwin on this stuff, you need to at least know your Nazis. What has American politics come to?

UPDATE: Yes, of course it’s a dumb poll. As befits its subject. And subjects.

JOHN MCCAIN DID A BLOGGER CONFERENCE CALL: I wasn’t on it, but Ann Althouse and Ryan Sager were, and report some news. McCain’s against civil unions, too. Not winning any points with me either.

GIULIANI COMES OUT AGAINST CIVIL UNIONS, which seems like something of a flipflop to me. At any rate, it’s not winning any points as far as I’m concerned.

HOW TO DO GUN CONTROL: “Special squads of police. No notice searches. Fines. Imprisonment.”

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh observes: “It does seem to me that a War on Guns, with unannounced random searches on streets and in homes, should be highly unappealing to anyone who has even some reservations about the War on Drugs, and questionable even to those who support the War on Drugs.”

I can certainly see a downside. And as Volokh notes, proposals like this do illustrate the dishonesty of claims that “No one is trying to take away your guns,” and that claims to the contrary are just a “gun lobby bogeyman.”

COMPACT FLUORESCENTS AND MERCURY: Steven Milloy has a piece on compact fluorescents and mercury that a lot of people are writing about. Milloy tells the horrifying story of a woman in Ellsworth, Maine who broke a compact fluorescent bulb and wound up stuck with a $2000 hazmat cleanup bill.

The story may be true, but she could have saved herself some money by googling “compact fluorescent mercury.” That would have brought her information like this:

The government’s Energy Star program says the amount of mercury in a compact fluorescent bulb is so small that there’s no immediate health risk if it’s cleaned up properly.

The program’s advice is to sweep up the pieces – don’t vacuum them – and put them into a sealed plastic bag. Wipe the area with a damp paper towel to pick up the fine shards and particles, and put the towel into the plastic bag as well. If weather permits, open the windows to ventilate the room. Treat the bag and its contents as hazardous waste, and recycle appropriately.

Or this:

Is it true that compact fluorescent light bulbs contain harmful mercury?

Compact fluorescent lights contain a very small amount of mercury, significantly less than those in fever thermometers. This small amount of mercury slowly bonds with the phosphor coating on the lamp interior as the lamp ages, prohibiting its entry into the atmosphere. Even breaking a fluorescent bulb is not a significant health risk because the amount of mercury vapor released is so small that it dissipates into the air with a minimal chance of inhalation.

What is the proper way to dispose of burned-out compact fluorescent light bulbs?

Though compact fluorescent light bulbs are exempt from Environmental Protection Agency and State of Washington regulations, Tacoma Power recommends that you dispose of burned-out bulbs as you would batteries, motor oil or oil-based paint. City of Tacoma and Pierce County residents can dispose of household hazardous waste, including burned-out compact fluorescent light bulbs, at the City of Tacoma Landfill Household Hazardous Waste Collection Site.

Doesn’t sound so scary to me. What about the overall environmental effects? Well, there’s this:

Ironically, compact fluorescent bulbs are responsible for less mercury contamination than the incandescent bulbs they replaced, even though incandescents don’t contain any mercury. The highest source of mercury in America’s air and water results from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, at utilities that supply electricity. Since a compact fluorescent bulb uses 75 percent less energy than an incandescent bulb, and lasts at least six times longer, it is responsible for far less mercury pollution in the long run. A coal-burning power plant will emit four times more mercury to produce the electricity for an incandescent bulb than for a compact fluorescent.

Or this: “The very small amount of mercury in a CFL — about 5 milligrams, compared to an old-fashioned home thermometer, which had about 500 milligrams — is safe while the bulb is in operation and poses little risk even if it breaks, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”

I’d be interested in seeing more on this topic, but if CFLs were as deadly as Milloy suggests, I wouldn’t expect big companies to sell them for fear that the trial lawyers would take them to the cleaners. I kind of think that Milloy is just having a bit of fun turning enviro-scare tactics back upon themselves, but I don’t think there’s much foundation to these worries.

MARC DANZIGER ON VIRGINIA TECH: “The students didn’t fail to act correctly by not attacking their attacker. The doctrine they were operating under — the one we have trained them in all their lives — failed them.”

IN THE MAIL: Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan’s Caucus of Corruption: The Truth about the New Democratic Majority.

Meet the new caucus. Same as the old caucus.

JOHN MCWHORTER:

It is reasonable to surmise that Barack Obama will be the next President.

Mr Obama has a once-in-a-lifetime charisma that Hillary Clinton could never approximate, and she also suffers from the handicap of not being black. For all of his other plusses, part of Mr Obama’s appeal lies in the fact that many whites feel that voting for a black presidential candidate would be Doing the Right Thing. Leon Wieseltier has been explicit about this; he is not unique.

Read the whole thing.

HAS BUSH TAKEN THE WRONG LESSONS FROM VIETNAM? Read this interview with Max Boot.

UPDATE: A failure of the generals? “America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.” Hmm. I’m not so sure, but read this and see what you think.

NIGERIA: “The government used the oil revenue, which is over two-thirds of of government income, to buy the recent elections. . . . The stolen oil money is spread around, with about ten percent of the population getting some of it, and doing what needs to be done to keep the thieving politicians in power. The majority of Nigerians get nothing, and the better armed politicians dare anyone to do anything about it. But the current government claimed to be reformers, and blamed all the former problems on corrupt military dictators.” Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

JOHN TAMMES POSTS MORE news from Afghanistan that you probably missed.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE LOOKS AT how people are spinning Petraeus.

MORE ON MIKE GRAVEL’S sudden stardom.

M.I.T. ADMISSIONS DEAN STEPS DOWN over resume-faking scandal. “Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became well known for urging stressed-out students competing for elite colleges to calm down and stop trying to be perfect. Yesterday she admitted that she had fabricated her own educational credentials, and resigned after nearly three decades at M.I.T. Officials of the institute said she did not have even an undergraduate degree.”

PEGGY NOONAN:

This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big–400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak–and eye-catching, as would be anything that “presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America’s indigenous people by genocidal Europeans.” Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times’s Bob Sipchen, who noted “the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus’s Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.”

What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:

The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.

We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we’re doing it more and more.

Well, government-sponsored race-hatred seems bad, too. But read the whole thing.

SECRETS OF “CROWD-BUILDING,” explained.

HILLARY AND HAMSHER: “Democratic activists privately questioned Clinton’s decision to appear on Firedoglake because of the tarnished reputation of Jane Hamsher, one of its chief bloggers.”

More here. It’s a tempest in a teapot, really — but also another reminder to bloggers who want to be political players that real political players (successful ones, anyway) are careful about the record they produce.

PATTERICO HAS MORE on the Atlanta cops charged in the Kathryn Johnston no-knock raid gone wrong.

Following up on a comment, I’d also like to know more about the judge who signed the warrant in this case.

UPDATE: Here’s more from Radley Balko:

We now know that Kathryn Johnston fired only a single bullet, through the door as police were trying to break in. They responded with a storm of bullets, which apparently both wounded Johnston and the officers themselves. When they realized their fatal error, they planted cocaine and marijuana in the woman’s home. They then pressured an uninvolved informant to testify to having made controlled buys at Johnston’s home to cover their tracks.

The New York Times is now reporting that the officers have told federal investigators that their behavior was not out of the ordinary. That corruption, planting evidence, and giving false testimony are routine at APD. That’s not surprising. The only way these officers could think they’d get away with all of this is if they were operating within a system that routinely allows for—or even encourages—such behavior. APD’s focus on arrest numbers and professional rewards for the big bust apparently incentivized such short cuts.

It’s also important to remember that it’s possible we wouldn’t know any of this were it not for the uncooperative informant who admirably refused to help the cops cover their asses.

Read the whole thing.

I’d be more impressed with the Democratic candidates if they had united in their opposition to the War on Drugs, which has done the country much more harm, over much more time, than the one in Iraq.

CLAYTON CRAMER LOOKS AT HR 297, the mental-illness reporting bill, and isn’t sure why some gun-rights groups are unhappy with it.

GREENHOUSE EFFECT UPDATE:

A flock of small jets took flight from Washington Thursday, each carrying a Democratic presidential candidate to South Carolina for the first debate of the political season. . . . No one jet pooled, no one took commercial flights to save money, fuel or emissions.

All but Biden, who flew on a private jet, chartered their flights — a campaign expense of between $7,500 and $9,000.

Couldn’t they have “jet pooled” to cut down on carbon emissions? Or, you know, flown commercial with the hoi polloi? (Via Newsbusters).

UPDATE: John McGinnis thinks it would have been smart to fly commercial: “Every jet flying the
friendly skies is filled with — Voters.”

THIS DOES SEEM LIKE A RATHER LOW THRESHOLD for swooning.

Plus this: “Maybe somebody needs to explain to Greenwald what ‘Trutherism’ means. Hint: it ain’t a compliment.” Well, in his circles it probably is. Hence the misunderstanding.

JOURNALIST AS DAFFY DUCK: But what’s really “despicable” here, of course, is that it works.

MICKEY KAUS NOTES debate Laphamization at the Associated Press, but concludes that it’s okay: “The one she wrote before the debate was better!”

SO I’VE ACTUALLY BEEN TRAVELLING TO AND FROM NASHVILLE TODAY, to a meeting at the Capitol on revising the state constitution, and I queued up a bunch of “scheduled posts” (including this one) before I left this morning. So if some big news event happened and I haven’t mentioned it, that’s because it hadn’t happened yet when I scheduled all of this stuff. More fresh stuff whenever I get home, which given that they’re forecasting hail, severe thunderstorms, etc. for Knoxville, Nashville, and the Cumberland Mountains in between may be late.

LIVEBLOGGING THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES’ DEBATE: I’d say that Mike Gravel improved his situation the most: “Gravel… that’s news to me. I didn’t even know he was still alive!”

Still alive! Getting that news out is an essential first step in a campaign.

UPDATE: Hey, Gravel-mania threatens to explode: “Where did this guy come from? . . . I suspect he is going to gain a LOT of attention and some popularity.” It’s a trend!

ANOTHER UPDATE: This rapid rise has already produced a wave of Gravel-Bashing: “I still don’t like Gravel. I think he’s crazy.”

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.” One debate and he’s already to stage three! Watch for people to start poaching his campaign staff.

MORE: A sure sign of momentum in a campaign — pundits are starting to suck up to the candidate: “Gravel was direct and tough on the other candidates during the debate. He also certainly provided the funniest moments of the debate. We have not given him enough attention and for this we apologize. Here is a link to his campaign website.”

STILL MORE: Matt Stoller hearts Mike Gravel. It’s Mikementum, baby!

Dave Weigel, not so much. He thinks Obama won, even though he had the biggest gaffe.

MORE STILL: I’m surprised that TigerHawk is swimming against the tide: “Gravel is a loon, by the way. He makes Kucinich look sober as a judge.”

I dunno. You gotta love this line of Gravel’s: “I’m embarrassed about this Congress.”

Hey, me too. Even more than the last one, and that’s saying something.

Best comment yet: “President Gravel? Only on an episode of The Flintstones.”

Though judging by tonight, that may be speaking too soon!

The Hotline blog: “Still unknown: What constitutes success in Iraq for Edwards, Obama and Clinton.”

I think the honest answer would be would be “my election in 2008.”

And here’s a roundup at The Moderate Voice.

I WENT TO NASHVILLE AND BACK TODAY, for a meeting of the state committee on constitutional revision that I’m on. It was at the Capitol, and when it was over Bob Cooper, the Attorney General, took one of our out-of-state visitors on a tour. I haven’t wandered the Capitol proper in quite a while, so I tagged along. Tennessee’s Capitol is very pretty in an austere sort of way, and if I’d had more time — and if I were Ann Althouse — I’d have a lot of stunning photos. But here are a couple, anyway. It was interesting to hear people compare Capitol-building trivia, and it brought home that when the artisans who designed the chandelier in the Senate chamber put in intertwined symbols of the state, they were doing something with political, not just aesthetic, implications — things that show even today in little bits of state pride on the part of constitutional officeholders. Federalism is built on these things, as well as on the Tenth Amendment.

The meeting was pleasant and useful, and in its informality and its matter-of-fact practicality it brought home another difference between state politics and government and those at the national level. Or maybe it’s just a Tennessee thing; I don’t have much experience with other states’ operations.

Driving both ways today, I noticed that high gas prices still haven’t induced people to slow down — or, judging from the traffic, to drive less. What was sad was that although some of the trees are in full spring glory, many are brown from die-back induced by the late freeze. They’ll bud eventually, but the huge patches of brown on the mountainsides looked like some strange disease was breaking out.

And yeah, posts continued via “scheduled posting” — I managed to get online briefly a couple of times, but never for all that long. I like that feature.

UPDATE: Yes, it was a public meeting, though sparsely attended by the public — I wouldn’t have blogged about it otherwise. I’m just not blogging about this stuff in detail because I don’t think many readers are deeply interested in updating the gubernatorial succession provisions of the Tennessee Constitution. But yes, they know about the blog — both Gen. Cooper and Gov. Bredesen made InstaPundit jokes during the introductions.

IN THE ECONOMIST, a look at changing technology and cottage industry.

It’s a good observation!

NEWSPAPERS ARE AGONIZING over whether to allow comments. LaShawn Barber has some suggestions.

EGYPT’S “DR. RUTH” SAYS: Muslims need better sex:

It took the 39-year-old mother three years of negotiations to get her show on the air. And a main reason she succeeded is that she talks only about sex allowed in the Quran — sex between husband and wife.

But even with that guideline, it’s no easy sell.

The promo for “The Big Talk” starts with Kotb saying, “Sex. Don’t be afraid. Join me to talk about sex without shame.”

And people are doing just that. The show is gaining in popularity throughout the Middle East. So much so that Kotb just signed with a new production company and plans to push the sexual envelope even further in her discussions.

For the moment her main advice for married couples: Have more sex.

“You have nowhere else to get your sexuality but from your spouse. It’s the only source available, so it’s very important.”

And for the men she has some blunt advice: “You have to have foreplay with your wife and you have to have sex with her frequently, not just when you want to.”

It’s good advice. Read the whole thing.

J.D. JOHANNES posts another report from Iraq.

(AND STILL ANOTHER) CULTURE OF CORRUPTION UPDATE:

Democrats in Congress appear to be taking full advantage of the “pay to play” system they said led to a “climate of corruption” under Republicans, an ABC News investigation has found.

“Washington looks pretty much the same as it always did,” said Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, despite Democratic promises of reform.

Campaign finance records made public this week show Democratic congressional campaign committees taking in substantially more in contributions than their Republican counterparts.

Read the whole thing.

TIME: Was Timothy Leary right?

POLICE INDICTED in the Kathryn Johnston no-knock raid in Atlanta.