THOMPSON QUITS PRESIDENTIAL RACE: Er, Tommy Thompson, that is.

IS HURRICANE DEAN in the process of forming?

FASHION TV: Ann Althouse and Robin Givhan on Bloggingheads.tv.

SHIFTING JUSTIFICATIONS for a gun ban in San Francisco.

MICHAEL SILENCE: “I am officially declaring privacy dead.” The Patriot Act is not involved.

MICHAEL YON emails this link and adds: “When I wrote in 2006 that I would not be surprised to see a base overrun in Afghanistan in 2007, some people called me a traitor. . . . We are winning in Iraq. Make no mistake about that. But we are losing in Afghanistan.”

Don’t know if that’s right, though I tend to trust Yon’s judgment– here’s the latest roundup on Afghanistan from StrategyPage — but it’s clear that it needs more attention and that it’s not getting enough. I also think that the drug warriors have been undermining the real war there.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “BTW drug warriors have done an awful lot to wreck economies, promote lawlessness, engender corruption and create illicit economies all over the third world, thus making people of color both miserable and dead. When do they get all the credit they deserve for that?”

To be fair, they’ve done plenty of harm here at home, too.

MORE: Clandestine weapons to Iraq? Probably actually destined for Iranian revolutionaries who will rise up in the spring. . . .

STILL MORE: John Wixted rounds up reports and comments: “I would be reluctant to disagree with Yon’s analyses of Iraq (even if they did not correspond to my own analyses, which they do), but I don’t think that his account of Afghanistan is correct. The Taliban are rising, but they are simply being eradicated on a regular basis.” I hope that analysis is correct.

JOHN PODHORETZ: “I hate to be nasty, but anybody who takes the Ames Straw Poll results seriously is an idiot.”

DAVE HARDY: “Some more revelations on how far CA is sliding toward the British standard, where you cannot defend yourself, yet the government will not enforce its rules, either.”

“IS THE WASHINGTON POST smoking pot again?”

Plus, what happened to Drew Carey?

MORE ENVIRONMENTAL HYPOCRISY, this time in Los Angeles government. Rules and self-restraint are for the little people.

MORE ON CHINESE CENSORSHIP, from James Fallows.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE GOES ALL California-superior on Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. “How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states [to] decide who gets to run for President?”

Now that’s not very nice. But I think the answer is, to piss off Californians and New Yorkers, something that the rest of the country agrees on . . . .

UPDATE: Bainbridge is guestblogging at Andrew Sullivan’s place, for those who missed it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related thoughts from Ed Driscoll.

ADDICTED TO REALITY TV: Hey, it’s hard to resist Sunset Tan.

BIONIC ARMS AND MORE: Reporting from DarpaTech.

100,000 MEET TO PLAN A GLOBAL CALIPHATE: Gateway Pundit has the scoop.

277 REASONS TO HAVE SEX.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The New York Times sniffs out some healthcare pork:

Despite promises by Congress to end the secrecy of earmarks and other pet projects, the House of Representatives has quietly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to specific hospitals and health care providers under a bill passed this month to help low-income children.

Instead of naming the hospitals, the bill describes them in cryptic terms, so that identifying a beneficiary is like solving a riddle. Most of the provisions were added to the bill at the request of Democratic lawmakers. . . .

Republicans sometimes did the same thing when they controlled Congress. Under a 1999 law, for example, a small hospital in rural Dixon, Ill., was deemed to be in the Chicago area — 95 miles away — at the behest of its congressman, J. Dennis Hastert, who was then speaker.

Meet the new boss, yada yada. (Via Prairie Pundit).

GOOGLE: When ownership isn’t ownership.

Notice that Google called these videos “purchased” and “download to own” — as though by buying them, they became your property. Funny kind of property, that. Imagine if these were DVDs: one day, a man from Virgin Megastore shows up at your door and says, “We’re taking away all your videos. Sorry! But we’ll give you a credit to spend at a different store. Not a credit for videos, though. Also: it expires in 60 days.”

This is a giant, flaming middle finger, sent by Google and the studios to the customers who were dumb trusting enough to buy DRM videos. How many of these people will trust the next DRM play from Google (no doubt coming soon from YouTube) or the studios?

Don’t “buy” products from people and companies you don’t trust.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: The Carnival of Cars is up! So is the Carnival of Recipes, focusing on slow cookers this time. (Here’s one of my slow-cooker recipes). But wait, here’s another Carnival of the Recipes.

There’s also a new Carnival of Homeschooling, and a new Haveil Havalim. I’m not keeping up with the carnival explosion, but you can get more by visiting BlogCarnival.com — and there are regularly updated highlights in the box in my right sidebar.

THOUGHTS ON WEALTH AND POVERTY from Tam. Also, fashion.

BEAUCHAMP UPDATE: “It seems silly and rather sad for The New Republic to be crawling further and further out on the limb for this guy when he’s all but sawn it off.”

WILL BUSH VETO THE lobbying “reform” bill?

“IN ALL FAIRNESS, YOUR SITE HAS POSTED AWFUL THINGS:” Harold Ford to Markos, on Meet the Press. Video at the link.

UPDATE: Are we seeing Markos going mainstream and leaving the netroots behind?

KITCHEN BLEG: I’ve got some pretty decent, but not top-quality, kitchen knives. My brother recently bought some much more expensive ones, and says the difference is big. I’m thinking of upgrading — I do a lot of cooking around here — and wonder if there’s really a big difference between, for example, these high-priced Wusthof knives and these “budget” Wusthof knives. Any other suggestions also welcomed.

CURIOUS DEVELOPMENTS in the Goose Creek case. Dan Riehl continues to follow things.

MORE EDWARDS/MURDOCH money hypocrisy.

ROBERT SAMUELSON:

We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week’s NEWSWEEK cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It’s an object lesson of how viewing the world as “good guys vs. bad guys” can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story. . . . But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don’t have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale—as NEWSWEEK did—in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.

I thought dissent was supposed to be the highest form of patriotism. . . . But read the whole thing. Personally, as I’ve noted before, the whole debate seems to me to be a religious sideshow. Regardless of what you think about global warming, there are lots of good reasons to avoid burning fossil fuels. But the global-warming discussion in the media is a consensus identity narrative designed to achieve political ends, not an effort to find facts or protect the environment. And this also accounts for the backlash.

UPDATE: More efforts to crush dissent, with threats of jail. They told me that if George W. Bush were reelected, those who failed to toe the line would be ostracized and threatened with prison. And they were right!

MICKEY KAUS: GM has the technology, but Toyota has the advantage.

AU REVOIR, Freedom Fries.

SURRENDER IS AS SURRENDER DOES: Jules Crittenden looks at some fancy political footwork on the surge and Iraq.

Some related thoughts from James Taranto: “Actually, when you think about it, it’s amazing how similar the 2008 race is to the 2004 race. We have a formidable establishment candidate who originally backed the war, then changed his mind (John Kerry then, Hillary Clinton now); a challenger who has opposed the war all along, and who is clearly out of his depth (Howard Dean, Barack Obama); and a third guy who stands around looking pretty (John Edwards, John Edwards).”

TOM SMITH BEATS ME in the tire-pressure geek arms race.

IN THE LONDON TIMES, questions about BBC bias:

The growing general agreement that the culture of the BBC (and not just the BBC) is the culture of the chattering classes provokes a question that has puzzled me for 40 years. The question itself is simple – much simpler than the answer: what is behind the opinions and attitudes of this social group? . . .

We in the BBC were acutely detribalised; we were in a tribal institution, but we were not of it. Nor did we have any geographical tribe; we lived in commuter suburbs, we knew very few of our neighbours and took not the slightest interest in local government. In fact we looked down on it. Councillors were self-important nobodies and mayors were a pompous joke.

We belonged instead to a dispersed “metropolitan media arts graduate” tribe. We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the royal family, the defence budget – it’s a wonder we ever got home.

The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground.

Read the whole thing, which is probably applicable beyond the BBC’s confines.

A ROMNEY VICTORY in the Iowa Straw Poll, according to Romney HQ.

UPDATE: Full report from Marc Ambinder. A surprise second-place showing by Huckabee.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lots of candidate and pundit reactions at The Corner.

BRENDAN LOY: The 2007 hurricane season is right on schedule.

HEH: “Oh, don’t you just know the linked-to article is a lifestyles piece in the NYT? Where do they find these people?”

THE ARMY ISN’T STONEWALLING — BEAUCHAMP IS: An Army response to TNR.

THANKS, Skippy!

DOES A REPORTER HAVE A DUTY TO APPEAR ON C-SPAN?

Nope. Just as nobody has a duty to talk to reporters.

A LIST OF terror websites based in the West.

OKAY, this is just disturbing:

Thomas Martel, 28, of Bonnie Brae is a big guy. So he has a hard time using the features on ever-shrinking user interfaces on devices like his new iPhone. At least, he did, until he had his thumbs surgically altered in a revolutionary new surgical technique known as “whittling.” . . .

The procedure involved making a small incision into both thumbs and shaving down the bones, followed by careful muscular alteration and modification of the fingernails. While Martel’s new thumbs now appear small and effeminate in comparison to his otherwise very large hands, he says he can still lift “pretty much anything I could lift before the surgery – though opening spaghetti sauce jars has been a problem. That was a big surprise.”

(Via Physics Geek. And it’s inspired a contest.)

UPDATE: Apparently, it’s also a hoax, which I actually find a relief.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

KIND OF A COUP: The Amazon page for Bjorn Lomborg’s new book on global warming features a review by Michael Crichton.

SHIP OF FOOLS. Reader C.J. Burch emails: “How come the bloggers are the first to notice and the reporters are the last to notice?”

It’s all about the narrative.

MICKEY KAUS:

I thought Wall Streeters were paid big money because they took big risks. Capitalism, etc. But when those risks actually materialize, and the Wall Streeters are actually threatened with large losses that might change their lifestyles, Jim Cramer shows up to demand that the government bail out his friends.

Plus: “Should the campaign of John Edwards be accusing other candidates of exploiting tragedy?”

UPDATE: A Cramer defense.

MILITARY VETERANS SPEAK OUT at Yale Law School.

COMPLAINTS ABOUT The New York Times’ Lebanon coverage. And an earlier complaint here.

A “DIRTY BOMB” THREAT in New York.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Plus, helpful background from Dan Riehl.

TAKING THE WSJ WEBSITE from subscription to free?

News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch has said he might make the Wall Street Journal’s Web site free, a shift that could compel Pearson to do the same with the online version of its Financial Times. . . .

“It would be an expensive thing to do in the short term. In the long term, it may be a great thing to do,” Murdoch said this week as he sketched his plan for the future of Dow Jones.

Hmm. I think the WSJ is one of the few publications of its type that can make a subscription model work.

U.N. TROOPS “HELPED TO SMUGGLE GOLD:”

The BBC has obtained an internal UN report examining allegations of gold smuggling by Pakistani peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It concluded that Pakistani officers provided armed escorts, hospitality and food to gold smugglers in east Congo.

The confidential report recommended the case be referred to Islamabad for appropriate action against the troops.

I wonder what will happen.

THE CLINTONS AND THE GAY COMMUNITY: “Hillary Clinton has gone about as far as Hillary Clinton will go in disavowing her earlier positions on major gay issues.”

NEWTROOTS vs NetRoots.

WATCHING BASEBALL SMARTER.

SOME HOUSING HORROR STORIES, from James Lileks.

SO THE DOW FINISHED THE WEEK slightly up, as were the other indexes. Good news? Or just a brief reprieve? Beats me.

THE BLOG WAR BEGINS.

A FLIP-FLOP ON TERRORISM PREDICTIONS, at the New York Times?

MORE ANIMAL-RIGHTS TERRORISM: Violent radicals aim to kill Jules Stein Eye Institute researchers who test on animals. There’s already been a car-bomb attempt.

SACRED BANDS AND SPARTA: A HISTORY LESSON FOR MIKE GRAVEL, from Victor Davis Hanson.

A NEW BEAUCHAMP STATEMENT from TNR, though still not terribly informative.

UPDATE: Dave Price is unimpressed. “Well, that’s a neat, lawyerly trick: insist that the Army do something they know the Army cannot do, and claim they are helpless to admit the story is fake otherwise. Slick.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jules Crittenden is unpersuaded.

SAVING GAS WITH A digital tire gauge? Not a bad idea, I guess, and keeping your tires inflated properly is a good idea anyway, but don’t expect anything really dramatic.

UPDATE: Some readers recommend filling tires with nitrogen. I’m pretty skeptical of this — air is nearly 80% nitrogen anyway, and upping the percentage to something likely to be still well below 100% (because of residual air in tires, etc.) doesn’t seem at all likely to make a difference.

ACE WONDERS WHY NOBODY’S TALKING ABOUT the NASA climate data revision.

UPDATE: Well, here’s a bit of notice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Will the mainstream media report the corrected story with as much gusto as they initially reported the claim that 1998 was the warmest on record? Doubtful. But they should. Good public policy can not be made on bad data.”

MORE: This comment at Ecotality distinguishes hottest years in America from hottest years globally, but I always understood this to be about American, not global, records. And I think I was right. As I noted in my earlier post, it indicates problems with the data sets. More here:

The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data. But consider this: For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world. If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China? And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations. No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900. That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.

Much more information at the link.

Plus, reports of Denial-of-Service attacks.

IS IT “PAY FOR PLAY” in Spitzer’s New York?

IT’S THE Tennessee Pork Patrol! Rope ‘em and brand ‘em.

LINDA GREENHOUSE IN A TIFF WITH C-SPAN: Why are journalists so often unhappy about being recorded? “What we’re hearing is that Linda Greenhouse wanted to be as free as possible to criticize the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right — without having to worry about such pesky things as, you know, ‘impartiality’ (which we bloggers don’t have to worry about, thankfully).”

BRYAN PRESTON gives John Murtha a call.

LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE BUSTING ON STEVE LEVITT for trying to think like the enemy. I understand the point, but there’s lots of this kind of brainstorming going on at jihadist sites anyway. Plus, presumably the NYT will harvest IP addresses and turn them over to the FBI, thus ensuring America’s safety.

UPDATE: Robert Mayer emails:

It is exactly because of the firestorm surrounding Steve Levitt’s comments that the blogosphere is becoming increasingly unreadable at the general level. Not only is it simply impossible to find something to become offended by and infuriated at on a daily basis, but it is even harder to do so about such stupid things.

In just about every terrorism class at any university in the country, students must think like terrorists in order to judge what they might do. In my own class, our final project was to plot our own terrorist attack and present it to the class. (We hacked and brought down the electricity grid, followed by an attack in a blacked out city).

Don’t intelligence analysts do this every day when they’re tracking down foreign jihadis? Don’t Homeland Security officials do this every day when thinking about the most vulnerable parts of our country?

I hope they are, because if they aren’t, I’m more worried about that than some smart comments that Steve Levitt made.

Yeah, people need to calm down a bit.

DESMOND LACHMAN: The housing bust is a big deal. The markets seem to agree, pretty much.

THOUGHTS ON earmarks, corruption, and rational ignorance.

WHAT NOT TO NAME YOUR BLOG: At least “InstaPundit” doesn’t come up . . . .

OUCH: “The top-quality fact-checking that can only be achieved by large media corporations is on fine display today, as Reuters is caught by a 13-year old Finnish schoolboy representing still photos from the movie ‘Titanic’ as pictures from the Russian North Pole expedition.”

A JOHN EDWARDS / ZAC EFRON nexus?

A LOOK AT NANOTECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE, from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

CARRY PERMIT CORRUPTION in California.

And more on the Boston Globe firearms straw purchase scandal. No explanations from Steve Bailey, just attacks on his critics.

Lots of background on the Bailey case at SayUncle.

BILL ARDOLINO is going back to Iraq.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Now go vote! “With the states on a race to set primaries and caucuses earlier than everywhere else, both major candidates will be probably known by the end of January, nine full months before the election — or as much time as it takes to make a baby. It’s a major change in the way the US has been electing presidents, and something that the Founders probably didn’t have in mind.”

SINCE I MENTIONED IT YESTERDAY, people want to know what I think of William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country. Alas, I haven’t started it yet. I’m currently reading the new Harry Turtledove book, the conclusion to his alt-history series in which the South won the Civil War, producing a series of follow-on conflicts making America look more like 20th Century Europe. It should be required reading for all those neo-confederate types who wish things had gone the other way in 1865. Meanwhile, if you follow the link there are some very positive reader reviews of Gibson’s book, and an interview, too.

TED KENNEDY DOESN’T LIKE WIND TURBINES, but Boston’s Electricians’ Union thinks they’re great. Because they mean jobs for electricians. But what’s that compared with a trivial infringement on Ted Kennedy’s ocean view? (Thanks to reader Matt Szekely for the tip.)

IF IT’S AUGUST, it must be time for another round of “Gender in the Blogosphere.” Ellen Goodman serves, and Ann Althouse volleys. “Goodman doesn’t really have too much to say, but I note that she doesn’t come up with one idea that’s not about how men are a problem. Somehow women never have any shortcomings. It’s really a shame, because if you’re a woman, then there’s nothing you can change about yourself to do better.”

TASK FORCE WARHORSE: Reporting from Haifa Street.

PERHAPS MIKE BLOOMBERG SHOULD HAVE WORRIED ABOUT THIS PROBLEM, instead of spending his time on trans-fats:

In a Crisis, Subway Riders Get Little Guidance

Compared with commuters in many of the world’s leading cities, subway riders in New York live in something of an information vacuum once they enter the system’s 468 stations. For decades, riders have regarded their creaking and antiquated subway network as a minor miracle, tolerating frequent delays, cramped stations and malfunctioning public-address systems.

But the storm this week, highlighting yet again deficiencies in how the authority gets information out, seemed to push riders past the limits of their patience.

This is not just a convenience issue, but a safety issue.

ARNOLD KLING looks at the Facebook Generation Gap.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER ON the TNR / Beauchamp affair: “We already knew from all of America’s armed conflicts — including Iraq — what war can make men do. The only thing we learn from Scott Thomas Beauchamp is what literary ambition can make men say.”

MATTHEW HOY: “It appears as though efforts by some in the military and media to turn a tragedy into a crime are going to fail. Yesterday, Lt. Gen. James Mattis decided not to court-martial Lance Cpl. Justin L. Sharratt and Capt. Randy W. Stone.” Something of an embarrassment for John Murtha, if he’s capable of embarrassment.

UPDATE: Murtha still running for cover.

ORIN KERR: Questions and answers on the new FISA bill. Plus a report on the FISA conference call for bloggers. Glad he was taking notes, as I was unable to, er, listen in . . . .

IF ONLY: “We’re entering the early mid-late summer blur, I suspect. Something deep, ancient, elemental and ancestral in the back of our minds has noted the angle of the sun at noon, and concluded: in two weeks I shall see school buses making practice runs. Of course, this information was useless to our Neolithic forebears, but it explains their epic poems about giant yellow beasts that prowled the land and devoured the first-born.” School started here yesterday. The insta-daughter’s opinion? . . . . Mixed.

SEGWAY FAN CLUB disbands.

MICKEY KAUS: “One way to characterize Bush’s second term in domestic policy is that he’s consistently moved to Plan B too late to salvage anything from the demise of his Plan A. That was certainly the case on Social Security reform, and in all probability will be the final story on immigration. Will he replicate that misjudgment on Iraq?”

DEFENDANT WINS BREATHALYZER SOURCE CODE. Well, without that being public it’s just a black box.

THEY USED TO BE CALLED “THE POPULAR PRESS,” BUT NOT ANY MORE:

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don’t care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.

And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news — roughly one quarter of all Americans — were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

More than half — 53 percent — of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for “failing to stand up for America”.

Do you think?

DON SURBER: “Come next January when the top is up on my Mustang and I am shoveling my driveway, I will be warm in the knowledge that at least some of my federal tax dollars will be used to allow members of anti-alcohol groups to sun themselves at the Bahai Resort hotel in Mission Bay, Calif.”

LIVEBLOGGING THE Democrats’ gay debate. I’m disappointed that no Republicans showed up. Not even Ron Paul.

UPDATE: More from Ryan Sager.

MORE: “The President of Canada?”

DIRTY BLOG TRICKS: A fake Fred Thompson website.

UPDATE: More here.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO HAVE THE RIGHT SENTIMENTS — you must have them at the proper time:

Hillary Clinton, who has criticized rival Barack Obama for saying the use of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and Afghanistan should be “off the table,” expressed a nearly identical sentiment about Iran a year ago, the Associated Press is reporting this afternoon.

After Obama made his remarks about nuclear weapons, Clinton said, “I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.” But in an April 2006 interview with Bloomberg Television, the AP reports, Clinton, when asked about reports that the Bush administration was considering a nuclear strike against Iran’s nuclear program, said: “I have said publicly no option should be off the table, but I would certainly take nuclear weapons off the table. This administration has been very willing to talk about using nuclear weapons in a way we haven’t seen since the dawn of a nuclear age. I think that’s a terrible mistake.”

Clinton’s campaign says things are different now. Yep.

“AREN’T YOU A LITTLE SHORT FOR A STORM TROOPER?” Francis Fukuyama denies any connection to “armies of cloned Hitlers.”

ARE THE DEMOCRATS peaking too early?

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: The Club for Growth has put up a Congressional Pork Scorecard tracking members’ votes on all 50 anti-pork amendments that have been presented.

Highlights:

* Sixteen congressmen scored a perfect 100%, voting for all 50 anti-pork amendments. They are all Republicans.

* The average Republican score was 43%. The average Democratic score was 2%.

* The average score for appropriators was 4%. The average score for non-appropriators was 25%.

* Kudos to Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) who scored an admirable 98%-the only Democrat to score above 20%.

* Rep. David Obey (D-WI) did not vote for his own amendment to strike all earmarks in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill. Rep. Obey scored an embarrassing 0% overall.

* 105 congressmen scored an embarrassing 0%, voting against every single amendment. The Pork Hall of Shame includes 81 Democrats and 24 Republicans.

* The Democratic Freshmen scored an abysmal average score of 2%. Their Republican counterparts scored an average score of 78%.

Follow the link for much more. Bottom line: “Unfortunately, the Club for Growth RePORK Card shows that most congressmen care more about lining their buddies’ pockets than they care about protecting American taxpayers.”

And, sadly, it’s a bipartisan problem. Incumbistan is a one-party state. Upside: My own congressman, Jimmy Duncan, scored 88%, which I actually find somewhat surprising.

KNOXVILLE — VALLEY OF THE BLOGS: “You can’t swing a cat in this town without hitting a blogger.”

FROM IPHONE TO ICLONE: “The little gadget was bootleg gold, a secret treasure I’d spent months tracking down. The miniOne looked just like Apple’s iPhone, down to the slick no-button interface. But it was more. It ran popular mobile software that the iPhone wouldn’t. It worked with nearly every worldwide cellphone carrier, not just AT&T, and not only in the U.S. It promised to cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to 10 times as many consumers.” But read the story to find out what happens, and get a look into the Chinese market for cloned products — even part-for-part Chevrolet copies.

SUBPRIME MORTGAGES AND UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

In short, government has been the principal factor preventing the “affordable housing” that politicians talk about so much.

Politicians have also been a key factor behind pushing lenders to lend to borrowers with lower prospects of being able to repay their loans.

The Community Reinvestment Act lets politicians pressure lenders to make loans to people they might not lend to otherwise – and the same politicians are quick to cry “exploitation” when the interest charged to high-risk borrowers reflects that risk.

The huge losses of subprime lenders, some of whom have gone bankrupt, demonstrate again the consequences of letting politicians try to micro-manage the economy.

Yet with all the finger-pointing in the media and in government, seldom is a finger pointed at the politicians at local, state and national levels who have played a key role in setting up the conditions that led to financial disasters for individual home buyers and for those who lent to them.

While financial markets are painfully adjusting, and lenders and borrowers are becoming less likely to take on so much risky “creative” financing, politicians show no sign of changing.

Why should they, when they have largely escaped blame for the disasters that their policies fostered?

Perhaps we should have hearings and subpoena some politicians for tough questioning. Oh, wait . . . .

BILL BRADLEY: Wake me up when the debates are over.

MORE DDT NEWS:

Mosquitoes that carry malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever avoid homes that have been sprayed with DDT, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The chemical not only repels the disease-carrying insects physically, but its irritant and toxic properties helps keep them away, the researchers reported in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

They estimate that DDT spray reduced the risk of disease transmission by nearly three-quarters. . . .”The historical record of malaria control operations show that DDT is the most cost-effective chemical for malaria control. Even now DDT is still considered to be the cheapest and most effective chemical for use in house spray operations,” the researchers wrote.

Read the whole thing.