HOW YOU CAN HELP Bangladesh cyclone victims.

UPDATE: Some good news about Bangladesh. (Bumped to top.)

IN SLATE, William Saletan on liberal creationism.

“BUCKWHEAT!” Another chance to play Name That Party!

THE NOT-SO-GREAT generation?

WOULDN’T MARK CUBAN BE COMPLAINING EVEN MORE if Fox refused to run his ads?

Meanwhile, some people are trying to organize a boycott of Redacted, — though from what I hear about the film, that shouldn’t be hard, but might be unnecessary. Like asking 8-year-olds to boycott liver and brussels sprouts. Even the Beauchamp-infested New Republic hated it. I like the commenter who referred to Redacted as “DePalma’s suicide bomb.” Heh.

UPDATE: Some amusing thoughts on TNR and Redacted.

TOM FRIEDMAN: “I have no idea who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but lately I’ve been wondering whether, if it is Barack Obama, he might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president.”

Obama-Cheney. Just one of several odd pairings I’m hearing today.

THIS STRIKES ME AS BAD POLITICS: “It’s been less than a week since New York’s Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Eliot Spitzer had to climb down from their support of driver’s licenses for illegal aliens. Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has moved to kill an amendment that would protect employers from federal lawsuits for requiring their workers to speak English. Among the employers targeted by such lawsuits: the Salvation Army.”

JAMES KIRCHICK: “Intervention in Darfur may fuel Muslim anger, but that can’t be an excuse to do nothing.”

THE RACIST ROOTS OF GUN CONTROL in Georgia.

Very interesting data on the 1906 Atlanta race riots, where mobs attacked black neighborhoods, the residents fought back (in an early form of straw man sales, light skinned residents bought guns for their neighbors), and police and the state militia responded with house to house searches for guns. The Atlanta Journal ran an editorial entitled “Disarm the Negroes,” endorsing the searches with comments such as “Should a collision between the races occur, it would be too late to deplore the fact that the negroes had been permitted to arm themselves.” The study also probes why GA law bans carrying at public assemblies, and notes the law was enacted after night riders attacked blacks who were travelling to a … public assembly, and they fought back.

This kind of thing isn’t news to those who have been paying attention, but it’s probably news to everyone else.

JOHN TIERNEY: “The keepers of bioethics are even more alarmed than usual now that scientists have reported cloning a monkey embryo and extracting stem cells.”

Some of the discussion sounds a bit familiar, which just demonstrates that these debates tend not to advance very much. Meanwhile, I still believe that Congress lacks the power to ban cloning anyway.

GETTING A YALE EDUCATION on the cheap. Well, sort of.

KENNETH ANDERSON on the Madrid bombing verdicts, law, and terrorism.

MICROWEAPONOMICS — a new coinage from Bob Krumm.

A CHRISTMAS WARNING: “Apparently, these days, one needs to possess an itty-bitty, teeny-weeny, Barbie-sized screwdriver to be able to open the battery compartments of many of the toys on the market today. Consequently, we have tons of dolls and helicopters and singing My Little Pony Pinkie Pies around the office that have not done a thing except sit there.” Be prepared!

ILYA SOMIN POINTS OUT a danger in using foreign law to interpret U.S. law: “For a Supreme Court made up of generalists, even keeping up with all the US law that the Court has to deal with is a full-time job, one that the justices often fail at. . . . This lack of expertise may help explain why those justices who do rely on foreign law never seem to do a systematic survey of the relevant foreign precedents, but instead simply pick a few examples that seem to support their position.”

PARTYING WITH the science crowd.

MY LEGAL CAREER IS A SUCCESS: I just noticed I got a “highly recommended” from Larry Solum.

A TELLING QUESTION about Iraq.

SHIFTING DEFINITIONS for “conservative ideologue.”

GERMANY: The soft underbelly of Europe?

WHEN JOURNALISTS “PLANT” THEIR OWN QUESTIONS — and their careers. “NY1 Anchor Quits After Calling a Show on the Station Under a False Name.”

HOW TO MEASURE ONLINE VIDEO: Just remember, all Web stats are at best rough approximations. And non-Web stats (like Nielsen or Arbitron) are probably worse.

A LOOK AT GUNS ON CAMPUS. I had some thoughts on this subject a while back.

DO WESTERN INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES exist?

ROGER KIMBALL HAS THOUGHTS on affirmative action.

BOURGEOIS CONSUMERISM: Neither “empty” nor “mindless.”

What is truly empty is the value that counsels A to live off of the wealth given to him by B and which B confiscated from C. And what is truly mindless is the notion that society progresses as greater numbers of us live as A’s or as B’s, and all the while thinking of C’s as being nothing more than contemptible cows to be milked for the “general good.”

Indeed.

PHONY OBAMA Swift-Boats the Swift-Boaters. Roger Simon is not amused. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I increasingly find Obama to be like a late night infomercial host – slightly charming, slightly unctuous, factually meaningless. Ready for the Presidency? Don’t be silly.”

ED MORRISSEY ON CNN: It all depends on what the meaning of “undecided” is. And if you accept the CNN-friendly definition, then Stephen Green’s observation makes perfect sense!

A BIG ROUNDUP OF new videogame releases. Crossbow training with the Wii?

MORE ON THE BANGLADESH CYCLONE, from Joe Gandelman.

VIDEO: Fred Thompson on funding the war. This is an excerpt from a full-length interview that’ll be up tomorrow.

IRAN SURRENDERS IN IRAQ: I credit the new Democratic congress!

MICKEY KAUS: “Has Hillary achieved Mutually Assured Destruction, scandal-wise? I doubt it.”

BABES WITH BULLETS.

GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE: Gun control kills people. In Uganda, under U.N. auspices. Read the whole, sad, story — the piece is a few months old, but it’s a useful reminder of what’s really involved in these projects.

IT’S CHILLY IN CHILE: Yeah, I know, it’s weather, not climate. Just remind the newswriters of that when it’s unseasonably warm.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Racansky emails:

I’m watching CNN Headline News, and they just had a report on global warming as a campaign issue.

Among the events related to global warming were “Hurricane Katrina,” “California wildfires,” and “Asian tsunamis.” Because it’s self-evident that SUVs and coal-powered plants cause undersea earthquakes — at least to the folks at CNN.

Like I said.

BILL O’REILLY spotted in Afghanistan. No, really.

REP. WILLIAM JEFFERSON accused of two more schemes.

IN THE MAIL: Timothy Zahn’s The Third Lynx.

A LOOK AT disaster response in Bangladesh. Guess who’s in the lead?

MORE SECOND AMENDMENT STUFF: With a decision on certiorari in the D.C. gun-ban case coming up, perhaps this week if rumors are to be believed, I’ve gone ahead and posted a forthcoming article of mine before publication. Entitled Guns and Gay Sex: Some Notes on Firearms, the Second Amendment, and “Reasonable Regulation,” it’s a look at how courts might deal with an individual right to arms, particularly in light of the D.C. Circuit’s overturning of the D.C. gun ban.

Prof. Adam Winkler has looked at some state right-to-arms cases and suggests that even if the Supreme Court finds an individual right to arms, nearly all gun control laws would wind up being upheld as “reasonable regulations.” I look at some other cases that Winkler doesn’t discuss — and in particular the way the privacy and gun right cases intertwine in Tennessee — and suggest that it doesn’t have to turn out that way. The gist: If courts pay as much attention to assessing the reasonableness of regulations aimed at firearms — where there’s a textually secured right — as they do to regulation of gay sex — where there isn’t — firearms owners will receive considerable protection. And if courts fail to do so, the legitimacy of courts will suffer considerably.

It’s a short piece, but you might find it worth your time if you’re interested in the subject.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to Winkler’s piece, too.

VIDEO UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this item from Wikipedia, with some useful information on AVCHD and what applications can handle it. Earlier post here.

EMAIL IS FOR old people. Amusing discussion in the comments.

WIRED ON SHOPPING, and how to score the best deals online. I was at the mall doing Christmas shopping yesterday, and it was already really busy. I talked to several folks who work there, all of whom thought it would be a pretty big Christmas, retail-wise. That means I’ll be visiting the mall a lot less for the next month or so, until the rush is over. I’ve tried to do my meatspace shopping earlier, and leave the rest for online shopping so as to avoid the crowds.

But “buy early” — one of Wired’s suggestions — may not always be good advice: Amazon, at least, will be having a big Black Friday sale with special offers to compete with the malls.

GUN-FRIENDLY DEMOCRATS in Virginia.

PETRAEUS PICKS the next generation.

Plus, craziness in Tennessee. Yep.

AND I TOOK FEWER THAN HALF OF THEM: Over 500 billion digital photographs in the United States alone. Hard to argue with this point: “That is an enormous estimate which highlights just how much digital cameras have changed photography.”

Yep. And one reason I’m an evangelist for all of this stuff is that ubiquitous digital photography and video breaks the Old Media stranglehold on news.

BARACK OBAMA, neocon. Maybe there’s hope for him yet!

NORMAN HSU: The Texas edition?

RON PAUL MOVES TO THE CENTER: “Opposing gun control is a far better sales pitch than those letters of marque and reprisal.” I’ve noticed Paul trying to mainstream himself, too. Actually, I’d be willing to give those letters of marque and reprisal a try. But, then, I’m not running for President . . . .

DAVE KOPEL ASKS IF NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENTS MATTER. A commenter replies: “The importance of ‘endorsements’ by media outlets has declined as the quality of the media has declined.”

MARK STEYN HAS THOUGHTS on what the world should be giving thanks for.

ADRIANA LUKAS remembers the Velvet Revolution. “A couple of weeks ago I was visiting Eastern Europe and despite the trickle of bandwidth available where I was staying, I found myself watching old clips from the communist era on YouTube. The most surreal was not the absurdity of their content, the ridiculous gravitas of the communist propaganda but the memory of this rubbish being taken seriously and accepted as the norm.”

Some of the things she links remind me of a song I used to listen to a lot: “Czech This Out,” by Frequency X. (Real names: Nicolai Vorkapich & Ray Castoldi). It takes a phrase from Moscow radio in 1968, “The defense of socialism in Czechoslovakia is more than the concern of the Czechoslovak people,” and gradually remixes it to “The defense of Czechoslovakia, the defense of people, the defense of the Czechoslovak people.” Subversive. And you can dance to it!

MICKEY KAUS NOTES a Sid Blumenthal-related coincidence.

TAYLOR OWEN: “Why is it that flying is seen as a license to drink at truly disturbing hours of the day?”

(Had this as David Adesnik earlier, but it was just the dreaded co-blogger confusion.)

THOUGHTS ON GUNS AND CIVILIZATION. I understand that Neal Boortz read this essay on the air yesterday.

IT’S A QUAGMIRE: Troops have kept the violence down, but the political solution is still a mess. In Kosovo.

SEARCHING FOR GUNS IN BOSTON: “Boston police are launching a program that will call upon parents in high-crime neighborhoods to allow detectives into their homes, without a warrant, to search for guns in their children’s bedrooms. . . . In the next two weeks, Boston police officers who are assigned to schools will begin going to homes where they believe teenagers might have guns. The officers will travel in groups of three, dress in plainclothes to avoid attracting negative attention, and ask the teenager’s parent or legal guardian for permission to search. If the parents say no, police said, the officers will leave.”

BUSH NOT A COMPLETE FAILURE IN IRAQ! Reuters ladles out the praise!

WHO IS CNN KIDDING?

Themselves, mostly.

UPDATE: They’re certainly getting attention.

DEBATING Hillary Clinton’s datability.

THOUGHTS ON MEDIA BIAS, from Oliver Kamm.

TOAD LICKING: Seems like a crime that is its own punishment.

SOME THOUGHTS ON VETERANS AND PTSD, at Blackfive.

MAJOR STEM CELL PROGRESS? Bring it on!

MEGAN MCARDLE reports on Cambodia: “Even the older generation seems to think that what we did wrong was not invading, but leaving after we had.”

MARK AMBINDER ON free trade flipflops.

JEEZ, THIS SUCKS: Bangladesh cyclone toll tops 1600. If you’d like to help, you can probably find some charities that are responding here.

INTERESTING PROPOSAL: A constitutional amendment barring courts from relying on foreign law.

OUCH: “Even The New York Times and Daily Kos are reporting on the CNN imbalance in the post debate analysis.”

VIDEO UPDATE: Following up on my earlier video post, I was at the mall this afternoon and picked up a copy of Final Cut Express 4 HD, and installed it on my Macbook Pro. Once I figured out that the files came in via “log and transfer” rather than “import” or “capture” it was fine — brought over a couple of clips from the camera and fiddled with them a bit. I’m not as fluent in Final Cut as in Vegas or Premiere, but it seems to work well. Helen thought the video looked better in Final Cut than in Vegas, though that may just be a function of the different monitors.

Note, by the way, that you must have an Intel-based Mac to handle AVCHD in Final Cut. Don’t ask me why.

AN INTERVIEW WITH Roger Daltrey.

HILL SHILLS HINT AT ‘BAM SLAM.

ANNOUNCING Lawyers for Fred Thompson. They’ve picked up some big names, including a few folks I’m surprised to see.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, Don’t turn on Ethiopia:

A new war in the Horn of Africa would destabilize the region and bolster radical Islam’s push to build a Muslim caliphate.

Sadly, Congress is poised to fuel the march toward war by passing a bill that threatens to cut off technical assistance to Ethiopia, one of our closest allies, if it does not, among other things, release political prisoners, ensure that the judiciary operates independently and permit the news media to operate freely. Ethiopia has already freed opposition leaders, reformed parliamentary rules to give opposition parties greater legislative responsibility and approved a new media law that meets international standards. By singling out Ethiopia for public embarrassment, the bill puts Congress unwittingly on the side of Islamic jihadists and insurgents.

The new Congress seems to be putting itself unwittingly on these guys’ sides pretty often.

ARTISTS CREATE CD TO THANK THE TROOPS:

America Supports You is a Defense Department program connecting citizens and corporations with military personnel serving at home and abroad.

Getting this project, which combined the music of Billy Joel, Brooks & Dunn, the Goo Goo Dolls, Jewel, Josh Groban, Los Lonely Boys, Melissa Ethridge, the Neville Brothers, Sarah McLachlan, the Lt. Dan Band, Montgomery Gentry, The Fray, and Five For Fighting, to troops’ ears took true teamwork. John Ondrasik, the singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name “Five For Fighting,” was intimately involved with making sure that happened.

Good for him, and read the whole thing. Our podcast interview with Ondrasik — who seems like a great guy — can be heard here. (Via Michelle Malkin, who has much more). Also see Blackfive’s post, John Ondrasik and his CD for the troops.

DID NSA PUT A SECRET BACKDOOR in the new encryption standard? Is it “Clipper Chip” without the chip?

Then again, private encryption services have their own issues.

IN THE MAIL: Aaron Klein’s Schmoozing With Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans to a Jew!

SPITZER UPDATE: “Not that the moribund New York State GOP has had much to celebrate, but the recent foibles of the inept Eliot Spitzer have sure provided an opening for them.”

BILL ROGGIO on what’s going on in the wilds of Pakistan. More here.

MY EARLIER POST ON VIDEO SOFTWARE prompted some questions — what did I get? My problem is that although I’ve got an old version of the pro Vegas Video, and Adobe Premiere Professional, neither will edit the AVCHD files from the new Sony HD camera. So I ordered Vegas Movie Studio 8, which is under a hundred bucks. It’s likely to do everything I need — Helen isn’t planning to make any documentaries in the near future — and the interface is the same as the big-brother version of Vegas so it’s familiar. In the unlikely event I need to work on Adobe, I can always save the files in some other format and reopen them there. Note that neither Final Cut Pro HD nor Final Cut Express HD will handle AVCHD files yet, so if you use those platforms you might want to hold off on buying an AVCHD camera. (iMovie ’08 will handle AVCHD, I’m told, but only after a fairly laborious transcoding process. My version of iMovie, which is still ’06, doesn’t recognize the files.)

I haven’t done much with it yet, but it opens the AVCHD files fine, and working with them is quite familiar to me, since I’ve used Vegas before. Some people don’t like Vegas, but I find it quite intuitive — the first thing I ever did with it was this trailer for Helen’s film, and I found it easy and fun.

Although I’m pretty happy with the camera, and the software is familiar, my advice to people looking for a camera for the holidays is to go with something a bit farther back from the cutting edge. Looking around at the message boards, etc., I’m finding that there are still a lot of teething problems with the AVCHD format. This isn’t an issue for me, really, but it might be for you.

UPDATE: Reader John Gibson emails: “Apple just released Final Cut Express 4. It handles DV, HDV, or AVCHD,
with the ability to edit all three formats in a single timeline. Price is $179.99 at Amazon.”

Huh. I just asked at the Apple store last week and they didn’t know anything about it. But you’re right, here it is. Says it doesn’t ship until next week, though.

A “STUNNING MOVE” in financial sanctions against terrorism. My guess is that deals are being made, sub rosa, and this is payoff for one of them. But that’s just a guess.

MICKEY KAUS: “I have seen the new nose (“front clip”) for the Pontiac Solstice. It’s ugly! They’ve styled it along the tongue-thrusting lines of the G6 GXP. If I had a cell phone camera I’d be rich.” That’s too bad. As Kaus notes, the current version of the Solstice, while unreliable, is gorgeous.

ED DRISCOLL ON the most busted name in news.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Progress that “progressives” ignore:

There’s an eery silence out there about what’s going on in Iraq. It’s almost as if the silence is, well, intentional.

Read the whole thing, which includes praise for Michael Yon. (Via Newsbeat1).

SOME ADVICE FROM YOUR public defender.

GENE SIMMONS’ ADVICE TO RECORD COMPANIES: Sue more customers!

THE CNN PLOT THICKENS: “Random” questioner at debate was Arkansas Democratic Party officer in 2003?

A NEW TWIST ON PRETRIAL PUBLICITY: Lawyer cites bloggers, media in bid to move trial tied to murders.

SALMA HAYEK VS. HARRY REID: A SUGGESTION THAT MY PRIORITIES are misplaced.

SOME THINGS never change.

GOT MILK? They’re lining up for it in Maracaibo. More here.

UPDATE: “Why don’t you shut up?”

MORE ON CNN’S planted questions. “It makes me wonder what else CNN is not saying.”

UPDATE: It just gets worse. And more here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Josh Marshall: “Can we just close down CNN?”

SHOWING YOU CARE ABOUT WORKERS by hanging out with celebrities. Isn’t that kind of like understanding poverty by working at a hedge fund?

HDTV AND the female candidate.

WHY THE F-15S ARE STANDING DOWN.

ARE WE ADDICTED TO GADGETS? I can quit any time! Gotta go — about to install my new video editing software. . . .

FROM GOURMET MAGAZINE, the ultimate Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll be cooking the usual leg of lamb, but this sounds yummy.

THE JUGGERNAUT IS GATHERING STEAM: “Lou Dobbs for President? Don’t laugh.”

THOUGHTS ON PEAK OIL, from Chevron’s CTO.