OUCH: Obama behind the French, on Iraq.

But Obama has been trying to walk back his pessimism.

YVES ST. LAURENT has died.

TAKING ON PUTIN AND HIS SATRAPS: Russian gays defy ban, more arrests at Moscow protests.

ALTERNATE HISTORY: Hopkins Slams FDR in New Book.

JEFF JARVIS: The day the Democrats lost it. Yeah, they could’ve at least given them 3/5 of a vote . . . .

REPORTING ON SPACE ELEVATORS at the ISDC.

AT SLASHDOT, they’re talking about how to set up a home lab/shop for kids. I had a somewhat related discussion here a while back.

OUCH: “So, when does the racial reconciliation begin – Obama promises to sprinkle his pixie dust and bring this nation together while taking his kids to a church where they are taught to hate whitey. And the two angriest, most unreconciled people we have met in this campaign are Obama’s wife and minister. Maybe he could spare some pixie dust for them.”

WHERE’S VOLOKH.COM? I emailed Eugene and he responded: “Thanks for asking . . . our hosting provider has had a fire, but it looks like we’ll be up late tonight or early tomorrow. If you could post something about that, that would be great.” Done!

MORE ON SEGREGATION AMONG THE NETROOTS: “Perhaps the lesson is that the proggosphere is so enmeshed in identity politics that black bloggers get taken for granted — much the way the Democratic party takes black voters for granted. Given the Democrats’ support for racial preferences, it is odd that the DNC blew the call in credentialing black bloggers to the convention planning to nominate Barack Obama as its standard bearer.”

HILLARY WINS BIG IN PUERTO RICO.

UPDATE: More from The Politico:

The cable networks called the island territory for Clinton the instant polls closed at 3:00 p.m., indicating a landslide; exit polls showed her winning virtually every group, including young voters typically loyal to nomination rival Barack Obama.

“I am overwhelmed by this vote today,” Clinton said in her victory speech. She used the speech to press the case that she’s proven her superior electability by pulling more popular votes than Obama.

She said more people have voted for her “than for any candidate in the history of presidential primaries. We are winning the popular vote.”

The argument is directed at the uncommitted superdelegates who will decide the nomination and Clinton spoke directly to them in her speech.

“I do not envy the decision you must make, but a decision has to be made,” she said. She asked them to consider three questions in making up their mind.

This speech would be more effective if some new Obama scandal just happened to appear in the next day or two. But what are the odds of that?

ANOTHER UPDATE: TalkLeft looks at popular vote totals.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN ENGLAND: “A police community support officer ordered two Christian preachers to stop handing out gospel leaflets in a predominantly Muslim area of Birmingham. . . . The evangelists say they were threatened with arrest for committing a ‘hate crime’ and were told they risked being beaten up if they returned. The incident will fuel fears that ‘no-go areas’ for Christians are emerging in British towns and cities, as the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, claimed in The Sunday Telegraph this year.”

I THINK THEY SHOULD DONATE A FEW KEGS TO NEXT YEAR’S ISDC: Sapporo introduces “Space Beer.”

Taking beer-making to a whole new sphere, Japan’s famous Sapporo Holdings Ltd. plans to launch a beer in November that’s literally from out of this world. The brewery will collaborate with scientists at the Okayama University in Japan to concoct this unearthly beverage from a third generation of barley grains that spent five months on the International Space Station in 2006.

Slogan: “Take me to your liter”!

SEEN IN THE HOTEL GIFT SHOP: Evidence of the fleetingness of political fortune. . .

CAR LUST: Remembering the Mustang Boss 302.

Plus, when car lust goes too far. Remember, it’s only supposed to be a metaphor.

MICHAEL SILENCE PROFILES my favorite member of the blogosphere.

THE LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION IS soliciting donations. It’s a worthy cause.

THE SELF-INVENTION OF TYRA BANKS:

When she was 20, she wrote in one of her notebooks: “If Michael Jordan can sell tennis shoes and Magic Johnson can sell cars, I can sell cornflakes. I can and I will. So just sit back and relax because here I come. . . . I’m going to hurt and abuse.” Banks looked pleased when she read that passage aloud. “It was a moment,” she said now. “When I showed that to my mom the other day, she said, ‘You didn’t just happen overnight.’ ”

Not many do. But “hurt and abuse”? Still, you have to love this bit: “We were in Rome for ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and I said to my v.p. at Bankable: ‘Look at this gorgeous architecture! But if there was a Wendy’s and a Wal-Mart right in the middle of it — bam! It would be even more gorgeous.’ ”

On the other hand, there’s this:

She studied another photo. “This girl is a bombshell,” she said. “Is she Southern?”

“Yes,” Mok said. “I wonder if she’s bigoted. That could be interesting.”

Well, somebody’s got a touch of bigotry there.

A CONTINUOUSLY UPDATED Puerto Rico primary roundup.

THOSE HATERS ARE EVERYWHERE! More Clinton-bashing from Father Pfleger.

THE CARNIVAL OF CARS IS UP!

MAJOR JOHN TAMMES: Why do I fight? He points to this photo essay of Iraqi life in Basra, from the Washington Post.

IN THE MAIL: A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, by Tony Horwitz. I liked his Confederates in the Attic. Reading the jacket copy, however, I wonder if the “conventional” middle-school history against which Horwitz is apparently reacting exists any more. At least, my daughter tells me that in her history classes it’s all Native Americans and African Americans, with the European settlers mostly as foils and backdrops. No doubt some future Horwitz will rediscover cowboys and Zebulon Pike . . . .

Trio’s, Market Square, Knoxville, Tennessee.

RASMUSSEN POLL: McCain Trusted More Than Obama on Economy, Iraq, National Security. As I said before, a lot of Republicans don’t like McCain, but it seems clear that the GOP primary process nominated the one candidate with a decent chance of winning in November. If Democrats respond to this year’s primary debacle by revising their procedures, they should probably conside adoptingr a winner-take-all primary, too. Of course, that approach on the Dem side would have produced a Hillary nomination. . . .

DEAR SENATOR OBAMA: Join my church.

THE WASHINGTON POST: The Iraqi Upturn: Don’t look now, but the U.S.-backed government and army may be winning the war. “Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained ‘special groups’ that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. . . . When Mr. Obama floated his strategy for Iraq last year, the United States appeared doomed to defeat. Now he needs a plan for success.” Do tell.

BLACK BLOGGERS FIGHT TO MAKE VOICES HEARD:

With its power-to-the-individual approach, the new media world promises anyone with a laptop the possibility of a publishing empire. But, as some black bloggers are finding out, the new media world is a lot like the old one: racially segregated, with many prominent black voices still fighting to be heard.

Some bloggers felt insulted this month when the Democratic National Committee selected 55 state-oriented blogs to cover its convention in Denver; critics said few featured African American voices. The DNC said race wasn’t considered in its selection from 400 applicants. Officials were more interested in the sites’ audience size and how much chatter about local issues appeared on them. The DNC answered critics Thursday by adding several sites led by African Americans to its general blogger pool.

But some critics say the DNC situation is indicative of a larger media divide. . . . That coverage gap is partly what inspired Gina McCauley to help organize the first Blogging While Brown conference this summer in Atlanta. The most popular online community conferences – like the Netroots Nation confab that grew out of the Daily Kos blog – tend to be predominantly white gatherings.

“The progressive blogosphere is segregated,” said McCauley, whose What About Our Daughters blog was accepted to the DNC’s blogger pool. Essence magazine named McCauley one of its 25 most influential people last year alongside Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and filmmaker Tyler Perry. “Black bloggers link to other black bloggers, and progressive white bloggers link to other white progressive bloggers,” she said.

Read the whole thing.

UH OH:

As the votes on the agreements were taken, one woman, wearing a blue “Team Hillary” shirt, shoved a man in a suit and tie wearing a small Obama button on his lapel. Another woman in a white Clinton shirt hung her head in her hands.

“That was a crime!” a man shouted.

“McCain in ’08! McCain in ’08!” a woman yelled from the back of the room. “No-bama! No-bama!”

Hey, we’ve been yelling “No-bama!” in Tennessee for years. . . . Plus, video here.

UPDATE: Violence against women!

SO WHY — AFTER FAILING TO DO SO WHEN IT WOULD HAVE DONE HIM THE MOST GOOD — did Obama decide to quit the Trinity Church now? Larry Johnson says that another shoe is about to drop. Hmm. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Related item here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Also here.

AMERICAN POLITICS: Infested with haters?

WORKING AGAIN ON ocean thermal power systems.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION? (CONT’D): “Given that the economy is flagging, this would seem an inauspicious time to be graduating from college and looking for full-time employment. Job prospects this year, however, have been better than career counselors and recent graduates had expected. . . . Preliminary surveys conducted by university and college career counselors indicate that the percentage of students who had found jobs by graduation was about the same as last year.” Okay, it’s not all rosy, but it’s not exactly the economic wasteland we’ve been hearing about.

DALE AMON sends this picture from my panel. The lighting wasn’t as dramatic as last year, but the backdrop was more impressive.

OUCH: “What Obama did today may have been politically necessary. It was certainly politically expedient. And it is yet one more blow to Obama’s image as a different kind of politician. In fact, as we’ve learned over the last few months, Obama appears to be a Chicago politician through and through.”

ALCEE HASTINGS will boycott the Democratic Convention over Florida.

POLITICO: Bill Clinton’s enemies list.

LISTENING IN on a McCain press conference call. “What was striking about the call was how eager the conventional reporters were to lend the Obama campaign a hand.” Somebody should put the audio of these calls online.

AN ARMY OF CHANGS: China’s Cyber Militias.

MORE ON OBAMA QUITTING Trinity, here.

UPDATE: Liveblogging the Obama press conference: “I will not denounce the church. It is not a church worthy of denouncing.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: I just remembered — this afternoon I saw some idiot on CNN talking about how Obama had weathered the “dstractions” relating to the Trinity Church with consummate skill. Not so much.

BOY, JUST POST A picture of Matthew Yglesias and the robophobia appears. (“Though perhaps we’ll all be thinking whatever our robot overlords tell us by then.”) The Yglesias reference is like a dog-whistle for the robophobes, I guess . . . .

OUCH: Europe ‘needs 75 years’ to catch US.

The Association of European Chambers of Commerce in Brussels warned that the transatlantic gap had widened yet further in the past five years by all key measures, despite the pledge by EU leaders at the 2000 Lisbon summit to transform Europe into the world’s “most dynamic knowledge-based economy” by the end of the decade.

The EU-wide umbrella group, known asEurochambres said the EU’s overall employment rate was still stuck at levels attained by the United States in 1978, chiefly due to an incentive structure that discourages women from working and prompts early retirement by those in their fifties.

It found that the European Union’s research and development levels were achieved by America as long ago as 1979, while the lag time on per capita income is 18 years.

“It will take the EU until 2072 to reach US levels of income per capita, and then only if the EU income growth exceeds that of the US by 0.5pc,” the study said.

I don’t think that regulating country line dancing is moving them forward any. . . . They’re way ahead of us on perks for bureaucrats already, though. And that’s saying something!

A LITTLE LATE: CNN is reporting that Obama has resigned his membership in the Trinity Church.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ REVIEWS Austin Bay’s Arena Academy.

MCCAIN and the bloggers. Plus, some questions.

A NEW Naomi Novik book — and Peter Jackson has acquired the film rights to the series, which sounds promising.

A CLINTON HURRICANE strikes the DNC.

Much more here.

UPDATE: Uh oh: “Koryne Horbal says she and other feminists are promising action that could hurt Obama’s candidacy if the disputed Florida and Michigan delegations are not fully seated at the Democratic National Convention. If Obama becomes the nominee under those circumstances, Horbal says she and others will write-in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s name on the ballot in November instead of voting for Obama.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Much more here, including video.

MORE: Just noticed that TalkLeft has been all over this. Plus, it’s pledge week there.

I’M SITTING IN on the Google Lunar X-Prize session, where several of the contestants are talking about their efforts. Interestingly, everybody so far has said they’re planning to establish a long-term lunar business, rather than just undertaking a one-shot effort to win the prize. That’s quite cool, since it holds out the prospect of many competitors continuing their efforts even if someone else wins the prize, thus — as prizes are wont to do — generating a lot of leverage out of the prize money.

There are now 14 competitors registered, from the United States, Romania, Italy, the Isle of Man, and Malaysia. It sounds like they expect more. Of course, they’ve lost Cringely.

UPDATE: Best line from one of the contestants: “Space is hard.”

JOHN ADAMS must be smiling in heaven.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails a link to this related post, which even has a space angle.

THEY JUST SHOWED A PICTURE from the Mars Phoenix lander, showing ice.

UPDATE: Here’s the image, and a release. Call it possible ice.

THE TOP TEN solutions to the world’s problems, courtesy of Ron Bailey.

IT’S NOT REALLY A SPACE CONFERENCE, unless they’ve got Astronaut Ice Cream in the bar.

AT TAXPROF: Biggest Losers Under Obama’s Plan to Remove the Current $102k Wage Ceiling for Social Security Taxes. Interestingly, they’re mostly Democratic states. States that would do best, on the other hand, are mostly Republican.

DO LIBERTARIANS undermine liberty? Nobody’s perfect.

IN THE MAIL: Peter Schweizer’s Makers and Takers, which argues for the inherent superiority, and greater happiness and worthiness of, conservatism and conservatives. I predict that conservatives will like it.

Sullivan’s Fine Food, Maryville, Tennessee.

THOUGHTS ON FREELOADING AND FAIRNESS, from Eric Scheie.

SO I’M SITTING IN THE PLANETARY PROTECTION / Asteroid impact discussion, and it’s quite good. I also recommend this article by Gregg Easterbrook in the latest Atlantic and there’s a video too. I do think that Easterbrook is perhaps a bit hard on NASA for not paying enough attention to this issue. There’s not a huge political sentiment in favor of it, there’s not a lot of money. The panel certainly is making clear that NASA is paying attention to the topic.

One risk that’s worth more attention, though, is that a relatively small asteroid impact would look enough like a nuclear explosion that if it happened in the wrong place or time it might trigger a nuclear war. Imagine such an event in India or Pakistan at a time of tension, with no warning. And there might well be no warning.

UPDATE: Comments on Easterbrook, from Rand Simberg.

JAPANESE WOMAN CAUGHT LIVING IN MAN’S CLOSET:

A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious when food mysteriously began disappearing. . . . The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man’s house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman “neat and clean.”

I’m trying to put a housing crisis spin on this, but . . . .

OUCH: Via Andrew Bolt.

ROBERT X. CRINGELY IS down on the Google Lunar X Prize. “It is hard enough to land on the Moon and drive around without someone setting additional administrative obstacles in the way. The X Prize Foundation should WANT a winner for this prize, but they don’t act that way.” He’s still planning to go to the Moon, though.

MICKEY KAUS on “Obamagoguery.” Ouch. The suggestion earlier about Obama’s staff needing to factcheck his statements seems to be a good one.

DIGITAL NOMADS: High gas prices promote telecommuting. “One thing leads to another. High gas prices prompt employers (including the federal government) to allow employees to work from home once a week. Once that’s accepted culturally, an elephant appears in the boardroom: If it’s OK once a week, why isn’t it OK five times a week? (This is what happened with ‘casual Friday’ — its once-a-week acceptance lead to the current trend of casual wear every day.) Once telecommuting is accepted, ‘extreme telecommuting’ — working from the Bahamas or Paris or an internet-connected shack on the Australian Outback — becomes acceptable, too. After all, once you’re out of the office and connecting to the company over the Internet, it doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?”

All is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen. Related thoughts here.

CAN WE PANDER? Yes we can!

ANN ALTHOUSE: Real men don’t use semicolons.

WELL, DUH: Consumers pick home over flying: “Consumers chose not to take 41 million trips over the last 12 months because flying is too much of a hassle, according to a new Travel Industry Association study.” Make something miserable, and people will be less inclined to do it. Go figure. But they were warned.

I MISSED THE “GALA DINNER” but Hugh Downs — who was in on the founding of the National Space Institute, one of the National Space Society’s predecessor organizations, back in 1973, got a lifetime achievement award.

SEX AND THE CITY: It’s not just for women! “If you’re a red-blooded American male, what’s not to like in a movie about four good looking women running around New York City indulging their libidos?”

A contrary view here.

“TEAM UTOPIA,” the winners of NASA’s space settlement design competition. They’re from a boys’ high school in India.

A LOOK AT TODAY’S New York crane collapse.

THE TELEGRAPH ON AMERICAN ACTIONS and European anti-Americanism. Europeans have been anti-American pretty consistently since America began, except for brief intervals where they needed us enough to (mostly) pretend otherwise. While politics and state-controlled media certainly play a role, it’s mostly about moral preening and justification for low defense spending. Ultimately, this kind of thinking hurts Europe far more than America — and will hurt Europe even more if America responds with isolationism.

OKAY, THE RECIPE SOUNDS YUMMY, but how many times do I have to explain that “barbecue” is not a synonym for “cooking out.”

HERE’S A REPORT from my space media panel yesterday.

IT’S NOT A SPACE CONFERENCE, unless there’s somebody walking around in a spacesuit.

CHINA’S SPACE PROGRAM: I’ve got a report from the ISDC up over at Popular Mechanics.

JOHNATHAN PEARCE: “Boris Johnson, the new London mayor, has already decided it is time for some R&R and has gone on a yachting holiday in Turkey. Good for him. . . . In an ideal world, politicians would be on holiday 12 months a year.”

THIS IS WHAT WE WANTED TO HAPPEN, RIGHT: People moving out of high-risk hurricane areas. It’s not much of a change, though.

BAD TIMING? “America’s presidential hopefuls are pushing government-heavy approaches to climate change — just as the rest of the world is rebelling against them.”

HOW TO MAKE grilled pizza.

THE GENDER RATIO at these things is far more even than it was a decade or two ago.

I’M SITTING AT A PANEL ON SPACE AND THE CANDIDATES, AND MILES O’BRIEN OF CNN is doing an absolutely terrific job of moderating a session with representatives of the Clinton (Lori Garver) McCain (Floyd Deschamps) and Obama (Steve Robinson) campaigns. (L-R). Details later, but O’Brien’s been great, really drilling down on the questions.

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY ANNOUNCES AN “L PRIZE” for high-efficiency lighting.

MCCLELLAN AND BUSH, SUMMED UP BY MARK TWAIN: If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

IN THE NEW YORK POST: John Hinderaker on the war on terror.

PROJECT DRIVEWAY: Daniel Krach on his hydrogen car. I drove one of those a while back and reported on it here.

POLITICO: “Barack Obama’s favorability ratings among white women has declined significantly in recent months, particularly among Democrats and independents, presenting an immediate obstacle for the likely Democratic nominee as he moves to shore up his party’s base.”

DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECESSION? (CONT’D): Jon Henke looks at economics and politics.

HILLARY, OBAMA AND IDENTITY POLITICS: All discussed in the latest PJM Political, with Ed Driscoll, Tammy Bruce, Ed Morrissey, Bill Bradley and Jennifer Rubin.

ABU MUQAWAMA takes off the mask.

IN THE MAIL: Jeffrey Kluger’s Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex, and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple.

The Mellow Mushroom, Knoxville, Tennessee. Keen observers will note that she’s appeared on InstaPundit before.

STEYN CANADIAN KANGAROO COURT UPDATE: “The Canadian Association of Journalists has formally applied for standing as an intervenor at the upcoming British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal hearings on a complaint of religious and racial discrimination against Maclean’s magazine.”

MCCAIN’S WEB GAP IS SHOWING. He’s got good web people on the campaign, but he’s way behind in grassroots Web efforts. I mean, this kind of thing is funny, but . . . .

GAY MARRIAGE by executive decision in New York.

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE is up!

More spaceblogging here.

CONTINUING THE SPELLING-BEE BLOGGING, over at Throwing Things.

HILLARY GETS A DIG IN: “I have the highest respect and regard for Sen. McCain, he and I have actually gone to Iraq and Afghanistan together.” (Via VIMH).

UPDATE: Bitterly clinging to “an outdated storyline about the war.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s a not so outdated storyline on the war. Coming to a newspaper near you, though probably not until after the election. . . .

OUR FRIENDS THE CHINESE: “U.S. authorities are investigating whether Chinese officials secretly copied the contents of a government laptop computer during a visit to China by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez and used the information to try to hack into Commerce computers, officials and industry experts told The Associated Press. Surreptitious copying is believed to have occurred when a laptop was left unattended during Gutierrez’s trip to Beijing for trade talks in December, people familiar with the incident told the AP. These people spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was under investigation.”

SO FAR I’M ENJOYING the International Space Development Conference. I did a panel on space and media yesterday afternoon, and saw interesting presentations on China in space and private spaceports. Last night I hung out in the bar with a bunch of folks, including Dale Amon (better known to most as a Samizdata blogger, but a space entrepreneur with a startup, too), Keith Henson, who looked quite hale despite his time in durance vile, Lori Garver, Greg Allison, Loretta Whitesides (founder of “Yuri’s Night”) and a host of others. Rand Simberg, alas, wasn’t able to make it this year.

ALTHOUSE ON MCCLELLAN: “‘I Knew It Was a Terrible Mistake, but I Didn’t Mention It Until I Got a Book Contract.’ . . . It seems to me that Bush didn’t do enough to boost support for the war. He let criticism go unanswered and seemed to trust that the American people would understand why he was doing the right things, so I completely don’t get the “permanent campaign culture” charge. As for the decision to concentrate on the WMD rationale over the democracy argument: It’s been well known for a long time.”