JOHN HINDERAKER ON OBAMA AND HOLDER:

Holder is a legitimate target because of the Rich affair, I guess, but frankly I have little or no interest in who helps Obama choose a V-P. What bothers me most about these battles is the implicit assumption by some that just about any involvement in the business world is somehow suspect. . . . This is frankly stupid. Covington & Burling and O’Melveny & Myers are top-notch law firms that have represented a vast array of clients. The idea that there is something wrong with associations with companies like UBS, Exxon Mobil and Hewlitt Packard is absurd. If any connection with a top law firm or a large corporation is somehow taken as a black mark, pretty soon those who advise our Presidential candidates, or serve in their administrations, will be as inexperienced as, say, Barack Obama himself. That would be a sad outcome.

Good point.

BOB BECKEL embarrasses himself.

THERE’S A BEAR IN THE WOODS SUBURBS: “Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers were tracking a black bear Sunday afternoon in a West Knoxville neighborhood. Officers got a call at 3 p.m. from a resident off Amherst Road who spotted the animal munching on the bird feeder in his back yard.”

MORE PHOTO QUESTIONS: What photographers do I like, and who do I emulate? I like a lot, most of whom — like Ansel Adams — I have better sense than to try emulating. I guess William Eggleston — some photos here — was something of an influence. And Walker Evans, with whom I share a strong interest in signs. But they’ve influenced a lot of people, mostly to better effect than me, I suspect. But I kind of see things the way they do, anyway.

Evans’ best work, in my opinion, was with James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Not something I’d care to try to emulate, though, and certainly not something I’d succeed in emulating if I tried, any more than I’d succeed in emulating Agee’s prose skills. As a great philosopher once said, a man’s gotta know his limitations.

BARACK OBAMA, deviating from “politically correct feminism.” “Now, I know what he is trying to do is to push more men to be involved in their children’s lives, but the way he is saying it, he is siding with traditionalists who think the male role is special, distinctive, and necessary.”

UPDATE: It’s nice to see Obama discussing “the duties of fatherhood,” but I hope he’ll follow up with more on the ways in which society undervalues fatherhood, and what to do about that, and not just stress punitive, nanny-state approaches regarding child-support.

HOMELAND SECURITY IS A JOKE (CONT’D:)

Lee Cooper of Solomons had done the smart thing and signed up for e-alerts about flight delays. So, thanks to a United Airlines e-mail, he knew that his 7:25 p.m. flight from Knoxville to Dulles was delayed until 9:40 because of air traffic control backups. That should have saved him more than two hours of waiting around at the airport. He did two more smart things: He printed his boarding pass and went to http://www.tsa.gov to check the average wait times at security checkpoints between 8 and 9 p.m.

His diligence, however, was unraveled by the Transportation Security Administration, which closed the security checkpoints at 7:30 p.m.

The result? Cooper ended up on the wrong side of security and had to wait until the next day to depart.

Jeez.

THOUGHTS ON Tim Russert and Father’s Day.

ENVIRONMENTAL GOOD NEWS: Leatherback turtles return to Texas. “For the first time since the 1930’s, federal biologists confirmed that a leatherback sea turtle has nested on a Texas beach, at the Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi. . . . The giant, ancient, endangered turtles, some the size of a Smart Car, have until now only been known to nest in four spots in the United States – with about three dozen females a year laying eggs on beaches along the east coast of Florida and slightly larger nesting populations in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE is up!

A GUIDE TO SUMMER ENERGY SAVINGS.

SHUTTING DOWN ULYSSES: “After more than 17 years of pioneering solar science, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission to study the sun will end on or about July 1. The Ulysses spacecraft has endured for almost four times its expected lifespan.”

Pretty good value for the money, I’d say.

JAMES LILEKS: “I feel as if Bizarro World is slowly leaking into ours. . . . It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not.”

DAVID BERNSTEIN: “There is a prevalent myth that large law firms, especially old, ‘white shoe’ firms, are bastions of patrician conservatism. This may have been true forty years ago.”

“IF THE AP MOCKS YOU, cap ‘em with a nine.” Heh.

WIKIPEDIA SCOOPED A.P. on the Tim Russert story.

LOTS OF NICE PHOTOS FROM PITTSBURGH at Pittsburgh Skyline.

AN AUDI A4 TDI THAT GETS 46 miles per gallon. Now available . . . in Britain.

AT THIS RATE, THEY’LL SOON MISS JOHN HOWARD: Australia to define three glasses of wine as “binge drinking.” (Via Andrew Bolt, who is not amused; nor should he be as that’s square within the “healthy” range). Scroll to the end, though, and there’s a hint that this is motivated by a desire for more tax revenue.

A SKINNY LAPTOP PC THAT competes with the Macbook Air?

IN THE MAIL: S.M. Stirling’s The Scourge of God: A Novel of the Change.

Cherokee Boulevard, Knoxville, Tennessee.

WHEN WELFARE STATES GO WILD. Alas, yelling show us your budgets! doesn’t produce much in the way of exciting video.

YES, I GET IT: You don’t like my country.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP OUT PEOPLE IN IOWA, this list of charities should still work.

THE ECONOMIST: “Many things in Iraq have at long last started to go right.”

A LOOK AT THE GUNS THAT Barack Obama doesn’t like. Which is pretty much all of them.

WELL, THIS SOUNDS LIKE GOOD NEWS: Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol. “Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.” Bring it on!

(Via Tom Grey). I certainly hope it pans out.

IT’S NOT RACE, IT’S ARUGULA.

KEEP THOSE KIDS BUSY: A big summer toy sale at Amazon.

TIGERHAWK: Iowa’s Katrina? “The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe.” But there’s a difference. “In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.”

More on the flooding here.

UPDATE: I’ll certainly be happy not to be reading stories like this from Iowa.

OUCH: The most morally abhorrent film ever made.

This isn’t just radical environmentalist fare; it’s perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It’s not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It’s us.

Environmentalists’ genocidal human-extinction fantasies just keep getting more detailed. Keep ‘em away from biotech, please.

And, obviously, someone has kept Shyamalan away from the scientists, anyway . . . .

UPDATE: Brian Noggle acquires a new perspective.

EXCITEMENT: Barack Obama knows and cares what bloggers say about his clothes!

UH OH: Delegate’s reversal stuns party: Wisconsin Democrat now publicly supports McCain.

As an avid supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries, Debra Bartoshevich is not alone in her frustration over Clinton’s defeat.

She’s not alone in refusing to support Barack Obama.

And she’s not entirely alone in saying she’ll vote this fall for Republican John McCain instead.

But what makes her unusual is that she holds these views as an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver this summer. . . .

Joe Wineke, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, reacted with disbelief when first told Friday afternoon that one of his state party delegates is now a McCain supporter.

“Not a delegate? To the national convention?” said Wineke, who was getting ready for the start of the Wisconsin state party convention Friday in Stevens Point.

“We have a Clinton national (convention) delegate who says she’s voting for John McCain?” Wineke repeated, for clarification. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Look on the bright side. At least she’s not calling Obama a terrorist.

“THE VICTORIANS WERE SUPERMEN.”

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS: Iraq Oil production could increase by 400,000 bpd by the end of 2008. Bring it on.

A PHOTO QUESTION: Reader Kelly Azar emails: “Please tell us what lens you’re using for all your great shots. Please!”

Well, it’s more than one. Recently, I fell victim to Ann Althouse’s peer pressure and bought this fisheye lens, which is used in pictures like this, or this.

Other wideangle stuff was shot with the 12-24 wideangle zoom, which is a hell of a lens though it doesn’t give the trademark fisheye effect. (Examples here and here.)

And there’s also the 18-200 VR DX zoom, which I used for pictures like this or this. This is probably the one lens to have, if you can have only one — wide range of focal lengths, vibration stabilization, compact size, and good quality. If I were adding just one more, it would probably be the fisheye — big difference, distortion correctable via software plugin, and not as expensive as the 12-24.

And thanks for the nice comments. I’m no Lisa Scheer or Rick Lee, but I have fun and I hope I can share a little bit of what I like about Knoxville and the surrounding area.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER: “It was a long curious day for the Tennessee Democratic party yesterday.”

A BLOG BOYCOTT OF THE ASSOCIATED PRESS? “Well, that’s kind of bullying needs some pushback. Effective immediately, Newshoggers is boycotting AP’s content, including that from other sites that syndicate their stuff. We will find other sources – Reuters usually has the same stories and syndicates our BlogBurst feed on its websites without a problem – or we simply will find a different story to blog about. We urge you to join us in boycotting these bullies.”

Further thoughts from Jeff Jarvis: “I talked to a reporter this week about the embattled Associated Press and said three times that I didn’t want it to die. I might take that back.”

HAPPY FLAG DAY.

And happy birthday to the U.S. Army!

BRING IT ON: “Toyota, rightly or wrongly, is widely considered the greenest automaker, and the company hopes to solidify its hold on the title and move beyond oil through a sweeping plan to produce cleaner, more efficient cars — beginning with a plug-in hybrid it will produce by 2010.”

BARACK OBAMA: looking more kindly on guns!

UPDATE: A reader emails: “And here I thought his side didn’t like guns. I guess they’re OK when they suit their needs, even rhetorically. That is so Rosie O’Donnell of him.” Ouch.

IRISH VOTERS GETTING SUPPORT ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE: “Political leaders across Europe were shaking their heads in frustration this weekend at the Irish voters’ veto of the latest European Union treaty. But many of their citizens weren’t. Ordinary Spaniards, Dutch, French and Britons, who wish they could get the same chance, might also say ‘no’ to the cold, distant heart of Europe.” Which is why they won’t be given the same chance . . . . “Many Europeans say this is exactly the problem with democracy Brussels-style, where European Commission members are not directly elected but wield continental powers. ‘We’re told we can vote no, that the system requires unanimity. But when (a `no’ vote) actually happens, every time, the EU tells us: You really only have a right to vote yes,’ said Dublin travel agent Paul Brady, who voted against the treaty.”

TIGERHAWK: “The question is, why do we keep seeing Obama supporters who revere Che Guevara?”

KNOXVILLE MAYOR BILL HASLAM: Laying the groundwork for a gubernatorial run in 2010?

PROF. MIKE O’SHEA: Ten things to look for when the Heller decision comes down.

SO I’M READING STEVEN PRESSFIELD’S Killing Rommel, which is based on actual efforts along those lines in World War Two. So far it’s quite good, which is no surprise. I’ve been a big Pressfield fan since Gates of Fire.

Knoxville, Tennessee.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “If you think those Yale law students ought to be able to sue the on-line idiots for saying what they did about them, don’t you also have to believe Tim Russert had a cause of action against Ezra Klein?”

Or against Matthew Yglesias’s commenters. I wonder if this stuff will make Howard Kurtz’s column?

WE’RE NUMBER TWO!

China has now clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of climate-warming gases, a new study has found. The increasing emissions from China – up 8 percent in the past year – accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions in 2007, the study found.

And that’s despite IowaHawk’s best efforts . . . .

KENT CONRAD: Angelo who? “I suppose Conrad could say he was just parsing this – he called Mozilo, but never met him – but really, that level of deception is what most reasonable people call a lie.”

TAYLOR MARSH: Many Hillary supporters can’t see voting for Obama — at least not right now.

MUCH MORE ON ANGELO MOZILO and the Countrywide loan scandal.

UPDATE: John Galvin emails:

The linked Times article says: “In an interview, Mr. Conrad said he was unaware of any special effort on his behalf and called his credit rating “spotless” in suggesting that he was eligible for favorable loan terms. He said he turned to Mr. Johnson and Mr. Mozilo because he was buying a property in Delaware and did not know where to get a mortgage in that state. After the phone call with Mr. Mozilo, a Countrywide loan officer called Mr. Conrad.”

Can you imagine a a member of the Senate Finance Committee who’s too bloody stupid to google “Delaware Mortgage”, too stupid to ask the real estate agent who sold him the house to recommend some lenders, too stupid to simply ask any of the legions of DC folks who have beach houses at Bethany Rehoboth, and Lewes? If he can’t even handle such a simple finance matter, how’s he supposed to handle the finances of the USA?

New excuse from senators caught dirty: “I’m the dumbest asshole ever born – but vote for me anyway”.

That seems popular. But Conrad may be lying there:

Unless they asked, V.I.P. borrowers weren’t told exactly how many points were waived on their loans, the former employee says. However, they were typically assured that they were receiving the “Friends of Angelo” discount, and that Mozilo had personally priced their loans. . . . Senator Conrad borrowed $1.07 million in 2004 to refinance his vacation home with a balcony and wraparound porch in Bethany Beach, Delaware, a block from the ocean. Mozilo instructed a subordinate to “take off 1 point,” or $10,700, according to a March 17, 2004, email.

Later that year, Conrad refinanced an eight-unit apartment building that he and his brothers owned in Bismarck, North Dakota. According to the former employee, the loan violated Countrywide’s normal policy of providing loans for buildings of four units or fewer. In an April 23, 2004, email, Mozilo encouraged an employee to “make an exception due to the fact that the borrower is a senator.”

Possibly Conrad didn’t know he was getting special treatment here, but that goes back to the “dumb” part, doesn’t it?

A GUILTY PLEA in the Goose Creek terror case. Gateway Pundit has more on the case.

3G AFTERGLOW: A roundup of Apple and iPhone news.

JOHNATHAN PEARCE: “Anyway, the fact that the Guardian regards what Mr Davis has done as a ‘stunt’ is, I suppose, a nice example of how the idea of a man taking a principled stand on something and endangering his political career is outside the frame of reference of parts of the media class.”

MAKE YOUR KIDS play in the dirt.

DIPLOMACY: Bush and Sarkozy looking to bury “freedom fries” era. Relations with European governments seem to be doing a lot better than you’d think.

Meanwhile, Gerard Baker thinks that Europe will miss Bush: “The US President is a useful bogeyman – but his successor’s policies may not be much different.” Hmm.

A RIGHT TO SPANK? This case is statutory, but in Tennessee there’s a good argument that parents would have a right to spank under the state constitution.

PAUL KRUGMAN GETS A ROTTEN TOMATO. As usual, Krugman picks a political conclusion, and as usual, the data are otherwise.

MORE THOUGHTS ON INFRASTRUCTURE:

Even before today’s fires and power outages disrupted downtown D.C., it had been a rough week for transportation infrastructure in the area. Commuting by the Metro’s Orange line was a disaster because of a derailment — and Metro officials bungled the back-up plans for shuttle buses, completely mishandling communications — even as high fuel prices push riders onto mass transit. And the MARC trains were the usual unreliable selves.

Plus this:

But the planning and much of the construction took place before the Great Society, before Medicare, before Medicaid, before welfare, before Food Stamps, before the Conservation Reserve Program, before the Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program, before the Community Development Block Grant Program, before the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, leafy spurge management grants, before HUD, the EPA, the Department of Education, etc., etc., etc….that is, before the explosion of federal spending and programs that now draw dollars that might have been spent on infrastructure.

Yep. It’s not a money problem, it’s a priority problem.

UPDATE: Col. Douglas Mortimer emails:

Um…all that spending and construction was before something else, too. It was before the NEPA and the ESA. Before EAs, and FONSIs, and EISs were required before the federal government could do anything. Any big federal construction projects can, and probably would be, tied up in environmental compliance litigation for years before a spade of dirt is turned.

Absolutely right.

JEFF JARVIS: “We are only now — a bit late — beginning to face up to sexism as a factor in the Democratic race and as an ongoing problem in America.”

BETTER DRUG DELIVERY, using nanotechnology.

SOMETIMES A PICTURE really is worth a thousand words.

UH OH: Poll: Fans Believe NBA Is Rigged.

SO I NOTICED THAT SLATE wasn’t carrying its “Today’s Blogs” feature this week, and emailed to find out what happened. Apparently, it’s been canceled. Too bad — I’ll miss it.

IN TOLEDO, A TERROR CONVICTION: “A federal jury on Friday convicted three Toledo-area men of Middle Eastern descent of plotting attacks against U.S. troops overseas and other terror-related acts. Mohammad Amawi, Marwan El-Hindi, and Wassim Mazloum, all of whom are Muslim, were convicted on all counts of conspiring to kill or injure people outside the United States and face sentences of life in prison.”

FRED THOMPSON IS UNHAPPY WITH THE SUPREME COURT: “Upon reading the opinion in Boumediene v Bush, one must conclude that the majority knew where they wanted to go and simply had to figure out how to get there. “

INSTAPUNDIT: At the center of all things.

Natch.

FACTS ON THE GROUND: “Senior Brookings fellows Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack gave a report today and entertained questions at a Brookings briefing on Iraq. It was the single most illuminating presentation I have witnessed on the status of Iraq and the potential way forward.”

Read the whole thing.

IRISH VOTERS REJECTED THE E.U. TREATY: Richard North has some thoughts. “Already, the European Commission president has declared that the treaty is still ‘alive,’ even though it is technically dead. However, there will be no overt attempt to make the Irish vote again, although the project will sail on.”

UPDATE: Dave Kopel: How the Irish saved civilization, again. “Treaty proponents lamented that Ireland, with only 1% of the EU population, could derail a 27-nation treaty. But the very fact that only 1% of the EU’s population was allowed to vote on a treaty which would massively reduce national sovereignty and democratic accountability was itself an illustration of the enormous ‘democratic deficit’ of the EU in general, and the Lisbon Treaty in particular. According to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the Lisbon Treaty would be defeated in every EU nation if referenda were allowed.”

TIM RUSSERT has died.

UPDATE: Richard Miniter remembers Russert. “He was two things that most Washington journalists are not: tough and fair.”

NASA AWARDS new spacesuit contract.

FROM MOOG, a “revolutionary” new guitar.

PROOF THAT THE WAR WASN’T FOR OIL: Donald Rumsfeld buys a Vespa.

LARRY KUDLOW: “Who can figure out what Sen. John McCain really stands for on the economy?”

UPDATE: No confusion here: Obama: Payroll tax on incomes above $250,000.

DEMOCRATIC SUPERDELEGATE DOESN’T WANT TO ENDORSE OBAMA:

The rise of Sen. Barack Obama, to become the Democrats’ presidential nominee has put most of his party’s faithful on his bandwagon — but not Lincoln Davis, a rural Tennessee Congressman with gubernatorial ambitions.

Davis (D-Pall Mall) is not yet endorsing the presumptive nominee in Obama, saying he’ll wait until the late August Democratic Party national convention.

In Davis’ sprawling 4th Congressional District — which ranges from as far west as Hickman County to as far east as the upper Cumberland Plateau — less than a quarter of Democrats in the largely rural district voted for Obama, the nation’s first African-American presidential candidate nominated by a major party, in Tennessee’s presidential primary. . . .

Fred Hobbs, a state Democratic Party Executive Committee member representing part of Davis’ district, said he understands why Davis is not endorsing Obama and is “skeptical” of the Illinois senator himself.

“Maybe [it’s] the same reason I don’t want to — I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. “He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Davis was not made available for comment.

His chief of staff, Beecher Frasier, said he doesn’t know for sure if Obama is “terrorist connected” but he assumes he’s not.

Well, that’s a relief. Sounds like there’s still some healing to do in the Democratic party, post-primary. Here’s much more from A.C. Kleinheider.

MICKEY KAUS: “I kind of hope Obama’s election will kill off much of hip-hop, at least the gangsta-inspired parts. But just killing off bling and gangsta fashion would be a start.” It’s those off-the-rack Burberry suits that are the key.

Plus, grilling Michelle: “According to Time, when the Obama camp ‘got wind’ of the ‘whitey’ rumor, his aides took it so seriously they confronted Michelle and ‘grilled her on the particulars.’ So why can’t bloggers and reporters do the same thing?”

JENNIFER RUBIN: Does the Obama Campaign Foreshadow His Presidency?

HAPPY NATIONAL PIGEON DAY!

IN THE MAIL: The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President.

Knoxville, Tennessee.

THAT SHOULD ENHANCE HIS CREDIBILITY ON THE DEFICIT: McCains report more than $100,000 in credit card debt.

MORE ON SPACE TOURISM, at Popular Mechanics.

SATELLITE IMAGERY AND HUMAN RIGHTS:

Now satellite images of villages there show clear evidence of the destruction of villages, with gray smudges all that is left in many cases. The analysis was done by the Science and Human Rights Project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Under a MacArthur Foundation grant, Lars Bromley, a geographer, and others there have been following up on eyewitness accounts gathered by Human Rights Watch and other private groups. Mr. Bromley and his team collect and analyze images from DigitalGlobe and other purveyors of satellite-gathered data to assess the claims.

Note that this involves actual human rights, not the phony Canadian variety.

THE STORY ON GOOGLE AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS MAKES SLATE, where it gets a rather dismissive treatment from Chris Thompson. I think he gets it wrong with the Does Google Hate America? headline, though. Google’s problem is that it’s not living up to its own “Don’t be evil” hype. Instead it’s acting like any other big-bucks transnational corporation; honoring U.S. patriotic holidays might be bad for its business, so it doesn’t. That focus on business is of a piece with its cooperation with Chinese censorship, something that I noted at the time:

Google has come under criticism from people on the left — and right — for its cave-in to Chinese demands for censorship. From “don’t be evil,” Google’s motto has seemed to be “don’t be evil unless there’s a really big market at stake.”

They’ve also come in for criticism from people on the right for alleged censorship in Google News, with charges that Google is purging itself of conservative news sites. And many people complained that Google, which puts up special logos for all sorts of other holidays, didn’t do anything to recognize Memorial Day.

That last point seems minor, but for some people it seems to have been the last straw. . . . Jeff Jarvis notes that Google’s ad business isn’t doing especially well, and says that the reason is trust. So what, exactly, does Google have that will protect it from a sudden shift in consumer sentiments?

A few years ago Google lost its position as an outfit that people trusted because they thought it was run by friendly well-meaning geeks, and became just another big corporation out for the money. I think that’s hurt them, and I also think it’s sad, if perhaps inevitable.

LARRY LESSIG ON THE KOZINSKI KERFUFFLE: “The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel – and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.”

IT’S NICE TO BE A MEMBER OF CONGRESS: Everyone loves you and wants to help:

Two influential US senators got “VIP” loans from a leading subprime mortgage lender that saved them tens of thousands of dollars, it was reported last night.

The Democratic pols, Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, both received the highly favorable loans under the designation “Friend of Angelo,” a reference to embattled Countrywide head Angelo Mozilo, Condé Nast Portfolio reported.

Dodd is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, while Conrad is chairman of the Budget Committee and a member of the Finance Committee. The two senators refinanced properties through the VIP program in 2003 and 2004, the report said.

But it wasn’t just them: “Others who received ‘FOA’ loans include Alphonso Jackson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bush who resigned in April, and Donna Shalala, who was secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration.”

You know, government conflict-of-interest rules can be pretty exacting where worker bees are involved, but these guys didn’t see anything wrong with taking “VIP loans”? Jeez.

I CERTAINLY HOPE THAT THIS IS TRUE: Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern says substantial vote tallies across the country show the European Union Lisbon reform treaty has been rejected.

MORE EVIDENCE THAT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DOESN’T GET IT. Links to your stuff are good. That’s why reporters for newspapers send me links to their stories.

A.C. KLEINHEIDER: Al Gore Veep Talk.

GREGG EASTERBROOK:

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

Read the whole thing, which offers some useful perspective.

UPDATE: Fabius Maximus continues to stoutly maintain that media pessimism about the economy is a myth.

THE VENDOR DEATH PENALTY: A new concept, but easy to grasp.

IT BEATS TRYING TO TEACH LONG DIVISION: Lesson plan: Teachers fake deaths of several students.

ANDREW BOLT: Bugger whales. Save Zimbabweans.

INDEED: “Brutality is pretty much the norm for most of human history; as we’ve gotten richer, we’ve gotten less violent in all sorts of ways–we’ve stamped out (mostly) once common practices like infanticide, torture, wife beating, and the stoning of adulterers. Hunter gatherers are vastly more likely to die from homicide than people living in the developed world. Goodness is, in some sense, a luxury good. The most valuable luxury good we have.”

GLENN FLEISHMAN ROUNDS UP THE LATEST on airborne wi-fi. Plus, the busborne kind!

IS AMERICA FACING A summer vacation crisis? No doubt we can look to the French for guidance.

SOUNDS GOOD TO ME: Clearwire promises a fully-open, “third pipe” WiMAX network.

MARY JACKSON: Muslim ‘No-Go Areas’ in Britain? Just Go There!

CANADIAN KANGAROO COURT UPDATE: Ed Cone has thoughts.