POLITICAL COURAGE in the Senate!

MERRY AL-CHRISTMAS!

MICKEY KAUS: “Hollywood Hates Obama? . . . As always, the entertainment community demands more policy details!“

THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY: Bad for libertarianism?

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR CONGRESSIONAL TRANSPARENCY in The New York Times. Further thoughts from Mark Tapscott.

IT’S TIME FOR THE (LAST MINUTE) Christmas Carnival of the Recipes.

EMBEDDED BLOGGER BILL ROGGIO posts a report on how the Iraq Study Group report played in Anbar. Plus an interview with a Milblogger. With video!

And read this, too.

SO RUDOLPH IS A GIRL’S NAME? Who knew?

TOYOTA NOW RULES THE AUTOMOTIVE ROOST: But for how long?

CATHY SEIPP: Old farts vs. bloggers:

I’d say that if it takes you a month to think of an idea for a blogging post you probably shouldn’t be blogging – or maybe even reporting or editing, at least not for the sorts of salaries they pay you at the Times, where indeed you can make a nice living while being almost completely bereft of ideas. That’s why I’m less sympathetic than many at the cost-cutting standoff going on now between the Tribune Company and its sometimes bloated L.A. outpost.

But maybe that’s me, and I admit this opinion may be flavored my general prejudice against writing coaches, which Baker was at the Times and now is on a freelance basis. From his own site: “Helping you is my calling. Getting there is your job.” Oh, dear. Journalists who want to help always strike me as better suited to social work or something, and unfortunately their earnest attitudes are one of the mainstream media’s biggest problems now in dealing with the rude new world of Internet journalism. . . . Some of blogging’s important elements include: regular and frequent posting, interactivity with readers, reaction and commentary to mainstream media news, links proving one’s point, and so on. You can get away with weakness in some of these areas if others are strong enough. But some perfectly fine journalists are just not bloggers, they don’t really get the Internet, and therein lies the basic problem facing newspapers today.

Read the whole thing.

THE MASK IS OFF THE MULLAHS: And it’s been pretty thin for an awfully long time.

TOM MAGUIRE: “Having read through the NY Times account of their interview with DA Mike Nifong, I Boldly predict that Mr. Nifong is planning to drop the remaining charges against the Duke Three at the Feb 5 hearing, or before.”

BLOGOSPHERE FAQs from Dean Barnett.

HAPPY FESTIVUS!

SOMALIA FALLING TO AL QAEDA: This is bad news.

SANDY BERGER: A rumination. “The more you read of the file the more you realize that there are many unanswered questions about Berger’s behavior.”

UPDATE: A Condi Rice thought experiment.

YES, WE’VE GONE SOUTH FOR CHRISTMAS: The Insta-Wife is posting pics.

IRAN HELD LIABLE FOR THE KHOBAR TOWERS BOMBING: A roundup.

JOHN SCALZI gets a writeup in The New York Times Book Review and I’m glad for him. However, the reviewer, Dave Itzoff, opens the review with the tired claim that Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is fascist. (Spider Robinson put that one to bed back in 1980). He does note the role of blogs in promoting Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and Ghost Brigades, though.

Our podcast interview with Scalzi is here. And see Scalzi’s comments here.

And I can’t help but observe that if Starship Troopers is fascist, then so is the “chickenhawk” argument favored by the antiwar left — with the added proviso that Heinlein was writing fiction, and the antiwar lefties are actually propounding a political position, of sorts.

UPDATE: More on Heinlein here.

SHOCKING BEHAVIOR: Urging law reform in Canada.

INDEED: “Pundits lose grip on reality when dealing with Internet.” “Bloggers should definitely be open to criticism by the mainstream media. That’s America. But lumping everyone together with the crackpots is neither fair nor honest. And the fact that so many reporters and pundits can’t seem to get the story right just proves the bloggers’ point that too many of them don’t know what they’re talking about on everything else.”

DUKE RAPE UPDATE — or maybe I should say Duke Non-Rape Update: Rape Charges Dropped in Duke Case. Other charges remain, however — though mostly, I suspect, as a testament to D.A. Mike Nifong’s inability to admit that he never had a case to begin with.

More here. And K.C. Johnson observes: “There is absolutely no justification for any continued allegations against any of the players; I suspect this is the beginning of the end for the case against them–and the beginning of the ethical and perhaps legal case against Nifong.”

JOHN O’SULLIVAN’S NEW BOOK gets a rather positive review (“dazzling”) from Michael Beran.

THE INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT ON SANDY BERGER is now available online.

LARRY KUDLOW likes John McCain.