IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers.

UPDATE: Reader Darin S. Morley writes: “Just another example of Google’s corporate policy: Don’t Be Evil.“

SOME TASKS ARE “INHERENTLY MORE OFFENSIVE TO WOMEN.”

YOU JUST CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Sens. Larry “Wide Stance” Craig and David “Diaper Boy”* Vitter have signed on to co-sponsor yet another federal bill that would amend the Constitution define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

‘Cause who has more reverence for the institution of marriage than these guys?

GET READY FOR THE OBAMA IRAQ PIVOT: It’s got to come soon, when you can read this kind of thing in The New Yorker:

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office. At the time, this pledge represented conventional thinking among Democrats and was guaranteed to play well with primary voters. But in the year and a half since then two improbable, though not unforeseeable, events have occurred: Obama has won the Democratic nomination, and Iraq, despite myriad crises, has begun to stabilize. With the general election four months away, Obama’s rhetoric on the topic now seems outdated and out of touch, and the nominee-apparent may have a political problem concerning the very issue that did so much to bring him this far.

It’s about time, since it’s nearly July.

UPDATE: Reader David Fleeger emails: “It was interesting that the author of the article in The New Yorker claimed that the US success in Iraq was mostly the result of luck. Even when trying to walk Obama back from the edge of disaster, the MSM is still stuck on stupid.”

ABC: How the FBI Botched the Anthrax Case.

DUMB LAWS is a blog devoted to just that. No shortage of material!

I’VE MENTIONED DAVID WILLIAMS’ The Mirrored Heavens before, but now here’s an interview with Williams.

UPDATE: Bill Quick emails:

So I’m out on my bike today – it’s gorgeous in SF – and I stop by the Bay for a breather and just to sit and watch the sailboats gliding under the Bay Bridge.

I open my backpack and drag out my 3 lb Lenovo with builtin EVDO, fire it up, and check my blog. Then yours – and see your post about The Mirrored Heavens. I click the link and check it out at Amazon. Sounds right up my alley. So I open my Sony eReader, connect it to my laptop, and buy the book for ten bucks, download it, and watch it join the 400 or so other books sitting in my reader.

It’s next on the “pile,” after I finish crunching my way through Peter Hamilton’s endless, but fascinating trilogy.

Speaking as a SF writer, I can tell you that intellectually this shouldn’t amaze me (and intellectually, I expect the process to be a lot more seamless in a couple of years), but as a 62 year old person who can remember when phones were black, tvs had tiny round screens, and the “network” was The Lone Ranger on CBS radio, there are times it seems downright miraculous.

Thanks for the recommendation.

Yeah, we’re not just reading science fiction. We’re living it! Hey, it’s the 21st Century, you know.

ROBERT MUGABE: The Anti-Mandela.

With Thabo Mbeki in the role of Best Supporting Actor.

MCCAIN’S MILITARY RECORD: Reader John Lunde emails: “Well, he served in Vietnam… and then he married a rich woman and got elected to the Senate. Are the Democrats now telling us these things don’t make for a good candidate?”

Heh. Plus, I must disagree with charges that McCain is being “Swift Boated.” For this to be a “Swift Boating,” people who stayed at the Hanoi Hilton would have to say that McCain was lying about what he did there — or perhaps that his repeated claims that events there were “seared, seared” in his memory are false, and he was never actually there at all — and those people would have to be telling the truth.

ROBERT NOVAK: Obama’s Dodge on Handguns:

While Scalia’s opinion for now saves Obama from defending a court that had emasculated gun rights, one inconvenient truth confronts the candidate. He has made clear that as president he would nominate Supreme Court justices who agree with the minority of four that the Second Amendment is meaningless. Would he want a reconstituted court to roll back the D.C. decision when the Chicago case gets there?

Yes he would.

ARTHUR SILBER IS CREEPED OUT by the messianic zeal of Obama fans.

Hey, it’s not as if they’re taking his name or anything!

DON’T CALL ME SHIRLEY. “Surely, I can state categorically that any political philosophy that has as its core value some variation of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ is antithetical to American values and, therefore, unpatriotic. Surely, I can state categorically that any political philosophy makes the ‘world’s’ feelings a priority over American interests or sovereignty is antithetical to American values or survival and, therefore, unpatriotic.”

And don’t forget mean-spirited.

MORE ON THE TUNGUSKA ANNIVERSARY: “Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the moment when something roared through the empty skies over Siberia and exploded, blasting forests for hundreds of square miles. More such incoming space rocks are inevitable. Are we ready? No.”

I BLAME KARL ROVE: Obama’s for Equal Pay, Yet Pays Female Staffers Less Than Males. “That is in contrast to Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s Senate office, where women, for the most part, out-rank and are paid more than men.”

THOUGHTS ON THE PRACTICE OF ETHICAL CONSUMERISM.

Meanwhile, reader A.L. Harris writes: “I cancelled my Chicago Tribune today. I will not economically support their position in Friday’s editorial on repealing the second amendment. But though they used their first amendment rights to propose stripping me of my second amendment rights, I would still use my second amendment rights to defend their first amendment rights. It’s an odd symbiotic relationship.” Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Shane Blake writes: “This analogy isn’t quite right. A symbiotic relationship, by definition, benefits both organisms. The relationship above could only be called parasitic.”

STEVE CHAPMAN:

Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, lamenting the decision overturning his city’s handgun ban, said Thursday, “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence.” That’s a dangerous statement for a politician to make–an empirical claim that can be judged against empirical data.

I emailed Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, one of the nation’s leading gun scholars, to ask if the proposition Fenty set out is true. Surprise: It’s not.

Falsehoods in support of gun control? Stop the presses.

PINK GUNS as rape prevention devices.

THOUGHTS ON PATRIOTISM AND SACRIFICE.

UPDATE: Another flip-flop?

BRING IT ON:

Scientists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center are about to embark on a human trial to test whether a new cancer treatment will be as effective at eradicating cancer in humans as it has proven to be in mice.

The treatment will involve transfusing specific white blood cells, called granulocytes, from select donors, into patients with advanced forms of cancer. A similar treatment using white blood cells from cancer-resistant mice has previously been highly successful, curing 100 percent of lab mice afflicted with advanced malignancies.

I certainly hope that this pans out.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, a reference to my colleague Alex Long: “a law professor at the University of Tennessee and perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions.”

KRUGMAN IS STUMPED, but Obama himself provides the answer.

DO WE HAVE A CONSERVATIVE SUPREME COURT? “Sure, conservatives are cheering the Heller decision, but how ‘conservative’ is a Court that invalidates the death penalty for child rape and declares that non-citizen detainees held outside U.S. sovereign territory by the military have a constitutional right to bring habeas actions in federal court, despite federal legislation to the contrary? Viewed as a whole, this term saw a Court that often defied easy ideological characterization.”

OUCH: In ‘survival mode,’ newspapers slashing jobs. “The increasingly rapid and broad decline in the newspaper business in recent months has surprised even the most pessimistic financial analysts, many of whom say it’s too hard to tell how far the slump will go.”

No wonder they’ve been telling us we’re in the midst of a second Great Depression. For them, it’s been true.

UPDATE: Reader Jerry Carroll emails:

Glenn: I’m enjoying your glee over the death of newspapers. But what will replace them when they’re gone? Think anybody is going to leave the comfort of their chair once a week to trudge to the city council and report on a blog what happened so the rest of us know? I see the time coming when there won’t be anyone watching local government, and what we know will only be what it wants us to know.

It’s not “glee.” And, in fact — as I’ve said repeatedly — I think the reason that newspapers are tubing is that they’re replaced the kind of hard-news reporting described above with editorializing and “attitude,” often in support of political positions that many people don’t agree with. I’d much rather see them flourish while doing a good job, but they’ve been cutting budgets for actual reporting for decades. Read Andy Krieg’s Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper, to see how this trend was already underway twenty years ago. If you turn out a product whose quality is steadily declining, while simultaneously treating a substantial part of your customer base as somewhere between evil and idiotic, don’t be surprised if your business gets worse. I’ve said for years that hard-news reporting is the killer app for Big Media, but they just don’t want to do it. They want to tell people what to think, instead of telling them what’s happening.

MORE: Reader Tom Fojtik emails: “In response to the guy expressing concerns about what replaces newspapers for those who want to know what is going on in city hall. We already have it and it’s called ‘cable access tv.’ I can watch myself at the bi-weekly Plan Commission four times a week if I want. And sometimes it’s even mildly entertaining.”

STILL MORE: On Jerry Carroll’s “glee” comment, a reader emails:

I don’t know how he/she came to such a conclusion about your attitude. I have felt it a bit too much sympathy. Your response is without a doubt, the bottom line. And concerning Jerry’s assessment of readers of the paper, we may be better off without them if that’s the extent of their desire to be informed. What can they tell city council but how the school needs more tax dollars for sex ed and global warming? For many of us its more of a “comfort” getting a cup of coffee, clicking on certain favorites and staying above the imposition of distortion and agenda.

And reader Arthur Barie writes: “One quick google search found a blog that does excellent work covering politics here in my county. Don’t be surprised if most counties have someone who takes this stuff seriously.” And it’s not as if local media do such a bang-up job covering local politics anyway.

MORE STILL: Reader Peter Farmer emails:

I reside in the Chicago area, and have read the local “Chicago Tribune” for most of my life (I am 47). I started reading it as a grade-schooler, and have had ample opportunity to see the changes at the Tribune Co. over the years. The Tribune used to be a great newspaper, one which could be relied upon to report the news as impartially as possible for a human institution. Sure, I can remember my father grumbling about it – he was a senior executive at Motorola and had many dealings with the press – but we certainly never cancelled our subscription or questioned its professionalism.

I cannot mark precisely when the Tribune and The New York Times began to go downhill; I began to notice dramatic changes in the nature and quality of the content about ten years ago. Most conspicuously, nearly every section and article – save perhaps the comics and the sports page – contained more and more opinion and less and less factual content. I’ll be the first to admit opinion writing has its place, but one must first know the facts before forming opinions about them, and newspapers like the Tribune seemed to have progressively less regard for this vital task on a daily basis than ever before. What sealed the deal for me was their “reporting” about the war in Iraq. I have studied the military and military history for over 30 years, and have many sources of information in that field besides newspapers. After the invasion, it was easy to discern that few if any Tribune or other big-city newspaper reporters left the safety of their hotels in the Green Zone. Apparently, it is OK to sit in the bar with your colleagues from the other papers and maybe CNN or CBS or NBC, and simply phone it in without getting yourself dirty. Worse yet, as the Israeli-Palestinian flare-up of two years has shown, our news services are remarkably gullible, and willing to be used by stringers working for our ideological enemies, i.e. Al-Qaeda, the PLA, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. or foreign news agencies biased against western values, such as Al-Jazeera. The AP was duped or worse, knowing used, “photo-shopped” images that purportedly showed an Israeli air strike against a marked ambulance, but were later exposed by internet fact-checkers as fraudulent propaganda on the part of the PLA. And, as you and many others in the conservative blogosphere have noted, Abu Ghraib made the front pages dozens and dozens of times, but not the good news about the war. Since the surge, presto! Good news about the war is nowhere to be found in the NYT or Tribune. Thank goodness for the blogosphere, and writers like Michael Yon and Ralph Peters.

Another nail in the coffin for the credibility of reporting by the dinosaur media is the sudden proliferation of celebrities as experts on everything from global warming to hostiles in the Iraq or Darfur to gay marriage. When did Rosie O’Donnell become an authority on anything besides mediocre comedy? And now – with a straight face no less – Al Franken is being considered seriously in some liberal-left quarters as Senatorial material. If that isn’t proof we’ve lost our collective minds, I don’t know what is! Perhaps he and Jerry Springer can hammer out the problem with the national debt in between cracking one-liners and interviewing one-legged transvestites or staging fights between estranged lovers.. Way back in the old days, when I was a kid (yeah, I know, the snow was ten feet deep and you had to walk twenty miles to school, grandpa), folks like these would have been laughed out of any serious newsroom or studio; they wouldn’t have made it in the door of any truly professional establishment, not to mention the Congress. Now, the Tribune features a column by Garrison Keillor, he of “Prairie Home Companion” fame. He has a nice show once in a while, but aren’t there better and better-qualified choices for a regular spot on your editorial page?

I am one of those folks who will mourn the death of the big-city news daily when it finally comes. I love a well-written newspaper, and the Fourth Estate has a critical role to play in the health of our Republic, if only they would in fact perform that role. Incidentally, author and physician Michael Crichton predicted the decline of the traditional media over decade ago; a transcript of one of his speeches on the topic is available on his website. Finally, my wife is from a small town, and we get the local newspaper each week – it shows all of the idiosyncrasies, of course, but all of the common sense, too – it respects the intelligence of the readers and does not stoop to political activism or naked partisanship. Maybe I’ll send a copy to the Tribune to show ‘em how it is done. Of course, they are too busy campaigning for Mr. Obama to notice….

Indeed.

DEMOCRATIC ATTACKS ON MCCAIN’S MILITARY RECORD: “When Obama loses in November, these schmucks can look back at such tactics and pinpoint where it all started going downhill. These same people whine like little b—hes at the slightest criticism of Barack Obama. But they go right into the gutter when attacking John McCain.”

UPDATE: With Wesley Clark, “we’re a long way from George Marshall.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh:

The Saddest Thing About Barack Obama’s Available Military Expertise…

…is that though he has Wes Clark in his corner, the only person he knows with the experience of getting a bomb on target is Bill Ayers.

Again, heh.

THE TENNESSEE REPUBLICAN PARTY MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT, if it’s getting attacked in the Huffington Post. But, as usual, the attacks on Republicans soften the fact that it was Tennessee Democrats talking about Obama having possible connections to terrorists.