ROGER SIMON: TNR changing the story.

UPDATE: “The New Republic still has not responded to Richard Miniter’s PJM article on the Scott Beauchamp scandal and the facts therein.”

“THANKS JOHN: You’re a really big help.”

UPDATE: Eric Scheie: “This is not to suggest that Bush is perfect. Far from it. I’m often disappointed in him, and many times I’ve looked back and asked whether things might have been different had Kerry won. The answer is yes they would have. I think they would have been worse. The more I read about Kerry, the more I’m glad I didn’t vote for him.”

Yes. Bush, as I’ve said many times, was a weak candidate. It’s just that Kerry was much weaker.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh: “In response to Bill Kristol saying John Kerry shouldn’t have left home to criticize American foreign policy abroad, Brit Hume yesterday quipped: ‘Is it really fair to John Kerry to argue, Bill, that when he’s in Switzerland, he’s away from home?'”

BILL KRISTOL ON FOX JUST NOW: “George Allen would be winning this race if it weren’t for the blogs and YouTube.”

That’s right. Allen helped himself recover by hiring blogger Jon Henke — but he’d have helped himself a lot more if he’d hired him before he was in deep macaca.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Several folks have heard back from their elected representatives. Here are some posts about the responses they got.

Dave Price was impressed with Barack Obama’s response.

Reader Julie Martin-Korb wrote Paul Sarbanes and reports: “Mr. Sarbanes is proud of his spending initiatives, and he is opposed to tax cuts for the wealthy ‘in this time of need,’ but the only sentence in his letter that is even remotely responsive to my request is this: ‘Simultaneously, Congress must continuously review federal spending in order to ensure that our Nation pursues a responsible economic course while providing needed recovery funds.'”

From Rochester, New York, Evan Dawson of 13 WHAM TV News emails:

I’m a reporter for the ABC News affiliate in Rochester, NY, and the pork-for-relief plan was our lead story on Monday, September 19th. Here are quotes and responses from two representatives:

From Rep. Randy Kuhl (R): “Are there some earmarks in the transportation bill that are key to economic development? In this area, with some of the earmarks that I was able to put in, they are. So I would be very hesitant to have them removed, because I think you have to have economic development in this country if you’re going to be able to support hurricane relief.” In other words, he’s not willing to trade in his pork, as it would undermine the country’s capacity to charitably support hurricane recovery efforts.

From Rep. Louise Slaughter (D), when asked about trasnportation bill pork: “A lot of it is frivolous.” However, when pressed regarding her own pork (Slaughter secured, among other things, $1.6 million for the Rochester Art Walk — an outdoor museum), she responded, “Well, we’ll look and see. That is indeed, as you point out — it’s in the transportation bill. We’ll look and see what can be postponed and what can be put off.” But she closed by saying that her first preference is to eliminate “Bush’s tax cuts for the extraordinarily wealthy.”

As a reporter, I take no position on the pork-for-relief proposal. I just wanted to help alert the public as to where their federal representatives stand.

I hope that lots of local media folks will do the same thing. Meanwhile, Matt Duffy continues his ongoing, though largely fruitless, dialogue with Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, and thinks that Price’s office is mostly interested in “slowing down my efforts at getting Price to answer these specific questions.” Gee, d’ya think?

Reader Robert Hahn shares this scintillating response from Rep. Donald Payne:

Thank you very much for your email. I always appreciate the chance to hear from constituents. Your issues are of concern to me; please be assured that I will take your views under consideration. If you haven’t already, please stop by my website at www.house.gov/payne.
Please feel free to email me again, and thank you very much for your letter.

Hahn adds: “I suppose if I get a non-form letter reponse in the next couple of days, I’ll forward that along.” We’ll be waiting!

Maybe for a while. Reader Jim Uren emails: “I emailed [Rep.] Anna Eshoo D-CA five days ago. No response.”

Zachary Rethorn notes that Sen. Mike Dewine is still reviewing proposals.

UPDATE: This column on PorkBusters gets it right: “It may be that only 30% of the items on the Porkbusters wishlist will be cut in, say, the first fiscal year after the Porkbusters campaign begins. That does not preclude another 30% or so being cut the next year. And the year after that as well. And so on. Changing the entitlement culture is an incremental process. But eventually, the small gains can add up and we can achieve a budgetary process that is more fiscally responsible than the one we are currently saddled with. Recognizing this fact will go a long way towards fashioning a successful anti-pork political strategy. And it is not like the political facts on the ground don’t make it easy to cut pork.” Indeed.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more, from Republican columnist Frank Cagle:

Bush may still be popular with the branch of the Republican Party that only cares about abortion, stem-cell research and displaying the Ten Commandments, but the fiscal-conservative small-government don’t-tread-on-me wing of the party has had enough.

He offers some advice on what the GOP needs to do to avoid disaster, which he sees as otherwise inevitable.

Meanwhile, Carroll Andrew Morse is worried that Katrina reconstruction will turn into pork. I’d say it’s a well-founded concern.

And reader C.J. Burch emails:

I have to admit, I’m surprised more of the fiscally responsible conservatives in the mainstream haven’t signed on to this idea. They certainly should. Why haven’t they? Where’s Robert Novak? Where’s George Will? Have you gotten any help from the folks over at the Corner? How about Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol?

How about ’em? My sense is that while complaining about corruption and waste and how they doom our society is considered acceptable punditry, attempting to do anything about the problem is seen as hopelessly naive.

JOHN TABIN REPORTS THAT DEMOCRACY seems to be busting out all over:

Let’s check the score:

Yesterday in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai was sworn in as that country’s first democratically elected president.

In Ukraine, the Kremlin-backed ruling party’s attempt to steal the election for Viktor Yanukovych appears completely stymied by the peaceful Orange Revolution. At minimum, it seems likely that there will be a re-vote on December 26.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 1.3 million Palestinians are registered to vote in the January 9 election of one of ten presidential candidates seeking to replace the marvelously dead Yasser Arafat. In Iraq, nearly 14 million Iraqis are registered to vote for one of 156 parties running in the January 30th election. As Bill Kristol has pointed out, commentators in the Arab world are starting to wonder aloud why the Arabs with the most significant voting rights are those under American or Israeli occupation.

Would it be pollyannaish, at this point, to be tremendously optimistic about the march of democracy and freedom?

Perhaps just a bit. But it’s certainly good news.

GORE AND DEAN: Mickey Kaus says that Gore’s endorsement of Dean is a tribute to web-power. Tim Cavanaugh says that Gore’s “extending his jinx.” Jonah Goldberg observes:

More important, it underscores how unserious Al Gore has become on the war on terrorism. Will Gore say that he should have picked Dean to be his runningmate in 2000? Al Gore claimed that Joe Lieberman would be the best possible stand-in for Al Gore should the need arise. He said that Lieberman’s qualifications were perfect to be president. Now, that was before the War on Terrorism. In the time since then, Joe Lieberman has been at the forefront of the War on Terrorism in the Senate. . . .

In other words, Al Gore not only thinks Howard Dean is more qualified to be president of the United States than Joe Lieberman was or is, he thinks that is especially the case now after 9/11. If you really let that sink in for a second, you can see what an amazingly mercenary and damn close to dishonorable position that is.

Ouch. Well, Gore wasn’t trying to win over Goldberg anyway. . .

It is rather a slam at Lieberman, but politics is politics and Lieberman’s candidacy is going nowhere. Dean’s, on the other hand, is looking unstoppable through the primaries.

At any rate, I’m not sure that Dean, if elected, would be as bad for the war on terror as Goldberg’s post, sort of, implies, or that Dean’s primacy in fact reflects a policy of surrender on the part of Democratic voters. Here’s Dean’s secret weapon in the general election: He’s an angry jerk. Okay, he’s not always a jerk, but he has his angry, jerky side. And that poses risks to his campaign that have been analyzed elsewhere.

But in the current climate (heck, probably in most political climates) an angry jerk is a lot better than a wimp, and Dean doesn’t come across as a wimp. Voters may conclude, and they may be right, that a President Dean would get angry at terrorists and respond appropriately, rather than rolling over and being a wimp. This, at any rate, is one reason why I’m not so sure the Dean / McGovern parallel that some people are drawing works.

UPDATE: Robert Crawford emails:

Your point about an angry jerk being better than a wimp misses something important: the jerk should be angry at the right things. I haven’t seen much evidence that Dean is really upset with the state of the Arab world, the conditions and traditions that have created the Islamist movements. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that Dean is angry at Bush for trying to do something about it.

Yeah, he’s playing to his base. That doesn’t make me feel any better about it, though.

Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has interesting observations regarding both Howard Dean and David Brooks — and on what the Internet means for both. Roger Simon has thoughts, too, while Steven Antler has an economic angle.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: QandO says that for Dean, Bush is the real enemy, not Islamist terror. But I’m not sure he’s paying enough attention to context, here.

And Daniel Drezner has a roundup of reactions from within and without the blogosphere. Meanwhile, I’m predicting that it will ultimately be a Dean/Edwards ticket for the Dems.

Finally, Obsidian Wings wonders if Dean is tough enough.

MORE: Bill Kristol thinks Dean can win.

ANDREW SULLIVAN SAYS TRENT LOTT MUST GO:

Why are the Republican commentators so silent about this? And the liberals? (Josh Marshall, to his credit, states the obvious. And Bill Kristol, to his great credit, expressed disbelief.) And where’s the New York Times? Howell Raines is so intent on finding Bull Connor in a tony golf club that when Bull Connor emerges as the soul of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, he doesn’t notice it. And where’s the president?

Or at least Karl Rove, who ought to see the handwriting on the wall.

UPDATE: “Good for Andrew,” writes Josh Marshall, who, like me, is mystified by Lott’s response so far.

JOE KLEIN says that Bob Shrum is killing the Democrats. So why is Bill Kristol imitating him?

CLONING UPDATE: Orrin Hatch is supporting cloning. Well, therapeutic cloning — he wants to outlaw human cloning. Still, that puts him on the opposite side of this legislative from Kristol, who supports the Brownback/Landrieu bill that would ban therapeutic cloning, too. I didn’t notice it at the time, but Gerald Ford took the same position last week.

RON BAILEY SAYS THAT Bill Kristol is wrong, very wrong in his predictions that genetic technology will lead to a Brave New World scenario:

As a consequence of this growing federal role, the government would necessarily be involved with setting standards and protocols for any new genetic technologies, including most especially interventions aimed at genetic enhancements. According to Kristol, cloning, even just therapeutic cloning to create perfect transplants, is further down the slippery slope where, when we reach the bottom, we will find that the Brave New World of government-mandated eugenics is inevitable. . . .

No one else appeared to notice the irony of Kristol’s analysis. Here was the man who is often credited with single-handedly stopping Clinton from nationalizing health care now declaring that free market medicine is doomed. Of course, Kristol might declare it doomed because such a declaration conveniently suits his political needs of the moment — that is, bolstering his campaign to ban both therapeutic and reproductive cloning. In any case, instead of trying to stop potentially beneficial biomedical research because he fears what the government may do with it one day, Kristol should instead be redoubling his already successful efforts to make the government less powerful and less intrusive in the private choices of citizens.

What he said.