THE NEW SUPREME BEINGS OF LEISURE CD will be out September 10, according to their website. I’ve been waiting: I got a promo email back in the winter promising it for May. Their comment: “This leisure business is hard work.”

ISNTAPUNDIT says old people are ruining America, and he’s kind of bitter about it. Meanwhile Dan Hanson thinks the youth vote is a waste of time. And don’t miss the automatic caption generator either. It had me laughing out loud, which made the electrician look at me kind of funny.

CHRIS BERTRAM reviewed Brink Lindsey’s book on his blog. Brink Lindsey responded. Bertram has responded to the response. Scroll and follow the links on this one; there’s a lot of meat there.

ERIC OLSEN is jealous of my free John Fogerty tickets. I probably shouldn’t mention the great show I saw — for five bucks! — that same year. It was a double-bill of The Rainmakers and Steve Earle at the 930 Club in DC. And it was only five bucks. For both! That’s almost as good as free.

THE PRIVATE CYBERWAR ON TERROR: My TechCentralStation column is up.

MAX SAWICKY calls me a racial name, then gets the TennCare issue all wrong. This guy claims to know something about health care, or economics? It doesn’t show here. In truth, TennCare is riddled with corruption, and inept at providing care. There are tens of thousands of dead people on the rolls, providers don’t get paid while big corporate “provider organizations” that Max would otherwise savage (if, that is, they weren’t sucking off the public tit) disappear with the cash. Fraud isn’t prosecuted, because the state government doesn’t want the bad publicity. His solution: raise taxes to fund it.

The income tax was wildly unpopular in Tennessee, which is why it didn’t pass. Now the insiders who tried to sneak it past — but who lacked the guts to make a political case for it in an actual election — are complaining that they were defeated by “mob rule,” a claim that Max uncritically endorses. He also seems to think he’s scoring points by noting that Tennessee’s pro-tax governor is a Republican. Well, duh. (I’m not one, you know.) A pathetic effort, Max..

And yes, I know, you shouldn’t respond to trolling like this. But Sawicky unaccountably enjoys a reputation among lefty bloggers as a thinker. Read the post, and draw your own conclusions about that.

UPDATE: Reader Stephen Hill suggests a double standard here:

Political protest at the capital (be it [Nashville] or Washington D.C.) is acceptable, and a hallmark of free speech – as long as you are protesting for liberal ideas. But if you protest for Libertarian or Conservative ideas, especially successfully (Gasp!), then you are exercising mob rule and inciting a riot.

Yes. It’s unAmerican to protest about taxes, after all. What would the founding fathers say?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yeah, I knew he was trolling. Enjoy the traffic Max. You’d get more of it if you had something interesting to say.

HUGH HEWITT HAS MY CAREER all planned out.

DRUGS MAKE PEOPLE STUPID, writes Joanne Jacobs. And not necessarily the people taking them.

AIR TRAVEL UPDATE: Despite being worn out from filling orders for “Impeach Norm Mineta” bumperstickers, Gary Leff is all over the issue of airline security’s impact on the airline industry.

Even if the airlines were going out of their way to make flying a pleasant experience — which no one suggests is the case — the long delays required while people confiscate G.I. Joe guns would change people’s economic calculus: a trip that’s worth doing if it can be done there-and-back in a day may not be worth it if you have to spread the travel over two days. That’s going to cost the airlines business, and it has. At the high end, everything I hear indicates that people are shifting to charters and fractional-ownership arrangements. Elsewhere, people are driving, or just not going. And teleconferencing seems to be more popular.

And the problem for the airlines is that this business won’t come back. People who get used to flying charters won’t hurry back to commercial service. People who teleconference won’t rush to fly in the future.

All of this might be worth it if it were making us safer. But it isn’t. Screeners are still missing a huge percentage of guns, knives, etc.

The point of the whole exercise isn’t even to prevent terrorism, really. It’s to fool us into feeling safer. I don’t think it’s working, but it’s taking the airline industry down in the process. I think my next Fox column will expand on these themes.

Meanwhile, if you feel the same way, well, you can get your Impeach Norm Mineta bumpersticker here. Buy a few and send ’em to your Senators and Congresscritter.

UPDATE: Jay Caruso has weighed in with more.

THEY SENT MOHAMMED ATTA A VISA after 9/11, but they were all over this woman.

I’d be more willing to spot the INS a few embarrassing failures with unthreatening people if I had confidence that they were at least doing a good job with the dangerous ones. But they’re planning to fingerprint people from some Arab countries — but leaving out visitors from Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 hijackers came from. Note to the INS: When you do stuff like that, it’s hard to cut you slack for jumping all over a woman from . . . New Zealand.

UPDATE: Spoons has the best take on the non-Saudi fingerprinting issue: “Just think, if these measures had been in effect last September 11, the terrorists would have been four short!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s even worse than that. Brian Erst points out something that I should have noticed but didn’t: none of the countries from which the 9/11 hijackers came is on the list for fingerprinting.

A WORD OF ADVICE: “Whatever you do, stay away from the brown ones.” It’s sort of a public service announcement, I guess.

CORSAIR has identified Osama’s worst nightmare.

DAN GILLMOR SAYS that “digital rights management” should be called “digital restrictions management.” Well put. It’s your rights that are being restricted.

MORE DEVELOPMENTS IN IRAQ, via Radio Free Mike.

LEX GIBSON emails this Georgia General Assembly resolution renaming “Cynthia McKinney Parkway” as “Memorial Drive,” “in honor and memory of all of those United States citizens who died on or after September 11, 2001, as a result of attacks on this nation by foreign enemies and in defense of this nation against further such attacks as part of Operation Enduring Freedom.” Appropriate signs are to be erected, recognizing the change.

UPDATE: I’ve received some emails saying that this resolution didn’t pass before the Ga. Leg. adjourned. Maybe next year.

I POSTED ON THE DC FORCED-ABORTION STORY almost a year ago, but the drama continues to unfold.

I’m pro-choice, which means that, you know, I think it should be, well, a choice. A lot of people in DC say that the District is essentially a colony. Well, if so I think it’s a colony that’s not ready for self-government. It certainly wasn’t when I lived there, and there’s no sign that it’s gotten better.

UPDATE: Think I’m exaggerating? One post above my year-old post on the abortion issue is this one about a man who was kept in a DC jail for two years without any charges, while jailers ignored his protests and notes. I wonder if there are any new developments on that case.

Even more pathetically, the apparatchiks who run the District’s government call their critics racist, even as they demonstrate their continuing contempt for the many black people who live there.

TIM BLAIR takes on Neville Chamberlain’s heir (well, one of them, anyway). And Henry Hanks identifies the compassionate spirits of the modern Left.

MY DAUGHTER’S SCHOOLDAY IS OVER, though since I’m at the office I don’t know how things were. But since I’m in the office, I know how my preparation for the start of classes here next week is going. Ugh. I’ve gone through a huge amount of “buffered” mail (that sounds better than “piled up” doesn’t it?) and filled a couple of trashcans with it. Why do people get so upset about spam? The real junk mail is much worse: you can’t make it go away with the click of a mouse.

UPDATE: Jeff Cooper is in the same boat.

I don’t really mind once classes are underway. It’s the transition I hate.

AN INTERESTING STORY about the Muslim doorkeeper at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

TED BARLOW points out that Bruce Springsteen’s organization denies that Tipper Gore asked for free tickets, though Fox’s Roger Friedman — who reports this — says that his anonymous source stands by the story.

Meanwhile, I have a confession to make. And it’ll make Alterman jealous as hell. I got free tickets to see John Fogerty’s 1986 comeback concert in Memphis, which was his first public appearance in over a decade, I believe — and I got them through a favor from a prominent Tennessee politician. I won’t mention his name, though. He might be embarrassed.

It was a great show. And I don’t feel at all guilty about the free tickets.

THERE’S PLENTY OF REASON to think that the D.A.R.E. program is a waste of taxpayer money, or worse. Now Dave Kopel has more reasons to consider it “worse.”

ERIC ALTERMAN wants to revamp his links, and he’s looking for volunteers to help him out.

CYNTHIA MCKINNEY’s latest emails inspire another response from Bill Herbert.

ANOTHER BLOW to the terrorism / poverty connection? Arafat is reported to be worth over a billion dollars.

THE SPACE ELEVATOR: Not quite science fiction any more.

UPDATE: Courtesy of reader Nigel Richardson, here’s the space elevator homepage at NASA.