CLONING UPDATE: Reader James Taranto sends a link to this Slate article on Hatch, LDS theology, and stem cells.

THE MULLAHS’ GRIP IS LOOSENING in Iran, in this very interesting story from ABC. (Via Clueless). Keep those Britney Spears videos on the air — they’re obviously weakening:

The 15-year-old girl trying out her new in-line skates in central Tehran also was making a bold fashion statement: jeans, a bulky sweater rolled up to her elbows and a bright orange head scarf barely hanging on to her hair.

Yet her outfit drew no special attention part of a quiet, but potentially momentous, test under way in Iran.

Almost daily, new boundaries are being defined for the “hijab,” the Muslim dress code for women enforced since the Islamic revolution 23 years ago.

Coming soon: a Barbie airdrop!

STEVE at HappyFunPundit has the email address for the PR firm behind the Saudis’ TV ads. He’s suggesting that people express their sentiments about making pro-Saudi advertisements.

READER ALEX BENSKY writes about the epidemic of “public health” studies relating to guns:

Why wouldn’t medical people have special insight into gun control, given that misuse of guns leads to health problems?

As a baseball fan, therefore, I have special insight into nuclear weapons programs, because an all-out nuclear attack on the U.S. might lead to an interruption in the American League schedule. As a matter of fact, I have direct insight, because I’ve got tickets to a Red Sox game in June.

And my friend the realtor has special insight into nuclear warfare because nuclear war would, after all, destroy real estate and reduce the value of what’s left. Maybe he could form a group called Realtors for Social Responsibility.

Why the hell not?

EMILY JONES is unimpressed by peace protesters.

STEPHEN GREEN says he doesn’t trust Bill Kristol.

MARTIN ROTH now has a more comprehensive list of Christian blogs.

LOS ANGELES IS THE ROME OF THE 21ST CENTURY, according to Ken Layne. So what’s the Athens?

Knoxville, of course, is the Sybaris of the 21st century.

ANOTHER major public-health study will be released tomorrow.

MORE ON CLONING: I’ve said it before, but it’s worth pointing out again that Congress’s enumerated powers don’t extend to a ban on cloning anyway. Such matters don’t concern big-government conservatives (if that’s a meaningful term) like Kristol, but this ought to give pause to more principled conservatives who believe that the Constitution actually means something.

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.

CHARLES JOHNSON comments on David Tell’s article about the U.N.’s obsession with Israel. Johnson hits the nail on the head: “In a sane world, the United Nations itself would be investigated.”

JUST HEARD A REALLY TERRIFIC STORY on space tourism on NPR. It was first-rate, with interviews from people in the space community who really get it, and who did a good job of explaining why it’s important.

BILL KRISTOL’S ANTI-CLONING GANG has its own commercial in response to the Harry and Louise pro-cloning ads. Too bad it’s basically full of lies.

Too harsh? Well, it says that the anti-cloning bill won’t ban life-saving research. But it will.

It says “some biotech companies will do anything to make a buck” — a faux-populism worthy of John Edwards and the Trial Lawyers.

It portrays real, human clones as walking around now because of cloning research (they’re not) — and suggests that if they existed they’d be patented, and hence owned, by big pharmaceutical companies, presumably leading to armies of subhuman cloned slaves. That’s not true.

This is Shrum-like in its dishonesty.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Murray writes:

Of course, the deeper hypocrisy of the Kristol ad is its explicit claim that those rascally corporations need to be reined in, or God only knows what they’ll do in their mad pursuit of profit, coming as it does from a right wing that has for years preached free market economics. I guess this means that I should expect to see Kristol at the next anti-globo rally, carrying a disfigured papier-mache puppet and condemning corporate greed, huh?

Well, that’s where they’re headed, based on this commercial. Though Kristol has never been much of a fan of free market economics. He likes big government — he just wants it to be his kind of big government.

HEY, THE CAIR WEBSITE IS DOWN. The reader who calls my attention to it asks: Could it have anything to do with this story on FoxNews?

Probably not. But stay tuned.

UPDATE: It’s back. Hey, it’s not like my site ever goes down. . . .

HEY, I ALMOST FORGOT: InstaPundit is site of the month over at Enter Stage Right, though they correctly report that I am not a conservative, but a Whig.

Does that count as right-wing? Who knows, anymore?

UPDATE: Reader Tyler Boswell writes: “The Whig party, huh? So that explains your hair in the pic.” Ouch. No, for better or worse, that’s all mine.

MICKEY KAUS is ahead of the curve on the John-Edward-backlash front. (“Who?” you may ask. “I am asking!” And well you may.) Kaus has the skinny in a piece long enough that I’m surprised it didn’t run in Slate. Maybe Jacob Weisberg’s a closet Edwards fan?

TAPPED, the American Prospect’s in-house blog, now has a stable URL so that you don’t have to go hunting around for it. Check it out — and scroll down to note TAPPED’s response to the Max Power porn-star incident.

SALON SEXWATCH — SPECIAL NOSTALGIA EDITION: Okay, I quit doing this feature a few months back because (1) I got sick of reading the lame Salon sex-advice column in search of actual sex; and (2) everyone knew about Rachael Klein’s column anyway, and I figured interested parties could go there on their own.

But a reader wrote to say that there’s actual sex in today’s Salon column. Well, kinda: there’s some advice how to kiss a woman, anyway, and later on some advice on how to avoid losing your erection. For the Salon column, that’s big progress. But it doesn’t really hold an, er, candle to Rachael Klein’s column on how to bring a woman to orgasm. Advantage: Klein. Some things never change.

CHRIS BERTRAM suggests that it’s kind of hard to be an anti-globalization, anti-bourgeois Marxist. If, that is, you’ve actually read Marx.

The problem isn’t that the far right is adopting leftist themes, but that the left, still as hostile to capitalism as ever but lacking a clearly articulated modernist alternative of its own since the failure of the Soviet experience and the Hayekian critique of central planning, has been drawn into adopting traditionally reactionary and conservative positions and a celebration of the very “idiocy of rural life” that Marx condemned. That doesn’t mean that we should be passive in the face of environmental destruction, but it does mean that we should think harder about how to combine a modern urban and diverse civilisation with greater social justice.

Yeah. But “thinking harder” isn’t a hallmark of the antiglobalization movement, is it?

MORE ON BELLESILES: There was actually another letter in the Emory Wheel today defending Bellesiles, also from a psychology professor who is affiliated with the Violence Studies program that Bellesiles founded. (Here’s a link to the Violence Studies faculty page). Unlike the letter from Patricia Brennan, mentioned below, this letter is entirely sensible: it doesn’t compare Bellesiles to an anti-lynching activist from 1902, and it doesn’t attempt to defend his work; it merely says that Bellesiles is entitled to keep his job until the University has investigated and come to a conclusion about whether he’s guilty of fraud.

JUST A THOUGHT: Maybe Israel should send some investigators to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to investigate claims of rape and child abuse by U.N. empoyees.

BELLESILES UPDATE: A letter in the Emory Wheel from Emory psychology professor Patricia Brennan suggests that Michael Bellesiles is the victim of a political witchhunt (she actually compares Bellesiles to an anti-lynching campaigner in the Old South), and says that Emory should be supporting him. Brennan asks some questions: “Exactly how many errors were found in Bellesiles’ work? Is this a large number of errors in light of the number of data points that he has provided? How many other books and research projects would fare better than Bellesiles’ when met with the same level of scrutiny? Where, and from whom, did this campaign against Bellesiles originate? Could this attack have been politically motivated?”

A response from Clayton Cramer (scroll down and click on the link) answers these questions: (1) Hundreds and hundreds; (2) Yes; (3) Nearly all of them; (4) from Clayton Cramer. The best part of Cramer’s response is this:

If this isn’t fraud, then it is presents an interesting opportunity for the psychology department to examine Professor Bellesiles, and explain about how someone with such a severe reading disability managed to earn a Ph.D. in History from University of California, Irvine, then become a full professor at Emory, without this serious reading disability being noticed.

Another reader, Don Williams, writes:

If Brennan is looking for a covert agent of the NRA, she might look at Bellesiles –he has made fools of our country’s gun control intelligentsia. The NRA could never have accomplished so much.

And he’s got a point. Note that Cramer and Williams both provide numerous links to support their positions — Cramer even links to a page showing actual copies of the original documents that Bellesiles misrepresents. Bellesiles’ defender Brennan does not provide any similar support, but merely spins conspiracy theories. Typical, I’m afraid.

UPDATE: Judging by this webpage, Prof. Brennan appears to be affiliated with the Violence Studies program that Bellesiles founded with the help of anti-gun scholar Arthur Kellerman. Her call for support is thus not exactly selfless.

HOWARD ANGLIN reports on the New York Sun’s front page today. Since you can’t get the Sun on the web yet, his regular posts are as close as you can come.

THOR VS. SPIDERMAN: With auxiliary insights into the worlds of religion, journalism, law, and politics. All courtesy of James Lileks.