JON HENKE writes that 2006 might be the Democrats’ 1994, as the Republican Congress grows less popular while not accomplishing much.

MICHAEL YOUNG: “Those who accuse the Bush administration of incompetence in the Middle East because of events in Iraq may soon have to temper that with an assessment of its shrewder behavior in Lebanon.” Of course, the latter was made possible by the former.

RON BAILEY REPORTS on the Kansas Intelligent Design hearings:

Who needs to make monkeys out of the Kansas Board of Education when its members are doing such a good job of it themselves? . . .

The anti-evolutionists affect not to know who or what the “intelligent designer” of their theory might be. He, she, it, or they could be little green men or purple space squid or a race of intelligent supercomputers—or maybe, just maybe, an omnipotent God. Who knows? We’re all just innocently asking “scientific” questions here.

But away from the glare of media attention, this pose of scientific objectivity cracks. “ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic,” admitted board member Martin. The intelligent design proponents in Kansas ask: Why not let children in public schools hear arguments for intelligent design in biology classes? Schools could “teach the controversy.”

Biologists retort by asking, “So it’s OK then for high schools to teach astrology, phrenology, mesmerism, tarot card reading, crystal healing, astral projection and water witching, too?”

Personally, I’m a Tiplerite.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT:

ROME (Reuters) – A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

Fabrizio Quattrochi was unavailable for comment. However, Jeff Goldstein sees this as a “velvet insurgency.”

Basically, where people warn about theocracy in the United States, we’re seeing what amounts to a trial for blasphemy in Italy.

Tom Wolfe once said that Fascism is forever descending on the United States, but that somehow it always lands on Europe. Perhaps the same is true with theocracy?

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PASSAGE from the filibuster-compromise memo:

We believe that, under Article II, Section 2, of the United States Constitution, the word “Advice” speaks to consultation between the Senate and the President with regard to the use of the President’s power to make nominations. We encourage the Executive branch of government to consult with members of the Senate, both Democratic and Republican, prior to submitting a judicial nomination to the Senate for consideration.

I suppose that I should see this as a sort of vindication, since I recommended just that approach in an article entitled Taking Advice Seriously: An Immodest Proposal for Reforming the Confirmation Process, published in the Southern California Law Review some years back, though I suspect that they’re not willing to go quite as far as I suggested..

I guess that makes me a member of the Coalition of the Chillin’.

IN THE MAIL: An advance copy of John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars. It looks quite good, but it’s not the sequel to Old Man’s War. Scalzi’s just started writing that one.

UPDATE: Reader Randal Carden notes something I had missed: Scalzi has made Agent to the Stars available for free online. Cool.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has more on Uzbekistan. Karimov is cozying up to China, whose leaders are understandably disturbed by the spread of democracy in the region, and untroubled by Karimov’s Tiananmen-like massacre.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999: Reader Clark Ghitis sends this from the WSJ (subscription only):

The number of millionaires in the U.S. increased to a record last year, boosted by gains in stocks and global financial markets, according to two new studies.

The number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more rose 21% in 2004, according to a survey released yesterday by Spectrem Group, a wealth-research firm in Chicago. It is the largest increase since 1998, according to the study, which was based on data from more than 450 qualified respondents. There now are 7.5 million millionaire households in the U.S., breaking the record set in 1999 of 7.1 million. The study excluded the value of primary residences, but included second homes and other real estate.

The InstaPundit household isn’t among those new millionaires, though.

UPDATE: No, sadly, we’re not among those old millionaires, either.

THIS IS COOL:

The American chestnut, prized for its timber and its crop of glossy dark nuts, once dominated Eastern forests from Maine to Georgia. The graceful trees were virtually wiped out by blight starting at the turn of the 20th century.

That loss, Case said, “was the greatest environmental disaster in the Western Hemisphere since the Ice Age.”

Now, after years of breeding, cloning and crossbreeding, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is ready to reintroduce disease-resistant chestnuts to Eastern forests next year.

Maybe we’ll get the elms back, too.

UPDATE: Reader Greg Hlatky sends this link to elm-restoration efforts.

ZARQAWI, AL QAEDA, AND SADDAM: Austin Bay has some observations.

HOWARD FINEMAN SUGGESTS — perhaps a bit hopefully — that the filibuster compromise represents a political turning point:

A generation ago, voters turned against the Democrats for the excesses of their welfare-state, big-government thinking. Washington WASN’T the answer to everything.

But, voters may conclude, the Bible isn’t either. They could turn against the GOP if they think the party is sacrificing the American tradition of pragmatism and respect for scientific progress – on, say, stem-cell research – in favor of religious fundamentalism, however sincere. Take a look at some of the key supporters of stem-cell research: Nancy Reagan, to name one – not to mention corporate executives who don’t want to see research money and energy drift away to other countries. Two religions are in collision, one of them secular and scientific, the other Biblical.

I’ve been warning of this for a while, and I think it bears repeating: Americans, for the most part, don’t share in the reflexive hostility to religion found in the upper reaches of journalism and the academy. On the other hand, Americans don’t like self-righteous busybodies — whether of the PC left or the religious right — telling them how to live, either.

There’s a relatively small group — under 20% of the electorate, I’d guess — that would really like to recast American society under far more religiously determined lines. That’s enough to steer the Republican party to disaster, as a similar group has done for the Democrats, but not enough to win elections much. The Democrats’ problem, of course, is that they’re even more dominated by their fringe than the Republicans, and the fact that the media establishment tends to share those views will make it harder for them to extricate themselves from this fix.

FUTURES MARKETS ELICIT INSIDER INFORMATION: I mentioned earlier that London bookmakers are giving odds on which character will be killed off in the next Harry Potter book. Now — spoiler alert — it seems that this has caused information to leak out. Tom Maguire has more, and notes that this supports the “futures on terror” idea.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF:

I’ve got a modest proposal to Ted Koppel and “Nightline”: why don’t you read one day the names and show the pictures of the 170,000 or so American servicemen and women stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan who every day are working their hardest to ensure that democracy takes root, terrorists are defeated, and these two countries have a chance to build a better future for their people. That might convince a cynic such as myself that you really care for the troops generally, and not just only when they can be cynically used to embarrass the Bush Administration.

It would take more than that to convince me, but this would be a start.

Koppel might look here for some ideas, too. But not here, unless he wants to play to his strengths . . . .

THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE IN BOLIVIA: I blame Hugo Chavez.

PRODUCT DESIGN MEETS VERSION FATIGUE: My TechCentralStation column for tomorrow addresses this subject — but for you, as InstaPundit Premium^TM subscribers (the only kind there are), it’s available now!

BLOG ENTRY solves murder.

DEMOCRACY, WHISKEY — can “sexy” be far behind?

EASONGATE II CONTINUES, with this observation:

At the Communications Workers of America, Candice Johnson said she could not provide any evidence for Foley’s revival of the Eason Jordan charges. Linda Foley refused requests for an interview.

Retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, a Fox News military consultant, was “frankly astonished.”

“It may be legitimate to investigate whether there may or may not have been an incident in which U.S. troops have targeted journalists, but there is no question at this point that major media figures are targeting the men and women of the United States military in Iraq, repeatedly and with no evidence,” he said.

Ouch.

MICHAEL TOTTEN says the Washington Post is misreporting on Lebanon.

A PARTY-VOTE ANALYSIS of the House stem-cell research vote.

BILL MAHER CAN RELAX, because Rob Smith is defending him against charges of treason.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF REVOLUTIONS is up.

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY ROUNDUP OF BIAS in media reporting on guns is up.

WHILE I’M WISHING GAS GANGRENE ON ZARQAWI, I’m about ready to wish it on the bastards from “The Bullseye Network” whose miserable adware is on my daughter’s computer.

UPDATE: Ran the MS antispyware beta and seem to have gotten rid of it, along with a bunch of other crap — but I had to do manual surgery before I could even access the Internet to download the program from MS. (I’ve used AdAware for this before, but wanted to give the MS version a try; seemed fine.)

Kids’ sites seem to be especially infested with this crap, which is particularly unforgivable.

UPDATE: Yep, reader Ben Cooper sends a link to this report confirming my suspicion that even reputable kids’ sites are adware nightmares:

Mainstream children’s Web sites host a glut of adware, a security firm said this week, proof that spyware makers are targeting kids in an attempt to slip by parents and get their software onto home computers.
Over a three-month period, said Kraig Lane, a group product manager in Symantec’s consumer division, his lab took new PCs out of the box, connected them to the Internet without monkeying with any of the default settings in Windows XP SP2, then surfed well-known sites in several categories, ranging from kids and sports to news and shopping.

“Our testers went to name-brand Web sites, and spent 30 minutes to an hour reading or interacting with sites,” said Lane. Testers tried to emulate real-world browser by reading articles, interacting with the site’s features, but not explicitly looking to accumulate files by downloading. “Then they ran spyware detection software and counted up what kind of security risks and how many files had been installed on the machines,” Lane said.

Children were the biggest target for spyware makers, by far. The trip to several kids’ sites installed a whopping 359 pieces of adware on Symantec’s PCs, five times more than the nearest category rival, travel. Popup ads proliferated on the machines after that, making them virtually unusable.

Message to the folks at NeoPets: Clean up your act.

AUSTIN BAY POINTS TO a useful article on security in Iraq.