I WISH THERE WERE SOME WAY TO DO THIS VIA PAYPAL:

A hostage held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one. . . . “I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one.”

(Via Tim Blair, who is appalled at the insensitivity involved.)

JOE GANDELMAN NOTES that some recent polls show Republicans losing independent voters in droves. I suppose I should claim vindication. Heck, even folks at NRO are complaining about the “puritanical zeal” of the GOP Congress.

Fortunately for Karl Rove, Democrats are riding to the rescue, as usual.

THIS IS UPSETTING:

China is building its military forces faster than U.S. intelligence and military analysts expected, prompting fears that Beijing will attack Taiwan in the next two years, according to Pentagon officials.

Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone by floating a rumor that Taiwan is acquiring nuclear weapons from North Korea . . . .

THE POLISH PLUMBER STRIKES BACK:

“I suggest that he ask the French why the heck for so many years they encouraged Poles to build capitalism when as it turns out they are Communists themselves,” Mr. Walesa, an electrician by trade, said in an interview published Friday in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. He added, “Piotr probably won’t have the chance to say this, so he should at least publicize Poland well in Paris.”

Read the whole thing.

THE MISSING LINK: “The WaPo has a front page profile on Karl Rove. Karl’s controversy is featured, but Sen. Durbin is not (even though he was mentioned in Karl’s speech).”

Plus, an attempt at an NYT Wikitorial!

EMILY BAZELON AND DAVID NEWMAN have a roundup of potential Supreme Court candidates that’s worth reading, though it unaccountably omits Eugene Volokh and Alex Kozinski.

BURNING SQUIRREL has been photoblogging from the Palo Alto anarchists’ march. Best line: “The serious message has a way of getting lost when stuffed movie collectibles are involved.”

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF: “By the way, you have to be worried when a guy with too much mascara and a snake wrapped around his neck has a keener grasp of basic new millennium geopolitics than so many leading lights of the Democratic Party.”

A SIX-MONTH POST-TSUNAMI ROUNDUP: Things are going about as you’d expect.

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING: I don’t get many modeling jobs, so I was happy to pose in a t-shirt for ThoseShirts.com. But I’ve been amply repaid, as something about that photo just keeps driving people to make utter fools of themselves. Though perhaps that’s not such a great feat, considering . . . .

In a somewhat-related item, here’s a collection of Robert Heinlein quotes, via Bill Quick.

UPDATE: The Insta-Wife followed the link to Wolcott’s post and observes that he completely misunderstands the point of her film. True, but probably not as much as he would if he had actually seen it . . .

At any rate, nothing says more about the decline of the old media establishment than seeing someone like Wolcott — once, whether merited or not, a man of some consequence — reduced to snarking (repeatedly!) at internet t-shirt ads in a desperate bid for attention. Just because Gaia listens to you, James, doesn’t mean that the rest of us do.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A Heinlein fan makes the rubble bounce.

BILL QUICK has a cooking thread. I’m of the do-most-everything-with-a-chef’s-knife school myself, though a good fillet knife can come in very handy.

GORDON SMITH on the politics of faculty hiring.

THE KELO DISCUSSION over at SCOTUSblog continues, with the latest post coming from Bob Ellickson, who observes: “In short, the Institute for Justice should be delighted that popular opinion has moved so sharply its way. I actually worry that political opposition to eminent domain may go too far, as it has in Japan, where completion of the second runway at Tokyo’s Narita Airport has proved to be impossible.”

I think we’re a long way from that. Most everyone I’ve heard opine on Kelo thinks that takings for public works are fine; the opposition is to taking for the sort of “economic development” project that Ellickson agrees tends to be a boondoggle. The danger, however, is that the public may grow sufficiently disgusted with the boondoggles that it stops making that sort of distinction. I don’t think we’re close to that situation, either, but I don’t think this decision is helping.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has been asking candidates about Kelo and is posting their responses.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF CORDITE IS UP!

MORE KELO FOLLOWUP:

NEW LONDON, Conn. – When a divided Supreme Court broadened the government’s right to seize private property this past week, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor painted a grim portrait of what she saw coming.

She said wealthy investors and city leaders had been given the power to run people from their homes to make way for new development. The line between public and private property has been blurred, O’Connor said in her dissent, and no home is safe.

While municipal leaders say O’Connor’s view is unrealistic, people who have fought eminent domain say it’s already here.

Read the whole thing.

D.C. JOURNALISTS pick their favorite political blogs.

STRATEGYPAGE ON TROOP RETENTION:

The U.S. Army, scrambling to maintain strength, are now making it easier for reservists to move over to the regular army. This is partly the result of commanders noticing that a lot of reservists are quite enthusiastic about being on active duty, and many are eager to stay on active duty. But by law, unless Congress declares a general mobilization, most reservists cannot be kept on active duty much longer. The maximum time a reservist can be on active duty for the current “emergency” is 24 months. The army isn’t saying how many additional regular army troops it is going to pick up with this program, but it will probably be several thousand, and maybe much more. An important aspect of this is that these troops have a lot of experience, making them much more valuable than newly trained recruits.

It’s interesting that retention seems to be going much better than recruitment. Perhaps the view of what’s going on that the troops get in the field is more positive than the view that potential recruits get from the media.

GENOCIDE IN ZIMBABWE: Normblog has a report on what the Archbishop of Bulawayo is saying.

BRAD RUBENSTEIN is Roomba-blogging. I hope his experience is better than mine.

ACCORDING TO THE INSTA-DAUGHTER AND INSTA-NIECE, who watched it on DVD last night, this is the best movie ever made.