WHO’S LOST FAITH IN PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS? Among others, professional journalists, apparently.

THOUGHTS ON POTTY-MOUTH POLITICS: There does seem to be a lot of that going around at the moment.

ROGER KIMBALL HAS MORE ON FLAG BURNING:

I dislike the spectacle of people burning the American flag as much as the next fascist, right-wing, pro-capitalist extremist (I summarize some of my recent fan mail). But Steyn is surely right that criminalizing the activity is cosmetic plaster, as ineffectual as it is incompatible with the principles of a free society. Are we so weak that such dissent is threatening as well as unattractive? If so, we are in worse shape than I had thought.

Indeed.

GATEWAY PUNDIT HAS A ROUNDUP AND VIDEO ON ZIMBABWE, where Robert Mugabe’s latest has left hundreds of thousands homeless.

CONTRARY TO BRIAN LEITER’S CLAIMS, I’m not behind this site. I’m not Juan Non-Volokh, either. I wonder, however, why Leiter is so obsessed with secret lives, and his false statements of fact, delivered with his habitual self-assurance, certainly don’t enhance his credibility on other subjects.

UPDATE: Leiter has apologized for his error, with his customary grace.

PHIL CARTER is going active duty. Send him your good wishes.

STEM CELL UPDATE: I should have mentioned this story the other day, but somehow forgot. Anyway, there looks to be more progress with adult stem cells, as opposed to the embryonic kind. Here’s a nice survey of the topic.

As I’ve noted before, this only eliminates one class of ethical objection to stem cell research, but it’s still important. It would certainly be good news for the Bush Administration, which is dreadfully out of step with public opinion on this topic. However, the article notes that adult stem cells can’t do everything, and I suspect that research with embryonic stem cells will be required in order to learn how to get more out of adult stem cells, though of course I could be wrong.

IN RESPONSE TO MY POST YESTERDAY, several readers suggest this movie as the best ever made. They may be right.

MARK STEYN WEIGHS IN against the flag-burning amendment. His reasons are worth reading.

SAVOR THE INDIAN BLOGOSPHERE: The latest Blog Mela is up!

IRS FILES COMPROMISED? TaxProf: “The potential security breach dwarfs those recently announced by ChoicePoint, Bank of America, Reed Elsevier, and others.”

HOW TO DEAL WITH MISTAKES: An excellent example from my local newspaper.

THOUGHTS ON THE POLITICAL LESSONS to be learned from Hank Hill.

CAN YOU MAKE BIG MONEY BY BLOGGING? Apparently so!

UPDATE: More here.

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.