PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s an NPR story on PorkBusters and the Bozeman, Montana move to reject pork in favor of Katrina relief.

I’LL BE ON PUNDIT REVIEW RADIO shortly.

THE NEW YORK TIMES’ REPORTING on New Orleans gun confiscation apparently conflicts with sworn testimony by city officials, which raises some questions.

DESTINED TO BE A TAGLINE: “I don’t usually understand Jeff Goldstein.”

UPDATE: But give him credit for the degree of difficulty he faces!

EVEN? Odd.

BLOWING IT ON BOLIVIA: Guess who?

UPDATE: Heh.

IT’S TIME FOR The Carnival of the Cats!

THE MAIN QUAD is a site that rounds up academic bloggers, both faculty and student.

NOW THAT’S PORKBUSTING: Over at Chicagoboyz, a revised federal budget that yields a $347.47 billion surplus.

MARK STEYN: “American politics seems to have dwindled down to a choice between a big government party and a big permanently-out-of-government party. . . . Big-time Republicans tell me Bush’s profligacy is doing a great job of neutralizing the Dem advantage in the spending-is-caring stakes. This may have been true initially — in the same sense as undercover cops neutralize a massive heroin-smuggling operation by infiltrating it. But, if they’re still running the heroin operation five years later, it looks less like neutralization and more like a change of management.”

SPACE ELEVATOR UPDATE: Arthur C. Clarke weighs in, in an oped in The Times:

In 1969, the giant multistage rocket, discarded piecemeal after a single mission, was the only way of doing the job. That the job should be done was a political decision, made by a handful of men. (I have only recently learnt that Wernher von Braun used my The Exploration of Space (1952) to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.) As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon — like the South Pole — was reached half a century ahead of time.

If Nasa resumes lunar missions by 2018, that timing would be just about right: it will be only a year short of the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step”. But banking on solid rocket boosters to escape from Earth, as being planned, will not represent a big technological advance over the Apollo missions. Even if the spacecraft are reusable, it will still cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch every kilogram into space. I think the rocket has as much future in space as dog sleds in serious Antarctic exploration. Of course, it is the only thing we have at the moment, so we must make the best use of it.

But I would urge Nasa to keep investing at least a small proportion of its substantial budget in supporting the research and development of alternatives to rockets. There is at least one idea that may ultimately make space transport cheap and affordable to ordinary people: the space elevator. . . .

As its most enthusiastic promoter, I am often asked when I think the first space elevator might be built. My answer has always been: about 50 years after everyone has stopped laughing. Maybe I should now revise it to 25 years.

Well, the laughter has pretty much stopped . . . .

ED MCNAMARA is doing more photoblogging from the pro-troops counterprotest in Washington today.

UPDATE: McNamara’s subjects make an interesting contrast to these folks. And these folks.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more photoblogging here.

MORE: David Adesnik — who was, unlike me, actually there — offers a comparison of styles between protesters and counterprotesters, though it comes out about the same in the end. I don’t understand, though, why calling members of the Workers’ World Party “communists” counts as pejorative, rather than descriptive.

However, he also makes this observation:

The Democratic Party, both in terms of official organizations and major politicians, stayed away from yesterday’s protests like the plague.

Combine that with the DailyKos criticism of the antiwar protesters, and I might almost conclude that there’s hope for the Democratic Party yet.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE offers an illustrated response to the Daily Kos’s list of protest do’s and don’ts.

MEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION: Missing in action?

135 women are graduating from college for every 100 men. The U.S. Department of Education projects that the gap will grow in coming years. Some sobering facts: The unemployment rate for men between the ages of 20 and 24 is 10.1%, or twice the national average. There are almost as many men in jail, on probation, and on parole (5,000,000) as there are men in college (7,300,000). Men with college educations earn an average of $47,000 per year; those whose education ended at the high school diploma earn an average of $30,000. What’s happening to young men’s prospects in this country is devastating. . . .

The question of why there are so few women in the hard sciences draws impassioned debate, urgent calls for equity, and lots and lots of money. But the question of why young men are disappearing from campus is not even being widely asked.

I notice, walking around campus, that there are almost always many more women in view than men.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike. While I was posting the above, the Insta-Wife (who has finally reactivated her long-dormant blog) was posting this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some readers think we need congressional hearings, in which university presidents are called upon to explain the shortage of male students. Okay, but give Larry Summers a pass — he’s suffered enough!

Here are some more thoughts on why men are in short supply in college. Meanwhile, N.Z. Bear is going all Heisenberg on me.

If so, others have my pheromonal powers, because reader Tracie Hampton emails:

I just read your entry mentioning 135 female college graduates to every 100 male grads to my husband Earl. He replied, “Is that all?” Recently retired from the USMC, my husband is currently attending East Carolina University in Greenville, NC where he is majoring in math and physics. He reports that his math and science classes are 90% male. In a class of ten students, one or two are female. In his general education classes, it’s the exact opposite. His U.S. History class has 65 students, 60 of them female. He estimates that while walking around campus between classes, the ratio of female and male students seems to run about 80/20.

It’s not that bad at UT, but maybe the Force is just stronger in Earl. He’s a Marine, after all . . . .

And my alleged powers apparently don’t apply to blood donations.

MORE: More thoughts here, featuring an argument that men seek high-paying work that doesn’t require college. And Arnold Kling does some math.

ALGERIA: Radical Islamists have been largely shut down, but now Berber activists are getting more active.

THE COUNTER-TERROR BLOG REPORTS:

Only days after Al-Qaida announced the completion of its latest campaign of violence aimed at avenging alleged “massacres” of Sunni Muslims in Tel Afar by the U.S. and Iraqi government, there are growing indications that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al-Qaida acolytes may be facing the most serious political and operational challenges they have encountered since they first joined the anti-coalition insurgency in mid-2003. The deadly glut of suicide bombings that began on September 8 has undoubtedly caused destruction and chaos–but militants were neither able to undermine the anti-insurgent operation in Tel Afar nor deter Iraqi government efforts to formulate a constitution.

Read the whole thing, and note the Saudi angle.

A FRIST FINANCIAL SCANDAL?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is facing questions from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission about his sale of stock in his family’s hospital company one month before its price fell sharply.

How much does this mean? Beats me. Jonah Goldberg isn’t sure either:

I doubt Frist is so stupid as to do what some allege. But I see nothing wrong with the appropriate agencies investigating Frist’s blind-trust stock sale. If anybody sees a good argument why it shouldn’t be investigated, I’d be curious to take a look. But as far as I’m concerned, it sounds like the right thing to do in a fairly no-brainer way. If he did something wrong the investigation is obviously warranted. If he didn’t, the investigation should clear him. Exoneration is as important a function as conviction.

Ed Morrissey thinks Frist should step down until it’s settled, but Tigerhawk has stock price charts and says the charges against Frist are wrong.

Professor Bainbridge, meanwhile — who specializes in this area of law — has a lengthy and useful post on what’s going on.

Regardless of what happens with this case, it’s the second term of an Administration, so we’ll probably see a lot more of this sort of thing, real or bogus. That’s not all bad: I think that the coming years will be good ones for this book!

WARREN BEATTY AT A NURSES’ CONVENTION — and all he rips is Gov. Schwarzenegger? Boy, I guess people do change . . . .

GAYPATRIOT: “If Iraq is like Vietnam, how come the rallies keep getting smaller?”

UPDATE: Reader Aaron Pastula emails: “And is it me, or are the anti-antiwar protests getting larger? A perfunctory scan of the photo roundups seems to suggest it…”

I don’t know. There were some very large rallies in 2003, but not so many since. There seems to be a new wave of interest, though.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some protest photoblogging from San Francisco here and here.

And Big Media blogger Jay Fitzgerald writes that he’s embarrassed by the poor quality of the protest coverage he’s seen from the MSM.

MORE: An interesting discussion of numbers in GayPatriot’s comments, but I don’t think there’s any credible argument that they match prewar numbers. It’s also worth noting that no mainstream Democrats are associating with these protests. If there were really broad grassroots support for this stuff, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, etc. would all be out front. Instead, they’re keeping their (very substantial) distance.

COULD RITA RETURN TO THE GULF? Jeez, I hope not.

TOM MAGUIRE looks at blog wisdom, left and right.

Plus — John Tierney’s last shred of influence!

G.M. ROPER looks at reportage from Iraq, with an assist from Chris Muir.

UPDATE: More criticism of the BBC’s reporting, too. Plus an illustration of what you can learn via Google. As Ken Layne famously wrote some years ago, “It’s 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass. And you, like many in the Hate America movement, are no longer able to dress your wretched ‘reporting’ in fiction. We have computers. It is not difficult to Find You Out, dig?”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE:

Harvard University researchers have found that molecular markers indicating the presence of cancer in the body are readily detected in blood scanned by special arrays of silicon nanowires — even when these cancer markers constitute only one hundred-billionth of the protein present in a drop of blood. In addition to this exceptional accuracy and sensitivity, the minuscule devices also promise to pinpoint the exact type of cancer present with a speed not currently available to clinicians.

A paper describing the work will appear in October in the journal Nature Biotechnology and is now posted on the journal’s web site.

Bring it on.

FIND THE PORK: A Flash game by Sean Gleeson. What’s realistic is that, just like real legislation, the ultimate enemy is boredom — I got 18 in a row, then gave up.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN DECONSTRUCTS a story on the anti-war protests by Jennifer Kerr of the AP. “Perhaps it’s too much to ask that our media simply report on the story without taking sides.”

UPDATE: Read the comments, which note some changes in the article, perhaps in response to criticism.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More criticism for Kerr here, with the suggestion that she save her prose stylings for an opinion piece, rather than reporting. Though the difference gets harder to discern . . . .

MORE: More Kerr-analysis here.

MORE STILL: Read this, from a Marine in Iraq, though it’s not specifically about Kerr.

And there’s this. Heh.