IN NASHVILLE NOW, blogging from the parking lot of the studio where I’m going to do Kudlow & Company along with some mystery guests later, before heading over to the BlogNashville conference — it’ll be on at about 5:40 Eastern. It was an odd drive; the blog documentary producers put a producer in the back seat of the RX-8 (at 5’2″ she fit just fine) and a cameraman in the passenger seat and interviewed me while I drove, with the director following in their truck and asking questions via the producer over a wireless intercom.

Kind of like William Gibson, except that nobody made him drive while he answered questions. . . .

Still no takers on the Lileks documentary idea, though.

UPDATE: Video of the Kudlow appearance here.

RYAN SAGER notes that Democrats are catching on to the problems with campaign finance “reform:”

Three years after the passage of McCain-Feingold (a.k.a. the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. the End of Free Speech As We Know It), a smattering of Democrats and liberal activists are slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to let the government decide who can and cannot engage in political speech.

After all, what would prevent incumbents in Congress from passing laws to secure their jobs by making it harder for their opponents to criticize them? And what would prevent a political party — holding, say, power in both houses of Congress and the White House — from using election laws to try to smother the opposition?

Right: Nothing.

Better late than never, I guess.

PEAKTALK REMEMBERS the third anniversary of Pim Fortuyn’s murder.

THE D.C. CIRCUIT HAS REJECTED THE BROADCAST FLAG. Ernest Miller — who’s been on a roll lately — has the story covered.

MICHAEL TOTTEN is back from Lebanon and, by popular demand, has posted a gallery of Lebanese protest babes:

A few words, though, before we begin. If any of you think only the Christian women of Lebanon walk around without their own portable tents, forget that. It’s isn’t even close to true. My hotel was on the Muslim side of Beirut and I saw almost as many modern-looking women on that side of the city as I saw in the Christian areas. Even Hezbollah doesn’t mandate the veil or the hijab.

Read the whole thing.

JIM LINDGREN: “I have been struck by the difference in treatment accorded Martha Stewart and the runaway bride, Jennifer Wilbanks.”

YES, BLOGGING HAS BEEN LIGHT, but I was working with the Insta-Wife on a video project (no, not one of hers — we were interviewed for a blog documentary).

Back tomorrow — though I’ll be travelling to the BlogNashville conference in the afternoon. More blogging from there, though.

READER BRAUN TACON EMAILS:

The world (English speaking world at least) has spoken:

John Howard

George Bush

Tony Blair

Seems to me those that oppose Iraq are in the clear minority, at least on the one particular topic of the war in Iraq.

What’s more, Meryl Yourish emails to note that George Galloway lost to war-supporter Oona King. I wouldn’t make too much of this, but you can bet that had these elections gone the other way, people would be making a lot of that.

[LATER: I think that Meryl is wrong about this — at least The Scotsman says Galloway is set to win it, and this report shows a Galloway victory. LATER STILL: Iain Murray says Yourish is wrong.]

Meanwhile, Jim Bennett emails:

What the media just isn’t picking up on is that this election is between the party that invaded Iraq because it wanted to enforce international order, versus the party that wanted to invade Iraq because Saddam needed to be taken out. Where else is that the case? The openly anti-war party is running a distant third — anywhere else, they’d be the govenment or the main opposition.

That’s not how it’s being reported, of course. There’s loads of electionblogging at England’s Sword. But Jim Geraghty is less sanguine on Blair’s account:

Summary at this hour: Labour wins majority, but greatly reduced. Blair’s political legacy is tarnished; the handover to Gordon Brown is just a matter of time. The Tories look set to have a surprisingly good night. And while the Liberal Democrats may do better than the exit poll, they may have increased their vote where they need it least (safe Conservative or Labour seats).

Stay tuned. I don’t know what to think — I like Blair for his support on the war, but not much else. The Tories, on the other hand, seem rather lame.

UPDATE: Bennett’s comment notwithstanding, it looks like bad news for Blair, and I suppose that war was part of the reason — though I wonder if it would have been different if it hadn’t been for the constant, and frequently dishonest, BBC coverage. But reader Hale Adams observes:

Blair’s reduced majority is probably due to: 1) the fact that his party’s been in power for eight years now, which is a pretty long run by modern standards (since, say, 1950); and 2) the fact that Labor’s majority was so lopsided at the start in 1997 as to constitute an elective dictatorship– even the loonier stuff Labor wanted could get through Parliament . . . . Both factors increase voter dissatisfaction because people get tired of governments (or Administrations, in American parlance) that have been around since “forever”, and because Labor has indeed passed some truly goofy laws in what is best described as a fit of absent-mindedness due to its huge majority.

If I were British, I’d be tempted to vote against Blair in spite of the war, based on other things. As an American, I of course would like to see him do well for diplomatic reasons. I guess there were a lot more British than American voters in this election . . . .

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Carpeting ≠ religion.”

Anti-carpetist bigot!

ORIN KERR TESTIFIED BEFORE CONGRESS on the Patriot Act today, and has posted some afterthoughts here.

AUSTIN BAY delivers a brutal Fisking to a Washington Post piece on war and history by Eugene Robinson. “Here’s the grand history Eugene Robinson et al are missing. It’s why I pity them.”

Better still, let us pity them not at all.

EXIT POLLS show a Blair victory, though with a reduced margin.

Stay tuned to see if the coverage matches my prediction.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste notes that my prediction is already bearing out. Can I call ’em, or what.

I’LL GIVE UP WORDPERFECT when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive. Randy Barnett seems to agree.

GEORGE WILL is offering much the same advice to the Republicans that I offered a while back. And it remains good advice.

BRIAN NOGGLE notes that there were surveillance cameras outside the British Consulate, but that they don’t seem to have helped much.

PRESSURE ON SYRIA MAY BE WORKING:

Syrian authorities have detained 137 Saudis after they attempted to cross into Iraq from Syria to take part in the anti-US insurgency there, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The would-be infiltrators are held in various Syrian prisons, said Al-Watan, which published the names of 17 of the detainees.

Via USS Neverdock, which asks: “Now, when is Bush going to start getting tough with the Saudis?”

IS THE SOLOMON AMENDMENT CONSTITUTIONAL? Lawprof Marci Hamilton says that it is, and adds:

While we’re being real, let’s face this reality: This suit is all about the will to power of political majorities in the law schools. They don’t like the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – and therefore, they don’t like the Solomon Amendment (because God forbid that they should sacrifice free federal money in order to honor their principles).

Read the whole thing.

ARE BLOGS PART OF A GREAT HIDDEN TECH BOOM? (“If all that sounds nuts — I mean, we’re talking about blogs here — you weren’t around for the early meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds and Kos have a lot more going for them than those nerds clutching homemade motherboards in 1976.”)

There’s certainly some sort of a boom going on.

UPDATE: More evidence of a boom:

U.S. Internet advertising surged 33 percent in 2004 to a record $9.6 billion, surpassing levels seen during the early Web boom, and will grow at a similar rate in 2005, according to data released on Thursday.

(Via Ed Driscoll, who has further thoughts.)

UPDATE: Still more evidence that there’s something going on: “Almost two out of three advertisers want to spend money on blogs.”

IN THE MAIL: John Ringo’s Into the Looking Glass, yet another science fiction story involving demons, etc., explained by quantum-mechanical stuff, kind of like Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives. I was just thinking that I had an original thought about the return of science fiction to a Lovecraftian vibe when I realized that it was already explained by the essay appended to Stross’s book, in which Stross compares the Cold War spy thriller to Lovecraft’s work. We’re in another shadow war at the moment, so perhaps that explains what’s starting to look like a trend.

WE’RE AT WAR AGAINST TERRORISTS, and the Oklahoma City bombing case is still unimpressive (“FBI agents searched the Herington home on March 31. Officials said agents found blasting caps and other explosive materials, apparently related to the 1995 attack, buried in a crawl space that hadn’t been checked earlier.” Good work guys — missing explosives for ten years that had been hidden in a house they had already searched!). This makes me wonder if the agents looking for Al Qaeda sleeper cells might not need some additional resources — and some remedial education. But instead, the Justice Department is devoting additional resources to stepping up obscenity prosecutions?

Someone tell Gonzales that there’s a war on.

MAX BOOT:

How can you tell if a political party is brain-dead? Easy. It spends an entire campaign denouncing the incumbent as a smarmy, good-for-nothing liar, rather than outlining its own agenda. The Republicans tried it against Bill Clinton in 1996, the Democrats tried it against George W. Bush in 2004, and now in Britain the Conservatives are trying it, with equal lack of success, against Tony Blair.

Such a tactic is beguiling because, to True Believers, the other side’s triumphs are never on the up and up; they must be the result of hoodwinking the hapless electorate. The problem with this approach was pointed out to me by a political strategist last week: “Voters think all politicians are liars. So telling them that someone is a particularly effective liar doesn’t work.”

It especially doesn’t work for the Tories because they’re accusing Prime Minister Blair of duplicity on an issue about which they actually agree with him. Conservative leader Michael Howard says he would have supported the invasion of Iraq even without weapons of mass destruction — the subject of Blair’s supposed dissembling. By nevertheless making the L-word the centerpiece of today’s election, Howard comes off as opportunistic and unprincipled.

Just as Kerry did, when he tried the same approach.

BOMBS EXPLODE AT THE UK CONSULATE IN NEW YORK CITY: A rather lame effort to affect the British elections, I imagine. Emphasis on the lame part: “After piecing together the shrapnel, police determined the devices were toy grenades that had been filled with gunpowder.” As noted below, Al Qaeda isn’t exactly flourishing these days.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I would note that today is the anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands as well.” Good point, and there have been bombings to mark that anniversary in the past — though if this is one of those, it merely underscores that the IRA isn’t exactly flourishing, either.

ARTIFICIAL RETINAS: Bring it on.

IS GOOGLE LEANING LEFT? This is troubling, if true; Google, of course, is entitled to have its own politics, but to the extent that it does it may undermine the trust that a search engine requires.

OUR “FRIENDS” THE SAUDIS: Fighting Al Qaeda by torturing Christians.