IAN HAMET invites readers to try their hand at constitutional interpretation. Free speech is involved.

My contribution: Obviously, the part about a ” well regulated Intelligentsia” only refers to state-paid academics such as myself, and it would be absurd to read this provision as extending the right to own and read books to the Great Unwashed. That way lies madness.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg writes that he thought he and Bill O’Reilly had already solved this problem.

WATCH OUT, GEARBOX! There’s a new auto-blogging carnival, The Carnival of Cars, and the first installment is now online.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE RECIPES is up, over at Boudicca’s Voice.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has an Uzbekistan update, with video.

YEAH, BLOGGING’S BEEN LIGHT TODAY: Hung out with the Insta-Wife, and saw my nephew Balram, who’s visiting for a week or so.

Back later.

MICKEY KAUS is fact-checking Rush Limbaugh, with an assist from Tom Maguire.

DEFENSETECH looks at military base closings and their impact on defense research.

THIS EFFORT BY HOUSE REPUBLICAN JOHN MCHUGH to get women out of combat zones strikes me as a bad idea. Certainly, judging by this after-action report, women are doing pretty well in Iraq.

AMIT VARMA IS EXPANDING UPON some comments he made on CNBC.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF explains underreported good news from Iraq — in The New York Times.

I wonder if certain underinformed Australian broadcasters have seen it?

ISLAMIC BIOLOGICAL WARFARE:

It turns out there are there are Islamic “Weapons of Mass Destruction” after all. In particular, biological weapons. But these mass killers have been developed within Islamic nations, and are doing most of their damage there. The war on terror has taken many American doctors to Islamic nations, and they have discovered a heretofore hidden AIDS epidemic. . . .

But it’s not just AIDS. In Nigeria, faith based paranoia on the part of Islamic clergy, and politicians, caused a polio epidemic, which is now spreading to other Islamic nations. The UN has been trying for years to wipe out polio (which has been eliminated in most Western nations). In the last few years, UN medical resources were massing to wipe polio out in one of the last places where it still thrives; northern Nigeria. But some local Islamic clergy got the idea that these foreigners and their medicine (polio vaccine) were actually out to poison young Moslem females and make them sterile. Yeah, it’s nuts, but it went over big in northern Nigeria and stopped the polio eradication program cold.

Can shooting yourself in the foot be a biological weapon? Metaphorically, anyway.

ED CONE: “I feel a little sorry for George Lucas, who can’t seem to help making joyless boring movies and has to know that the LOTR cycle flushed him from the pantheon by demonstrating the superiority of Tolkien as a fantasy writer and Jackson as a fantasy filmmaker.”

I think that’s a bit harsh; Lucas has made some great films. It remains to be seen whether this new effort will be one of them. Here is some more evidence that it won’t be.

TODAY IS THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia.

UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has more on the bombing and its context.

VIOLENCE IN UZBEKISTAN: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Related post here.

JOHN HAWKINS is Fisking Cal Thomas. IowaVoice adds: “I don’t see what the paranoia is all about here. It’s a bit early for the MSM to be circling the wagons.”

MOXIE: “It seems there is no reason for me to blog anymore. Not only is Arianna taking over the blogosphere, but she also has a gay houseboy named Andrew.”

DAVID BOAZ: “If conservatives don’t want federalism any more, will liberals pick up the banner?”

There does seem to be a lot of fair-weather federalism on the right these days.

SUGGESTIONS SOLICITED: I’m trying to put together a generic blog-reporting kit, kind of like what I used to shoot the blog video and photos at BlogNashville. (Yes, that was in the nature of an experiment, as well as an effort to encourage others). But though my setup works pretty well, it’s probably not the best, and I’d welcome any suggestions. This would be for a package that could be sent to bloggers, often outside the United States, to facilitate reporting, so it should be rugged, (comparatively) cheap, and easy to use.

I use a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop, which I like a lot. The one I use is overkill for blog-journalism: It has the DVD-writer, for example. But the downside is that it has an SD slot only. Not a big deal — I just used a USB cable to hook up my camera — but more options would be better. Key laptop features: Decent display (so that when you edit photos or video you can see what you’re doing), long battery life, lots of I/O options, reasonably light, cheap and rugged.

For the stills and video I used this cheap Sony, which did an excellent job with video and — very important when you’re interviewing people — audio. (A filmmaker even emailed to ask what external mike I used. None: Just the matchhead-sized built-in one. But the sound was clear despite background noise). Still, while I’m quite happy with it, is there anything better?

Software: I edited those photos with MicroGrafx Picture Publisher 7, an obsolete and only-sort-of-available program. It’s not Photoshop, but it’s good enough, and it’s easy and fast. I can open it and edit, size, sharpen and save a photo in not much more time than it takes for Photoshop to load, or so it seems. Is there something similar that’s still available? Cheap, fast, easy, and good enough. (I haven’t used GIMP, but I hear it’s not terribly user-friendly.) The Dell came with a trial version of Paint Shop Pro 8, which seems to be an updated-but-not-improved version of the MicroGrafx program.

I edited the video with Windows Movie Maker 2. Advantage: It’s easy, and it’s free. Disadvantage: Saves only in WMV. (I cheated and resaved the Quicktime versions with Vegas Video). Is there a good, easy, and cheap video editor that saves in multiple formats? One that nontechnical people (or at least those less geeky than me) would find friendly? I’m thinking maybe SONY Vegas Movie Studio, which I think is basically the Vegas Video Factory software from Sonic Foundry, which I’ve used and which is OK. (Alternatively, of course, someone else could do the format conversion later). Other suggestions?

Aside from these, what else should be in a package like this, given the constraints of toughness, reasonable cost, and ease of use? Email me if you’ve got any ideas.

UPDATE: Adam Keiper emails with suggestions from his experiment:

Other things worth including in the kit, space permitting:

– extra batteries and an extra flash card for the camera;
– headphones, if you’re doing video-editing while an event is going on live;
– and, in case lots if people want to plug in their laptops and there aren’t many outlets, it doesn’t hurt to have a small power strip.

Good points.

I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH IN THE BLOGOSPHERE disturbing . . . .

A FEDERAL JUDGE has struck down Nebraska’s ban on same-sex marriages. Eugene Volokh has some thoughts.

JOHN COLE WRITES that the Bolton nomination is no big deal:

In six months this will not even be an issue other than in hysterical MoveOn.Org fund-raising e-mails. I have complete faith in the capacity of the United Nations to chew up and spit out whoever we send there.

Read the whole thing.

THE CARNIVAL OF TOMORROW is a blog-carnival of futurism-related posts.

CHRIS NOLAN:

Here’s something that’s been bothering me for months now. So I decided to keep track.

The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that styles itself as one of the nation’s more thoughtful periodicals, has steadfastly avoided running a major feature by a woman writer since the beginning of the year. I’m not joking. And I’m not over-reacting. I have the past four months – that’s the past six months of editorial planning, a half-year, a substantial amount of time – sitting on my desk. I saved them for just this reason.

None of the magazine printed since mid-December carry any substantial written, by-lined contributions by women. What does appear is brief, usually in the back-of-the book critic’s section or in “The Agenda” at the front. And to add insult to injury, the magazine’s one featured female writer, Sandra Tsing Loh, a self-styled celebrity Mom who you may know from NPR, has dwelled for two months in a row on her kids, on her kids’ schools and books about women like her. What’s worse, the headline on this month’s piece makes a joke about schools and “breast-milk-curdling.” Dudes, when your kids are ready for school, most of them have stopped breast feeding.

One hopes.

VERONICA KHOKHLOVA contrasts two writers.

COMMENTS ON THE EVOLUTION OF THE BLOGOSPHERE, from Peter Hannaford in The American Spectator.

Comments on Hannaford — with an emphasis on the “evolutionary” part — from Sissy Willis, who also has more here.