SOME AIRLINES ARE ENGAGING IN OPEN PROFILING OF PASSENGERS, without even trying to hide it.

ADVICE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE, from Lorie Byrd.

GOOD NEWS: “South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-suk’s embarrassing ethical lapses have stalled his ambitious expansion plans in the United States and England, but leading scientists in both countries say stem cell research won’t be seriously disrupted by the scandal.” I still think the scandal is overblown anyway.

EXECUTIVE PAY AND GENERAL MOTORS: Some thoughts over at GlennReynolds.com.

DOES THIS MEAN IT’S A BUBBLE? OR THAT IT’S NOT A BUBBLE? New home sales hit record highs. My guess is that it’s a bubble, but my judgment in these matters doesn’t deserve much weight.

IN THE MAIL: Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre’s Spychips : How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. Bruce Sterling calls it “a masterpiece.”

Some people would probably like to see us all wearing these.

UPDATE: Tech reporter Hiawatha Bray emails:

I know and like Katherine Albrecht. I’ve covered her for years and think she’s often rather more paranoid than the facts justify. But in Spychips, she and McIntyre have done their homework and rely almost entirely on actual documents from the companies and trade organizations working on RFID chip applications. The book makes a very persuasive case that some of America’s biggest companies want to embed tracking technology into virtually everything we own, and then study our usage patterns 24 hours a day. It’s a truly creepy book and well worth reading.

Yeah, this is a topic that has attracted its share of paranoia. But sometimes the paranoids are right!

BAD REVIEWS FOR BUSH’S IMMIGRATION SPEECH: Neal Boortz: “There was nothing in his speech we haven’t heard before, and his new immigration policy is just as contradictory as the old one. . . . I’m sure representatives of Al-Qaeda are preparing to apply for their guest-worker permits as we speak.”

Michelle Malkin is unhappy, too. And Joe Gandelman has a roundup of reactions.

UPDATE: Bush is charged with rewriting history on the Reagan Amnesty.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Prawfsblawg weighs in: “Yet liberal principles require a drastic reduction of immigration controls. Foreigners flock to our shores because there is demand for their labor. The same principle that supports free trade of goods and services — the law of comparative advantages — applies with equal force to freedom of movement.”

Responses here and here.

JOE LIEBERMAN:

I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood–unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn. . . .

Here is an ironic finding I brought back from Iraq. While U.S. public opinion polls show serious declines in support for the war and increasing pessimism about how it will end, polls conducted by Iraqis for Iraqi universities show increasing optimism. Two-thirds say they are better off than they were under Saddam, and a resounding 82% are confident their lives in Iraq will be better a year from now than they are today. What a colossal mistake it would be for America’s bipartisan political leadership to choose this moment in history to lose its will and, in the famous phrase, to seize defeat from the jaws of the coming victory.

A colossal mistake, but one that quite a few seem ready to make, if allowed.

IN TODAY’S WALL STREET JOURNAL (free link) a look at John Bolton at the U.N.:

What has confounded John Bolton’s abundant detractors, both American and foreign, is how little he has lived up to their caricature of him as the fire-breathing, unilateralist, neo-conservative pit bull during his first four months as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. . . .

Some call what the U.S. is trying to achieve — with significant support from other countries, notably Japan — the GE-ization of the U.N., that is, introducing the modern management mechanisms of global companies. Together the U.S. and Japan provide more than 40% of U.N. funds (the U.S. 22% and Japan 19%). Among the leading opponents are Pakistan, Egypt and India.

Shockingly, much of the opposition appears to revolve around patronage, perks and pork.

CLIVE DAVIS looks at changing media attitudes toward Kyoto.

HMM. RETAIL SALES DOLLARS weren’t as good as hoped over the weekend due to heavy discounts, but online sales are up. Are we seeing a shift to shopping online? Certainly in my household, but we’re probably not typical

MICKEY KAUS offers lessons for the New York Times from Cable TV.

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION to ask those seeking office in 2006 and 2008.

BUSH AND BOMBING: A shocking revelation.

LOOKING FOR BOOKS? Lots of lists at the Brothers Judd site.

G.M. ROPER is taking submissions for a blog carnival on German-American relations.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ offers good advice to the Congressional Republicans: “Get clean or meet your electoral doom, guys. I wouldn’t care so much (about Republicans losing–taking bribes and lying about it we can all hate) if it weren’t ideas that are ultimately the casualties.”

I’d like to see more ideas and less bribery, please. I have to agree with Ralph Peters’ rather limited case for the GOP: “There’s plenty I don’t like about the Bush administration. Its domestic policies disgust me, and the Bushies got plenty wrong in Iraq. But at least they’ll fight.” They’ve been better than the Democrats on the war, all right. But the Republicans have managed to disappoint even my quite low expectations on many other fronts.

UPDATE: Bill Quick is unhappy, too, but draws a lesson.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Galbraith offers this take on today’s political situation:

The current political situation often reminds me of an old saying by Casey Stengel about how to successfully manage a baseball team.

“The key to managing is keeping the 50% of the players who hate you from talking to the other 50% of the players who aren’t quite sure they hate you.”

Right now, both parties are trying to prevent that roughly 50% of the electorate who hate them from convincing some of that other roughly 50% to join with them in their enmity.

And it’s a pretty close race to the bottom, so to speak.

It would be funny, if it weren’t tragic. Meanwhile, read this lengthy post by Joseph Britt.

MORE: GayPatriot is unhappy, too.

Big Cunningham-resignation roundup here.

CANADIAN GOVERNMENT FALLS: “A corruption scandal forced a vote of no-confidence Monday that toppled Prime Minister Paul Martin’s minority government, triggering an unusual election campaign during the Christmas holidays.”

UPDATE: Damian Penny has been liveblogging it.

And here’s more from Ed Morrissey, who’s been on this story from day one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Canadian MP Monte Solberg liveblogged the vote from the floor. (Via Kate McMillan).

Austin Bay has more.

MORE: Reader T.J. Marshman thinks that Ed Morrissey deserves credit for bringing down the Candadian government, by breaking the publication ban on the Gomery investigation. Could be! I started to say that before, but didn’t want to be accused of blogger triumphalism.

MORE STILL: Reader Crash Ringenberg emails:

Conservative bloggers have now taken down Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and the fricken Canadian Government.

Liberal bloggers have taken down Jeff Gannon and Jim Guckert—oh wait, that’s the same person.

Advantage: Conservatives!

Okay, that’s definitely too much triumphalism, even for a guy named “Crash.”

STILL MORE: On the other hand, Richard Riley says that Crash isn’t triumphalist enough: “Crash left out Trent Lott, Harriet Miers and The Bridge to Nowhere.” Though, contra Crash’s point, it’s worth noting that all of those — especially Lott — were bipartisan efforts.

LT. SMASH reports on an anti-war protest that he says was more “anti-victory” than anti-war.

UPDATE: A look at the recruiting numbers. Hey, they’re better than these numbers! I guess it’s more of that reverse-Vietnam phenomenon. . . .

SOME FOOL TRIED TO INTIMIDATE MICHELLE MALKIN: The results are about what you’d expect. . . .

Sending legal threat letters to bloggers seldom seems to work out well for the threateners.

TOM MAGUIRE: “Is Andrea Mitchell the next Bob Woodward?” Plus, keeping an eye on Tim Russert! And he’s got lots more interesting stuff. Just keep scrolling.

CLAY CONRAD offers advice on how to help displaced New Orleans musicians.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE has an item on “self-plagiarism” in law reviews. You can read my views on plagiarism in this chapter from the ethics book I wrote with Peter Morgan. But the short version is that I don’t think that there’s any such thing as “self-plagiarism.” Plagiarism consists in passing off someone else’s words as one’s own, so you can’t self-plagiarize. (Arthur Leff, one of my scholarly heroes, had one passage he repeated in almost everything he wrote. But it always worked. Why change perfection?)

At any rate, like many issues, this is better dealt with by contract than by rule. If law reviews think that too much work they get is repetitive and unoriginal, they’re entirely free to require that no part of any work they publish can have been published before. Problem solved, if problem it is.

JOHN FUND says that Democratic and Republican politicians are standing in the way of sensible energy policies.

I’ve had some thoughts on the subject here, and I’ll have some more later on.

EUGENE VOLOKH LOOKS AT BLOGS AND BIG MEDIA and makes some useful observations.