ANDREW ROTH looks at how protectionism is killing an American industry and may lead to jobs being sent overseas.

IN THE MAIL: An advance copy of John Scalzi’s Ghost Brigades, the sequel to his blogospherically-acclaimed Old Man’s War.

I was going to make Wonkette’s new novel my next read, but I think Scalzi may take priority: I prefer science fiction to Washington politics, these days.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: The Carnival of Education is up. So is the Carnival of the Vanities. And don’t miss the Tangled Bank science carnival. And there are lots more blog carnivals here.

UPDATE: The second edition of Fair Tax Friday is up, too.

MAX BORDERS: “No one wants to see a family of four killed by a drunk driver. But the United States has veered way out of the lines in its DUI laws, and it’s time to rethink them from bumper to bumper.”

I blame the influence of M.A.D.D., which has morphed from an anti-drunk-driving group into a neoprohibitionist anti-alcohol group.

DOMESTIC SPYING BY THE NSA? If this report is true, it really is a major shift in U.S. surveillance policy — though I’m not sure whether snooping on international calls that originate or end in the U.S. is such a big departure. Orin Kerr has more. “While the statutory privacy laws have an exception for this type of monitoring, see 18 U.S.C. 2511(f), and the constitutional limits on e-mail surveillance are uncertain even in traditional criminal cases, the constitutionality of warrantless interception of telephone calls in situations like this is really murky stuff. ”

I can’t see any very compelling reason to bypass the courts here, especially given that warrants in these cases are almost always granted. Which makes me wonder what’s up.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (free link) has a big article on the growth of videoblogging. I think there’s more to the phenomenon, but it’s nice to see it getting some attention.

HALEY BARBOUR is reportedly getting a “red-carpet reception” in Washington as he asks for Katrina relief money.

I wish he’d turn at least a bit of his attention to the Cory Maye case.

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE: Ed Morrissey wonders why the New York Times editorial page isn’t excited about Iraq.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson has a related observation:

For some time, a large number of Americans have lived in an alternate universe where everything is supposedly going to hell. If you get up in the morning to read the New York Times or Washington Post, watch John Murtha or Howard Dean on the morning talk shows, listen to National Public Radio at noon, and go to bed reading Newsweek it surely seems that the administration is incommunicado (cf. “the bubble”), the war is lost (“unwinnable”), the Great Depression is back (“jobless recovery”), and America about as popular as Nazi Germany abroad (“alone and isolated”). But in the real adult world, the economy is red-hot, not mired in joblessness or relegating millions to poverty. Unemployment is low, so are interest rates. Growth is high, as is consumer spending and confidence. Our Katrina was hardly as lethal as the Tsunami or Pakistani earthquake. Thousands of Arabs are not rioting in Dearborn. American elderly don’t roast and die in the thousands in their apartments as was true in France. Nor do American cities, like some in China, lose their entire water supply to a toxic spill. Americans did not just vote to reject their own Constitution as in some European countries.

The military isn’t broken. Unlike after Vietnam when the Russians, Iranians, Cambodians, and Nicaraguans all soon tried to press their luck at our expense, most of our adversaries don’t believe the U.S. military is losing in Iraq, much less that it is wise now to take it on. Instead, the general impression is that our veteran and battle-hardened forces are even more lethal than was true of the 1990s — and engaging successfully in an almost impossible war.

Nor are we creating new hordes of terrorists in Iraq — as if a young male Middle Eastern fundamentalist first hates the United States only on news that it is in Iraq crafting a new Marshall Plan of $87 billion and offering a long-oppressed people democracy after taking out Saddam Hussein. Even al Jazeera cannot turn truth into untruth forever.

Read the whole thing.

GREAT NEWS FROM IRAQ, but Charles Krauthammer notes the bad news in Iran:

Lest you get carried away with today’s good news from Iraq, consider what’s happening next door in Iran. The wild pronouncements of the new Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have gotten sporadic press ever since he called for Israel to be wiped off the map. He subsequently amended himself to say that Israel should simply be extirpated from the Middle East map and moved to some German or Austrian province. Perhaps near the site of an old extermination camp? . . .

Everyone knows where Iran’s nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets, which have been modified so that they can reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel.

As far as I’m concerned, in light of these statements the Israelis are entitled to launch a first strike of any magnitude, whenever they choose.

THE ARAB NEWS editorializes:

It was the voice of the Iraqi people that was being heard yesterday, not the bomb blasts of the terrorists. What little violence there was as millions crowded toward their local polling stations only served to demonstrate how incoherent and pointless are the efforts of the men of violence to change the country through further bloodshed.

Indeed. Nice that they’re noticing it.

POWER LINE has video of Iraqi election commercials, which is pretty cool.

JULIAN SANCHEZ looks at NPR’s notorious right-wing bias.

THE JAWS OF KARL ROVE’S TRAP TIGHTEN:

House Republican leaders drafted legislation on Thursday that rejects calls for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq as “fundamentally inconsistent with achieving victory” and said they would force a vote on Friday.

It would be the second time in five weeks that GOP leaders maneuvered for a vote on the war in the face of Democratic calls for a timetable for withdrawal.

The resolution expresses the commitment of the House “to achieving victory in Iraq.”

It’ll be interesting to see who votes against it.

MARK STEYN was on the Hugh Hewitt show tonight, talking about the Iraqi elections, Rep. Murtha’s latest comments, and more. The transcript is here.

SOME KATRINA FOLLOWUP:

The interviews, combined with Thursday’s testimony, indicate vast confusion about who was ultimately responsible for the levees.

Regulations show that the Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for building levees and conducting annual inspections, and the state is charged with training and overseeing New Orleans levee district officials.

The Orleans Levee District, headed by a board of politically appointed commissioners, is responsible for day-to-day maintenance and repair of levees _ usually by staff engineers. An Aug. 16 work order released by the Senate panel, for example, shows that inspection crews did check the levees but also cut nearby grass and green space.

The former president of the commission described a lax _ if festive _ inspection process by its appointed members.

“You have commissioners,” former president James P. Huey told investigators in a Nov. 29 interview. “They have some news cameras following you around, and all of this stuff. And you have your little beignets, and then you have _ you go do the tourist and that and you have a nice lunch somewhere or whatever. They have this stop-off thing or whatever. And that’s what the inspections are about.”

Read the whole thing, which also shows that nobody seemed to know who was in charge.

CAYMAN ISLANDS UPDATE: I’ve written before about the debate over whether to construct a Dolphinarium on Grand Cayman to attract tourists. Now there’s a poll on the Cayman Compass (lower right) if you’d like to express your view.

MORE ON TORTURE: They’re still wrangling over the McCain bill, but I think it’s pretty much certain to pass, with at most minor modifications. And at the risk of sounding like an Alexander Bickel proceduralist, I think that’s a good thing even aside from the merits: This sort of thing is Congress’s duty. I’m not sure, however, that the bill is specific enough, and I think that an unclear bill will either chill legitimate interrogations, or leave gray areas that will permit conduct that’s tantamount to torture or — likely as not — both. But I’m not sure about that, and at least Congress is making some sort of move to address its constitutional responsibilities.

Meanwhile, I think there’s an excellent discussion of the topic by Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright over at their very cool Blogging Heads TV site.

And Andrew Sullivan — pursuant to his apparent brand differentiation strategy, I guess — is bravely standing up to the “NRO-Reynolds chorus,” whatever that means. I don’t think I really agree with Mark Levin, Rich Lowry, et al. on the specific subject at hand, though I confess that I haven’t followed that particular pissing match very closely. However, I do agree with them that Andrew has been consistently, pompously, and annoyingly moralistic and irritatingly unspecific. So if that’s the chorus, well yes — but it’s a song that has a lot of notes, most of them struck by Andrew himself. And I’m irritated with him, not for the reason you might think — because I disagree with Andrew — but more the contrary, because every time I read one of his preening posts, I find my opposition to torture weakening in response, even though I’ve been consistently in opposition to torture since 2001 (and before). God help me if he ever starts blogging in support of nanotechnology and bans on cloning — I’ll probably start looking at Leon Kass more sympathetically. It’s like listening to Robert Bork talk about original understanding jurisprudence.

AUSTIN BAY has questions the media should ask Howard Dean and John Kerry.

WIKIPEDIA WARS UPDATE: With all the criticism of Wikipedia, here are two interesting stories. First, a study claims it’s as accurate as Brittanica.

Second, my brother (the history professor one, not the budding rock-star one) notes that after a bunch of academics criticized Wikipedia for being inaccurate, some of them came up with a novel idea: Help make it better!

He’s got posts on that shocking phenomeon over at Cliopatria, here and here.

RUSS FEINGOLD is offering some pretty compelling reasons to oppose the Patriot Act renewal legislation. Read the whole thing, but this excerpt is telling:

Let me make one final point about sneak and peek warrants. Don’t be fooled for a minute into believing that this power is needed to investigate terrorism or espionage. It’s not. Section 213 is a criminal provision that could apply in whatever kind of criminal investigation the government has undertaken. In fact, most sneak and peek warrants are issued for drug investigations. So why do I say that they aren’t needed in terrorism investigations? Because FISA also can apply to those investigations. And FISA search warrants are always executed in secret, and never require notice. If you really don’t want to give notice of a search in a terrorism investigation, you can get a FISA warrant. So any argument that limiting the sneak and peek power as we have proposed will interfere with sensitive terrorism investigations is a red herring.

As I say, read the whole thing. (Via Jacob Sullum, who observes: “Now even the senators who haven’t bothered to read the legislation cannot credibly pretend to believe this law enforcement wish list is all about fighting terrorism.”)

Here, by the way, is what I wrote on September 11, 2001:

It’s Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new “Antiterrorism” legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats’ wish lists. They will be things that wouldn’t have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That’s what happened in 1996. Let’s not let it happen again.

Yeah, I can call ’em.

CURTIS LEMAY AND JOHN MURTHA: An interesting comparison.

KERRY DECIDES TO HELP SHORE UP BUSH WITH HIS BASE:

MA. Sen. John Kerry said last night that if Dems retake the House, there’s a “solid case” to bring “articles of impeachment” against President Bush for allegedly misleading the country about pre-war intelligence, according to several Dems who attended.

Kerry was speaking at a holiday party for alumni of his WH ’04 bid.

I first heard this theory right after the ’04 election, from Limbaugh or Hannity or someone else I dismissed; it seemed dumb to me. But obviously, I was wrong — or at least, my “too dumb for the Democrats” threshold was set too high. What’s funny is that lots of Bush supporters would be okay with the GOP losing the House as a way of teaching the Republican House a lesson for its pork-laden profligacy — but not if it’s going to let the Democrats bring a politically-motivated impeachment resolution over the war. (Will those who voted for the war, like Kerry, resign, too?) So by making this statement, Kerry makes a Democratic recapture of the house notably less likely, by motivating GOP’ers who might otherwise stay home to turn out.

Of course, you can count on Kerry to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, as quite a few of those “alumni” could probably attest. . . .

UPDATE: Donald Sensing emails: “Don’t you really mean your ‘too dumb for the Democrats’ threshold was set too low? Because they sure jumped over it with ease!”

I stand corrected.

MORE COMMENTARY on today’s press coverage:

There is an interesting disconnect in the U.S. media, and it goes beyond the usual complaints of pessimism or hostility to the American war effort. Go back and look at the transcript of NBC’s “Meet the Press” for Nov. 27, which we noted the next day–and in particular the journalist roundtable, which features five senior Washington journalists, all of whom seem to agree that democracy in Iraq is a dead letter. The only mention of Iraq’s then-forthcoming election was in a setup quote from the White House press secretary. To hear the journos talk, it was as if they hadn’t even heard that Iraqis were going to the polls.

And yet the producers at CNN and Fox appear to have regarded a genuine election in Iraq as such a routine event that it didn’t merit continuous live coverage. (Both stations did break into the recorded fare for occasional live updates.) It’s quite a striking indication of just how out of touch with the outside world are those within the Beltway media bubble.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Here’s a roundup of Iraqi blog coverage from The Seattle Times.

I’M ON A PODCAST for the ideablog SinceSlicedBread along with Amy Sullivan of The Washington Monthly. I’m not sure I was all that sparkling, but she gets good reviews. . . .

MATT POTTINGER: “Why I gave up journalism to join the Marines.”