DAVID CORN reports on evacuating the Capitol today, and observes: “I’m going to have consider telecommuting more seriously.”

IRANIAN BLOGGERS MEET WITH A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE and blog about it in English. Global Voices has the links.

TIGERHAWK offers a tax-reform plan.

OVER AT THE COUNTER-TERRORISM BLOG, Andy Cochran was moblogging the evacuation via his Blackberry. Posts here and here.

UPDATE: Timeline here.

PROF. BAINBRIDGE IS BLOGGING FROM A FACULTY MEETING:

My vision of purgatory is a meeting that never ends. So my one hope is that St. Peter will apply these earthly hours against my stint in Purgatory.

Even if he doesn’t, it’ll likely seem like Heaven by comparison.

MARK GLASER: Seven Big Ideas (and one pet peeve) from BlogNashville.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: Don’t miss this week’s Carnival of Education.

And there’s also this week’s Carnival of the Vanities, as well as the latest Christian Carnival.

If that’s not enough — and swell as it is, why should it be? — you can check out this week’s Carnival of the Liberated, which rounds up Iraqi blog posts, and another installment of the revived Carnival of the Revolutions, featuring posts by and about democratic revolutionaries around the world.

CONDI RICE: “‘Democratization,’ Rice told the foreign ministers, is ‘not an event, it is a process.'”

Indeed.

DID THE NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISH A MISLEADING CHART on marginal tax rates? TaxProf has a roundup.

IN THE MAIL: Matthew Simmons’ Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.

Simmons says that the Saudis are a lot closer to running out of oil than the world realizes, and that Saudi production is at unsustainably high levels right now. This certainly contradicts the ever-more-optimistic Saudi claims about reserves and production capacity. I’ve wondered what was behind the Saudi claims, though I’m no expert: My actual thought was that the Saudis were trying to discourage exploration elsewhere, but the other possibility is that they’re in a desperate endgame.

Simmons’ book is blurbed by bigshots, but I hope it’s wrong. It’s certainly another argument for doing what we know we need to do anyway, which is to increase efficiency and find other sources of oil, and energy generally.

UPDATE: A skeptical take on the oil-shortage scenario, here, and here’s a CSIS report on Saudi oil reserves that specifically responds to Simmons’ claims and finds them wanting. Beats me, but as I say, it’s pretty clear what we should be doing.

THE PHANTOM PROFESSOR: Inside Higher Education looks at an anonymous prof-blog and its chilly reception by the SMU administration.

SORE LOSERS: A pretty hard-hitting TV spot on the Bolton battle (video here). I have to wonder why the vaunted Karl Rove machine didn’t have these things ready to go when Bolton was nominated, though. Transcript here. (Via Gateway Pundit.)

BLAST FROM THE PAST: John Hiler’s excellent Microcontent News is back.

PRAWFSBLAWG:

What is the most widely read work of jurisprudence by those in the legal system? Is it H.L.A. Hart’s The Concept of Law? Ronald Dworkin’s Law’s Empire? No . . . it’s actually the Multistate Bar Exam. . . . It therefore comes as a great surprise that the Bar exam has received such scant scholarly attention.

Some interesting thoughts on what that means follow.

AUSTIN BAY looks at the recent anti-American conclave in Brazil and observes:

Anti-American elites have staged a conference in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia. And they immediately discovered their various gripes with “America” didn’t mesh. Nope, varied stripes of jealousy, hate, envy, and fear of liberty aren’t the foundation for a cohesive “united front,” though bellicose demands and “we’re victims” propaganda will get them headlines.

His point about the Berbers is also well taken.

JEFF JARVIS: “Is Google the next AOL?”

JON STEWART ON CABLE CHANNELS AND BLOGS: Crooks and Liars has the video, and Ed Cone has some comments.

JIM FLETCHER has posted some superb photos of the Smoky Mountains online, and he’s now selling prints from his site.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Exposure Manager, where I host my photos, has added a lot of cool new features, including sharpening and color correction.

KEVIN SITES has made his entire mosque-shooting video available on the Web. BoingBoing has the story, and a link.

THIS IS PRETTY COOL: My BlogNashville video has been captioned for the deaf and hearing-impaired. The folks responsible hope to do more of that sort of thing, and also to use the captioning to make Web video search-engine friendly.

RON BAILEY REPORTS that James Q. Wilson has resigned from the President’s Bioethics Council. No word on why, but Bailey observes:

Two of the seven members of the Council who voted in favor of proceeding immediately with therapeutic cloning to produce human embryonic stem cells are already gone–Wilson’s departure makes it a third.

Council Chairman Leon Kass replaced the two earlier dissenters with three tractable bioconservative intellectuals whose views on bioethics Kass finds less challenging. The question is will Wilson’s replacement be yet another bioconservative clone?

I’ve been critical of the Council in the past, here and here, though it’s worth noting that Wilson emailed me to defend Kass a time or two. Here’s the advice I offered Kass, at the beginning.

JOHN HAWKINS OFFERS ADVICE TO BLOGGERS, especially new ones.

THE BELMONT CLUB has a roundup, with maps, of the fighting along the Syrian border and what people are saying about it.

UPDATE: Chester has multiple posts on what’s going on.

A CANADIAN CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS?

The House of Commons has passed a motion that calls for the Liberal government to resign, but the Liberals are shrugging it off as only procedural.

The vote, which passed 153-150, is one of several attempts by the opposition to bring down what has become a shaky minority government under Prime Minister Paul Martin. Though the Liberals tried hard to block the Opposition Conservative motion, they are sticking to their view that losing it doesn’t mean they’ve lost the confidence of the House of Commons.

(Via Newsbeat 1.) Steven Taylor has more here and here, and Ed Morrissey has further thoughts. Is Canada now a banana republic? I think it’s still a bit early to proclaim that.

UPDATE: This is cool — a Canadian M.P. blogging from the floor via his Blackberry.

More comments here and here.

REACTIONARY BOOBS against nanotechnology: But I’m sure they’re nice boobs, once you get to know them.