FUTURES MARKETS ELICIT INSIDER INFORMATION: I mentioned earlier that London bookmakers are giving odds on which character will be killed off in the next Harry Potter book. Now — spoiler alert — it seems that this has caused information to leak out. Tom Maguire has more, and notes that this supports the “futures on terror” idea.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF:

I’ve got a modest proposal to Ted Koppel and “Nightline”: why don’t you read one day the names and show the pictures of the 170,000 or so American servicemen and women stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan who every day are working their hardest to ensure that democracy takes root, terrorists are defeated, and these two countries have a chance to build a better future for their people. That might convince a cynic such as myself that you really care for the troops generally, and not just only when they can be cynically used to embarrass the Bush Administration.

It would take more than that to convince me, but this would be a start.

Koppel might look here for some ideas, too. But not here, unless he wants to play to his strengths . . . .

THINGS ARE GETTING WORSE IN BOLIVIA: I blame Hugo Chavez.

PRODUCT DESIGN MEETS VERSION FATIGUE: My TechCentralStation column for tomorrow addresses this subject — but for you, as InstaPundit Premium^TM subscribers (the only kind there are), it’s available now!

BLOG ENTRY solves murder.

DEMOCRACY, WHISKEY — can “sexy” be far behind?

EASONGATE II CONTINUES, with this observation:

At the Communications Workers of America, Candice Johnson said she could not provide any evidence for Foley’s revival of the Eason Jordan charges. Linda Foley refused requests for an interview.

Retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, a Fox News military consultant, was “frankly astonished.”

“It may be legitimate to investigate whether there may or may not have been an incident in which U.S. troops have targeted journalists, but there is no question at this point that major media figures are targeting the men and women of the United States military in Iraq, repeatedly and with no evidence,” he said.

Ouch.

MICHAEL TOTTEN says the Washington Post is misreporting on Lebanon.

A PARTY-VOTE ANALYSIS of the House stem-cell research vote.

BILL MAHER CAN RELAX, because Rob Smith is defending him against charges of treason.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF REVOLUTIONS is up.

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY ROUNDUP OF BIAS in media reporting on guns is up.

WHILE I’M WISHING GAS GANGRENE ON ZARQAWI, I’m about ready to wish it on the bastards from “The Bullseye Network” whose miserable adware is on my daughter’s computer.

UPDATE: Ran the MS antispyware beta and seem to have gotten rid of it, along with a bunch of other crap — but I had to do manual surgery before I could even access the Internet to download the program from MS. (I’ve used AdAware for this before, but wanted to give the MS version a try; seemed fine.)

Kids’ sites seem to be especially infested with this crap, which is particularly unforgivable.

UPDATE: Yep, reader Ben Cooper sends a link to this report confirming my suspicion that even reputable kids’ sites are adware nightmares:

Mainstream children’s Web sites host a glut of adware, a security firm said this week, proof that spyware makers are targeting kids in an attempt to slip by parents and get their software onto home computers.
Over a three-month period, said Kraig Lane, a group product manager in Symantec’s consumer division, his lab took new PCs out of the box, connected them to the Internet without monkeying with any of the default settings in Windows XP SP2, then surfed well-known sites in several categories, ranging from kids and sports to news and shopping.

“Our testers went to name-brand Web sites, and spent 30 minutes to an hour reading or interacting with sites,” said Lane. Testers tried to emulate real-world browser by reading articles, interacting with the site’s features, but not explicitly looking to accumulate files by downloading. “Then they ran spyware detection software and counted up what kind of security risks and how many files had been installed on the machines,” Lane said.

Children were the biggest target for spyware makers, by far. The trip to several kids’ sites installed a whopping 359 pieces of adware on Symantec’s PCs, five times more than the nearest category rival, travel. Popup ads proliferated on the machines after that, making them virtually unusable.

Message to the folks at NeoPets: Clean up your act.

AUSTIN BAY POINTS TO a useful article on security in Iraq.

IN A HOLE, NEWSWEEK keeps digging. “We retracted, but we didn’t really mean it!”

CAN WE-DIA SAVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT FROM MEDIA? Some thoughts over at GlennReynolds.com.

BILL QUICK ASKS:

What was the last “big one” that secular, small-government, constitutionalist conservatives won under the GWB administration?

If you give me a week, I might think of something.

UPDATE: Interesting discussion in Bill’s comments. Reader Thomas Manning sends this link to a post by Virginia Postrel on the Bush Administration’s regulatory philosophy, which is better than its predecessor’s.

Meanwhile, reader James De Benedetti answers Bill’s question: “That would be Social Security privatization, which you don’t seem too thrilled about.”

Er, we’ve “won” that one? I’d be thrilled if we did, but I don’t think it’s ready to go into the victory column.

CHUCK SIMMINS has a report, with photos, from an anti-Bush protest over Social Security.

MICROMEDIA challenging dictatorship in North Korea.

A REUTERS-ERROR FISKING: On Hummingbirds!

ARABS ARE DOING MUCH BETTER IN AMERICA than anywhere else. This raises questions:

This census data should prompt soul-searching in many quarters. Cultural determinists may want to revise their theories of Arab backwardness. Arab leaders should be ashamed when they see their emigrants prospering in the United States while their own people are miserable. And Europe should wake up to the possibility that it may have less of an “Arab problem” than a “European problem.” Then again, maybe the cultural determinists have an explanation for why Europeans are so predisposed against Arab success.

(Via Daniel Drezner, who advises “read the whole thing” — good phrase! — and who has some interesting stuff in his comments, too).

IF THE SAUDIS DON’T LIKE HIM, I’m inclined to think he might be OK.

NOAM SCHEIBER on the filibuster deal:

So a deal has been struck on the filibuster. Republicans will allow Democrats to keep the filibuster as long as Democrats never use it. This way, both sides win (except for the Democrats).

Once again, the Republicans have shown their skillfulness when it comes to resetting parameters. Until recently, the perception had been that Bush had consistently filled the courts with extreme conservatives, with only a handful of truly batty nominees failing to meet the standards of Democrats. Now, facing the threat of the “nuclear option,” Democrats have backed down on these as well.

Well, the compromise certainly seems to have produced bipartisan unhappiness. I don’t know if that’s a mark in its favor or not.

UPDATE: Josh Trevino is unhappy, too, but for different reasons.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oops, my mistake. That’s not Noam Scheiber, but T.A. Frank, who’s filling in for him at &c.

FORENSIC ACCOUNTANTS are testifying on the Canadian scandals. Newsbeat 1 is covering it.

THE DUTCH ARE LOSING INTEREST in the E.U., according to this report in The Guardian. Daniel Drezner, meanwhile, notes that the French aren’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm, either.