AUSTIN BAY has some observations on Zarqawi’s role in Iraq.

TWO WORDS YOU can’t say at Bucknell. They’re playing right into Evan Coyne Maloney’s hands by acting as unpaid marketers for his documentary!

CHARGES OF RACISM in the Tennessee Legislature.

TOM DELAY has been indicted. I’m on travel and haven’t had time to read the many emails I’ve gotten proclaiming his obvious guilt or persecuted innocence, but it’s obviously an embarrassment for the G.O.P. On the other hand, maybe his replacement will be better at finding pork . . . .

HOWARD KURTZ has a roundup on the PorkBusters effort.

ROGER SIMON wants your help.

MICKEY KAUS wonders why the New York Times hates poor people: “TimeSelect–and with it Web access to columnists such as Paul Krugman–is unavailable to those too poor to have credit cards. . . . News of the NYT policy comes at a time when Hurricane Katrina has raised profound issues of race, class, and gender.” Heh.

I FORGOT TO LINK THIS YESTERDAY, but Patrick Ruffini’s monthly GOP straw poll is up again. Giuliani and Rice are once more in the lead, in the respective “real” and “fantasy” categories.

AS I MENTIONED LAST NIGHT, I liked the Serenity preview. In fact, I liked it enough that I ordered the Firefly DVD set. I figured that for 29 bucks it had to be worth it.

KATRINA FOLKLORE VS. FACT, over at Gateway Pundit.

MORE GREEN, LESS RED over at the PorkBusters site, but there’s still a long way to go. If you haven’t called your Senators and Representative and asked them what locally directed federal spending they’d cut, you may want to go ahead and do so. And if you hear back, email me with the subject line “Pork Response” (and don’t use that for anything else, please) and I’ll follow up.

THE SUPREME COURT has granted cert. in the Cuno case. That probably makes this conference on state tax incentives and the Cuno case at the University of Minnesota a lot more relevant.

ANNE APPLEBAUM on the Louisiana pols’ demands:

Surely this is not the time for the government to write blank checks, for legislators to get greedy about unnecessary canals in their districts, or for federal agencies to launch projects that make future flooding more likely. Surely this is the time to spend money wisely. Right?

Wrong — and if you thought otherwise, then you, like me, are still learning how deeply corrupt America’s legislative branch has become. . . . Despite the fact that Louisiana spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water projects that turned out to be unnecessary, or even damaging, the proposal makes it possible to suspend cost-benefit analyses.

In its scale and sheer disregard for common sense, the Louisiana proposal breaks new ground.

But, as she says, it’s just a more-dramatic case of the usual pork. I wonder if we won’t see a revival of Balanced-Budget Amendment enthusiasm, and perhaps even a revival of Perot-style third-party enthusiasm (which would be devastating for the Republicans) if things don’t come under control.

ORIN KERR: “[Y]ou can bet that Justice Breyer will uphold the basic idea of anticipatory warrants. Shortly before he became a Justice, Breyer approved anticipatory warrants under the Fourth Amendment. . . . Note how Breyer replaces the textual requirement that ‘no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause’ with a somewhat different inquiry into whether the warrant ‘can help assure that the search takes place’ when probable cause exists.”

MONTANA — THE PORK STATE!

The Bozeman City Commission voted unanimously Monday night to keep $4 million in federal appropriations for a downtown parking garage — despite pleas to redirect the funds to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

Not very impressive. (More background here).

NIKON HAS ACKNOWLEDGED PROBLEMS WITH ITS DIGITAL SLRS: I’m not sure if this covers the autofocus problem that I experienced.

SO, AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, I went to see the blogger-screening of Serenity. I liked it. There were quite a few people from the law school and the local blogging community there, and my sense is that most people agreed.

The trailer was quite reflective of the film. I thought the acting was good, and the whole film had a human touch that many science-fiction action flicks lack. The cinematography was more TV-like than movie-like, but I actually liked that effect. And the sound, often boomy and annoying in films of this type, was excellent.

One of my colleagues attended (not a blogger, but a serious geek — yes, the stillsuit one — who has watched all the Firefly episodes and who is a huge Joss Whedon fan) and she liked it a lot, and noted the presence of the trademark Whedon humor.

I enjoyed it, and I think it will do very well.

UPDATE: Other blog reviews here and here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Also here, here, here, and here.

And here!

“THE MANOLO, he is the six-figure blogger.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY:

How much do U.S. taxpayers owe Louisiana? Surely not the whole $250 billion that the state now wants. Congress needs to stand up for fiscal sanity.

Call us cheap or churlish, but our sympathy for the Pelican State’s political leaders is starting to fade. Louisiana has been ravaged by two hurricanes, much of its largest city is in ruins and huge numbers of its people are without homes. All true.

But if America’s spirit of compassion has no limits, its public purse does. The federal government is rightly helping Louisiana clean up, rebuild and guard against future catastrophes.

But it’s not obliged to hand over hundreds of billions in aid with no questions asked. . . .

Congress already has approved $62.3 billion in Katrina aid for the Gulf Coast and will no doubt have to allocate several billion more to cover damage from Hurricane Rita. So even by the standards of post-Katrina politics, Louisiana is starting to look a tad greedy.

Very few will come forward to make such an observation at this point. But more should, and Congress needs to muster up the courage, for once, to fulfill its obligations to American taxpayers.

Actually, a lot of people seem willing to make that observation, which is a testament to the extent of the Louisiana pols’ overreaching. Indeed, I think we’ll see a real — and much-needed — debate on whether to fund the rebuilding of New Orleans, beyond the port, at all.

UPDATE: Nick Gillespie urges politeness.

OUCH.

INDEED: “So we now have two major reports — one on the New Orleans Times Picayune website and the other in the L.A. Times — about the way in which the major media spread all sorts of hysteria about the conditions inside flooded New Orleans. How will this jibe with all the talk about how the media threw off its self-imposed shackles after 9/11 and found their critical and passionate voice yet again?”

MORE THOUGHTS on higher education, from Victor Davis Hanson.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Here’s a Nashville story — with video — interviewing Blake Wylie on Tennessee pork and PorkBusters. Contact your local media and suggest they cover cuts in your area!

UPDATE: Could this be a sign of progress?

Republican leaders are taking pains to demonstrate a growing commitment to fiscal restraint one week after a contentious standoff with House conservatives over federal offsets to pay for recovery efforts in the hurricane-beleaguered Gulf Coast region. . . .

Unlike most years, GOP House and Senate leaders will offer a continuing resolution that temporarily funds the government at the lowest of three possible levels: the current fiscal 2005 level, or the level passed in either the House or the Senate appropriations bills this year, according to knowledgeable GOP aides.

Like the space elevator experiment below, it’s a baby step, but it’s a step.

RAY KURZWEIL’S NEW BOOK, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology is now out, and getting considerable attention (along with an enviable Amazon ranking). Here’s a review from the San Jose Mercury News and here’s a piece in the Boston Globe. A roundup of some blogosphere posts can be found here.

SPACE ELEVATOR UPDATE:

A private group has taken one small step toward the prospect of building a futuristic space elevator.

LiftPort Group Inc., of Bremerton, Wash., has successfully tested a robot climber — a novel piece of hardware that reeled itself up and down a lengthy ribbon dangling from a high-altitude balloon.

The test run, conducted earlier this week, is seen as a precursor experiment intended to flight validate equipment and methods to construct a space elevator. This visionary concept would make use of an ultra-strong carbon nanotube composite ribbon stretching up to 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) from Earth into space.

It’s a baby step. But it’s a step.