AMBER TAYLOR REMINDS US that today is International Kissing Day.

BLACKFIVE has some questions on chickens, hawks, and military recruiting on campus. Donald Sensing has more questions.

BILL QUICK on Alberto Gonzales: “I don’t have a major opinion about the necessity to immediately overturn Roe v. Wade, but I can never support a Supreme Court nominee who thinks the Second Amendment doesn’t exist.”

AGING AS A DISEASE: I reflect on some comments by Aubrey de Grey, in this week’s TechCentralStation column.

A READER AT REUTERS emails that London will get the 2012 Olympic games. This won’t please Jacques Chirac, who’s no fan of English cuisine. Send him some spotted dick!

UPDATE: Story here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a report that Chirac’s assault on English food may have cost Paris the deal. Heh. I hope it’s true.

RIDE ALONG WITH AUSTIN BAY IN AFGHANISTAN as he discusses the war with veteran war correspondent Mike Hedges in this video. (Quicktime version here).

Austin shot a lot of cool video, but this project is definitely demonstrating things that can go wrong. In this case it was a bad third-party audio codec. Thanks to blog video god Trey Jackson for fixing this one!

UPDATE: Check out Austin’s column from Iraq, too.

STEPHEN CARTER on confirmation politics:

Confirmation hearings for nominees to the high court only make matters worse, for the would-be justices are forced to sit before the cameras, under oath, as senators ask them questions they cannot ethically answer, on how they would vote on cases that might come before them. This process began not in the early Republic but in the battle over Jim Crow. In the 1950’s, the Southern Democrats who controlled the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to require every nominee to appear in person in order to grill them about Brown v. Board of Education. Before Brown, it was almost unheard-of for a nominee to testify. When the Dixiecrats changed the rules, the liberal position was that inquiries about such matters as judicial philosophy posed a threat to the independence of the judiciary.

The left of that era was correct. The spectacle we have made of confirmation hearings reinforces the public notion that the justices exist to decide cases the way political movements want them to. Liberals think the right started it, and conservatives think the left started it, but the important question is not who started it but who is going to stop it.

Read the whole thing. It appeared over the holiday weekend and I missed it; I suspect others may have missed it too.

I’VE ALWAYS HAD MY DOUBTS about the expansive view of the treaty power in Missouri v. Holland. Nicholas Rosenkranz has doubts, too, and has a highly recommended article on the subject. (Via Volokh).

MORE OF THIS, PLEASE: “American troops on the Syrian border are enjoying a battle they have long waited to see – a clash between foreign al-Qa’eda fighters and Iraqi insurgents. Tribal leaders in Husaybah are attacking followers of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist who established the town as an entry point for al-Qa’eda jihadists being smuggled into the country.”

DEFINING “CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS” DOWN?

EVERYONE COMES TO KNOXVILLE EVENTUALLY: Tonight it was Sasha Volokh and his blogger wife Hanah (Metchis) Volokh. I was a bit under the weather from allergy attacks, but we had a very nice dinner overlooking the lake.

JOSH TREVINO has firsthand reporting from the G8 protests, with photos.

THE CHECKPOINT CHARLIE MEMORIAL has been taken down. Gateway Pundit has a report, and video.

TOM MAGUIRE has more on the Rove / Plame story, and suggests that the New York Times is having trouble keeping track of what’s going on, despite (or because) the paper is so deeply involved.

THE CARNIVAL OF REVOLUTIONS, featuring blog posts on the pro-democracy movement worldwide, is up at Registan.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS writes that worrying too much about American casualties empowers the insurgency.

FORGET CAT FOOD: For some bloggers, it’s baby food.

TECH-ADVICE BLEG: Austin Bay has sent me some video files, with the extension .asf. They won’t open in Vegas. I can open and edit them in Windows Movie Maker — but I can’t save the resulting video to a separate file. What’s wrong, and what can I do about it?

UPDATE: The problem seems to be with a 3d-party codec that will let me play, but not save, the files. I may just have to get Austin to resend, but alas he’s on travel and probably can’t.

EUGENE VOLOKH writes that comment threads are like parties.

Maybe I should entertain more!

RANKING THE WORLD’S BEST NEWSPAPERS: Roger Simon can’t resist a bit of snark.

BILL STUNTZ on Lewis Powell and Sandra Day O’Connor:

One more similarity is worth noting, and it’s one that should give pause in the midst of all the praise. If Powell and O’Connor had a single defining characteristic as judges, it was this: Both were very comfortable–too much so–exercising power.

As with all of Stuntz’s pieces, read the whole thing. I think, however, that the problem with the Supreme Court is that it hasn’t exercised enough power, relative to the Courts of Appeals, anyway.

IT’S A CARNIVAL OF CARNIVALS! Up today are Grand Rounds, the medical carnival, the Carnival of the Capitalists, a business- and economic-blogging carnival, the Carnival of the Liberated, rounding up posts from bloggers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and The Red Ensign Standard, which rounds up Canadian bloggers.

Plus Carnivalesque, on early modern history, and the Carnival of Personal Finance. You should really check these out, as they’re a great way to discover new blogs and bloggers you may want to read. Don’t count on me to find ’em all — I try, but there are just too many good blogs out there.

Also, don’t miss Alphecca’s weekly report on media coverage of gun issues. Shockingly, it’s often biased.

UPDATE: There’s also a Carnival of Liberty!

CHARLES STROSS’S SINGULARITY NOVEL, Accelerando, is finally out. I got an advance copy and thought it was quite good.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that you can still download the book for free at his website. However, I read it in electronic form and I think I enjoyed it less than I would have enjoyed a real book. Maybe it’s because I spend so much time on a laptop already, but reading a book on a laptop screen isn’t that enjoyable to me.

HERE’S A ROUNDUP OF BUSINESS BLOGS, from Business Week.

Background here.