SUNDAY, I complained about a lack of media coverage of Egyptian anti-terrorist protests. Not everyone ignored them, though: Here’s a story from NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday. And here’s a story from today’s Guardian on Karim Elsahy’s Cairo antiterror protest.

Karim notes a followup protest planned for Friday — plenty of time for Big Media folks to send reporters and cameras!

There’s also a link to a charity for the victims of the Sharm El Sheikh bombing.

A BLOG solves a murder? (Thanks to Eric Muller for the tip.)

BRANNON DENNING:

I came up with a few questions that I’d like to see asked during Roberts’s confirmation hearings.

* To what extent and under what conditions, if any, should the Supreme Court look to foreign law for guidance in interpreting the U.S. Constitution?

* What role should stare decisis play in constitutional adjudication?

* To what extent can the President make foreign policy independently of Congress, and can the President’s foreign policy—not otherwise undertaken pursuant to congressional authorization or embodied in a treaty or executive agreement—preempt state and local laws that express a different policy?

Are there any cutting edge issues that you’d like to see brought up at the confirmation hearings? Am I being too tough on Senator Schumer?

I’d like to know what Roberts thinks of penumbral reasoning as a methodology.

MICKEY KAUS: “Is Hillary Clinton ever electric? I deny it.”

He’s not buying her move to the center, either.

IRAQI BLOGGER OMAR looks at the latest draft of the proposed Iraqi constitution and is unimpressed. He’s posted some translations with commentary.

MORE FROM MOSUL: Michael Yon has posted another report, with photos, about how the Iraqi police are doing. Excerpt:

The enemy in Iraq does not appear to be weakening; if anything, they are becoming smarter, more complicated and deadlier. But this does not mean they are winning; to imply that getting smarter and deadlier equates to winning, is fallacious. Most accounts of the situation in Iraq focus on enemy “successes” (if success is re-defined as annihiliation of civility), while redacting the increasing viability and strength of the Iraqi government, which clearly is outpacing the insurgency.

The Mosul police are now strong enough to launch successful undercover operations, and have been fanning out across Mosul and surrounding villages, snooping and listening for snippets. On July 15th, police working undercover in a village Northwest of Mosul heard a group of villagers talking about a weapons cache, but the location was not mentioned. Iraqi forces locked down the village, searched and found a weapons depot from Syria into Mosul. Iraqi police also found and rescued the 28 year-old woman I mentioned briefly in the last dispatch. She was the wife of a Mosul journalist, and had been kidnapped and held for ransom by members of a beheading cell. After the village search, police hauled four men to a Mosul station for interrogation, and alerted the Americans.

Read the whole thing.

TECH BLEG: If I have an audio CD-R of unknown provenance, can I extract information about the machine that burned it that might help me track it down? If the music was downloaded from an Internet site, will any useful information survive? Where would I go to find out more about that?

VERIZON EVDO UPDATE: I’m getting “Broadband Access” in Knoxville now — two different places, both at about 350kbps according to the CNET bandwidth tester. I’ve heard reports of the broadband coming and going in this area over the past few weeks; I hope they’ll roll it out for good soon.

GRAND ROUNDS IS UP, for all your healthcare and medical-blogging needs.

I’M READING JESSE WALKER’S Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America. Very interesting stuff. I suppose there’s an argument that podcasting and satellite radio are making this less important than it used to be, but I think that neglects the geographic / local aspects of broadcast radio. It’s not obsolete, just different.

JAMES OBERG:

At first glance, NASA’s decision to possibly launch even if a sensor glitch reappears suggests that the space agency was wrong two weeks ago to postpone the launch. However, the two decisions actually are very different, and indicate how much NASA’s safety culture has improved.

And in other space news:

The House Friday overwhelmingly endorsed President Bush’s vision to send man back to the moon and eventually on to Mars as it passed a bill to set NASA policy for the next two years.

The bill passed 383-15 after a collegial debate in which lawmakers stressed their commitment to not just Bush’s ambitious space exploration plans but also to traditional NASA programs such as science and aeronautics.

Good.

QUITE SOME TIME AGO, Mickey Kaus wrote:

Keep this between us, but would a violent-but-short Shiite vs. Sunni civil war (in which the U.S. was not involved) be the worst thing that could happen? Just askin’! It might be the essential predicate to a rough ethnic and religious balance of power. Or it might produce a stable, de facto partition.

Well, it might not be the worst thing that could happen (from our perspective), but it would be very bad. However, from the Sunnis’ perspective, it would be the worst thing that could happen, since they are growing increasingly unpopular as sponsors of / collaborators with terror attacks through Iraq — and nobody liked them that much anyway. They’re also growing militarily and economically weaker. Al Qaeda types like Zarqawi think that a massacre of Sunnis would galvanize the rest of the Arab (or at least Sunni) world, but that’s got to look less likely as time passes and as Al Qaeda gets less popular inside and outside Iraq.

As WestHawk observes: “A full-blown sectarian civil war in Iraq would be bad for all, but it would be positively lethal for the Sunni position in Iraq. At the limit, they would be ethnically cleansed from the country. . . . It would be ugly to watch and bad for America’s reputation, but few could say, in this scenario, that the Sunnis had not brought it on themselves.” The Sunnis, I suspect, realize this, and old Ba’athist fantasies of omnipotence seem to be fading (Chemical Ali is said to be singing like a canary, along with several other Saddam cronies). If this is true, we’ll see plenty of traditional brinksmanship but the Sunnis will always wind up making a deal, because the consequences of not making a deal will be too horrific. What’s more, if they’re smart, they’ll recognize that holding out too long makes for a worse deal, as their position declines.

That’s how it looks to me, anyway. Am I right? I don’t know. I’m no Juan Cole or anything, but I could still be wrong.

MERYL YOURISH says that Condi Rice is “absolutely made in the Powell mode” when it comes to the Palestinians. That’s not meant as a compliment.

“I’LL NEVER MAKE AN ISSUE of my opponent’s Mormonism. That would be wrong.

“What, you didn’t know he was a Mormon? He is. I wondered why you didn’t ask about his Mormon faith and its possible impact on the election. Only one wife though, as far as I know — but then you can never be too sure with those Mormons,, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Just kidding, everyone knows that Mormons have given that up. Most of them, anyway. Sadly, some people are still prejudiced against those Mormons and their polygamous ways. But I’ll never make an issue of Mormonism, because that would be wrong. Forget I even brought the whole Mormonism thing up. The Mormonism is a nonissue, after all. Who cares whether someone is a Mormon in this day and age? Not me. And I suspect that no more than a possibly winning margin tiny percentage of voters would be prejudiced enough against Mormons to vote based on something as silly as someone being a Mormon. This is the 21st Century, after all, where things like someone being a Mormon just shouldn’t matter.”

THIS WEEK’S COTILLION is posted, with a film noir theme.

Also check out the latest Carnivals of Revolutions, Music, the NBA, and RINOs.

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-WIT PRIGS: A sad story, really, but with moments of comic relief.

GATEWAY PUNDIT has roundups on Dagestan, where Islamic terror attacks abound, and from the Phillipines, where Gloria Arroyo faces impeachment.

THEO VAN GOGH’S KILLER gets life without parole.

HEH. “Let’s not even consider why the cow’s lipstick is smeared.”

MORE BAD NEWS FROM AFRICA. I think it’s time for the Liber8 concert.

ADVISE AND CONSENT: Over at Legal Affairs, Brannon Denning and Erwin Chemerinsky are debating judicial confirmations, and in particular (at the moment at least) what sorts of questions Senators should ask, and what sorts nominees should, and shouldn’t, answer.

UPDATE: I should also link the latest Blawg Review, a carnival of lawbloggers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tony Mauro looks at Roberts’ likely impact on the other Justices if he joins the court. Mauro thinks his measured rhetoric and lack of stridency will enhance his impact. Indeed.

CATHY SEIPP says we’re living in Gladys Kravitz nation:

But is it really a harmless situation that now anyone with Internet access can find out, for free, your age; for a few dollars, your address; and for just a few dollars more, a complete background check? Beyond issues raised by the ChoicePoint scandal, the MasterCard fiasco, and general identity theft, why is complete public access to the particular location of exactly where you live perfectly legal? . . . There’s no point anymore, for instance, to defense attorney arguments that Megan’s Law is invasive because it allows worried citizens to find out the addresses of sex offenders. Sex offenders can now find out where worried citizens live and they don’t need any special law to do it.

She’s not very happy with this state of affairs.

HEH:

Two years ago—and again a few days ago—Glenn Reynolds took a lot of abuse for calling the Plame Affair “‘too complicated’ for me to feel I really understand it”. More recently, Duncan “Atrios” Black took rather less abuse (none) for expressing confusion about the matter.

That’s the price I pay for being ahead of the curve!

UPDATE: Some people are less shy.

EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN says it’s a Hollywood death spiral.

Maybe if their movies were good. . . .

SISSY WILLIS: There may be hope for Western Civilization yet.

As one of my anthropology professors noted, cultures learn. Even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain.