CHRISTINE HURT: “If you want a reminder of how far our society has come in the last 40 years, try explaining the impact of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement to a 5 1/2 year-old.”

Read this post, too.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll sends this interesting link. Not so long ago.

MORE SCOOPS FROM SEYMOUR HERSH — and a rather troubling disclosure regarding conflicts of interest and payola.

IF YOU’RE TRYING TO GENERATE INTERNET BUZZ, you could do worse than bill yourself as a “coffee-drinking, erotic cowgirl.”

Mmmm. Coffee.

A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER: Zephyr Teachout induces Bill Quick and Jeralynn Merritt to agree.

RATHERGATE UPDATE: The New York Times looks at the locked PDF file question. Meanwhile, John Podhoretz looks at the missing political bias, and Bill Kristol notes that quite a few unanswered questions remain.

ECONOBLOGARAMA: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up!

DARFUR UPDATE: Some people in New York City are celebrating Martin Luther King day with a rally at the U.N. to protest the genocide in Darfur, and the U.N.’s inaction, which seems quite appropriate to me. It’s at 5 p.m.

HUGH HEWITT:

There is a Kennedy dynasty in Massachusetts and vast Kennedy affection in the Democratic Party and among liberal media. But there is no Kennedy dynasty in America, just an interesting family that wished for a dynasty and could never figure out that Jack’s politics might have pulled it off, but never Teddy’s.

Indeed.

WELL, SURE:

[T]he real interventionists and socialists at heart are the Americans, and that the real Canadian tradition is one of rugged individualism being slowly frittered away under the overwhelming influence of American collectivism.

But if people are saying this, it means that our disinformation agents at the CBC aren’t doing their jobs.

I’VE BEEN CRITICAL OF HOMELAND SECURITY FOR SOME TIME: This report does nothing to increase my confidence: “In today’s security-obsessed, post-9/11 era, one might think that it would be difficult to haul a convincing replica of an atomic bomb across the country. Not so, as John Coster-Mullen inadvertently proved in October 2004.”

UPDATE: Famed blog-commenter Cecil Turner (well, he is) emails that I’m wrong:

In the first place, the logical method for terrorists employing a nuclear weapon is by placing one in a shipping container and detonating it in a US port. Hence the security arrangements should be oriented outward from the ports, not inward toward the highways. In the second, as articles like this one make clear, such devices are detected by scanning for their radioactive material–not by their realistic-looking cases. While I’d probably agree homeland security is less than impressive, this is not a good example.

I guess he’s right, really. But still . . . .

TIM BLAIR EMAILS:

Apparently my site has been hacked — all posts and archives removed, etc. Not sure yet if anything can be recovered.

Worse, I’m currently unable to post (password details have been corrupted) so would appreciate if any or all of you could alert readers.

More crushing of dissent. I blame John Ashcroft! Alberto Gonzales!

ONE OF THE THEMES OF MY TALK at Yale Law School’s blog conference was that Cass Sunstein’s theory of polarization and self-filtering, as spelled out in his book, Republic.com, didn’t really apply to the blogosphere.

Now Jim Miller takes the argument further, and I have to say that it has gained force in the intervening two years. And — as the Von Drehle piece on the red states that has engendered so much discussion in the blogosphere demonstrates — you don’t need technology to breed estrangement. Indeed, what Sunstein sees as “polarization” may really just be the end of a monopoly.

I do, however, disagree with Miller that any single blog — and certainly not this one — is a sufficient source of diversity. That’s why I encourage people to branch out in their blog-reading.

UPDATE: This piece by Gordon Crovitz on how the Internet is revolutionizing things is a must-read.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

ARTHUR CHRENKOFF posts his regular roundup of underreported good news from Iraq, and observes:

It has been a mission of this fortnightly column, now in its 19th edition, to bring to readers’ attention all that “gets overlooked if not ignored” in Iraq: the advancements of the political and civil society; the rebirth of freedom, economic growth and reconstruction progress; the generosity of foreigners and the positive role coalition troops play in rebuilding the country; and the usually unremarked-upon security successes.

Contrary to some critics, the intention has never been to whitewash the situation in Iraq or to downplay the negative. The violence, bloodshed, disappointments and frustrations are all there for everyone to see and read about in the “mainstream” media on a daily basis. Pointing out positive developments is not to deny the bad news, merely to provide a more complete picture. As voters faced with the defining foreign policy issue of the new millennium, we owe it to ourselves to be fully informed about the state of affairs in Iraq–and that means rebuilt hospitals as well as car bombs.

What follows is not the full picture of Iraq–merely that part of it you don’t often see on the nightly news or the pages of newspapers.

And thanks to Arthur for doing it, and to the folks at the Wall Street Journal for giving a blogger such a big platform. And, if you haven’t already, read this critique of the press coverage from a soldier in Iraq.